The humid air breathed stiflingly close and heavy--an unspeakable atmosphere, in which an odor like that of putrescence mingled with a stronger murkiness. He might have wakened in a den of reptiles, where half the inhabitants were very much deceased--or--a comparatively faint whiff of air like this had scented the storehouse which was also a passage to the banks of Llewellyn Creek.
Striving with all his will, fairly forcing his muscles to obedience, Colin managed to raise his head and shoulders an inch or so, then fell back exhausted.
"Take your time," advised a voice. "You can hardly expect to meet such an adversary as my little gatekeeper and leap up in full strength immediately afterward."
Colin knew that voice.
"Ches'r--Reed!" he articulated with great difficulty, but a weaker man would have been past any speaking, for he would have been dead some time since. "Is--that thing--on me--now?"
"No. I assure you, though, that it was touch-and-go whether or not I could get him off in time. A bit more and your veins would have been empty, my friend."
Certainly as a rescuer Reed had a curious way of speaking--a sneering, contemptuous way, that seemed to hide a secret insult. And--his veins? The side of Colin's throat felt swollen, and just where shoulder and neck joined there was a heavy, dull aching. That heavy blow on the neck would account for the one, but the other? He remembered the feel of those soft, cold lips between neck and shoulder.
"Here, have another drink." Leaning over, Reed set a glass to his patient's lips, and Colin gladly obeyed. The fiery strength of the draft coursed through him, and it was a strength sadly needed.
"You are in my work-room," said Reed. "Sit up and look about you."
Upon again struggling to raise himself and with Reed's arm under his shoulder, Colin succeeded and sat panting heavily.
An earlier suspicion was confirmed. From shoulder to forearm he was skillfully involved in thin, strong ropes. This did not greatly surprise him, for Reed's tone had carried its own warning of unpleasantness in store, and if the Dusk Lady had come home, she might in all innocence have related the tale of last night's doings. One expects no discretion of madness.
But though finding himself a bound prisoner roused no surprise, the surroundings of his captivity assuredly did.
The scene was laid in the extensive cellars of the Jerrard house; but the colonial architect who planned that residence would have found. trouble in recognizing this portion of his work.
To make Reed's "workroom" possible, a good share of the dwelling's interior had been bodily born out. Its ground was the level of the old cellars, and took up their full extent, which was considerable. All the central part opened upward into a kind of square shaft, three stories high, with blank, white sides, whose roof was that enormous "cupuly" which had so puzzled the station lounger.
To the contractors who did the work, Reed had explained that he required a high, well-enclosed chamber, with plenty of room in it for air circulation.
* * * * *
Since first regaining his senses here, Colin would have said that even more room for air circulation would have been an improvement--a great deal more room. In the service of science, however, men are wont to smile at personal inconvenience. So Reed smiled through the somewhat turgid atmosphere, as his prisoner sat up and took cognizance of his strange surroundings.
Rather than a work-room, Colin might have almost thought himself facing the inspiration for some mad poet's dream of Walpurgis night, or for such an artist as Dor� to picture a new and more appalling vision of the inferno's lower circles.
He saw a dim, marsh-like expanse, whose further boundaries were completely veiled in vapors. It extended on three sides of the solid ground that underlay the shaft alone. It was roofed by the black underbeams of the floor above, and out of its mire rose the old granite piles that supported them.
That dim expanse must be called swamp or marsh, because a better name has not been made to name it by. But Nature never made a marsh like that. Between the granite pillars, fungoids and some kind of whitish vegetation like pale rushes grew thickly, but though those fungoids and rushes had a strangeness of their own, it was not the vegetable growth alone which made Reed's marsh peculiar.
Its entire space was acrawl with living forms that for repulsiveness could only be compared to a resurgence from their graves of creatures dead and half-decayed.
Colin saw them by a livid light that by no means increased their beauty--a light that was derived from the fungoids. These singular growths glowed with a whitish-gray effulgence that, diffused by curling vapors, gave the place such a dim illumination as might grace the surface of a witch's caldron.
A cold, dank caldron it was, with fires pale and heatless as the moon, and giving off with, its mist wraiths the effluvium of decay and of the life that springs from decay.
Like some horrible, hidden ulcer, Reed's work-room lay festering; and above it the black beams of the old house dripped and rotted with its moisture.
Not to Colin had been sight of a white marble rotunda, opal-domed, where surrounded by golden thrones a strange marsh glowed. But even had he seen it, that place to this had been homelike, as its white hounds were kindly, friendly beasts, compared to the creatures of this.
Out from among slimy rushes and glimmering fungoids, out of the rising whorls of vapor, came a Thing. It leaped in one bound from the mire to a scrambling foothold on the firm ground where Colin sat.
Save that it was neither the reptile nor saurian one might expect from such a breeding-place, the creature was hard to classify. In color, it might have been white, but for the mire in which it had been wallowing. High above four slender legs arched a thin, shaggy back, and beneath a plaster of mud and green slime gaunt ribs stood out like the bones of a beast that has starved to death in the desert. Its head, drooping low at the end of a neck equally gaunt and colloped, had a feline shape.
But no honest great cat of the jungle ever owned such eyes. Large, lambent, yellow as topaz, they stared Colin in the face with the most curiously knowing expression--and its knowledge was solely evil.
The brute was silent--in all that place there was no sound but the drip of water, an occasional splash or swishing of the rushes--it was silent and stared him, eye to eye. Then the lips drew up in a fiend's snarl that disclosed the yellow fangs of a fiend behind. One stiff-legged, forward step it took, still staring at its securely-bound prey.
Sick with repulsion rather than healthy fear, Colin knew that it meant to spring. This, he thought, was the final revenge Reed had planned for his servant's slayer--to have his throat torn out by those grinning detestable jaws. By one great effort, and without a word or glance of appeal to the man beside him, Colin steadied himself to meet death as he had always met its danger--unswervingly, eye to eye and face to face.
CHAPTER XXII
A Herder of Goblins
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Colin was ready, but in thinking that his death was planned at the jaws of that frightful beast, he had misjudged his captor.
Stepping forward, Reed intervened his own person between the flame-eyed brute and its purposed victim. Uttering a sharp command he waved it back--with that left hand of his, that Colin saw very clearly now was covered with a bulky, white fur glove.
The beast's jaws opened wider in a soundless snarl. Then with a cringing motion it whirled, leaped and vanished in the swamp like the gaunt fantom of hunger it resembled.
Reed turned. "They know their master, eh, O'Hara?"
"It seems so." Colin eyed him sternly. "What sort of goblin den is it you have here?"
"Goblins? Your Celtic superstition deprives me of credit! What you see is my work--my work, all mine! No supernatural bogy or god or demon lent any help to the creation of these dainty pets! They are mine--the children of my unaided hand and brain! Do you doubt me?"
He put the interrogation with an explosive insistence that puzzled Colin. When he spoke of the "workroom" as a goblin-den, he had used the term in a hy
perbolic sense. Despite everything, his preconception of Reed as an experimenter in freak zoology had kept the supernatural from his thoughts and not even his experience with the luminous, blood-sucking gatekeeper had changed this view.
In the steaming jungles between Capricorn and Cancer he had seen creatures as strange and loathsome. Such a one had Reed found, no doubt, brought it here and fed it daintily till it throve past the size of its tropical fellows.
And he had taken it for granted that the frightful, starved-looking brutes thronging this den were the misbred abortions of more natural beasts.
But Reed's words had an effect contrary to their meaning. As if with new vision Colin scanned the fetid breeding-ground.
The feline brute had hidden itself, but a number of its fellows were distinct in all their grotesquerie. From the pale blob of a thing that lurched past on a bunch of tentaclelike legs, to a creature so buried in mire that only its bony head lay on the surface like the yellowed skull of a horse, all were hideous. But nature herself makes many loathesome forms.
It was not their ugliness that enlightened Colin. It was their eyes.
Venomous, intelligent, unforgettable, that which looked-through them was far removed from the innocent ferocity of wild beasts. They were goblins!
And turning from them to their master he saw in Reed's glance that same stare of naked, demoniacal hate that was in the eyes of his creatures.
* * * * *
At Green Gables a white-haired man paced restlessly up and down the library, and as he walked there poured from his lips the pent-up stream of a story so terrible, and at the same time so incredible, that he had dared to tell it to no man before.
And in this he was right, for in all America there were but two living men who would have believed. Anthony Rhodes was not one of them, but it was not to Rhodes that he was talking. That level-headed young lawyer sat by the table, toying with a paper-weight and wondering if there was any risk that the second lunatic he had entertained might become dangerously violent.
That the second lunatic claimed to be the father of the first made the tale no more credible. Rhodes could only think of the beautiful "Miss Reed" with pity, but he saw no reason why he should be called upon to tolerate her equally mad relatives.
Perhaps had Rhodes either shared in the fragmentary confidence bestowed by Colin on his return from Mexico in June, or stood behind a bulging door and watched the white claw of a demon rip through its panels, his credulity might have been greater.
To Cliona had been both these experiences. It was to her that the white-haired man talked, and whether Tony were convinced or not bothered her very little just now. In fact, for once Cliona was not thinking of Tony. She was listening with the keenest and most lively attention to the story of Svend Biornson, once adviser to the Council of Sacred Gilds in Tlapallan, now a homeless wanderer, trailing an unnameable horror across the earth.
It was a trail he had lost--lost very soon after it entered the United States. Only the chance that guided his wanderings to this city had also ordained that he reach there in time to read of the latest ravages at Carpentier. In June he had been on the western coast, whither the purely local excitement over that earlier mystery had never traveled.
And yet it had been on some such incident as this bungalow affair that Biornson had relied to pick up the trail again. "I knew," he said, "that its ambition had become impatient--that strange, bad events must soon happen because of it --"
"I was sure," said Cliona, "that the thing which came to my door that night had no natural origin!"
"Madness--pure madness!" muttered Rhodes, playing with the paper-weight and wondering if it would be worse for Cliona's nerves to put the stranger out now, or let him go on talking till he began to get dangerous.
"I saw your brother's name in this morning's account," continued Biornson, "and a reference to what happened in June. I looked that up in the old files at the Daily Record once and then--then I knew. From what I have already told you, you can imagine how wild with anxiety I have been to find them--and it, the thing they took, I should almost say, that escaped with them from Tlapallan.
"I went straight to Carpentier. I suppose your brother was too disturbed and preoccupied to recognize me and"--he laughed shortly--"Mr. O'Hara is not a person who is easily stopped when he happens to be in a hurry! By the way--I--the fact is, when your brother does recognize me, he may not exactly meet me with open arms. There was something--a thing I neglected to tell you.
"At our last parting I did him a very great wrong. That was fifteen years ago, but it was not the kind of wrong that a man forgets."
Biornson paused somewhat drearily. In spite of his anxiety to find Colin, enlist his help and get from him any information he might have acquired, he rather dreaded that moment of recognition.
"Colin's probably forgotten it," said Cliona abstractedly. "He never bears malice long." Her mind was running back over the man's narrative. "I tell you, Mr. Biornson, there can be no question at all. This Reed man, with his hints to Colin of strange beasts, with his albino servant, and his daughter who's so lovely and strange and claims to be no daughter of his--the three of them fit to a T with what you've been hunting! For the black god you speak of, I do not know. Colin said nothing to me of seeing any such carved stone demon out there, and the poor girl--I am afraid we gave her little chance to tell us of anything."
"You meant well. Oh, I know by your face, and your manner and your--your sympathetic comprehension--you meant well. You say she seemed in good health, only very mournful. Mournful! How can I make up to her for this last year? I had never thought to be glad for my dear wife's death. But I thank God now that Astrid passed in peace, with the child she loved at her side, to be mourned by many friends--yes, I am glad she passed before that red night came to Tlapallan.
"But our poor child--let me find her again--only let me find her--This won't do!"
Biornson halted and visibly straightened, both in spirit and body.
"Personal ties," he said sternly, "have a compelling grip, but my duty lies first in another direction. Mr. Rhodes, do you realize that we have to save the world from an invasion atrocious beyond credence? I don't think it has begun yet. I believe--I hope that we are in time to smother the thing in its infancy.
* * * * *
"The priests of Nacoc-Yaotl knew the danger. They were very careful to restrict the power they had of it to one certain channel. But it is free now--free--loose in the world with its chosen servants! You may think me mad if you like, but I swear to you that there was--there is--life in that dreadful, carved black stone called Nacoc-Yaotl! A life that is ambitious and vile and that chose these vile men I have told you of for the agents of its fiendish ambition!
"And it has an enmity against the human race--an enmity darker and vaster than human enmity could ever be! Can you believe, child, that there are gods of old who still live? Old gods, and powers that have survived the passing of their worshippers?"
"I can the easier believe in your demon," Cliona said, "for the sake of that which came to my door one night. Now, do you really think, Mr. Biornson, that it was the porcelain image Colin brought me from Mexico that drew the bad luck to our bungalow?"
"I do indeed!"
"Then I have no doubt you are right. And I think 'tis in Reed's house at Undine that you'll find the lair of the evil spirit you are seeking!"
"Cliona--Rhodes!" ejaculated Tony, getting to his feet at last, and shocked beyond measure by the whole conversation.
"Cliona O'Hara Rhodes," she corrected him with a sidelong flash of very much excited blue eyes. "There are things that we Irish are quicker to understand than the rest of the world. You keep out of this, Tony!"
CHAPTER XXIII
The "Lord of Fear"
Table of Contents
"Look about you," said Reed. "Before I carry out my purpose, there is much for you to see and hear."
Though in Colin's opinion he had already seen a trifle more than enough, he
obeyed Reed's gesture and glanced behind him. After a moment he turned back.
"That's not strange," he said wearily. "That the old black devil himself should preside here is just the most natural thing in the world, Mr. Reed!"
For some reason, Reed's sneering face flooded with angry color.
"I preside here!" he snapped. "Stand up and turn around! Quick! Or you'll find a devil in me really to be dreaded!"
But though Colin might be foolish enough to believe in demons, he was not a man easily overawed by one.
"If you wish me to stand," he said quietly, "you'll have to be either untying me or helping me up. That leech-thing of yours has not left me in just the pink of condition."
To feign a greater weakness than he felt was elementary strategy, but to his disgust not much feigning was required. It was all he could do to get on his feet, with Reed's rather grudging assistance, and once up he found himself very wavery and with a painful tendency to buckle at the knees.
No sooner was he up than he sat down again, but this time on a chair carved, so near as he could tell, from virgin gold.
One does not expect to find solid gold furniture in the midst of a swamp. But neither is it usual to find a swampful of fiends in the heart of an old colonial residence. Being past surprise, Colin viewed his surroundings with interest and let it go at that.
The space immediately beneath the shaft, whose square was some twenty-five feet in diameter, had been floored with cement, on a higher level than the marsh, but sweating with dampness from the general moisture. Three sides were open to the swamp, but the fourth was a wall, flush with the side of the shaft above it and pierced by a single broad, high doorway.
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