This edition first published in 2025 by
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Selection, introduction and notes © 2025 Katy Soar
Volume copyright © 2025 The British Library Board

“Pussy” © 1931 The Estate of Christine Campbell Thomson.

“More Spinned Against…” © 1953 The Estate of John Wyndham, reproduced by permission of David Higham Associates and Paper Lion Ltd.

“Above Ker-Is” © 1978, 2012 by Debra L. Hammond as literary heir of Evangeline Walton Ensley, reprinted by permission of the copyright holder.

“Justice Tresilian in the Tower” © 1980 Alan Kitch.

“Family History” © 1998 Stephen Baxter, reproduced by permission of Selectric Artists.

“The House of Fenris” © 2008 Graham John Cooling.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be pleased to be notified of any corrections to be incorporated in reprints or future editions.

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Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7123 5567 4
e-ISBN 978 0 7123 6809 4

Cover design by Mauricio Villamayor with illustration by Sandra Gómez

Frontispiece: “11e Vue du Temple de Proserpine” by Guillaume F. Gmelin, Basle, 1786. Illustration on page 6: “Mithras sacrificing at the vernal equinox”, sketch by William Stukeley of a stone in bas relief found 10 foot underground in Micklegate, York in 1747. Illustration on last page: “A Cat of Bubastis” by David Young Cameron, 1909.

Text design, typesetting and ebook by Tetragon, London

Contents

Introduction

A Note from the Publisher

Dionea – Vernon Lee

The Ring – Thomas Graham Jackson

The Great Mother – R. Ellis Roberts

The Wind in the Portico – John Buchan

The Owl – F. A. M. Webster

Pussy – Flavia Richardson

The Veil of Tanit – Eugene de Rezske

The Face in the Wind – Carl Jacobi

Serpent Princess – Edmond Hamilton

More Spinned Against… – John Wyndham

Above Ker-Is – Evangeline Walton

Justice Tresilian in the Tower – Ken Alden

Family History – Stephen Baxter

The House of Fenris – John Cooling

Notes on the Mythology

Introduction

The stories in this volume all draw on perhaps the oldest and most universal of story collections—the myths of the ancient world. It is in this ancient mythological world that we find the root of the word “weird”: the Old English word “wyrd”, from which our word “weird” developed, means something like “fate” or “destiny”. The cognate Old Norse word urðr can be translated similarly, but it is also the name of a Norse goddess, one of the Norn, the three goddesses of fate, whose role, according to Völuspá in the Poetic Edda of the tenth century CE, was to establish laws, allot life to the sons of men, and set their fates. Thus, the weird as a genre is inherently mythological; we shouldn’t be surprised then that the mythical or mythological is a subject of the weird too.

And like the Norn, stories of mythical weird involve a disruption of regular temporality. The three goddesses of the Norn are, as mentioned, Urðr, and her sisters Verðandi and Skuld. These names mean, respectively, the past, the present, and the future—the Norn thus represent the presence, at once, of all aspects of time. Similarly, weird temporalities challenge our linear narratives of time (Carroll and Sperling, 2020). As Mark Fisher wrote, the weird is that which does not belong. What can belong less in our contemporary times than the presence of a deity whose temple doors should have long since closed?

This anthology is a collection of fourteen stories of the mythological weird. The stories are not simply reworkings of traditional myths; instead, they are self-contained stories in which the mythical past (if indeed it ever really is past) returns to wreak its weird havoc on the present. Most of the architects of the mythological weird in these stories are deities, although there are occasionally characters or creatures who are not gods in themselves, but whose origins are in the mythical, rather than literary tradition, and whose stories are inseparable from or interwoven with a god or gods from their own pantheon. As the protagonists belong to the divine sphere, the choice of subjects for the volume is mythological rather than folkloric; of course, the line between the two is vague and fluid—as Claude Lévi-Strauss once said “Les contes sont les mythes en miniature” (“folktales are myths in miniature”). Lévi-Strauss was talking about the structure and form of folktales and myths, but, as Elliot Oring states, the two can also be distinguished by the attitude of communities towards them, with myth considered to be a form of sacred truth within a larger ideological system and a setting outside of historical time. These stories often feature a sacred narrative, concerned with the exploits of supernatural beings. In comparison, folktales are a more informal kind of cultural narrative, their nature and expression more fluid and adaptable as they are not necessarily considered to be sacred in their character.

Of course, this is not a perfect definition of either mythology or folklore, nor is it one that everyone will necessarily agree with. And indeed, an exploration of the difference would be a book in itself. But for the purposes of this collection, the division between a sacred truth and a folkloric narrative was one that worked well when putting the contents of this book together and helping decide if a story was suitably “mythologically weird”.

What I have tried to do here is include stories which draw on genuine mythical characters, by which I mean gods or creatures whose stories and sources we can trace back into antiquity. Where many mythical characters in literature or film are often unnamed, or created specifically for a particular narrative, the majority of these included here are real deities and creatures that were the focus of worship and myths dating back into the ancient past. Even in the examples where the deity seems to be original (in Buchan’s “The Wind in the Portico”) or unnamed (Webster’s “The Owl”), their characteristics and attributes are drawn from genuine gods in their respective pantheons.

By utilizing genuine ancient deities and mythological creatures, whose existence in the ideology and beliefs of their societies can be attested to through literature and archaeology, the authors of these stories allow for a veneer of reality over the fictional elements; the stories are fantastical, but there is enough of what Mattias Frey has termed “the authenticity feeling” to make the reader wonder if these unruly ancients may well come back to trouble our more rational present.

Aside from the authenticity of the creatures featured in the stories, I have also tried to bring together a variety of stories which draw on equally varied sources of myths, from different cultures and countries, rather than simply the usual Greek or Roman tales with which readers are more likely familiar to some degree. Of course, they are included too—there is such a rich collection of Classical myths which survive from antiquity, and which provided a fruitful source for writers of the weird, that it would be impossible (and wrong) to exclude them. But here I have attempted to select stories which consider some of the more obscure gods and creatures of the Classical world. In that regard, we find Greek inspiration in the earliest of the stories included in the collection, Vernon Lee’s 1890 short story “Dionea”, but also in the works by John Wyndham and Carl Jacobi. These latter two focus on mythical characters or creatures rather than gods directly, and bring them from the Hellenic past to the comfortable and bourgeois setting of mid-twentieth-century Britain. Elsewhere, in Stephen Baxter’s “Family History”, we find a Roman god in a contemporary British setting. Other mythologies are represented too. While not perhaps as well-known as their Greek or Roman counterparts, you will find stories rooted in Nordic myth (“The House of Fenris”), Romano-British (“The Wind in the Portico”), Mesopotamian (“Serpent Princess”), Egyptian (“Pussy”), Etruscan (“The Ring”), and Anatolian/Phrygian (“The Great Mother”). The volume also features characters from more obscure mythologies, less familiar to the casual reader: F. A. M. Webster’s “The Owl” draws upon Aztec myth in his story of a doomed romance with strigidaean overtones, while Ken Alden in “Justice Tresilian in the Tower” mingles British mythology with medieval history. In “The Veil of Tanit” Eugene de Rezske takes us into the world of Punic mythology, and the inspiration for Evangeline Walton’s “Above Ker-Is” is the mythology of Brittany.

The range is in itself intriguing. It would be expected that writers of the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries would have knowledge of the Classical world, as Greek and Roman texts would have been a core element of a public school education. But weird writers of the first half of the twentieth century in particular were also aware of the wider mythologies, deities and supernatural creatures of the world. The range of mythical characters is wide. Some are malevolent, others seductive, or even playful. Similarly, the tone of the tales is varied too. You may find some horrifying, others disturbing, while some are even humorous—but all are decidedly weird. In this collection you will read stories of human-spider body swaps, of evil Aztec bird cults, of condemned medieval Justices protected by the power of the old gods.

To avoid spoiling the outcome of the stories by revealing too much information on the mythological protagonists here in the introduction, I have put together an appendix at the end of the volume where you can find out a little more information about the specific deities or creatures that feature in these stories.

But for now, light the candles, burn the incense, and be prepared for strange, unruly and weird presences as you read these tales. Because, in the words of The Wicker Man’s Lord Summerisle, “here, the old gods aren’t dead”.

Katy Soar

References

Jordan Carroll and Alison Sperling, “Weird Temporalities”, Studies in the Fantastic, 9:20, 1–22, 2020.

Kerry Dodd, “From the Inevitable to the Inexplicable: Investigating the Literary and Linguistic Roots of the Weird”, Fantastika, 1:1, 36–53, 2017.

Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater Books, 2017).

Mattias Frey, “The Authenticity Feeling: Language and Dialect in the Historical Film”, Research in Film and History, 1:1, 2018.

Elliot Oring (ed.), Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: An Introduction (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1986).

A Note from the Publisher

The original short stories reprinted in the British Library Tales of the Weird series were written and published in a period ranging across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There are many elements of these stories which continue to entertain modern readers; however, in some cases there are also uses of language, instances of stereotyping and some attitudes expressed by narrators or characters which may not be endorsed by the publishing standards of today. We acknowledge therefore that some elements in the stories selected for reprinting may continue to make uncomfortable reading for some of our audience. With this series British Library Publishing aims to offer a new readership a chance to read some of the rare material of the British Library’s collections in an affordable paperback format, to enjoy their merits and to look back into the worlds of the past two centuries as portrayed by their writers. It is not possible to separate these stories from the history of their writing and therefore the following stories are presented as they were originally published with minor edits only made for consistency of style and sense. We welcome feedback from our readers, which can be sent to the following address:

British Library Publishing

The British Library

96 Euston Road

London, NW1 2DB

1890

Dionea

Vernon Lee

Vernon Lee (1856–1935) was the penname of the English writer Violet Paget, a travel writer, novelist, musician, and critic. She was born in Château St. Léonard, near Boulogne, France, in 1856 into a wealthy, peripatetic British family. In 1875 she first published under her deliberately ambiguous pseudonym, H. Vernon Lee (shortly after modified to Vernon Lee), a series of articles on women novelists for La Rivista Europea. While most famous for her work on aesthetics, she is also known for her collection of gothic stories, published in 1890. The collection Hauntings: Fantastic Stories contains four supernatural stories which combine themes including the allure of the past, psychological obsession, and the challenging of the gender binary—the story included here involves an apparent exiled Greek goddess who appears on the shores of nineteenth century Montemirto Ligure in Italy.

From the Letters of Doctor Alessandro De Rosis to the Lady Evelyn Savelli, Princess of Sabina

Montemirto Ligure, June 29, 1873

I take immediate advantage of the generous offer of your Excellency (allow an old Republican who has held you on his knees to address you by that title sometimes, ’tis so appropriate) to help our poor people. I never expected to come a-begging so soon. For the olive crop has been unusually plenteous. We semi-Genoese don’t pick the olives unripe, like our Tuscan neighbours, but let them grow big and black, when the young fellows go into the trees with long reeds and shake them down on the grass for the women to collect—a pretty sight which your Excellency must see some day: the grey trees with the brown, barefoot lads craning, balanced in the branches, and the turquoise sea as background just beneath… That sea of ours—it is all along of it that I wish to ask for money. Looking up from my desk, I see the sea through the window, deep below and beyond the olive woods, bluish-green in the sunshine and veined with violet under the cloud-bars, like one of your Ravenna mosaics spread out as pavement for the world: a wicked sea, wicked in its loveliness, wickeder than your grey northern ones, and from which must have arisen in times gone by (when Phœnicians or Greeks built the temples at Lerici and Porto Venere) a baleful goddess of beauty, a Venus Verticordia, but in the bad sense of the word, overwhelming men’s lives in sudden darkness like that squall of last week.

To come to the point. I want you, dear Lady Evelyn, to promise me some money, a great deal of money, as much as would buy you a little mannish cloth frock—for the complete bringing-up, until years of discretion, of a young stranger whom the sea has laid upon our shore. Our people, kind as they are, are very poor, and over-burdened with children; besides, they have got a certain repugnance for this poor little waif, cast up by that dreadful storm, and who is doubtless a heathen, for she had no little crosses or scapulars on, like proper Christian children. So, being unable to get any of our women to adopt the child, and having an old bachelor’s terror of my housekeeper, I have bethought me of certain nuns, holy women, who teach little girls to say their prayers and make lace close by here; and of your dear Excellency to pay for the whole business.

Poor little brown mite! She was picked up after the storm (such a set-out of ship-models and votive candles as that storm must have brought the Madonna at Porto Venere!) on a strip of sand between the rocks of our castle: the thing was really miraculous, for this coast is like a shark’s jaw, and the bits of sand are tiny and far between. She was lashed to a plank, swaddled up close in outlandish garments; and when they brought her to me they thought she must certainly be dead: a little girl of four or five, decidedly pretty, and as brown as a berry, who, when she came to, shook her head to show she understood no kind of Italian, and jabbered some half-intelligible Eastern jabber, a few Greek words embedded in I know not what; the Superior of the College De Propaganda Fidē would be puzzled to know. The child appears to be the only survivor from a ship which must have gone down in the great squall, and whose timbers have been strewing the bay for some days past; no one at Spezia or in any of our ports knows anything about her, but she was seen, apparently making for Porto Venere, by some of our sardine-fishers: a big, lumbering craft, with eyes painted on each side of the prow, which, as you know, is a peculiarity of Greek boats. She was sighted for the last time off the island of Palmaria, entering, with all sails spread, right into the thick of the storm-darkness. No bodies, strangely enough, have been washed ashore.

July 10

I have received the money, dear Donna Evelina. There was tremendous excitement down at San Massimo when the carrier came in with a registered letter, and I was sent for, in presence of all the village authorities, to sign my name on the postal register.

The child has already been settled some days with the nuns; such dear little nuns (nuns always go straight to the heart of an old priest-hater and conspirator against the Pope, you know), dressed in brown robes and close, white caps, with an immense round straw-hat flapping behind their heads like a nimbus: they are called Sisters of the Stigmata, and have a convent and school at San Massimo, a little way inland, with an untidy garden full of lavender and cherry-trees. Your protégée has already half set the convent, the village, the Episcopal See, the Order of St. Francis, by the ears. First, because nobody could make out whether or not she had been christened. The question was a grave one, for it appears (as your uncle-in-law, the Cardinal, will tell you) that it is almost equally undesirable to be christened twice over as not to be christened at all. The first danger was finally decided upon as the less terrible; but the child, they say, had evidently been baptized before, and knew that the operation ought not to be repeated, for she kicked and plunged and yelled like twenty little devils, and positively would not let the holy water touch her. The Mother Superior, who always took for granted that the baptism had taken place before, says that the child was quite right, and that Heaven was trying to prevent a sacrilege; but the priest and the barber’s wife, who had to hold her, think the occurrence fearful, and suspect the little girl of being a Protestant. Then the question of the name. Pinned to her clothes—striped Eastern things, and that kind of crinkled silk stuff they weave in Crete and Cyprus—was a piece of parchment, a scapular we thought at first, but which was found to contain only the name Δɩoνεα—Dionea, as they pronounce it here. The question was, Could such a name be fitly borne by a young lady at the Convent of the Stigmata? Half the population here have names as unchristian quite—Norma, Odoacer, Archimedes—my housemaid is called Themis—but Dionea seemed to scandalize every one, perhaps because these good folk had a mysterious instinct that the name is derived from Dione, one of the loves of Father Zeus, and mother of no less a lady than the goddess Venus. The child was very near being called Maria, although there are already twenty-three other Marias, Mariettas, Mariuccias, and so forth at the convent. But the sister-bookkeeper, who apparently detests monotony, bethought her to look out Dionea first in the Calendar, which proved useless; and then in a big vellum-bound book, printed at Venice in 1625, called “Flos Sanctorum, or Lives of the Saints, by Father Ribadeneira, S.J., with the addition of such Saints as have no assigned place in the Almanack, otherwise called the Movable or Extravagant Saints.” The zeal of Sister Anna Maddalena has been rewarded, for there, among the Extravagant Saints, sure enough, with a border of palm-branches and hour-glasses, stands the name of Saint Dionea, Virgin and Martyr, a lady of Antioch, put to death by the Emperor Decius. I know your Excellency’s taste for historical information, so I forward this item. But I fear, dear Lady Evelyn, I fear that the heavenly patroness of your little sea-waif was a much more extravagant saint than that.

December 21, 1879

Many thanks, dear Donna Evelina, for the money for Dionea’s schooling. Indeed, it was not wanted yet: the accomplishments of young ladies are taught at a very moderate rate at Montemirto: and as to clothes, which you mention, a pair of wooden clogs, with pretty red tips, costs sixty-five centimes, and ought to last three years, if the owner is careful to carry them on her head in a neat parcel when out walking, and to put them on again only on entering the village. The Mother Superior is greatly overcome by your Excellency’s munificence towards the convent, and much perturbed at being unable to send you a specimen of your protégée’s skill, exemplified in an embroidered pocket-handkerchief or a pair of mittens; but the fact is that poor Dionea has no skill. “We will pray to the Madonna and St. Francis to make her more worthy,” remarked the Superior. Perhaps, however, your Excellency, who is, I fear but a Pagan woman (for all the Savelli Popes and St. Andrew Savelli’s miracles), and insufficiently appreciative of embroidered pocket-handkerchiefs, will be quite as satisfied to hear that Dionea, instead of skill, has got the prettiest face of any little girl in Montemirto. She is tall, for her age (she is eleven) quite wonderfully well proportioned and extremely strong: of all the convent-full, she is the only one for whom I have never been called in. The features are very regular, the hair black, and despite all the good Sisters’ efforts to keep it smooth like a Chinaman’s, beautifully curly. I am glad she should be pretty, for she will more easily find a husband; and also because it seems fitting that your protégée should be beautiful. Unfortunately her character is not so satisfactory: she hates learning, sewing, washing up the dishes, all equally. I am sorry to say she shows no natural piety. Her companions detest her, and the nuns, although they admit that she is not exactly naughty, seem to feel her as a dreadful thorn in the flesh. She spends hours and hours on the terrace overlooking the sea (her great desire, she confided to me, is to get to the sea—to get back to the sea, as she expressed it), and lying in the garden, under the big myrtle-bushes, and, in spring and summer, under the rose-hedge. The nuns say that rose-hedge and that myrtle-bush are growing a great deal too big, one would think from Dionea’s lying under them; the fact, I suppose, has drawn attention to them. “That child makes all the useless weeds grow,” remarked Sister Reparata. Another of Dionea’s amusements is playing with pigeons. The number of pigeons she collects about her is quite amazing; you would never have thought that San Massimo or the neighbouring hills contained as many. They flutter down like snowflakes, and strut and swell themselves out, and furl and unfurl their tails, and peek with little sharp movements of their silly, sensual heads and a little throb and gurgle in their throats, while Dionea lies stretched out full length in the sun, putting out her lips, which they come to kiss, and uttering strange, cooing sounds; or hopping about, flapping her arms slowly like wings, and raising her little head with much the same odd gesture as they;—’tis a lovely sight, a thing fit for one of your painters, Burne Jones or Tadema, with the myrtle-bushes all round, the bright, whitewashed convent walls behind, the white marble chapel steps (all steps are marble in this Carrara country), and the enamel blue sea through the ilex-branches beyond. But the good Sisters abominate these pigeons, who, it appears, are messy little creatures, and they complain that, were it not that the Reverend Director likes a pigeon in his pot on a holiday, they could not stand the bother of perpetually sweeping the chapel steps and the kitchen threshold all along of those dirty birds…

August 6, 1882

Do not tempt me, dearest Excellency, with your invitations to Rome. I should not be happy there, and do but little honour to your friendship. My many years of exile, of wanderings in northern countries, have made me a little bit into a northern man: I cannot quite get on with my own fellow-countrymen, except with the good peasants and fishermen all round. Besides—forgive the vanity of an old man, who has learned to make triple acrostic sonnets to cheat the days and months at Theresienstadt and Spielberg—I have suffered too much for Italy to endure patiently the sight of little parliamentary cabals and municipal wranglings, although they also are necessary in this day as conspiracies and battles were in mine. I am not fit for your roomful of ministers and learned men and pretty women: the former would think me an ignoramus, and the latter—what would afflict me much more—a pedant… Rather, if your Excellency really wants to show yourself and your children to your father’s old protégé of Mazzinian times, find a few days to come here next spring. You shall have some very bare rooms with brick floors and white curtains opening out on my terrace; and a dinner of all manner of fish and milk (the white garlic flowers shall be mown away from under the olives lest my cow should eat it) and eggs cooked in herbs plucked in the hedges. Your boys can go and see the big ironclads at Spezia; and you shall come with me up our lanes fringed with delicate ferns and overhung by big olives, and into the fields where the cherry-trees shed their blossoms on to the budding vines, the fig-trees stretching out their little green gloves, where the goats nibble perched on their hind legs, and the cows low in the huts of reeds; and there rise from the ravines, with the gurgle of the brooks, from the cliffs with the boom of the surf, the voices of unseen boys and girls, singing about love and flowers and death, just as in the days of Theocritus, whom your learned Excellency does well to read. Has your Excellency ever read Longus, a Greek pastoral novelist? He is a trifle free, a trifle nude for us readers of Zola, but the old French of Amyot has a wonderful charm, and he gives one an idea, as no one else does, how folk lived in such valleys, by such sea-boards, as these in the days when daisy-chains and garlands of roses were still hung on the olive-trees for the nymphs of the grove; when across the bay, at the end of the narrow neck of blue sea, there clung to the marble rocks not a church of Saint Laurence, with the sculptured martyr on his gridiron, but the temple of Venus, protecting her harbour… Yes, dear Lady Evelyn, you have guessed aright. Your old friend has returned to his sins, and is scribbling once more. But no longer at verses or political pamphlets. I am enthralled by a tragic history, the history of the fall of the Pagan Gods… Have you ever read of their wanderings and disguises, in my friend Heine’s little book?

And if you come to Montemirto, you shall see also your protégée, of whom you ask for news. It has just missed being disastrous. Poor Dionea! I fear that early voyage tied to the spar did no good to her wits, poor little waif! There has been a fearful row; and it has required all my influence, and all the awfulness of your Excellency’s name, and the Papacy, and the Holy Roman Empire, to prevent her expulsion by the Sisters of the Stigmata. It appears that this mad creature very nearly committed a sacrilege: she was discovered handling in a suspicious manner the Madonna’s gala frock and her best veil of pizzo di Cantù, a gift of the late Marchioness Violante Vigalena of Fornovo. One of the orphans, Zaira Barsanti, whom they call the Rossaccia, even pretends to have surprised Dionea as she was about to adorn her wicked little person with these sacred garments; and, on another occasion, when Dionea had been sent to pass some oil and sawdust over the chapel floor (it was the eve of Easter of the Roses), to have discovered her seated on the edge of the altar, in the very place of the Most Holy Sacrament. I was sent for in hot haste, and had to assist at an ecclesiastical council in the convent parlour, where Dionea appeared, rather out of place, an amazing little beauty, dark, lithe, with an odd, ferocious gleam in her eyes, and a still odder smile, tortuous, serpentine, like that of Leonardo da Vinci’s women, among the plaster images of St. Francis, and the glazed and framed samplers before the little statue of the Virgin, which wears in summer a kind of mosquito-curtain to guard it from the flies, who, as you know, are creatures of Satan.

Speaking of Satan, does your Excellency know that on the inside of our little convent door, just above the little perforated plate of metal (like the rose of a watering-pot) through which the Sister-portress peeps and talks, is pasted a printed form, an arrangement of holy names and texts in triangles, and the stigmatized hands of St. Francis, and a variety of other devices, for the purpose, as is explained in a special notice, of baffling the Evil One, and preventing his entrance into that building? Had you seen Dionea, and the stolid, contemptuous way in which she took, without attempting to refute, the various shocking allegations against her, your Excellency would have reflected, as I did, that the door in question must have been accidentally absent from the premises, perhaps at the joiner’s for repair, the day that your protégée first penetrated into the convent. The ecclesiastical tribunal, consisting of the Mother Superior, three Sisters, the Capuchin Director, and your humble servant (who vainly attempted to be Devil’s advocate), sentenced Dionea, among other things, to make the sign of the cross twenty-six times on the bare floor with her tongue. Poor little child! One might almost expect that, as happened when Dame Venus scratched her hand on the thorn-bush, red roses should sprout up between the fissures of the dirty old bricks.

October 14, 1883

You ask whether, now that the Sisters let Dionea go and do half a day’s service now and then in the village, and that Dionea is a grown-up creature, she does not set the place by the ears with her beauty. The people here are quite aware of its existence. She is already dubbed La bella Dionea; but that does not bring her any nearer getting a husband, although your Excellency’s generous offer of a wedding-portion is well known throughout the district of San Massimo and Montemirto. None of our boys, peasants or fishermen, seem to hang on her steps; and if they turn round to stare and whisper as she goes by straight and dainty in her wooden clogs, with the pitcher of water or the basket of linen on her beautiful crisp dark head, it is, I remark, with an expression rather of fear than of love. The women, on their side, make horns with their fingers as she passes, and as they sit by her side in the convent chapel; but that seems natural. My housekeeper tells me that down in the village she is regarded as possessing the evil eye and bringing love misery. “You mean,” I said, “that a glance from her is too much for our lads’ peace of mind.” Veneranda shook her head, and explained, with the deference and contempt with which she always mentions any of her countryfolk’s superstitions to me, that the matter is different: it’s not with her they are in love (they would be afraid of her eye), but where-ever she goes the young people must needs fall in love with each other, and usually where it is far from desirable. “You know Sora Luisa, the blacksmith’s widow? Well, Dionea did a half-service for her last month, to prepare for the wedding of Luisa’s daughter. Well, now, the girl must say, forsooth! that she won’t have Pieriho of Lerici any longer, but will have that raggamuffin Wooden Pipe from Solaro, or go into a convent. And the girl changed her mind the very day that Dionea had come into the house. Then there is the wife of Pippo, the coffee-house keeper; they say she is carrying on with one of the coastguards, and Dionea helped her to do her washing six weeks ago. The son of Sor Temistocle has just cut off a finger to avoid the conscription, because he is mad about his cousin and afraid of being taken for a soldier; and it is a fact that some of the shirts which were made for him at the Stigmata had been sewn by Dionea;”… and thus a perfect string of love misfortunes, enough to make a little “Decameron,” I assure you, and all laid to Dionea’s account. Certain it is that the people of San Massimo are terribly afraid of Dionea…

July 17, 1884

Dionea’s strange influence seems to be extending in a terrible way. I am almost beginning to think that our folk are correct in their fear of the young witch. I used to think, as physician to a convent, that nothing was more erroneous than all the romancings of Diderot and Schubert (your Excellency sang me his “Young Nun” once: do you recollect, just before your marriage?), and that no more humdrum creature existed than one of our little nuns, with their pink baby faces under their tight white caps. It appeared the romancing was more correct than the prose. Unknown things have sprung up in these good Sisters’ hearts, as unknown flowers have sprung up among the myrtle-bushes and the rose-hedge which Dionea lies under. Did I ever mention to you a certain little Sister Giuliana, who professed only two years ago?—a funny rose and white little creature presiding over the infirmary, as prosaic a little saint as ever kissed a crucifix or scoured a saucepan. Well, Sister Giuliana has disappeared, and the same day has disappeared also a sailor-boy from the port.

August 20, 1884

The case of Sister Giuliana seems to have been but the beginning of an extraordinary love epidemic at the Convent of the Stigmata: the elder schoolgirls have to be kept under lock and key lest they should talk over the wall in the moonlight, or steal out to the little hunchback who writes love-letters at a penny a-piece, beautiful flourishes and all, under the portico by the Fish-market. I wonder does that wicked little Dionea, whom no one pays court to, smile (her lips like a Cupid’s bow or a tiny snake’s curves) as she calls the pigeons down around her, or lies fondling the cats under the myrtle-bush, when she sees the pupils going about with swollen, red eyes; the poor little nuns taking fresh penances on the cold chapel flags; and hears the long-drawn guttural vowels, amore and morte and mio bene, which rise up of an evening, with the boom of the surf and the scent of the lemon-flowers, as the young men wander up and down, arm-in-arm, twanging their guitars along the moonlit lanes under the olives?

October 20, 1885

A terrible, terrible thing has happened! I write to your Excellency with hands all a-tremble; and yet I must write, I must speak, or else I shall cry out. Did I ever mention to you Father Domenico of Casoria, the confessor of our Convent of the Stigmata? A young man, tall, emaciated with fasts and vigils, but handsome like the monk playing the virginal in Giorgione’s “Concert,” and under his brown serge still the most stalwart fellow of the country all round? One has heard of men struggling with the tempter. Well, well, Father Domenico had struggled as hard as any of the Anchorites recorded by St. Jerome, and he had conquered. I never knew anything comparable to the angelic serenity of gentleness of this victorious soul. I don’t like monks, but I loved Father Domenico. I might have been his father, easily, yet I always felt a certain shyness and awe of him; and yet men have accounted me a clean-lived man in my generation; but I felt, whenever I approached him, a poor worldly creature, debased by the knowledge of so many mean and ugly things. Of late Father Domenico had seemed to me less calm than usual: his eyes had grown strangely bright, and red spots had formed on his salient cheekbones. One day last week, taking his hand, I felt his pulse flutter, and all his strength as it were, liquefy under my touch. “You are ill,” I said. “You have fever, Father Domenico. You have been overdoing yourself—some new privation, some new penance. Take care and do not tempt Heaven; remember the flesh is weak.” Father Domenico withdrew his hand quickly. “Do not say that,” he cried; “the flesh is strong!” and turned away his face. His eyes were glistening and he shook all over. “Some quinine,” I ordered. But I felt it was no case for quinine. Prayers might be more useful, and could I have given them he should not have wanted. Last night I was suddenly sent for to Father Domenico’s monastery above Montemirto: they told me he was ill. I ran up through the dim twilight of moonbeams and olives with a sinking heart. Something told me my monk was dead. He was lying in a little low whitewashed room; they had carried him there from his own cell in hopes he might still be alive. The windows were wide open; they framed some olive-branches, glistening in the moonlight, and far below, a strip of moonlit sea. When I told them that he was really dead, they brought some tapers and lit them at his head and feet, and placed a crucifix between his hands. “The Lord has been pleased to call our poor brother to Him,” said the Superior. “A case of apoplexy, my dear Doctor—a case of apoplexy. You will make out the certificate for the authorities.” I made out the certificate. It was weak of me. But, after all, why make a scandal? He certainly had no wish to injure the poor monks.

Next day I found the little nuns all in tears. They were gathering flowers to send as a last gift to their confessor. In the convent garden I found Dionea, standing by the side of a big basket of roses, one of the white pigeons perched on her shoulder.

“So,” she said, “he has killed himself with charcoal, poor Padre Domenico!”

Something in her tone, her eyes, shocked me.

“God has called to Himself one of His most faithful servants,” I said gravely.

Standing opposite this girl, magnificent, radiant in her beauty, before the rose-hedge, with the white pigeons furling and unfurling, strutting and pecking all round, I seemed to see suddenly the whitewashed room of last night, the big crucifix, that poor thin face under the yellow waxlight. I felt glad for Father Domenico; his battle was over.

“Take this to Father Domenico from me,” said Dionea, breaking off a twig of myrtle starred over with white blossom; and raising her head with that smile like the twist of a young snake, she sang out in a high guttural voice a strange chaunt, consisting of the word Amor—amor—amor. I took the branch of myrtle and threw it in her face.

January 3, 1886

It will be difficult to find a place for Dionea, and in this neighbourhood well-nigh impossible. The people associate her somehow with the death of Father Domenico, which has confirmed her reputation of having the evil eye. She left the convent (being now seventeen) some two months back, and is at present gaining her bread working with the masons at our notary’s new house at Lerici: the work is hard, but our women often do it, and it is magnificent to see Dionea, in her short white skirt and tight white bodice, mixing the smoking lime with her beautiful strong arms; or, an empty sack drawn over her head and shoulders, walking majestically up the cliff, up the scaffoldings with her load of bricks… I am, however, very anxious to get Dionea out of the neighbourhood, because I cannot help dreading the annoyances to which her reputation for the evil eye exposes her, and even some explosion of rage if ever she should lose the indifferent contempt with which she treats them. I hear that one of the rich men of our part of the world, a certain Sor Agostino of Sarzana, who owns a whole flank of marble mountain, is looking out for a maid for his daughter, who is about to be married; kind people and patriarchal in their riches, the old man still sitting down to table with all his servants; and his nephew, who is going to be his son-in-law, a splendid young fellow, who has worked like Jacob, in the quarry and at the saw-mill, for love of his pretty cousin. That whole house is so good, simple, and peaceful, that I hope it may tame down even Dionea. If I do not succeed in getting Dionea this place (and all your Excellency’s illustriousness and all my poor eloquence will be needed to counteract the sinister reports attaching to our poor little waif), it will be best to accept your suggestion of taking the girl into your household at Rome, since you are curious to see what you call our baleful beauty. I am amused, and a little indignant at what you say about your footmen being handsome: Don Juan himself, my dear Lady Evelyn, would be cowed by Dionea…

May 29, 1886

Here is Dionea back upon our hands once more! but I cannot send her to your Excellency. Is it from living among these peasants and fishing-folk, or is it because, as people pretend, a sceptic is always superstitious? I could not muster courage to send you Dionea, although your boys are still in sailor-clothes and your uncle, the Cardinal, is eighty-four; and as to the Prince, why, he bears the most potent amulet against Dionea’s terrible powers in your own dear capricious person. Seriously, there is something eerie in this coincidence. Poor Dionea! I feel sorry for her, exposed to the passion of a once patriarchally respectable old man. I feel even more abashed at the incredible audacity, I should almost say sacrilegious madness, of the vile old creature. But still the coincidence is strange and uncomfortable. Last week the lightning struck a huge olive in the orchard of Sor Agostino’s house above Sarzana. Under the olive was Sor Agostino himself, who was killed on the spot; and opposite, not twenty paces off, drawing water from the well, unhurt and calm, was Dionea. It was the end of a sultry afternoon: I was on a terrace in one of those villages of ours, jammed, like some hardy bush, in the gash of a hillside. I saw the storm rush down the valley, a sudden blackness, and then, like a curse, a flash, a tremendous crash, re-echoed by a dozen hills. “I told him,” Dionea said very quietly, when she came to stay with me the next day (for Sor Agostino’s family would not have her for another half-minute), “that if he did not leave me alone Heaven would send him an accident.”

July 15, 1886

My book? Oh, dear Donna Evelina, do not make me blush by talking of my book! Do not make an old man, respectable, a Government functionary (communal physician of the district of San Massimo and Montemirto Ligure), confess that he is but a lazy unprofitable dreamer, collecting materials as a child picks hips out of a hedge, only to throw them away, liking them merely for the little occupation of scratching his hands and standing on tiptoe, for their pretty redness… You remember what Balzac says about projecting any piece of work?—“C’est fumer des cigarettes enchantées.”… Well, well! The data obtainable about the ancient gods in their days of adversity are few and far between: a quotation here and there from the Fathers; two or three legends; Venus reappearing; the persecutions of Apollo in Styria; Proserpina going, in Chaucer, to reign over the fairies; a few obscure religious persecutions in the Middle Ages on the score of Paganism; some strange rites practised till lately in the depths of a Breton forest near Lannion… As to Tannhäuser, he was a real knight, and a sorry one, and a real Minnesinger not of the best. Your Excellency will find some of his poems in Von der Hagen’s four immense volumes, but, I recommend you to take your notions of Ritter Tannhäuser’s poetry rather from Wagner. Certain it is that the Pagan divinities lasted much longer than we suspect, sometimes in their own nakedness, sometimes in the stolen garb of the Madonna or the saints. Who knows whether they do not exist to this day? And, indeed, is it possible they should not? For the awfulness of the deep woods, with their filtered green light, the creak of the swaying, solitary reeds, exists, and is Pan; and the blue, starry May night exists, the sough of the waves, the warm wind carrying the sweetness of the lemon-blossoms, the bitterness of the myrtle on our rocks, the distant chaunt of the boys cleaning out their nets, of the girls sickling the grass under the olives, Amor—amor—amor, and all this is the great goddess Venus. And opposite to me, as I write, between the branches of the ilexes, across the blue sea, streaked like a Ravenna mosaic with purple and green, shimmer the white houses and walls, the steeple and towers, an enchanted Fata Morgana city, of dim Porto Venere;… and I mumble to myself the verse of Catullus, but addressing a greater and more terrible goddess than he did:—

“Procul a mea sit furor omnis, Hera, domo; alios; age incitatos, alios age rabidos.”

March 25, 1887

Yes; I will do everything in my power for your friends. Are you well-bred folk as well bred as we, Republican bourgeois, with the coarse hands (though you once told me mine were psychic hands when the mania of palmistry had not yet been succeeded by that of the Reconciliation between Church and State), I wonder, that you should apologize, you whose father fed me and housed me and clothed me in my exile, for giving me the horrid trouble of hunting for lodgings? It is like you, dear Donna Evelina, to have sent me photographs of my future friend Waldemar’s statue… I have no love for modern sculpture, for all the hours I have spent in Gibson’s and Dupré’s studio: ’tis a dead art we should do better to bury. But your Waldemar has something of the old spirit: he seems to feel the divineness of the mere body, the spirituality of a limpid stream of mere physical life. But why among these statues only men and boys, athletes and fauns? Why only the bust of that thin, delicate-lipped little Madonna wife of his? Why no wide-shouldered Amazon or broad-flanked Aphrodite?

April 10, 1887

You ask me how poor Dionea is getting on. Not as your Excellency and I ought to have expected when we placed her with the good Sisters of the Stigmata: although I wager that, fantastic and capricious as you are, you would be better pleased (hiding it carefully from that grave side of you which bestows devout little books and carbolic acid upon the indigent) that your protégée should be a witch than a serving-maid, a maker of philtres rather than a knitter of stockings and sewer of shirts.

A maker of philtres. Roughly speaking, that is Dionea’s profession. She lives upon the money which I dole out to her (with many useless objurgations) on behalf of your Excellency; and her ostensible employment is mending nets, collecting olives, carrying bricks, and other miscellaneous jobs; but her real status is that of village sorceress. You think our peasants are sceptical? Perhaps they do not believe in thought-reading, mesmerism, and ghosts, like you, dear Lady Evelyn. But they believe very firmly in the evil eye, in magic, and in love-potions. Every one has his little story of this or that which happened to his brother or cousin or neighbour. My stable-boy and male factotum’s brother-in-law, living some years ago in Corsica, was seized with a longing for a dance with his beloved at one of those balls which our peasants give in the winter, when the snow makes leisure in the mountains. A wizard anointed him for money, and straightway he turned into a black cat, and in three bounds was over the seas, at the door of his uncle’s cottage, and among the dancers. He caught his beloved by the skirt to draw her attention; but she replied with a kick which sent him squealing back to Corsica. When he returned in summer he refused to marry the lady, and carried his left arm in a sling. “You broke it when I came to the Veglia!” he said, and all seemed explained. Another lad, returning from working in the vineyards near Marseilles, was walking up to his native village, high in our hills, one moonlight night. He heard sounds of fiddle and fife from a roadside barn, and saw yellow light from its chinks; and then entering, he found many women dancing, old and young, and among them his affianced. He tried to snatch her round the waist for a waltz (they play Mme Angot at our rustic balls), but the girl was unclutchable, and whispered, “Go; for these are witches, who will kill thee; and I am a witch also. Alas! I shall go to hell when I die.”

I could tell your Excellency dozens of such stories. But love-philtres are among the commonest things to sell and buy. Do you remember the sad little story of Cervantes’ Licentiate, who, instead of a love-potion, drank a philtre which made him think he was made of glass, fit emblem of a poor mad poet?… It is love-philtres that Dionea prepares. No; do not misunderstand; they do not give love of her, still less her love. Your seller of love-charms is as cold as ice, as pure as snow. The priest has crusaded against her, and stones have flown at her as she went by from dissatisfied lovers; and the very children, paddling in the sea and making mud-pies in the sand, have put out forefinger and little finger and screamed, “Witch, witch! ugly witch!” as she passed with basket or brick load; but Dionea has only smiled, that snake-like, amused smile, but more ominous than of yore. The other day I determined to seek her and argue with her on the subject of her evil trade. Dionea has a certain regard for me; not, I fancy, a result of gratitude, but rather the recognition of a certain admiration and awe which she inspires in your Excellency’s foolish old servant. She has taken up her abode in a deserted hut, built of dried reeds and thatch, such as they keep cows in, among the olives on the cliffs. She was not there, but about the hut pecked some white pigeons, and from it, startling me foolishly with its unexpected sound, came the eerie bleat of her pet goat… Among the olives it was twilight already, with streakings of faded rose in the sky, and faded rose, like long trails of petals, on the distant sea. I clambered down among the myrtle-bushes and came to a little semicircle of yellow sand, between two high and jagged rocks, the place where the sea had deposited Dionea after the wreck. She was seated there on the sand, her bare foot dabbling in the waves; she had twisted a wreath of myrtle and wild roses on her black, crisp hair. Near her was one of our prettiest girls, the Lena of Sor Tullio the blacksmith, with ashy, terrified face under her flowered kerchief. I determined to speak to the child, but without startling her now, for she is a nervous, hysteric little thing. So I sat on the rocks, screened by the myrtle-bushes, waiting till the girl had gone. Dionea, seated listless on the sands, leaned over the sea and took some of its water in the hollow of her hand. “Here,” she said to the Lena of Sor Tullio, “fill your bottle with this and give it to drink to Tommasino the Rosebud.” Then she set to singing:—

“Love is salt, like sea-water—I drink and I die of thirst… Water! water! Yet the more I drink, the more I burn. Love! thou art bitter as the seaweed.”

April 20, 1887

Your friends are settled here, dear Lady Evelyn. The house is built in what was once a Genoese fort, growing like a grey spiked aloes out of the marble rocks of our bay; rock and wall (the walls existed long before Genoa was ever heard of) grown almost into a homogeneous mass, delicate grey, stained with black and yellow lichen, and dotted here and there with myrtle-shoots and crimson snapdragon. In what was once the highest enclosure of the fort, where your friend Gertrude watches the maids hanging out the fine white sheets and pillow-cases to dry (a bit of the North, of Hermann and Dorothea transferred to the South), a great twisted fig-tree juts out like an eccentric gurgoyle over the sea, and drops its ripe fruit into the deep blue pools. There is but scant furniture in the house, but a great oleander overhangs it, presently to burst into pink splendour; and on all the window-sills, even that of the kitchen (such a background of shining brass saucepans Waldemar’s wife has made of it!) are pipkins and tubs full of trailing carnations, and tufts of sweet basil and thyme and mignonette. She pleases me most, your Gertrude, although you foretold I should prefer the husband; with her thin white face, a Memling Madonna finished by some Tuscan sculptor, and her long, delicate white hands ever busy, like those of a mediæval lady, with some delicate piece of work; and the strange blue, more limpid than the sky and deeper than the sea, of her rarely lifted glance.

It is in her company that I like Waldemar best; I prefer to the genius that infinitely tender and respectful, I would not say lover—yet I have no other word—of his pale wife. He seems to me, when with her, like some fierce, generous, wild thing from the woods, like the lion of Una, tame and submissive to this saint… This tenderness is really very beautiful on the part of that big lion Waldemar, with his odd eyes, as of some wild animal—odd, and, your Excellency remarks, not without a gleam of latent ferocity. I think that hereby hangs the explanation of his never doing any but male figures: the female figure, he says (and your Excellency must hold him responsible, not me, for such profanity), is almost inevitably inferior in strength and beauty; woman is not form, but expression, and therefore suits painting, but not sculpture. The point of a woman is not her body, but (and here his eyes rested very tenderly upon the thin white profile of his wife) her soul. “Still,” I answered, “the ancients, who understood such matters, did manufacture some tolerable female statues: the Fates of the Parthenon, the Phidian Pallas, the Venus of Milo.”…

“Ah! yes,” exclaimed Waldemar, smiling, with that savage gleam of his eyes; “but those are not women, and the people who made them have left us the tales of Endymion, Adonis, Anchises: a goddess might sit for them.”…

May 5, 1887

Has it ever struck your Excellency in one of your La Rochefoucauld fits (in Lent say, after too many balls) that not merely maternal but conjugal unselfishness may be a very selfish thing? There! you toss your little head at my words; yet I wager I have heard you say that other women may think it right to humour their husbands, but as to you, the Prince must learn that a wife’s duty is as much to chasten her husband’s whims as to satisfy them. I really do feel indignant that such a snow-white saint should wish another woman to part with all instincts of modesty merely because that other woman would be a good model for her husband; really it is intolerable. “Leave the girl alone,” Waldemar said, laughing. “What do I want with the unæsthetic sex, as Schopenhauer calls it?” But Gertrude has set her heart on his doing a female figure; it seems that folk have twitted him with never having produced one. She has long been on the look-out for a model for him. It is odd to see this pale, demure, diaphanous creature, not the more earthly for approaching motherhood, scanning the girls of our village with the eyes of a slave-dealer.

“If you insist on speaking to Dionea,” I said, “I shall insist on speaking to her at the same time, to urge her to refuse your proposal.” But Waldemar’s pale wife was indifferent to all my speeches about modesty being a poor girl’s only dowry. “She will do for a Venus,” she merely answered.

We went up to the cliffs together, after some sharp words, Waldemar’s wife hanging on my arm as we slowly clambered up the stony path among the olives. We found Dionea at the door of her hut, making faggots of myrtle-branches. She listened sullenly to Gertrude’s offer and explanations; indifferently to my admonitions not to accept. The thought of stripping for the view of a man, which would send a shudder through our most brazen village girls, seemed not to startle her, immaculate and savage as she is accounted. She did not answer, but sat under the olives, looking vaguely across the sea. At that moment Waldemar came up to us; he had followed with the intention of putting an end to these wranglings.

“Gertrude,” he said, “do leave her alone. I have found a model—a fisher-boy, whom I much prefer to any woman.”

Dionea raised her head with that serpentine smile. “I will come,” she said.

Waldemar stood silent; his eyes were fixed on her, where she stood under the olives, her white shift loose about her splendid throat, her shining feet bare in the grass. Vaguely, as if not knowing what he said, he asked her name. She answered that her name was Dionea; for the rest, she was an Innocentina, that is to say, a foundling; then she began to sing:—

“Flower of the myrtle!

My father is the starry sky:

The mother that made me is the sea.”

June 22, 1887

I confess I was an old fool to have grudged Waldemar his model. As I watch him gradually building up his statue, watch the goddess gradually emerging from the clay heap, I ask myself—and the case might trouble a more subtle moralist than me—whether a village girl, an obscure, useless life within the bounds of what we choose to call right and wrong, can be weighed against the possession by mankind of a great work of art, a Venus immortally beautiful? Still, I am glad that the two alternatives need not be weighed against each other. Nothing can equal the kindness of Gertrude, now that Dionea has consented to sit to her husband; the girl is ostensibly merely a servant like any other; and, lest any report of her real functions should get abroad and discredit her at San Massimo or Montemirto, she is to be taken to Rome, where no one will be the wiser, and where, by the way, your Excellency will have an opportunity of comparing Waldemar’s goddess of love with our little orphan of the Convent of the Stigmata. What reassures me still more is the curious attitude of Waldemar towards the girl. I could never have believed that an artist could regard a woman so utterly as a mere inanimate thing, a form to copy, like a tree or flower. Truly he carries out his theory that sculpture knows only the body, and the body scarcely considered as human. The way in which he speaks to Dionea after hours of the most rapt contemplation of her is almost brutal in its coldness. And yet to hear him exclaim, “How beautiful she is! Good God, how beautiful!” No love of mere woman was ever so violent as this love of woman’s mere shape.

June 27, 1887

You asked me once, dearest Excellency, whether there survived among our people (you had evidently added a volume on folklore to that heap of half-cut, dog’s-eared books that litter about among the Chineseries and mediæval brocades of your rooms) any trace of Pagan myths. I explained to you then that all our fairy mythology, classic gods, and demons and heroes, teemed with fairies, ogres, and princes. Last night I had a curious proof of this. Going to see the Waldemar, I found Dionea seated under the oleander at the top of the old Genoese fort, telling stories to the two little blonde children who were making the falling pink blossoms into necklaces at her feet; the pigeons, Dionea’s white pigeons, which never leave her, strutting and pecking among the basil pots, and the white gulls flying round the rocks overhead. This is what I heard… “And the three fairies said to the youngest son of the King, to the one who had been brought up as a shepherd, ‘Take this apple, and give it to her among us who is most beautiful.’ And the first fairy said, ‘If thou give it to me thou shalt be Emperor of Rome, and have purple clothes, and have a gold crown and gold armour, and horses and courtiers;’ and the second said, ‘If thou give it to me thou shalt be Pope, and wear a mitre, and have the keys of heaven and hell;’ and the third fairy said, ‘Give the apple to me, for I will give thee the most beautiful lady to wife.’ And the youngest son of the King sat in the green meadow and thought about it a little, and then said, ‘What use is there in being Emperor or Pope? Give me the beautiful lady to wife, since I am young myself.’ And he gave the apple to the third of the three fairies.”…

Dionea droned out the story in her half-Genoese dialect, her eyes looking far away across the blue sea, dotted with sails like white sea-gulls, that strange serpentine smile on her lips.

“Who told thee that fable?” I asked.

She took a handful of oleander-blossoms from the ground, and throwing them in the air, answered listlessly, as she watched the little shower of rosy petals descend on her black hair and pale breast—

“Who knows?”

July 6, 1887

How strange is the power of art! Has Waldemar’s statue shown me the real Dionea, or has Dionea really grown more strangely beautiful than before? Your Excellency will laugh; but when I meet her I cast down my eyes after the first glimpse of her loveliness; not with the shyness of a ridiculous old pursuer of the Eternal Feminine, but with a sort of religious awe—the feeling with which, as a child kneeling by my mother’s side, I looked down on the church flags when the Mass bell told the elevation of the Host… Do you remember the story of Zeuxis and the ladies of Crotona, five of the fairest not being too much for his Juno? Do you remember—you, who have read everything—all the bosh of our writers about the Ideal in Art? Why, here is a girl who disproves all this nonsense in a minute; she is far, far more beautiful than Waldemar’s statue of her. He said so angrily, only yesterday, when his wife took me into his studio (he has made a studio of the long-desecrated chapel of the old Genoese fort, itself, they say, occupying the site of the temple of Venus).

As he spoke that odd spark of ferocity dilated in his eyes, and seizing the largest of his modelling tools, he obliterated at one swoop the whole exquisite face. Poor Gertrude turned ashy white, and a convulsion passed over her face…

July 15

I wish I could make Gertrude understand, and yet I could never, never bring myself to say a word. As a matter of fact, what is there to be said? Surely she knows best that her husband will never love any woman but herself. Yet ill, nervous as she is, I quite understand that she must loathe this unceasing talk of Dionea, of the superiority of the model over the statue. Cursed statue! I wish it were finished, or else that it had never been begun.

July 20

This morning Waldemar came to me. He seemed strangely agitated: I guessed he had something to tell me, and yet I could never ask. Was it cowardice on my part? He sat in my shuttered room, the sunshine making pools on the red bricks and tremulous stars on the ceiling, talking of many things at random, and mechanically turning over the manuscript, the heap of notes of my poor, never-finished book on the Exiled Gods. Then he rose, and walking nervously round my study, talking disconnectedly about his work, his eye suddenly fell upon a little altar, one of my few antiquities, a little block of marble with a carved garland and rams’ heads, and a half-effaced inscription dedicating it to Venus, the mother of Love.

“It was found,” I explained, “in the ruins of the temple, somewhere on the site of your studio: so, at least, the man said from whom I bought it.”

Waldemar looked at it long. “So,” he said, “this little cavity was to burn the incense in; or rather, I suppose, since it has two little gutters running into it, for collecting the blood of the victim? Well, well! they were wiser in that day, to wring the neck of a pigeon or burn a pinch of incense than to eat their own hearts out, as we do, all along of Dame Venus;” and he laughed, and left me with that odd ferocious lighting-up of his face. Presently there came a knock at my door. It was Waldemar. “Doctor,” he said very quietly, “will you do me a favour? Lend me your little Venus altar—only for a few days, only till the day after tomorrow. I want to copy the design of it for the pedestal of my statue: it is appropriate.” I sent the altar to him: the lad who carried it told me that Waldemar had set it up in the studio, and calling for a flask of wine, poured out two glasses. One he had given to my messenger for his pains; of the other he had drunk a mouthful, and thrown the rest over the altar, saying some unknown words. “It must be some German habit,” said my servant. What odd fancies this man has!

July 25

You ask me, dearest Excellency, to send you some sheets of my book: you want to know what I have discovered. Alas! dear Donna Evelina, I have discovered, I fear, that there is nothing to discover; that Apollo was never in Styria; that Chaucer, when he called the Queen of the Fairies Proserpine, meant nothing more than an eighteenth century poet when he called Dolly or Betty Cynthia or Amaryllis; that the lady who damned poor Tannhäuser was not Venus, but a mere little Suabian mountain sprite; in fact, that poetry is only the invention of poets, and that that rogue, Heinrich Heine, is entirely responsible for the existence of Dieux en Exil… My poor manuscript can only tell you what St. Augustine, Tertullian, and sundry morose old Bishops thought about the loves of Father Zeus and the miracles of the Lady Isis, none of which is much worth your attention… Reality, my dear Lady Evelyn, is always prosaic: at least when investigated into by bald old gentlemen like me.

And yet, it does not look so. The world, at times, seems to be playing at being poetic, mysterious, full of wonder and romance. I am writing, as usual, by my window, the moonlight brighter in its whiteness than my mean little yellow-shining lamp. From the mysterious greyness, the olive groves and lanes beneath my terrace, rises a confused quaver of frogs, and buzz and whirr of insects: something, in sound, like the vague trails of countless stars, the galaxies on galaxies blurred into mere blue shimmer by the moon, which rides slowly across the highest heaven. The olive twigs glisten in the rays: the flowers of the pomegranate and oleander are only veiled as with bluish mist in their scarlet and rose. In the sea is another sea, of molten, rippled silver, or a magic causeway leading to the shining vague offing, the luminous pale sky-line, where the islands of Palmaria and Tino float like unsubstantial, shadowy dolphins. The roofs of Montemirto glimmer among the black, pointing cypresses: farther below, at the end of that half-moon of land, is San Massimo: the Genoese fort inhabited by our friends is profiled black against the sky. All is dark: our fisher-folk go to bed early; Gertrude and the little ones are asleep: they at least are, for I can imagine Gertrude lying awake, the moonbeams on her thin Madonna face, smiling as she thinks of the little ones around her, of the other tiny thing that will soon lie on her breast… There is a light in the old desecrated chapel, the thing that was once the temple of Venus, they say, and is now Waldemar’s workshop, its broken roof mended with reeds and thatch. Waldemar has stolen in, no doubt to see his statue again. But he will return, more peaceful for the peacefulness of the night, to his sleeping wife and children. God bless and watch over them! Good-night, dearest Excellency.

July 26

I have your Excellency’s telegram in answer to mine. Many thanks for sending the Prince. I await his coming with feverish longing; it is still something to look forward to. All does not seem over. And yet what can he do?

The children are safe: we fetched them out of their bed and brought them up here. They are still a little shaken by the fire, the bustle, and by finding themselves in a strange house; also, they want to know where their mother is; but they have found a tame cat, and I hear them chirping on the stairs.

It was only the roof of the studio, the reeds and thatch, that burned, and a few old pieces of timber. Waldemar must have set fire to it with great care; he had brought armfuls of faggots of dry myrtle and heather from the bakehouse close by, and thrown into the blaze quantities of pine-cones, and of some resin, I know not what, that smelt like incense. When we made our way, early this morning, through the smouldering studio, we were stifled with a hot churchlike perfume: my brain swam, and I suddenly remembered going into St. Peter’s on Easter Day as a child.

It happened last night, while I was writing to you. Gertrude had gone to bed, leaving her husband in the studio. About eleven the maids heard him come out and call to Dionea to get up and come and sit to him. He had had this craze once before, of seeing her and his statue by an artificial light: you remember he had theories about the way in which the ancients lit up the statues in their temples. Gertrude, the servants say, was heard creeping downstairs a little later.

Do you see it? I have seen nothing else these hours, which have seemed weeks and months. He had placed Dionea on the big marble block behind the altar, a great curtain of dull red brocade—you know that Venetian brocade with the gold pomegranate pattern—behind her, like a Madonna of Van Eyck’s. He showed her to me once before like this, the whiteness of her neck and breast, the whiteness of the drapery round her flanks, toned to the colour of old marble by the light of the resin burning in pans all round… Before Dionea was the altar—the altar of Venus which he had borrowed from me. He must have collected all the roses about it, and thrown the incense upon the embers when Gertrude suddenly entered. And then, and then…

We found her lying across the altar, her pale hair among the ashes of the incense, her blood—she had but little to give, poor white ghost!—trickling among the carved garlands and rams’ heads, blackening the heaped-up roses. The body of Waldemar was found at the foot of the castle cliff. Had he hoped, by setting the place on fire, to bury himself among its ruins, or had he not rather wished to complete in this way the sacrifice, to make the whole temple an immense votive pyre? It looked like one, as we hurried down the hills to San Massimo: the whole hillside, dry grass, myrtle, and heather, all burning, the pale short flames waving against the blue moonlit sky, and the old fortress outlined black against the blaze.

August 30

Of Dionea I can tell you nothing certain. We speak of her as little as we can. Some say they have seen her, on stormy nights, wandering among the cliffs: but a sailor-boy assures me, by all the holy things, that the day after the burning of the Castle Chapel—we never call it anything else—he met at dawn, off the island of Palmaria, beyond the Strait of Porto Venere, a Greek boat, with eyes painted on the prow, going full sail to sea, the men singing as she went. And against the mast, a robe of purple and gold about her, and a myrtle-wreath on her head, leaned Dionea, singing words in an unknown tongue, the white pigeons circling around her.

1919

The Ring

Thomas Graham Jackson

Thomas Graham Jackson (1835–1924), also known as Sir Thomas Jackson, was one of the most distinguished architects of the late Victorian period. During his 62-year career, from 1862 until his death in 1924, he worked extensively in the architecture of education, notably Giggleswick in North Yorkshire and his own alma mater Brighton College. He also worked in Oxford University, where his most famous design is the Bridge of Sighs. He was a keen traveller, an antiquarian, a scholar, and an accomplished writer; he published works on architecture, as well as a number of travelogues and memoirs. However, he was 84 years old before he published his only collection of ghost stories. Six Ghost Stories was published in 1919 by John Murray. The stories were written in the style of M. R. James, who Jackson greatly admired, acknowledging his influence in the preface. The tale selected for this collection has a Jamesian antiquarian and academic as its protagonist, whose fascination in finding and entering an untouched Etruscan tomb may also be his downfall.

Two Englishmen were sitting one autumn evening in the garden of the inn at Corneto. The sun had just set over the sea, and the short Italian twilight had begun. The plain down below was already in shadow, but hues of purple and violet still tinged the hills, and invested them with all the ineffable charm of a Tuscan landscape at eventide. The elder of the two men was an Oxford Don, a well-known antiquary and student of ethnology. The younger had been a Fellow of the same College, but had settled in London and taken to literary pursuits, in which he had already made his mark. They had spent the morning in the museum, examining with the help of the courteous curator the rich collection of Etruscan antiquities, and in the afternoon had visited the famous necropolis on the plateau behind the town, and penetrated into a score or more of the painted tombs. They finished the day by crossing the valley to the bare plateau on the opposite hill, where once stood the proud city of Tarquinii, which gave kings to Rome, when Rome itself was but a thing of yesterday, sprung from an upstart settlement of outlaws and robbers. As they sat and sipped their coffee in the gathering dusk, their minds were full of what they had seen; of the mystery of that strange people who came to Italy from nobody knows where, whose written language nobody had ever interpreted, whose gloomy religion coloured the whole ritual of the Romans, and of whom the best record is to be found in their graves.

“I can imagine nothing more delightful,” said the younger man at last, “than to penetrate into an untouched Etruscan tomb, another Regulini-Galassi discovery; where, though the body may have turned to dust—though, for the matter of that, glimpses have been seen of one before it fell to pieces—the ornaments that had fallen off show how the man lay amid the votive offerings to his gods, with his cherished possessions and trinkets all standing around him or hanging on the walls just as they had been left by his relatives three thousand years ago. But I fear there is no chance of such a piece of luck nowadays. The tombs everywhere seem either to have been rifled in bygone ages, or stripped in modern times, to enrich museums and collections.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Dr. Morton, the elder man; “it may be, as you say, too late for discovery, and yet— But, at all events, I agree with you that nothing could be more interesting.”

“You were here some weeks before I joined you,” said Archie Bryant. “I think you came mainly to study the folklore of Tuscan peasantry. How have you been rewarded?”

“Fairly well. It is not easy to get below the surface with the Italian peasant when you try to fathom his beliefs. But it is curious how much has survived of something older than the Catholic faith he shows to his priest.”

“Indeed,” said Bryant. “Do you mean he has not forgotten Tinia, Fufluns, and Teramo, and the other Etruscan deities whom we have been looking at on vases, and in the tombs?”

“So far from having forgotten them,” said Morton, “many of the old peasants, though they are Catholics outwardly, have much more real faith in la vecchia religione, the outworn creed, as you would think it, of Etruscan mythology. There are still many women streghe, witches, who know and practise incantations, but of course all that is under the ban of the Church, and though luckily the Holy Office can no longer burn them, they are very timid and afraid of attracting notice. However, I have managed to get into the confidence of some of them, and have learned a good deal that would surprise you, as it certainly did me. It is even said that it is usual for a family to have one of their number brought up in the old religion, in order that they may have friends in all quarters.”

Bryant laughed, and said it was like the way families in the time of the Wars of the Roses took care to have some of their relatives in each camp, so as to have a friend on either side in case of accidents.

“But to return to what you said just now,” said Morton, “about visiting an untouched Etruscan tomb, do you know that I have great hopes we may really manage it. One of the women into whose confidence I have got, and who has given me a host of spells and incantations which I hope some day to publish, is a strega, or witch, and my belief is that she knows of such a tomb. She says, however, it is dangerous to visit it, no doubt from some superstitious views about the old gods—Tinia, the god of thunder, and the rest. But we shall know more tomorrow, and I have no doubt we shall manage to open the tomb with the aid of a golden key.”

They laughed, and rose from their seats, and, after a turn or two in the alleys of the garden, went to bed.

The next morning was spent partly in the museum, and partly in the communal library. Bryant’s interest was excited by the subject of Etruscan mythology, which was new to him, and under Morton’s guidance he dipped into the ample stores of literature that bore upon it. As they walked away in the evening Bryant said:

“And you really mean to tell me that Tinia and other members of the old Etruscan Olympus still have their followers among the descendants of the people whose tombs we have visited. I can hardly believe it.”

“I don’t wonder you should be incredulous,” replied Morton. “They do not have it all to themselves, for the saints have their share of popular favour; but, besides the prayers that they offer to the saints, many of the peasants believe in the folletti or spirits of the past; charms and incantations are addressed to them, and legends are preserved of their potent aid. But in a few minutes I will convince you beyond all doubt. We are going to visit an acquaintance I have made—the woman of whom I told you last night; and there she is waiting for me. I doubt, by the way, whether she is actually one of the streghe, or witches, but she knows most of their lore.”

Bryant saw a peasant woman seated at her door, spinning with distaff and spindle as her ancestors had done before her from time immemorial. She rose at their approach, pushed the end of the distaff through her belt, and greeted them with the dignified courtesy that sits naturally on the Italian of the humblest degree, his heritage from an ancient civilization. She seemed to Bryant a woman of sixty years, or perhaps rather younger, for women age more rapidly in Italy than with us, and she retained much of the classic beauty of her youth.

“Antonietta,” said Morton, “I have brought a compatriot, a lover of your country and people.”

“The Signore is welcome,” said Antonietta, with a smile and a slight inclination, and she invited them to enter her house. A young girl who was sitting there rose as they entered, whom Antonietta presented as her daughter Chiarina. She was a Tuscan beauty, with blue eyes and a rich complexion burned by the sun to a tint like the bloom on an apricot, set off by the bright-coloured handkerchief thrown over her head and fastened with silver pins.

“I have been telling my friend,” said Morton, “what you told me the other day of a tomb which—”

“Ah!” said Antonietta, interrupting him. “Scusi, Signore. These things must not be spoken of lightly,” and she looked furtively round and shut the door carefully. Returning to Morton’s side, she continued in a low voice:

“And is the Signore really bent on what he proposed? Is he not afraid of disturbing those we dare not speak of?”

“We should make no disturbance, Antonietta,” said he. “I only want to see a tomb of one of the old people just as it was finished and left by those who made it. I think you said you knew of one that had never been disturbed.”

“There is such a tomb, Signore, and Chiarina knows it as well as I. No one else does. But it is dangerous for strangers to visit it, as I have warned you, Signore.”

“But you and Chiarina go there safely,” said Morton.

“Yes, but that is different. There are reasons,” and she nodded her head sagely. “We are known. They would not harm us.”

“Is that why you wear a guard against evil spirits?” said Bryant, pointing to the silver cross that hung on her bosom. “They cannot touch a good Catholic, I suppose.”

“Si, si, sicuro; sono buona Cattolica,” replied Antonietta. “I am a good Catholic, though I do not believe all the priests tell me.” And then in a lower voice to Morton, “You know what I believe.”

“La vecchia religione, the old religion?” said Morton. She nodded two or three times, but said nothing.

“But now about this tomb,” said Morton, returning to the object of his visit.

“Signore, be advised. Think no more about it. There are those there who would not welcome you. It would not be wholesome for you to go. I speak for your good.”

“But I will be careful to give no offence,” said Morton. “I am bent on going, and trust to you to help me,” and as he spoke he slipped two gold pieces into her hand. Antonietta looked at them for a minute, and then said:

“Well, if the Signore is resolved, I can certainly guide him, but, no! I will not be paid for it,” and she laid the money down on the table and pushed it towards him. “Neither dare I take you myself. Chiarina knows the way, and she is not bound like me. She shall take you, but it must be by night and secretly, and there must be no more than you two.”

Morton faithfully promised to obey her conditions, and it was arranged that Chiarina should meet them after dark at the town gate which gave on to the necropolis.

They were punctual at the rendezvous, and found Chiarina waiting for them. She was dressed in black, and had a black shawl or hood over her head which concealed her features. She made a sign of recognition, and preceded them without a word.

It was a lovely starlit night, without a moon. Not a breath of air stirred the trees, and the silence was unbroken save by the silver tone of the bell in the Palazzo Comunale, tolling the hour of twenty-three. A few belated wanderers returning to the city passed them on the high road, but as their footsteps died away in the distance, the dead silence settled down again. When they had proceeded about a mile Chiarina turned off by a by-path, that led across the solitary waste. Around them lay the unseen city of the dead; the ground was honeycombed with tombs, where, amid pictured scenes of dancing and revelry, a mockery as it were of mortality, lay the dust of Lucomos and warriors, people of that mysterious race whose history and language are alike forgotten.

“And yet,” said Morton, “one may believe that they are the same people still; mixed, no doubt, with Goths and Lombards, but mainly derived from the old stock that worshipped Tinia here before the days of Romulus.”

“I like the idea,” said Bryant, “and, according to you, they still pay him a divided homage, though he has many rivals in Catholic hagiology. But I like to think that Chiarina’s ancestors followed Lars Porsena of Clusium to the siege of Rome—”

Their guide caught the mention of her name, and looked round with her finger on her lip to enjoin silence. They were traversing a thick wood of undergrowth by a path obscurely marked, which might easily be overlooked by one who was not familiar with the route, but Chiarina never faltered or hesitated on her way. They now descended slightly into a thicker grove; the trees met overhead, and it was with difficulty they saw their guide before them. At last she stopped and turned to her companions. Taking Morton by the hand and signing to Bryant to follow, she drew them through a thicket and then, striking a match, lighted one of the earthen lamps that the peasants still use, exactly like those found in the tombs of their ancestors and placed there three thousand years ago. They found themselves facing a ledge of rocks, about ten feet high, that had evidently been scarped by the hand of man to a smooth face.

Here Chiarina turned to them, and in a whisper warned them to be silent.

“The Signori will be so good,” she said, “as not to speak while we are here. There are those whom we must not disturb, or they will be angry. But I will do what is wanted to appease them.”

They promised to do as she bid them, Bryant much interested in her seriousness and her unfeigned alarm, and amused at the idea of two prosaic Englishmen in the twentieth century assisting in a religious function of thirty centuries ago.

Pulling away a bundle of brushwood, Chiarina showed by the feeble light of her lamp a descent of steep steps leading to a doorway at the foot of the rock, and following her they entered an excavation imperfectly visible till their eyes had become more accustomed to the darkness. They then found themselves in a vaulted chamber, cut in the rock, with a square pier left in the middle to support the roof. On this pillar, as Chiarina held her lamp high above her head, they saw a huge figure of Typhon, with twisted serpents for legs, and outstretched wings, grasping a thunderbolt as if to hurl it at an intruder. The walls presented to their delighted eyes a series of paintings as perfect as when the artist had given them his last touches. On one side were rural scenes, harvest and vintage, with jocund peasants and oxen. On another were pictures of banquet and revelry, youths piping and maidens dancing. All spoke of the joy of life, of nature, and contentment. On another wall were scenes more appropriate to the place: there sat Hades black and gloomy, and beside him Persephone with snakes bound in her hair, while Charon, con occhi di bragia, with his bark stood awaiting his freight of souls. All this, however, was like what the visitors had seen in other tombs during the preceding day, though nowhere so brilliantly preserved as here.

But what was their wonder to see around them the treasury of the dead, untouched by the hand of man since the last inmate of the tomb had been laid to rest. His golden collar and breastplate and other ornaments lay on a bier of bronze, though the body that wore them had melted away from within them into dust. On the wall hung his weapons, and around were arranged painted vases, such as form the priceless treasures of countless museums. Morton and Bryant had indeed their wish satisfied to the full.

As they stood in the death-like silence of the tomb, the mystery of the ages weighed upon their senses; the unknown occupant whose dust undisturbed no doubt lay still on the floor: the things he had used in life, that had hung idly beside his bier for countless centuries; the inscriptions on the walls intended to tell who and what he had been, which could be read but which no one could understand, all combined to make an indescribable impression on the imagination. Pictures of the gods of the outworn creed of ancient Etruria surrounded them—outworn, but no! What was Chiarina doing? At the far end of the cell she had lighted a little flame on a bronze tripod, and while dropping on it pinches of incense, was muttering some charm or incantation of which only a few words reached them. The ancient deities, then, still had their worshippers.

As Bryant looked on in amazement, a strange sense of unreality clouded his mind: he was for the moment as it were transported back to ancient days, the present was confused with the past, and the intervening centuries vanished as a dream. Before he recovered himself something fell on his foot. He stooped to pick it up. It was a ring, and he half-unconsciously put it on his finger. As he rose he met the gaze of the Typhon painted on the central pillar. In the flickering light of the lamp it seemed instinct with life; its expression seemed changed, and it appeared to regard him with malevolence and deadly hate. Its gaze fascinated him, and he could not remove his eyes till the touch of Morton on his elbow recalled him to himself, and he saw that Chiarina had finished her divinations and was anxiously urging them to depart. As they mounted the steps that led to the upper world, a vivid flash of lightning was followed almost instantaneously by the crash of thunder. Chiarina clung to them in terror.

“Go, go, Signori,” cried she. “It is Tinia. He is angry. I must go back to appease him,” and she pushed them through the thicket into the pathway and then disappeared into the darkness. Left without a guide, they scrambled as best they could through the wood and into the open country, and with some trouble found the high road. A few lights of the town twinkled in the distance to direct them, and they hurried onward with a strange sense of insecurity. The heavens were black with clouds, the lightning was incessant, a deluge of rain caught them while they were still in the open, and they arrived at the inn drenched to the skin.

“A strange adventure,” muttered Morton as they parted for the night. “A trifle uncanny, eh? One might almost imagine there was after all something in their creed, were it not too absurd. But what is that on your finger?”

Bryant looked at his hand. He had forgotten the ring he picked up, and he now examined it with curiosity. It was a curious piece of Etruscan goldsmith’s work with some letters inscribed round the rim which he could not decipher.

“Oh! the ring,” said he. “It fell at my feet from somewhere or other. I suppose I brushed against one of the bronze tables and knocked it off, and I picked it up and slipped it on my finger, and then forgot all about it.”

“H’m! well, you know best,” said Morton, “but I think you would have done better to have left it there. However, good-night, I am longing to get dry again.”

Bryant was of an imaginative turn of mind, as befitted his literary vocation, and the adventure of the night made an impression on him that kept him for some time awake. The whole scene presented itself to his memory; the silent walk, the wood, the mysterious tomb with its contents, and above all the countenance of the Typhon with its scowl of concentrated hate. This last pursued him into dreamland, and caused him to pass a troubled night.

Next morning they thought it right to go and see whether their young guide had got safely back, and had not suffered from the storm. Chiarina, however, it appeared had fared better than they, for the storm ceased about the time they reached Corneto. But Antonietta was anxious and troubled. Something she said was wrong, and the storm showed displeasure on the part of the powers on whom they had intruded. As they were leaving Corneto that afternoon, Morton shook her by the hand, and said, “You see, Antonietta, no harm but a wetting has come of our visit, which you thought so dangerous.”

Antonietta said nothing, but when Bryant offered his hand her eye caught sight of the ring. Dropping his hand she made an exclamation of horror.

“Signore,” she cried, “do you know what you have done, you have brought a curse upon you; restore the ring at once, or mischief will befall you.”

“But we are leaving Corneto today,” said Morton, “and have no time for another visit. And what harm can come of the ring.”

“Besides,” said Bryant, “on further looking at it, I think it is a very curious piece of work; and I mean to give it to the Museum when I get home.”

“If you keep it,” said Antonietta in great excitement, “perhaps you will not get home. And you will never give it to the Museum, for it will not leave you till you restore it to the place you took it from. The hand that took must be the hand to restore.”

“But that is impossible,” said they both. There was no time to go back to the tomb. And besides Bryant had taken a fancy to it, and looked forward to presenting the Museum with a genuine antique, of whose authenticity there could be no question. He even declined to give it to Antonietta who said she herself would take it back, and that would suffice. At last she threw up her hands in despair, and retreating into her cottage slammed the door behind her.

Early in the afternoon they parted; Morton for Rome, and Bryant for Viterbo, by way of Toscanella where he meant to stay a day or two to see the two fine churches, and the Etruscan tombs. His conveyance was a primitive car little better than a costermonger’s cart, drawn by a weedy little horse, and driven by a hobbledehoy of a lad, the son of the proprietor. The road at first lay along the high plateau where the tombs were. In the country beyond there were no houses or villages to be seen, though the land was well cultivated, for the farmers and their men go in and out daily in carts from the town. The desolate country had been the scene of brigandage not long before, and the memory of Tiburzi and his nephew was not yet extinct. Giovanni amused Bryant with tales of this sordid hero, and of his escapes, and final capture, till their conversation was suddenly stopped by a lurch of the vehicle which threw them both into the ditch. On getting to their feet they found that beyond a few bruises and scratches, neither of them was hurt, but the cart had one wheel off, and the shaft broken. They were at least seven miles from Corneto, and more from Toscanella; there was no place nearer where help could be had, and they were in a bad case. At last they decided the only thing was to get back to Corneto. The ruined car they pulled into the ditch, and with cords from the harness secured Bryant’s slender luggage on the back of the horse, and set off on foot to retrace their way to Corneto.

Their return caused no little surprise. It was too late to make a fresh start that day, and Bryant returned to his old quarters. As he was undressing his eye caught the ring. Well, thought he, “if Antonietta knew of this accident it would give her a fine argument for her theory that the ring would bring me bad luck.”

The loss of a day made Toscanella and Viterbo out of the question, for Bryant had to hurry back to London to complete a magazine article which was wanted by a certain date. Next day therefore, he took the train to Pisa and Genoa on his way home to England. He was curiously unlucky. His luggage was delayed at the frontier, and he arrived in Paris with nothing but a hand bag. This kept him three days more, till the missing portmanteau arrived, and he reached London nearly a week later than he had intended. Other little accidents of less consequence happened, and combined to cause him some uneasiness. His nights, moreover, were disturbed by dreams. He seemed always to be drawn towards that silent tomb, and to be face to face with the scowling monster on the pillar. A morbid feeling of terror slowly mastered him. He could not shake it off, and gradually the evil countenance began to intrude itself into his thoughts by day. It interrupted his work, and his writing which had been his greatest pleasure became a labour and a burden.

One day it occurred to him that he had not sent that Etruscan ring to the Museum, and he carefully packed it and sent it to the curator with a letter to say he had been fortunate enough to pick up a genuine piece of Etruscan goldsmith’s work in Tuscany, and he would be glad if the Museum authorities would accept it for their collection. He took the packet to the post office himself, and on his return found a parcel on his table from his publisher. On opening it, he found it contained the manuscript of the article he had sent since his return from abroad, the one in fact for the sake of dispatching which, he had been so anxious to get home. A letter from the publisher accompanied it. It ran as follows:

“Dear Sir,—I regret to say I am obliged to return your article which in its present shape is quite unsuitable for our pages. The subject on which we invited you to write was one on which we had reason to believe you were an authority, but what you send us seems unequal and largely irrelevant. In particular we fail to understand the allusions in which it abounds to Etruscan mythology.

“I am, Sir,
“Your obedient servant,
“The Editor.”

“What on earth does this mean,” said Bryant to himself. “The man must have got hold of another paper, and confused it with mine.”

The paper, however, was his, and on glancing over it he was aghast. “Is it possible I wrote this balderdash,” thought he. “I must be going mad,” and he pressed his hand to his brow. But there was no mistake about it being his writing, full of literary faults and widely incoherent as it was. The colour rushed to his cheeks as he tore the shameful pages up and tossed them into the paper basket. Etruscan mythology, too, what on earth could have made him drag that into an article on the “History of the Colony of New Zealand.” Was he never to get out of his head the memory of that ill-omened visit? And as his mind reverted to the events of the night the scowling visage of the Typhon presented itself to his mental vision. “Is it possible,” he thought, “that that ring has some potent force for evil. Well, anyhow, I am rid of it now; and no further harm can come of it.”

He slept better that night, and next day decided to go for a long walk in the country in the hope of steadying his shaken nerves. He found an old college friend disposed for an outing, and they took the train to Clandon, and walked over Newlands Corner to St. Martha’s chapel, down to Shamley Green, Wonersh, and Bramley, and so home by rail. They dined together at the Oxford and Cambridge Club, and then parted, Bryant to his chambers in the Temple. On his table, he found a packet by registered post. It contained a letter from the Director of the museum, and a small parcel in cotton wool of which he guessed too well the contents. The letter ran thus:

“Dear Sir,—We are much obliged to you for your kind offer of the enclosed ring, which we return with our thanks. It appears to us to be one of the clever copies made in Germany of Etruscan antiquities, by which many collectors have been taken in. We venture to express our hope that you were not too heavily mulcted in the purchase.

“Your obedient servant,
“——, Director.”

“Much they know about it,” said Bryant bitterly, as he unfolded the packet, and looked at his fatal possession with dismay. The window was open, and in a sudden rage he flung it far and wide into the court, and went to bed.

He felt better next morning, and after breakfast settled down to some literary work that had come in the day before. But it would not do. His mind was confused, and all power of clear expression seemed to have left him. As he was sitting in despair with his head on his hands there was a knock at the door, and Mrs. Filcher, the laundress, entered with something in her hand.

“Begging your pardon, Mr. Bryant,” she began, “I picked up this ’ere little ring in the court, and seeing as I have noticed it on your finger, I know’d it to be yourn, and so I have brought it up. Thank you, sir, good-morning, sir.”

And the good woman sidled out a shilling the richer, but leaving Bryant in an agony of despair. “Can I never shake off this strange oppression?” thought he, as he gazed on the fatal circlet of gold that lay on the table before him. The words of Antonietta came back to his memory: “it will never leave you till you restore it to the place you took it from.” It seemed as if it were true. Twice he had tried in vain to get rid of it, and twice it had been restored; that night he would make sure of a riddance. He remained in his rooms till evening in a sort of mental torpor. He could neither eat nor drink. A creeping horror took possession of him; as he cast his eyes about in the dusk, innocent book-shelves seemed to resolve themselves into sepulchral forms, and in the midst appeared the scowling visage of the Typhon. At last when night fell he took the ring, descended his staircase, and found his way to the Embankment. The tide was up; with all his might he flung the ring into the river, and then sank down on one of the seats. Famished and exhausted he felt more dead than alive, and half fainting, and half asleep, he lost consciousness.

“Now then, wake up,” said a gruff voice in his ear, some hours later, while a heavy hand on his shoulder gave him a good shake, and he woke to find the morning breaking, and a burly policeman standing over him. He roused himself, and stood up. “Beg pardon, sir,” said the policeman, seeing he was a gentleman, “bit overcome, sir, was you? Hadn’t you better get to your home, sir, ’stead o’ lying here? Let me lend you a hand till you’ve steadied yourself.”

Bryant thanked the man who went off contented with half-a-crown, and then tottered back to his chambers, and threw himself on his bed in a fever. As he sank on the pillow he happened to raise his hand. On his finger was the fatal ring. Was it then only a dream that he had flung it into the river? He could not tell. His brain was in a whirl; one thought only beat upon his mind, “it will never leave you till you restore it to the place you took it from.” He rose from his bed resolved to act on the warning. Every attempt to part with it had failed; the Museum would not have it; and it came back mysteriously twice when he had hurled it away in desperation. Antonietta must be right. He would go to Corneto and find her, and she should guide him again to the fatal place which he now wished to heaven he had never seen.

In half an hour he had put up a small bag of his things, and was on his way to Cook’s to secure a sleeping-berth in the St. Gothard express. The excitement he had gone through, his fasting the day before, and his sleepless night began to tell on him. He scarcely noticed anything on the journey, and lived as in a dream. At the frontiers he roused himself to pass the customs, and then sank again into a sort of stupor. At Chiasso he felt a thrill at the thought he was again in Italy, and nearing his point. At Milan there was a delay of some hours which put him in a fever of impatience. Another night in the train, and then, thank Heaven, in the early morning he alighted at Corneto. He was so weak he could hardly stand, but he managed to reach the omnibus, in which he climbed the hill to the city which is some two miles or so from the station.

He was greeted as an old acquaintance by the padrone of the inn where he and Morton had stayed before, to whom he had telegraphed for a room. Breakfast and a bath restored him a little, and then he set, off to find Antonietta. He found his way to her house without difficulty, and saw the familiar figure standing at the door and spinning with distaff and spindle as of old.

“Antonietta,” he cried, “I am here again, and want your help.”

The woman turned and faced him. It was not Antonietta.

Bryant stood amazed and confounded; the disappointment was too great.

“The Signore asked for Antonietta,” said she. “Perhaps the Signore knew Antonietta.”

“Yes, yes,” stammered he, “I knew her. Where is she? I am come from England expressly to see her.”

“Ah! Signore, you have not heard. La povera Antonietta è morta. She is dead.”

Bryant reeled as if he had been shot. His last hope was struck from under him. He staggered and would have fallen had not the contadina caught him, and put him into her seat.

“Prego! S’accomodi? the Signore seems ill. I will fetch a glass of water.”

Bryant recovered himself a little, and said

“And her daughter, Chiarina, is she dead too?”

“Oh, no! la Chiarina is well, but she is not here. She is with her friends at Montefiascone. I can give you her address if you like.”

Bryant seized on this suggestion with the eagerness of a drowning man grasping at a floating spar, and after resting a little longer at the invitation of the good woman, he rose and managed to regain his hotel. He wrote at once to the address that had been given him, but he could not wait for the answer, and ill as he was he sallied forth to try and find that fatal tomb. All that afternoon he wandered like an unhappy spirit over the ground. He knew they had gone two miles or more from the town, and that they penetrated a wood. He searched every copse and thicket he could see, but in vain. He found nothing like the scene of their midnight adventure, and returned dispirited in the evening to his hotel. The next day he again sallied out and wandered to and fro in his quest, wearying himself in vain, for he could find nothing like the place he was looking for. A carabiniere saw him, and watched his devious movements with suspicion.

“The Signore seems to be seeking something,” said he.

“I am looking for a tomb,” said Bryant.

“The Signore should apply to the custode who will guide him. All the tombs are closed, and visits are not permitted without the custode.”

Bryant murmured something in reply, and wandered on while the carabiniere kept the eye of suspicion upon him. In the evening he staggered home. No news had come from Chiarina, and in despair, utterly worn out, and broken down, he threw himself on his bed, and gave himself up for lost.

Dr. Morton was sitting in his rooms at Oxford after breakfast, smoking his morning pipe, and casting an eye occasionally at the notes of a lecture he was to give that morning on folklore. In writing it he had made use of his experiences in Tuscany during the late holiday. The thought of this brought Bryant to his recollection, and he drew from his pocket a letter received from him a few days back, which had puzzled him a good deal. It was very short, and consisted of a few broken sentences to which he could not attach much meaning. It said: “I am being bothered and pestered beyond all endurance in a way that drives me mad. I cannot part with that ring. You do not know what I am suffering. One thing is certain, I must obey Antonietta, and go back.”

“But why,” thought Morton, “does he bother himself about his ring? Why should he part with it, if he does not like to do so, and why does he let people pester him about it? Some dealer or other I expect who wants to buy it. But who’s there? Come in,” he said in reply to a knock at the door.

The new-comer was one of the Fellows who was a great friend of Bryant, and Morton after a few words on general matters asked him if he had heard anything of Bryant lately.

“Well, as you ask me,” said Williamson, “I have, and I am uneasy about him. You know he wrote a great deal for the Piccadilly magazine, and in fact was one of their principal contributors. Well, I met Henderson, the editor, at the Athenæum the other day, and he said to me, ‘What is the matter with your man, Bryant?’ ‘Nothing that I know of,’ said I. ‘Why do you ask?’ ‘I ask,’ said he, ‘because he sent us an article the other day for the Piccadilly that he could only have written if he were drunk or mad. It was rambling and illiterate, and of course, useless to us. But the curious thing was that it dragged in head and shoulders a lot about Etruscan tombs, and a fatal ring, that had nothing whatever to do with the subject.’”

“A ring you say,” said Morton. “Now that is curious, for I was just reading when you came in, a letter from him that I received a few days ago, about a ring. I remember he did pick up a ring in an old Etruscan tomb we visited together, and one of those half necromantic women of the place prophesied it would bring him no good. He talks also of going back there. I remember the inn where we stayed, and I have a mind to wire out to find out if he is there.”

Morton accordingly telegraphed to the padrone of the Stella d’Oro at Corneto to ask whether Signor Bryant was there, and he prepaid the answer. The answer did not come till the next day. It said:

“The Signore is here. Very ill. Prays you to come.”

Morton was much concerned, for he had a great regard for Bryant. Something was evidently wrong, and the ring seemed to be at the bottom of it. Morton remembered saying to Bryant that he would have done better to leave it behind. His researches in folklore had revealed to him the superstitious belief of the peasantry in the old Etruscan mythology, and it had sometimes occurred to him, though he always dismissed the idea as absurd, that they might have some ground for their faith. And now here was Bryant evidently in some mysterious way or other in trouble about the ring he had picked up. Well, at all events, Morton resolved to go at once in answer to his friend’s appeal.

In due time he arrived at the Stella d’Oro, and the padrone met him with a serious face. “I am glad you are come, Signore,” said he. “Your poor friend has been raving and calling for you. He keeps crying out about a ring and a tomb, and we cannot tell what he means. The doctor shakes his head, and will not say what he thinks.”

Morton was much concerned, and asked for particulars of his illness. The landlord said Signore Bryant had been very strange, very unlike what he was when Morton had been there with him; that he spent his days wandering about the country as if in search of something, so that the police had noticed it, and had been inquiring about him, as if they suspected him of some mischief. But that at last he had completely worn himself out, and had now been lying a week in a raging fever and delirium.

“You had better come and see him, Signore, though I doubt he will not know you.”

They mounted the stair silently, and stole quietly into the darkened room.

“He is very still now,” said the padrone, as they approached the bed. “I hope he is sleeping; sleep will do him good.”

But as Morton bent over his friend and called him by his name he realized that poor Bryant’s troubles were over. He was dead.

Morton was excessively shocked, and quite overcome. Bryant had been his most intimate and congenial friend; he had watched with interest his literary career, which promised great things, and he grieved to think a life that had opened so well should be so prematurely cut short. He sat by his poor friend’s bedside in sincere distress.

A message was brought to him a little later that a young woman, a contadina, was below, and asked for the English gentleman. Morton descended, and found himself face to face with Chiarina, who remembered him at once. She explained that she had come in reply to a letter from the English Signore, and would have come sooner had it been possible, but she had been from home for some days.

“And now, Chiarina,” said Morton, “you come too late to see him. The poor Signore is no more.” Chiarina expressed her regret and sympathy, and asked what the poor Signore died of.

“He wore himself out,” said Morton, “looking I imagine, for the tomb you showed us that night.”

“Oh! Dio! Surely he did not venture to go there by himself,” said Chiarina. “Is it that which has brought this illness on him?”

“No, I think not. He seems to have failed to find it. But he has been in trouble about a ring. You remember he picked one up in the tomb, and your mother told him it would bring him bad luck. What can you tell me about it?”

“Ah! Now I understand,” said Chiarina. “Signore, that ring has killed him. Those you know of never forgive. You will remember my mother said ‘the hand that took must be the hand to restore.’ Till he restored it, he would have no peace, and now it has brought him to his death.”

Now, thought Morton to himself, I understand his return to Corneto, his wild rambling about the place, and his anxiety to find Antonietta and Chiarina. He wanted, of course, to get them to guide him to the tomb and return the ring.

He stood a little while in thought, and then asking Chiarina to await his return, he went back to the chamber of death, and stood by the dead man’s bedside. He took the cold hand in his; on the finger was the fatal ring.

“Humph!” said Morton. “There is no knowing what mischief it may do. Perhaps after all the ring had nothing to do with it, and poor Bryant’s sufferings may have been imaginary so far as it was concerned. But anyhow, it seems to have plagued him in life, and I should be sorry to think it plagued him in death. On the whole, I had better draw it off from his finger, and give it to Chiarina to take it back to the place it came from.”

1923

The Great Mother

R. Ellis Roberts

Richard Ellis Roberts (1879–1953) was a writer and journalist who worked on the Pall Mall Gazette (1903–5) as well as contributing to a variety of periodicals including Observer, London Mercury, Bookman, and Guardian. Among his early publications are a study of the poet Samuel Rogers (1910) and a translation of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1912). During the First World War he served as a First Division Clerk at the Admiralty, before resuming his journalism career in journalism and becoming literary editor of the New Statesman (1930–32), then Time and Tide (1933–34) and editor of Life and Letters (1934–35). In 1939 he emigrated with his wife Harriet to her homeland of America.

In 1923, he published his only volume of fiction, The Other End. It has been noted by Douglas A. Anderson that several of the stories are Machenian in style, and indeed Roberts had published an appreciation of Arthur Machen in The Bookman the previous year. The story included here is one of several from the volume that deal with “the gods themselves returning to influence mysteriously, tragically, the lives of present-day men and women”, as a contemporary review in The Bookman puts it. Here the worship of an ancient goddess in a British grove may be the demise of a promising young academic.

I

Extract from a letter of John Prideaux Scott, one time fellow of the College of Our Blessed Lady, Oxford. The letter was addressed to his friend Geoffrey FitzMaurice, and given to him by Scott’s executors.

“My Dear FitzMaurice,

“You have asked me rather frequently in the last few months to give you some information about Hugh Flinders. As his biographer, you’ve naturally been anxious to discover when his astonishing talent as an artist first showed itself, what were his interests and his bent while he was at Oxford, and whether the rest of us prosy fellows guessed what a genius we had among us. I’m afraid you’ve thought me both stupid and ungracious; you’ve known me to be uncommunicative. Others have told you that I was Flinders’ best friend and constant companion; and you’ve not unnaturally resented my silence and my evasions. When you have read the enclosed story, you will, I hope, understand. I knew I had not long to live; and to discuss the story, as I should have been forced to, had I told you in conversation, would have been unbearable. Even now I am not sure whether I am right in putting it on paper. But I promised Flinders before he died, that a record of his strange experience should be made; and entrusted to you, his biographer. It was his expressed wish that you should make what use of the story you thought fit. You may either publish it, or suppress it—tho’ if you do this my manuscript is to be kept in the British Museum—or you may simply draw your own deductions as to the significance of this story, and use them in writing the life. I am not going to advise you. I cannot, if I would, decide on the value of Flinders’ experience; I can only vouch for its reality. Now as to his later career…”

The rest of Scott’s letter is not relevant to this story. I have used the information his letter gives me in my large biography of Flinders; but I could not decide to do anything about this document except publish it as he wrote it.

II

I had always been friendly with Flinders. He was a quiet man. Not retiring, but never anxious for acquaintance. He played no games, except lawn tennis and cricket. And he did not work at all hard, except at subjects and periods not touched on in the average man’s work. He was a well-made man, big in bone, but with very small hands and feet, and a head which, in its heavy droop, seemed almost to be quarrelling with his body. He had no parents, and felt his loneliness acutely. He used to say that an orphan was a new Adam, and could not be expected to remember his ancestry.

When I first got to know him—somewhere in our second term—he was a very keen Catholic. He generally used to go to High Mass at Barney’s; but occasionally he went to the Cowley Fathers. But he definitely liked the popular orgiastic music, and almost rollicking services of S. Barnabas, and he liked its mob of undergraduates. Although he was an ardent classical scholar, he was very impatient of the false Hellenism which still marked Oxford in our undergraduate days. He loathed that tired statue of Antinous which decadent men would have in their rooms; and he was still more intolerant of the vague ardour which balanced the Lady of Chartres or Nürnberg by a Chinese Buddha or a little group of the Bull-killer. His Christianity was by no means simple, or easy. It was a savage effort. An effort after experience, in which he appeared to demand rather more than those emotional and spiritual experiences which for most of us are the results of religion. Yet he was not, as I could see later on, a mystic. What he really wanted was magic. And I have often wondered whether official Christianity, especially in this country, is not too hard on those who need magic. No doubt their claim is difficult to satisfy: but ought we not boldly to admit the fact that many people do not belong, religiously, to our period at all? Just as some are medieval, others Renascence, others Puritan—so some are primitive, and can understand nothing but the swift cruelty of the knife, or the harsh discipline of the blood-stained stone.

However, for a long time (as Oxford time goes) Flinders remained orthodox in his practice. When he first found other avenues of approach, I don’t know. He would never speak afterwards about his first adventures into other paths, except to insist that they were accidental. For myself I have little doubt that he was attracted from the other side. I don’t think he was the aggressor; but that the powers which he ultimately found had sought him out. After all, we believe that in our religion God seeks the soul, and may it not be so in others?

Flinders, like most young men who think at all, and talk at all, at Oxford, thought and spoke about sex. Rather too much: but then so long as we deliberately feed our adolescents on the two literatures that are fullest of sex-atmosphere, what can we expect? The callous are not, perhaps, much harmed. The sensitive either win through, or are broken. I don’t quite know which fate overtook Flinders.

He, at this time, somewhere about the autumn of 1898, had got to the period, or to the mood rather, when the things of the flesh seem intolerable. He was determined on celibacy, on virginity, on that agonized purity which so often overtopples into lust. He was not (he had too keen a sense of ordinary decency) that most despicable of objects, a woman-hater; but his interest in women was very small. He had been brought up in the ordinary way, and had not, in spite of his public school, lost all delicacy of feeling: but he had been sufficiently revolted by what he learnt at school to give him a bias against women. He found it difficult to remember that they were individuals, and he had no intimate women friends.

The assault must have begun in the Lent term of 1899, when he was in for Mods. I found him one day poring over Grant Allen’s edition of “Attis.” I read a little anthropology in those days; and I asked him what he thought of Allen’s theory which, as you will remember, reduces the idea of God to manure. He muttered something about “Mucky nonsense,” and then went on excitedly—“Scott, it’s not Allen I’ve been reading, it’s Catullus. I’d never read the ‘Attis’ before. It’s fine. Listen.”

And he chanted out that amazing passage:

Simul hæc comitibus Attis cecinit notha mulier,

Thiasus repente linguis trepidantibus ululat,

Leve tympanum remugit, cava cymbala recrepant,

Viridem citus adit Idam properante pede chorus.

Furibunda simul anhelans vaga vadit, animam agens,

Comitata tympano Attis per opaca nemora dux,

Veluti juvenca vitans onus indomita jugi:

Rapidæ ducem sequuntur Gallæ properipedem.

Itaque ut domum Cybelles tetigere lasullæ,

Nimio e labore somnum capiunt sine Cerere.

Pigu his labente langore oculos sopor operit:

Abit in quiete molli rabidus furor animi.

“Yes; very like the Salvation Army,” I said.

“Oh, don’t be flippant, Scotty. Yet—perhaps it is. I’m sure we want more of it. More of this self-sacrifice. More of this ardour. More of this reckless desire for service. It’s more gorgeous, this, than the organ at Barney’s.” And he read again:

Mora tarda mente cedat: simul ite, sequimini

Phrygiam ad domum Cybelles, Phrygia ad nemora deæ

Ubi cymbalum sonet vox, ubi tympana reboant,

Tibicen ubi canit Phryx curvo grave calamo,

Ubi capita Mænades vi jaciunt hederigeræ,

Ubi sacra sancta acutis ululatibus agitant,

Ubi suevit illa divæ volitare vaga cohors:

Quo nos decet citatis celerare tripudiis.

“Well, I think I prefer the ‘Berenice’—and I’m certain I do the ‘Epithalamion.’ But I daresay it will be useful for you to know the ‘Attis.’”

“Useful,” he asked sharply. “Useful? What do you mean, Scott? Useful for what?”

I stared at him.

“Why, you old owl, for the schools of course. There’s only three weeks, you know—”

“Oh! the schools. I’d forgotten all about them. Come along and play a game of squash-fives in the Wuggins Courts. Old Prothero promised to keep us places.”

III

It was about a fortnight later that I saw Flinders again. I don’t mean that we had not met in the interval. But that on this occasion I should have guessed something of the real Flinders and of what he was suffering, even had the day not ended in the catastrophe it did. I had been to confession on a Friday afternoon, to the Cowley Fathers’ church. As I was making my thanksgiving, I heard a groan from somewhere near. I saw Flinders kneeling about three chairs away. His face was contorted with trouble, and the tears were falling from his tight-shut eyes. A lay-brother, a funny little man like a tortoise in spectacles, gazed at him professionally as he trotted past. Then something roused Flinders, for he opened his eyes, got up and went to Father Terence’s confessional.

One does not as a rule wait for a fellow undergraduate, if one happens to discover him at his religious duties; but something made me stay until Flinders should come out. I knelt there, looking at the image of Our Lady, and trying to pray. Flinders’ appearance had driven me to think about him. I somehow had a presage that he was, not merely in trouble, but at some crisis in which I was to bear a part. I had not then any kind of idea what it was, nor how it would affect me. I think now it is possible that the same power which had been impelling him, had, out of caprice, begun to control my mind, and so procure for itself a witness and a tribute to its potency.

Flinders was not long at his confession. When he came out, he came—I had anticipated it somehow—straight to me.

“Come along, Scott. I want to talk. No—” as I hesitated—“I’ve no penance. I’ve not had absolution. Come along.”

We came out of the odd little door—it was before the days of the present west end, and its big tower—and when we were in the Iffley Road, we turned and walked away from Oxford. At first we tramped along in silence. I could see Hugh was trying to make a beginning; and that it was no little thing he had to talk about. I didn’t like to begin myself; and it would have been futile to make conversation.

I wish I could give you some idea of the force and character of Hugh Flinders. He was quite the ablest man, not of our year, but of our times: for sheer brain power, for æsthetic sensibility and for a general sense of values he was incomparably bigger than the ordinary able undergraduate. I remember conversations of his in which he anticipated much of modern thought; and his insight into the past was almost uncanny in its power of realizing not only the mental, but the physical and moral atmosphere, of the classical period.

Gilbert Murray has a little of that power now, and so had poor Benecke; but Murray at his best cannot avoid bringing the Gods of Olympus into the barrier of Temple Fortune; and Benecke, with all his brilliant diagnosis of the Greek temperament, had too loose a hold on the essential human character. That was where Flinders excelled. He knew humanity in a way that would be surprising in any one, and was staggering in so young a man. It was that which made him so intolerant of the æsthete. He loved Lang’s “In the Wrong Paradise,” and was never tired of insisting on the falsity of the Renascence idea of Hellenism. It would be difficult to say whether he hated Pater or Wilde more. Both had, in his eyes, presented the English public with a picture of Greek life and ideals that was false even to the decadent Hellenism of Alexandria.

I tell you this that you may not mistake his tragedy for that of a man obsessed by the fancy picture of Greek civilization. What he did, or suffered, he did or suffered from a firm belief in the reality, the primitive truth of that intense nature-worship which Greek religion shared with other faiths.

He did not speak until we had turned the corner where the Iffley ’bus used to stop, and were climbing the hill to the “King of Prussia.” Then he began:

“Scott, do you believe in classical mythology?”

“How do you mean, Hugh?”

“How—well, would it surprise you to know that the old worship goes on? That hills near here are still sacred to Apollo? That groves are still dedicated to Diana, and woods to Pan? I don’t mean stupid revivals like old Taylor’s: I mean survivals of the old faith among the old people—people to whom Christ and the saints are less direct of access than earth-stained Pan, gross Priapus, or even Jupiter of the storm.

“For months now I have resisted and I can resist no longer. I’m going to the grove tonight; and I should like you to come too, if you will. Will you?”

I was not much enlightened by Hugh’s revelation. I could see he was serious, and I did not doubt he was sane. But I found it difficult—as you must in reading, to actualize what I heard. It seemed like a poor game; and its vagueness left me a little annoyed.

“What grove, Flinders? And what’s the point of going now? I don’t see what you are at.”

“You will if you come,” he replied. “Anyway, I must go.”

“But do explain more, Hugh. Whose devotee are you?”

He looked at me in an odd way, and replied as oddly.

“I have found the ‘Attis’ useful, Scott. I go to worship the Great Mother. I go to get strength. It is not there for me, I am sure”—and he waved his hand at the country behind us—“nor in the church at Cowley, though they, too, know something. But they don’t go far enough.”

He refused to speak any more. I did not dare leave him. Apart from my feeling that it was only decent to see him through whatever he was going to experience, I felt an odd power impelling me on. It didn’t seem possible to evade or to refuse. We walked on steadily in the growing dusk; and by the time we reached Nuneham Courtenay it was quite dark. We went down the hill through the village, and Hugh turned abruptly into the road which leads to March Baldon—or to one of the Baldons. I have never been there since. After following the road about half a mile, he cut through into a field. It was one of those sinister fields, which, one knows, have at some time harboured the suicide or the abandoned. I have been told since that I am “psychic”—to use the jargon of theosophy—and on that night I first felt the advantages of that power. There were other presences in the field, curious, thin, meagre little things. I turned to Hugh.

“This field is strange, Hugh, isn’t it? Somehow one feels there are things—things deserted—helpless little things. Bah—I’m getting stupid.”

“Ah! you feel it—” said Flinders exultantly—“I wondered if you would. Yes, this is the field of renunciation. Or one of them. I don’t like coming through here—” he seemed suddenly to be asking for sympathy.

“Well, for God’s sake, Hugh, let’s go back. I’m ready to talk this over—but I don’t like—”

“No—I have turned back too often. After all, if I can’t persist in my Christianity, there are other ploughs to hold, and other fields to sow. And I believe this is the way.”

We went on in silence.

At the end of the field there was a stile which led into a wood. As I crossed it I noticed that it did not seem much darker in the wood than it was outside. I missed that descending cap of darkness which usually overtakes one on the first entry. It was a dark night. The moon was small and young, and the stars did not avail much against that Lenten gloom which preludes Easter. Yet in the wood it actually seemed lighter than it had been in the field. We were walking along a little path, heavy with damp grass and trodden straw. Hugh was more rapt than he had been, and seemed more careless of his way. Once or twice he stumbled against a root, and righted himself with a sharp laugh. I was by now thoroughly nervous. I am not an imaginative man, but the odd matter-of-factness of our proceedings, contrasted with Hugh’s vague promise of something mysterious, produced its result. I was strung-up, and ready to start at a shadow. As I walked on, uneasy, Hugh spoke again.

“I have never been in the wood before. It is here they meet. Here—”

Suddenly I felt irritable.

“What ‘they’—who are ‘they’?”

“They—those who worship the Great Mother—she who is called Cybele. Those who get into contact with her; who know how to sacrifice nature, and by sacrifice win strength, and self-control. This faith, too, knows the new truth—‘He who would save his life must lose it’—aye, and”—here he muttered something which I could not hear.

I did not then guess what he meant. Classics are so taught in this country that few boys realize the essential significance of the classical myths. Things like the story of Leda, or of the Bull, horrors like the tale of Io have not the reality of our native fairy stories. Why, boys can read about Marsyas and still admire Apollo.

I had lost the end of Hugh’s last sentence. He was walking ahead of me, and then that happened which I cannot explain. I suppose it makes my story useless as evidence. Hugh vanished. It was a moonlit night, and I was within reach of him; we were clear of any trees, and the ground was flat, yet Hugh, with whom I had been talking and whom I had seen a moment before, had completely disappeared. I was frightened with that complete, stark fear which you can explain as you please. It may be only the unconscious memory of our cells, those damnable, blessed cells which keep some secular knowledge of the days, æons ago, when that which was to become man, was spawned upon the waters or crept in the ancient slime, and knew its one chance was never, never to be overcome by the insensate and unspeakably strong powers of Chaos. Whether it was fear of that old disorder moved in my blood, or—but it does not matter. I was sweating with fear. I cried aloud, “Hugh! Hugh!” And all the response I had was an echo which turned his name into a cry of woe and loss. I then, in spite of my fear and a strong instinct against my action, pressed forward—but I could not move. A mist—oh! not unlike the valley mists we have near the Thames, and yet so unlike, which blew heavily at my feet and before my face seemed to solidify if I tried to pass it. I could go back, but terrified as I was, this I would not do. I leaned desperately against that cold and clammy wall, and strove to find Hugh’s figure in the little patch of green which showed faintly in the moonlight.

Then I heard the song. It was high and shrill, and as I strained to catch the syllables I recognized phrases in Latin—“Procul oh! procul este profani!” The chant seemed to come from very far off; and even more faintly I heard a low, continuous shuffling, and then a quick, sharp stamping and then, in incredible rapidity, the pad, pad, pad, of what must have been hundreds of bare feet on the hard ground. All the time there was the far-off chanting. I was nearly swooning with terror, and with the dreadful baffled effort as I pushed against the mist which wavered so slightly and lightly, and yet barred my progress as if it had been a wall of mesh-steel. It was like one of those nightmares in which you cannot wake, cannot rid your mind or your body from some weight, something unknown which obstructs for a moment all the freedom of your life. It was complete suffocation without loss of consciousness. And all the time, faster and faster the bare, invisible feet of the frantic, invisible dancers raced and beat, pad, pad, pad… and I could feel nothing but the horror of cold and damp behind which was my friend. The dread of it was frightfully increased by the fact that while, to my ears and my touch nothing was present that was not incredible and awful, nothing which did not disgust and dismay me—all the time I could see, thro’ the floating wraiths of mist only the moon shining very calmly on a four-acre field of grass, a field with a stone in the centre, against which Farmer Morrell’s cows were used to rub themselves. There were no cows in the field that night.

That, I say, was all I could see. Suddenly, though, as I gazed—trying to reduce the deadly effect of what I heard and felt by what I could see—I realized that the strangest thing was to be shown to my eyes. The grass in the field was tall and rank. As I looked at the field, I saw that the grass was being beaten down, beaten as if by some storm of tremendous hailstones. It was going even as I gazed—though nothing fell upon it but the light of the moon and the quick sound made by those invisible feet—the green grass was disappearing, broken and crushed and trodden to the earth. I made a final desperate effort to break through the wall of mist, feeling I should be nearer reality if I could handle that smashed grass; as I thrust, suddenly, as suddenly as the chanting and the dancing had come, came complete silence. Then a long, high shriek, a shriek of agony and triumph, in a voice I knew so well.

Hugh’s life was saved; he left Oxford and, after a time in a nursing home, started work in London and succeeded. It was Farmer Morrell found him and me—I had fainted on hearing his cry—and he fetched Dr. Whitman, and was kind and efficient. He was singularly uninquisitive about the whole affair, except as to how his good field of hay had been turned in a few hours, to a hard clay without a vestige of grass upon it.

1926

The Wind in the Portico

John Buchan

John Buchan (1875–1940), 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, is best known for his spy thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915). After gaining a degree in Classics from Oxford, he had a varied career, being—amongst other things—private secretary to the High Commissioner in South Africa and the fifteenth Governor General of Canada.

Buchan also wrote several effective supernatural stories, which are often tied in with the landscape in which they are set. Many of the stories drew on his knowledge of the Classical work and pre-Christian cults, such as his 1914 short story “Basilissa”, which was expanded into the novel The Dancing Floor in 1926, and the novel Witch Wood (1927). This story first appeared in the short story collection The Runagates Club (1926), which features the reminiscences of the members of a London dining club. Set in the Shropshire wilds, the discovery of an altar to a Romano-British god may be the undoing of a reclusive country squire.

Henry Nightingale’s Story

A dry wind of the high places… not to fan nor to cleanse, even a full wind from those places shall come unto me.

Jeremiah IV. XI–XII

Nightingale was a hard man to draw. His doings with the Bedawin had become a legend, but he would as soon have talked about them as claimed to have won the war. He was a slim dark fellow about thirty-five years of age, very short-sighted, and wearing such high-powered double glasses that it was impossible to tell the colour of his eyes. This weakness made him stoop a little and peer, so that he was the strangest figure to picture in a burnous leading an army of desert tribesmen. I fancy his power came partly from his oddness, for his followers thought that the hand of Allah had been laid on him, and partly from his quick imagination and his flawless courage. After the war he had gone back to his Cambridge fellowship, declaring that, thank God, that chapter in his life was over.

As I say, he never mentioned the deeds which had made him famous. He knew his own business, and probably realized that to keep his mental balance he had to drop the curtain on what must have been the most nerve-racking four years ever spent by man. We respected his decision and kept off Arabia. It was a remark of Hannay’s that drew from him the following story. Hannay was talking about his Cotswold house, which was on the Fosse Way, and saying that it always puzzled him how so elaborate a civilization as Roman Britain could have been destroyed utterly and left no mark on the national history beyond a few roads and ruins and place-names. Peckwether, the historian, demurred, and had a good deal to say about how much the Roman tradition was woven into the Saxon culture. “Rome only sleeps,” he said; “she never dies.”

Nightingale nodded. “Sometimes she dreams in her sleep and talks. Once she scared me out of my senses.”

After a good deal of pressing he produced this story. He was not much of a talker, so he wrote it out and read it to us.

There is a place in Shropshire which I do not propose to visit again. It lies between Ludlow and the hills, in a shallow valley full of woods. Its name is St. Sant, a village with a big house and park adjoining, on a stream called the Vaun, about five miles from the little town of Faxeter. They have queer names in those parts, and other things queerer than the names.

I was motoring from Wales to Cambridge at the close of the long vacation. All this happened before the war, when I had just got my fellowship and was settling down to academic work. It was a fine night in early October, with a full moon, and I intended to push on to Ludlow for supper and bed. The time was about half-past eight, the road was empty and good going, and I was trundling pleasantly along when something went wrong with my headlights. It was a small thing, and I stopped to remedy it beyond a village and just at the lodge-gates of a house.

On the opposite side of the road a carrier’s cart had drawn up, and two men, who looked like indoor servants, were lifting some packages from it on to a big barrow. The moon was up, so I didn’t need the feeble light of the carrier’s lamp to see what they were doing. I suppose I wanted to stretch my legs for a moment, for when I had finished my job I strolled over to them. They did not hear me coming, and the carrier on his perch seemed to be asleep.

The packages were the ordinary consignments from some big shop in town. But I noticed that the two men handled them very gingerly, and that, as each was laid in the barrow, they clipped off the shop label and affixed one of their own. The new labels were odd things, large and square, with some address written on them in very black capital letters. There was nothing in that, but the men’s faces puzzled me. For they seemed to do their job in a fever, longing to get it over and yet in a sweat lest they should make some mistake. Their commonplace task seemed to be for them a matter of tremendous importance. I moved so as to get a view of their faces, and I saw that they were white and strained. The two were of the butler or valet class, both elderly, and I could have sworn that they were labouring under something like fear.

I shuffled my feet to let them know of my presence and remarked that it was a fine night. They started as if they had been robbing a corpse. One of them mumbled something in reply, but the other caught a package which was slipping, and in a tone of violent alarm growled to his mate to be careful. I had a notion that they were handling explosives.

I had no time to waste, so I pushed on. That night, in my room at Ludlow, I had the curiosity to look up my map and identify the place where I had seen the men. The village was St. Sant, and it appeared that the gate I had stopped at belonged to a considerable demesne called Vauncastle. That was my first visit.

At that time I was busy on a critical edition of Theocritus, for which I was making a new collation of the manuscripts. There was a variant of the Medicean Codex in England, which nobody had seen since Gaisford, and after a good deal of trouble I found that it was in the library of a man called Dubellay. I wrote to him at his London club, and got a reply to my surprise from Vauncastle Hall, Faxeter. It was an odd letter, for you could see that he longed to tell me to go to the devil, but couldn’t quite reconcile it with his conscience. We exchanged several letters, and the upshot was that he gave me permission to examine his manuscript. He did not ask me to stay, but mentioned that there was a comfortable little inn in St. Sant.

My second visit began on the 27th of December, after I had been home for Christmas. We had had a week of severe frost, and then it had thawed a little; but it remained bitterly cold, with leaden skies that threatened snow. I drove from Faxeter, and as we ascended the valley I remember thinking that it was a curiously sad country. The hills were too low to be impressive, and their outlines were mostly blurred with woods; but the tops showed clear, funny little knolls of grey bent that suggested a volcanic origin. It might have been one of those backgrounds you find in Italian primitives, with all the light and colour left out. When I got a glimpse of the Vaun in the bleached meadows it looked like the “wan water” of the Border ballads. The woods, too, had not the friendly bareness of English copses in winter-time. They remained dark and cloudy, as if they were hiding secrets. Before I reached St. Sant, I decided that the landscape was not only sad, but ominous.

I was fortunate in my inn. In the single street of one-storied cottages it rose like a lighthouse, with a cheery glow from behind the red curtains of the bar parlour. The inside proved as good as the outside. I found a bedroom with a bright fire, and I dined in a wainscoted room full of preposterous old pictures of lanky hounds and hollow-backed horses. I had been rather depressed on my journey, but my spirits were raised by this comfort, and when the house produced a most respectable bottle of port I had the landlord in to drink a glass. He was an ancient man who had been a gamekeeper, with a much younger wife, who was responsible for the management. I was curious to hear something about the owner of my manuscript, but I got little from the landlord. He had been with the old squire, and had never served the present one. I heard of Dubellays in plenty—the landlord’s master, who had hunted his own hounds for forty years, the Major his brother, who had fallen at Abu Klea; Parson Jack, who had had the living till he died, and of all kinds of collaterals. The “Deblays” had been a high-spirited, open-handed stock, and much liked in the place. But of the present master of the Hall he could or would tell me nothing. The Squire was a “great scholard”, but I gathered that he followed no sport and was not a convivial soul like his predecessors. He had spent a mint of money on the house, but not many people went there. He, the landlord, had never been inside the grounds in the new master’s time, though in the old days there had been hunt breakfasts on the lawn for the whole countryside, and mighty tenantry dinners. I went to bed with a clear picture in my mind of the man I was to interview on the morrow. A scholarly and autocratic recluse, who collected treasures and beautified his dwelling and probably lived in his library. I rather looked forward to meeting him, for the bonhomous sporting squire was not much in my line.

After breakfast next morning I made my way to the Hall. It was the same leaden weather, and when I entered the gates the air seemed to grow bitterer and the skies darker. The place was muffled in great trees which even in their winter bareness made a pall about it. There was a long avenue of ancient sycamores, through which one caught only rare glimpses of the frozen park. I took my bearings, and realized that I was walking nearly due south, and was gradually descending. The house must be in a hollow. Presently the trees thinned, I passed through an iron gate, came out on a big untended lawn, untidily studded with laurels and rhododendrons, and there before me was the house front.

I had expected something beautiful—an old Tudor or Queen Anne façade or a dignified Georgian portico. I was disappointed, for the front was simply mean. It was low and irregular, more like the back parts of a house, and I guessed that at some time or another the building had been turned round, and the old kitchen door made the chief entrance. I was confirmed in my conclusion by observing that the roofs rose in tiers, like one of those recessed New York skyscrapers, so that the present back parts of the building were of an impressive height.

The oddity of the place interested me, and still more its dilapidation. What on earth could the owner have spent his money on? Everything—lawn, flower-beds, paths—was neglected. There was a new stone doorway, but the walls badly needed pointing, the window woodwork had not been painted for ages, and there were several broken panes. The bell did not ring, so I was reduced to hammering on the knocker, and it must have been ten minutes before the door opened. A pale butler, one of the men I had seen at the carrier’s cart the October before, stood blinking in the entrance.

He led me in without question, when I gave my name, so I was evidently expected. The hall was my second surprise. What had become of my picture of the collector? The place was small and poky, and furnished as barely as the lobby of a farmhouse. The only thing I approved was its warmth. Unlike most English country houses there seemed to be excellent heating arrangements.

I was taken into a little dark room with one window that looked out on a shrubbery, while the man went to fetch his master. My chief feeling was of gratitude that I had not been asked to stay, for the inn was paradise compared with this sepulchre. I was examining the prints on the wall, when I heard my name spoken and turned round to greet Mr. Dubellay.

He was my third surprise. I had made a portrait in my mind of a fastidious old scholar, with eye-glasses on a black chord, and a finical weltkind-ish manner. Instead I found a man still in early middle age, a heavy fellow dressed in the roughest country tweeds. He was as untidy as his demesne, for he had not shaved that morning, his flannel collar was badly frayed, and his fingernails would have been the better for a scrubbing brush. His face was hard to describe. It was high-coloured, but the colour was not healthy; it was friendly, but it was also wary; above all, it was unquiet. He gave me the impression of a man whose nerves were all wrong, and who was perpetually on his guard.

He said a few civil words, and thrust a badly tied brown paper parcel at me.

“That’s your manuscript,” he said jauntily.

I was staggered. I had expected to be permitted to collate the codex in his library, and in the last few minutes had realized that the prospect was distasteful. But here was this casual owner offering me the priceless thing to take away.

I stammered my thanks, and added that it was very good of him to trust a stranger with such a treasure.

“Only as far as the inn,” he said. “I wouldn’t like to send it by post. But there’s no harm in your working at it at the inn. There should be confidence among scholars.” And he gave an odd cackle of a laugh.

“I greatly prefer your plan,” I said. “But I thought you would insist on my working at it here.”

“No, indeed,” he said earnestly. “I shouldn’t think of such a thing… Wouldn’t do at all… An insult to our freemasonry… That’s how I should regard it.”

We had a few minutes’ further talk. I learned that he had inherited under the entail from a cousin, and had been just over ten years at Vauncastle. Before that he had been a London solicitor. He asked me a question or two about Cambridge—wished he had been at the University—much hampered in his work by a defective education. I was a Greek scholar?—Latin, too, he presumed. Wonderful people the Romans… He spoke quite freely, but all the time his queer restless eyes were darting about, and I had a strong impression that he would have liked to say something to me very different from these commonplaces—that he was longing to broach some subject but was held back by shyness or fear. He had such an odd appraising way of looking at me.

I left without his having asked me to a meal, for which I was not sorry, for I did not like the atmosphere of the place. I took a short cut over the ragged lawn, and turned at the top of the slope to look back. The house was in reality a huge pile, and I saw that I had been right and that the main building was all at the back. Was it, I wondered, like the Alhambra, which behind a front like a factory concealed a treasure-house? I saw, too, that the woodland hollow was more spacious than I had fancied. The house, as at present arranged, faced due north, and behind the south front was an open space in which I guessed that a lake might lie. Far beyond I could see in the December dimness the lift of high dark hills.

That evening the snow came in earnest, and fell continuously for the better part of two days. I banked up the fire in my bedroom and spent a happy time with the codex. I had brought only my working boots with me and the inn boasted no library, so when I wanted to relax I went down to the taproom, or gossiped with the landlady in the bar parlour. The yokels who congregated in the former were pleasant fellows, but, like all the folk on the Marches, they did not talk readily to a stranger and I heard little from them of the Hall. The old squire had reared every year three thousand pheasants, but the present squire would not allow a gun to be fired on his land and there were only a few wild birds left. For the same reason the woods were thick with vermin. This they told me when I professed an interest in shooting. But of Mr. Dubellay they would not speak, declaring that they never saw him. I daresay they gossiped wildly about him, and their public reticence struck me as having in it a touch of fear.

The landlady who came from a different part of the shire, was more communicative. She had not known the former Dubellays and so had no standard of comparison, but she was inclined to regard the present squire as not quite right in the head. “They do say,” she would begin, but she, too, suffered from some inhibition, and what promised to be sensational would tail off into the commonplace. One thing apparently puzzled the neighbourhood above others, and that was his rearrangement of the house. “They do say,” she said in an awed voice, “that he have built a great church.” She had never visited it—no one in the parish had, for Squire Dubellay did not allow intruders—but from Lyne Hill you could see it through a gap in the woods. “He’s no good Christian,” she told me, “and him and Vicar has quarrelled this many a day. But they do say as he worships summat there.” I learned that there were no women servants in the house, only the men he had brought from London. “Poor benighted souls, they must live in a sad hobble,” and the buxom lady shrugged her shoulders and giggled.

On the last day of December I decided that I needed exercise and must go for a long stride. The snow had ceased that morning, and the dull skies had changed to a clear blue. It was still very cold, but the sun was shining, the snow was firm and crisp underfoot, and I proposed to survey the country. So after luncheon I put on thick boots and gaiters, and made for Lyne Hill. This meant a considerable circuit, for the place lay south of the Vauncastle park. From it I hoped to get a view of the other side of the house.

I was not disappointed. There was a rift in the thick woodlands, and below me, two miles off, I suddenly saw a strange building, like a classical temple. Only the entablature and the tops of the pillars showed above the trees, but they stood out vivid and dark against the background of snow. The spectacle in that lonely place was so startling that for a little I could only stare. I remember that I glanced behind me to the snowy line of the Welsh mountains, and felt that I might have been looking at a winter view of the Apennines two thousand years ago.

My curiosity was now alert, and I determined to get a nearer view of this marvel. I left the track and ploughed through the snowy fields down to the skirts of the woods. After that my troubles began. I found myself in a very good imitation of a primeval forest, where the undergrowth had been unchecked and the rides uncut for years. I sank into deep pits, I was savagely torn by briars and brambles, but I struggled on, keeping a line as best I could. At last the trees stopped. Before me was a flat expanse which I knew must be a lake, and beyond rose the temple.

It ran the whole length of the house, and from where I stood it was hard to believe that there were buildings at its back where men dwelt. It was a fine piece of work—the first glance told me that—admirably proportioned, classical, yet not following exactly any of the classical models. One could imagine a great echoing interior dim with the smoke of sacrifice, and it was only by reflecting that I realized that the peristyle could not be continued down the two sides, that there was no interior, and that what I was looking at was only a portico.

The thing was at once impressive and preposterous. What madness had been in Dubellay when he embellished his house with such a grandiose garden front? The sun was setting and the shadow of the wooded hills darkened the interior, so I could not even make out the back wall of the porch. I wanted a nearer view, so I embarked on the frozen lake.

Then I had an odd experience. I was not tired, the snow lay level and firm, but I was conscious of extreme weariness. The biting air had become warm and oppressive. I had to drag boots that seemed to weigh tons across that lake. The place was utterly silent in the stricture of the frost, and from the pile in front no sign of life came.

I reached the other side at last and found myself in a frozen shallow of bulrushes and skeleton willow-herbs. They were taller than my head, and to see the house I had to look upward through their snowy traceries. It was perhaps eighty feet above me and a hundred yards distant, and, since I was below it, the delicate pillars seemed to spring to a great height. But it was still dusky, and the only detail I could see was on the ceiling, which seemed either to be carved or painted with deeply-shaded monochrome figures.

Suddenly the dying sun came slanting through the gap in the hills, and for an instant the whole portico to its farthest recesses was washed in clear gold and scarlet. That was wonderful enough, but there was something more. The air was utterly still with not the faintest breath of wind—so still that when I had lit a cigarette half an hour before the flame of the match had burned steadily upward like a candle in a room. As I stood among the sedges not a single frost crystal stirred… But there was a wind blowing in the portico.

I could see it lifting feathers of snow from the base of the pillars and fluffing the cornices. The floor had already been swept clean, but tiny flakes drifted on to it from the exposed edges. The interior was filled with a furious movement, though a yard from it was frozen peace. I felt nothing of the action of the wind, but I knew that it was hot, hot as the breath of a furnace.

I had only one thought, dread of being overtaken by night near that place. I turned and ran. Ran with labouring steps across the lake, panting and stifling with a deadly hot oppression, ran blindly by a sort of instinct in the direction of the village. I did not stop till I had wrestled through the big wood, and come out on some rough pasture above the highway. Then I dropped on the ground, and felt again the comforting chill of the December air.

The adventure left me in an uncomfortable mood. I was ashamed of myself for playing the fool, and at the same time hopelessly puzzled, for the oftener I went over in my mind the incidents of that afternoon the more I was at a loss for an explanation. One feeling was uppermost, that I did not like this place and wanted to be out of it. I had already broken the back of my task, and by shutting myself up for two days I completed it; that is to say, I made my collation as far as I had advanced myself in my commentary on the text. I did not want to go back to the Hall, so I wrote a civil note to Dubellay, expressing my gratitude and saying that I was sending up the manuscript by the landlord’s son, as I scrupled to trouble him with another visit.

I got a reply at once, saying that Mr. Dubellay would like to give himself the pleasure of dining with me at the inn before I went, and would receive the manuscript in person.

It was the last night of my stay in St. Sant, so I ordered the best dinner the place could provide, and a magnum of claret, of which I discovered a bin in the cellar. Dubellay appeared promptly at eight o’clock, arriving to my surprise in a car. He had tidied himself up and put on a dinner jacket, and he looked exactly like the city solicitors you see dining in the Junior Carlton.

He was in excellent spirits, and his eyes had lost their air of being on guard. He seemed to have reached some conclusion about me, or decided that I was harmless. More, he seemed to be burning to talk to me. After my adventure I was prepared to find fear in him, the fear I had seen in the faces of the menservants. But there was none; instead there was excitement, overpowering excitement.

He neglected the courses in his verbosity. His coming to dinner had considerably startled the inn, and instead of a maid the landlady herself waited on us. She seemed to want to get the meal over, and hustled the biscuits and the port on to the table as soon as she decently could. Then Dubellay became confidential.

He was an enthusiast, it appeared, an enthusiast with a single hobby. All his life he had pottered among antiquities, and when he succeeded to Vauncastle he had the leisure and money to indulge himself. The place, it seemed, had been famous in Roman Britain—Vauni Castra—and Faxeter was a corruption of the same. “Who was Vaunus?” I asked. He grinned, and told me to wait.

There had been an old temple up in the high woods. There had always been a local legend about it, and the place was supposed to be haunted. Well, he had had the site excavated and he had found—Here he became the cautious solicitor, and explained to me the law of treasure trove. As long as the objects found were not intrinsically valuable, not gold or jewels, the finder was entitled to keep them. He had done so—had not published the results of his excavations in the proceedings of any learned society—did not want to be bothered by tourists. I was different, for I was a scholar.

What had he found? It was really rather hard to follow his babbling talk, but I gathered that he had found certain carvings and sacrificial implements. And—he sunk his voice—most important of all, an altar, an altar of Vaunus, the tutelary deity of the vale.

When he mentioned this word his face took on a new look—not of fear but of secrecy, a kind of secret excitement. I have seen the same look on the face of a street-preaching Salvationist.

Vaunus had been a British god of the hills, whom the Romans in their liberal way appear to have identified with Appolo. He gave me a long confused account of him, from which it appeared that Mr. Dubellay was not an exact scholar. Some of his derivations of place-names were absurd—like St. Sant from Sancta Sanctorum—and in quoting a line of Ausonius he made two false quantities. He seemed to hope that I could tell him something more about Vaunus, but I said that my subject was Greek, and that I was deeply ignorant about Roman Britain. I mentioned several books, and found that he had never heard of Haverfield.

One word he used, “hypocaust”, which suddenly gave me a clue. He must have heated the temple, as he heated his house, by some very efficient system of hot air. I know little about science, but I imagined that the artificial heat of the portico, as contrasted with the cold outside, might create an air current. At any rate that explanation satisfied me, and my afternoon’s adventure lost its uncanniness. The reaction made me feel friendly towards him, and I listened to his talk with sympathy, but I decided not to mention that I had visited his temple.

He told me about it himself in the most open way. “I couldn’t leave the altar on the hillside,” he said, “I had to make a place for it, so I turned the old front of the house into a sort of temple. I got the best advice, but architects are ignorant people, and I often wished I had been a better scholar. Still the place satisfies me.”

“I hope it satisfies Vaunus,” I said jocularly.

“I think so,” he replied quite seriously, and then his thoughts seemed to go wandering, and for a minute or so he looked through me with a queer abstraction in his eyes.

“What do you do with it now you’ve got it?” I asked.

He didn’t reply, but smiled to himself.

“I don’t know if you remember a passage in Sidonius Apollinaris,” I said, “a formula for consecrating pagan altars to Christian uses. You begin by sacrificing a white cock or something suitable, and tell Apollo with all friendliness that the old dedication is off for the present. Then you have a Christian invocation—”

He nearly jumped out of his chair.

“That wouldn’t do—wouldn’t do at all!… Oh Lord, no!… Couldn’t think of it for one moment!”

It was as if I had offended his ears by some horrid blasphemy, and the odd thing was that he never recovered his composure. He tried, for he had good manners, but his ease and friendliness had gone. We talked stiffly for another half-hour about trifles, and then he rose to leave. I returned him his manuscript neatly parcelled up, and expanded in thanks, but he scarcely seemed to heed me. He stuck the thing in his pocket, and departed with the same air of shocked absorption.

After he had gone I sat before the fire and reviewed the situation. I was satisfied with my hypocaust theory, and had no more perturbation in my memory about my afternoon’s adventure. Yet a slight flavour of unpleasantness hung about it, and I felt that I did not quite like Dubellay. I set him down as a crank who had tangled himself up with a half-witted hobby, like an old maid with her cats, and I was not sorry to be leaving the place.

My third and last visit to St. Sant was in the following June—the midsummer of 1914. I had all but finished my Theocritus, but I needed another day or two with the Vauncastle manuscript, and, as I wanted to clear the whole thing off before I went to Italy in July, I wrote to Dubellay and asked if I might have another sight of it. The thing was a bore, but it had to be faced, and I fancied that the valley would be a pleasant place in that hot summer.

I got a reply at once, inviting, almost begging me to come, and insisting that I should stay at the Hall; I couldn’t very well refuse, though I would have preferred the inn. He wired about my train, and wired again saying he would meet me. This time I seemed to be a particularly welcome guest.

I reached Faxeter in the evening, and was met by a car from a Faxeter garage. The driver was a talkative young man, and, as the car was a closed one, I sat beside him for the sake of fresh air. The term had tired me, and I was glad to get out of stuffy Cambridge, but I cannot say that I found it much cooler as we ascended the Vaun valley. The woods were in their summer magnificence but a little dulled and tarnished by the heat, the river was shrunk to a trickle, and the curious hill-tops were so scorched by the sun that they seemed almost yellow above the green of the trees. Once again I had the feeling of a landscape fantastically un-English.

“Squire Dubellay’s been in a great way about your coming, sir,” the driver informed me. “Sent down three times to the boss to make sure it was all right. He’s got a car of his own, too, a nice little Daimler, but he don’t seem to use it much. Haven’t seen him about in it for a month of Sundays.”

As we turned in at the Hall gates he looked curiously about him. “Never been here before, though I’ve been in most gentlemen’s parks for fifty miles round. Rum old-fashioned spot, isn’t it, sir?”

If it had seemed a shuttered sanctuary in midwinter, in that June twilight it was more than ever a place enclosed and guarded. There was almost an autumn smell of decay, a dry decay like touchwood. We seemed to be descending through layers of ever-thickening woods. When at last we turned through the iron gate I saw that the lawns had reached a further stage of neglect, for they were as shaggy as a hayfield.

The white-faced butler let me in, and there, waiting at his back, was Dubellay. But he was not the man whom I had seen in December. He was dressed in an old baggy suit of flannels, and his unwholesome red face was painfully drawn and sunken. There were dark pouches under his eyes, and these eyes were no longer excited, but dull and pained. Yes, and there was more than pain in them—there was fear. I wondered if his hobby were becoming too much for him.

He greeted me like a long-lost brother. Considering that I scarcely knew him, I was a little embarrassed by his warmth. “Bless you for coming, my dear fellow,” he cried. “You want a wash and then we’ll have dinner. Don’t bother to change, unless you want to. I never do.” He led me to my bedroom, which was clean enough but small and shabby like a servant’s room. I guessed that he had gutted the house to build his absurd temple.

We dined in a fair-sized room which was a kind of library. It was lined with old books, but they did not look as if they had been there long; rather it seemed like a lumber room in which a fine collection had been stored. Once no doubt they had lived in a dignified Georgian chamber. There was nothing else, none of the antiques which I had expected.

“You have come just in time,” he told me. “I fairly jumped when I got your letter, for I had been thinking of running up to Cambridge to insist on your coming down here. I hope you’re in no hurry to leave.”

“As it happens,” I said, “I am rather pressed for time, for I hope to go abroad next week. I ought to finish my work here in a couple of days. I can’t tell you how much I’m in your debt for your kindness.”

“Two days,” he said. “That will get us over midsummer. That should be enough.” I hadn’t a notion what he meant.

I told him that I was looking forward to examining his collection. He opened his eyes. “Your discoveries, I mean,” I said, “the altar of Vaunus…”

As I spoke the words his face suddenly contorted in a spasm of what looked like terror. He choked and then recovered himself. “Yes, yes,” he said rapidly. “You shall see it—you shall see everything—but not now—not tonight. Tomorrow—in broad daylight—that’s the time.”

After that the evening became a bad dream. Small talk deserted him, and he could only reply with an effort to my commonplaces. I caught him often looking at me furtively, as if he were sizing me up and wondering how far he could go with me. The thing fairly got on my nerves, and to crown all it was abominably stuffy. The windows of the room gave on a little paved court with a background of laurels, and I might have been in Seven Dials for all the air there was.

When coffee was served I could stand it no longer. “What about smoking in the temple?” I said. “It should be cool there with the air from the lake.”

I might have been proposing the assassination of his mother. He simply gibbered at me. “No, no,” he stammered. “My God, no!” It was half an hour before he could properly collect himself. A servant lit two oil lamps, and we sat on in the frowsty room.

“You said something when we last met,” he ventured at last, after many a sidelong glance at me. “Something about a ritual for re-dedicating an altar.”

I remembered my remark about Sidonius Apollinaris.

“Could you show me the passage? There is a good classical library here, collected by my great-grandfather. Unfortunately my scholarship is not equal to using it properly.”

I got up and hunted along the shelves, and presently found a copy of Sidonius, the Plantin edition of 1609. I turned up the passage, and roughly translated it for him. He listened hungrily and made me repeat it twice.

“He says a cock,” he hesitated. “Is that essential?”

“I don’t think so. I fancy any of the recognized ritual stuff would do.”

“I am glad,” he said simply. “I am afraid of blood.”

“Good God, man,” I cried out, “are you taking my nonsense seriously? I was only chaffing. Let old Vaunus stick to his altar!”

He looked at me like a puzzled and rather offended dog.

“Sidonius was in earnest…”

“Well, I’m not,” I said rudely. “We’re in the twentieth century and not in the third. Isn’t it about time we went to bed?”

He made no objection, and found me a candle in the hall. As I undressed I wondered into what kind of lunatic asylum I had strayed. I felt the strongest distaste for the place, and longed to go straight off to the inn; only I couldn’t make use of a man’s manuscripts and insult his hospitality. It was fairly clear to me that Dubellay was mad. He had ridden his hobby to the death of his wits and was now in its bondage. Good Lord! he had talked of his precious Vaunus as a votary talks of a god. I believed he had come to worship some figment of his half-educated fancy.

I think I must have slept for a couple of hours. Then I woke dripping with perspiration, for the place was simply an oven. My window was as wide open as it would go, and, though it was a warm night, when I stuck my head out the air was fresh. The heat came from indoors. The room was on the first floor near the entrance and I was looking on to the overgrown lawns. The night was very dark and utterly still, but I could have sworn that I heard wind. The trees were as motionless as marble, but somewhere close at hand I heard a strong gust blowing. Also, though there was no moon, there was somewhere near me a steady glow of light; I could see the reflection of it round the end of the house. That meant that it came from the temple. What kind of saturnalia was Dubellay conducting at such an hour?

When I drew in my head I felt that if I was to get any sleep something must be done. There could be no question about it; some fool had turned on the steam heat, for the room was a furnace. My temper was rising. There was no bell to be found, so I lit my candle and set out to find a servant.

I tried a cast downstairs and discovered the room where we had dined. Then I explored a passage at right angles, which brought me up against a great oak door. The light showed me that it was a new door, and that there was no apparent way of opening it. I guessed that it led into the temple, and, though it fitted close and there seemed to be no keyhole, I could hear through it a sound like a rushing wind… Next I opened a door on my right and found myself in a big store cupboard. It had a funny, exotic, spicy smell, and, arranged very neatly on the floor and shelves, was a number of small sacks and coffers. Each bore a label, a square of stout paper with very black lettering. I read “Pro servitio Vauni”.

I had seen them before, for my memory betrayed me if they were not the very labels that Dubellay’s servants had been attaching to the packages from the carrier’s cart that evening in the past autumn. The discovery made my suspicions an unpleasant certainty. Dubellay evidently meant the labels to read “For the service of Vaunus”. He was no scholar, for it was an impossible use of the word “servitium”, but he was very patently a madman.

However, it was my immediate business to find some way to sleep, so I continued my quest for a servant. I followed another corridor, and discovered a second staircase. At the top of it I saw an open door and looked in. It must have been Dubellay’s, for his flannels were tumbled untidily on a chair, but Dubellay himself was not there and the bed had not been slept in.

I suppose my irritation was greater than my alarm—though I must say I was getting a little scared—for I still pursued the evasive servant. There was another stair which apparently led to attics, and in going up it I slipped and made a great clatter. When I looked up the butler in his nightgown was staring down at me, and if ever a mortal face held fear it was his. When he saw who it was he seemed to recover a little.

“Look here,” I said, “for God’s sake turn off that infernal hot air. I can’t get a wink of sleep. What idiot set it going?”

He looked at me owlishly, but he managed to find his tongue.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” he said, “but there is no heating apparatus in this house.”

There was nothing more to be said. I returned to my bedroom and it seemed to me that it had grown cooler. As I leaned out of the window, too, the mysterious wind seemed to have died away, and the glow no longer showed from beyond the corner of the house. I got into bed and slept heavily till I was roused by the appearance of my shaving water about half-past nine. There was no bathroom, so I bathed in a tin pannikin.

It was a hazy morning which promised a day of blistering heat. When I went down to breakfast I found Dubellay in the dining-room. In the daylight he looked a very sick man, but he seemed to have taken a pull on himself, for his manner was considerably less nervy than the night before. Indeed, he appeared almost normal, and I might have reconsidered my view but for the look in his eyes.

I told him that I proposed to sit tight all day over the manuscript, and get the thing finished. He nodded. “That’s all right. I’ve a lot to do myself, and I won’t disturb you.”

“But first,” I said, “you promised to show me your discoveries.”

He looked at the window where the sun was shining on the laurels and on a segment of the paved court.

“The light is good,” he said—an odd remark. “Let us go there now. There are times and seasons for the temple.”

He led me down the passage I had explored the previous night. The door opened not by a key but by some lever in the wall. I found myself looking suddenly at a bath of sunshine with the lake below as blue as a turquoise.

It is not easy to describe my impressions of that place. It was unbelievably light and airy, as brilliant as an Indian colonnade in midsummer. The proportions must have been good, for the columns soared and swam, and the roof (which looked like cedar) floated as delicately as a flower on its stalk. The stone was some local limestone, which on the floor took a polish like marble. All around was a vista of sparkling water and summer woods and far blue mountains. It should have been as wholesome as the top of a hill.

And yet I had scarcely entered before I knew that it was a prison. I am not an imaginative man, and I believe my nerves are fairly good, but I could scarcely put one foot before the other, so strong was my distaste. I felt shut off from the world, as if I were in a dungeon or on an ice-floe. And I felt, too, that though far enough from humanity, we were not alone.

On the inner wall there were three carvings. Two were imperfect friezes sculptured in low-relief, dealing apparently with the same subject. It was a ritual procession, priests bearing branches, the ordinary dendrophori business. The faces were only half-human, and that was from no lack of skill, for the artist had been a master. The striking thing was that the branches and the hair of the hierophants were being tossed by a violent wind, and the expression of each was of a being in the last stage of endurance, shaken to the core by terror and pain.

Between the friezes was a great roundel of a Gorgon’s head. It was not a female head, such as you commonly find, but a male head, with the viperous hair sprouting from chin and lip. It had once been coloured, and fragments of a green pigment remained in the locks. It was an awful thing, the ultimate horror of fear, the last dementia of cruelty made manifest in stone. I hurriedly averted my eyes and looked at the altar.

That stood at the west end on a pediment with three steps. It was a beautiful piece of work, scarcely harmed by the centuries, with two words inscribed on its face—APOLL. VAUN. It was made of some foreign marble, and the hollow top was dark with ancient sacrifices. Not so ancient either, for I could have sworn that I saw there the mark of recent flame.

I do not suppose I was more than five minutes in the place. I wanted to get out, and Dubellay wanted to get me out. We did not speak a word till we were back in the library.

“For God’s sake give it up!” I said. “You’re playing with fire, Mr. Dubellay. You’re driving yourself into Bedlam. Send these damned things to a museum and leave this place. Now, now, I tell you. You have no time to lose. Come down with me to the inn straight off and shut up this house.”

He looked at me with his lip quivering like a child about to cry.

“I will. I promise you I will… But not yet… After tonight… Tomorrow I’ll do whatever you tell me… You won’t leave me?”

“I won’t leave you, but what earthly good am I to you if you won’t take my advice?”

“Sidonius…” he began.

“Oh, damn Sidonius! I wish I had never mentioned him. The whole thing is arrant nonsense, but it’s killing you. You’ve got it on the brain. Don’t you know you’re a sick man?”

“I’m not feeling very grand. It’s so warm today. I think I’ll lie down.”

It was no good arguing with him, for he had the appalling obstinacy of very weak things. I went off to my work in a shocking bad temper.

The day was what it had promised to be, blisteringly hot. Before midday the sun was hidden by a coppery haze, and there was not the faintest stirring of wind. Dubellay did not appear at luncheon—it was not a meal he ever ate, the butler told me. I slogged away all the afternoon, and had pretty well finished my job by six o’clock. That would enable me to leave next morning, and I hoped to be able to persuade my host to come with me.

The conclusion of my task put me into a better humour, and I went for a walk before dinner. It was a very close evening, for the heat haze had not lifted; the woods were as silent as a grave, not a bird spoke, and when I came out of the cover to the burnt pastures the sheep seemed too languid to graze. During my walk I prospected the environs of the house, and saw that it would be very hard to get access to the temple except by a long circuit. On one side was a mass of outbuildings, and then a high wall, and on the other the very closest and highest quickset hedge I have ever seen, which ended in a wood with savage spikes on its containing wall. I returned to my room, had a cold bath in the exiguous tub, and changed.

Dubellay was not at dinner. The butler said that his master was feeling unwell and had gone to bed. The news pleased me, for bed was the best place for him. After that I settled myself down to a lonely evening in the library. I browsed among the shelves and found a number of rare editions which served to pass the time. I noticed that the copy of Sidonius was absent from its place.

I think it was about ten o’clock when I went to bed, for I was unaccountably tired. I remember wondering whether I oughtn’t to go and visit Dubellay, but decided that it was better to leave him alone. I still reproach myself for that decision. I know now I ought to have taken him by force and haled him to the inn.

Suddenly I came out of heavy sleep with a start. A human cry seemed to be ringing in the corridors of my brain. I held my breath and listened. It came again, a horrid scream of panic and torture.

I was out of bed in a second, and only stopped to get my feet into slippers. The cry must have come from the temple. I tore downstairs expecting to hear the noise of an alarmed household. But there was no sound, and the awful cry was not repeated.

The door in the corridor was shut, as I expected. Behind it pandemonium seemed to be loose, for there was a howling like a tempest—and something more, a crackling like fire. I made for the front door, slipped off the chain, and found myself in the still, moonless night. Still, except for the rending gale that seemed to be raging in the house I had left.

From what I had seen on my evening’s walk I knew that my one chance to get to the temple was by way of the quickset hedge. I thought I might manage to force a way between the end of it and the wall. I did it, at the cost of much of my raiment and my skin. Beyond was another rough lawn set with tangled shrubberies, and then a precipitous slope to the level of the lake. I scrambled along the sedgy margin, not daring to lift my eyes till I was on the temple steps.

The place was brighter than day with a roaring blast of fire. The very air seemed to be incandescent and to have become a flaming ether. And yet there were no flames—only a burning brightness. I could not enter, for the waft from it struck my face like a scorching hand and I felt my hair singe…

I am short-sighted, as you know, and I may have been mistaken, but this is what I think I saw. From the altar a great tongue of flame seemed to shoot upwards and lick the roof, and from its pediment ran flaming streams. In front of it lay a body—Dubellay’s—a naked body, already charred and black. There was nothing else, except that the Gorgon’s head in the wall seemed to glow like a sun in hell.

I suppose I must have tried to enter. All I know is that I found myself staggering back, rather badly burned. I covered my eyes, and as I looked through my fingers I seemed to see the flames flowing under the wall, where there may have been lockers, or possibly another entrance. Then the great oak door suddenly shrivelled like gauze, and with a roar the fiery river poured into the house.

I ducked myself in the lake to ease the pain, and then ran back as hard as I could by the way I had come. Dubellay, poor devil, was beyond my aid. After that I am not very clear what happened. I know that the house burned like a haystack. I found one of the menservants on the lawn, and I think I helped to get the other down from his room by one of the rain-pipes. By the time the neighbours arrived the house was ashes, and I was pretty well mother-naked. They took me to the inn and put me to bed, and I remained there till after the inquest. The coroner’s jury were puzzled, but they found it simply death by misadventure; a lot of country houses were burned that summer. There was nothing found of Dubellay; nothing remained of the house except a few blackened pillars; the altar and the sculptures were so cracked and scarred that no museum wanted them. The place has not been rebuilt, and for all I know they are there today. I am not going back to look for them.

Nightingale finished his story and looked round his audience.

“Don’t ask me for an explanation,” he said, “for I haven’t any. You may believe if you like that the god Vaunus inhabited the temple which Dubellay built for him, and, when his votary grew scared and tried Sidonius’s receipt for shifting the dedication, became angry and slew him with his flaming wind. That wind seems to have been a perquisite of Vaunus. We know more about him now, for last year they dug up a temple of his in Wales.”

“Lightning,” some one suggested.

“It was a quiet night, with no thunderstorm,” said Nightingale.

“Isn’t the countryside volcanic?” Peckwether asked. “What about pockets of natural gas or something of the kind?”

“Possibly. You may please yourself in your explanation. I’m afraid I can’t help you. All I know is that I don’t propose to visit that valley again!”

“What became of your Theocritus?”

“Burned, like everything else. However, that didn’t worry me much. Six weeks later came the war, and I had other things to think about.”

1931

The Owl

F. A. M. Webster

Today Frederick Annesley Michael Webster (1886–1949) is best remembered as one of the most important names in the history of athletics. He was an athlete who won the Javelin competition at the English National Championships in 1911 and again in 1923. During the First World War he served with the King’s African Rifles from 1918 to 1919, before being declared unfit for military service in July 1919. As an athletics coach, he led Bedford School to victory in the Public Schools Challenge Cup eight times in a row, and was appointed coach to the AAA (Amateur Athletic Association of England) from 1945 to 1948. He was a prolific writer of books on athletics, publishing around 25 books on the subject between 1913 and 1948. However, he also wrote numerous fiction tales, particularly spy thrillers under the name of “Michael Annesley”, but also detective stories featuring the elderly scientific detective “Old Ebbie”, as well as adventure stories set in Africa. The story here—a tale of secret romance and Aztec bird cults—was first published in the 1931 anthology At Dead of Night and then in 1933 in the August edition of Weird Tales.

Alison Mercer was one of the loveliest creatures ever created by the good God. In her case, moreover, beauty was something more than merely skin deep. One came to gasp at the sheer loveliness of her pale face, and the perfect proportions of her slim body, but stayed to wonder, as the days went by, and one came to realize the greater beauties of her stainless soul.

What a girl she was! Pure gold clean through, body and soul alike, all white-hot youth and innocence, unafraid and utterly unsoilable. That was Alison Mercer.

And, because she was what she was, her friends turned up their eyes in horror when they heard of her engagement to Simeon Stroud.

Why did she accept his proposal of marriage? You’ll have to ask her father about that. You see, no one knows what passed between old Tom Mercer and Alison, that time she came back from a ski-ing holiday in Scandinavia. All Alison saw was that the old man had aged about a hundred years in less than thirty days, and her deep, sea-green eyes went wide with worry.

“Daddy, darling,” she expostulated, “you’ve been gambling again!”

“Nothing much, m’dear—bit of a flutter,” mumbled old Tom uncomfortably. “Leastways, that’s what it looked like at first. Hell! How was I to know the durned stock was going to drop twenty points in twenty-four hours?” he exploded. “A fellow gave me a sure tip, I tell you. I can’t explain how the certainty came unstuck. All I know is that the chap who landed me in the cart is willing to do the right thing by me. He’s awfully anxious to meet you, Alison!”

“Is he, Daddy? Well, I’ll try to be extra nice to him, if he’s going to help you out of your troubles.”

Tom Mercer shot a queer, sidelong look at his daughter, and his eyes were very anxious.

“You’ll find Stroud a sound sort of fellow,” he suggested.

“What is he, Daddy, a financier, or a company promoter?”

“Neither, my dear. He’s by way of being a famous archæologist and is a great authority on ancient South American civilizations. He’s only just back from a big exploration in those parts. I thought he’d know what he was talking about, or I shouldn’t have put money into Chilean Nitrates.”

“Ugh,” shuddered the girl, “those old Aztecs worshipped birds and wore cloaks of feathers. I can’t bear birds, so I hope we’ll be able to keep him off that subject.”

Strangely enough, Alison’s first impression of Simeon Stroud, when he came to Horley Grange and was presented by her father, awakened in her mind all the horrors of her secret pet obsession. Some people can’t stay in the same room with a cat, others can’t stand the sight of snakes or spiders. Alison Mercer couldn’t abide the touch of a bird and, once, when a girl friend had caught a sparrow and placed it, fluttering, in Alison’s hand, she had fainted clean away. She loved all God’s creatures—don’t let there be any mistake about that—but there was something about the smoothness of a bird’s breast and the palpitation of a bird’s wings that made her feel physically sick.

And Simeon Stroud was like a bird. Not a decent daylight warbler, but some beastly nocturnal fowl, that flew on silent wings and peered in through sleeping people’s windows, with horrible, luminous eyes. Such night-fowls live on flesh. But there was nothing predatory about Simeon Stroud’s appearance. Upon the other hand, one gathered the impression that this little man was abnormally wise; but one felt, also, that his knowledge was abysmally evil. Further than that, he had a quick way of turning his head sharply from side to side, and of shooting furtive, inquiring glances all over the place, while he spoke in a queer, twittering sort of voice. His nose, set between wide, staring eyes, descended almost straight from below his forehead and ended in a sharp, under-turned point. A soft, fluffy fringe of hair, which encircled his face from one ear to the other, did not improve his appearance.

Despite an almost nauseating feeling of revulsion, Alison—probably for the sake of her father—accepted the advances of this strange suitor. The first time he embraced her the girl nearly fainted, for that fluffy fringe of face-hair, which he favoured, felt horribly soft—just like the breast feathers of a bird, in fact. Her whole body went cold and rigid with sheer, stark terror at his touch, and yet she contrived to accept that first caress without betraying her true feelings.

Most people in Horley referred to the newly-engaged couple as “Beauty and the Beast”, but there was one acknowledgeable student of mythology who likened them, artfully enough, to Pallas Athene and her owl.

Alison feared a scene when a light-hearted friend disclosed the nature of their latest nick-name, for she knew the violence of her fiancé’s temper. But, far from being displeased, Stroud positively preened himself, smiling oddly all the time, and finally gave himself a quick shake, for all the world like a bird ruffling up its feathers to get the dust out of them.

“After all,” he said quietly, “Pallas Athene was one of the most beautiful and virtuous of the goddesses of ancient Greece, while it is generally conceded that the owl is the wisest of birds.”

“Well, let’s hope you won’t develop its nocturnal habits after you are married, Mr. Stroud,” teased the irresponsible visitor.

When they were alone that evening, Alison looked long and thoughtfully at her future husband. He had evidently found that the cap, supplied by the nick-name, was a good fit, and was well content to wear it. He really was rather like an owl, she told herself, and, for the first time, out there in the half-dark of the veranda, she noted the queer, luminous quality of his tawny-gold eyes. Then, as she continued to study him, she saw that the tops of his ears were Puckishly pointed.

An involuntary shiver ran through her, but she allowed no sign of distress to escape her when he rose presently and came to kiss her good night. When she was alone, however, her head dropped to her folded arms and her slim shoulders heaved spasmodically. They were to be married soon and, after that, there would be no blessed hours of darkness and peace and solitude to follow after that detested evening embrace. She would be the property of Simeon Stroud, body and soul, and again she shuddered at the thought, while there broke from her lips a pitiful little cry: “I am doing it all for you, Daddy; I am doing it all for you!”

A week before Alison’s wedding was due to take place, Hugh Davenant arrived home in England. He went straight from the boat to stay with his married sister at Exton, a small village a couple of miles beyond Horley. Next morning he drove into the town to make some much-needed additions to his wardrobe, for he had worn nothing but the thinnest of garments in the South American tropics, and such European suits as he had brought home with him had been purchased ready-made, and were appallingly badly cut. His sister was unable to accompany him, but he had something to tell her upon his return at lunch-time.

“They say that the world’s a small place,” he announced, as he unfolded his dinner napkin, “and I’m beginning to believe it.”

“Did you run across a pal in Horley, Hugh?” inquired his brother-in-law.

“God forbid that I should ever call Simeon Stroud a pal of mine,” Davenant answered piously.

“So you know our local ‘lion’, do you, dear?” queried his sister. “He settled among us about twelve months ago. You’ll meet his future wife this afternoon. She’s coming over for tennis.”

Hugh put down his knife and fork hurriedly, and there was a look of real concern on his clear-cut, handsome features.

“Do you mean to say that that man is going to be married?” he queried.

“Yes, dear, and to a most charming girl. But why do you ask? He’s supposed to be tremendously rich.”

“Listen, Claudia,” said Hugh, “Simeon Stroud may be as rich as Croesus, for all I know. That doesn’t alter the fact that he’s a most unutterable swine. The South American Indians could tell you some queer tales of his cruelties. But, apart from that, I happen to know that he got mixed up with the followers of some horrible, filthy sect out in South America, people who claim to be descendants of the old Aztec priests. Between them they tried to revive some ancient form of bird worship; but, when it came to a question of permitting the sacrifice of young girls to a heathen deity, even a corrupt South American government stuck in its toes, and wouldn’t stand for that sort of thing.”

“My Lord! Someone ought to warn Alison’s father,” broke in Lambert.

“I think you’d find it a pretty thankless task,” responded his wife. “Most people imagine that Tom Mercer has sold Beauty to the Beast.”

“That’s bad,” commented Davenant. “Is she a nice sort of girl?”

A slow smile spread over Claudia Lambert’s features. “You just wait until you see her, my lad,” she answered.

When Alison arrived at the Lamberts’ place that afternoon, the party was in full swing and Hugh giving an amazing display of agility on the tennis-court.

The girl stood quite still, and her breath ceased for an instant, as she caught sight of the players; for that lean, bronzed man who bounded agilely about the court with wonderful athletic ease, provided the very beau-ideal of all her dreams; and she knew, instinctively, that his hand was of the right size to hold her heart.

“I wonder whether you are admiring my brother’s superabundant energy or his personal appearance most?” said Claudia softly, and Alison came out of her reverie with a self-conscious start.

“He’s rather a dear,” went on Claudia, “and his fitness is perfectly amazing, for he was very badly gassed, to say nothing of being buried alive, when a land mine was blown up during the War. By the way, Alison, he’s just come home from the parts of South America where Mr. Stroud made all his discoveries. So you’ll have something in common to start with when I introduce him to you presently.”

It was not, however, of South America that Hugh talked to Alison when Claudia presented him at the conclusion of the set. In point of fact he seemed, rather, to go out of his way to avoid touching upon that particular topic. When Alison asked him, point-blank, if he knew her fiancé, he replied shortly that he had met him.

After that first meeting the affair developed with amazing rapidity. If one believed in the existence of such mysterious affinities as “soul-mates”, one would have said that Alison Mercer had found hers, with her first sight of Hugh Davenant, playing tennis, like a lambent flame, on the Lamberts’ court. Expressed in more mundane speech the fact remains that she fell head over heels in love with him right away. And, because this was so, and because she was intensely loyal to her father and to the promise she had given to Simeon Stroud, she seemed, to Hugh, inexplicably cold at their next meeting.

It was the day after the Lamberts’ party, and Hugh had induced his sister to take him to call at Horley Grange, because he intended dropping a hint of warning in old Tom Mercer’s ear. It wasn’t an easy task to perform, for Alison’s father was most mysteriously “in funds”, wherefore, from that old reprobate’s point of view, “everything was for the best, in this best of all possible worlds”.

None the less, Hugh knew a great deal more about the activities in South America of Simeon Stroud than he had let fall at his sister’s luncheon-table. He had heard tales of a temple, hidden away in the secret heart of the forest, where men made human sacrifice to a bird which, even allowing for the extravagance of native legends, must be something quite abnormal in the avian world. Once, on a hunting expedition in that same forest, he had found the body of a young girl, frightfully and filthily mutilated, and with the eyes pecked out. Upon another occasion he had met a newly-blinded man who ran screaming through the trees, with blood streaming from features which had been torn to ribbons by rending talons.

These things he had seen with his own eyes. And men said that it was Simeon Stroud, who had discovered the secrets of long-dead Aztec priests, selling his soul in exchange for those secrets, who had revived the awful rites attendant upon the worship of the Great Bird.

Tom Mercer laughed, but took no offence, when his young visitor hinted that he should, as a father, make further inquiries before permitting his daughter’s marriage to take place.

“You’re a sly dog, Davenant,” he chuckled, “and Alison is a wonderfully desirable girl, but I’m afraid you’re a bit too late in the field. We are under great obligations to Simeon Stroud.”

They had been pacing the terrace of Horley Grange as they talked, but now Hugh Davenant stopped suddenly in midstride.

Was he in love with this glorious girl who had come so suddenly into his life? Pity? Ah, yes! He had pitied her from the bottom of his heart, ever since he had heard that she was destined to marry Simeon Stroud. But, even though pity is so close to love, as hate is akin to fear, the notion of loving her, himself, had never entered his head, until Tom Mercer had made his covert suggestion.

Then, as they stood there, the girl came round the corner of the house and the man knew, recognizing the finger of Fate as clearly as the girl had done yesterday, when she had seen him for the first time upon the Lamberts’ tennis-court, that he loved Alison Mercer with all his soul.

The wonder and the glory of the great revelation held him, however, for but the briefest instant. There was something woefully amiss with the present situation. Why were Alison’s cheeks wet with tears? What could have happened to bring to her eyes, which normally reflected nothing but the serenity of her soul, that look of sheer, naked terror that now informed them? Why was she trembling, and why came and went her breath in little frightened gasps?

Behind her stood Simeon Stroud, who might have answered all those questions.

At the sight of her parent, the last shreds of a tremendous determination, which had sustained her, deserted Alison Mercer. With a little stifled cry, half-tears, half-laughter, she ran to her father, drawing his protecting arms closely about her body and hiding her face upon his breast.

“Why, my precious, why now, what’s amiss?” he soothed her, and his voice was wonderfully tender.

“Oh, Daddy, it was awful, awful!” sobbed the girl. “We were watching the sunset, Simeon and I, and, although the light has not yet gone, a great white owl came flying silently out of the woods and settled on my shoulder. It was an owl, and yet it was different to any owl I have ever seen, and, oh, Daddy, it was utterly evil!”

“There, there, little one, come along to old Nannie, she’ll stay with you, while you lie down for a bit. Simeon, will you look after Davenant? I’ll be coming back with a shotgun shortly, I’m not too fond of owls myself.”

“I am sorry,” Stroud answered, “but I have an important letter to write before the mail leaves. Perhaps Mr. Davenant will excuse me?”

When Mercer returned to the terrace a few minutes later he carried a loaded gun tucked under his arm and his face was very grave.

“Davenant, my boy,” he volunteered, “I’m a bluff, John Bull sort of chap, without much imagination, probably, but I’m damned if I like this business!”

“Miss Mercer has told you what really happened then?” Hugh questioned sharply.

“Yes, it appears that Stroud got a bit amorous, round there at the back of the house. Alison swears that when she refused to allow him to kiss her, in view of the windows of the servants’ quarters, he lost his temper and uttered a most peculiar cry. Whereupon, or so she says, that blessed, great owl that scared her so badly came winging up from the woods. It may be only her imagination, of course, but she declares that the bird flew straight for her eyes, and only settled on her shoulder at a word from Stroud. I suppose you don’t think there is anything in all this business?”

Hugh did not reply. For long moments he remained leaning against the balustrade, while he puffed thoughtfully at his pipe. Then he, in his turn, asked a question.

“One hates to work on hearsay, Mr. Mercer,” he stated apologetically, “but local gossip has it that Stroud has got you under his thumb. You can tell me to mind my own business if you like, of course; but, frankly, just how deeply are you in his debt?”

“I owe him £20,000.”

“Was the advance made after he became engaged to your daughter?”

“Yes,” said Mercer, speaking very low, and the red colour which flushed his face was no reflection of the setting sun.

Hugh dropped a kindly hand upon the old fellow’s shoulder. “Transfer your debt to me,” he said. “I don’t pretend to be a millionaire, but I’d pay a good deal more than the money you owe Simeon Stroud to secure your daughter’s happiness.”

Tom Mercer looked this sudden saviour in the eyes with startled delight. “Why, yes,” he breathed. “That would be one way of setting Alison free, wouldn’t it?”

The girl herself reacted strangely to the news of her release from the hateful engagement, to which she had committed herself for her father’s sake. Old Tom, who insisted upon acquainting her with the glad tidings, just as if her salvation was entirely of his own devising, wished to save her the painful task of giving her fiancé his congé in person. But to this plan she would not consent.

“No, Daddy,” she said firmly, “we’re treating Simeon pretty badly, anyway. The least I can do, in common decency, is to see him and tell him how sorry I am if the breaking off of our engagement should cause him any pain.”

“Spoken like my own brave, little girl,” said her father heartily. “But, at least, you must let me be present at the interview.”

Alison smiled as she shook her head, but she was neither smiling, nor feeling particularly courageous as she took her way to the dark house where Stroud lived, deep in the woods.

She found him seated in a deep chair in his gloomy, book-lined library. When he rose to greet her, and would have taken her in his arms, she pushed him gently away.

“Simeon,” she said, pausing just inside the door, “I am afraid I have come to hurt you. This engagement of ours has been all a dreadful mistake. I have never loved you; and Simeon, there is something about you—something bird-like—that simply terrifies me. I have tried to go through with it, for my father’s sake; but, oh, Simeon, I just couldn’t face it all, when it came to the final pinch.”

Stroud returned to his seat without a word, and then the girl realized, with a half-stifled gasp of horror, that a great owl had fluttered silently out of the shadows and was perched upon the high back of its master’s chair. The fascination of the moment was frightful. Man’s and bird’s alike, the two pairs of eyes fronting her glowed luminous and golden in the half-dark. Man and bird alike seemed to brood, with heads sunk forward; and the girl saw, with a shudder, that each had sharply-pointed ears; but, whereas those of the great bird were feathered, those of the gross man were tip-pointed with tufts of hair.

“So,” sneered Simeon, “you do not find yourself able to love me, my fair Alison?”

“Oh, please, I’m so sorry,” she broke in.

The man silenced her with never a gesture, never a movement, but only by the luminous intensity of the stare he turned upon her. And, from close beside his head, the owl stared at her too.

“I was not thinking of you or me,” he answered in his soft, bird-like voice. “I was only pitying your father, who must suffer for this sudden folly of yours.”

Something in the covert sneer aroused the girl’s anger.

“My father will pay you back the money with which you sought to buy me,” she flared back at him.

The man rose slowly to his feet and moved towards her down the length of the room. And, as he came, the owl fluttered up from the back of the chair and floated forward, not a foot above his head. Bird and man, together, they presented an awful picture of incarnate evil. Alison shrank back with a low moan of fear, for Simeon Stroud’s hand was rising, each moment his eyes seemed to grow larger, and his lips were framing the strange call which, she felt sure, would unloose that grim, familiar fluttering overhead to attack her eyes.

Then the unbearable tension was broken. A sharp rap echoed from the panels and the door was flung open.

“Mr. Davenant has called for Miss Mercer, sir!” announced a manservant, and Alison ran past him into the well-lit hall where Hugh was waiting. One last, frightened look she threw back into the gloomy library. Simeon Stroud still stood there, hand half-raised and sombre eyes smouldering in deep sockets, but of the owl that had fluttered above his head she could see no sign.

Next day Simeon Stroud received his £20,000 from old Tom Mercer’s solicitor, and, from that time onwards, the folks of Horley saw him no more. From that time, too, Alison Mercer became a changed woman. All the care-free happiness of girlhood returned to her, she had found love and she had no fear of taking between her two hands the best of all gifts the gods may bestow upon mortals. But summer had come and gone again before Hugh returned to Horley, to ask for her hand in marriage and to receive such a joyful assent as set his whole soul singing.

They were to be married just before Christmas, and Hugh had taken an old-fashioned, furnished house at Uleswood in the Lake District for their honeymoon. The place was in wild country, not far from Ullswater. There was a distinct similarity between the two names and it never occurred to Hugh that “ule” is the old English form for “owl”; and that “Uleswood” is, therefore, “Owlswood”, otherwise he might have chosen another locality for their honeymoon. On the other hand, he might not have done so; for Stroud seemed to have vanished entirely from their lives, and it is doubtful if they ever gave a thought to him, until Alison received, among the last of many wedding-presents, four silver pepper-castors fashioned to represent owls. No card accompanied this gift, but she entertained no doubt as to whence it had come; and yet, for some reason, which she did not even attempt to explain to herself, she did not mention the matter to Hugh. Those four silver symbols filled her with a strange, vague dread, and perhaps she feared that mention to Hugh of her former fiancé might cast some shadow upon the magic wonder of their honeymoon.

The house at Uleswood proved to be a perfect little gem of steep-gabled roofs, leaded and mullioned windows and oak-panelled rooms. The night they arrived was one of gorgeous moonlight, the bedroom was hot and close with the resinous reek of the pine-logs blazing in the hearth, and Alison set the window wide open before she crept into bed.

Midnight was long past when a finger of moonlight stole softly across the floor, crept up the wall and travelled sveltely on until it rested upon two heads—one dark, the other golden—which lay so close to one another. Hugh stirred uneasily and murmured in his sleep.

“Twhitt! Twhoo!!”

Hugh’s sleepy eyes opened and he turned in search of that beauty of soul and body that the night had given entirely into his keeping.

“Twhitt! Twhoo!!”

Faint and from far away the horned owl’s cry came echoing.

Hugh’s hand stretched out and touched the soft, warm curve of his bride’s breast, that rose and fell so gently. The lovely warmth of living flesh comforted him, banished the vague fear which the owl’s cry had aroused in his half-wakened fancy. A small hand sought for and encircled his fingers. His head sank back upon the pillow. Sleep was returning.

“Twhitt! Twhoo!!”

Louder—and nearer now! Great evil eyes, luminous and eerie, glared in through the leaded panes. Wide wings were spread and a vast form floated silently towards the open casement. Hugh Davenant turned restlessly and shuddered in his sleep. The moon was gone, swallowed up by a bank of black-bellied clouds. The white mystery circled slowly above the wedded lovers slumbering in that soft, warm bed. Silence, abysmal darkness. Nothing save twin lamps of fear that floated through the gloom.

Hugh Davenant dreamed that he was back in a front-line trench in Flanders. And it was as it had been in the beginning. Once more the blind night rocked to the awful roar of big guns, once more the trench-lights soared, green and ghastly, towards the storm-dark skies; and yet, once more, the dreaded North-East gas wind came blowing out of the blackness across No Man’s Land, with death enfolded beneath the silence of its wings—its wings silent as those of an owl.

“Twhitt! Twhoo!!”

The claws of the gas clouds were searching for Davenant’s windpipe, its wings descended upon his face, tearing and rending his flesh. A catch at the back of his throat—water for breath. Fight it off! Kill those bloody swine in the helmets who were following up the foul veils of death they had let loose.

Something was striking at his eyes now. God! If they should blind him. Then, at last, his hands closed upon living flesh. Something human to battle with—something that couldn’t kill, as the poison-gas killed—a soft, human throat—the shrill whistle of life’s breath crushed out by merciless hands. Dear God, if he could only see! See and exult at the sight of starting eyeballs, glimpse the black tongue protruding through snarling lips. Curse this gas-helmet that was blinding him.

He released his hands to snatch it off and felt his fingers sink into soft feathers, while something tore at his face with rending agony.

“Oh, Christ! Jesu Christ, save me!”

Weak and agonized, the pitiful prayer echoed in his ears, and he knew, as the mists of dream-madness cleared from his brain, that it was around her throat—his wife’s throat—that his hands had been locked in the awful death-grip.

His hand stretched out towards the lamp beside the bed, but before his fingers could find the switch, something soft and feathery struck him in the face again, and again a hooked beak pecked savagely at his eyes.

“Oh! Jesu Christ, save us both from the Power of the Beast!”

Again that feeble, piteous cry for aid; and, as if in answer from overhead, a terrifying scream of baffled, evil rage:

“Twhitt! Twhoo!!”

Hugh’s fumbling fingers found the switch, the room was flooded with light and he saw a great owl, as big as an eagle, it seemed, go circling round the room for the last time.

As it vanished through the window, Hugh, heedless of the blood streaming from his features, snatched up the revolver, which long habit overseas had accustomed him to placing always upon a table beside his bed, and sprang to the open casement. As he reached the window the moon sailed into sight and he saw the great owl flying fast and low above the ground, as it circled towards the house for a fresh attack.

The vastness of it seemed to fill all the space of night as it rushed upon him. But the man’s nerves were steady as chilled steel, as he fired again and again, aiming with deadly deliberation to send the heavy bullets smashing into the evil brain behind those luminously glowing eyes.

And then it was over. With a last wild shriek, the awful cry of some lost soul hurled down to face everlasting damnation, the great owl heeled over and fluttered slowly to the earth.

Alison crept shakily across the room, fingering her bruised throat with tender touch. She closed and barred the casement and turned to tend the man whose handsome features had been cut to ribbons by the cruel talons of the great bird.

And in the morning, a gardener, coming early to his work, found beneath the window of the honeymooning couple the dead body of a man with strangely pointed ears and a fringe of soft hair encircling his features. The rest of his face was unidentifiable, for heavy bullets had smashed their way through between the eyes and the head was almost blown to pieces.

But to whom, save Simeon Stroud, could those pointed, hair-tipped ears and that strange fringe of feathery fluff about the chin have belonged?

1931

Pussy

Flavia Richardson

Flavia Richardson is better known as Christine Campbell Thomson (1897–1985), most famous as the editor of the Not at Night series of horror anthologies published in the 1920s and 1930s. Many of the stories in the anthologies were culled from Weird Tales; authors such as H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard received their first hardcover publication, as well as first British publication, in its pages. Editor and anthologist Mike Ashley has referred to the Not at Night anthologies as “a landmark series in the history of horror short fiction”.

She was also a writer of short fiction, and published under the name Flavia Richardson. These stories were all published in Weird Tales and her own anthologies, with the exception of the 1961 story “Message for Margie”, which was published in 1964 under her real name in The Fifth Pan Book of Horror Stories. She was also an occultist, a friend of Dion Fortune, and a member of the Society of the Inner Light. Under the name Christine Hartley she wrote two non-fiction occult books, The Western Mystery Tradition (1968) and A Case for Reincarnation (1972).

This story is a tale of a possessed British Museum souvenir, of ancient Egyptian feline goddesses, and cat fighting; like Webster’s “The Owl”, it was published in 1931 in At Dead of Night, one of Thomson’s Not at Night anthologies.

Godfrey Ellerton picked up the little green figure of a cat that he had bought that afternoon in a shop close to the British Museum. It was a pretty little thing, hard and cold to the touch, made in some composition. The dealer who had sold it to him had been unable to name the material, and, in consequence, had been disposed to let it go for a comparatively small sum. Most buyers wanted bronze or ivory or authentic work from some locality.

Godfrey had bought it because he liked it, and because it would make a pleasant addition to the ornaments on his mantelpiece.

The door, which he had left slightly ajar, was pushed open a little farther. Simpkins, the black cat belonging to the housekeeper, came in, in his usual stately manner. He was well aware that the “third floor front” generally had crumpets for tea—and Simpkins’s soul thrilled at the thought of butter.

“Hullo, old boy,” said Godfrey carelessly. “Come and see what I’ve got. A little cousin of yours!”

Simpkins pursued his stately way round the table, put his paws on Godfrey’s knee and jumped up. Then a strange thing took place. Simpkins sniffed at the little composition figure—once, twice, and then arched his back and spat violently. For a second longer he paused, then sprang to the floor in one long wild leap, and hid himself behind the corner cupboard.

“Well, that’s funny,” said Godfrey, half-aloud. “I didn’t know you were as jealous as all that, Simpkins.”

Getting to his feet he set the little cat well out of reach on the mantelpiece, and then bent down to coax the erring Simpkins.

It took him exactly eleven and a half minutes by his watch to persuade Simpkins to come out into the open, and even then the cat sidled round the outskirts of the room. When he reached the fireplace he gave one leap across the hearthrug and subsided, trembling, under a chair.

Godfrey picked him up at last, and comforted him with thoughts of tea and crumpets, but he could feel the quick thudding of Simpkins’s heart, and the instinctive bristling of his fur.

The crumpets were not much of a success that afternoon. It was patent to Godfrey that Simpkins was only staying in the room because he was too proud to run away, and because he was a creature of fixed habits. But he ate his portion of tea and lapped his milk with one ear cocked and his muscles tensed.

Presently Simpkins went away, and Godfrey settled down to read. He turned a few pages, then threw the book down, with a laugh.

“I wonder what upset old Simpkins so much,” he said to himself.

The thought was sufficient to send him across to the fireplace. He took the little cat down from the mantelpiece and studied it closely. It seemed entirely ordinary. Not thinking much of what he was doing, Godfrey went back to his seat, still clutching the cat. He put it on the table at his elbow.

The shadows lengthened. The lamplighter came round the streets and touched the lamps to sudden life. The beams from one of them on the other side of the road touched Godfrey’s window, and made a bar of molten gold on the floor. He switched on the reading-lamp, but did not trouble to rise and draw the curtains.

As he sat down his hand came into contact with the little cat. He drew it away sharply, and looked at his fingers. Puzzled, he stared again. He could have sworn that he had touched something soft and yet damp, furry yet with a trace of the sleekness of a seal.

He read a page or two, then, forced by some unconscious desire, put out his hand again and felt the little cat. It was quite cold and hard, just as he had expected.

Godfrey laughed and went on reading. About half an hour later he suddenly became aware that there was another presence in the room. He looked up, rather unnerved. The room was dark, save for the bar of lamplight on the floor and the little circle of light cast by the shaded reading-lamp. Just outside that little circle were two pin-points of light—green light… like the eyes of a cat.

He muttered an oath, and, overcoming an extraordinary feeling of repulsion, caught up the cat. He studied it carefully, and then set it down again.

“A trick of the light,” he muttered. “Must have caught some curious cross reflection. Funny effect.”

He got up and drew the curtains across the windows, so that the golden bar was shut out. Now the room was quite dark but for the reading-lamp. As he went back to his chair Godfrey could not keep his eyes off the little cat. It seemed to have grown. It seemed to be smiling. The eyes were distinctly alight—green eyes—beastly—indescribably beastly…

Godfrey felt rather sick. He held on to the chair while he rapidly thought over what he had eaten that day. Nothing that could have troubled his digestion so much. And there was the very odd behaviour of Simpkins an hour or so earlier… He looked again.

The green cat had grown larger… and it had moved. It was now almost entirely inside the circle of light, and while this movement took some of the brightness away from its eyes, it emphasized the horror that was growing. As Godfrey looked, he became aware that the smooth back was ruffling, the eyes were dropping, hair was growing.

“Dear Heaven!” he muttered. “Am I mad?”

He dared not leave the room. The table stood between him and the door, and he was curiously aware that he would not be allowed to pass the cat. The knowledge that he was for the time being at any rate under the dominion of a stronger power than himself was disturbing, but at least it removed any necessity for active decision.

The cat was definitely growing larger. Now it was almost life-sized. But it did not stop. It went on growing steadily, with a terrible remorseless growth that emphasized its inevitability.

Still Godfrey stood and stared. He realized that the hand which was gripping the back of the chair was stiff and bruised with the pressure he had exerted. But he did not dare to leave go. That homely, solid chair back was his one protection against madness, the one security he felt in a tottering world.

Then he became conscious of a new sound in the room—very faint and far away—the sound of a thin, sweet music—the music that comes from reed instruments. The high, thin notes came clearly through the air. The cat heard them too. It expanded again, and then it smiled.

The smile made Godfrey close his eyes. Then he opened them again because, horrible as it was to see the cat, it was more horrible to be shut out from what was going on.

The smile became so broad that the cat seemed to vanish.

“A Cheshire cat,” Godfrey muttered to himself. “A Cheshire cat.” The cat faded away and only the grin was left.

A grin. Surely one could combat a disembodied thing—a ludicrous thing like a grin with no face behind it? He shifted his grip on the chair-back and swung his weight slightly more forward.

But before he could move the music swelled and changed. There was a menacing note now behind the reeds, a note that held him with a strange, unknown fear. And yet he was aware that this was not unknown. There was something about it, æons old, that called to him, something that echoed faintly through the centuries and found its answer in his subconscious brain.

The cat had reappeared. It had grown larger. Soon it would have to leave the table. It was too big to accommodate itself in comfort.

Suddenly Godfrey knew that when the cat left the table his nerve would go. As long as it was perched there, it seemed to be isolated, on a different plane. But as soon as it descended, as soon as it left the ring of light, it would be something ineffably terrifying. As he looked, it moved, stretched one paw out delicately, and then another. And then it grinned again, and its eyes grew larger and more ancient.

The music swelled, died down and swelled again. A strange odour was creeping into the room. Restively, Godfrey became aware of it. Strange, yet reminiscent. New, yet entirely old. Stale, yet with the fresh sweetness of spices, of sunshine and the long hot days.

For a second his conscious mind refused to register. Then he knew the smell and grew still more afraid. It was the smell of incense and of the perfumes of the dead.

Words began to mingle with the music. Words in some long-dead tongue that he had never known. Yet their import began to convey itself to him through the brain and the long sleeping souls of years.

He tried to cry out for help, but he could not. He tried to tell himself that it was a dream, a nightmare, but he knew it was true.

He saw the great cat raise itself, arching its back, sweeping its tail, like some animal of the jungle that is aware that the prey is safely cornered. There was something revolting about its movements, something that subtly expressed its certainty, the complete absence of haste. What was written, was written.

The words grew clearer now and Godfrey felt that strange certainty that in a little while he would himself be able to join in the song. Registration was becoming clearer, he felt as if he were groping for the words of a half-forgotten hymn…

The cat came to the edge of the table and looked up at him. Compelled by some power stronger than himself, Godfrey met its eyes.

The sight of them sent the blood coldly through his veins. In those green eyes was mirrored the terror of the ages, the ancient sin that never dies… the crime for which there is no atonement.

And he knew that he must be part and lot in that sin, enduring through the years as long as heaven and earth should endure—that for him there would be no return.

The music was louder now, almost deafening. Drums had been added to the reed instruments. They were beating out a song of triumph. The big cat purred and licked its chops, languorously, lustfully.

The power that had been Godfrey’s will was slipping away. He knew now that the words of the hymn were ringing in his mind. In a moment he would open his lips and utter them… and from then there would be no hope.

The cat yawned and gathered itself together as if for a spring.

The room seemed to be full of voices. The hymn surged on to a triumphant roll of drums, and the words became clearer. Godfrey could hear them now with his earthly ears as well as with his mind.

But one word still eluded him, and he tried to shut his mind and his memory, for until he could say that name of the cat he was safe.

Of a sudden, if seemed to grow angry, as though aware that his puny will was being pitted against the forces of the past. It drew itself up still further… The sound of voices grew louder.

And then Godfrey knew the name of the cat, the name of fear, the name of dread, the name that was whispered in hushed tones in Thebes before the dawning of the Day. And the muscles of his throat tightened, and his eyes started forward in their sockets as he strove to control the overwhelming desire to say that word aloud.

Around him were the voices, jibing, commanding, luring…

The desire was overwhelming. The scent of the incense rose in his nostrils, he could scarcely stand for the cloying sweet faintness that overtook his senses… yet he stood firm.

Then the great cat sprang. As he felt its claws in his neck, felt the hot fetid breath upon his face, Godfrey knew a great sense of relief, in that the end had come but yet he had not spoken.

And as he lost consciousness he heard the snarls of the great beast, baulked of its final desire, and the cries of the people whom he could not see, rising in applause and honour of Pasht, who is Bubastis, who is the Sin of Egypt…

When they found him in the morning his face was very peaceful, though his throat had been marked with scratches that might have been made by a very large cat. Neither the doctor nor the landlady could understand them…

But Simpkins, after nosing round the door with the utmost care, ran in and spat at a figure of a small green cat that was half-hidden by the body of Godfrey Ellerton.

1932

The Veil of Tanit

Eugene de Rezske

Information on this author is hard to come by; with this story, originally published in 1932 in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, his name is spelt Eugene de Rezske (as recorded here). However, with the only other works known to be by the author, he is cited as Eugene de Reszke. A detective story, “The Rim of Scarlet”, was published under the De Reszke name in The Dragnet Magazine in 1928, while two of his other tales were published in 1930 in Amazing Detective Tales, in the August and October editions. The following story seems to be the only supernatural tale by the author. It is a story of cursed antiquities, evil pagan priests, and Carthaginian deities worshipped still in the depths of the Arabian desert.

Carl Marquart, traveller and adventurer, was thumbing a catalogue case in the reference department of the great library at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue when his attention was suddenly drawn to the face of a man at the next table, similarly occupied.

Marquart’s prolonged regard was strange, for, to the ordinary observer, there was nothing about the man to attract the slightest notice. Small and pudgy of stature, soft looking, unobtrusively dressed, he was altogether the mousy sort of person one would expect to see bending over a ledger at a high desk or in a minor professorial chair. It was something on his face that was in utter contradiction to this appearance that so held Marquart. Not his features, for they were in absolute agreement with the rest of him—no, it was the tan on that face that amazed him.

Marquart had just returned from a little adventure in Al Yemen in Arabia to his no small profit, incidentally. And Marquart had just such a tan himself, perhaps slightly lighter if anything. Now Marquart knew tans. There is a world of difference in tans. There is the tan you get in the Canadian woods of a summer. There is the tan you acquire in Florida of a winter if you can afford one. And there is the tan that burns into your skin under the Congo sun in a season’s big-game shoot. This stranger’s wasn’t any of these.

His tan was nothing but a desert tan. A little closer inspection and Marquart narrowed it down either to that of the Sahara or to the Arabian; there was not the slightest doubt of it, he decided. No other sun ever produced that combination of colour, that dark brown that in certain lights took on a purplish hue and radiated darkly emanations of stored heat.

Marquart was tremendously interested. What business would such a person have in mid-Sahara or deep Arabia?

He forgot the book he was looking for and became lost in this speculation. The stranger turned and seeing himself observed became nervous. He gave Marquart one startled glance and hurried off to the ticket desk. There he handed in his slips, got his seating ticket and disappeared into the reading room.

Marquart’s amused eyes looked after the scurrying figure until it was out of sight, and then he followed. As he entered the reading room Marquart took the first book that came to hand from the shelves inside, located his quarry and took a seat some distance away, but one which afforded him a plain view of the little fellow.

His curiosity consumed him. A regular bloodhound for the strange, the unusual, the bizarre, the exotic, Marquart’s accurate observation told him that here was a riddle and an enigma. Could he solve it? Perhaps, if he caught the man’s eye, if he smiled at him casually and had a smile in return so that he could go over to the man and say plainly: “My name is Carl Marquart and I also have just returned from the desert where I had a pretty little adventure. If you’ve nothing to do in the next hour or so, let’s tell our respective stories to each other.”

Idle thoughts, these, as he sat slumped back in the chair, his eyes on the man.

The stranger suddenly raised his head from the book. Their eyes met. Marquart essayed a slightly embarrassed smile. It was, he felt at once, rude, uncalled for. He was prepared for a glance of contempt in return. But he certainly wasn’t prepared for what followed.

As their eyes met the stranger’s face blanched under the tan—went pale. His eyes, even from that distance, Marquart saw, distended with nothing less than terror. It was a look of such haunting fear that it froze Marquart’s smile on his face.

The man arose abruptly and almost ran out of the reading room.

Marquart decided that he had gone far enough. Plainly, his interest had disturbed the little man profoundly. Well, that was that. He tried to read the book before him, to forget the strange episode. But it was no use. He wasn’t in the least interested in “The Economic Aspects of the Industrial Revolution in England.” He shut the tome with a bang that brought him some nasty looks from the readers about him and slunk out of the reading room.

In no hurry, and still thinking of the incident he took the steps down to the Fifth Avenue exit. As he neared the bottom, that unfailing perception of men who have known and contended with nature in her primitive moods told him, even in this great marble hall, that he was being watched.

From the corner of his eye Marquart searched the hall. Sure enough, there, behind a marble column was that unaccountable man, his eyes riveted on Marquart. Marquart thereupon turned and smiled. The man left his position and walked over to the water font further down the hall. Marquart smiled to himself as he saw the fellow take out and swallow a powder paper and drink it down with water. Just what you’d expect, Marquart mused.

“One of these after each meal, Mr. Smith,” he could almost hear the doctor saying, “and one before going to bed. It will do your liver a world of good and tone up the system. And how’s business, by the way?”

And certainly it was an amazing tonic, that powder. For, as Marquart stood there the man came toward him. Gone was the fear in those eyes, the shrink in the body. The man came over with a quite genial smile.

“I see you are interested in me.”

“Yes, very much indeed.”

The obvious retort, “Why?” didn’t come. Instead the little man regarded Marquart steadily for a moment with a quizzical, puzzling, unfathomable look.

“My name is Carl Marquart.”

The man smiled.

“Names. Do they matter? Call me Smith if you wish.” And again that puzzling look now spread to the corners of the mouth in a wry little smile as if he and Marquart were both in on some droll story.

“Smith? Smith?… Why, that’s very suitable. Just the name I had in mind. How do you do, Mr. Smith?”

Mr. Smith looked at his watch.

“I have just half an hour, Mr. Marquart, before an appointment. I have no doubt but that you’d wish to accompany me for a little walk there. It’s a beautiful day.”

“Why, I’d be delighted, Mr. Smith. I won’t deny that I’d like to hear you talk if you would. I’m sure the story—”

“Oh, yes, yes. The story. It is an amazing story, Mr. Marquart, simply astounding. I shall tell it to you.” Mr. Smith slapped his thigh and went into a burst of laughter. “Yes. That would be effective. That would be the thing. I shall tell you what happened to me in detail and you will be the only man to know it from beginning to end. Yes. From the very beginning to the very end. Otherwise, it would remain forever untold. First of all, because I don’t know a soul I could tell it to; and secondly—well, secondly, it happened to me. To me, you understand. That in itself is astounding!”

They walked through the great doors and were soon on Fifth Avenue. Mr. Smith turned downtown with the silent Marquart at his side. In the sweet spring sun the little man expanded and became animated. He began his story and Marquart forgot the sun and the sky, the time, the place, the circumstances. For he was listening to one of the strangest stories in all the annals of adventure.

“Until two years ago,” Mr. Smith began, “there was, in all the world, but one individual with whom I was intimate enough to call him friend. And he has gone.

“When I was a boy, I was a puny little fellow and soon learned to turn inward that normal energy which only brought me insult and ridicule from my school fellows. I had a strong sense of life, of adventure, of daring. I built castles and dreamed dreams. My physique chained my energy but not my fancy. I took to reading omnivorously and soon came to prefer history above all other types of literature. It was the only food that came near to appeasing that hunger for adventure in me. Excluded from the world of mundane things I slew dinosaurs, drew plans for pyramids, commanded a legion in the Punic wars and was Alexander’s closest adviser.

“I am trying to convey to you how intense was my longing for living actively, physically, intensely. What do you think I became? A professor of ancient history in a small mid-western college where I lived and taught obscurely until two years ago, until my forty-ninth year. In all my life, until that time, nothing had happened to me. Nothing had even come near to happening to me. Absolutely nothing.

“I told you I had one friend. His name was Peter Armand, a resident of our little college town. We were drawn together because of a similarity of interests. I was a professor of ancient history. He was a collector in a limited way of Egyptian and Persian antiques—vases, trinkets, coins, bits of statuary, and so forth. He was, like myself, a bachelor and a recluse of simple tastes. His only pleasure was his occasional trips abroad from which he’d come back loaded with all sorts of pieces. Most of them were devoid of interest. Many were fakes. But now and then he’d come back with a real find, and we’d discuss it for days and weeks before it went into that part of his collection which he valued most.

“There you have the background of my life. Can you imagine anything more placid, anything more rooted and riveted? But listen.

“It all started because of a newspaper write-up. Armand had allowed a Sunday paper of a nearby city to photograph and reproduce some of his pieces. Among these was a photograph of a certain very ancient and crudely, but profusely, carved block of scarred metal that might have been a box except that there was no apparent means of ingress into it. It had no joints, no hinges, no seams, no lid of any kind. I had hardly even glanced at it, and Armand never mentioned it that I can remember.

“Early one evening about three months after these pieces had been brought out in the paper he telephoned me to come over.

“‘Smith,’ he said as soon as I had arrived, ‘I have just had an interesting visit from an extremely interesting stranger. What do you make of the name?’ He handed me a card which bore upon it one word: Eochim.

“‘The word strikes an echo somewhere in the depths of my brain,’ I told him. ‘But don’t expect me to unearth it. My mind is a regular junkshop of obscure jetsam of every description.’

“‘Well, what do you think this Eochim was here for? He wanted that box affair.’

“‘I suppose you told him that you never sell anything out of your rummage bag.’

“‘I would have if he’d asked to buy it. He didn’t. He said that the thing belonged to him—no, to his people. That’s what he said. To his people. That it had been unlawfully abstracted three centuries ago by Shah Lelaad of Irak, since when it had been lost track of until it appeared that I had it.’

“‘Interesting if true,’ I said.

“‘Oh, I believe it’s true enough, Smith. Up to that point friend Eochim sounded logical enough. But then he demanded the box, and I refused him point-blank, naturally. Do you know what his counterthrust was? A good old-fashioned magic threat. He said that he was in no hurry. He’d get it all right after my doom had overtaken me—just like that.’

“‘Let’s see the box or whatever it is,’ I said. ‘There must be something to it.’

“About an hour later there came a telephone call by long distance from the next state where a brother of Armand and his old mother lived on a farm. His brother was on the wire. I know he recognized his voice immediately. His mother had suddenly been taken sick and the brother wanted to know if he would come the next morning. He said he would, of course. And then he spoke to the old family physician who was attending her. After he hung up he decided he would not wait until morning after all. He telephoned an automobile-renting firm in the city and engaged a powerful car with a chauffeur to make the trip then and there.

“I remained in his house intending to give this antique a real inspection. I was all alone, Armand’s housekeeper having left for the night. I lifted the metal block from its pedestal and brought it onto the large library table and under a strong reading light. I wondered then how I had ever missed noticing the thing. For, from the first close glance it captured my interest completely. I knew I was in for a work of hours so I decided I’d stay over, and, to make myself comfortable, I went upstairs and brought down a suit of pyjamas, a dressing gown and slippers. There was a couch in the library, and, intending to sleep here if sleep could tear me loose from that box, I donned the pyjamas and robe and went to work.

“The antique was about two feet square and about one foot deep. It appeared to be made of bronze, roughly hammered. The carvings I mentioned covered its every surface. These appeared to have been done simply by working a sharp instrument into the surface of the metal, and so, outlining the figures. I soon discovered that all those figures were simply different attitudes and postures of the same person and that person was none other than Tanit, the great goddess of Carthage, the deity of plenty and fertility, second in power only to Moloch, and a divinity of the most popular cult of the Punic republic.

“I can tell you I was impressed. If the thing was genuine it was a rarity of rarities. For the Romans did such a thorough job in the destruction of Carthage that, although its civilization was contemporary with that of Rome, research had discovered little that would permit us to reconstruct its life directly. All we know of Carthage is still in the writings of Romans, their inveterate enemies. Nevertheless even the prejudiced Romans attest to the perfection of its crafts and the splendour of its arts. That was why these crude carvings puzzled me so. The thing had so patently been intended for permanence that the indifferent workmanship of the figures was puzzling, paradoxical.

“I studied the figures and noted that the attitudes of Tanit were distinctly threatening, warlike. She was represented with a sword, with a brand of fire, with a bowl of pitch and sulphur. In other postures she seemed to be hurling anathemas, uttering fearful curses, and so on. Not once did she appear in her natural character as the placid and voluptuous Tanit whose business was the very opposite of war and destruction.

“The problem presented by these two paradoxes—the crudeness of the art and the strange attitudes of Tanit—threw me into a fever of excitement. To a professor of ancient history that in itself would be in the nature of an adventure. Suddenly I remembered that Armand owned a very powerful magnifying glass.

“So faint, that even by the aid of the glass it took me hours to decipher it, was an inscription in Roman characters, sandwiched in between the figures. Here was another surprise: Roman characters on a Carthaginian antique? But when I deciphered that writing it all came to me at last. What drama!

“‘Herein by the Eochim, the Dead; the Zaimph of Tanit. The dread vengeance of Tanit pursue the generations forever of him who touches…’

“In the small house approaching dawn I reconstructed in my mind a scene. Scipio Africanus II was battering at the walls of a doomed Carthage. In the marvellous temple of Tanit, the ancient Eochim—the family of Tanit priests, heirs to all the secret knowledge of Ur and Babylon and Egypt before them—gathered outside the innermost sanctuary that enshrined the Veil of Tanit, known as the Zaimph, the very essence of the deity.

“To touch the Zaimph was death; to even look upon it was the most horrible of sacrilege. ‘Herein by the Eochim, the Dead…’ What else could it mean but that the Eochim had put the Zaimph into this metal block that was indeed a box, a box upon which the threatening postures of the goddess had been hastily chiselled and the line written for the special benefit of the Romans whose entry into the city was now but a matter of days. And then, having touched and locked upon the Zaimph they themselves were ‘The Dead.’ They all immediately committed suicide!

“And in surged the conquering Romans, ploughing Carthage and its civilization into fine dust to the hysterical scream of Cato that reached them from across the Mediterranean: ‘Delenda est Cartago!’ Carthage must be destroyed!

“But this box? None had touched it!

“I was mad with an excitement that had me trembling from head to foot. Was it possible that in this bronze casket reposed the most famous, the most dreaded sacred object antiquity, the Zaimph itself!

“I lifted the box and shook it. Not a sound. Where was the lid? How had those cunning priests sealed it so there was no trace left? I dipped a cloth in benzine and rubbed at the surfaces until they were polished clean. Then, with the glass, I began a minute examination, inch by inch. I came across a small particle of a different metal encrusted upon the bronze in one corner. I scratched it bright with my knife, and it looked like lead. Why was it there? It looked for all the world like a deep set plug. I fetched up a box of tools.

“From this I selected a sharp and stout awl and began hammering it gently into the lead spot. It was deep. The awl bit into the metal three inches, and then, of a sudden, there was a sharp hiss of air that jerked the tool handle back into my palm. Simultaneously one side panel of the box flew open striking the table a resounding blow as it fell flat upon it. It was held to the inside of the box by an ingenious, inner hinge.

“Do you understand how that box had been sealed? Think of it! They had created a vacuum that had lasted for over two thousand years! And that was part of the knowledge that Rome destroyed.

“Do you remember Flaubert’s attempt at a description of the Veil of Tanit? He spent half a lifetime on research of Carthaginian life and here is what he says of it: ‘It was bluish—like night; yellow—like dawn; and crimson—like the sun; harmonious, diaphanous, glittering and light. This was the mantle of the goddess, the sacred Zaimph, which no one might behold!’ And here was I, an obscure pedagogue in an obscure mid-western town in the U. S. of America, beholding it. The Veil of Tanit!

“It lay folded tight and wrapped about in white cloth, as fresh and bright and glittering and diaphanous as the day it had been put in. Trembling in every limb, my teeth chattering, half believing I would drop dead any minute, I uncoiled it and spread it out to its full length, and, absolutely spellbound, hypnotized, I regarded it for minutes and minutes. I forgot myself completely, forgot my surroundings; forgot where I was, or in what century I lived. I was back in Carthage, a worshipper of Tanit and terrorized by the sacrilege I was committing.

“The mood switched. Now I was a barbarian chief from across the Pyrenees, and my name was Matho. I had stolen the Zaimph and was wearing it, walking boldly through the despairing populace of Carthage to my army of three hundred thousand men on the plains below. None touched me. They averted their heads at my approach even while desiring with all their souls to tear me to pieces. For they felt I was taking with me the thing that made Carthage great. I knew that Hamilcar, their great general, was destined to wipe me and my armies off the face of the earth for this sacrilege. Yet the feeling of momentary power I had was so tremendous…

“I think it was unconsciously, that, musing thus, I took off my robe and the pyjamas and lifting the Veil over me I inserted my head into the hole in the middle and let it fall about my naked shoulders in mantle fashion. The Zaimph enveloped me, rippling softly about my body, billowing down to my ankles. It covered me voluminously from neck to feet. How can I describe what it did to me? It seemed to make me grow a foot taller in stature, to bulge out my flabby muscles into knots of cast iron, to unsurge into every corner of my being will and power and daring and strength.

“The sharp ring of the door-bell broke rudely into my little act and threw me almost into a fit.

“Hastily I drew on my clothes over the Zaimph, hardly conscious of my surroundings. I closed the box and put it back on its pedestal. The door-bell kept ringing.

“When I opened it a stranger stood at the threshold. He had on an ordinary business suit of blue and carried a cane. He was rather tall and spare and very dark. On his chin was the strangest beard I had ever seen. It was short, but it had two points, and was waved horizontally. The hair of it was black and tightly curled. In his lapel was a sprig of some flower that I had never seen before and it smelled strongly with a soft penetrating odour. His eyes were black as night and deep as abysses and they never left my face.

“I knew who he was. I whispered it.

“‘Eochim!’

“He bowed slightly and followed me into the library. His voice was deep and vibrant, and he spoke perfect English as only educated foreigners can speak it.

“‘I was strolling by and noticed the light,’ he said. It did not occur to me that there was anything unusual in a stroll at dawn. ‘You are—?’ he inquired.

“‘Professor Smith,’ I answered. ‘A friend of Mr. Armand.’

“‘Then you will be interested in this. I imagine you don’t yet know—’

“He extended a newspaper to me. It was the morning paper. I read the headlines hurriedly: Peter Armand dead. Auto accident. Terribly burned and lacerated. Tortures. Hospital. Death. Struck a tree off the road. Chauffeur miraculously untouched. Car demolished.

“‘I have come for that box,’ Eochim said after a minute. ‘It is mine. It has been stolen. That is why your friend is now dead. Three centuries ago it was stolen from us by one of Shah Jelaad’s men who had come with a caravan to buy frankincense from us.’ Eochim glanced down at the sprig of flower on his lapel. ‘That man died in the Ruba-el-Khali, in the “Place of Loneliness” upon the desert in horrible torture. To Shah Jelaad and to his household the box brought death and misfortune of every kind; to him and to his heirs. Peter Armand bought it from a Persian knowing it had been stolen from the subterranean treasure coffers of a palace in Iraq. That eunuch is now a leper in Shiraz and Peter Armand is dead. The time has come. It shall repose once more within our temple.’

“‘You are an Eochim,’ I whispered, ‘a priest of Tanit? Where? Where upon this earth is Tanit worshipped?’

“The stranger gave me a startled look. ‘How do you know?’

“‘Ah, I know more, Eochim. Much more. That box contains…’

“A repressed cry escaped his lips. But I went on, suddenly enjoying his amazement.

“‘The Veil of Tanit! The Zaimph!’

“Eochim ran to the box and snatched it under his arm. I laughed exultingly, possessed of an inexplicable frenzy. For the first time in my life something was happening that involved me, something that I felt was smeared with the brush of danger, stamped with the seal of adventure, signed with the leering signature of death itself. Now was my chance to plunge into the thick of it. I laughed hoarsely.

“‘No, Eochim. It is not there. The Zaimph is gone. The box is open. I have the Veil, Eochim! I am wearing it! It is mine! Shall I show it to you…?’ I made a movement of my hand toward my shirt front. Eochim believed. He fell on his knees with his face to the floor.

“‘No! No!’ he cried. ‘It is death. It is sacrilege! You are doomed!’

“‘I am not afraid, Eochim! It is not death to me. It is life and power! See how you cringe before me?’

“He had gotten up slowly with face averted from me and as soon as he was on his feet he ran from the house.

“I knew I was going to hear from my friend, Eochim. I longed for the adventure to develop. I couldn’t eat or sleep; I couldn’t work. I was another man. And since I couldn’t attend my classroom duties, I resigned and left town, a few days later, taking the box with me and wearing, for precaution, the mantle of Tanit.

“A good thing it was, too, for Eochim had me kidnapped one night. Bundled, tied hand and foot and gagged, I was thrown into an automobile and taken to a coast city. If I had not been wearing the Zaimph I would have been done for along the way. But he was beside me in the car during the journey and I warned him. The next thing I knew I was a prisoner in a dark hole of a freight hatch. The lurching motion told me I was already on the high seas, and the violence of the movement impressed me with the fact that the vessel was some battered hulk of a tramp that knew the tropic seas and their frowsy ports better than it knew the Atlantic.

“The sea journey must have taken months; actually months. During that time I was more dead than alive. When I was taken out at last it was in the deep of night. Within an hour of our arrival there was a cavalcade of camels ready, and, perched under awning in a takht-rawan of two camels, like a prince or some great potentate, except that I was securely bound, we were on our way into the desert, into the ‘Place of Loneliness,’ the Ruba-el-Khali itself.

“The desert journey must have taken more months. Half the time I was unconscious from the torture of my bonds. It was only in the cool nights that some spirit came back to me. During the day that terrible sun beat into my little shelter atop the camels as if the canvas was made of gauze. The tilt of the animals bruised my soft body into blotches of insensible flesh.

“At last we reached a great salt lake, skirted its shores for a day and came to a range of quite lofty hills. We reached these hills at night. They were covered with verdure which gave off a perfume that drenched the night. We pressed on over them through a pass and came one morning to a great oasis nestling in a valley. Tall palms rose into the air, and houses of white sandstone trimmed with red brick and profusely balconaded shone through the trees.

“As we neared I heard the murmur of running water and the tumult of a town. We entered a great gate into a wide street and I saw in a square at the end of this street a great and beautiful temple of curious design. I knew it was no mosque and I knew these people were not Moslems. During the journey, instead of the five daily prayers, there was only one stop for prayer and that was at high noon. And it was not a prayer. It was an act of adoration, to the sun. And at night there would be another such to the moon when it was high. These were fire-worshippers, Shamanaim, devotees of Moloch-baal, the sun god, and of Tanit, the moon goddess.

“Through surging crowds of people we proceeded until we reached the temple. There I was taken down, unbound, and ordered to wash my hands and face. Frankincense was given me to put on my hair and rub upon my hands. When I was ready I was ushered in through magnificent corridors of flagstone and alabaster to a high ceiled apartment. I was taken through many rooms.

“But at last I stood before a great dais supported by unspeakable figures and shaped in the form of a great belly. Upon this dais, in a milk white robe with crimson facings, sat Eochim. At his feet upon the platform was the box of the Veil of Tanit. He bade me sit.

“‘My friend,’ he said, ‘consider your situation carefully. You are in Al-Khartoug, the city of the Beni-Khartougs, descendants of the refugees from the destruction of Carthage. We trace our lineage directly to the great families of Carthage, to the Barcas, the Hannos, the Schanhabarim, children of the Baal-gods of antiquity. I am the supreme power here with one associate, the high priest of the Moloch. You are completely in my power.

“‘Know then that you are destined for a terrible death. That is inescapable, inevitable, and in the hands of Tanit herself. I am willing to leave it in her hands. I will leave here for half an hour. If you will take off the Zaimph and put it back within the box and remain undressed so that I may see that you do not have it I shall give you a royal escort and see that you get back safely to America as far as it is in the power of a human being to do so. For I believe that you will die, anyway.

“‘If you do not do that, if you refuse to return what does not belong to you, but to us, we shall have to devise ways of taking it from you. In that case I promise you that no human being ever endured the torture you will be put through.’

“My veins were pounding with excitement and with exultation. For months I had turned the situation over in my mind. What could they do? If it was death to see or touch the Veil, if they indeed believed that, how could they molest me? Killing me would mean tearing the Zaimph by dagger or bullet and tainting it with my blood. They could poison me, true. But then who would strip the corpse, who would disrobe me of the sacred mantle? The priest’s offer itself confirmed me. I myself was to put the Zaimph back into the box. And the only way he would verify that would be to see that I did not have it on me! What belief in the Veil, in its sacred character and in its powerful tabu, that signified!

“Was I going to cheat myself of playing such a role as I could see unfolding before me? Did I get so far in my adventure only to lie down and cry quits. Unthinkable! I was going to go through with it, death or no death, torture or no torture. The feel of the Zaimph next to my skin sent a wave of power and exultation through my whole being.

“‘You can have my answer right now, Eochim,’ I cried. ‘It is no! And what are you going to do about it?’

“At this juncture another man entered. He was an impressive looking individual, extraordinarily tall. He wore a toga of shimmering yellow and on his breast a shining plate set with blazing jewels. His beard covered his chest and almost hid a face cast in evil lines. Eochim stepped down from the dais, and they engaged in a whispered conversation. Eochim’s face was troubled, but the other one’s shone with an ironic malignancy. I knew of course that the tall one was a priest of Moloch by his robe and the equality with which the two conversed; he was the high priest, and, also, co-ruler with Eochim. If Eochim asked his counsel in the dilemma he got no help from the Molochite for the latter soon left, laughing as if at a joke and casting what I took to be a glance of admiration in my direction.

“‘Whatever your motive may be,’ Eochim said to me after an interval, ‘you are certainly a man of great courage. Who would have suspected it!’ He had a charming smile as he spoke. In fact the fellow was, by every standard, a gentleman. ‘I must take time to think this out clearly and if you will give me your word, Professor, that you will guard the mantle from exposal I shall turn you loose until we decide what shall be done. Don’t think of escaping. It would be folly, and you would perish on the desert before a day is gone. Besides, you would be tracked down with ease.’

“That suited me. I gave him my word and went out upon the street. There, in front of the temple, a great crowd was assembled, and, as I emerged into the sunlight, the assemblage gave up a murmur and all knelt on hands and knees before me as if I were a god. So they knew I was wearing the Zaimph! You can imagine my feelings. Not even in the wildest dreams of my boyhood days had my soaring imagination placed me in such a position. I enjoyed it immensely. For the first time in my life I was supremely happy with the realization of the extent of my power.

“I descended among the people. Saving the men who once a year guided a caravan of frankincense to the coast none had ever seen a blond-haired man before. This distinguishing mark, added to the fact that I wore the mantle without dropping dead on the spot, endowed me with the attributes of divinity. As I came down they parted before me, dreading to touch me.

“For months I was free in Al-Khartoug. I refused a house offered me and chose to live in a tent in an open space so that I could see and hear all about me. They spoke Arabic, a tongue whose roots I am familiar with, so that it was not difficult for me to piece their talk together. And I circulated freely among them and was treated everywhere as if I were a valuable piece of delicate china. Continually I marvelled at the inaction of Eochim whom I seldom saw, but at length I understood the reason from snatches of conversation I overheard and the character of political undercurrents that I caught.

“It seems that the town was split in two great factions: The supporters of Tanit, and those of Moloch. The Moloch cult had enjoyed the greater power since the disappearance of the Veil these three hundred years. They were loath to see the other party come back into power which the recovery of this sacred object would certainly bring about. For Tanit was a cult devoid of the cruelty and the bloodthirsty character of Moloch, and the Veil was by far the most sacred symbol in their entire religion. Ahrim, the high priest of Moloch, therefore, had been putting every possible obstacle in the way of Eochim, to recover the Veil.

“I learned that it had been proposed to cast chances so that he upon whom the symbol fell was to either strangle or poison me: that is, kill me in a neat and bloodless manner, then strip me of the Veil, return it to its box, and commit suicide. It was this plan of Eochim’s that Ahrim opposed, and he was strongly upheld in his opposition, of course. No one wanted to take the chance.

“Eochim was in despair. Not only was Ahrim’s opposition gallingly effective, but another factor had now entered into the situation. I had personally become quite popular. There was no doubt but that the Beni-Khartougs took to me from the first. While they were careful not to come in contact with me they continually dogged my footsteps, and I had only to wish for something and it would be brought and put down within my reach.

“Incredible as it seemed, I knew, that, little by little, a third party was taking shape in Al-Khartoug—my party. I suddenly began seeing visions and dreaming dreams of superseding both Tanit and Moloch, banishing their priests and founding in the Ruba-el-Khali a little kingdom of my own, reigning as a god-king, taking a queen and passing the title on to my heirs.

“There was only one flaw to this dream, and that was Tanit. Yes, despite myself I had a sneaking respect for her power. Not all my learning, my own religion nor any power within myself had been able to do for me what the Veil of Tanit was doing. It, and it alone, kept me, preserved me, raised me to the heights where my secret desires had ever been enthroned. How could I help believing, there, where the civilization of the Occident is an unreal as Shamanism is here on Fifth Avenue!

“Fool that I was, I couldn’t wait for events to ripen. I precipitated matters by proposing a truce to Eochim. Again I was before him in his apartment telling him of my plan, clothing it in wily words.

“‘I have you cornered, Eochim,’ I said; ‘and you know it. If any harm came to me now you would have to reckon with a factor you never thought of—my popularity. Listen then to my proposition. I like Al-Khartoug. I will renounce the West completely, and, I assure you, without a twinge.

“‘Let us make an alliance, working to one end—the elimination of the worship of Moloch. Let us enshrine Tanit, and Tanit alone. With the Veil it will be possible. I shall wear it on me all my life. Only when I come to die will I restore it to its casket so that it may be placed in the sanctuary of the temple. There is your solution. In return for that, make me a ruler with you in Al-Khartoug. With your party and my popularity we can do it, despite Ahrim. And then, in our lifetime, you will see, we will raze Moloch to the dust.’

“His eyes glowed. I had struck home, I knew. I admired my own Machiavellian finesse. It did not occur to him that in the back of my mind, despite my apparent respect for Tanit was a plan for the eventual elimination of that pagan goddess also. It was such a dream, I thought in my ecstasy, as marks the beginning of empires and the birth of dynasties.

“He sprang from the dais and walked about the room. ‘There are more private chambers in my apartment than this,’ he said. ‘You should have warned me of what you had in mind first. If the priests of the Moloch-baal heard you they would throw you to him to burn, Veil and all. I cannot afford that. Leave me now until I talk it over with my people.’

“I left, sobered somewhat. At the door of the temple sat a beggar cutting a piece of bread with a dagger. An impulse came over me, and I stopped to snatch the dagger from him. He let it fall from his hands and cringed away from me. I picked it up, stuck it in an inside pocket and walked on.

“That night I awoke in my tent to the sound of footsteps without. I sat up with a lurch as the flap parted and the tall figure of Ahrim stopped to enter. He came to where I lay and regarded me with a venomous smile.

“‘You are an ungrateful dog,’ he said evenly. ‘But for me you would have been food for the vultures these three months. Do you think I am Ahrim, Right Hand to Moloch-baal himself, for nothing! Walls speak to me and the innermost secret of the crawling ant is written in plain characters for my eyes. Now even the Veil of Tanit cannot save you. For the Moloch is greater than she, and his vengeance comes first.’ He spat on me and then bent down and picked me up with one powerful hand.

“I snatched at the dagger in my pocket and with a frenzied sweep of my arm I let him have it in the ribs. It sank in with a soft crunch. Surprise and agony spread upon that evil face, and he dropped to the ground. I raced out of the tent, sped through the deserted streets to the temple of Tanit and reached the door of Eochim’s apartment. My wild knocking was answered by a sleepy priest who was armed with a scimitar. He fell away before me, and in a few moments I came upon Eochim who had risen at the noise.

“‘I have killed Ahrim!’ I gasped. ‘What shall I do?’

“He gave a groan. ‘They will feed you to Moloch!’

“‘It mustn’t be. Come.’

“In half an hour I was perched on a camel with one companion to lead me through the desert, and I can still hear Eochim’s words ringing in my ears:

“‘He is taking you by the long way to Makalla. If you get through, take ship from there to Aden and seek the protection of the British. Wait for me there. It is very likely that now Ahrim is dead I may accept your proposition in good faith. It will do you no good to try and hide from me, for I shall find you wherever you are. Till then, farewell.’

“‘I shall wait,’ I said quietly.

“The first journey through the Ruba-el-Khali was simply a passage in the royal suite of a Cunarder compared to this second one. It is indescribable. It was after twenty solid weeks in the desert, and after it was all over, that I really came to believe with heart and soul in the Veil of Tanit. Certainly I couldn’t ascribe my lasting through as much as three weeks of it to the body God gave me. I believe that without the Veil of Tanit I would now be a patch of white bones under that sun.

“My driver, used to the desert, kept cursing the day he was born that he should have to endure such hardship, such torture of sun and thirst and madness. Well, what was it in me that made me the stronger of the two? Look at me! Look at my body. Listen, we have been talking only a little while—do you hear how my breath whistles for shortness? It was this same body, enfeebled by a long sedentary life, that went without water when there was only just enough for one, so that a hardy Arab of the desert might drink it instead. How do you account for it?

“But I shan’t linger on that journey. Accept it as a miracle that we reached Makalla after twenty weeks in the Ruba-el-Khali. There I boarded a filthy native fishing-boat and reached Aden at last. And, miracle of miracles, when I got there Eochim was waiting for me.

“It was in the library of the Government House that I had my last interview with him.

“Ahrim, he informed me, was recovering from the wound. It was now impossible for me ever to return to Al-Khartoug. Eochim had brought the box with him. He pleaded with me to return the Veil.

“‘No,’ I answered. ‘This thing must be played out to the end, Eochim. When I am wearing it I feel like a god. Without it life would become empty, dull, meaningless. I would be what I was, a particle of nothing. And I refuse to be nothing if I can help it. I have been that for close to fifty years. Others have climbed the ladder; others have fulfilled their lives. I have the same right despite the form in which I was cast. I will do only this for you. I will make a will in which I shall bequeath the Veil to you and your successors when I die.’

“For a long time he didn’t speak. When he did at last his words were charged with fate, with prophecy.

“‘My friend,’ he said, ‘you are living in a fool’s paradise. Tanit is playing with you, for she has her playful moods. And you are responding like the puppet you are. But I tell you this: Some day soon you will forget or neglect to wear the Veil of Tanit. That day will be your day of doom. You will die. Whether by the caprice of Tanit or by the hand of one of my men, wherever you are, you will die. And you know very well that Tanit’s vengeance is not mild. Remember Peter Armand. Remember the leper eunuch.’

“With these words he left me abruptly and forever.”

Professor Smith had stopped in front of a building some minutes before he came to the end of his tale. Marquart did not even look up, so absorbed was he in the story. Smith paused for a long while. His next words tore into Marquart’s consciousness.

“Those last words of Eochim have burned into my brain. ‘Some day you will forget to wear the Veil,’ he had said. I resolved to make a test of that, in short, to see my adventure through to the very end, to squeeze every last drop of juice out of it.

“Today I took off the veil, put it in its box, and went out without it!

“On the box I left instructions for its disposition to Eochim should I fail to return within forty-eight hours. I then divested myself of every possible mark of identification so that if I was to die I would do so anonymously and without trouble. This I owed to Eochim. I went to the library. There I saw you, and I noticed you watching me, marking me. I saw you follow me into the reading room and smile at me. You knew! I saw you follow me downstairs. I was sure then.

“You are one of Eochim’s men! By your hand I was to die! I was caught. There was no Zaimph to save me!”

Professor Smith swayed suddenly, and Marquart attributed it to his inordinate excitement. He decided that Smith must be demented, of course. But he lay on Marquart’s arm like a dead weight, and Marquart eased him to the steps of a building. Smith’s eyes opened and a smile came to his lips. He looked at his wrist watch and Marquart had to bend close to hear:

“This was a half-hour powder. It’s fast—by two minutes… I foresaw everything… I owe it to my friend, Eochim, to save you from a possible—death penalty… My regards to Eochim. I even came here… Here! Save trouble… no regrets… I have lived…”

And then Smith was no more. Marquart shivered in the spring sunlight. He looked up at the building over the heads of the crowd that had quickly gathered. With a gasp he saw that Smith had led him to the threshold of the morgue.

1936

The Face in the Wind

Carl Jacobi

Carl Richard Jacobi (1908–1997) was a frequent contributor to Weird Tales and other pulp magazines during the 1930s. While a student at the University of Minnesota, he worked on the Minnesota Daily and was an editor for several campus journals and magazines. His first publication for Weird Tales (“Mive” in 1932) received high praise from H. P. Lovecraft. He would go on to publish horror fiction in other pulp magazines, such as Strange Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, and Ghost Stories, while more adventure and crime-based tales appeared in The Skipper, Doc Savage and Dime Adventures Magazine. His wish was to be a full-time fiction writer, but his parents’ ill health led him to take on more work outside this in order to support them. He wrote textbooks and worked as an editor, but in 1942 he was forced to take a full-time job with Honeywell as an electronics inspector, which severely limited his ability to produce fiction, although he continued to produce work into his 70s. With the decline of the pulp magazines, his works were published in three collections: Revelations in Black in 1947, Portraits in Moonlight in 1964, and Disclosures in Scarlet in 1972. These were all published by Arkham House press, one of whose founders was Jacobi’s friend and fellow Weird Tales contributor August Derleth.

The story here, in which the frog wall in a crumbling English estate is holding back an ancient mythological evil, was first published in the April 1936 edition of Weird Tales. In a 1983 article, SF historian Sam Moskowitz lists the most popular stories in Weird Tales from 1924 to 1940. While the overall winner was the fifth and final instalment of Robert Howard’s “The Hour of the Dragon”, Jacobi’s “The Face in the Wind” came in second place.

Today is Tuesday. For more than a week, or since the morning of last Thursday when the dark significance of the strange affair was first publicly realized, my life and the quiet routine of Royalton Manor have been thrown into a miserable state of confusion. It was of course to be expected, all details considered, and I took it upon myself to answer carefully all questions and repeat again and again for each succeeding official the part I played in the prologue to the mystery. Doubtless the London press was justified in referring to the sequence of events as a Royalton Enigma; yet in so doing it aroused a morbid curiosity that has made my position even more bewildering. For the story which I told, and which I know to be true; has been termed impossible and merely the wanderings of a crazed brain.

Let me begin by saying that like my fathers before me, I have lived here at Royalton all the days of my life, and I have seen the manor dwindle from an imposing feudal estate to a few tottering buildings and a small plot of weed-choked ground. Time and times have gone hard with the house of Hampstead.

There are, or rather were until last Thursday, but two of these buildings occupied. Both in a considerable state of disrepair, I had reserved the right lower wing of the one which in earlier years boasted the name, Cannon Tower, for myself and my books. The other, an ivy-covered cottage, formerly the gardener’s quarters, I had given over to an old woman some four months before. Her name was Classilda Haven.

Classilda Haven was a curious individual. A hundred times I have sat at my desk watching her through the open window as she cultivated her patch of vegetables, and I have racked my brain for a reasonable excuse to remove her from my property. The woman, according to her own statement, was nearly eighty; her body was bent and weazened, and her face witch-like and ugly with the mark of age. But it was her eyes that bothered me, drew my gaze every time she came within my vision. They were black, heavily browed, and sharp and clear as a young girl’s.

At intervals when I have taken my morning walk through the old grounds, along the ruined frog wall, as I still prefer to call it, and on to the edge of Royalton Heath, I have felt those eyes staring after me. It was imagination, of course; nothing more. There has always been to my mind something grotesque in senility, something repelling in the gradual wasting away of all human qualities day by day.

Classilda Haven had stumped up to my door one evening late in April and inquired in a cracked voice if I wished to let the old gardener’s cottage. She was a stranger to the district, I knew, and a woman of her age hobbling about unsheltered at that season is bound to be an object of pity. I asked casually if she had no relatives, no home; to which she replied that her son, her only means of support, had been killed in a motor lorry accident in London a week before. She had taken her few savings and entrained for Royalton, where she seemed to remember a distant relative was living. Arriving in the village she had found no trace of him, and so, without money, had wandered aimlessly down the Gablewood Pike.

There was, of course, no refusing such a plea, and much as I disliked having my solitude interrupted, I had given her the key to the cottage, loaned her a few sticks of furniture, and tried to make her comfortable. In due time, I presumed, the relative would make his appearance and the woman would go on her way.

But as spring gradually wore into summer and these things did not happen, I began to look upon the old crone as a fixture. Not until August did the horror begin, and then I had undying reason to regret my philanthropy.

It began with Peter Woodley. Woodley was a youth of twenty, a son of merchant villagers, in whom I had taken considerable interest. The boy aspired to paint. He had no unusual talent, it is true, yet his canvases had a certain simplicity in their likeness to surrounding landscapes that had caught my eye, and I had given him two or three art volumes that had found their way into the Hampstead library.

But on this morning as he stood in my study he appeared greatly excited and upset. His hair was clawed in wild disarray, and he was breathing hard, as if he had run to the manor all the way from Royalton.

“Mr. Hampstead,” he gasped, “it isn’t true, is it, the story I heard in the village? You’re—you’re not going to change the frog wall?”

I leaned back in my chair and stared at him. “The frog wall?” I repeated. “Why yes, Woodley, I’m going to have it repaired. Repaired, that’s all. It’s badly in need of work, and the masons are coming tomorrow. But what on earth—”

Young Woodley dropped into the chair opposite me and spread his hands flat on the desk top.

“You mustn’t do it, sir. You can’t. You promised me I could use it for one of my pictures.”

“Why, so I did,” I said, smiling. “I had forgotten. But I’m not changing the entire wall—just the two sections on either side of the gate. The stones have fallen almost entirely away, and I don’t want the frogs to get through. That’s the only reason for the wall being there, you know, Peter. The marsh on the other side is swarming with frogs. The wall was erected by my ancestors to keep the manor grounds free from the pests and permit the Hampsteads to sleep… If it’s rustic settings for your paintings you want, there are plenty of places—”

“But you don’t understand, sir.” Woodley in his earnestness was leaning far across the desk. “You don’t understand. There’s something on the other side of that wall besides frogs. There’s something in that marsh that will get out, that will come into the grounds if you have the wall altered. I can’t say what, sir. I really don’t know what. But if you’d been out there at night in the moonlight, staring at the gate as I have, trying to see how I wanted to place my painting, you’d know.”

I looked at him curiously there in the morning light of my study. “The wall is already down in those two places,” I replied. “If there’s anything in the marsh, and I’m quite sure there isn’t, it certainly could get through now.”

Woodley shook his head slowly, half in negative, half in perplexity.

“It’s not the physical boundary I mean,” he said. “It’s not the wall itself. It’s the actual space and time that it’s occupied all these years that you’re changing. Mr. Hampstead, don’t do it!”

Naturally, such vague innuendoes did not induce me to countermand my order to the masons. Yet as the hours passed, something in the memory of Woodley’s disturbing attitude instilled in me an indefinable sense of nervousness. Several times I caught myself staring out of the window toward the decayed remnants of the old frog wall, wondering what the boy had meant.

I turned at length to the shelves of the Hampstead library and spent two hours among the ancient volumes there, trying to rest my curiosity. The diaries of each successive resident of the manor were still intact, and I knew they included all mention of wine-cellars, out-houses and rooms which had been added to Cannon Tower during the generations. Curiously enough, however, search as I would, I could find no allusion to the erection of the frog wall, save one, and this, in the last memoirs of one Lemuel Hampstead, 1734, was most confusing. It read:

The Frogg Wall, which I have ordered builded, will this day be finished, God willing, and I am now contente to departe from this world and bestowe my title and possessions upon my eldest son. There will be no more tragedyes like that which befelle my father, Charles Ulrich, and his wife, Lenore. The wall will be blessed by the church in the manner which I have planned, and there will be a Holie Bible sealed in each corner poste. I—

Here age had left its mark on the page, and the writing became undecipherable. But vague and meaningless as it all was, it was enough to set me thinking hard.

I personally supervised the masons’ work the following day. It was a prosaic affair. The two workers simply removed the crumbling bits of stone from the two sections of the wall flanking the gate and patched the aperture with modern bricks. But they were forced to move the gate forward a few feet because of the marshy condition of the ground.

Classilda Haven shambled up to me as I stood watching the men ply their trowels. She smiled a toothless, evil smile.

“Ye’ll be changin’ the frog wall, I see,” she said in her rasping voice. “All of it?”

“No, just the two sections,” I replied, viewing her presence with some irritation.

The aged woman nodded, and I found myself staring again into her strange eyes. They were young, those eyes, clear and piercing, and they seemed oddly incongruous there in the wrinkled, leather-like face.

She turned abruptly, hobbled forward a few steps and, head down like a bird, stared at one of the workmen as he carefully placed his bricks in position. Gingerly she ran a veined hand along the newly mortised surface, then looked up and shrilled:

“Why don’t you tear it all down?”

I forced a tolerant smile. “Don’t be absurd, Classilda,” I said. “If I did such a thing, the place would be overrun with frogs, your garden as well. You know that.”

She made a queer reply, an answer which seemed to escape from her involuntarily.

“Frogs,” she squeaked, her eyes gleaming queerly. “I like frogs. I like them better than anything in the world.”

Peter Woodley came that afternoon with his easel and his box of paints. I saw him through the window of my study as he selected a position near the iron gate-door, opened his little folding camp-stool, and began to walk slowly back and forth along the side of the newly repaired wall.

His agitation, which had been so pronounced the day before, seemed to have left him, though I couldn’t help feel that he looked upon the renovated stonework with resigned eyes. He moved about several times before he apparently found the angle he desired, then seated himself and began what I presumed were the charcoal outlines.

My book attracted my attention then, and I forgot the boy for perhaps an hour. But suddenly I was jerked out of my chair by an ear-splitting scream. With a lurch I was across the floor and staring through the open casement at the weed-tangled grounds.

Peter Woodley lay prone on his face by his easel, his body still as death!

I raced out of the house and across the intervening space with all the speed I could muster. A moment later, as I examined him, I breathed a sigh of relief. He was still alive, but his heart was fluttering weakly. Cold water applied to his forehead and smelling-salts administered to his nostrils brought him around five minutes later, but when his eyes blinked open and he looked up at me, a moan of terror came to his lips.

“Good God! Mr. Hampstead!” he whispered. “I saw it! It was beautiful, but it was horrible. I saw it!”

“Saw what?” I asked, chafing his wrists. “In heaven’s name, Peter, what’s the matter?”

He struggled to his feet then, swayed dizzily and stepped over to his easel. For a moment he stood there, staring down at the few charcoal outlines on the canvas. Then he slumped weakly onto the camp-stool and buried his head in his hands.

“Mr. Hampstead,” he said, looking up abruptly, “promise me you’ll never let me come here again. Promise me you’ll keep me away from the manor grounds, by force if necessary. I must never attempt to paint that wall again, do you understand? And you, sir, couldn’t you lock this place up and move into the village? Couldn’t you, sir?”

There was sincere anxiety written across his face, and his eyes were still gazing far out into space with a bewildered frightened expression that was foreign to the boy’s usually calm nature.

“Nonsense, Peter,” I replied. “You’ve been working too hard. You’ve let your imagination run away with you, that’s all. Come into the Tower, and I’ll give you a bit of brandy.”

He shook his head, muttered something incoherently under his breath, and then, picking up his painting equipment, turned and strode quickly through the manor grounds toward the distant Gablewood Pike.

For a while I stood there, watching his figure grow smaller and smaller in the afternoon sunlight. I was puzzled more than I cared to admit by his strange attitude, and I was deeply disturbed by his allusions to “something which he had seen.” For obviously as strapping a fellow as young Woodley does not faint dead away from sheer imagination. Neither does he babble queer warnings to a man twice his age without a reason.

And then as I turned and began to walk slowly toward the door of my study, my eyes suddenly took into focus a patch of ground near the old wall. The workmen repairing this section had, in order to aid their movements, torn up the weeds and rank underbrush which grew unmolested in this part of the property.

And there in the freshly upturned earth was the imprint of a gigantic bird-like claw.

It was ten minutes past twelve that night when I found myself sitting up in bed, staring at the radium dial of the taboret clock. Cannon Tower was still as death, and there was no sound from without save the distant mournful croaking of frogs beyond the wall. Even as I listened, that bass obbligato ceased abruptly, and the world lapsed into a heavy, ringing silence.

I got up, slid into a pair of slippers and moved across to the window. Curious. If there is one thing that is a certainty in my life, it is my profound manner of sleeping. Once retired, I seldom if ever awake before my usual rising hour. And yet there I was, eyes wide open, heart thumping madly with the terror and bewilderment of one who has been jerked suddenly from the macabre fantasies of a nightmare.

But I had not been sleeping. Neither, I was positive, had any unusual sound disturbed my slumbers. The manor grounds stretched below me, blue under the August moonlight like a motionless quilt, and beyond, vague and indistinct, I could see the flat, barren expanse of Royalton Heath.

A thin blanket of clouds slid over the moon then, darkening the shadows into a thick, brooding umbra, and simultaneously it happened.

From the east, from somewhere deep in the recesses of the marsh that lay beyond the frog wall, there rose into the still air a horrible, soul-chilling cry. It was a cry I can never hope to forget, the scream of a bird of prey about to make its kill, a thousand times magnified, and ending in a high-pitched shriek that was strangely human.

Motionless I stood there, eyes riveted in the direction of the old wall, muscles tense as wire. For a moment I saw nothing, the blackness below me was thick and impenetrable. Then suddenly, with the quickness of a camera-shutter, the moon broke through that cloud mass once more, and the manor grounds returned to their blue silver.

The cry came again, nearer. The echo thrown back from the walls of Cannon Tower passed on into the distance like the wail of a lost soul, and with a choking gasp I turned my eyes skyward.

High above me, outlined against the driven cloud, circling like a giant vulture in the night, was a bird of colossal size. Its wing-spread was enormous, a full twenty feet from tip to tip, and its head and body were curiously elongated and heavy. Even as I stood there, staring at it, my face wet with terror, it wheeled and swooped toward me.

Forward, straight toward the Tower it sped as if intent on dashing itself to pieces against the ancient masonry. Then it veered sharply and raced toward my window.

An instant I stood there, transfixed. Then, stupefied and numbed as I was, my subconscious mind had enough clarity to whip me around and send me lurching back into the room. There was a century-old percussion pistol on the right wall, mounted in its carved metal holster, and I knew it was always loaded, a feeble but comforting protection in my solitude.

In the half-darkness I seized it, pushed the hammer to full cock, leaped back to the window and fired.

There came an instantaneous violent flapping of those mighty wings, an overpowering stench of death and decay, and crashing into my ear-drums a repetition of that hideous cry. The spectre disappeared.

Faintness seized me then. Spots and queer-coloured lights swirled in my vision, and I sank backward to the floor. But even as I closed my eyes to unconsciousness I knew, as I know now, that what I had seen was no dream, no vagary of a sleep-drugged brain.

For gazing at me there, with its huge feathered wings and repulsive vulture body, had been the face of a beautiful woman!

A bad electrical storm came up next day after almost three weeks of sultry heat. I spent the morning pottering about my studio as usual. Outside, the thunder crashed and boomed ceaselessly.

But come afternoon I refused to be kept indoors any longer, and so, donning an old rain-jacket, I began my usual walk through the manor grounds. I was still weak and trembling from my unexplainable experience of the night before; my brain was bewildered and seeking an answer.

The rain was coming down hard from a thick, grey sky, and the weeds and undergrass flanking the little path were dripping with wet. Behind me the great vine-covered walls of Cannon Tower loomed grim and silent.

At the gate-door of the frog wall I suddenly stopped. The barrier, always locked with staple and bolt, stood wide open, revealing just beyond the wild, undulating expanse of the marsh. I moved to close it, but a moment later Classilda Haven appeared, working her way up the reed-covered incline toward me. And for some unknown reason I viewed her presence there with suspicion.

“Classilda,” I snapped. “Who gave you permission to go beyond the gate?”

Her clothes and her hair were dripping with rain, and the dishevelment gave to her, it seemed, a curiously repelling ornithoid appearance. It was odd, but never until that moment had I noticed how distinctly avian were the contours of her weazened body and her talon-like hands. She cocked her head to one side, looked at me, and laughed a squeaky laugh.

“I’ve been down in the marsh,” she said. “I went to get some dirt for my garden. Those workmen, the careless fools, have trampled all over it.”

I glanced at the orderly rows of lettuce and cabbages which in some places had been crushed and overturned by unobserving feet.

“Not workmen,” I said. “I’m afraid it was young Woodley that did this. I shall have to tell him to be more careful. He comes here to paint, you know, at night sometimes in the moonlight, and I suppose he didn’t notice where he walked. But,” I added, remembering his words and firm decision which he had made following his fainting spell, “I don’t think you’ll be troubled with him any more. He’s taken a dislike for the place, and he’s staying away.”

The old crone stood looking at me with those youthful, beady eyes. She smoothed some of the water from her black dress, shifted her basket of dirt to her other hand and smiled cryptically.

“Not too much of a dislike, Mr. Hampstead,” she said, displaying her toothless gums. “He was here last night, painting. I spoke with him.”

I stared at her. If both Classilda Haven and Peter Woodley had been awake and in the manor grounds during the night, then they too must have seen the hideous thing which had flown out of the marsh and looked in my bedchamber window. All the horror of what I had seen, all the terror of that nocturnal vision which the intervening hours had inclined to soften and pale in my memory, returned then, and I leaned weakly against the bole of a cypress tree.

“Classilda,” I began slowly, “were you—did you see—”

But with a swish of her sodden skirts the old woman turned, laughed that mirthless falsetto laugh once more, and hobbled off toward her cottage.

Deeply troubled, I buttoned my jacket closer about the throat and continued my walk through the slanting rain. I was heading for the edge of Royalton Heath, where, as was my custom, I would stop a moment and gaze out over that sombre stretch of wasteland which I had known for so many years. But this time my leisurely walk was destined to be interrupted.

Near the end of the manor grounds where the frog wall turned abruptly to the left and headed into the depths of the marsh, I came upon Peter Woodley. Hatless and without coat of any kind, he was sitting in the long, brown weeds, unmindful of the swirling rain and apparently oblivious of my approach. And in his hands were two impossible things.

For a full instant I stood there gazing at him, watching his hands as they worked diligently at their task. Then I cleared my throat and spoke:

“Peter,” I said, “what on earth are you doing with that bow and arrow? I thought you were an artist, not a huntsman.”

He started as though prodded with a knife, leaped to his feet, and tried to conceal the two articles upon which he had been working. But as if through a telescope my eyes centred upon the arrow-shaft. It was the metallic arrowhead that held my gaze, a head long and slender, ending in a needle-point and made of silver.

Without answer Peter Woodley wrapped the two articles in a piece of canvas and seized a larger package from the ground, a package I had not noticed before.

“With your permission, sir,” he said, “I’d like to walk back with you to the Tower. I finished my picture of the wall last night, and I’d like to hear what you think of it.”

Fifteen minutes later, bent over the desk in my study, I stared down upon Woodley’s newly painted canvas. The lowering clouds without had spread a premature darkness in the room, and I had lighted two of the candelabra. But even with this added illumination I could not quite believe my eyes.

For a long time I stood there, looking down at the oily brush marks, examining the background and the objects in the centre. Then with a gasp of incredulity I sank into a chair.

“Peter, my boy!” I exclaimed, “did you actually paint this? It’s excellent—a masterpiece!”

He looked suddenly wan and haggard as he seated himself opposite me and began to run his fingers absently along the design of the table.

“Yes,” he said dully, “I did it. There are a few remaining touches to be added before it is completed, but the painting as you see it is the work of a few hours. I worked last night in your grounds by moonlight. I—I wish to God I hadn’t.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He nervously lit a cigarette and leaned forward in his chair.

“Mr. Hampstead,” he said, “that painting—I simply can’t realize it came from my brush, done by my own hand. I meant to paint a simple likeness of the old frog wall with the iron gate in the centre. But as I worked there in the moonlight, something seemed to take hold of me. I felt as if a will other than my own were controlling my thoughts. I painted as I have never painted before, worked at terrific speed in a nervous frenzy. And when I had finished I was in a state of complete exhaustion.

“I don’t understand it, sir,” he went on. “Sometimes I think I’ve been going mad the last few days. But there’s something wrong with that picture, something terribly wrong. Every time I look at it I have a dreadful feeling it never should have been brought into creation.”

“Nonsense, Peter,” I said, looking across the desk at the propped-up canvas. “You’ve done an admirable piece of work. Frankly, I didn’t think you had it in you. None of your earlier efforts have displayed such unusual talent as this.”

Woodley left half an hour later, but not before I had persuaded him to leave the painting in my care.

“I’d like to study it if you don’t mind,” I told him. “I’m planning to go to London next month, and I may want to take this along. Perhaps I can place it in a contest for you, or if not, find someone who would like to buy it.”

He seemed little affected by my words. Ordinarily any compliment I might bestow upon his work would have been received with boyish enthusiasm and appreciation of my interest. But now he stood there in the doorway, hands hanging at his sides, eyes lowered as if he were oppressed by some mental cloud.

When he had gone I carefully shut all the doors to my study, returned to my desk and moved the painting a few inches farther back where there was no chance of shadow impairing my view of it. Then I trundled the heavy armchair into the centre of the room to a position about four feet directly before the desk, sat down, and deliberately fastened my eyes upon the canvas.

I confess that at the moment there was nothing positive in my mind which would account for my actions. But from the first moment I had gazed down upon the picture I had realized that young Woodley’s strange speech was not the result of an overwrought imagination. Quite definitely there was something wrong with the painting. Something wrong, I say, and yet I was unable to see anything in the oil presentation beyond a simple and familiar scene.

That scene had been beautifully done, it is true. There was the old frog wall and the black bulk of the huge gate-door with the blur of the marsh in the background. The colouring and effect of the mellow moonlight had been accomplished with rare artistry, and it did not seem possible that so inexperienced and untrained a youth as Peter Woodley could have wielded a brush with such finesse. And yet more and more as I stared across at it there came the impression that I was looking upon something indescribably evil.

For perhaps ten minutes I remained there, studying each brush mark in the flickering glare of the two candelabra. Then abruptly, acting on impulse, I stepped across the room and unhooked the long framed mirror which adorned the farther wall.

I placed the painting now at an angle on the right corner of the desk. And at the opposite corner, lengthwise on a parallel angle, I set the mirror.

Returning to my chair, I adjusted my position slightly, then looked hard at the reflection in the mirror. Beyond the fact that the glass vision thus seen was the usual reverse of the original, there was no change.

But an instant later, with a choking cry I had leaped from the chair and, face down, had pressed my eyes to the looking-glass. In God’s name, what I had seen could not possibly be true! It was a trick of my thoughts, a mental image projected into the droning solitude by a still persistent and bewildered memory. But no…

Clearly focused in the mirror was the reflection of Peter Woodley’s painting in oil. But my eyes had caught a different angle to the lines now, the perspective had changed, and where before I had seen only the likeness of the frog wall and the iron gate-door, and the marsh—in place of that was—a woman’s face!

It was incredible, and it was incredibly beautiful. A woman’s face returning my gaze silently—with black lustrous hair, Grecian features, and lips that were curved in a slight mocking smile; an exquisite face painted with classic loveliness but with strange piercing eyes I seemed to remember having seen once and many times before.

Many moments I remained there, staring far into the glass. Then I reached for the decanter, poured myself a strong, undiluted portion of whisky and slumped dazedly into the chair. My brain was going round and round, my heart pounding like a trip-hammer.

It would have been a most curious enigma, this optical illusion, this accidental use of the double perspective, even had I looked upon a reflected object thus that was new and foreign. But when I stopped to realize that what I saw there was not only familiar but engraved in my brain in a hideous memory of the immediate past, the whole vision became alive with horrific possibilities.

For the woman’s face which looked back at me from the reflection of the looking-glass was the same face I had seen in the head of that loathsome flying monster that had peered into my bedchamber window the night before!

I ate no dinner that evening. As dusk darkened into night and the thunder and rain dwindled off, I sat by the window of my study, staring out into the dripping grounds, drawing deeply on my old Hoxton pipe. The hours passed slowly. By ten o’clock the last remaining cloud had left the sky, and the moon rode high and clear.

I roused myself then, and still smoking furiously, let myself out of Cannon Tower and through the garden exit into the manor grounds. In contrast to the gloominess of the afternoon, the way before me now was brilliant under the blue light and tessellated with curious elliptical shadows from the overhanging verdure. Off in the marsh, the frogs, still unaware no doubt of the complete cessation of the storm, were silent.

I walked slowly, head down, immersed in my thoughts. When I reached the high gate-door in the wall, I paused a moment, reflecting how perfectly young Woodley had caught the moonlit scene in his painting. Then, knowing that sleep would be impossible under the circumstances, I crossed over to an old tree-stump, wiped the rainwater from its surface with my handkerchief, and sat down.

How long I remained there in the half-darkness I don’t know. The moon moved high in the heavens and began to descend toward the west. I filled and lighted my pipe several times.

But suddenly the snapping of a twig whipped me out of my revery, and I turned to see Classilda Haven slowly advancing down the path. I watched her casually. Then I sat bolt upright, huddled farther back in the shadow, and stared with a rising feeling of perplexity.

What was the old crone doing in the grounds at this hour? And why was she skulking forward like a wary snake, looking back over her shoulder at each step to see if she were followed?

A moment later I was pressed close against the bole of a cypress tree, muscles stiffened to attention. With a final look behind her, Classilda Haven had stepped to the iron gate-door, unlatched the staple and pin, and was swinging the barrier slowly open. One instant she hesitated, head cocked to one side, listening. Then she passed through the aperture and disappeared in the direction of the marsh.

For a quarter of an hour I held my position, waiting for her to return. Far back in a corner of my brain a vague suspicion was beginning to grow, and I sought for an answer to the woman’s strange actions.

Then it happened! The iron gate opened again—slowly, and a figure stepped into the shadows. It was not Classilda Haven. It was a woman who did not resemble the old crone in any way. She was young, tall, dressed in filmy white, with long raven hair that cascaded down her back. A moment she paused there, her hand on the latch. Then she moved into the open moonlight, and I jerked electrified to attention.

That face again—divinely beautiful with a satin complexion, carmine lips, and eyes black and piercing! The same face I had seen once flying in the night and again in the changed perspective of Peter Woodley’s painting! Was I going mad?

The woman seemed to glide slowly forward, to float down the path as though her feet were treading air. Presently she moved closer to the frog wall, raised one arm high over her head and began to move it up and down, back and forth, in long sweeping arcs.

She was writing! Writing in chalk! I saw that as the moonlight streaming through the trees focused the crumbling masonry and the silent figure in blue relief. A foot high and carefully fashioned in curious stilted lines the characters took form.

The word completed, the woman stepped back and studied it carefully. I looked out from my hidden position behind the tree and read:

“CELAENO”

The chalk word seemed to gleam like white fire against the grey darkness of the old wall, and although I could not at the moment fathom its meaning, it touched a responsive chord somewhere in my memory. Celaeno. It seemed—

There was something weirdly impossible in it all. Standing there deep in the shadow of the huge cypress tree, my unlighted pipe clenched tightly between my teeth, I felt as if I were viewing the scene from the doorway of another world.

The woman moved farther down the wall to a position on the other side of the iron gate-door. Abruptly she stopped again, raised the chalk and scrawled in those same stilted letters:

“CELAENO”

I thought then I had unwittingly made my presence known, for the woman, upon completion of the last letter, whirled and turned those penetrating eyes straight in my direction. But it was another sound which she had heard, a sound of slow footsteps advancing down the path.

In measured pace they came on, louder and louder, like the rhythmic cadence of a muffled mallet. An instant later another figure came upon the scene, and a new wave of bewilderment swept over me.

It was Peter Woodley—Woodley clad in an old green dressing-robe, with his eyes closed and his arms stretched stiffly before him in the manner of a sleepwalker. Straight toward the woman in white he advanced, step by step.

“I’m coming, Celaeno,” he whispered. “Celaeno… I love you, Celaeno.”

As he drew nearer, a slight smile turned the woman’s lips. I saw it in the moonlight. And she leaned forward, grasped the boy by the right arm and began to lead him toward the gate.

But there, as the iron door swung open of its own accord, a change came over Woodley. His eyes flickered open, his body stiffened, and a hoarse cry sounded deep in his throat. On the instant he seemed to realize what was happening. He wrenched his arm away from the woman’s grasp, turned, and with a scream of terror began to run down the path toward the Gablewood Pike.

Transfixed, held by some inner hypnosis, I stood there, looking after him. He fled like a deer, running wildly across the open patches of moonlight, the skirts of his green dressing-robe swirling after him. And when I again turned my eyes to the scene before me, three inexplicable things had happened.

The woman in white had disappeared; the iron gate-door was locked and pinioned from the outside; and the two chalk words scrawled upon the frog wall were no longer there!

Peter Woodley slammed open the door of my study next morning and strode into the room without knocking. I was thankful that he had come. There were a thousand questions I meant to ask, the whole fantastic mystery to discuss. It was time, I realized, to talk openly.

But Woodley brushed aside my preliminary remarks with a wave of his hand.

“My painting,” he cried. “Where is it? I’m going to tear it apart bit by bit and throw the pieces in the open fire! Give it to me!”

I stood up, walked across to the window, and answered him dully.

“It’s gone,” I said. “I had it locked here in the old wine cabinet. When I came down this morning I found the doors still locked but the picture gone.”

He seemed on the verge of a complete collapse as he stood there swaying.

“Gone,” he repeated in a far-away voice. “Gone.” Then:

“It’s that painting that’s caused it all, Mr. Hampstead. It’s a net, a spider-web that has entangled me and brought me under her power. Since I have finished it I can not help myself. I almost succumbed last night. She was beautiful. God, how beautiful! But when I think of the condition of my arm—”

“Your arm?” I repeated. “What do you mean?”

He stared at me a moment as if hesitant to say anything further. Then, abruptly, he slipped out of his coat and pulled back the sleeve of his shirt.

“I haven’t been to a doctor yet,” he said slowly. “But I know medicines won’t be able to do anything for me. This—this is not a physical ailment.”

I took a step closer and then suddenly recoiled, a wave of nausea sweeping over me.

“Good God!” I whispered. “Not a physical ailment? Are you mad?”

From the elbow down, the flesh of the right arm was a horrible blackened mass, with the veins standing in livid prominence and the hand shrivelled as in the last stages of gangrene.

“But Peter—yesterday!” I began in a trembling voice.

He nodded lifelessly.

“Yesterday,” he replied, “that arm was all right. I found it this way when I awoke in bed this morning. Mr. Hampstead, don’t you realize what we’re up against? Don’t you realize what it all means?”

I reached for the brandy glass and drank a little with shaking lips.

“Am I going mad, Peter?” I asked finally. “Are we both mad? None of it seems possible—like some strange dream that has become a reality.”

Woodley turned abruptly and strode across to the wall of book-shelves on the farther side of the room. There he ran his eyes slowly along the stacked array of ancient volumes. At length he chose one and returned with it to the desk.

“I was here yesterday morning when you were still in bed,” he explained. “I knew I could find what I was looking for in your library, and I wanted to verify my suspicions. Mr. Hampstead, when you read this, you must believe. You must help me. Together perhaps we can free ourselves.”

The volume he had laid on the desk before me was significant in itself. It was a copy of Richard Verstegan’s Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, that evil work long ago banned by God-fearing people as being inspired by Satan. Up to that moment I had never been aware that it existed in my library, but from the signature on the fly-leaf I saw it must have come into my ownership as part of the collection of Lemuel Hampstead, my ancestor of the Eighteenth Century. Woodley now opened it to a middle page, and bending lower, I read:

And Neptune and Terra had three daughters. And their names were Celaeno, Aello, and Ocypete. But theye were offspring accursed, for theye were winged monsters with the face of a woman and the bodys of vultures. Theye emitted an infectious smell and spoiled whatever theye touched bye their filth. Theye were harpies!

With a choking cry I kicked back my chair and leaped to my feet. “Harpies!” I screamed. “God in heaven!”

Harpies! Those fabulous monsters, creatures of evil who delighted in carrying mortals from this earth to hell and everlasting torture! Harpies, winged horrors of classic mythology, sometimes with the face of a hag, sometimes with the body and face of a beautiful woman! Was it possible such fantasies were more than the mental creations of Grecian philosophers and actually existed in our own mundane world?

In a swirl of confusion the pieces of the mystery were beginning to take position in my brain. One thing I saw. Alone among my ancestors, Lemuel Hampstead had sensed the hideous danger that lurked in that ancient marsh, and under guise of keeping the frogs out of the manor grounds had erected a protecting wall. I recalled the faded passage I had read in his memoirs:

The wall will be blessed by the church, and there will be a Holie Bible sealed in each corner poste…

Now I understood why the two manor residents previous to Lemuel Hampstead, Charles Ulrich and his wife, Lenore, had come to such dark and horrible ends, the woman dying from “a strange maladie whiche caused her face and hands to blacken and rot away,” and the body of the man “to be found in the depths of the slough with his eyes torne from their sockets and his head slashed with the mark of claws.”

An idea struck me, and I whirled upon Peter Woodley. “Classilda Haven!” I cried. “Classilda Haven, it is she—”

He nodded. “I’ve suspected so for a long time,” he said. “But there are two more. Always three. They are the spirit of the storm winds. Their homing-place is said to be in Crete, but they can move about the world with the speed of light. They are the personification of classic evil, created perhaps by mass mental imagery long ago and still existing, a throwback from another age.”

“Classilda!” I repeated dazedly. “Oh, the foulness of it!” I jerked to my feet. “I’m going to her cottage and—”

Woodley shook his head slowly. “You wouldn’t find her now,” he said. “But even if you did, nothing can harm them while in human form. No, we must wait.” He turned on his heel, left the room a moment and returned with a long tube of rolled canvas. Opening it and removing its contents, I saw that he was holding the long bow and arrow which I had seen him working on in the grounds the day before.

“They’re finished, sir,” he said; “the only method I know of fighting them. A bow and an arrow with a silver head. I’ve made two arrows. What good they’d do even if they struck, I don’t know. But we can try.”

For a moment as the clock pounded its ticks through the silence of the room we sat staring at each other. Woodley’s face was tight and drawn, his eyes were glassy, his hands shaking.

“Tonight,” he said suddenly, “in a few hours the horror will begin. God help us!”

Midnight, and the wind was screaming over the grounds with the mournful whine of an Eolian harp. I lay stretched at full length in a clump of underbrush, waiting… waiting for I knew not what. At my side, within arm’s reach, lay Woodley’s bow and his two silver-headed arrows. In my pocket was a metal bottle with the crucifix emblazoned on its sides.

There was water in that bottle, holy water from the little church in Royalton, obtained by Woodley early in the afternoon as part of our feeble and blind defence. What its Christian effect would be against these nightmares of another theology I did not know, but in case of any emergency I meant to use it.

We had made hurried plans there in my study before darkness closed in. Woodley was to remain in the Tower, all lights turned off, while I, armed with those strange weapons, kept watch near the wall. Not unless I called out for help was he to show himself, and then only with the utmost caution. I had argued hard before Woodley grudgingly consented to this arrangement.

“It’s youth they want, Peter,” I told him. “They want you because you’re young. They care nothing about me. I’m a middle-aged man with a life half spent.”

Time snailed by as I crouched there. Up above, the moon shone at intervals through rents in a flotilla of velvet clouds. Ahead of me the tree branches clawed the night darkness, and the tall, dead weeds undulated like snakes.

And then the garden door of the Tower creaked open, and I saw Peter Woodley step out and advance down the path. He had removed his hat and coat, and his face shone white as death.

Unable to understand his appearance, I hissed a warning at him there in the shadows.

“You fool!” I cried. “Go back! I didn’t call.”

My words had no effect. Slowly, stiffly, with the same mechanical sleepwalking pace that had marked his entrance to the grounds the night the harpy-woman wrote her name in chalk, he passed me and continued parallel to the wall. Straight to the iron gate-door he moved, then stopped motionless.

“Celaeno!” he called softly. “Where are you?”

For a moment there was silence, broken only by the moaning of the wind. Then mounting into the night air, wavering and hideous, came once again that wailing scream. From the other side of the frog wall it sounded, rushing nearer.

An instant later I had leaped to my feet and was staring above me. In the gloom, high over the manor grounds, circled that mighty shape—a giant, vulture-like bird with great pointed black wings and the head and breast of a woman! A harpy!

Heart racing, I watched it hover there, carried back and forth by the raging wind. Then my eyes turned farther to the left, and I jerked back with a shriek of horror. There were two more of the loathsome creatures, and those two were swooping down straight toward me.

Paralysed, I caught a glimpse of female faces with exquisite features, long, streaming black hair and crimson, evil lips. Then a sharp claw ripped across my chest and tore my coat to ribbons. I struck out madly, felt my fists pound deep into the feathery expanse of their wings, struck again and went down, overwhelmed by their bodies.

It was a moment of madness. I fought with every ounce of strength I possessed, with terror striking deep into my very soul. I rolled over and over, sought frantically to free my right hand and draw forth the bottle of holy water.

A nauseating stench of death and decay seared into my nostrils. My face and body were bleeding from a hundred places, and I was fast losing my strength. But suddenly one of those razor claws yielded to my frenzied blows and with a lunge I whipped my hand sideward, grasped the bottle, uncorked its spout and showered the water out before me.

The result was cataclysmic. The harpies leaped back and stood gazing at me, women faces twisted in expressions of stark hate. Again I whirled the bottle, this time spilling part of the contents into their eyes.

There was a double shriek of rage. The monsters ran clumsily backward, hesitated a moment, then swooped into the air and fled.

For a moment I leaned gasping against the trunk of a tree. Then as the realization that the horror still was not finished filtered into my bewildered senses, I turned, seized the bow and silver-headed arrows and ran on into the grounds.

Near the end of the property, far beyond the gate, I saw them again. They were flying high above me, three titanic shapes etched black against the moonlit sky. And in the claws of one of them, held by his hair, dangled the body of Peter Woodley.

With shaking hands I fitted an arrow to the bow-string and pointed it upward. Back until the bow was bent almost double I pulled, then released it. It whined upward, shot past one of the monsters—and missed.

Panting, mumbling a prayer aloud, I seized the second shaft and made ready to fire again. But the harpies had sensed their danger, ceased their circling and with enraged cries were heading high toward the frog wall and the distant marsh.

I gave a last frenzied look above me, took quick aim and let fly that last arrow. Upward it sped, a gleaming streak in the moonlight.

And suddenly the night was hideous with the cries and shrieks of the wounded monster. The creature fluttered and spun like a top. It opened its claws as it wobbled off toward the marsh, and the body of Woodley, released, dropped downward, fell like a meteor straight onto the jagged top of the frog wall.

An instant later I was at the boy’s side, bending over his broken and blood-covered body. He rose up as I lifted his head in my arms.

“Thanks, Mr. Hampstead,” he whispered. “It was—it was the only way.”

He fell back with a sigh, and I was alone with the corpse of Peter Woodley.

There is little more to tell. No one believes me. The villagers stare curiously at my whitened hair and shrink away shuddering as I meet their gaze. The district doctor feels of my pulse, looks into the cornea of my eye and shakes his head perplexedly. And the police continue to search the countryside for some trace of Classilda Haven.

Fools! I have taken them to the gardener’s cottage and shown them the empty black silk dress, nailed as it is to the centre of the floor by a silver-headed arrow. I have led them to that section of the frog wall near the iron gate-door and traced slowly, letter for letter, the faint, almost obliterated lines that one moonlight night spelt so clearly the word “Celaeno.” And I have placed on the table the wall mirror and Woodley’s painting, which had been found somewhere in the depths of the marsh—placed them at their proper angles and pointed out the strange woman face that looked back silently from the changed perspective.

But in each case they only look at me sadly and murmur: “Poor man, there is nothing there.”

1948

Serpent Princess

Edmond Hamilton

Edmond Hamilton (1904–1977) was a pioneer in science fiction. Born in Ohio, he left college before finishing a degree and began to work on the Pennsylvania railroad, before selling his first story, “The Monster-God of Mamurth” to Weird Tales in 1926. For the next twenty years he was a prolific writer, but it was in science fiction—particularly the genre of space opera—that he made his biggest mark. He was the originator of many tropes that went on to become standard in the genre, including an energy sword which George Lucas (a fan of Hamilton) later adopted into the lightsaber. He later became a comic book writer, joining DC comics in 1946 where he wrote for the Batman and Superman series, and developed the Legion of Super-Heroes series.

“Serpent Princess”, first published in Weird Tales in January 1948, is a Lovecraftian take on Mesopotamian archaeology and mythology.

Hugh Macklin told himself that he was acting more like an imaginative boy than a serious, thirty-year-old archaeologist. But that couldn’t stop the vague, meaningless dread that oppressed him.

He had lain awake for hours, on his narrow camp-cot. And it was not the hot closeness of the air inside the little tent, nor the solemn boom of surf from the nearby Persian Gulf, that had prevented him from sleeping.

“The wrath of Anu, lord of the sky; of Enlil, lord of the wind; of Adad, lord of the lightning; be on him who again opens this temple and uses its instrument to awaken evil Tiamat and her folk!”

That terrific invocation ran through Macklin’s mind now, as it had ever since morning when they had first uncovered the blocked, sealed entrance of their great find, the temple of Tiamat.

De Ferdey, head of the expedition, had translated the crumbling columns of age-old cuneiform, his high-pitched voice shrill with excitement. The elderly little scholar had almost babbled, when Macklin and Thorpe confirmed his reading by independent translation.

“A temple dedicated to the serpent-goddess Tiamat! This proves that it’s the oldest find in Babylonian archaeology! It makes Woolley’s work at Ur, and de Morgan’s at Elam, look modern!”

Roos, the hulking, fat Dutch artist who was sketcher for the De Ferdey Expedition, was the only one who had looked troubled then.

He had stood with them in the sandy excavation on the very shore of the blue Gulf, staring with puzzled eyes at the square, massive little stone building and the inscribed blocks that sealed its doorway.

“But why?” he had asked. “Why should they have put so terrific a curse on their own temple?”

“Enki wither his body, Nergal freeze his soul, Shamash burn him in fire, who awakens again those of the abyss whom I, Marduk, have bound!”

“Tiamat was the serpent-goddess of the sea-deeps, in ancient Babylonian legend,” De Ferdey had explained. “She and her evil race were supposed to have been chained somehow by Marduk, ancient hero-king.”

The little scholar’s eyes had kindled. “It’s always been supposed Marduk was only a solar myth—but this inscription proves he really lived! A ruler of the world’s dawn who suppressed the worship of Tiamat!

“We’ll know more of this when we open the temple tomorrow!”

Tomorrow was only hours away, now. And still Macklin had not been able to sleep, because of that vague oppression.

It was ridiculous, he told himself in renewed self-disgust. The people who had carved that inscription had been dust six thousand years and more. They and their invocations and curses were merely material now for a scholarly monograph.

Macklin knew an old trick of sleep he had learned from an Asian shaman. He used it now, willing his feet, his limbs, his body, to relax.

He slept. And, it seemed instantly, the vague oppression that he had felt leaped suddenly into horror.

The sound came first. Faint and distant, the mere echo of a memory of a sound. It crept to him through the night and touched him with delicate cold fingers, and somehow he knew what the sound was. Someone, long ago in another world, had struck a great crystal bell. Hugh Macklin could hear it speaking still, clear and sweet and wicked; like the pulsing of an alien heart.

In his dream, Macklin saw himself rise and go out of the tent, because the bell-note called him and he knew that he must go.

He stood on the shore of the dark sea, looking outward, and now the crystal singing of the bell blended with the voices of the waves and the sea wind, but was strengthened rather than lost. It called him still, and Hugh Macklin followed, out into the sea.

The black water closed over his head. He was not afraid of the water. He was not conscious of cold or the need to breathe. He felt himself gliding swiftly downward, deeper and deeper into the gulf, and still the bell sang to him.

He was afraid of the bell. Terribly afraid. And yet as he plunged downward into the utter blackness of the ocean bed he was aware of a growing excitement, an eagerness that ran through him like sudden fire.

Then a strange knowledge came to him, though in his dream it did not seem strange. The lovely crystalline voice of the bell was only the stronger echo of another voice, more delicate, more beautiful, more evil.

The voice of a woman, calling from the long night shadows of the sea.

Pale phosphorescence, pale spreading light like the silver radiance of stars. Macklin knew that he was almost there. He saw the great cliffs rising sheer behind their veils of water, and the long clean stretch of sand and whitened shells that was the ocean floor. He saw—the city.

Crystal towers, cut from the clear green-white crests of breaking waves. Walls of coral and floors of the shining silver sand. He passed over the clustered roofs, where they lay between the two folding arms of the black cliffs. He looked down, and saw the blurred, still shapes that slept in the crystal chambers, dreaming dreams as old as the sea.

But he did not pause. He rushed on, with a terrible hungry eagerness.

Above the city, apart from it, like a diamond on some great primal altar, a crystal palace stood on a ledge of rock. And the woman’s voice spoke in Hugh Macklin’s soul, and it was glad, and full of power.

The bright walls flowed past him like a broken star, and he was in the palace.

Upward through the silent gleaming halls, moving with the floating smoothness of a dream. Upward past vaulted chambers where the great golden doors stood open, swinging with the stately breathing of the sea. Upward to the highest tower, and the stillness was deeper than death.

She waited for him, there.

No one barred the way. No guard was at the door but a flight of little fish like a shower of butterflies. She had no handmaids, no courtiers, no one to attend her. But even now she had worshippers. Great shadowy creatures hung in the clear water around her as she slept, their fins moving slowly, slowly, and a long coiling shape curled lovingly around her, its shining head upon her shoulder, watching with cold strange eyes.

Macklin saw these things vaguely, as he saw the high clear vault of the roof and the couch whereon she lay, that was like an open shell and glowed like mother of pearl. But they did not matter. She was all that mattered.

Her voice would be like a faery bell, ringing silver in his heart. If she moved, her body would have the grace of all the sea’s bright children, sinuous strength, wonderful ease and quickness. Her limbs were smooth, shaped out of the joyous whiteness of foam, and it seemed a pity that they should be so still.

She was human and yet she was not human. She was more beautiful than any human woman Macklin had ever seen. She was beautiful like the morning of the world, when the gods were born out of sunlight and sea-waves and the strength of the wind. There was no weakness in her, no fear, no change. The heavy trampling feet of the ages of mankind had never touched her, and somehow Macklin knew that to her there was no such thing as death.

It was a pity that she slept. A pity that such wondrous life must be so still.

He looked into her face, her lovely face that had in it a shining wickedness so far beyond the petty evils of human life that it ceased to have the meaning of wrong as Macklin knew it. Her shadowed eyelids brushed her cheeks with gleaming lashes, and Macklin’s heart was wrung with the pain of it, that she slept and he could not look into her eyes.

But she could speak to him! Macklin heard the singing crystal voice clearly in his mind now, and knew that it was her mind that spoke to his.

“Yes, my mind,” came her sweet whisper of thought. “It is not chained in sleep, like my body. It can reach out and draw other minds to me—as it has drawn yours.”

In his dream, Macklin’s thought was awed, his hungry eagerness tempered by dread.

“You are—the goddess Tiamat?” he murmured.

“The princess Tiamat!” rang the answer. “Yes, princess of the older human race—the race who went back to the sea from the land, as the great sea-reptiles and the great whales went back.”

Her speech, her thought, rushed swift and shining now through Macklin’s dazed and dreaming mind.

“We of the sea were older—and wiser—than the men of land. That is why we sought to teach the brutish, barbarous land-folk our arts and wisdom. And we taught them much.”

Macklin felt the heavy weight of ages of time in Tiamat’s brooding thought.

“The land-folk called us, by a great bell whose sound was power. They called and we answered, rising from the sea to instruct them. We gave them the first elements of civilization. We even brought many of them by our arts to this sea-city, land men who dwelt with us here in the sea! And they worshipped us as gods.

“All except Marduk, their king. He was jealous of us. He hid his hatred until he had learned our arts of magic science from us. And then Marduk proclaimed us as evil, and used our own arts against us to bind us in this paralysed, death-like sleep!”

Like silver flame blazed the bitter wrath in Tiamat’s thought, and then Macklin felt it sink back to dull despair.

“Sleeping, sleeping, as age on age has rolled across the earth—but only our bodies! And that was the horror of the fate that treacherous Marduk fastened on us, that our minds should remain wakeful!”

In his dream, Macklin’s heart wrung to pity for her.

“Tiamat, can you never be awakened? Can you never live again?”

Swift came her answer. “There is one way! The great bell in the temple on the shore—the bell by which long ago the land-folk called to us! Its vibration can shatter the paralysis in which Marduk bound us! It would awaken us!

“The bell still exists! Marduk dared not destroy it, for the very act of destruction would have sounded the bell and awakened us! He could but seal it up, with a curse upon it. You have but to open the sealed temple. First break the inscription on the outer block—”

“First break the inscription,” Macklin murmured mechanically.

“—and then pull the centre blocks aside,” prompted Tiamat’s silver whisper.

“The centre blocks—” Macklin repeated, again.

Suddenly, in his dream, it seemed to him that the whole undersea world about him heaved and rocked to a violent shock.

And then it was all wavering and fading, the weird sea-city below and the crystal tower in which he was, and the pearly couch on which Tiamat’s sleeping, unhumanly-human body lay.

“Macklin! Macklin!” a thunderous voice seemed roaring through the waters as all darkened and faded. “Wake up!”

Macklin opened dazed eyes. It was Thorpe’s voice he heard, and Thorpe’s square, aggressive face was close to his as the other shook his shoulders violently.

“Macklin, what are you doing?”

Macklin looked dazedly around. He was not now in his tent. He stood in the moonlight at the sealed entrance of the temple of Tiamat.

But that entrance was no longer sealed! Hands had torn aside the blocks inscribed with Marduk’s curse and warning!

His hands, Macklin suddenly realized! His fingers were bruised and bloody where they had torn at the blocks. In his sleep, in his dream, he had opened the long-sealed temple of Tiamat!

In the moonlight, Thorpe’s aggressive face showed his astonishment and bewilderment.

“Why did you open the temple secretly? Why not wait till morning as we planned?”

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” Macklin stammered. “I was sleepwalking, dreaming—”

Dreaming? Of a sudden, he felt an aching sorrow that Tiamat’s unearthly beauty had only been a dream.

He saw her again as he had seen her in that weird vision, sleeping in her crystal palace tower down deep beneath the sea, her loveliness warded and watched by grotesque creatures of the deep.

But had it been only—dream? Had not her mind urged him to open the temple and sound the mysterious bell that could awaken her again to life? And had he not, at the very moment he dreamed that, been blindly tearing aside the inscribed blocks to enter the temple?

Fear settled upon Macklin’s mind like thin ice forming on a pool. A dream that could take possession of a man’s mind and body like that, was more than dreaming!

New voices aroused him from his brooding.

De Ferdey and Roos had been awakened by Thorpe’s shouting, and were approaching.

De Ferdey, his scrawny little figure ridiculous in a brilliant dressing-gown, had anger on his pinched face.

“Thorpe, what are you and Macklin doing? You had no right to open the temple without me!”

Thorpe shrugged. “I found Macklin doing it. He says it was somnambulism, a dream.”

Jan Roos’ hulking, obese figure stiffened, his moon face and round blue eyes showing how much he was startled.

“A dream?” rumbled the fat Dutch artist. “I too was having one when I awoke—a verdommt nightmare about that.”

He gestured with his flabby hand across the little strip of beach toward the moonlit, heaving expanse of the Gulf.

Macklin looked at him swiftly. Had the Dutchman too dreamed of—Tiamat?

Unreasoning, hot jealousy flared for an instant in Macklin’s mind, at the thought that his strange dream-tryst with that sleeping princess beneath the sea had been shared by Roos.

Next moment, he was appalled by his own reaction. Was he cracking up mentally, to harbour such crazy ideas?

He got a grip on himself. “I’m sorry about the temple, sir,” he told De Ferdey. “I guess I’ve been so eager about opening it, that when I started sleepwalking I went and did it.”

The little scholar looked placated. “I suppose there’s no harm done, Macklin. But if some of our Arab workers sneaked inside before morning, they might loot it.”

“I’ll stand guard,” Thorpe offered. De Ferdey nodded assent and turned away. “I suggest we go back to bed.”

Jan Roos looked at Macklin a little furtively as they parted outside the tents. “Macklin, this dream of yours—” he began.

Again, Macklin felt the prick of senseless jealousy, and it made his answer curt.

“There’s no point in discussing nightmares. Good night, Jan.”

In his tent, he did not go back to his cot. He lit his gasoline lantern and sat sprawled in a camp-chair, smoking mechanically as his mind churned.

Never before had he experienced the unpleasant sensation of losing control even briefly of his own body’s action. And it had shaken him.

He told himself that he had to reason it out or it would leave a scar of fear on his subconscious.

“It’s easy enough to explain,” he assured himself. “The inscription on the temple, cursing anyone who might want to ‘awaken Tiamat,’ was what triggered off my mind.”

Macklin had been steeped for a half-score of years in Babylonian archaeology, in the faith and thought of those men of ancient Sumer who had first of all men reared a civilization.

And their great legend of how Marduk, the warrior magician-king, had conquered and bound evil Tiamat and her serpent-folk of the sea, was so familiar to him that it had sprung alive in his dreaming mind.

“Yet there were some things in the dream that are not in the legend,” Macklin thought, puzzledly.

He got out his reference books and leafed through the pages of transliteration from ancient cuneiform which told the epic story of that primal conflict.

“Evil and beautiful was Tiamat, of the serpent people of the sea. Evil taught she from the waters to the sons of men, luring them by her bright beauty to deathly life beneath the sea. Spirit of heaven remember! Spirit of earth remember!”

Like a stern voice out of dim ages spoke to Macklin this saga of an ancient and awful conflict.

“By their own tricks of force did Marduk conquer the serpent folk, binding Tiamat and her horde in sleep, to waken not till the world dies. Spirit of heaven remember! Spirit of earth remember!”

Macklin went through the pages twice, seeking reference to that part of his dream in which Tiamat had spoken of a great bell that had been used to summon her, and that now could awaken her.

He found no such reference. But that, he reasoned, must have been a fictive detail supplied by his own imagination. For all the rest of his dream obviously came from his own memory of the ancient legend.

The assurance quieted his shaken nerves. Even so, he was reluctant to sleep again. But when he did sleep, no further dreams came.

In the glare of morning sunlight, Hugh Macklin felt a little foolish as he recalled the night.

“Just nerves,” he muttered as he shaved. “Too much of ancient Babylon. I need a dose of New York, night-clubs, subways.”

Thorpe, yawning and stretching, greeted them when they went to the temple on the sandy shore.

Their white-robed Arab workmen, curious to see the result of their long digging, stood in the background as De Ferdey, twitching with eagerness, directed the removal of the rest of the blocks that filled the massive door.

“The most ancient type of Sumerian masonry!” burbled the little scholar; “Careful not to crack those blocks! Now we’ll have a look inside!”

De Ferdey could walk in upright, but the rest of them had to stoop in the low doorway.

The angling beams of their heavy flashlights showed the interior of the temple as a single dark, oblong, windowless room. Directly in front of them rose a low stone pier four feet high.

It was inscribed, but it was not the inscription but the thing that lay upon the pier that first caught their eyes.

“Why, it’s a sistrum!” De Ferdey exclaimed, amazed. “But not like the Egyptian or any other known type.”

The thing was a thick, foot-long bar of gold, with a handle midway by which it could be held. Projecting from the bar were seven little sistra on whose golden wires were strung tiny crystal spheres.

Thorpe was excitedly translating the inscription graven deep in the pier.

“The power of Marduk, the wisdom of Marduk, the sceptre of Marduk, whose force can freeze and bind!”

Macklin picked it up, shook it slightly. The little crystal spheres chimed together on their golden wires.

Faint as was the note, it seemed for an instant to pierce his ears and brain. He felt himself reeling—

“Put it down!” ordered De Ferdey. “That sound is excruciating in this confined space.”

An exclamation from Jan Roos made them swing around. The obese Dutch artist was playing his flashlight beam upon the walls of the room.

His fat face was suddenly strange. And as Hugh Macklin looked up, he felt an equal impact of emotion.

“Those mural paintings—they’re odd,” De Ferdey was saying puzzledly, behind Macklin.

The ancient murals of Tiamat’s temple were more than odd, to Macklin. They were stunning.

For they showed a city beneath the sea—a city of crystal towers and walls of coral, and floors of silver sand. Above the city on a great ledge glittered a crystal palace, and about palace and city swam serpentine humans who were not quite human.

“The same scene, exactly the same scene, that I saw in my dream last night!” gasped Macklin.

De Ferdey looked startled, for a moment. But then he said, “You must have squirmed in and had a look, while you were sleepwalking.”

“But I too—” Roos began, and then fell silent.

Macklin noticed now that in the pictured undersea city, beside the swimming serpentine sea-folk, there walked ordinary men—men in ancient Sumerian dress, men with blind-staring eyes and strange faces.

He remembered that in his dream, Tiamat had said the sea-folk brought land-men somehow living to their city. And he remembered also a phrase of the ancient legend he had read during the night.

“Evil taught Tiamat to the sons of men, luring them by her bright beauty to deathly life beneath the sea.”

“Look what I’ve found back here!” called Thorpe, his voice pitched high with excitement.

At the back of the temple room, a well eight feet across yawned in the stone paving. It was a black mouth of water, obviously connecting by a passage with the sea that boomed on the nearby shore.

On either side of the well rose a stone pillar, and the two pillars supported a massive stone cross-bar from which hung a bell.

The bell was of shimmering crystal, flaring out six feet from the ring at its top to its curving lip. It was inscribed with characters that were not Sumerian nor any other human language. And it hung with its lower third submerged in the black water.

Macklin felt a deadly tightness close upon his heart. “The bell of Tiamat!” he whispered. “The bell by which long ago they summoned her, and that now can awaken her!”

He knew, now. He knew that his strange vision of the night could not have been mere dream built of memory.

For in the ancient legends, in his memory of them, was no mention of such a bell. But the bell, the bell that Marduk could not destroy without reawakening Tiamat’s folk, was here!

Then Hugh Macklin suddenly shouted. “Roos, don’t!”

Beside the crystal bell, there hung from the stone cross-bar a massive crystal mace, a striker. Nobody but Jan Roos had noticed it.

Roos had seen and grasped it, and was lifting it to strike the crystal bell. And a terror born in dream suddenly brought that cry of dread from Macklin’s lips.

Roos paused, glaring at Macklin with eyes that at this moment were not the Dutch artist’s naive blue eyes at all.

“And why not?” he asked thickly. “Why not sound the bell?”

Macklin, seeing the glazed, strange look in the other’s eyes, knew beyond all doubt that Roos knew.

“You can’t!” he cried. “It means—”

Thorpe was staring at them, puzzledly, but De Ferdey’s shrill voice intervened.

“Macklin is right—do you want to take a chance of cracking this bell?” he sputtered at Roos. “It’s an invaluable relic!”

Slowly, Roos let the mace fall. It swung like a heavy crystal pendulum by the heavy gold wire that held it to the cross-bar.

“This place is unprecedented!” De Ferdey was babbling joyfully, now. “I’d like to see their faces in Philadelphia when we publish this!”

The little scholar peremptorily motioned them out of the dark stone room.

“Don’t touch a thing until we can photograph everything in situ!”

Macklin was the photographer of the expedition. He was glad of that, for the pressure of excited work that day kept him from thinking. And he dreaded to think.

He wanted not even to consider the implications of a dream that anticipated reality—a dream of beauty and horror that had wrenched his heart with a great throb of mixed fear and desire when Roos had almost struck the bell.

He had wanted that bell to sound. He had wanted it because something deep in his mind knew that its sounding would awaken that dream-visioned sleeping sea-princess whose beauty was still an ache in his heart.

But even more deeply he had dreaded the sounding of the bell, for there was that in him which knew it was a tocsin for unutterable evil.

“We’ve made the find of the century!” De Ferdey exulted at dinner that night. “There must be other incalculably ancient relics in this region. We’ll comb this whole coast!”

He told them that he had sent up to Basra for boats and diving-equipment.

“There has probably been subsidence here—we may find much more under the shallow waters along shore.”

Hugh Macklin hardly listened. He was watching Roos across the table. The big Dutchman was unusually silent.

But his moonlike face was colourless, strange. Time and again, Macklin saw the man’s eyes shift through the open door of the tent to the dark, tumbling sea.

Macklin could no longer doubt that the Dutchman too had dreamed, that a strange call from the sea had come to him too, that—

He clenched his fist beneath the table and silently told himself, “I am Hugh Macklin of Ardmore, Pennsylvania, and I am a scientist, and I blindly believe no thing that can’t be proved.”

It didn’t work. It didn’t take the shadow of that incredible memory out of his brain.

Lying on his back in his dark tent later, he felt that his defences against the impossible were weakening. For now it seemed to him that in the breathlessness of the night there was something hushed and fearfully expectant, in the shout of the surf something joyously expectant.

“I am Hugh Macklin—”

Clang!

Earth and sea and sky seemed suddenly vibrating to that distant, muted silvery sound.

It was not loud to his ears. It was a ghost-sound, touching octaves of sonic vibration that his hearing could barely attain.

Clang!

Again, the ringing note, its swelling pulse making complex counterpoint with the first note’s echoes, moving fast and far—

Macklin found himself on his feet, shaking. “Roos! He’s sounding the bell of Tiamat!”

Fear flung Macklin out of his tent like a giant hand, and urged him in a stumbling run along the moonlit shore.

It was not fear for himself. It was a quaking dread that that summoning bell might cause an impossible thing to happen—a thing that would forever shatter for him the solid-seeming surface of the ordinary world.

“It couldn’t happen!” he told himself prayerfully. “It couldn’t! But if it did—”

The intolerable ringing sweetness of the bell had died away. But on his right, as he ran, the black sea boomed hoarsely jubilant on the beach.

Tiamat’s temple came into sight, low, squat and grey in the moonlight, its open door staring out to sea like a blind eye.

“Roos!” yelled Macklin, as he pitched forward.

Then he had his answer. But not from Roos. It came from far out on the heaving black ocean, out where great billows leaning toward land flung white spray-lace at the moon.

Over the sound of wind and wave there came from far seaward, a silver, singing cry. A high, sweet shout, throbbing with superhuman exultation.

Hugh Macklin stopped dead, seized by a cold breathlessness. He strained his eyes seaward.

“Tiamat!” he choked.

Like a hoarse, loud echo, from nearer in the sea came the sobbing howl of a great voice.

“Tiamat!”

It was Jan Roos’ voice that uttered that hoarse and eager cry. And now Macklin saw him.

The hulking Dutchman was floundering out through the shallows, half-stumbling and half-swimming, clumsily flailing his great arms.

He was going out to answer that silver, singing call, and already only his massive head was above the billows.

“Roos, wait! Wait!” yelled Macklin, breaking the spell and running out into the surf.

Roos never turned. He floundered madly on, toward—

Toward what? Was it a glistening, coiling white woman-shape that swam those distant wave-crests with lithesome ease? Was it that, or curling foam?

Then Hugh Macklin glimpsed white arms flung up from the waves toward the moon, glimpsed an exultant face, heard again the joyous, pulsing cry. And again, Roos shouted as he plunged on.

For a moment, Macklin glimpsed the two heads together—then saw white arms like supple serpents coil around Roos’ neck, and heard the Dutchman’s wild shout of joy as he sank beneath the billows.

And then there was only the wind, and the surf on the shore, and Hugh Macklin crying out across an empty, moonlit sea.

“Roos! Roos!”

Yet not horror for Roos’ fate shook him most deeply, in this moment. The horror was there, but with it was blind jealousy.

Another had awakened Tiamat, another had answered her call and gone down with her into the sleeping city beneath the sea! He, Hugh Macklin, should have been her chosen—

Macklin knew later that he must have been very close to the brink of sanity at this moment, very close to hurling himself seaward in answer to that blind, aching impulse.

It was the voices that held him—first the excited shouts of Arab labourers running toward the shore, and then the alarmed exclamations of Thorpe and De Ferdey as they dragged him back out of the surf.

“Macklin, what’s happened?”

Hugh Macklin pointed seaward with a shaking hand. “Roos! He sounded the bell to awaken Tiamat, and she came and called him! And he went!”

He heard Thorpe swear and tell De Ferdey, “He’s out of his head. Stay with him and quiet him down, while I find Roos.”

Macklin sat on the sand with his head in his hands, hardly conscious of De Ferdey’s nervous voice or the low voices of the scared Arabs. Then Thorpe came back.

“Roos isn’t here anywhere, sir! Macklin, exactly what happened?”

Macklin told them. And he saw the growing incredulity on their faces as he told.

“It’s true!” he finished desperately.

Thorpe spoke swiftly to De Ferdey. “I don’t doubt that Roos did throw himself in, sir. He and Macklin have both been acting queerly. I’ll take Macklin back to his tent and give him some luminal.”

The drug drew a thick, woolly blanket over Macklin’s mind, with merciful quickness.

When he awoke, the late afternoon sun was slanting through the door of the tent. Thorpe sat in a camp-chair watching him, his square brown face thoughtful.

“Feeling better?” he asked Macklin casually. “Here, have some coffee.”

The hot coffee from the thermos was black and bitter. Thorpe waited until he had drunk it, and lighted a cigarette.

“Now tell me all about last night, Macklin,” he said quietly.

Hugh Macklin laughed mirthlessly. “I see. You’re trying to humour the madman.”

“Bosh!” retorted Thorpe. “You’re not crazy. Roos may have been, a little. He was a high-strung, nervous type, for all his fat. But you’ve just had a little too much work, heat and flies.”

Macklin shrugged. “It’s a good explanation. Only it isn’t so. Now listen.”

He forced himself to talk carefully and coolly. Thorpe listened without attempt to interrupt, till he had finished.

Then he spoke deliberately. “You really believe, then, that the sounding of that bell awakened a sleeping woman in the sea?”

Macklin hesitated. “Not a woman—not as we know women. They’re a different kind of humanity, a species of man that split off long ago and went back to the sea. This is perhaps the last remnant of that offshoot human species.

“And Tiamat was not just sleeping. It must have been a queer form of suspended animation, the vital nervous centres paralysed by some application of force. It’s been done with animals in the labs.”

“I see,” said Thorpe. “And you think that Marduk did that to Tiamat long ago? And that the bell’s vibration could break that paralysis and thus awaken her from suspended animation?”

Macklin flushed. “I know it sounds fantastic. But what other explanation is there?”

“The common-sense one,” Thorpe said forcefully. “You and Roos were both tired, nervous, excited by our finding of the temple. The temple of Tiamat suggested a weird dream to your tired mind—”

“A dream in which I heard the bell, remember!” Macklin interrupted. “And at that time we didn’t know there was such a bell inside the temple.”

“You were sleepwalking—you must have squirmed inside and seen those mural paintings and the bell,” Thorpe insisted. “It’s the only logical explanation.”

“But I saw Tiamat out there on the waves, calling to Roos!” exclaimed Macklin.

“By your own account, you saw something vague and white,” Thorpe retorted. “Sea-foam in the moonlight—your overwrought imagination supplied the rest.”

Hugh Macklin hesitated. The part of his mind that clung desperately to the common-sense, everyday world wanted to believe Thorpe.

But he couldn’t believe. He knew that Tiamat lived, and had awakened. And, most frightening of all, that belief brought him a strange, singing joy.

Thorpe pressed his argument. “Look, Macklin—I want you to get this feverish fancy out of your mind. There’s one sure way to do it. That’s to sound the bell tonight and let you see for yourself that nothing really happens.”

Instantly, again, Hugh Macklin felt that powerful throb of mixed fear and desire. If the bell were sounded, would Tiamat come again?

Or was it as Thorpe said, mere delusion born of an overtired mind? He had to know, one way or another. He had to know.

“All right,” he said, keeping his voice carefully even. “We’ll do it.”

When he and Thorpe went out of the tent into the gathering twilight a little later, they met De Ferdey. The little scholar was too upset to give Macklin much attention.

“The Arabs are threatening to leave!” he shrilled. “What happened last night aroused their superstitions. You know—the usual talk about the ruins of the ancients being accursed. And right when we may be on the verge of further discoveries!”

He pointed toward the flat boats and heaps of equipment that now lay drawn up on the beach nearby.

“The boats and the diving suits came this afternoon—we could maybe find a whole city in this shallow water. But if they leave—”

“I’ll talk to them, later,” soothed Thorpe. “A little higher wages should fix it. Right now, we’re going to the temple.”

De Ferdey stared, seeming to notice Macklin for the first time. “To the temple? For what? Macklin, have you got over your delirium?”

“Of course he has,” Thorpe said hastily. “Come along, Macklin.”

In the deepening darkness, the little oblong temple brooded still as though watching with its blind eye the eager, reaching hands of wave-foam that grabbled up the beach toward it.

The moon was rising but it was very dark inside—so dark that Macklin could at first discern only the glimmer of the sistrum on the stone pier, and the vague, shimmering outline of the great crystal bell back in the deeper shadow.

His uncanny feeling of mingled hope and dread was getting stronger by the minute. He had a wild impulse to turn and flee, but knew that to do so would be to prove to Thorpe that his wits were tottering.

Thorpe turned, at the bell, and his voice was embarrassed. “Macklin, don’t take offence. But you haven’t been normal. And I don’t want to take a chance of anything happening to you when I sound this bell.”

Hugh Macklin was puzzled for a moment. “What do you mean?”

The other took a pair of leather straps from his pocket. “I want to secure you before I sound this bell. Sounds can have queer effects. I don’t want you throwing yourself into the sea, too.”

It took Macklin aback. He knew now that despite Thorpe’s calm manner, the other thought him at least partly insane.

But he forced himself to nod assent. “All right. I quite understand.”

Thorpe tied him around the shoulders with the straps, to one of the two stone pillars that supported the bell.

Then the other grasped and raised the heavy mace. “A sound is just a vibration of the air. Keep remembering that, Macklin.”

Thorpe struck the bell.

It wasn’t as Macklin had expected. It wasn’t a faint, ringing pulse of sound such as he had heard the night before.

He had been at a distance, then. But now he was right beside the crystal bell, inside the confined space of the little temple. The sound was different.

It was not like a sound at all. It was like an explosion of immaterial force that threatened to rive heaven and earth. A god might signal the end of a universe by such a mighty note.

Macklin, half-stunned, saw the water in the black well quivering wildly around the submerged bottom of the bell. The sound was going out through the water to the sea, out even faster and farther than it could go through air.

Thunderously drowning the ringing echoes came Thorpe’s second stroke upon the bell. Another stroke followed, and another, until the dark little temple seemed crowded with raging, silvery sound.

Thorpe let the mace fall, and stood panting. “That was loud enough, wasn’t it? And you see, nothing has happened.”

Nothing? The last ringing reverberations were dying away, and Macklin’s ears could now again detect the sound of the sea-wind and the boom of the dark surf out there beyond the open door.

Nothing? Why was it that the murmur of the wind suddenly strengthened, grew louder and keener, grew to a high, sweet singing cry outracing the leaping billows toward the land?

Macklin uttered a cry. “Thorpe, she is coming! Tiamat! I can hear her—”

Thorpe’s voice broke in, taut with anxiety. “Macklin, get a grip on yourself! You have to conquer this thing in your mind right now!”

He pointed at the moonlit ocean out there beyond the open door and the beach.

“Can’t you see that there’s nothing there, that—”

Thorpe broke off. His shadowy figure became rigid as he stared.

For there was something out there on the moonlit sea. A slim shape, swimming with seal-smoothness toward the shore.

A serpentine white arm broke from the water, and dark hair swept back like wind-driven seaweed as a delicate, triangular face tilted moonward to utter that singing silver cry.

“Tiamat!” Macklin yelled again. “Thorpe, I told you—”

But Thorpe didn’t hear him. Thorpe was striding out of the temple, toward the beach and the breaking waves.

“It’s a woman, only a woman!” Thorpe’s thick voice came back. “I’ll prove it!”

Macklin knew that the man’s matter-of-fact world was shattering beneath his feet, and that it was the supreme need for reassurance that drove him.

He saw Thorpe walk out until the breaking waves clasped his waist, staring fixedly ahead toward that white woman-shape that was swimming swiftly, swiftly, in toward him.

Macklin suddenly strained against the straps that bound him to the pillar, and yelled an incoherent warning.

He knew that Thorpe could not hear him. But Thorpe’s own sudden dread spun the man around to start toward shore.

Swiftly, smoothly, flashed the lithesome swimming shape of Tiamat after him. In the moonlight, Thorpe’s pallid face became suddenly ghastly as white arms coiled round his neck from behind.

Macklin heard a cry of horror that mingled weirdly with a joyous silver shout. And then two heads went down.

He guessed afterward that for a time he hung half-conscious in his straps. For his next clear sensation was of hands nervously unbinding him, and De Ferdey’s shrill voice.

“I saw!” De Ferdey was shrilling, over and over. “I saw that—something—come in and drag Thorpe down!”

The little scholar was shaking, his hands quivering violently as he tried to unbuckle the straps.

“And the Arabs saw too! They’ve gone, fled! Macklin, what are we to do?”

A queer, cold calm had come upon Hugh Macklin’s soul. He answered evenly.

“I am going out there, after them. After Tiamat. She will have no more victims.”

De Ferdey recoiled from him a little. “Are you mad? Go out into the sea—drown yourself?”

“There are the diving-suits,” Macklin answered. “They’re tank-suits, self-contained, strong enough for any reasonable depth. I’m going in one of them.”

His voice suddenly shouted. “What else can I do? We’ve wakened something ancient and evil, by our blundering disregard of Marduk’s warning! As though our modern science was the only science that ever had existed!”

The little scholar wrung his hands! “It’s mad, what you say! And yet—I saw!”

Macklin disregarded him in the next feverish hours. He assembled one of the diving-suits. It was a simple affair with duralumin oxygen-tank between the shoulders, devised for amateur divers in shallow waters.

He fastened the lead-weights to his belt, and then as the sun rose, clumped back on the lead-soled shoes toward the temple.

De Ferdey followed him fearfully. The little scholar watched wide-eyed as Macklin lifted the sistrum of Marduk from its inscribed pier and thrust it into his belt.

“Macklin, you’re crazy!” he cried. “If you think that there is any power in that ancient magical instrument—”

Macklin’s sombre eyes traced the inscription on the stone. “The power of Marduk, the wisdom of Marduk, the sceptre of Marduk, whose force can freeze and bind.”

Macklin said, “There was power in the bell.”

He turned and went slowly toward the sea. The slow, swinging, ponderous tread of the heavy boots, the unhuman outlines of suit and helmet, gave him the look of some antediluvian god-thing striding toward judgment. With every movement the sistrum gave out a faint chime of sound, softer than a child’s breathing, and yet Macklin thought that the waves shied from it like frightened horses in their landward rush.

He walked out into the surf, but this time there was no voice of singing crystal calling to him. The water closed over his head. He was afraid of the water. He was conscious of the cold, the crushing, numbing weight of it. This time he did not glide with the smooth bodiless ease of a dream. He walked, and his steps were slow and painful, and there was no joy in them.

Instinct, or the memory of his dream, led him toward the city, and it seemed to him that ages went by in the dark green depths of the sea, and his heart was heavier than the lead weights that held him down.

Pale phosphorescence, pale spreading light like the silver radiance of stars. The great cliffs rising sheer behind the veils of water, and the long clean stretch of sand. The crystal towers, carved from the crests of breaking waves. And above, on the black ledge of rock, the palace of Tiamat like a fallen star caught on the breast of a storm-cloud. And Hugh Macklin cried out in his heart, a broken, desperate shout of negation.

He had known that he would see it, as he had seen it all before. And yet it was a shock—to be awake, terribly awake, and see the country of a dream.

He knew that even after all that had happened he had still not quite believed. A man, if he were sane at all, could not quite believe. A man, if he were sane at all, could not help hoping that it had only been insubstantial dream.

He went on, across the sand and the crumbling shells, with the slow leaden tread of doom. The doom of all mankind, which had abdicated an ancient, alien glory for the sake of a human soul.

The sleepers no longer slept.

He saw them in the open spaces, bright beautiful shapes that sported with their cousins of the sea. Great gleaming fish went arrowing between the crystal towers, and the people of Tiamat played with them, more fleet, more graceful, than the perfect children of the sea. The game they played together was more than a frolic. It was a living hymn of joy because the long sleep was over, because the shackled bodies were free again. And the sea was glad, and her children welcomed back their gods.

Hugh Macklin walked between the coral walls of the city, and one by one the people of Tiamat stopped and watched him and drew back before him, and the fish ceased from their flashing play and watched him too, drifting motionless beside the white shoulders of their lords. It seemed to Macklin that the very motion of the sea had stopped, as though the water itself had life and were watching him.

His hand was on the shaft of the sistrum, and he could feel its chiming vibrant whisper as he moved.

Sceptre of Marduk, whose force can freeze and bind.

The people of Tiamat were afraid.

Macklin looked upward to the palace, and waited.

She came, as he had known she would. She came like a drift of pearly foam, bright as the morning sun, and her beauty was like a stabbing pain in Macklin’s heart. Tears came hot and blinding to his eyes, and he shook them away because he must look at her, must see her clearly and for all time, because there would not again be light and loveliness in all the world for him.

Dark hair floating around the delicate face, the flesh like soft pearl, tender and radiant. The strong sweet shoulders and lifting breasts, the long line of the flanks and slender hips, the limbs that were all sinuous grace.

He tried to see where and how she differed from the human, and realized that the difference lay in inner structure. There was no stiffness, no awkward articulation of joints, no heaviness. Her bones were light and supple, and all the lines of her body and the motion of it were curving and perfect as the waves, without angularity or limitation. She was the original, the perfect creature, unmarred by the restricting shackles of evolution on the unfriendly land. She was the mould, and humanity was only the broken echo.

He wanted to fall down on his knees and worship her. More than that, he wanted to tear off the hampering suit that weighed his body and gather her loveliness into his arms and kiss her little curving mouth that had in it the laughter and the mocking joy of all the waters that ever danced in the morning of the world under a warm young sun.

He looked into her eyes.

He was sorry that he had. He was sorry that he had not been satisfied to remember her as he had seen her first, with her lids closed in sleep.

Dark mystic depths, and lighter shades like shallows over sand, and little errant glints of light like the touch of moonbeams. Knowledge long forgotten and visions half remembered were in her eyes.

They were eyes that had watched the banners of all the nations of man brighten and fade and go down into dust, and yet were not sad, but like the eyes of a child that watches an endless and fascinating play. Youth was in them, and joy, and above all they were the eyes of a woman and they smiled.

Hugh Macklin forgot the cold and crushing weight of the sea. He forgot the sceptre of Marduk, and the reason for his coming. Very softly he spoke her name—“Tiamat! Tiamat!”—and the sound of it inside his helmet was like the whisper of distant surf laughing at the shackled land.

The remembered voice of his dream spoke within his mind, like silver speech transformed to thought.

“Why have you come, Hugh Macklin?”

For a long time, he could not answer. The still sea waited, and the people of the city waited, and the great fish lay motionless and watching. The sistrum, too, was silent, unshaken by any motion of the water.

And Hugh Macklin could not answer Tiamat because her eyes were on him, and he knew that she had known the answer to that question before he had left the temple, and she was laughing at him.

She was not afraid. Her people might fear, but not Tiamat. He knew that even Marduk had not been able to teach her fear.

Finally he answered hoarsely, speaking the thought that he knew her mind could hear.

“You know why I’ve come.”

She had floated closer to him, imperceptibly. Her flesh glowed with the warm soft lustre of pearl. Macklin’s hands reached out, unconsciously, blindly, and she laughed, a little silver ripple in his mind.

“I know,” she said. “But do you?”

He had to tell her. He had to look into her eyes and tell her. The words hurt him, each one separately as he dragged them out.

“You’re evil, Tiamat. You killed my friends. You—”

He stopped. It was hard to speak. Her body was long and wonderfully slender and her shoulders were like white coral under her dark floating hair. He tried again.

“I came to—”

He could not say it. It was blasphemy. It was worse even than if he said, “I have come to kill you.” To chain that breathing vibrant loveliness in a living death—

Tiamat smiled and whispered, “You came because you love me.”

And Hugh Macklin knew that she was right.

She stretched her white arms upward, lazily, and said, “I have taken lovers before from the world of men.”

She drifted closer on the breath of the sea, and her eyes were merry and full of light.

“Would you like that, Hugh Macklin? To love me, to stay with me always?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

He was racked with longing, just to be near her, to watch her move among the crystal towers and listen to the singing music of her voice. Through her, a man might glimpse the wonder of eternal life, of youth and never-ending beauty.

“Take off your helmet, Hugh Macklin. That ugly thing that hides the beauty of the sea. Let the water touch you. Let me touch you, let me kiss your lips and set you free of the land forever.”

Her hands, reaching out to him. Her mouth, tender and passionate and laughing—

“Take off your helmet, Hugh Macklin.”

He wanted to, he hungered to, but one last memory of fear held him. The remembered picture of the temple walls, covered with paintings of other men who had answered the call of Tiamat.

“What of them?” he asked harshly, above the pounding of his heart. “Were they happy here, the dead who could not really die?”

“Why do you call them that? They had eternal life, until Marduk destroyed them because he was mortal and must die himself. Look around you. Could you be unhappy here?”

No, thought Macklin, not unless one could be unhappy in fairyland.

Tiamat said, “Could you be unhappy here—with me?”

Macklin slowly raised his hands, and began to fumble with the heavy bolts of the helmet.

It was then that Roos and Thorpe came, thrusting their clumsy way between the people of the sea. They had lost their goddess, and they had hunted for her, and now they had found her.

They scrambled toward her across the sand, floundering, their human bodies pitifully unsuited to the task. The huge Dutchman, the lean, hard-bitten Thorpe, men Macklin had known and worked with—but they were men no longer.

They were nothing, not beast nor fish nor anything that lives normally under the sun. They were not even alive. They did not breathe for they had no need of breath, now that their life was only a pseudo-life fanned within them by the magic of an ancient, evil science.

Their faces were the empty patient faces of the dead, and their eyes were without sight or soul or hope.

Until they saw Tiamat.

Then it was as though torches had been lighted in a dark cave. They scrambled toward her, dog-like, and fell at her feet and worshipped.

Hugh Macklin said heavily, “Are they, too, your lovers?”

Tiamat’s eyes had narrowed as she sensed the sick, cold horror that struck him like a blow. But she only smiled.

One is ugly, the other old. You are young, Hugh Macklin, and you are not ugly.” Her face was lovely, tempting, eager, with lips that would be for him alone.

“Take off your helmet. Stay with me—and love me.”

Roos reached out one water-wrinkled, flabby hand and touched her little foot, and ground his forehead in the sand.

Macklin took his hands away from his helmet and gripped the sistrum, and the golden haft of it seemed to burn his hand.

He saw dreadful anger flash into Tiamat’s face.

He saw the waiting ranks of her people break into chaos, into movement, into attack.

He felt the fear that was greater than the fear of death run like a wave through the sea, and all the universe was full of rushing silver bodies like a rain of stars.

He felt himself go down under the attack, but still he gripped the sistrum and shook it, and the shock of his fall shook it harder.

More with his soul than with his hearing, Macklin heard the first piercing chiming of the sistrum swell into a terrible, rending sword of sonic vibration.

Sound could daze, sound could stun the nerve-centres. And this awful, poignant sound could stun them into—paralysis.

It seemed to him that all the torrent of living things rushing upon him was instantly shocked and frozen by that dread, piercing note that struck and stunned their more delicate brains. It seemed to him that all the waters and life of earth were stilled.

The awful voice of Marduk’s sistrum commanded, and the world obeyed, and Hugh Macklin knelt on the floor of the sea, blinded with fears, as he shook the sceptre made of gold and crystal and living death.

After a time he dropped the sistrum, and he also lay still.

Hugh Macklin rose, like an old and broken man, from the floor of the sea. He lifted the sceptre of Marduk from the sand and thrust it into his belt again, and then he raised his eyes and looked at the thing he had done.

The crystal towers stood as they had before, but their domes were cracked and riven by the vibration-voice of the sistrum. The fish had fled before it. And on the sand between the broken towers, the people of Tiamat slept.

In all the city, only two things moved. Roos and Thorpe, whose human mechanism, like Macklin’s, was too dull to be paralysed by the subtle vibration. They crouched like two weeping children on the sand, and watched Tiamat.

Hugh Macklin raised her lovely body in his arms. Her eyes were closed now. No more memories, no more light, no more laughter. All the wonderful swiftness and grace of her body stilled, all the life and the joy. Macklin had ceased to weep. What he felt in his heart was too deep for tears.

He started off, toward the cliff where the shining palace waited. Thorpe and the Dutchman followed. They moaned for Tiamat, and they could not understand.

Hugh Macklin climbed a precarious path up the black cliff to the ledge, bearing the sleeping Tiamat in his arms. He entered the palace.

Upward through the silent gleaming halls, slowly, heavily, sadly. Upward past vaulted chambers where the great golden doors stood open, swinging with the stately breathing of the sea. Upward to the highest tower, and the stillness was deeper than death.

When he entered Tiamat’s chamber, he saw that already the fish were coming back, slipping-like shadows into the room.

He laid Tiamat on her couch, gently, tenderly, straightening her limbs so that she might be comfortable, stroking the dark hair back from her face. Roos and Thorpe crept to the foot of the couch and knelt there, and Macklin knew that they would stay, beyond the end of the world if need be, waiting for Tiamat to awake.

He leaned over her, wishing that he might kiss her lips, and the slow tears fell and blurred the glass window of his helmet.

Just at the last she spoke to him, very faintly because her mind was still stunned. She spoke his name, and the singing, crystal sweetness of her voice was far off and infinitely sad.

“You will come back, Hugh Macklin.”

Macklin closed his eyes. He said, “I love you, Tiamat. But I will not come back.”

He turned and went out of the room. At the door he paused and looked back, once, and saw that again that great coiling creature of the deep had looped itself around the still shape of beauty, and that its head was once more pillowed on her shoulder.

Roos and Thorpe crouched unmoving at Tiamat’s feet, and he knew that they would never move from there.

He went away from the palace, down through the crystal city, and still the chiming echo of her voice followed him.

You will come back. You will come back.

He was full of a terrible weakness. The ocean floor was dark, and empty, and very cold.

He knew that the land, when he reached it, would be no better. He knew that he could not bear to live where he could not hear the sea, and yet also that the sound of every breaking wave would break his heart again.

You will come back, Hugh Macklin.

“Perhaps, Tiamat,” he whispered. “Perhaps some day I will.”

1953

More Spinned Against…

John Wyndham

John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (1903–1969) was a prolific writer of science fiction who wrote under several pseudonyms. His first story appeared in 1919 in the Bedales school magazine, but his first real publication came in 1931 when the story “Worlds to Barter” appeared in Wonder Stories under the penname John Beynon Harris. He published science fiction short stories, novelettes and novels during the 1930s, although these earlier novels (Stowaway to Mars and The Secret People, published as John Beynon) were not initially successful.

After the Second World War, in which he worked in the Army’s propaganda department before serving as a cipher operator and took part in the Normandy landings, he adopted the penname John Wyndham, and real success came in the 1950s with his novels including The Day of the Triffids (1951) and The Midwich Cuckoos (1957).

“More Spinned Against…” was first published during this later period, in the May–June 1953 edition of the American fantasy and science fiction digest Fantastic. It is a delightfully weird story of Greek mythology with a deliciously surprising ending.

One of the things about her husband that displeased Lydia Charters more as the years went by was the shape of him; another was his hobby. There were other displeasures, of course, but it was these in particular that aroused her sense of failure.

True, he had been much the same shape when she had married him, but she had looked for improvement. She had envisioned the development, under her domestic influence, of a more handsome, suaver, better filled type. Yet after nearly twelve years of her care and feeding there was scarcely any demonstrable improvement. The torso, the main man, looked a little more solid, and the scales endorsed that it was so, but unfortunately this simply seemed to emphasize the knobby, gangling, loosely-hinged effect of the rest.

Once, in a mood of more than usual dissatisfaction, Lydia had taken a pair of his trousers and measured them carefully. Inert and empty, they seemed all right—long in the leg, naturally, but not abnormally so, and the usual width that people wore—but put to use, they immediately achieved the effect of being too narrow and full of knobs, just as his sleeves did. After the failure of several ideas to soften this appearance, she had realized that she would have to put up with it. Reluctantly, she had told herself: “Well, I suppose it can’t be helped. It must be just one of those things—like horsy women getting to look more like horses, I mean,” and thereby managed a dig at the hobby, as well.

Hobbies are convenient in the child, but an irritant in the adult; which is why women are careful never to have them, but simply to be interested in this or that. It is perfectly natural for a woman—and Lydia was a comely demonstration of the art of being one—to take an interest in semi-precious and, when she can afford them, precious stones: Edward’s hobby, on the other hand, was not really natural to anyone.

Lydia had known about the hobby before they were married, of course. No one could know Edward for long without being aware of the way his eyes hopefully roved the corners of any room he chanced to be in, or how, when he was out of doors, his attention would be suddenly snatched away from any matter in hand by the sight of a pile of dead leaves, or a piece of loose bark. It had been irritating at times, but she had not allowed it to weigh too much with her, since it would naturally wither from neglect later. For Lydia held the not uncommon opinion that though, of course, a married man should spend a certain amount of his time assuring an income, beyond that there ought to be only one interest in his life—from which it followed that the existence of any other must be slightly insulting to his wife, since everybody knows that a hobby is really just a form of sublimation.

The withering, however, had not taken place.

Disappointing as this was in itself, it would have been a lot more tolerable if Edward’s hobby had been the collection of objects of standing—say, old prints, or first editions, or oriental pottery. That kind of thing could not only be displayed for envy, it had value; and the collector himself had status. But no one achieved the status of being any more than a crank for having even a very extensive collection of spiders.

Even over butterflies or moths, Lydia felt without actually putting the matter to the test, one could perhaps have summoned up the appearance of some enthusiasm. There was a kind of nature’s-living-jewels line that one could take if they were nicely mounted. But for spiders—a lot of nasty, creepy-crawly, leggy horrors, all getting gradually more pallid in tubes of alcohol—she could find nothing to be said at all.

In the early days of their marriage Edward had tried to give her some of his own enthusiasm, and Lydia had listened as tactfully as possible to his explanations of the complicated lives, customs, and mating habits of spiders, most of which seemed either disgusting, or very short on morals, or frequently both, and to his expatiations on the beauties of colouration and marking which her eye lacked the affection to detect. Luckily, however, it had gradually become apparent from some of her comments and questions that Edward was not awakening the sympathetic understanding he had hoped for, and when the attempt lapsed Lydia had been able to retreat gratefully to her former viewpoint that all spiders were undesirable, and the dead only slightly less horrible than the living.

Realizing that frontal opposition to spiders would be poor tactics, she had attempted a quiet and painless weaning. It had taken her two or three years to appreciate that this was not going to work; after that, the spiders had settled down to being one of those bits of the rough that the wise take with the smooth and leave unmentioned except on those occasions of extreme provocation when the whole catalogue of one’s dissatisfactions is reviewed.

Lydia entered Edward’s spider room about once a week, partly to tidy and dust it, and partly to enjoy detesting its inhabitants in a pleasantly masochistic fashion. This she could do on at least two levels. There was the kind of generalized satisfaction that anyone might feel, in looking along the rows of test tubes, that at any rate here were a whole lot of displeasing creepies that would creep no more. And then there was the more personal sense of compensation in the reflection that though they had to some extent succeeded in diverting a married man’s attention from its only proper target, they had had to die to do it.

There was an astonishing number of test tubes ranged in the racks along the walls; so many that at one time she had hopefully inquired whether there could be many more kinds of spiders. His first answer of five hundred and sixty in the British Isles had been quite encouraging, but then he had gone on to speak of twenty thousand or so different kinds in the world, not to mention the allied orders, whatever they might be, in a way that was depressing.

There were other things in the room besides the test tubes: a shelf of reference books, a card index, a table holding his carefully hooded microscope. There was also a long bench against one wall supporting a variety of bottles, packets of slides, boxes of new test tubes, as well as a number of glass-topped boxes in which specimens were preserved for study alive before they went into the alcohol.

Lydia could never resist peeping into these condemned cells with a satisfaction which she would scarcely have cared to admit, or, indeed, even have felt in the case of other creatures, but somehow with spiders it just served them right for being spiders. As a rule there would be five or six of them in similar boxes, and it was with surprise one morning that she noticed a large bell jar ranged neatly in the line. After she had done the rest of the dusting, curiosity took her over to the bench. It should, of course, have been much easier to observe the occupant of the bell jar than those of the boxes, but in fact it was not, because the inside, for fully two-thirds of its height, was obscured by web. A web so thickly woven as to hide the occupant entirely from the sides. It hung in folds, almost like a drapery, and on examining it more closely, Lydia was impressed by the ingenuity of the work; it looked surprisingly like a set of Nottingham lace curtains—though reduced greatly in scale, of course, and perhaps not quite in the top flight of design. Lydia went closer to look over the top edge of the web, and down upon the occupant. “Good gracious!” she said.

The spider, squatting in the centre of its web-screened circle, was quite the largest she had ever seen. She stared at it. She recalled that Edward had been in a state of some excitement the previous evening, but she had paid little attention except to tell him, as on several previous occasions, that she was much too busy to go and look at a horrible spider: she also recalled that he had been somewhat hurt about her lack of interest. Now, seeing the spider, she could understand that: she could even understand for once how it was possible to talk of a beautifully coloured spider, for there could be no doubt at all that this specimen deserved a place in the nature’s-living-jewels class.

The ground colour was a pale green with a darker stippling, which faded away toward the under side. Down the centre of the back ran a pattern of blue arrowheads, bright in the centre and merging almost into the green at the points. At either side of the abdomen were bracket-shaped squiggles of scarlet. Touches of the same scarlet showed at the joints of the green legs, and there were small markings of it, too, on the upper part of what Edward resoundingly called the cephalothorax, but which Lydia thought of as the part where the legs were fastened on.

Lydia leaned closer. Strangely, the spider had not frozen into immobility in the usual spiderish manner. Its attention seemed to be wholly taken up by something held out between its front pair of legs, something that flashed as it moved. Lydia thought that the object was an aquamarine, cut and polished. As she moved her head to make sure, her shadow fell across the bell jar. The spider stopped twiddling the stone, and froze. Presently a small, muffled voice said:

“Hullo! Who are you?” with a slight foreign accent.

Lydia looked round. The room was as empty as before.

“No. Here!” said the muffled voice.

She looked down again at the jar, and saw the spider pointing to itself with its number two leg on the right.

“My name,” said the voice, sociably, “is Arachne. What’s yours?”

“Er—Lydia,” said Lydia, uncertainly.

“Oh, dear! Why?” asked the voice.

Lydia felt a trifle nettled. “What do you mean, why?” she asked.

“Well, as I recall it, Lydia was sent to hell as a punishment for doing very nasty things to her lover. I suppose you aren’t given to—?”

“Certainly not,” Lydia said, cutting the voice short.

“Oh,” said the voice, doubtfully. “Still, they can’t have given you the name for nothing. And, mind you, I never really blamed Lydia. Lovers, in my experience, usually deserve—” Lydia lost the rest as she looked around the room again, uncertainly.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “I mean, is it really—?”

“Oh, it’s me, all right,” said the spider. And to make sure, it indicated itself again, this time with the third leg on the left.

“But—but spiders can’t—”

“Of course not. Not real spiders, but I’m Arachne—I told you that.”

A hazy memory stirred at the back of Lydia’s mind.

“You mean the Arachne?” she inquired.

“Did you ever hear of another?” the voice asked, coldly.

“I mean, the one who annoyed Athene—though I can’t remember just how?” said Lydia.

“Certainly. I was technically a spinster, and Athene was jealous and—”

“I should have thought it would be the other way—oh, I see, you mean you spun?”

“That’s what I said. I was the best spinner and weaver, and when I won the all-Greece open competition and beat Athene she couldn’t take it; she was so furiously jealous that she turned me into a spider. It’s very unfair to let gods and goddesses go in for competitions at all, I always say. They’re spitefully bad losers, and then they go telling lies about you to justify the bad-tempered things they do in revenge. You’ve probably heard it differently?” the voice added, on a slightly challenging note.

“No, I think it was pretty much like that,” Lydia told her, tactfully. “You must have been a spider a very long time now,” she added.

“Yes, I suppose so, but you give up counting after a bit.” The voice paused, then it went on: “I say, would you mind taking this glass thing off? It’s stuffy in here; besides, I shouldn’t have to shout.”

Lydia hesitated.

“I never interfere with anything in this room. My husband gets so annoyed if I do.”

“Oh, you needn’t be afraid I shall run away. I’ll give you my word on that, if you like.”

But Lydia was still doubtful.

“You’re in a pretty desperate position, you know,” she said, with an involuntary glance at the alcohol bottle.

“Not really,” said the voice in a tone that suggested a shrug. “I’ve often been caught before. Something always turns up—it has to. That’s one of the few advantages of having a really permanent curse on you. It makes it impossible for anything really fatal to happen.”

Lydia looked round. The window was shut, the door, too, and the fireplace was blocked up.

“Well, perhaps for a few minutes, if you promise,” she allowed.

She lifted the jar, and put it down to one side. As she did so the curtains of web trailed out, and tore.

“Never mind about them. Phew! That’s better,” said the voice, still small, but now quite clear and distinct.

The spider did not move. It still held the aquamarine, catching the light and shining, between its front legs.

On a sudden thought, Lydia leaned down and looked at the stone more closely. She was relieved to see that it was not one of her own.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” said Arachne. “Not really my colour, though. I rather kill it, I think. One of the emeralds would have been more suitable—even though they were smaller.”

“Where did you get it?” Lydia asked.

“Oh, a house just near here. Next door but one, I think it was.”

“Mrs. Ferris’s—yes, of course, that would be one of hers.”

“Possibly,” agreed Arachne. “Anyway, it was in a cabinet with a lot of others, so I took it, and I was just coming through the hedge out of the garden, looking for a comfortable hole to enjoy it in, when I got caught. It was the stone shining that made him see me. A funny sort of man, rather like a spider himself, if he had had more legs.”

Lydia said, somewhat coldly:

“He was smarter than you were.”

“H’m,” said Arachne, noncommittally.

She laid the stone down and started to move about, trailing several threads from her spinnerets. Lydia drew away a little. For a moment she watched Arachne, who appeared to be engaged in a kind of doodling, then her eyes returned to the aquamarine.

“I have a little collection of stones myself. Not as good as Mrs. Ferris’s, of course, but one or two nice ones amongst them,” she remarked.

“Oh,” said Arachne, absent-minded as she worked out her pattern.

“I—I should rather like a nice aquamarine,” said Lydia. “Suppose the door happened to have been left open just a little…”

“There!” said Arachne, with satisfaction. “Isn’t that the prettiest doily you ever saw?”

She paused to admire her work.

Lydia looked at it, too. The pattern seemed to her to show a lack of subtlety, but she agreed tactfully. “It’s delightful! Absolutely charming! I wish I could—I mean, I don’t know how you do it.”

“One has just a little talent, you know,” said Arachne, with undeceiving modesty. “You were saying something?” she added.

Lydia repeated her earlier remark.

“Not really worth my while,” said Arachne. “I told you something has to happen, so why should I bother?”

She began to doodle again. Rapidly, though with a slightly abstracted air, she constructed another small lace mat suitable for the lower-income-bracket trade, and pondered over it for a moment. Presently she said:

“Of course, if it were to be made worth my while…”

“I couldn’t afford very much—” began Lydia, with caution.

“Not money,” said Arachne. “What on earth would I do with money? But I am a bit overdue for a holiday.”

“Holiday?” Lydia repeated, blankly.

“There’s a sort of alleviation clause,” Arachne explained. “Lots of good curses have them. It’s often something like being uncursed by a prince’s kiss—you know, something so improbable that it’s a real outside chance, but gets the god a reputation for not being such a Shylock after all. Mine is that I’m allowed twenty-four hours’ holiday in the year—but I’ve scarcely ever had it.” She paused, doodling an inch or two of lace edging. “You see,” she added, “the difficult thing is to find someone willing to change places for twenty-four hours.”

“Er—yes, I can see it would be,” said Lydia, detachedly.

Arachne put out one foreleg and spun the aquamarine round so that it glittered.

“Someone willing to change places,” she repeated.

“Well—er—I—er—I don’t think—” Lydia tried.

“It’s not at all difficult to get in and out of Mrs. Ferris’s house—not when you’re my size,” Arachne observed.

Lydia looked at the aquamarine. It wasn’t possible to stop having a mental picture of the other stones that were lying bedded on black velvet in Mrs. Ferris’s cabinet.

“Suppose one got caught?” she suggested.

“One need not bother about that—except as an inconvenience. I should have to take over in twenty-four hours again, in any case,” Arachne told her.

“Well—I don’t know—” said Lydia, unwillingly.

Arachne spoke in a ruminative manner:

“I remember thinking how easy it would be to carry them out one by one, and hide them in a convenient hole,” she said.

Lydia was never able to recall in detail the succeeding stages of the conversation, only that at some point where she was still intending to be tentative and hypothetical Arachne must have thought she was more definite. Anyway, one moment she was still standing beside the bench, and the next, it seemed, she was on it, and the thing had happened.

She didn’t really feel any different, either. Six eyes did not seem any more difficult to manage than two, though everything looked exceedingly large, and the opposite wall very far away. The eight legs seemed capable of managing themselves without getting tangled, too.

“How do you?—Oh, I see,” she said.

“Steady on,” said a voice from above. “That’s more than enough for a pair of curtains you’ve wasted there. Take it gently, now. Always keep the word ‘dainty’ in mind. Yes, that’s much better—a little finer still. That’s it. You’ll soon get the idea. Now all you have to do is walk over the edge, and let yourself down on it.”

“Er—yes,” said Lydia, dubiously. The edge of the bench seemed a long way from the floor.

The figure towering above turned as if to go, and then turned back on a thought that occurred to her.

“Oh, there’s just one thing,” she said. “About men.”

“Men?” said Lydia.

“Well, male spiders. I mean, I don’t want to come back and find that—”

“No, of course not,” agreed Lydia. “I shall be pretty busy, I expect. And I don’t—er—think I feel much interested in male spiders, as a matter of fact.”

“Well, I don’t know. There’s this business of like calling to like.”

“I think it sort of probably depends on how long you have been like,” suggested Lydia.

“Good. Anyway, it’s not very difficult. He’ll only be about a sixteenth of your size, so you can easily brush him off. Or you can eat him, if you like.”

“Eat him!” exclaimed Lydia. “Oh, yes, I remember my husband said something—no, I think I’ll just brush him off, as you said.”

“Just as you like. There’s one thing about spiders, they’re much better arranged to the female advantage. You don’t have to go on being cumbered up with a useless male just because. You simply find a new one when you want him. It simplifies things a lot, really.”

“I suppose so,” said Lydia. “Still, in only twenty-four hours—”

“Quite,” said Arachne. “Well, I’ll be off. I mustn’t waste my holiday. You’ll find you’ll be quite all right once you get the hang of it. Goodbye till tomorrow.” And she went out, leaving the door slightly ajar.

Lydia practised her spinning a little more until she could be sure of keeping a fairly even thread. Then she went to the edge of the bench. After a slight hesitation she let herself over. It turned out to be quite easy, really.

Indeed, the whole thing turned out to be far easier than she had expected. She found her way to Mrs. Ferris’s drawing-room, where the door of the cabinet had been carelessly left unlatched, and selected a nice fire-opal. There was no difficulty in discovering a small hole on the road side of the front bank in which the booty could be deposited for collection later. On the next trip she chose a small ruby; and the next time an excellently cut square zircon, and the operation settled down to an industrious routine which was interrupted by nothing more than the advances of a couple of male spiders who were easily bowled over with a flip of the front leg, and became discouraged.

By the late afternoon Lydia had accumulated quite a nice little hoard in the hole in the bank. She was in the act of adding a small topaz, and wondering whether she would make just one more trip, when a shadow fell across her. She froze quite still, looking up at a tall gangling form with knobbly joints, which really did look surprisingly spidery from that angle.

“Well, I’m damned,” said Edward’s voice, speaking to itself. “Another of them! Two in two days. Most extraordinary.”

Then, before Lydia could make up her mind what to do, a sudden darkness descended over her, and presently she found herself being joggled along in a box.

A few minutes later she was under the bell jar that she had lifted off Arachne, with Edward bending over her, looking partly annoyed at finding that his specimen had escaped, and partly elated that he had recaptured it.

After that, there didn’t seem to be much to do but doodle a few lace curtains for privacy, in the way Arachne had. It was a consoling thought that the stones were safely cached away, and that any time after the next twelve or thirteen hours she would be able to collect them at her leisure…

No one came near the spider room during the evening. Lydia could distinguish various domestic sounds taking place in more or less their usual succession, and culminating in two pairs of footfalls ascending the stairs. And but for physical handicaps, she might have frowned slightly at this point. The ethics of the situation were somewhat obscure. Was Arachne really entitled? Oh, well, there nothing one could do about it, anyway.

Presently the sound of movement ceased, and the house settled down for the night.

She had half expected that Edward would look in to assure himself of her safety before he went to work in the morning. She remembered that he had done so in the case of other and far less spectacular spiders, and she was a trifle piqued that when at last the door did open, it was simply to admit Arachne. She noticed, also, that Arachne had not succeeded in doing her hair with just that touch that suited Lydia’s face.

Arachne gave a little yawn, and came across to the bench.

“Hullo,” she said, lifting the jar, “had an interesting time?”

“Not this part of it,” Lydia said. “Yesterday was very satisfactory, though. I hope you enjoyed your holiday.”

“Yes,” said Arachne. “Yes, I had a nice time—though it did somehow seem less of a change than I’d hoped.” She looked at the watch on her wrist. “Well, time’s nearly up. If I don’t get back, I’ll have that Athene on my tail. You ready?”

“Certainly,” said Lydia, feeling more than ready.

“Well, here we are again,” said Arachne’s small voice. She stretched her legs in pairs, starting at the front and working astern. Then she doodled a capital A in a debased Gothic script to assure herself that her spinning faculties were unimpaired.

“You know,” she said, “habit is a curious thing. I’m not sure that by now I’m not more comfortable like this, after all. Less inhibited, really.”

She scuttered over to the side of the bench and let herself down, looking like a ball of brilliant feathers sinking to the floor. As she reached it, she unfolded her legs and ran across to the open door. On the threshold she paused.

“Well, goodbye, and thanks a lot,” she said. “I’m sorry about your husband. I’m afraid I rather forgot myself for the moment.”

Then she scooted away down the passage as if she were a ball of coloured wools blowing away in the draught.

“Goodbye,” said Lydia, by no means sorry to see her go.

The intention of Arachne’s parting remark was lost on her: in fact, she forgot it altogether until she discovered the collection of extraordinarily knobbly bones that someone had recently put in the dustbin.

1978 (1927)

Above Ker-Is

Evangeline Walton

Born in Indianapolis on November 24, 1907, Evangeline Walton Ensley began composing stories at the age of 6. Homeschooled due to ill health, she was a voracious reader. It was the Mabinogion, the collection of medieval Welsh tales, which would have the biggest influence on her, and inspire her 1936 book “The Virgin and the Swine”, a retelling of fourth “branch” of the Mabinogion. In 1970, Lin Carter, the author and editor of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, reissued it as part of the series, and from this Walton would go on to create further retellings of the other branches of the Mabinogion. She won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award in 1973 for The Song of Rhiannon, the third-published volume of the four Mabinogion books, and in 1989 won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. In 1983 she published The Sword Is Forged, the first volume in a proposed trilogy about Theseus. She died in 1996.

“Above Ker-Is” is one of the very few short fantasies written by Walton. It was written in 1927 and forgotten in a trunk for fifty years until it was subsequently rediscovered and published in The Fantastic Imagination II, edited by Robert H. Boyer and Kenneth J. Zahorski, in 1978. In her letters from the English novelist and philosopher John Cowper Powys, he notes her recommendation of the books of Anatole le Braz, the “Bard of Brittany”, a Breton poet and folklorist, who was probably the inspiration for this tale which is based on the legend of Ys, a Breton city drowned due to the actions of the pagan princess Dahut.

In my will I have left instructions that at my death the envelope containing these papers shall be burned unopened. Otherwise to write them would have violated the secrets of the confessional. And this is the strangest confession to which I, Jean Rosel, a parish priest of Douarnenez, have ever listened; one shrouded in uncanny, fabulous dreams of an earlier day, even though part of it is as simple if also as old as flesh.

It was the time of the pardon at La Palude, the greatest of our Breton festivals, and all day pilgrims had been passing on their way to the blessed St. Anne. The sick going to pray for healing, fishermen going to give thanks for preservation from their great enemy, the sea. Late that afternoon he knocked at my garden gate, a tall gaunt man in whose dark face a tremendous vitality warred oddly with asceticism. We talked of common things at first, of the pardon and the pilgrims.

“They come as their ancestors came, Father, when Heol was still worshipped on Menez Bre. Now they come to pray to the blessed grandmother of Jesus; then they paid homage to Another, older and more terrible. Her whose laughter fishermen still think they heard, down in the deep.”

“It is a blessing,” I said, “that the worship of the gentle mother of Mary has replaced that of cruel elemental forces.”

“It was not only storm-tossed waves they feared and worshipped, Father. There was Another.”

He was leaning forward, and his eyes were wide and bright, even glassy. He pointed to the great nearby Bay of Douarnenez, beneath whose blue waters, the peasants say, now lies King Gralon’s palace of cedar, silver and gold. There, by St. Guennole’s command, the King stayed the flood by casting in his daughter, despite her tears and terror. A grim tale, perhaps a twisted reminiscence of human sacrifice, and my guest’s mouth was grim.

“She made a full meal there, Father. But she wanted more.”

Somewhat startled, I said: “The sunken city of Ys may well be an old wives’ tale.”

His voice changed suddenly. “Will you hear my confession, Father?”

Until then we had been only two gentlemen talking together. I was startled again, I do not know quite why, but I agreed, as was my duty.

He said slowly: “My family has owned land near here for centuries. The Kerivals. You have heard of Guennole Kerival, Father?”

I had. As a divinity student of great promise, but one who had never taken his vows. He had disappeared instead, leaving vague and scandalous rumours behind. I said only, “Yes. I have heard of him.”

“As a great sinner?” He smiled rather wryly. “I never have been sure how great my sin was, but tonight I am going to find out. That is why I came here—I may not be able to come to any priest again.”

I felt suddenly uneasy. Twilight was coming; the sky was pale blue, mottled with great splashes of gold, but a faint shadow already lay upon the earth. There was a stillness like the stealthy quiet of gathering forces.

“Self-murder? Surely you would not dare that crime against yourself, my son?”

He laughed. “When I stand in guilt before the Highest, it will not be for my own death. Yet the man I might have been died long ago; these many years I have been his ghost. But who killed him—myself or another—that is what I must find out tonight.”

He looked down at his hands, where they lay open on his knees. Long hands, sinewy and powerful; their strength could have thrown an ox, yet once he had been famed for his brilliance, for his learning…

“You know that I was trained to be a priest, Father. It was my lifelong dream, and my mother’s. She thought me as handsome and clever as my name-saint, and my father’s opposition completed the parallel. When he died it seemed that heaven had opened the way for us. I was free to seek that holiness on which my mind had been set from infancy.”

“My son, did you never think of the dangers of presumption?”

“Maybe so. I have come to think, of late years, that it was my nature to carry things too far… But right or wrong, St. Guennole was always before me, my hero and model, he who likewise had forsworn all the good things of the world and even ignored his own father’s wishes, in that search for holiness. He had been beautiful, yet no earthly love had stayed him. He had been good, yet terrible in his goodness; unafraid, in his own complete sanctity, to punish, taking in his hands that vengeance which is God’s.” For a little while he was silent, brooding. “Before I went away to study I quarrelled about him—my saint—with Alise-Guenn, the flax-spinner’s daughter. My mother said that Alise-Guenn had the modern irreverence for all holy things, but I think it may have been only that then as always Alise-Guenn was a law unto herself. And who has a right to be that?” His strong hands clenched.

“‘I do not like your St. Guennole,’ she told me that day. ‘He was a bad man.’

“‘For saying that you should have fear—and shame too, Alise-Guenn!’ I said angrily. ‘St. Guennole was a holy man. One of the blessed saints.’

“She smiled at me with her blue-green eyes that seemed all green then, and there was more mockery than usual in her twisted coral mouth, though her smiles always mocked. ‘Murderers are considered bad,’ she said, ‘and St. Guennole made King Gralon drown the Princess Ahes. Gralon’s own daughter. That wasn’t holy. It was murder.’

“I drew away from her, saying stiffly: ‘You had better ask God to forgive you, Alise-Guenn. The Princess was a demon; she had to die.’

“‘Why? She only stole the silver key to open the gate for her lover! It was by accident that she opened the dikes and submerged Ker-Is. I don’t care! It was ugly—ugly—for her own father to kill her! And for your saint to make him do it. Doing ugly things can’t be holy.’

“She threw back her hair and faced me. She was not yet twelve then, but already the boys were watching her. Her mother too used to watch her, with the air of a fat, comfortable barnyard hen who has hatched out a swan. Or something stranger… People said that the flax-spinner, being long barren, had finally supplicated that famous dark stone, the Groach H’ouard, with heathenish and never-to-be-told-of rites, as our childless and misguided Breton women have done for ages. If so, Alise-Guenn was no right human child; the One who answers such prayers cannot be God. And she did have a strangeness about her. To look at her was to think of legendary faery women born and reborn in human shape, with Oeil-en-Lune, to fulfil some mysterious pagan destiny. Such beauty fascinates, even though it is not of God.

“I said sternly: ‘You’re blaspheming, Alise-Guenn.’ But she only laughed at me.”

“‘I’m glad—glad—that she’s still alive down there in the water! Even if she does kill sailors with her singing and her kisses. Being murdered didn’t make an end of her. Nothing can stop her now. Your St. Guennole can’t; the Virgin herself can’t. She said so.’

“‘That’s only a legend,’ I answered roughly, ‘a silly, blasphemous legend. There’s nothing God and his saints and the Virgin can’t stop. Probably St. Guennole never had any princess drowned at all, but if he did he was right. Whatever a saint does is right, because he is a saint. If we question that, it’s sacrilege, and the devil is working in us. You’re as bad as a heretic, Alise-Guenn; you ask the same kind of wicked questions they do.’

“She stared at me, and her eyes were like two great emeralds, two stone-hard, mocking emeralds. ‘I don’t think a little exercise would hurt your head, Guennole. Are you never going to think a thought your name-saint or somebody else hasn’t already thought—one of your own?’

“I wanted to seize her and shake her, but somehow I was afraid of contact with her flesh. Though I wanted to touch it—to feel the warm firmness, the rose-petal softness of it. To bruise it… I said still more sternly: ‘If you’re going to do nothing but blaspheme, Alise-Guenn, I’ll go.’

“‘If you’re going to do nothing but preach, as if you’d already taken orders, you’d better go, Guennole. I didn’t come out here to go to church.’

“I turned my back upon her and she added: ‘I think it’s really rather nice of the princess to kiss the sailors. The storms would come and drown them anyway.’

“Without more words I left her, but as I walked off through the twilight her voice pursued me with the Princess Ahes’s siren song, its eerie wailing sweetness mingling with the murmur of the sea:

‘Ahes breman Mary Morgan,

E skeud an cabr, d’an noz, a gan.’*

“I left for the city without seeing her again, and the next few years were filled with study. With unswerving, dedicated labour. In my mind I always saw myself as one of the faithful few, a white-robed figure walking steadfastly upon the heights, above the masses who lived joyously and naturally, like the beasts. I despised their weakness. Love was an uncleanness of the flesh, incompatible with purity. And the more I withstood the flesh, the fiercer my ambition—that is, my yearning for holiness—grew. All earthly fires fused into that one magnificent dream of spiritual glory: God—and myself serving Him, not failing Him like all those others… Egotism, you say? No, no, the thirst for holiness!

“Then my mother fell ill, and I was forced to return home.

“That was in the spring, a spring of endless, never-pausing rain. The grey mist and the cruel monotonous patter of the raindrops seemed to fill the universe; one wondered that earth and sky did not melt together into one great grey cloud… I was of no real help to my mother. All she wanted of me was to have me there to smile at whenever she did wake from her continual, weak dozing. If I could have talked to her of God’s goodness, read aloud to her from pious works, it would have been different. My idleness irked me; I grew restless, strained…

“I asked our housekeeper about Alise-Guenn. She said that all the young men of the parish were mad about the girl, who smiled on each and laughed at them all. ‘Like a cat with a pack of mice,’ she said and sniffed.

“‘But she is going to marry young François Kerbastiou now; her own aunt stopped by and told me that it is settled at last.’ My mother woke unexpectedly and said, ‘So you need not worry about her, Guennole.’

“Instead of relief I felt a hot sick dismay. Something so like jealousy that I was horrified and astonished…

“A few days later a pardon was held. The weather suddenly cleared and my mother urged me to go. And I told myself that a strong man did not need to avoid temptation. I came after Vespers, when the young men were wrestling and running races before the girls grouped near the old church. One stood near the yellow bonfire, and her hair gleamed with a strange, greenish light. Can it be natural for gold hair to shine like that under some lights?

“‘Alise-Guenn!’ Somehow I found myself beside her, holding her hands. She drew back, out of the circle of the firelight, and her low laugh had a note of crooning sweetness, of elemental power.

“‘So you have not forgotten old friends—monsieur?’

“‘Not “monsieur” to you, Alise-Guenn.’

“Then I was silent, regretting my impulsive words, awkwardly groping for safer ones. Her hands were cool and slim, yet I dropped them as if they had been hot. Yet I walked on with her, into the shadow of the trees. One, gnarled and low-trunked, made a natural seat, which she took. In the dusk her face was like a silver flame, and her eyes were blue-green, unfathomable shadows of beauty. She seemed one with some great harmony that held all the vastness of the moonlit woods and the far-off, gently murmuring sea.

“I had to say something; I said: ‘You and François should have waited until I was ordained. Then I could have married you.’

“She laughed. She laughed until she rocked back and forth and would have fallen from the tree if I had not caught her. The feel of her body shocked me like electricity, and I tried to draw away, but the fair shining head lay back on my shoulder. She smiled up into my eyes.

“‘So they have been telling you that too? Well, if I am ever married, you will marry me, Guennole Kerival.’

“The rest of the evening I kept a distance between myself and her, but I could still feel her, feel that strange, half-delightful, half-dreadful tingling her body had sent through mine. As though in some subtle sense she still lay there, invincible and inescapable, in my arms.

“I got little rest that night. Time after time I woke, jerking myself up out of troubled dreams. Then at last I found myself walking towards the bay. I thought, ‘I will bathe there; then perhaps I can sleep.’

“But I could not find the bay. The beach had vanished. Instead there was solid land, crowned by the white walls of a great city.

“The city of Ker-Is—Ker-Ahes—in all its lost splendours!

“For a moment I stopped, thinking that I had gone mad. Then I went on, as it seemed predestined that I should go on. I walked between the great gates, down the streets of wonder that legend had preserved and deified, past pale palaces whose contents not even legend remembers. I saw a church, and I told myself that all must be well. Surely the swimmer whom old tales foretell had found sunken Ys and rung its church bells, so bringing it up again out of the sea.

“But I heard no church bells, and in that gleaming place I felt nothing Christian. But I never thought of turning back. Neither did I choose my way; I only followed it as steel follows the magnet… The smell of the sea was in my nostrils, and also the smell of cedar.

“And then, round a bend in the way, I saw it—King Gralon’s palace of cedar, silver, and gold. Gorgeous as though sun and moon had fused together to form that wonder, their radiance dimmed by the lovely soft colours of countless twilights, until it was bearable to human sight. The silver doors were shut, but as I looked they opened, with a movement that had the irresistible, effortless softness of waves. The space within was like a pit of magic dusk, a dusk which filled me with the fear that a poor swimmer feels for deep waters. But like the magnet-drawn I could neither stop nor turn back…

“I stood in a great shining chamber, and in the centre of it was a couch, and on the couch she sat. She wore only a wave, and it foamed white against the more rosy white of her breast and shoulders. Her hands were held out to me, and she was smiling, an irresistible, beckoning smile. And I knew that wherever the sea was, waves were rising around us, a flood that could not be escaped. I cried out like a drowning man, yet in delight as well as horror:

“‘Ahes… Ahes… Alise-Guenn!’

“Later, much later, I woke alone in my own bed, and the moonlight was falling, in a pale pure pool, upon the rug.

“I did not stay long in Brittany after that. My mother was mending slightly, and she herself was the first to say that I should go back to my neglected studies. All my pride and hopes had come to this: that I ached to flee from the scene of my humiliation and sickening shame…

“I made confession. I flung myself into study and prayer; I filled my mind with high, safe things. Yet always she hovered at the back of it, a lovely, evil shadow waiting to enter. Alise-Guenn, who had roused the defiling urges of my flesh…

“Then my mother grew worse. I had to return to Brittany. I am not sure why I thought I had to ask about Alise-Guenn.

“She had grown cold toward François Kerbastiou. There was no real proof, my housekeeper admitted, that she ever had made him any promise. But François, wild with anger and grief, had followed her one day when she had walked upon the cliffs, and she had returned alone. Later, when his body was washed up by the sea, his mother had accused her of murder. Nobody really believed that the girl had actually pushed her lover over the cliff, but many felt that she had driven him to suicide. She was no better than an outcast now; her own mother had died, and it was said that in her last days few words had passed between mother and daughter. I saw how well-deserved Alise-Guenn’s lot must be, but I also felt unwilling doubt and pity. The memory of her, gay and unafraid, cried out against this utter defeat.

“Late in the autumn my mother died. I mourned for her; it was the breaking of the oldest, completest tie, but it was also the breaking of a chain. Now I could escape. Yet on the night of her funeral I could not rest. Striving with some trouble I could not or would not put a name to, I paced the cliff paths. Until I heard a voice behind me.

“‘Monsieur—Guennole—’

“I wheeled sharply. In the intense stillness I had heard nothing, only the lapping of the waves, but she was there, her black dress one with the dark, her face a shining pallor.

“I could not speak. I felt, my whole being tensing for our final struggle, and she came nearer.

“‘Say whatever you really believe, Guennole.’

“Somehow I found my voice. ‘I have heard ugly things of you. What is the truth, Alise-Guenn?’

“‘It is hard to say.’ For a moment she was silent, then her emerald eyes met mine squarely. ‘Ugly things—do you think I would do them, when I hate ugliness more than anything in the world? More than what you call sin?’ She stopped and drew a deep breath. ‘I will be honest. I made a mistake. I only smiled at François Kerbastiou as I smiled at all the others, but I should have stopped smiling at him. For he was one who could believe what he wanted to believe.’

“‘Your smiles, Alise-Guenn!’ I said bitterly… ‘What are they?’

“‘They are half friendliness, at least.’ The shining gaze did not waver; it grasped me as a magnet grasps. ‘And the other half—well, it has always been as if something greater than myself bade me do it—as if I had to follow some old, old law… But I did not want François Kerbastiou to follow me up here that day. I told him that his love would pass, and it would have—it was of that kind, a feverish thing. But he was like a little boy, he could not bear to give up what he wanted. He seized me. I pushed him back,—and he slipped…’

“Her shoulders shook, as water ripples, and she was crying. Never, even in our childhood, had I seen her cry. She put her hands to hide the shining tears.

“‘Do you think it was sweet to see him fall? That it is a sweet sight to remember?… And now no woman speaks a friendly word to me, and no man, except for one reason… But I will not abase myself. I will not try to explain to people who think only of themselves and little things. But you too know what it is to dream. That is why I care, Guennole; why I have always cared.’

“I believed her then. I thought I knew that she was honest, and that I understood her for the first time. Pagan or not, there was nothing dark or weak in her. She was like a strong wine, but so she had been made. All the depths and the heights were in her, and yet she was neither too high nor too low.

“In a great rush of tenderness and pity I put my arms about her. What I felt seemed beautiful and holy. ‘Don’t cry, Alise-Guenn. Sweetheart—love—’

“She put her arms round me. I felt her breasts, and the old fire ran through me. I knew then what I had done…

“I flung her from me, but she did not fall. It was I who staggered back. She was still there before me, a figure of eerie glamorous beauty gleaming there.

“‘So that is all you can see in me—evil and temptation.’ Back into the liquid silver of her voice had come the mockery, hard and bitter now. ‘You have spoilt both the man and the priest, Guennole Kerival.’

“I wanted to run away, but I could not. My body was hot and quivering: one awful ache of longing. She moved forward, and it seemed to me that her moving was like the rising of the sea, resistless, beautiful. Like Ahes rising from her waters; from those waves that are said to form a bed for her and the man who dies beneath her kiss…

“‘But you will always want me, even if you cannot love me.’ Her laugh cut like a silver whip.

“I was between her and the path. She put her hand on my arm to push me aside. If she had not—if she had not—I seized her then. She cried out once, but in my ears a louder voice was ringing—St. Guennole’s command to Gralon long ago. It gave me strength—and as I lifted her, held her above the sea that roared far below us, I cried out myself: ‘St. Guennole was right! St. Guennole was right!’”

He hid his face in his hands. My garden was very still. The tide was coming in.

“No one ever guessed. She was never—found.” He lifted his face, and its weary hopelessness dispelled my horror. “That is significant, surely, Father? On our coast the bodies of the drowned are always found. I think it significant, too, that François Kerbastiou died by drowning. The fate of all her victims, through all the ages. Is she not said to be many times reborn? Maybe she herself does not always know, maybe sometimes she shares some of the feelings of other women. Once she was born as that princess who destroyed her own city, and again as—”

“My son, do not delude yourself.” I spoke sternly. “You murdered a woman. There is no Ahes.”

“The Fathers of the early Church believed that the pagan gods were demons!” he flashed back at me, his jaw setting. But instantly he grew quiet. “Forgive me, Father. To you, I know, it must seem a delusion. I myself do not wholly believe. For the deed did not free me. I could not take my vows. All these years I have wandered—wondered, until I was almost worn out with wondering: Was it—or was it not—murder?”

I was silent; I had already given him my answer. Perhaps, in a little while, he could bring himself to face it.

He said, still quietly: “For years I have hidden inland, Father, but tonight I am going out to sea. If she does not come, I will admit my delusion, I will give myself up to the law. If she comes, it will be enough to know that I am not a common murderer. I must know.”

Perhaps I did not act wisely then. I was taken by surprise, stunned by the horror and strangeness of it all. I did insist upon accompanying him. He agreed to that readily, saying: “She will not harm you, Father. Her quarrel is with me.”

We set off in the twilight, with my good Yann Bergat, in his fishing-boat. The gold splashes in the sky were growing paler and smaller, like a fading halo, and the sea sung about our bows with a mocking yet crooning sound, exquisitely sweet. The sound was like a woman’s laugh, I thought, amused by my overwrung folly, and like a cat’s contented purring. It was strangely soothing. I found myself very weary, and lay down in the thwarts. Kerival sat up very straight, his fixed, unhappy eyes staring out to sea…

A great slap of water in my face woke me. I called out and pulled myself up into a sitting position. Luckily, we were not far from shore, but the sky had darkened. Wind and waves were roaring. I looked around and then called again, sharply: “Yann! Where is Monsieur Kerival?”

He crossed himself. “St. Anne knows. He was at the far end of the boat, and my back was turned. But when this storm came up all of a sudden and I looked around, he was not there. I could see nothing on the water. Nothing anywhere…”

* See Anatole Le Braz’s Les Pays des Pardons.

1980

Justice Tresilian in the Tower

Ken Alden

Ken Alden was the penname of Alan Kitch. According to Hugh Lamb, who included several of his stories in his Tales of Terror series, he was from Bridgwater, Somerset and worked in local government. He was also a screenwriter, and a regular correspondent with the Daily Mirror. As well as Lamb’s series, he also contributed multiple stories for the Fontana Book of Ghost Stories series.

“Justice Tresilian in the Tower” was published in 1980 in Hugh Lamb’s New Tales of Terror. It is an unusual and intriguing historical tale of pagan gods and royal traitors in medieval Britain.

The guard looked down from the battlement of the Well Tower at the three bears from the royal menagerie, who had been taken down to the Thames to catch their food. It was already so dark that he could only see them when they moved. As he watched, the white bear caught a large trout, put it into its mouth and began to shake it around. This was a mistake. The fish’s flesh ripped and the bear lost its grip. The trout fell into the mud a few yards away, where it tossed and turned in agony. The bear moved forward to retrieve its meal, but the two pages who held its lead pulled it back.

“No, Titus!” shouted the larger of the two. “That one’s for us.”

The boy let go of the lead and tried to pick up the trout. Just as he was about to grab it, the bear growled and hit out at him with its paw. The boy pulled back, tripped over some driftwood and fell into the mud.

The guard heard footsteps coming up the tower’s stairs. He turned to face the doorway just in time to see his sergeant come through it. He quickly came to attention and saluted. The sergeant did not bother to acknowledge this.

“Have you been given your instructions?” demanded the sergeant.

The guard nodded.

“The governor told you what the end result would be?”

Another nod.

“Then you should realize how important this is, and why it should look like an accident.”

“My father and my father’s father, my whole family have fought only for Bran. If I failed him they would kill me.”

The sergeant frowned. “They wouldn’t get a chance. We would do it for them.”

The sound of laughter came up from the river bank. Both men looked down over the battlements to see what had happened. The page had now retrieved the trout. He was holding the twitching fish up in front of the bear and taunting the creature with it.

“What the hell are you doing down there!” shouted the sergeant.

The pages jumped and looked up at the tower.

“You should have brought those things in long ago. If you don’t hurry we’ll close the gates on you.”

The pages glared at him for a moment. Then they started pulling their charges towards the steps that lead to the wharf.

“Leave the fish!” shouted the sergeant.

“But we can’t just throw it away,” protested the mud-covered page. “It’s a good fish.”

“Leave it or you don’t get in.”

The page dropped the fish and made a gesture at the tower. The sergeant had already turned back to the guard, however, and did not see it.

“Lieutenant Kinn is meeting him at the Lion Tower now,” he said. “They should be here soon. Remember—he is powerful. His family could do us a lot of harm. So it must look like an accident.”

“Yes, sir.”

The sergeant turned abruptly and started down the steps. When he was out of sight, the guard looked down over the battlement. The pages were now using the small bridge at the foot of the Well Tower to cross the moat. On the other side of the wharf the trout was writhing its last few moments away. The guard carefully noted its position. If he got this killing over quickly he should be able to retrieve that fish before the tide came in.

As the bears were led along Water Lane towards the Lion Tower, Lieutenant Kinn and Master Tyne stepped back into a doorway to avoid them.

“Those things have been involved as well,” said Kinn. “On All Hallow’s Eve, one of my men saw two of them on the casemate near the Brass Mount. When he threw a stone at them, they just disappeared.”

“That sounds like a normal ghost,” murmured Tyne. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Yes—well—a few days later another man was killed at his post by some wild animal.”

“Um—I see.” Tyne nodded his head a few times. “That does not sound like a normal ghost. I don’t suppose there was any chance of something from your menagerie doing it?”

“None, they are too well guarded.”

The men left the doorway and moved on down the lane.

“That’s the Well Tower.”

Kinn pointed it out. Tyne gave it only a casual glance.

“I hope you don’t want me to spend the whole night up there in the fog,” he said.

“Well that’s where it always starts. What better place could there be to see it all?”

The lieutenant left the main lane and started to stride down the small path that led to the Well Tower. Tyne did not follow him.

“Wait!” he shouted.

Kinn came to a halt and turned to look at him.

“What’s the matter?”

“You said there was plenty of time before it starts and I want to see the chapel first.”

Kinn glanced at the tower and then reluctantly came back to Tyne. “It’s this way,” he said and he led Tyne through the opening by the Leathern Tower which took them into the great inner courtyard where the White Tower stood.

“Has it only been these floating things and beasts?” Tyne asked as they crossed the yard. “Nothing else?”

“There is nothing else that can be easily described.”

“Well, so far you have told me nothing that would justify the fuss you are making.”

“There are other things, but they are not material. It gets very oppressive here late at night.” The lieutenant looked up at the stars. “Sometimes I think there is a huge ship up there, floating above us, in the darkness. The stars get blotted out and it is not by a cloud. There is often lightning when there is no storm.”

Tyne nodded at the White Tower.

“Tresilian is in there, I suppose.”

“Yes.”

“Whereabouts?”

“His cell is at the top on the right.”

“And the floating things always make their way to that part of the building?”

“Always—they go directly for the judge.”

“Who was it suggested he be put there?”

Kinn shrugged. “Nobody, I think; he was just put there.”

A raven landed on a nearby post and let out a squawk. Tyne stopped to look at it.

“How many of the birds are there now?” he asked.

“Oh, hundreds.”

“And they are still fed?”

That’s the governor’s orders.”

Tyne went up to the bird and held his hand out to it. The bird jumped on.

“Your master is still as powerful as ever, then,” he said to it.

The raven let out another squawk by way of reply and then flew off.

“Is the bird significant?” Kinn asked.

“Oh, very significant.”

“In what way?”

“Let’s see the chapel. Then I’ll explain.”

Kinn led him past the White Tower to the chapel of St. Peter on the other side of the great yard. It was very near the homes of the mint workers’ families, so there were a good deal of bones and other refuse scattered over the grass. Tyne kicked aside the decomposing head of a chicken.

“This is worse than Westminster,” he said.

Kinn gave another indifferent shrug. “There are few dogs in the tower to clear it away.”

They entered the chapel. There were only a few lit candles in it, but these were enough to show that the place was deserted. The two men picked up a candelabrum each and used them to illuminate the wall paintings. These consisted of demons, goats, sheep, oak trees, grape vines and many similar objects.

“How recent are they?” Tyne asked.

“Many come from the time of the Black Prince. But most were done just after Richard’s coronation.”

Tyne nodded his head several times. “Does the Bishop of London visit this place?”

“It’s not part of his diocese.”

“I doubt if he would be happy if he saw it anyway. You see that there?”

Tyne pointed at a naked man wrestling with a deer. The two figures seemed to merge into one so that the deer’s antlers looked as if they were coming out of the man’s head.

“That’s Cernunnos. Some call him Herne. Now, you see that fellow there?”

He pointed at a man whose hair was replaced by leaves and who had a grapevine in his mouth.

“That’s the Green Man of the May Day celebrations, and you see that dragon sitting on a globe? That’s the Worm Ouroboros. They have merged ancient practices with the Bulgar, Albigensian, Catharist, Manichaean and Gnostic heresies. They are Lollards all right, and probably a lot more. You were right to bring me here. Your suspicions are well founded. Now let’s have a look at the altar.”

They walked quickly to the back of the church where a small wooden altar was kept. On the altar there was a Celtic cross and a small stone penis. Tyne picked up the penis.

“Few churches in London would openly display these now. Though I dare say that there are still several country churches who have them on the altar, rather than in it.” He looked round at the walls again. “I’m surprised they don’t have Shiela-na-Gig here.”

Kinn looked puzzled. “Who?”

“Oh come, lieutenant, surely you have seen her carved in some church or other? She’s that naked lady who sits with her legs wide open, showing all her charms. She’s usually enticing her consort, Bal, the ever-upright. A well developed gentleman, that. You must have seen them.†

Kinn shook his head. “I do not go to that sort of church.”

Tyne grinned. “Ah—that’s probably just as well. If you did you wouldn’t have had to call me in. Now I don’t suppose I could see Justice Tresilian, could I?”

Kinn looked unhappy about this. “What about the Well Tower?” he asked.

Tyne made a dismissive gesture. “Oh, there’s still plenty of time for that. If I’m going to make a worthwhile judgement I’ll have to see Tresilian sooner or later. There are no objections to that, I hope.”

“I suppose not. But I’ll have to arrange guards. We can’t just walk in on him.”

Tyne strode towards the exit. Outside in the courtyard, he paused to let Kinn catch up.

“Wait here,” said Kinn, when he did so. “I’ll arrange for the guards.”

He hurried over to the nearest house and began banging on its door. After about half a minute the bolts were pulled back and a unkempt youth stepped out into the courtyard.

“What is it?” he demanded.

“I want you to go to the Well Tower and fetch the sergeant and the private you will find there. Bring them to the northern entrance of the White Tower.”

The youth frowned. “Why should I?”

“Because I am going to give you a groat, that’s why.”

Kinn fiddled around in his purse until he found an example of the coin. The youth examined it with distaste.

“This comes from the Bristol mint,” he said.

“So? It’s still legal tender. It does not have to be made by your fair hand. Do you want it or not?”

“All right.”

“The Well Tower,” Kinn reminded him.

“I remember.”

The youth started to stroll across the yard.

“Run,” Kinn urged.

He ran.

The lieutenant watched him for a few seconds, then made his way back to Tyne and the two of them headed towards the White Tower.

“You don’t think it was King Richard who had those things painted on the wall, do you?” Kinn asked as they neared the tower.

Tyne shrugged. “Who knows if you don’t? You’re more likely to have some idea than I am. I doubt it, though. Richard—our sovereign lord, the second of that name—does not really oppose that sort of thing or support it. He doesn’t really care. But there are a good many in court who do support it. They may not do so openly, but behind the scenes that’s a different matter.”

“Who should I report this to, then?” said Kinn.

“Don’t ask me. I’m just here to comment on the floating things.” Tyne pointed a finger at the lieutenant. “You’re the one who should know how things stand at court. If you don’t I should find out who suggested that he be put in the White Tower and not one of the others. That would give you a clue.”

“Why is the White Tower important?”

“Because it was built on a very ancient mound, part of an important pagan temple.” Tyne pointed at the base of the tower they were approaching. “You can still see its outline, though the surrounding yard has risen over the years and partly masked it. Buried in that mound is the head of Brutus of Troy, the founder of London. Next to it is the head of the god Bran.”

Tyne glanced at the lieutenant and saw only incomprehension in his face. “Really, my friend you show a most surprising ignorance. If you stopped any serf in the street he could tell you all of these things.”

The incomprehension was replaced by annoyance. “I do not belong to the community of serfs, but to the pure community of God.”

Tyne grinned again. “Yes, well, as I said before, that’s to my advantage.”

The frown deepened. “I would prefer less wit from you and more information. Tell me about this Bran.”

The grin went. “He was an important god who ruled this island before the days of Christ. He could not be killed by any man. Or rather, he could only be killed by one who knew his real name. He always carried a twig of alder into battle. That was the clue to his name.”

They came to a halt outside the White Tower’s northern door. Tyne continued his lecture without a pause.

“A woman called Gwydion guessed what the twig meant. Shortly after Bran was killed when a poisoned arrow hit his heel. His head stayed alive though and kept on prophesying even after they had buried it here. The raven was his bird. It was his sacred symbol. That’s why there are so many of them here. They are protecting him and carrying out his will. To a lesser extent, the crow, rook and the blackbird are also his.”

“And you think that these people who want to harm Justice Tresilian still worship this Bran and so had him brought here, to the White Tower?”

“Possibly—Bran still has many followers in Essex and after the way the good justice treated Wat Tyler’s colleagues, he would have plenty of enemies there.”

The sergeant and the guard from the Well Tower appeared on the other side of the yard and started to hurry across it.

“This castle is part of a line of power,” Tyne went on. “A line that greets the midwinter sunrise. The two other sacred hills of London, Llandin and Penton, are also on this line. If you really want to know who is responsible for the flying things, you may find them there.”

The sergeant and the guard reached the tower and saluted their superior.

“We are paying a visit to Justice Tresilian,” Kinn told them. “You two will stand in for the White Guard.”

He turned, pulled out a ring of keys and used one of them to open the tower’s large oak door. Inside, there was a long stone corridor lit by only one burning torch. Lieutenant Kinn took this out of its holder and then led them along the corridor to a flight of steps. At the top of the stairs there was another corridor, at the end of which was Justice Tresilian’s cell. Kinn got out his ring of keys again and pushed one of them into the cell’s door. As the lock turned, there was a loud clang which was followed by a cry of fear inside the cell. Kinn then pushed open the door and held up the torch.

Tyne caught a glimpse of a thin old man with several days’ growth of bristles on his face. Then Kinn entered the cell and blocked his view. When he entered the little room himself, Sir Robert Tresilian was cowering on the floor, trying to hide his face in a corner.

“Come on—let’s see you.” Kinn gave the justice a kick.

The old man pulled himself further into the corner.

“Let’s see you, I said.”

He kicked again.

This time, the old man turned to look at them.

“He has the eyes of a statue,” said Tyne after staring at Tresilian for a moment. “There is nothing there.”

Kinn nodded in agreement. “I say that as well. But the governor is not so sure. The trouble is the good justice says so little that you can’t really judge.”

A strange noise sounded in the distance, something that Tyne had never heard before. He gave Kinn a questioning look.

“It’s the elephant,” the lieutenant explained. “It often does that when things start to happen.”

“Let’s get to the Well Tower, then.” Tyne hurried from the cell.

“You two stay here,” Kinn said to the sergeant and guard. “We’ll certainly be back.” Then he followed Tyne.

By the time both of them had reached the courtyard, every animal in the royal menagerie seemed to be giving voice to its fear.

“It’s worse than ever tonight,” said Kinn.

The two men hurried over to the opening by Leathern Tower. As they entered Water Lane there was a roll of thunder and a flash of lightning.

“That’s how it always starts,” shouted Kinn. “Look at the Well Tower!”

Tyne looked at it. The top of the tower was glowing slightly.

“That’s the Roman’s fire,” he shouted back. “I’ve seen it on a ship’s mast.”

A ball of light left the tower and floated off over the moat.

All the animals in the menagerie suddenly fell silent.

“That’s just lightning.” Tyne went on shouting, even though the noise was gone. “Just lightning—it’s nothing supernatural.”

Kinn started to hurry back towards the main courtyard. “Come here,” he said as he ran.

Tyne followed him. As he left Water Lane, another ball of light formed at the top of the tower. This floated across the lane and hit Leathern Tower. There was a flash which dazzled Tyne for a moment.

“Follow me.” Kinn ordered. “Follow me, or you’ll miss it.”

Tyne staggered after him and nearly hit a wall. By the time he had got out into the courtyard, another ball of light had formed. This managed to miss Leathern Tower and floated out over the courtyard. Behind it there was a thin trail of light, like a glowing rope attached to the ball. The other end of the rope was attached to the Well Tower. The further the ball got from the tower, the smaller it became. It seemed to lose its energy by creating the rope. Finally it disappeared completely and there was just the rope floating in the air.

“Is this how it always happens?” Tyne asked.

Kinn nodded. “Always. In fact, it’s hardly started.”

A new ball of light left the Well Tower. It travelled along the rope and when it reached the end continued onwards, leaving a new length of rope behind it.

“You see what it is aiming for, don’t you?” Kinn shouted.

The ball was heading for the White Tower. It seemed to be aiming directly at the section which held Justice Tresilian’s cell. About two-thirds of the way across the courtyard it ran out of energy and disappeared, leaving behind just the waving line.

“There’s always a pause here,” said Kinn. “I think it gathers up force for the final effort.”

The line started to curl upwards. For a while, it looked as if it were going to try and tie itself into a knot.

Suddenly the elephant began to trumpet again. This was the signal for the whole menagerie to start howling.

“Look upwards,” Kinn suggested. “Can you see the ship above us?”

Tyne looked upwards. All he could see was blackness. The stars had disappeared.

“It is only a cloud,” he said.

“Look closely!” Kinn urged. “You can see the timbers of the thing.”

Tyne could still see nothing.

Another ball of light started to make its way along the rope. This time, there was more force behind it. When it reached the end of the rope it sailed on until it hit the side of the White Tower. There was another flash, though not as dazzling as the earlier one had been. Tyne still hid his eyes. When he looked again the ball had gone. There was just the glowing rope rubbing itself against the stone wall.

Kinn ran towards the White Tower. Tyne quickly followed him. They both raced along the stone corridor and up the stairs. Kinn reached the top first and came to a halt there. The corridor that led to Justice Tresilian’s cell was illuminated by the light that was shining through the cell’s open doorway. The sergeant and the guard were out in the corridor trying to keep well back from the doorway and stare through it at the same time.

When he heard Tyne on the steps directly behind him, Kinn hurried forward again.

“Is it the same as before?” he asked as he neared the cell.

“Yes, sir,” replied the sergeant.

Kinn stopped directly in front of the doorway and stared into the cell.

“Devil’s work,” he murmured.

The glowing rope had come right through the stone wall, apparently without damaging it. Once in the cell it split into several smaller strands that looked rather like the roots of a plant. Most of these roots had attached themselves to the walls and seemed to be discharging their energy into the stones. The biggest root, however, had attached itself to Justice Tresilian’s chest and was causing him to jerk around like a fish out of water. His mouth was open, but he was apparently beyond screaming. The pain had made him lose all appearance of rational humanity. It had reduced him to mere twitching flesh.

Tyne did not hurry down the corridor. He strolled down it with an unnatural calmness. As he neared the cell, he gave a little nod. The guard then stepped forward and pushed Kinn into the cell.

The moment the lieutenant was in the room all the spare roots left the walls and attached themselves to him. There was another blinding explosion of light. This time, however, it lasted for over a minute. When all the energy had expended itself and the roots had faded, there were two inert bodies in the cell. The guard stepped forward and bent down over the one that had been Lieutenant Kinn.

“He should be dead,” said Tyne. “It will look as if his heart has raced itself to a halt.”

The guard moved over to the second body.

“He should be alive, though,” Tyne added. “We can’t have him missing his own execution.” The magician turned to the sergeant. “I must get back to the temple immediately. There is still a lot to be done if we are to keep the force under control. You can tell the governor that we have got rid of his curious Christian.”

Five days later the execution of Justice Tresilian took place. There was a huge crowd on Tower Hill. Practically everybody hated the justice. There had been singing and dancing for hours. But when the Tower’s gates opened and the cart carrying Justice Tresilian was pulled up to the execution platform, everyone fell silent. They were silenced not by the sight of the justice, but by the large flock of ravens that flew above the cart. The few Christians who understood what this meant grew frightened. Many of them turned their heads away. Others started to hurry back to the city. Those who did not understand merely wondered what had caused such a flock to gather. The great majority of the crowd grinned, laughed and grew excited because of the sight.

As the executioners prepared the gallows the flock of birds grew bigger. All the crows, rooks and blackbirds of London were joining it, until there was a massive cloud of them, which cast a shadow over the gallows. When Justice Tresilian was pushed from the ladder and swung from his rope, a shout came from the crowd. Few were looking at the dying man. Everyone was staring upwards. At the moment the justice fell, the black mass up in the sky seemed to convulse and take on features. For that moment, there was a strange, unnatural, illusion. It seemed that up there in the sky was floating the huge detached head of a man. A man who was looking down at the gallows and laughing.

† Historical note. A survey carried out after the second world war by Professor Webb, then Secretary of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, showed that ninety per cent of British churches built before the time of the Black Death had a stone penis hidden in their altar. A good example of Shiela-na-Gig and Bal can be found at St. Mary’s Whittlesford, Cambridgeshire; it is by no means the only example though. Most areas have one or two; however, they are usually hidden away. The best known “sexy” carving is the contortionist in Chalk Church, Kent; Charles Dickens mentioned it in Great Expectations. —K.A.

Author’s note: Bran is a real mythological character. In fact, beyond the magic, everything in the story has a historical or mythological basis. The word “bran” means crow or raven and alder in various ancient British languages. He was one of the most important British gods, so important that King Arthur was said to have been jealous and had part of the Tower of London pulled down so that he could dig up Bran’s head. Since the legend of the Tower ravens is still alive, he obviously did not succeed. The evidence for pagan survivals in this period is best presented in the work of Margaret Murray and Michael Harrison. Even some of the magic has a factual basis. In 1817 the Keeper of the Crown Jewels, who lived in the Tower, was at dinner with his family when a weird cylindrical object floated into the room. It was as thick as a man’s arm and filled with a thick blue and white fluid which kept separating into thinner clouds. When something was thrown at it, the cylinder disappeared. Only a few months after this incident, one of the sentries died after being attacked by a huge phantom bear. Originally it was going to be Judge Jeffreys in the Tower. I naturally had an interest in him since the judge committed many of his worst crimes in Bridgwater and there is a remote possibility that I am descended from his chief executioner. However, I did not think that the story would really work in that period so I moved it back a few hundred years to the reign of Richard II. The case of Justice Tresilian almost exactly matches that of Judge Jeffreys. The Wat Tyler revolt that the justice helped suppress had many signs of a pagan uprising against the oppression of the church. —K.A.

1998

Family History

Stephen Baxter

One of the most recognized names in modern science fiction, Stephen Baxter is known for his hard sci-fi novels such as The Time Ships and The Light of Other Days, co-authored with Arthur C. Clarke. With a doctorate in aerospace engineering research, he originally worked as a teacher before becoming a full-time writer. His first published work was the 1986 short story “The Xeelee Flower” in Interzone magazine; since then he has gone on to win the British Science Fiction Award, the Locus Award, the John W. Campbell Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award.

“Family History” is a 1998 short story first published in Stephen Jones and David Sutton’s Dark Terrors 4: The Gollancz Book of Horror anthology. It is a tale of what may go wrong if you fail to follow your family’s religious traditions, particularly if those traditions date all the way back to Roman Britain.

The Wall ran to the left of the road. It was a long, hummocky earthwork, like a line of beasts buried in the intense green that blanketed the ground. After two thousand years the mortar had crumbled to dust, and unruly life sprouted from the stones’ every frost-cracked crevice. The Wall itself was flanked by partially filled ditchwork, and punctuated by the remains of turrets and milecastles and forts; the surviving buildings were reduced to their foundations, which were moulded into eerie stone ripples by centuries of subsidence.

The Wall marched for seven hundred miles, across the neck of the country, from Carlisle to Newcastle.

Beyond the Wall there was only moorland waste: rowan trees clinging to rock outcrops, scattered farmsteads, knots of cattle diminished by the sweep of the landscape. The cattle seemed to glare, challenging, into Valler’s warm BMW. As if some remnant of their ancient wildness had yet to be bred out of them.

Sunday morning in Northumberland. The February sky was a grey lid, betraying no hint of the sun.

Valler had grown up here, but he had always felt out of place, lost in this huge time-steeped landscape.

Somehow threatened.

After the encounter with his father this morning Valler had intended to drive by the most direct route back to London, back to his life. But frustration and aggression were still fizzing in his blood.

In fact his hand still hurt.

And some impulse had made him swing off the A road to follow this minor route, the Roman road that tracked the line of the Wall. He was heading east; sooner or later he would hit the southbound A1, around Newcastle.

He came to a church.

He knew it, in fact: it was called Saint Andrew’s, and it was a squat, ugly Anglo-Saxon pile. He’d spent every Sunday morning of his youthful life here, dragged along by his mother.

After fourteen centuries the church looked like an eroded, crouching animal.

He slowed.

There was a pub opposite the church.

It used to be called something appropriate—the Wilfrid Arms?—but now it was part of a chain, meaninglessly renamed the Frog and Firkin. But it was brightly lit, replete with chalk boards offering Satellite Football and Country-Style Hot Food.

And it was open, of course. Sunday morning.

Six, seven hours to London from here, Valler. A quick one would calm him down. And it would be a kind of triumph, to drink in sight of his mother’s church.

He pulled into the pub car park.

Outside the BMW, the air was profoundly cold: not freezing, but laden with a moisture that seemed to work into his lungs. But he relished the sudden discomfort. The distraction.

… It had come to a head this morning.

The whole point of Valler’s weekend visit was to get his father to sign the papers that would get him, at last, out of his miner’s cottage and into sheltered accommodation.

And then they could sell the cottage.

And so release the money Valler needed.

Simple. Valler had everything prepared, had rehearsed what he would say.

But when Valler had called, he found the old man in all his Mithraic finery: the absurd red tunic with its piped sleeves and yellow belt, and the Superman cloak hanging off that wizened remnant of a body, and the patera and sword in those arthritic hands. He was the Father of the Temple: the highest Grade, the earthly counterpart of the Unconquered God himself.

The old fool was trying, one last time, to recruit Valler. To make him stay here, as the last of the line.

Family history, he’d said. Two thousand years. Valler should put aside the middle-class claptrap he surrounded himself with in London. He should come back here, to what was, in the end, all that mattered.

Family and blood.

But Valler hadn’t come here for this tired old bullshit.

He’d said so.

And one thing had led to another.

And then—

… He found he’d crossed the road, to the church. There were a few cars here, bumped onto the road’s dark green verge.

He walked along a gravel path to the back of the church, to the heavy wooden door. It was propped open with a wedge.

Walking in was like being swallowed by a dry old mouth.

He let his eyes dark-adapt. There was a battered wooden chair here, notices about services, a box for restoration donations.

He passed through a second door and entered the body of the church. There was a sharp, warm smell of incense and flower perfume, and just for a moment Valler was a child again, holding his mother’s hand.

There were people here, mostly women and children. A brightly robed vicar was reading at a candlelit altar.

It was a service, some kind of modern happy-clappy thing for simple minds.

Of course it’s a service. It’s Sunday, Valler.

Nobody had noticed him.

The church’s enclosing, womb-like darkness was barely relieved by the sparsely placed candles.

Valler found himself standing on the gravestone of a Roman soldier. INTERFECTUS IN BELLUM—killed in the war. It was a warrior’s memorial slab, recycled as a paving stone.

The women were dowdy, overweight and slumped. The men wore tracksuit tops stretched over beer bellies. The restless kids were of all ages. There was a group of older girls, huddling together like young heifers, whispering and giggling.

Heifers, yes.

These people were like cattle, most of them without jobs, without purpose or function or beauty, the fight bred out of them. Like the cattle in the fields outside.

Like his father.

Brittunculi. The little Brits. That was what the Romans had contemptuously called those they had conquered.

Valler despised them all.

One of the older girls turned and looked directly at Valler.

She was slim, but he could see the curve of hips, the push of small breasts under the striped football shirt she wore. Her oval, perfectly symmetrical face seemed to shine against the drab background. She looked at him as a child would, without calculation or mockery, her eyes blue windows. But her lips were full.

She could have been as old as seventeen, as young as fourteen.

He felt his mouth dry. He was dismayed by the power of his lust for this girl.

The girl turned away. Somehow he found it hard to pick her out again.

Now the ancient, reworked stones seemed enclosing, oppressive.

He walked out of the church. Outside, the sky was unbroken cloud. He sucked in the damp, cold air.

He headed back over the road. He hesitated at the BMW, then went on to the pub, blood swirling.

The redeveloped bar was too big, too cold. There were a couple of old men drinking pints of thick black local beer with a steady, practised purpose. A TV mounted in an upper corner carried a rattling, noisy cartoon.

Valler ordered a bitter from the bored landlord. And then another. He drank his beer quickly. It was pumped, gassy. He could feel it working on his head, but its taste was sour.

He lit up a cigarette, filling his nose and mouth with the smoke.

… The girl, though.

He’d never been able to understand how such beauty was able to emerge from the herds of Brittunculi, with their lousy diet and precocious smoking and drinking. But emerge it did, in every generation, and the girls bloomed like etiolated flowers for their few short years. Long enough for them to attract the fumbling hands and stiff dicks of the local boys.

Pretty little heifers.

With mothers who were probably younger than he was.

And the boys who were like he used to be, awkward and useless, aching with lust.

But it was different now, for him.

Valler worked in computers in the City.

He had made a lot of money out of the year 2000 panic. Selling the work of underpaid Third World programmers to lazy, scared corporations. His world was lit by bright fluorescents, indifferent to weather or season, textured by an unceasing social buzz of wine and cigarettes and videos and sex. More wine than sex nowadays, now he was forty and his belly and hair showed it…

He hated to come back here, from where he’d escaped, hated to have to handle all this family history bullshit, the business with his father.

But the year 2000 bubble was bursting, and Valler had a lifestyle to keep up.

He needed his father’s money.

He wished he was in London now, surrounded by the press of people and traffic noise and the stale stink of cigarette smoke and car exhaust.

The girl, though.

He imagined touching her.

Her hands would be weak, the bones fragile, unable to match his greater strength. The muscles of her belly would be flat, lean. Like an animal’s.

He turned his thoughts away, disturbed by their intensity.

He looked out of the grimy window, across the road towards the church.

… He thought he saw the girl—the same girl—standing on the far side of the road. That oval face like a coin, turned to him.

She was gone, lost in the grime of the glass.

He drained his pint and walked out of the pub.

He found himself back at the church, without conscious intent. The service was over; the cars had gone.

He was out of breath just from walking across the road. He could feel the beer inside him, too much this early, sour and flat. The world was sour too, just blocks of greasy light, livid green and dun sandstone and the sky’s pervasive dull grey.

He reached the door of the church. It was locked.

Behind the church was a small stand of trees, leafless and stark. And there was movement, against the background of the trees. Black and white stripes.

He turned that way, panting. He stepped off the path. He could feel long, dead grass crushing under his leather shoes, lapping at his heels.

Soon he was out of sight of the road and the BMW.

He pushed through the damp undergrowth at the back of the church, on the fringe of the copse. There was rubbish, plastic bags and lager cans. He was probably walking over layers of old graves here, he thought, strata of ancient mouldering corpses.

He couldn’t see the girl. He felt a frustrated tightness in his lower belly.

… But what if you do find her, Valler? What do you want?

He should just walk back to the pub, take a piss, get in the BMW.

He felt pulled apart—by the road to London, the girl—his father in his ridiculous robe, cowering when Valler had approached him.

To stop the clamour in his head he plunged through the grass, ignoring the dew soaking into his shoes.

He found a hole in the ground.

It wasn’t railed off or marked: it was just a gaping mouth in the damp, worked earth.

He remembered this now. Another piece of his childhood mythology. This was the crypt: even older than the rest of the church, long abandoned.

He bent, wheezing a little, and peered inside.

There were steps: steep, awkward-looking blocks. There was no sign of a light.

He looked around. The girl was nowhere to be seen. She could only be in the crypt.

He couldn’t find his lighter in his pockets. He pictured it sitting on the sticky pub table.

He shouldn’t go down there. If he fell—

The first step was the hardest, a good two feet deep and no handholds.

Bracing his hands on the slimy walls, he worked his way down, from step to step. He had to tuck in his arms to force his shoulders and head into the hole. It was like some bizarre inverted birth.

Deeper still. His head sank beneath the level of the turf.

There was a stink of dampness and moss, of half-digested things. The sky shrank to a rectangle of silver-grey.

A face, in the deeper darkness below. Shining like an oval medallion at the bottom of a pond.

Then it was gone.

He pushed on, breathing hard, impatiently working his way down the worn, slick steps.

He reached the bottom. It was so unexpected he stumbled.

There was no light save a dim greyness behind him, no sound save the scratch of his own breath. He raised his arms and stepped forward.

Walls, damp and slick, to either side. He was in a tunnel.

He took a step forward. Then another.

He could scarcely get lost, darkness or not. It wasn’t even cold. It was like climbing through some rocky intestine.

The last murky daylight glimmer died. He walked on, deeper.

The beer seemed to be working at his temples now, filling his head with a banging pulse, obscuring the darkness with splashes of retinal blood.

He didn’t have any firm intention. Nothing planned.

He was strong. She was weak. He had money. Fifty quid was nothing to him, but would be a hell of a lot to a girl like that. Enough for—

Enough for what, Valler?

Nobody knew he was here.

Those old boys in the pub wouldn’t remember him. He could be back in the BMW and gone in five minutes. After—

After what?

She was just a pretty heifer.

On he walked. Obscurely tempted.

He could feel a texture in the blocks that made up the walls. Parallel grooves, the characteristic of Roman-dressed stone. But, when he explored the joins in the walls, he found the stone blocks had been crudely cut, jammed together with gritty, crumbling mortar. This was stone mined by the Brittunculi from the abandoned towns of the Empire. Like gulls pecking over corpses.

Valler’s fluttering fingers found a wall, ahead of his face. To his right, an open space. A corner, then.

He stepped forward—

Light.

He threw his hands over his eyes and cried out.

—But had there been just a glimpse of movement—a slim form, an oval face—ducking out of sight?

He forced himself to open his blinking, streaming eyes.

He was in a small chamber: an arched roof of stone blocks, a roughly levelled floor. The only light came from cressets—wicks floating in what smelled like tallow, set in recesses that were stained black with soot.

The only light.

And yet those primitive lamps had seemed, briefly, as bright as the sun.

It was just dark-adaptation. He’d been taken in by a mediaeval special effect.

He laughed, deliberately, out loud.

His voice returned no echo.

He walked forward.

There was an altar here, just a crude block of dressed stone. Before it was a pit, dug in the earth, the size of a coffin.

It looked to him like an ordeal pit.

Aside from the tunnel, there was no way out of the chamber.

He turned, letting his eyes become accustomed to the light. The cut-up Roman stones contained fragments of friezes, inscriptions, even bas-relief carving, sliced apart and jammed together.

They were fragments of an image.

As he looked round the room he could piece it together, like assembling a jigsaw.

A young man kneeling on the back of a bull, which he had forced to its knees. Some kind of incised starburst effect around the man’s head. With one hand he was forcing back the bull’s head, and with the other he drove a sword into the bull’s body. A dog and a serpent leapt up to the wound to drink the blood, and a scorpion was collecting the bull’s semen.

There was an inscription, in three pieces. DEO INVICTO SOLI MITHRAE.

Valler, startled, knew the image. He had grown up with it, thanks to his father.

This was the primaeval bull: the source of all brute force and untamed vitality, the first creation of Ahura Mazda, Lord of Creation. And the god was releasing that flood of primordial, beneficial energy into the world.

The god was Mithras: Lord of Light, protecting, avenging.

The emperors had manned their Wall with dark-skinned men from the eastern provinces. The soldiers, far from home, had brought their own old gods to protect them from whatever untamed beasts lay to the unyielding north here.

They had brought Mithras. DEO INVICTO, the Unconquered God.

But the early bishops had reviled Mithras, Christ’s dark, ancient twin. They had banned his rites, burned his books, desecrated his temples. And thus, here was this image, a tauroctony, once found in every mithraeum in the Empire: a sacred tableau sliced to pieces to make up the walls of the crypt of this dismal church. A demonstration of Christ’s triumph.

But maybe, in the end, the bishops had failed. Maybe Christ hadn’t prevailed here after all.

His father told Valler he’d understand when he was old enough to join the Temple as a Raven, the lowest of the seven Grades. Old enough to descend into some dank cave like this one, and undergo the initiation ordeal.

But Valler had understood already.

He hated what he had glimpsed of the exclusively male, secretive, unforgivingly strict cult. He hated his father’s absences and distance. He hated his dead mother’s bemused, tolerant Christianity, her readiness to forgive her husband’s eccentricities.

… Or maybe, Valler, you just hate your own weakness. You could never survive a Mithraic initiation, could you? And maybe you just hated to witness your parents’ relationship, more flexible and more subtle than any you’ve proven capable of…

His father’s disapproving, disappointed face superimposed itself on Mithras’s stone glare.

His father’s face: filled with stubbornness, his refusal to give up the Temple, to move into the sheltered flat, to start waiting to die.

His father’s face: as Valler drove his fist into it.

His father used to be a big man: strict, always disappointed, always punishing. But he wasn’t big any more.

His father’s face, at last: fixed with a glare. An unspoken promise of revenge. A look that had presaged a beating for the child Valler.

But that didn’t matter a cold damn now. What could he do? Valler was the strong one now, and would take what he wanted.

Valler had taunted him.

Where is Mithras now, old man? Where is your protector, the Unconquered God? Gone. Dead two thousand years. As you will be, soon.

His father’s face—

He heard footsteps. Remote, echoing.

It must be the girl.

He felt blood surge in his loins. He stood in the middle of the crypt, hands huge and clammy at his sides.

He must be crazy to have got himself in so deep. His car was separated from him by fifty feet of earth, London by three hundred miles.

… But he’d seen the way she’d looked at him.

His father’s face.

His father would probably warn him off.

Valler blood ran deep and wide here.

For—it was said—a Mithraic Temple had survived in this lost corner of Northumberland, its small flames kept alive for two thousand years by the descendants of a Sixth Legion centurion. A man who had never gone home.

A man called Valerius.

That was the family history, anyhow, the reason it mattered so much to his father.

She might be your cousin.

But even if she was, it didn’t matter. He had money. He would be gone in an hour.

He had condoms.

Footsteps at the base of the stairs.

Heavy.

It was the girl. It must be.

But if not—

It struck him suddenly that he was trapped here, in this crypt.

The lights went out.

In darkness, Valler cried out.

He had to hide.

He could think only of the ordeal pit.

He stepped into the pit and lay down. It had no cover. He could feel mud working into his shirt collar. The mud was cold, and stank of blood, of old meat.

He crossed his arms over his chest.

The footsteps were still approaching, still getting louder.

Heavier.

Clattering.

Not a girl’s steps.

Valler screamed.

Clattering, like the tread of some huge, monstrously heavy man.

Or of an animal.

A wild, untamed animal.

Like a bull.

2008

The House of Fenris

John Cooling

Graham John Cooling was born in London in 1959. He had a number of jobs but is now retired from his work as a computer programmer. His interest in mythology was spurred by discovering his uncle’s collection of books on Greek and Roman legends, and his mother’s own interest in these stories, particularly that of Pygmalion and Galatea. Amongst the books he persuaded his parents to buy him was the Saga of Asgard.

In 1999 he published an article called “The Revenge of Vulcan” in Faunus, the journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen (of which he is also a member), on Machen’s novel The Hill of Dreams. His childhood discovery of the tale of Fenris killing Odin at Ragnarok in the Saga of Asgard was what first led him to the story in this collection, in which the new owner of a remote and ancient house is haunted by a vision of a severed hand and the sound of howling. The story was first published in 2008, in Mark Valentine’s anthology The Black Veil and Other Tales.

“Each night is the same, Morrow. I begin to find sleep, hoping that at last I shall be spared the awful vision. My mind drifts away from the waking world, images play at random and then with a sudden burst my thoughts are focused as if through a funnel, and I see suspended above me a severed hand, dripping with blood. And I hear, like a great gust of wind, a terrible howling. It seems to last for many moments, though in fact it is a few seconds only, and then there is a cold, brittle silence.”

Dr. Morrow, of the School of Comparative Mythology at the University of St. Edmundsbury, frowned. “How long have you been at Thorsby, Overbury?” he demanded abruptly. He placed his thick spectacles upon his nose with meticulous precision, tugged at his waistcoat ends and peered at his old school friend.

“Only a few weeks. I’d been scouting around for quite a while since I came back from the Yukon, and I made up my mind I wanted a place full of history. After so long out of the dear old country, I felt I needed to be part of its deep-rooted past once again. The agents offered me all sorts of very commodious new red-brick constructions but I fairly spat at them. In the end they got the message, and said that Thorsby would be just the place for me. There has been a settlement there since before the Norman Conquest, or so they claimed. The name, anyway, is Old Danish in origin. That would meet my requirements. Why they have to build new stuff when there’s plenty of old places like this lying empty, I do not know. I said as much to the chap who leased me Thorsby, and he quite agreed, though he did say sometimes tenants have strange prejudices about old empty houses. And then he smirked. I think I see his point now, but I tell you Morrow, I’m not giving up. Will you come down and help me sort this thing out?”

Morrow eyed his friend cautiously. “I need to know more. Have you had any changes made to the house since you took it?”

Overbury considered. “Very few. But I did have the wine cellars opened up. I could not understand what was the point of having such excellent storage and barring it all off. The steps led down to a stout door which had been sealed and all its handles removed. I mean to live in some comfort after all the hardships I had out in the Yukon, and a good cellar is high on my list. I had them break open the door and start building the pipes and racks for the bottles I shall acquire.”

“Did you indeed?” said Morrow. “Anything untoward happen?”

“Beastly smell when we first got the door open, if that’s what you mean. Not surprising considering it’s been closed up for years.”

“Just damp and rot, then?”

Overbury paused. “Yes, just so. But some foul vermin smell too. Put me in mind of some of the rank-smelling dens we found out in the wastes of the Territories—wolves’ leavings and suchlike. However, I don’t see how that could have affected my dreams, old man.”

Morrow considered, and moving surprisingly quickly for a man of his girth, mixed two more drinks from the choice selection in his cabinet and handed one to Overbury. He then opened an old oak cupboard and picked out, from what was hung on the inside of the door, what looked like a series of curious letters in iron.

“The cellars are only to be used for storing wine?”

Overbury replied, “I moved various old pieces of junk and other ‘heirlooms’ left lying about in the house into the cellar. Some were almost wholly defaced, and I thought about getting rid of them. I only kept them to take to the museum as I have no use for them. The cellar seemed a good place for them temporarily. I cannot think that they can have anything other than historical value and even then I think it is doubtful.”

Morrow said, “I will look at them when we go to the house. This, however,” he continued, “is one set of old objects which I believe may come in useful,” pointing to the items he had taken from the cupboard.

On arrival at Thorsby, Morrow was surprised to find that it looked tranquil from the outside. It was pale, solid, with well-maintained grounds, and had been carefully preserved. He walked slowly around it to get a better impression. Also his habitual caution in matters of the occult made him desire to know what he was getting himself into.

He was somewhat peevish. “You said this was an ancient place. Perhaps. But I could not understand why a place with a Danish name should be still standing and still in use now, as they built in wood rather than in stone—and this is a stone building.”

Overbury replied that he not yet delved into the history that much. Morrow walked around the house again. The aspect of the house itself was not at all daunting. Rather it seemed to be built with the idea of renewal in mind. The austere, almost classical lines reminded Morrow of Roman architecture.

It was in the interior that darker thoughts seemed to come into Morrow’s mind. Certainly, the builder had a clear idea of perspective and beauty. The original conception of the house appeared clever. It was the use it had been put to which seemed the problem. Morrow felt the filaments of unease steal upon him as they always did when his researches led him into the presence of something genuinely uncanny. He fought off the urge to fling these sensations from his mind, and let them creep insidiously further into his consciousness, awaiting the first hints of revelation that might come. As he stood in the lofty entrance hall, the feeling of an all-seeing mischief-making mind and an inhuman one at that, made Morrow shiver against his will. He cast about for some more fortifying force to sustain him, and found it in the fine harmony of the house. The amount of care that had been put into the original construction gave it a contrasting aura of serenity and reminded Morrow of a temple.

He knew where he must go. Overbury conducted him down the bare, neglected staircase to the cellar. A rank odour rose up and pervaded his senses, just as the first encroachments of fear had done. The feeling of some vast inhuman mind also persisted. It was the feeling of being watched by a malevolent will that was the most disturbing feature.

He stood in the empty, hollow, low chambers of the cellar, and saw that on one slab, his friend had put away a disordered collection of items from the house above. He sifted through these carefully, discarding a broken umbrella, a cracked port flask, rusting keys, a ball of twine, several dull vases, and other left-overs. Then something made him pause. It was a tablet in terracotta, with blurred figures upon it, perhaps a pair of putti or cupid-type figures and some heraldic animal. Probably used as a garden ornament, Morrow mused to himself, yet the figures were either very primitive or very debased. He put this item back with a puzzled expression on his face.

“Michael, this is one of the things which you brought from upstairs?”

The tone of voice turned this into a question, and Overbury nodded his assent.

Morrow became thoughtful.

He paced about the cellar a little, then looked up at his friend, who was expectantly awaiting his advice. “Well,” cautiously offered the Professor, “the first question in my mind is whether these are simply dreams you experience, or whether they are visions. Although they appear in the room above I think it is more likely that the origin is here below. And—I think that the only way we can find out for sure what is going on is to observe from the cellar itself at night.”

There was a brittle silence, as if the cellar itself were waiting. Overbury replied, “I understand. Yet I am beginning to think I was wrong to stay in this place and that actually spending a night in the cellar may be highly dangerous.”

Morrow said, “There are parts of the entire manifestation which I do not understand, but I begin to see glimpses. There are measures which we can take to ensure our safety. The iron characters I have brought with me may offer us some form of safeguard. We will be in the cellar, but I am determined that we will have torches with us as well as those. I fear it may in any case be too late to stop what is emerging here. We must face it.”

They waited that night in the dank echoing cellar. At first it appeared that nothing was going to happen, and after some desultory talk to keep themselves awake, their eyes began to weaken and their heads to nod, as they crouched upon the floor. But they concentrated hard on the four faltering torches of flickering fire, which cast curious shadows upon the walls, like a weird dark drama of misshapen things. And from those shadows, as the two men watched transfixed, figures began to form. At first there was no more than the stealthy movement of a slight gathering of darkness in the door from the passageway, but this writhing shadow grew until the shape of a black spectral chain could be distinguished. Then other forms followed quickly, and some had the semblance of the human, and some that of the creatures who go upon four feet. Then all this wavering, pulsing gloom was pierced by two great red orbs of light, and around these the vast lineaments of a ravening creature coalesced—a great jaw, a pointed snout, pointed ears, and a lolling tongue. The shadow-wolf’s eyes gleamed with the nearest thing to pure evil that Morrow had ever seen, in all his encounters with the abnormal. He shrank back against the bare walls, forgetful of all his learning and all his caution, until his hand touched the cold iron of the black characters he had brought with him. He drew these out and raised them above the spot where he and Overbury crouched in terror, chanting and using them to ward off what was before them.

But the vision had not finished. The great wolf was held by the chain they had first seen, and the chain was held by another being, deeper in the shadow. This being, which had the form of a man, was tugged to and fro by the beast whose leash he held. Morrow forced himself to allow his preternatural alertness to the psychic world to reassert itself, and with a rush he felt an ingress of reassurance. He felt fixity of purpose, the grim struggle of a brave man who knows fear but has succeeded in conquering it.

Then there was a hideous lurch in the course of the vision. The great wolf-shadow rose up and lunged towards the master that held it on its chain of dark air. The shadow-man did not hesitate, but threw off the assault, putting his hand deep into the wolf’s maw to prevent it from closing upon him, and working furiously to weave the chain in great circlets, so that it was fully wrapped around the wolf. The wolf attempted to shake the chain off, but found that each attempt merely wrapped the chain more tightly around it. It was as if the very efforts of the wolf made the chain more able to resist him. The wolf’s convulsions became more and more furious, and in its extremity of hatred and anger, it closed its great jaws upon the shadow-man’s hand. Morrow gestured again and again with the iron runes he held and in his anguish bellowed them aloud.

The image of the bound wolf and the man holding his maimed hand started to recede. The pair staggered up the steps and were able to get through the rest of the night without further incident.

In the morning, Morrow eyed his friend over the hasty breakfast they had contrived, each preoccupied with his own thoughts. Michael Overbury caught his stare. “Well, you see? What I have seen each night has been the aftermath of all that cursed shadow-show—the dangling, severed hand. Nothing for it but to get out and let it carry on its crazy ritual all to itself again. Perhaps one of those nice new red-brick sheds might not be such a bad idea after all.”

Morrow cleared his throat, and bit with care into a slice of toast and marmalade. After he had absorbed that, he remarked, with studied carelessness, “Oh, it is all quite clear so far. You do evidently have here a most ancient temple of the Danes: those agents were not for once bluffing. It is evidently a place of ancient power. And all that vision came from Norse mythology, of course. The Norse gods faced peril from a son of the god Loki, who had taken the form of a wolf and was called Fenris Wolf. He was taken by Loki to Asgard, and shown the iron bands the gods would use to hold him. Fenris laughed at them and when bound easily shook them off. The gods came with a special bind which was made by magic and at this point Fenris refused to let the gods bind him. He said that one of the gods would have to put his hand in his mouth before he would allow himself to be bound. Brave Tyr did and had his hand bitten off. But Fenris Wolf was bound.”

He paused. “Something here is in danger of unbinding him. We were only saved last night by those iron rune-letters I had brought, which came from the excavation at Gothborg—Hardrasson gave them to me as thanks for the help I gave him in identifying some of the finds there. They are the runes of Vidar, son of Odin, the only being able to withstand the might of the wolf.”

He helped himself to more marmalade.

“However, the problem in this case is why the Fenris has become active again. I believe the answer lies in this tablet, which you had deposited in the cellar. I do not know if any actual records can be found, but there is something in the fine dimensions of this house which suggests inspiration from a Roman temple. Perhaps the site is older still than the Vikings, and—just as the heathen worship has returned here in such full force, so has that older paganism. I have studied this tablet carefully and believe it shows Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome, who were suckled by a great she-wolf. By taking this icon into the lair of Fenris you invoked more than you knew, and reawakened the wolf-form, with the consequences we have seen. By removing it, and by leaving in its stead my runes of Vidar, to grow in strength, we shall stop the visions below.”

“Even so,” he added, with characteristic caution, “I should abandon those plans for a grand wine-cellar if I were you…”

Notes on the Mythology

Dionea (Dione)

“Dionea seemed to scandalize everyone, perhaps because these good folk had a mysterious instinct that the name is derived from Dione, one of the loves of Father Zeus, and mother of no less a lady than the goddess Venus.”

Dione is one of the Greek Titans, the pre-Olympian deities, a daughter of Oceanus and Tethys (according to the earliest reference to her parentage, in Hesiod’s Theogony). The earliest literary reference to her is in Homer’s Iliad of the eighth century BCE, where she is the mother of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, beauty and desire, by Zeus (although Hesiod in his Theogony proposes a different parentage). The name Dione is the feminine version of Zeus. A goddess named di-u-ja or di-wi-ja is listed in the Linear B tablets from the Mycenaean palace of Pylos, dating to the thirteenth century BCE, which has been interpreted by some as an early reference to Dione. On this tablet she is listed alongside di-wa (Zeus). In the first century CE, Strabo tells us that Dione shared Zeus’ temple at the sanctuary at Dodona, and her name is found on lead oracular tablets at the site from the mid-sixth to the second century BCE. The priestesses of Dione at Dodona were referred to as “doves”, and the dove is one of the most frequent attributes of Dione’s daughter Aphrodite.

The Ring (Tinia)

“She says, however, it is dangerous to visit it, no doubt from some superstitious views about the old gods—Tinia, the god of thunder, and the rest.”

Tinia was the chief god of the Etruscans, the ancient people of Etruria in Italy. He was a sky god, referred to as father (apa). The Etruscan culture goes back to c.900 BCE, and originally their gods may not have been envisioned in human form. By the seventh century BCE the Etruscans began to be influenced by the Greeks, and from then on many of their gods took on attributes comparable to their Greek counterparts.

Tinia’s first representations in art date to the sixth century BCE, where he is often represented in bronze statuettes, sometimes holding a thunderbolt, like Zeus or Jupiter, with whom he became associated. He is depicted similarly on bronze mirrors, where his identifying name is inscribed next to him. In some depictions he is bearded, in others he appears more youthful.

As the god of sky and thunder, he is often depicted holding a thunderbolt; he wielded three different types of thunderbolt, which ranged from benign (for warnings), one that could be used for good or evil purposes, and a purely destructive one; Tinia needed permission from a group of other gods to use the last two. From various inscriptions we know he was also the god of boundaries, and had connections to the underworld. He is the consort of the goddess Uni.

The Great Mother (Cybele)

“They—those who worship the Great Mother—she who is called Cybele.”

In mythology, Cybele (or Kybele) is most famously associated with her lover Attis, possibly originally a Phrygian vegetation god. According to Ovid, Cybele fell in love with the shepherd Attis, but when he fell in love with a nymph, Cybele had her killed and Attis went insane, castrating himself with a sharp rock. Flowers sprang from his blood, and he was changed into a pine tree.

She was originally a Phrygian goddess. Her origins as the Great Mother goddess stretch back into the first millennium BCE in Anatolia. It is thought the goddess Kubaba, attested in ancient Syria at least as far back as 1800 BCE, may have been an early version of Cybele, or influenced her development and cult. The first epigraphic references to her in Phrygia (central Turkey) come from the seventh century BCE where both niches and elaborate architectural facades were cut into rock faces in the highlands and inscribed in Old Phrygian, dedicated to Matar (Mother), or occasionally Matar Kubileya or Kubeleya. In Phrygia she was considered to be the mother of the gods, goddess of motherhood, fertility and the mountains.

She was brought to mainland Greece by the sixth century BCE, where she became associated with Rhea and Demeter. While she had a public shrine in the Athenian agora, she was mostly worshipped in private shrines. Her worship was said to be associated with the ecstatic rites of Dionysos and Pan, accompanied by loud music and wild dancing. She was the guardian of the city’s public records and recognized as an ancestral figure, and in art was always accompanied by lions.

Her worship came to Rome in 204 BCE following a Sibylline prophecy that the only way to ensure a Roman victory in the Punic wars was to bring the “Idaean Mother” to Rome. From here she becomes a state goddess, whose official title was Mater Deum Magna Idaea (the Great Idaean Mother of the Gods), and a temple was built to her on the Palatine Hill. Her festivals in Rome included the spring festival, the Megalensia, which lasted ten days. Led by the eunuch priests of her cult, known as the Galli, there were a series of processions, ritual sacrifices and purification rites. After two days of ritual mourning for Attis, on 24 March, known as Dies Sanguinis (Day of Blood), the Galli ritually self-flagellated until they bled, and may also have practised self-castration.

The Wind in the Portico (Vaunus)

“Vaunus had been a British god of the hills, whom the Romans in their liberal way appear to have identified with Apollo.”

In Buchan’s work, we have the only example in this collection of a god who seems to have been created for the story. It is said he was identified with the Roman Apollo; British tribes often assimilated their gods with those of the Romans. Archaeologically, there are at least seventeen dedicated to Apollo himself found in Britain, and it is possible that the altars to Arciarcon in York and Arecurius in Corbridge may be dedicated to a god who shares his attributes.

However, Vaunus sounds remarkably similar to the Roman god Faunus. A grandson of the god Saturn, he was associated with wild places, herding, hunting, and forests, in particular the mysterious sounds of the forest which were said to be his voice. He was often depicted with his companions of satyrs and fauns. In 193 BCE a temple was built for him on Tiber Island, financed by a fine imposed on drovers; it was from this time he became identified with the Greek god Pan. He was celebrated during the Lupercalia each February in Rome, and two festivals, known as Faunalia, were celebrated in his honour, on 13 February and 5 December.

In Britain, Faunus is best known from the Thetford Hoard, a remarkable hoard of late-Roman gold jewellery and silver tableware found at Gallows Hill, Thetford, Norfolk, in 1979. Amongst this were 32 silver spoons inscribed with “DEI FAVNI” (“to Faunus”), alongside various epithets in native Brythonic, including “the Mighty”, “Fosterer of Corn”, and “Protector”. Intriguingly, Pan masks—usually to be attached to bronze ewers and other tableware—have been found in some numbers in Roman Norfolk (could this be related to the half-human faces of the hierophants of Vaunus whom Buchan describes in his story?).

Another alternative inspiration or source for Vaunus is Silvanus. Like Faunus, he was a rustic Roman divinity, associated primarily with the forests, but one who had no official temple in Rome. However, he became a popular deity in the northern Roman provinces, including Britain, where he seems to have been more popular than Faunus. While the latter is known only through the Thetford hoard, multiple altars were dedicated to Silvanus across Britain. He was often equated with Roman gods, such as Mars at Housesteads on Hadrian’s Wall, as well as local deities such as Vinotonus on Scargill Moor in County Durham. Intriguingly, at Lydney in Gloucestershire, he is equated with Nodens, the Celtic god that inspired some of the weird works of Arthur Machen.

The Owl

“And men said that it was Simeon Stroud, who had discovered the secrets of long-dead Aztec priests, selling his soul in exchange for those secrets, who had revived the awful rites attendant upon the worship of the Great Bird.”

While there is no specific owl god in Mesoamerican mythology, the owl had important symbolism in Aztec and Mayan myth, and is associated with several different deities, all of whom are linked to the underworld, and any of which could have been the inspiration for Webster’s malevolent owl god.

Mictlantecuhtli was the principle Aztec god of death and guardian of the bones of the dead, who ruled over Mictlan, the underworld. He was associated with the screech owl because the owl’s call was considered to be a bad omen, preceding death or misfortune. In the Codex Borgia, an Aztec pictorial manuscript of the late Post-Classic period (1250–1521 CE), the owl appears in Chicunamictlan, the deepest level of Mictlantecuhtli’s domain. Elsewhere in the codex, an owl is shown inside a temple of bones, drinking the blood of a sacrificed captive held by Mictlantecuhtli. In art, Mictlantecuhtli is often shown wearing owl feathers.

The owl also has strong symbolic connections with Tezcatlipoca, one of the most important gods of the Toltecs and the Aztecs, and a god of the night who can roam freely between this world and the world of the dead. Tezcatlipoca’s name means “smoking mirror” or “dark mirror lord” which may relate to the obsidian mirrors used in Aztec necromancy. He is associated with the horned owl in the Mesoamerican calendar; Tezcatlipoca provides the souls of those born on the tenth day to the owl to carry to the afterlife.

In the related Mayan pantheon, God L (so-called because the original Mayan name of the god was unknown) appears in various art scenes of the Maya Classic period (c.250–900 CE), as well as in the Dresden codex, one of only four extant Mayan manuscripts and possibly the oldest surviving book written in the Americas, dating from the later post-classical period (c.1300–1521). An important piece of his regalia is his owl headdress, topped by feathers and even sometimes the bird’s head. The close association between the owl and the god has led to a belief that the owl is the god’s companion spirit, or even that they are avatars of each other. Aside from the headdress, he is usually depicted as an aged man, with jaguar markings and cape, and a characteristic smoking cigar. He is a patron of merchants but also a lord of the underworld, linked to human sacrifice, warfare and darkness.

It is also interesting to note the word tlacatecolotl, which means human-owl, in the Nahuatl (Aztec) language. Tlacatecolotl has a variety of meanings, including a malevolent shape-changing sorcerer or shaman, who took the form of a horned owl and caused sickness and death.

Pussy (Bastet)

“…rising in applause and honour of Pasht, who is Bubastis, who is the Sin of Egypt…”

In Richardson’s story there appears to be a confusion or conflation of two distinct Egyptian deities, Pakhet (sometimes written as Pasht or Pakht) and Bastet (whose principal cult centre was at Bubastis).

Pakhet was a lion-headed goddess worshipped primarily near the mouth of the wadi near Beni Hasan in Middle Egypt, where two temples to her were dedicated. Her name means “she who scratches/tears”, and in the Coffin Texts (a collection of spells, incantations, and other religious writings inscribed on coffins from the First Intermediate period (c.2130–1938 BCE) and the Middle Kingdom (1938–c.1630 BCE)), she is referred to as “the Night Huntress”.

Bastet (also referred to as Bas or Bast) was a cat-headed goddess, worshipped as early as the Second Dynasty (c.2890–2670 BCE) who was depicted in early representations with lion imagery; cat imagery becoming more common after 1000 BCE. Her early lion-like appearance matched her fierce nature, as a goddess of vengeance for her father, the sun god Ra, but the transition from lion to cat in appearance corresponds with both the domestication of the cat in Egypt and an associated softening of her nature. She became a household goddess, protector of the hearth and of pregnant women.

Her most important cult centre was at Bubastis in the north-east Delta, the name deriving from “per-Bastet”, or “house of Bastet”. In the fifth century BCE the Greek writer Herodotus describes her festival at the site, which consisted of up to “700,000 persons”, singing, dancing and drinking more wine in the one day than would be consumed throughout the rest of the year. One of the most popular goddesses in Egypt, her temples were sites of dedications of bronze cat amulets and statues, as well as mummified cats. Thousands of these have been excavated from Bubastis as well as other sites in the Nile Valley.

The Veil of Tanit (Tanit)

“I soon discovered that all those figures were simply different attitudes and postures of the same person and that person was none other than Tanit, the great goddess of Carthage, the deity of plenty and fertility, second in power only to Moloch, and a divinity of the most popular cult of the Punic republic.”

Tanit, also known as Tinnit, was a chief deity of ancient Carthage (in present day Tunisia) and the consort or wife of the god Baal. She was most likely of Levantine origin, the earliest representation of her coming from Sarepta in Phoenicia (Lebanon), where a seventh–sixth century BCE ivory plate found in a temple was dedicated to Tinnit-Astarte.

However, most of our epigraphic evidence comes from Carthage and North Africa, the vast majority from the Tophet sanctuary-cemetery at Carthage. The Tophet is a sacrificial sanctuary, which contains inscribed funerary stelai connected to cremation burials of young children and animals in urns, as well as a being a site for ritual activities and votive offerings. In regard to the remains of young humans in the Tophet, the majority of scholars (although not all) now believe that most of the infants had died of natural causes, and were then offered or dedicated to Baal and Tinnit, rather than deliberately harmed. The Carthage Tophet was established c.800 BCE, but inscriptions to Tinnit begin at the end of the fifth century BCE, with stela commemorating sacrifices to Tinnit and Baal Hammon, in which Tanit is referred to as “Face of Baal”. From here it is thought that the Tophet practice spread to other sites connected to Carthage. The appearance of Tanit’s name with Baal’s at this time suggests that Tanit had become a powerful Carthaginian deity in her own right, and she would go on to supersede him as the main deity—she sometimes has the title “rabat” (“chief”).

Tanit’s roles are unclear, but she may be both celestial, connected with the moon, and chthonic (her cult was practised in caves in some Punic sites in Spain). She may also have been connected to sailors and to the maritime world. Her iconographical attributes include dolphins, fish, pomegranates, an open hand, and doves. She is often represented symbolically through the “sign of Tanit”, which may be a schematic rendering of the goddess with her arms raised, and is found on stela, coins, figurines, and in many other locations, and it increases in frequency as her popularity as a goddess rises from the fifth century BCE onwards.

The Face in the Wind (Harpies)

“In the gloom, high over the manor grounds, circled that mighty shape—a giant, vulture-like bird with great pointed black wings and the head and breast of a woman! A harpy!”

The harpies, whose name harpyiai means “the swift robbers”, were first mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey as personifications of the storm winds. They were also known as the “Hounds of Zeus”, on whose bidding they would snatch away people from the earth. When a person disappeared without trace, they were said to have been taken by the harpies.

In Hesiod’s Theogony they are described simply as flying maidens, and they appear as such on vase paintings of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. It was not until later Latin writers such as Virgil and Ovid described them that they acquired their monstrous appearance; birds with women’s heads, long claws, and faces pale with hunger. They were thought to live in islands called the Strophades, a place at the entrance of the underworld, or a cave in Crete.

Perhaps the most famous myth of the Harpies involves King Phineus of Thrace, an ancient blind soothsayer who had incurred Zeus’ wrath by revealing the secrets of the gods to mankind. As punishment, whenever Phineus would try and eat, the Harpies would swoop down, snatch the food away and foul the plate. The Harpies were eventually chased away by the Boreads, the winged sons of the North Wind, and the Argonauts.

Serpent Princess (Tiamat)

“A temple dedicated to the serpent-goddess Tiamat! This proves that it’s the oldest find in Babylonian archaeology.”

In Babylonian and Akkadian mythology, Tiamat is the personification of the primordial sea and the mother of the gods. She is first attested in an incantation of the Old Akkadian period (c.2340 and 2200 BCE) but there are few other references to her until the first millennium BCE. She is best known from the Babylonian epic of creation, Enuma Elish (c.1200 BCE).

With her consort, Abzu (the freshwaters) she created the first race of gods. They were the parents of the first gods, Lahmu and Lahamu, whose own children were Anshar and Kishar, and grandchildren, Anu and Ea. Annoyed at the boisterousness of these younger deities, particularly how their dancing churned Tiamat’s waters, Abzu plotted to destroy them despite Tiamat’s opposition. When Ea heard of this, he cast a spell over Abzu, appropriated his power, and then killed him and built a temple over his remains. Tiamat, with her new consort Kingu and an army of monsters, went to war with the younger gods to avenge Abzu. The younger gods were helpless against the threat until Ea’s son Marduk promised to defend them if they acknowledged him as first of the gods. They agreed, and Tiamat was defeated. Marduk split her in two, with half forming the sky and heavens, and the other half becoming the earth. He then created humans out of the blood of Kingu and retired to his temple in Babylon.

Tiamat’s description in Enuma Elish is quite vague, and describes her both as woman and as a body of water, and at one point she is also said to have a tail. She has been associated with images of dragons, but these connections are dubious and there is no extant Mesopotamian imagery that reflects her this way.

More Spinned Against… (Arachne)

“Of course not. Not real spiders, but I’m Arachne—I told you that.”

Arachne, from the site of Colophon in Lydia, was a talented weaver who challenged the goddess Athena to a weaving contest. Athena’s creation depicted the Olympian gods on their thrones, while Arachne’s showed the amorous adventures of the gods, often in animal form. An enraged Athena destroyed the cloth, whether because it was superior to hers or because the scene offended her. In despair, Arachne hanged herself, but Athena turned her into a spider, so that she is fated to spin for ever after but always have her creations destroyed.

The story of Arachne seems to be a cautionary tale against hubris and is most likely of a late date. The earliest written account is found in Virgil’s Georgics of the first century BCE, although the most famous version of the myth is in the slightly later Metamorphoses by Ovid in the first century CE. A black figure aryballos (oil jar) from Corinth dating to c.600 BCE has been claimed to show the competition, although there are no specific features to distinguish it from any other weaving scene. As such, our first firm representation of the myth comes from Virgil.

Above Ker-Is (Ahés)

“St. Guennole made King Gralon drown the Princess Ahes. Gralon’s own daughter. That wasn’t holy. It was murder.”

Ahés (more often Dahut or Dahud) was the daughter of Gradlon, the semi-legendary fifth century “king” of Cornouaille in Brittany. In mythology, he is the king of the sunken land of Ys, whose capital city is Ker-Is. Dahut is warned against her wicked and lustful ways and wild pagan revelries by St Winwaloe but ultimately the city is punished and a storm floods Ys. Gradlon is warned of the imminent disaster and attempts to flee on horseback with Dahut, but she hinders his escape, and she either falls from the horse or is thrown from a cliff by her father, who then flees to safety.

The earliest direct reference to Dahut is in Albert Le Grand’s third edition of Vies des Saints de la Bretagne Armorique (1680): “la Princesse Dahut, fille impudique du bon Roy, laquelle périt en cet abysme”. In this telling, she steals the key to the dike gate that protects Ys from the sea from her father and opens the gate during her carousing, flooding the city. Dahut does not appear in the earliest stories of the destruction of Ys, Pierre Le Baud’s Cronicques et ystoires des Bretons (1480) or the 1580 miracle play, Buhez Sant Gwenole. One of the most complete versions of the story is found in Hersart de la Villemarqué’s 1844 book Barzaz-Breiz (“Songs of Brittany”). In this version, Dahut becomes a mermaid.

Rachel Bromwich has noted that Villemarqué most likely borrowed elements of the story from a twelfth-century Welsh poem from The Black Book of Carmarthen about the submerging of Cantre’r Gwaelod, the “Bottom Cantred”, in Cardigan Bay. She also notes that the name Ahés may be related to a legendary Breton figure known as La Vieille Ahés, who goes back to at least the twelfth century and is represented as an ancient road-maker who believes herself to be immortal, and his parallels with the Welsh Elen Lluyddawc, patroness of Roman roads, and the Irish Cailleach Bheara (“the Hag of Baera”).

Justice Tresilian in the Tower (Bran the Blessed)

“Buried in that mound is the head of Brutus of Troy, the founder of London. Next to it is the head of the god Bran”

Bran the Blessed, or Bendigeidfran (“blessed crow”), is a legendary king of Britain, best known from the Mabinogion, a group of stories from medieval Welsh manuscripts, parts of which may date back to older Iron Age traditions.

Bran is often considered to be a giant, as it was said that he could wade across the strait between Britain and Ireland. He is the son of Llŷr and the brother of Branwen, who was unhappily married to the Irish king Matholwch. On hearing his sister was being ill-treated, he gathered an army and went to Ireland, where he was fatally wounded in the foot by a poisoned spear during battle. Before he died, Bran orders his seven surviving companions to cut off his head and bury it at Gwynfryn (“White Hill”) in London (thought to be the Tower of London), where it would act as a Protector and Guardian of Britain. The head was known as the Urdawl Ben, and it continued to live and talk for 87 years before it was buried. However, according to the Welsh Triads (a group of medieval manuscripts), King Arthur had the head dug up so that Britain might be defended by the valour of his warriors rather than by a talisman.

The story of his head and the meaning of his name was thought to be connected to the tradition of keeping ravens at the Tower to guard the nation; however, research has shown that the tradition of keeping ravens at the tower cannot be traced before 1895. There is some speculation that Bendigeidfran is related or connected to Belatucadros, a Celtic god worshipped by the Britons in northern Britain.

The reference to Gwydion in the story’s footnotes is a reference to another character from the Mabinogion, a magician and hero. In the poem “The Battle of the Trees” (“Cad Goddeu”) from the medieval Welsh manuscript The Book of Taliesin, Gwydion enchants the trees to be his army in his battle against Arawn, the Lord of Annwn (the otherworld). Gwydion ultimately triumphed by guessing the name of one of Arawn’s men, Bran, from the alder twigs in his hands. It is never stated directly, but this Bran has been interpreted by some as Bran the Blessed.

Justice Tresilian (Sir Robert Tresilian) is a real historical figure. He was a Cornishman who began his legal career in the 1350s, being promoted to chief justice in 1381 after the murder of his predecessor. He apparently treated those thought to have been involved in the Peasant’s Revolt with particular severity, and also developed a reputation for corruption. Loyal to Richard II, in 1387 he fell foul of the Lord’s Appellants, a group of nobles seeking to impeach the king, who charged him with treason. He fled before his trial, and was tried in absentia; when he was discovered hiding in Westminster, and on 19 February 1388 he was executed, being hanged at Tyburn; one account claims that he was stripped naked and found to be adorned with “amulets and signs painted with celestial characters, the head of a devil and the names of demons”.

Family History (Mithras)

“They had brought Mithras. DEO INVICTO, the Unconquered God.”

Mithras is most famous as a Roman soldier god around whom a mystery cult developed, but his roots are more ancient, although there is no absolute consensus on his origins. The first reference of his name comes from the second millennium BCE, on a clay tablet from Boghazköy (Anatolia), the ancient capital of the Hittite Empire, in which Mitra is invoked as guarantor of a treaty between the Hittites and the Mitanians. He is best known from Persia, where in the Yast (hymn) to Mithra in the Avesta (Persian sacred texts) from the fourth and fifth centuries BCE, he is equated with the sun.

When the Romans adopted the cult of Mithras is unclear; the first record of Mithras in the Roman world is from the Thebaid, by the poet Statius in the first century CE, and the first archaeological evidence relating to Mithras dates from the same period, around 100 CE, in the form of a dedicatory relief in Rome depicting Mithras killing a bull. How it got to Rome is unclear; according to Plutarch, it was Cilician pirates who introduced Mithras to the Roman legions stationed there, and his worship went on to become incredibly popular among the Roman army. That it was the legions that spread his worship across the empire is attested by the presence of temples and other dedications to Mithras in military settlements and camps in Thrace, North Africa, Dacia and Britain (including the temple to Mithras at the remote frontier fort of Housesteads on Hadrian’s Wall).

Little is known about the Roman cult of Mithras as his devotees were members of a Mystery Cult, who were forbidden from sharing information with non-initiates. What we do know comes from archaeological evidence such as architectural remains, mosaics and statues.

His temples (Mithraea) were usually underground, either in a cave or built into an imitation of one. They often contained an apse or platform with an altar, usually depicting the bull-slaying scene, and often inscribed with “DEO INVICTO”, “the Unconquered God”. In these scenes Mithras usually wore Persian clothing—a tunic, cloak and peaked Phrygian cap. His is most frequently depicted in the act of killing a bull in a cave, known as a tauroctony. Celestial bodies often accompany the scene, suggesting an astronomical connection to the action and cult.

The cult was male-only, mostly drawn from military and customs officials, although civilians also joined. A fragment of papyrus from Egypt contains lines from a Mithraic initiation script, and from that, and iconography, it seems that initiation was the most important ritual in the Mithraeum. New initiates were stripped, blindfolded and bound, and then knelt before the highest initiate, the Father, who pointed a weapon at the initiate’s head. There were seven levels of initiation: Raven, Bridegroom, Soldier, Lion, Persian, Sun-Runner and, finally, Father.

How far Roman Mithras can be associated with the Persian god is unclear. While Roman Mithras appears Persian in his representation, cult elements, such as the mithrae, the bull-slaying scene, and levels of initiation, are unique to itself. Mithraism as practised by Roman legionaries was most likely a combination of several elements, including Persian, that came together in the first century CE to create a new cult, whose popularity was to grow considerably over the next few centuries, until its decline and eventual disappearance in the fifth century CE.

The House of Fenris (Fenris)

“By taking this icon into the lair of Fenris you invoked more than you knew, and reawakened the wolf-form, with the consequences we have seen.”

In Norse mythology, Fenris (or Fenrir) was the giant wolf offspring of Loki, the trickster god, and the giantess Angrboda. Most of his myth is known from the Prose Edda, written in Iceland in the thirteenth century. He was so fierce that he was avoided by the other gods, and it was only the war god Tyr who was able to feed him. The gods, wishing to remove him from Asgard but fearing that spilling his blood would dishonour their sanctuary, decided to have him bound and taken away. Fenris was able to break the first two iron chains that bound him, Laeding and Dromi, before the gods convinced the dwarves to create the chain Gleipnir, as thin as a silken ribbon but stronger than any iron, made from the noise of a moving cat, the beard of a woman, the root of a mountain, the sinew of a bear, the breath of a fish, and the spittle of a bird. As Tyr bound him, Fenris bit down and severed his forearm. Fenris is still bound on an island in the sea (Amsvartner), awaiting Ragnarok when, according to the Poetic Edda (a thirteenth-century manuscript, composed of mythological and heroic poetry from 800 to 1000 CE), he will swallow Odin but ultimately be avenged by Odin’s son Vidar.

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