by Cave, Hugh
Then I ran, knowing better than to remain and try to reason with a man so fiendishly angry. I had no desire to fight him; nor could I, at that time, explain the reason for my investigation of that forbidden room. I ran, as fast as my legs would take me; and when I looked back, after plowing blindly through the deep cogon grass to the edge of the small clearing, I saw him standing rigid in the doorway of the house, his hands clutching the door-frame and his legs spread wide beneath him.
And with that picture engraved in my mind, I turned and plunged down the trail to the village.
That was the beginning of what I may rightly call a reign of terror—not for me, but for the natives. From that day on they were not safe in going near Peter Mace's house, and yet, despite the danger, their curiosity continued to take them there. More than one tale reached me of the boy's insane fury—of how, on discovering some luckless native inside the forbidden boundary, he had rushed out like a man gone mad, pursuing the native even into the jungle. True, these tales reached me after many recountings, and were certainly magnified for my benefit; but they were nevertheless significant. I did not go again to Peter Mace's domain.
And then one day he came to me! Alone he came, in the heat of noonday, bare-headed and bare-footed. Gazing at him, no man could ever have guessed that this disheveled degenerate had been, less than three weeks ago, a young and well-to-do adventurer. He faced me unsteadily. His eyes were black-rimmed, blood-streaked. His breath was foul with liquor fumes. And yet he came triumphantly. He glared at me! His wet lips, set in a facial mask which had not felt the touch of a razor for days, curled upward at the corners and grinned at me viciously.
"Well," he sneered, "are you still curious?"
I stood on the veranda of my house and stared at him, half afraid of him and half pitying him. But he wanted no pity. His filthy hands gripped the railing, and his bare feet were planted firmly on the steps. He returned my stare.
"Well, can't you speak?" he said. "Am I so drunk I can't be spoken to?"
"You are," I answered coldly. "You're too drunk to know what you're doing."
"That's what you think," he said, thrusting his face forward. "But I'm not doing anything, see? It's done. If you want to satisfy your damned curiosity, you can come back with me and satisfy it! And don't worry; I won't kick you out this time. I won't need to!"
Why I went with him, after such an outburst, I am not sure. Curiosity? Certainly, to a limited extent. But it was more than that. The boy was ill. He was mentally ill, morally ill. He needed help. It was my duty to go with him.
And I went. Assailed by doubts and by no little physical fear, I followed him into the jungle. Had he wished to murder me in safety and secrecy, he could have done so easily, in that labyrinth of gloom. The trail underfoot was slimy and uncertain after a night's rain. Not once did the sun beat down upon us through the ceiling of interlaced branches and drooling aroidinae which hung above us at every step. On all sides the eternal drip, drip, drip of moisture accompanied our slow progress. No word passed between us.
He could have murdered me, I say; but he did nothing but trudge along like an automaton, slopping through pools of black mud and staring straight ahead of him. The physical effort of that unpleasant journey was doing something to him. When we reached the clearing where his house stood, he turned to look at me with bewildered eyes, as if he had forgotten why I had accompanied him. And, in truth, he had forgotten!
"What do you want?" he demanded sullenly.
I hesitated. I tried desperately to read what lay behind his challenging stare. I told myself that his bewilderment was genuine; that the knowledge of what he had done while in the grip of liquor and near-madness had, in reality, gone from him. So I said, very quietly, as we stood there on the steps of his house:
"You asked me to help you."
"Help me?" he frowned. "How?"
"You had something to tell me, to show me. Some trouble that was hurting you. You came to me because it is my duty to hear other men's troubles and show them, if I can, a way out."
For quite some time he studied me, as if he were studying some printed puzzle in a book and wondering if the given solution were the correct one. He raised one hand to push the mop of hair out of his eyes, and then he chewed on the knuckles of that hand, gazing at me all the while like a small child trying very hard to recall certain things which had been forgotten. Finally he smiled and led the way into the house.
From that moment on, he was not the same. He turned to Menegai, his house-boy, who was standing near us, and told the native to go away and leave us alone. Then he motioned me silently to a chair, and drew up another chair facing me. He leaned forward, peered steadily at me, and finally said:
"Do you know who I am, Father?"
"Truthfully," I replied, "I do not."
"No, no, I don't mean that. Peter Mace is my real name. I mean, do you know who I am? What I am?"
"I should like to," I told him. "Then I might be able to help you."
"Yes, you might. But I'm not religious, Father. I don't believe in a God, that way. I know too much that is different."
"Tell me," I suggested softly.
And he told me.
His name was Peter Mace. Had I ever heard that name? Did I know what it meant in New York, Philadelphia? No? Well, names did not mean much in the South Seas, anyway—and he smiled wearily as he said that. What did it matter? His part of the name was unimportant, after all. He had been only a student at a well-known New York medical school—an honor student, until his fourth year, when he had been expelled in disgrace for certain lectures and experiments which were better left undescribed.
There had been a girl. A lovely girl, but a creature of the streets. Maureen Kennedy was her name. She had loved him.
"She was clean, pure," he told me. "We loved each other the way your God meant a boy and a girl to love. Nothing else in the world was worth thinking about. And—your God took her from me."
He, Peter Mace, had been living a life of secrecy at the time, reluctant to face his family after being expelled from the university. He had cast his lot with a likable young fellow who kept small and unpretentious rooms in the Village. This fellow, Jean Lanier, studied art. No! Created art!
"They laughed at him, Father, just as they laughed at everything beyond their understanding."
But she had died. Death had stalked those shadowed rooms, leering and screaming in derision, until—
"I went mad, Father. Sometimes I am still mad, when I think of it, of her. There she lay, in my arms, dead. A woman of the streets, they said. An unclean woman. But she was not! She was beautiful! For two days I sat beside her dead body, caressing her, staring at her, until my eyes could cry no more and I had no voice left for sobbing. All that while Jean Lanier kept silence, bringing me food and drink, respecting my anguish, never once condemning me. And then, in my madness, I conceived the idea of keeping her with me forever!"
Forever? Peter Mace must have seen the horror that came into my eyes as I stared at him. He smiled and leaned forward to place his hand gently on my arm.
"Not that way, Father," he said, shaking his head. "You misunderstand. Jean Lanier, he was an artist, a sculptor. We stole money, he and I, and for a week he worked day and night, without sleeping, to make for me what I wanted. When it was finished, we covered her poor dead body and took it far from the city, where every single thing was quiet and peaceful. There, at night, we buried her. No one missed her; no one asked questions. She was only a woman of the streets; and who cares when a woman of the streets disappears?"
He stared at me, and at the floor, and for a long time he did not speak again. Then he said heavily:
"1 should never have done it, Father. I should never have made Jean Lanier do what he did. It drove me insane. It filled my mind with hate for Almighty God. And because I had studied these"—he pointed bitterly to the pile of forbidden books on the table beside us—"there was only one way for me to turn. I studied more and more. I learned things
. Jean Lanier turned me out and would have no more of me. Wherever I went with the thing Jean had made for me, people whispered and called me mad."
"And so," I said, "you came here to Faikana."
He nodded. "That, too, was part of the madness," he confessed. "It was no separate insanity in itself; it was a part of the whole. I had to get away from every living person. I had to be alone, with her. Do you understand?—I had to be alone with her! I had to finish what I had started! And I have! I have!"
All at once he was on his feet before me, laughing shrilly. I shrank from him, realizing the horror of the transformation that had taken place in him. I knew, then, the condition of his mind. When he had come for me, at my house, his mind had been full of this strange triumph which was burning within him, and he had been at least partly mad. Then, on that long, silent journey through the jungle, the fires within him had burned low; he had even forgotten the cause of his madness. And now he had slowly, terribly, talked himself into being once more a savage beast with but one idea. Certainly it was no sane man that I cringed from.
"I'll show her to you!" he bellowed, beating the air in front of my face with his clenched fists. "You sneaked upstairs once, damn you, and all you saw was a chunk of dead marble! Come up with me, now! I'll show you something your religion-stuffed brain won't dare believe!"
He gripped my arms and hauled me out of my chair. His wide eyes were close to my face, finding fiendish satisfaction in every expression that twisted my features. He shook me as a grown man shakes a terrified child.
"You think your idiotic religion is the answer to everything in life, don't you?" he flung out. "You think you know all there is to know! Well, I'll show you! I'll teach you something!"
He pushed me past the table, where those obscene volumes were piled. Savagely he held my arm and forced me toward the ladder which led to that shadowed chamber above. Had I been able to get past him, to reach the door, I should have fled from that place without hesitation, just as I have fled once before. But escape was not possible. He would have followed me—I am sure of it—and dragged me back. God alone knows what might have happened then.
The ladder swayed perilously as I climbed it. I had no time to ascend cautiously. Had I paused, he might have thrust me forcibly up those slender rungs, precipitating both of us to the floor below. Strange that I should have feared physical harm, when I should have been dreading a thousand times more intently the probable mental horror into which I was stumbling! But I did not see that horror at first, even after clambering through the aperture in the ceiling and groping to my feet on the floor of the room beyond. That room was a domain of shadow, and the sudden flare of a match in Peter Mace's uplifted hand did not at first reveal the thing that faced me.
Then I saw, and stepped backward with such violence that my rigid body was lashed by the nipa uprights in the wall behind me. Peter Mace had paced forward to a small table and ignited a candle which sat there; and the candle—a crude, home-made thing which burned with ghastly brilliance—sputtered and hissed as it flooded the chamber with illumination.
That room was a garret, small and bare and uninviting. Standing erect in it, a man of ordinary height could have reached up, without effort, and touched the ceiling. Walls and floor were of the crudest construction, fashioned of huhu wood and overlaid with coarsely woven atap mats. Only one window was in evidence, and that masked by a strip of unclean cotton cloth. And there, against the far wall, staring straight at me, sat the thing which I had once before dared to look at. There, in the restless glare of the candle, the thing confronted me—and this time I saw every separate, single detail of it.
I have said before that the thing was a woman. It was. Now, as I advanced fearfully toward it, fascinated by the almost life-like manner in which it studied me, I could not repress amazement at the uncanny perfection of it. If Jean Lanier had made this, then Jean Lanier had been truly an artist! For the woman was a creature of marble, so delicately and expertly sculptured that every portion of her exquisite form could have been mistaken, even at close range, for living reality. Naked she was, and sitting in an attitude of meditation, with her extended hands holding the metal dish which I had seen before. And I knew intuitively, even as I wondered at the uncanny loveliness of her, that there was something terrible, something wrong, in the way she was sitting there. "This," I said slowly to Peter Mace, "is the woman you loved? This is Maureen Kennedy?"
He laughed—not wildly or triumphantly, but so softly that I turned abruptly to peer at him, and found him smiling at me as a man smiles who knows more, much more, than his victim.
"She will be the woman I love, when I am finished," he replied; and he walked to the marble figure and put his hands on her shoulders, and looked down into her face as if she could understand him.
And then I made a mistake. I believed him to be less mad than when he had forced me up the ladder a moment ago. I put my hand on his arm and said quietly:
"My boy, this is not good. Your friend should never have made such an idol for you to worship. The commandment tells us: Thou shalt have none other God but me."
He flung my hand away. Savagely he whirled on me, glared at me. I thought his clenched fist would crash into my face. Then he stepped back, smiling. Deliberately he walked past me to the opening in the floor, and stooped, and dragged a heavy wooden square over the aperture, securing the square in place with thongs which were attached to it. With equal deliberation he paced to the opposite wall, grasped a chair which leaned there, and set the chair down in the center of the room. Standing behind it, he said evenly:
"Come here and sit down."
"I have no wish to remain in this room," I retorted.
"Come here and sit down."
"Why?"
"Because I say so! And if your idiotic God were here, he would sit beside you. If either of you refused, I would kill you both."
I hesitated, and he stood motionless, waiting. Slowly, then, I obeyed him, and my hands trembled on my knees as I lowered myself into the chair.
"Now you will sit here and watch," he ordered, "and you will say nothing. I have work to do. I must not be interrupted. And if your foolish God does not strike you down for looking at forbidden things, you will soon know why I asked Jean Lanier to make this woman for me!"
And now I must recount truths which were perhaps better left untold. Probably I shall be condemned severely for the words which I here set down. Perhaps I shall be more than condemned—and you, also, for reading them. But these things must be told, for the salvation of those who may someday be mad enough to walk in Peter Mace's footsteps!
There I sat, in a small chamber filled with leaping shadows. There, facing me, sat that marble image of a too-lovely woman. The exit was closed, the single window shut and masked. We were alone, Peter Mace, the woman, and I, in a room cursed with sinister thoughts and evil machinations. And, disregarding my presence entirely, the boy proceeded with his unhallowed labors.
He went first to a small compartment in the wall and took therefrom a number of bound volumes, one of which he carried to the table. Poring over this, and deliberately turning its pages, he found what he sought and began to read silently to himself. I saw his lips move with the words. I saw the terrible eagerness in his eyes as they stared unblinkingly at the page. Rigid and motionless he stood there, full in the candle's glare, his shoulders hunched forward, his head down-thrust, his hands clenched white on the table-top. Then he straightened, turned slowly, and walked toward the woman.
From a soft leather pouch which lay there at the woman's feet, he took something small and black and touched it to the woman's marble lips. I thought at first that it was a crucifix; then I saw my error and shuddered, for it was an inverted crucifix and the face upon it was the face of a leering demon. Carefully he placed it in the metal dish which the woman's lifeless hands extended toward him. With the same deliberate care he took a small phial in his hands, and poured into the dish a viscous dark liquid which gleamed dully in the di
m light. Then I saw a match blaze brightly, and the dish was suddenly alive with pale blue flame.
Slowly, then, the boy sank to his knees. He did not turn to look at me. I doubt if he even realized my presence. He knelt, and stared into the woman's face, and raised his arms in supplication. From his lips came an almost inaudible low monotone, as if he were praying.
In truth, I thought he was praying, and my heart was filled with pity for him. I respected his torment; I understood his loneliness. Then I heard the words he was muttering—I knew them for what they were—and it was I who prayed to a merciful God to forgive us both!
You have heard of the Black Mass? You are aware of its hideous significance? Then you know the extent of the madness in Peter Mace's soul, and you know to whom he was muttering his maledictions.
But it was more than that. Dimly I realized the enormity of his intent, and slowly but surely, as I listened, I became prey to utter terror. A thousand times since that day I have reviled myself for not finding courage enough to stop him. Had I leaped out of my chair and flung myself upon him, he might have thanked me for it later. Even had I been forced to seize the very chair in which I sat, and strike him with it, I could not have been condemned for such violence. For the boy was mad. He was inviting annihilation.
Yet I sat there, staring at him. I sat rigid, eyes wide and blood pounding in my temples. I was terrified and fascinated, and, God help me, I let him have his way.
Those words, I can hear them yet, whenever I sit alone in a shadowed room. They mutter at me in the same singsong chant. They are in my brain.
"This is the night, O Bethmoora. This is the night, though it be day and the sun be shining without our sanctuary. Hear me, while I walk by the black lake of Hali, O Nyarlathotep. Hear me what I say . . . word for word . . . as the earth-born must say to command the presence of the Black King. Hear me . . . heaven in art . . . heaven in art . . . and the Yellow Sign is burning on the altar of my desire, that she may open her eyes and be mine again. Who father our name, thy be hallowed! Words for you, O Yuggoth, O Yian, O Hastur, O Prince of Evil! Give her to me, I say, and command your price. And in the name of the Great One who must not be named . . . through the wells of night where the crawling ones lurk unseen, waiting for wings to raise them . . . and in the name of the headless ones born in the red foulness of the limitless pit . . . give her to me in life, O Hastur. Give her to my arms, O Yuggoth! Hear me, O Lord of Lords, Nyarlathotep!"
