Clay (5 page)

When Ambler had completed his examination in the privacy of Cassandra’s chamber, he plodded heavily down the twisting staircase. I offered him a drink, muttering something about its being a raw night. It was only a pretense of civility with me, until, in the firelight of the sitting room, I saw the new expression that had crept into Ambler’s eyes. I had seen many expressions there, after such sessions with Cassandra; expressions of doubt or bewilderment, or of professional satisfaction at her apparent recovery, but, now, there was something almost like pleasure in those soft gray eyes. I poured him a glass of sherry. He gulped it and winked.

“You’ve been wise people, you and your wife, Doctor,” he said, after a pause. The eyes were actually twinkling.

“Wise?” His good humor had begun to irritate me.

“Of course! Nothing could have been more intelligent.... I don’t like to seem personal, but after all, it’s been fairly obvious that you and Cassandra... well, something’s come between you.... But, now, this.... Certainly, a child is just the thing to bring you together again.... It’ll make all the difference in the world in this gloomy old place....”

I suppose I hadn’t really been listening to him. I remember packing my pipe, absently, and scratching a match on the box. It made a tiny, lost noise in the shadowy bleakness of the room. Then, he made that crack about a child, and 1 just stood there, staring at him, the match flickering in my hand. There was nothing but a hollow numbness in me; afterward, I found a scorched scar on the skin of my thumb and forefinger.

I realized dully that Ambler was chuckling; his hand was on my shoulder.

“Well, don’t look so confused, old man,” he said heartily. “I guess Cassandra wanted to surprise you herself, and now I’ve gone and spoiled it for her by blurting it out....”

“She never said a word...

Ambler laughed and I think I managed a watery grin; he gave me that line about the husband always being the last to know. We had another glass of sherry. I tried to act natural. The wine spread hazily through my puzzlement; a warmth swirled in my head, as I saw Ambler to the door, a vague, unreasonable anger. I was hurt at the silent wall Cassandra had erected between us; it seemed impossible, almost inhuman, that she could have known such a thing, and deliberately kept it hidden from me.

When Ambler had disappeared into the maw of the storm, I bolted the door. Our lights had given out again, and I walked unsteadily. The anger throbbed in my temples now; it kept time with the flickering of the candelabra light as I slowly climbed the winding staircase to Cassandra’s room.

5

The door was locked. My shadow cast a dark blot against its panels, a ghost that wavered drunkenly into the half-light. My hand was perspiring; the candelabrum kept slipping in my grasp. I knocked, listening to the leaden echo it made in the subterranean catacombs of the house. There was no answer. I called:

“Cassie!” My tongue felt thick and dry. I waited.

“I’m lying down, darling. I’ve a headache...Cassie’s voice was brittly light, controlled with an effort.

“I want to talk to you.” Anger cut through my tone.

For a long moment, there was nothing but the spectral whisper of the waxed candlewicks as they sputtered anxiously; then, a murmur of footsteps beyond, and the key turned in its socket. I let myself in, closing the door behind me.

Cassandra was standing by the fireplace; the instant I saw her, anger ebbed from my mind. There was something terribly small and frightened about her lovely, small body in the gossamer softness of a negligee. I set the candelabrum on a table and went to her; my hands trembled at the warmth of her shoulders. She did not draw away; she did not move at all.

“Ambler told me about the baby,” I said gently.

It was then that she turned; she was smiling, and in that moment, all the falseness had gone out of her face. A quiet warmth touched it. She traced my lips with her fingertips.

“I wanted to tell you myself....”

I did not realize, then, that the taut sham was still in her voice. I kissed her. I told her it was wonderful. I said all the foolish things a man has a right to say at such a time. And, then, suddenly as I had begun, I stopped. Her mask had slipped; the warm tenderness was gone. A wall of nothingness blotted out the walls of her eyes. Cassandra twisted violently from me.

“It’s no good,” she whispered hoarsely. “It’s no good!”

“Cassie.... I don’t understand.... I...”

She spun to face me; blurred stains of tears streaked the sallowness of her cheeks. In the jaundiced candleglow, her eyes were abnormally bright.

“Can’t you see? Do you have to be told?” Trembling lips twisted in a coarse sneer. Her small, even teeth seemed somehow vicious. “You’re not wanted here! Just go away and let me be! I never want to see you again!” The hard grin widened and unstable laughter bubbled hysterically in her throat. “Your child! Do you think I’d bear your child! Can’t you see I’ve changed? Don’t you know you’ve lost me... that I belong to him now... ever since that night I went to the cove... to the Abyss.... I’ll always belong to him.... Always! Always! The bride of Yoth Kala...!”

The maniacal laughter cracked off as I gripped her shoulders; my fingers chewed into her flesh. I could feel her breath against my face, hot and sobbing.

“Cut it out!” I snapped. “Stop it, Cassie!”

She stood there for an eternity, staring at me; the mood whirled and twisted and childlike, bewildered fear was in her eyes again. She began to cry, her slight frame shuddering pitifully.

“It’s true, I tell you,” she gasped. “It’s not your child. You don’t believe me... you think I’m crazy.... You needn’t believe me.... Just go away... before he comes for me.... He said he would come.... I don’t want him to hurt you.... I don’t want them to make you like me... like my father....” She was babbling senselessly, the words tumbling from her lips. .. Yoth Kala will come.... I hear his voice... he sings You hear?... Calling me... his bride... the mother of his child I come, O, husband of the Green Void.... I come...

It wasn’t easy to hold her. I still have four parallel scars on my right cheek where her nails bit in frantically. She twisted with a strength that was nothing human, her lips muttering, her high, cracked voice shrilling that loathsome melody that meant death and horror and endless unrest to any who heard it. Finally, I won. Quite suddenly, she stopped struggling, she peered childishly into the darkness beyond us, her head cocked pathetically to one side, listening. She took an uncertain step toward the window before she fell. There was no sound save the rustle of her negligee as she crumpled at my feet. A thread of crawling spidery fog snaked in through the halfopen casement, lingering like a shroud over her body. The stench was something from the bottomless watery depths of the sepulchre, a vile effluvium that was somehow the embodiment of every malevolent terror that stalked Heath House.

Cassandra and I were shadows playing a part against a papier- mache background in a scene from the opiate-deep nightmares of Poe. I did things without stopping to wonder why. I can recall carrying her to the bed, and touching her pulse with fingers so numbed by horror that they could scarcely detect the fluttering heart-beat beneath them.

That was the night I came to an end of it. You can take just so much; you can go on hoping things will change, that you will awaken from this monstrous dream of falling through a void of unutterable terror. Then, you hit bottom. Staring at the chalky stillness of my wife’s face, lost in the whiteness of the pillows, I knew I would have to break through. If I was to save her at all, I had to get to the bottom, I had to take this noisome fear in my hands and tear it out by the roots.

I had to open the cancerous sore of the secret that ate at Cassandra’s mind, the secret that lay buried in Lazarus Heath’s book-room.

I was quite calm about it. When her breathing had become safe, I took the key gently from the necklace. With something that was more instinct than purpose, I got my revolver from the night-table drawer; it was fully loaded. I locked Cassandra in and went down the hall to the library. The gun made me feel better. It was something solid and sane to hold onto. A month later, the prosecution used the gun as exhibit “A”; they called it the murder weapon!

What I found beyond the massive, chiseled portal was a thing that laughed at the puny, human bravery of guns; a malignant, flowering evil that spawned itself in the pen-scrawled words of a man long-since food for the gnawing maggots of an unspeakable hell. As I pushed open the door, staring blindly into the pit of darkness beyond, I almost wished for a stinking, flesh-born terror with which I could clash; an evil that lived and breathed, and could bleed and die. I found nothing but a dusty, dry-rot smelling chamber, that had been too long without air and sunlight. A mouldering, half-burned candle stood at the edge of what Lazarus Heath had used as a writing-table; I held a match to it.

A butterfly of flame sputtered to lift, throwing mammoth shadows along the crumbling plaster walls, casting an unwanted eye of light on the endless shelves of books long used to the privacy of night, untouched by curious hands. I wandered aimlessly about the high, barren room, gazing upon titles so antiquated, so much a part of a past beyond remembrance, beyond life and death, that I should have sworn it was a library straight from the flaming abyss of Hell. They were books not meant for mortal eyes, tales told by cults that sank into oblivion before time was measured, cast out from earth, trailing the ruins of their hideous, blood-thirsting rites behind them. Here and there, more sane, understandable volumes came to view. There was a priceless collection of sea lore, and in one spider- webbed corner, I found a yellowed, thumbed copy of “The Odyssey”; one section had been underscored, its battered pages mute testimony of endless reading and rereading. It was the passage describing the escape of Odysseus from the syrens. God knows, Lazarus Heath had reason to be fascinated by it.

*

The shrill tumult of Cassandra’s wild babbling still thundered softly in my brain. I stood very still, thinking, “This is the room.” The root of it had to be tangled in the tomb-like dust of this shadowy chamber. But, where? my mind echoed. Where? My wanderings had brought me to the worm-eaten throne-chair behind Heath’s writing- table. The light of the candle did a danse macabre as I sank heavy into the seat; it washed the black marble table-top with a flood of icy yellowness. Then, I saw the diary. I gave it a casual, irritated glance, and then, as the frenzied scrawl impressed itself upon my consciousness, I leaned closer. Faint gold-washed letters glittered brassily in the semi-darkness. “Lazarus Heath—His Book.”

It may have been only the figment of a sick, overwrought imagination; I don’t know. I know that I felt it there within me, the instant I touched the book. I felt the evil that sighed through Heath House, suddenly come to life, as I thumbed nervously through the water- stained pages of Lazarus Heath’s diary. The demented tittering of the storm rose from a whisper to the howl of a rabid dog baying at the moon. Sleet lashed at high casement windows and the silken portieres rustled anxiously. Even before I began to read that incredible, unholy record, I knew I held the root in my hands.

There was nothing sinister in the first entry. It was made in the steady, squarish script of a self-educated seaman, and dated February 21st, 192-. The words were sure and sane, with no hint of the hell- penned horror that lay in the final pages of the book.

Lazarus Heath had shipped out as First Mate aboard the freighter
Macedonia
, bound Southeast for Africa. It was as simple and prosaic as that. For pages there was nothing but the easy, satisfied chatting of a sea-faring man setting down, for his own amusement, the record of an interesting but mundane voyage. The first leg of the journey had gone well; even the weather had been with the Macedonia. The crew was competent and not too quarrelsome, and already looking forward to a “time” in the African coast-towns. Then, somewhere in the Southern Atlantic, they ran into the fog.

At first, Lazarus Heath made only passing mention of it; although it had come upon them unexpectedly and was intensely thick and disconcerting, it was judged that they would sail on through it on instruments without too much difficulty. There was a controlled, sensible attitude in Heath’s script at this point; he was writing for himself the things he had told his men. At the dose of the entry he wrote, as though loathe to admit it, even to himself: “There is a certain uneasiness among the men; it is not good for the nerves, this endless, blinding fog....” The writing trailed off with the first whisper of the uncertainty that was laying siege to Lazarus Heath’s mind.

The next entry was made four days later in a dashing, cold hand. It was short and bewildered. “Still this damnable fog, and that is not the worst of it. The instruments have begun to act queerly. We must go on as best we can and trust in the Almighty. Men very jumpy....” And, on the night of the same day, the controlled hand had wavered perceptibly as it scribbled: “Instruments gone dead. What in God’s name does it mean?” The story continued.

The coming of the voices was not sudden. It began with Dyke. Lazarus Heath knew little about the gangling, blond-bearded kid called Alan Dyke. He had signed on in New York as a fireman. A quiet, uneasy individual, he spent most of his leisure with books. He affected the bilge-water lingo of the sea, but underneath, he was only a kid, and he was scared. It began, according to Heath, when the engines went dead. They had expected that for what seemed a century. The
Macedonia
couldn’t go on plowing in blind circles forever; the fuel gave out. The hell-fire in the bowels of Heath’s ship guttered and died; there was only an echoing ghost of the roar that had choked the engine room.

*

It was too quiet. An unholy, nerve-rending silence enveloped the becalmed
Macedonia
. After a time, the men even gave up talking, as if the very echo of their voices, hollow and dead in the smothering fog, terrified them.

Dyke was on the foredeck when he heard the voices. Heath, standing beside him, had sensed an abrupt new tautness in the bony, coltish frame. Dyke’s adolescent face strained to one side, marble- blue eyes gazing blindly into the mist; he listened. His words came to Lazarus Heath as though they had been separated by some yawning, fog-choked abyss.