“What kind of books?”
He acted as if he didn’t want to talk about it, but was impelled to speak.
“Skipped through some books on dowsing…you know…”
Beverly perked up with a look of interest.
“Are there books about it?”
He chuckled hollowly. “Plenty of books, but none of them say much. There’s a history to dowsing, of course, and they all treat that. The authors are either totally for dowsing as a fact, or totally against it. None of the authors, it seems, are dowsers. They’re just investigators…and writers. It was a foolish notion I had, anyway.”
She sensed that the subject oppressed him and wisely refrained from pursuing it further.
“Well, we don’t seem to have any more springs in our yard, so I guess it doesn’t matter. There’s a good play on TV tonight, and I want you just to relax and forget all about…”
“Sure. I could stand some rest, hon. Feel beat up.” He stood up, yawned, and went into the living room.
The television play was mediocre. Drake yawned all the way through it. At its close, he clumped off to bed and fell instantly into deep, dreamless sleep.
* * * *
Again the clarion call of the mystic saraband pulled him awake. Drake sat up in bed, panting, his brain astir with vague, delightful memories. Beverly slept peacefully, and the moon painted a broad band of silver across her face and night-clad upper body. The gold of her hair fought against the silver of the moonlight and lost. It looked like a cloud of fine-spun platinum against her pillow.
There was something in the elfin light that flooded the bed which brought out a certain appealing quality no woman save Beverly had ever had for Drake. Briefly he yearned for her, then the throbbing ululation of devilish melody in his mind overcame the impulse and he found himself dressed, crashing through moon-drenched thicket.
The dance slowed its tempo as he approached, and as he stepped through a screen of young elms into the clearing, the swirling of naked figures became a close-knit weaving and swaying, their song a tremulous humming with vocal counterpoint. Suddenly there were words that had meaning for Drake, a contrapuntal repetition, now in low, murmuring melody, liquid as a clear, cold freshet springing down a piney mountainside.
“Hail the Bridegroom!… Hail!”
The massed dancers converged upon him. Drake saw the gleam of moonglow on their eyeballs, the flashing refulgence of panting breasts, of sinuous torsos… He yielded to an intoxicating influx of passion, a living flame that ripped through his body, then flickered and failed, and nothing of it was left save a frigid ash. The hair prickled at the nape of his neck. The singers were silent, poised, staring at him, sensing that their hold upon him had somehow snapped.
Drake fell back a step. He yearned to move forward, to be swept up again in a maddening chorus of voices and flowing bodies, in a welter of passion and delight…but something deep as the shadow of the elms, as hard and bright as the floating moon, shut like a door between his mind and his feelings…and he turned and fled, back to the house, to Beverly, to…
What it was that impelled him so to run, Drake did not know. It was a consuming urgency that brooked no delay, a greater urgency than that imposed upon him by the massed singers in the thicket, and diametrically opposed, accompanied by such a sense of prickling dread that it left him gasping.
He heard the, sound of its going as he launched himself against the kitchen door, heard the frantic, watery splashing of it as the door burst open. He flipped the light switch on…the floor was a sea of roiling water.
Poised on the threshold, Drake stared at it without comprehension, aware only that it seethed and boiled away from him, smote with a splash against the cellar door. The panel crashed open, and the water poured foaming into the basement.
Almost at once, the aromatic sump pump woke to whirring life, began to pump the water into the French drain prepared for its outflow beside the house.
A step grated on the drive and Drake whirled. Ben Harrian stood limned in the light pouring out of the kitchen door. His face drawn and pallid, his mouth was half open as if he had been about to speak.
“What do you want?” Drake snarled at him.
The sump pump still whirred softly in the basement. Drake knew that Ben heard it too, and he suspected that Ben knew why it was whirring. What was Ben Harrian doing here at this time of night, anyway? Drake got hold of himself.
“Sorry. I didn’t see it was you. Ben. What’s the trouble?”
Ben smiled slightly, his thin, handsome face passively calm.
“I…I just dropped by, Jack. I couldn’t sleep for…for thinking. I was afraid you would be in bed…”
“Beverly’s asleep.” Drake announced crisply.
“Of course, Jack. I can speak to you out here. I’ve…I’ve been worrying. Sheriff Hamilton dropped by this morning…yesterday morning now, I guess. We went with him, Zuelda and I, to his office…”
Drake grunted. “So that’s where, you were. I stopped by to see you.”
Ben’s face lighted. He sat down on the kitchen step.
“He said he’d talked to you. I was wondering what you made of this drowning business.”
Drake leaned in the doorway. “Some fool of an intern got hold of the wrong corpse, naturally. Hamilton will probably get a corrected report next week. A man doesn’t drown in thin air.”
Ben got to his feet. He looked reassured.
“You don’t think there was an assailant lurking in the thicket…?”
“With a bucket of water?” Drake snorted.
Ben grinned…almost, it seemed to Drake, as if with relief.
“Okay, you win! I’d better be getting back. I left my car down at the end of the street…didn’t want to wake you if you were sleeping…”
He turned and walked off into the dark.
“Liar!” Drake thought He stared into the dark, though Ben Harrian was no longer visible. “I’d give a nickel to know just why you were hanging around here!”
Drake locked the kitchen door and went into the living room. The mantel clock pointed to ten minutes past two.
Drake continued to muse about Ben Harrian as he undressed for bed. There was that dark, somber air about him that he didn’t understand, for one thing. Take Zuelda; now…her face was like an open book. She was everything her husband was not…so full of life and the love of living…but what was the almost passionate affection she expressed for Beverly, a faint glow of which he seemed to feel washed over upon himself? Both the Harrians seemed unusually devoted to the Drakes, though their acquaintanceship was short indeed.
A profound weariness assaulted Drake’s frame. He started as he suddenly recalled the gushing flood in the kitchen. He had been so intent on concealing its presence from Ben that it had slipped his own mind until just now.
What manner of horror was it he had witnessed…what dark rite had he interrupted by his untimely return? Could that rush of…of water, wasn’t it?…have any relationship to them…be one of them?
How could he ever sleep again with so frightful a question unanswered? He looked at Beverly, the sweet outline of her cheek cuddled against the pillow…then the segmented parts of his night’s experience clashed in his brain, burst into jumbled fragments that whirled madly and exploded in ribbons of incandescence upon the darkness of his mind. Drake toppled over in inert slumber.
* * * *
There were thundershowers the next day, and Drake mooned around the house, hating the inclement weather. He blamed his feelings on a night of poor sleep, not realizing he had scarcely slept at all. His mind was confused with a chaotic non-remembrance of racing dreams from which he could isolate no single bizarre scene. He looked out the window at the rain puddles in the yard and street, remembering those other puddles with a vicious kind
of wonder.
Drake had little enough to say to Beverly, and she seemed to respect his reticence, though with a puzzled crease between her eyes.
“You’ve not been feeling well lately, John. I think you ought to stay home from the office tomorrow…take another day of rest.”
He shrugged, switched on the TV and settled himself for a dull afternoon. By and by, the sun came out, the landscape steamed itself dry, and Drake went out for a walk.
He felt impelled, somehow, to stroll up toward the thickety ridge, in the direction Tom Ellers had taken. There was nothing in the wood but damp humus and puddles that glistened among the scrub. The earth was unaccountably dry in a clearing among the brush. It looked somehow familiar, then Drake remembered that here was where they had found Ellers’ body.
He threw himself on the ground to rest, turned his eyes up to the sky and balefully studied the few woolly clouds that still lingered after the rain. He was troubled in mind and spirit, possessed of a wonder that went deeply and acutely into his perceptions. He wondered what this impelling wonder was…nothing had been the same since Tom Ellers had come up here on the hill and died…had drowned in a sea of dry grass, brush and trees.
Somehow, Drake felt no sense of personal danger from his surroundings. He was completely detached from the physical world as he wrestled with a thing that was in his mind alone. He let his thoughts drift over the events of the night of Ellers’ death, tried to correlate them into something that resembled coherence.
The clouds drifted by as the sun declined. Slowly, Drake drifted away and away, until finally he slept in complete exhaustion of brain and body.
* * * *
Drake felt as if he were floating. A strange, bluish luminescence engulfed him, a sparkling blueness, alive with a strange, vital sort of sentience. The sparkles waxed and waned in the blueness, and he was conscious of dim, blue shapes that swam around him. He saw their glistening eyes as they peered at him, felt the presence of naked bodies close to his own, stirring the sluggish medium in which he seemed to float.
Somehow, Drake did not care. He contemplated his surroundings with a mindless apathy. “I’m dreaming, of course,” he thought, as one thinks in dreams. “I should wake up and get back to the house. Beverly will be wondering where I am.”
But he made no effort to extricate himself from, the dream. He allowed himself to drift, blissfully at peace, fully relaxed, a floating mote, an atom, a wretched shell of nothing among the glimmering shapes of the blue void.
Drake’s perceptions seemed to sharpen after a time. The limits of the void extended themselves to floor, walls, ceiling. He was in an eerie, blue-lit cavern…the light which lit it he knew had no physical existence, but was merely an impression of his mind, reaching out with some other sense to palp the eternal gloom of this rift in the limestone womb of the earth. He smiled to himself for dreaming such a bizarre thing as this, knowing that he dreamed, but accepting the dream for fact nonetheless.
He seemed to float midway between the floor of the cavern and its stalactite encrusted ceiling. The female shapes, with here and there among them the arrowing form of a male figure, swarmed around him, above, below and on both sides. He became aware then of a thrumming and humming that existed in his mind alone, as the images of the cavern-creatures existed, a wavering chorus of melody which he identified as coming from the throng about him.
The dream-people were singing to him—a song that welcomed him to the blue-lit cavern under the earth. There was a pathos in their welcome, and a sweetness and a lulling lure that made his presence there a thing of desire to him.
All at once, a single figure, swam out of the crowding myriad, a dainty figure, her hair a cloud of shadow that caressed her shoulders, floated on the too heavy medium of the cavern atmosphere. Her arms moved slowly, with sinuous grace, as if she actually swam in something that was as if it were water…though even Drake’s sleeping mind rejected the thought, for he breathed, and the air of Earth was his medium.
There, was something vaguely familiar about the elfin features that closely and more closely approached his own, but his mind was dulled, and he could not place the familiarity of her. She hovered above him—he could have touched her simply by lifting his hand, but he lacked the will to do so. Her hair floated around small, piquant features, blue-gleaming, shapely shoulders. The points of her tiny breasts pressed almost against him.
Her lips smiled, and her eyes caressed him voluptuously. He heard the murmur of her voice deep in his mind, and his perceptions fled before the ecstasy of promise in her words.
“Tonight, while the undines dance, my love… I’ll wed you and you’ll wed me, as it was done when the world was young.
Drake threshed, aflame with desire, as her lips met his and clung. He flung his arms up to embrace her, but he embraced nothing, and awoke in the still darkness of the thicket.
He rolled over and sat up, head swimming, eyes still blinded by the blue glare of the dream-cavern. The world was a silent, breathless place, peopled with moveless shadows among the scrub, gashed by the glare of the rising moon…a full moon tonight…a glowing orb that spectacularly lightened the sky to dusty blue and paled the stars.
Drake made to stand, but for some odd reason, his legs refused to support him. He sat panting, his mind’s eye still aglow with that world of dream, his inner ear vibrating yet to the luring promise of the witch with the floating hair…the strangely familiar witch who promised herself to him body and…
The moon rose higher and higher on his dazed musing…and the dance of the undines began.
He noticed suddenly how the moonlight sparkled on pools of water that nestled among the scrub. All at once, ripples beset the surfaces of them, though there was no breeze, so that they shimmered and winked like glowing eyes in the darkness…like giant jewels flung strew by some sublime hand.
The pools stirred…and moved. They shifted position with wills of their own, rose in mounds, then in dripping columns and bulging shapes that spun and glistened in the moonlight. Then began a slow, erratic motion, from moon-bright night to densest shadow, back and forth, gliding, slithering, bending, twisting…and slowly the undine shapes took form, became as lovely women, bending and swaying in rhythmic dance. He was swept away by the sight of them in their nakedness, by the song to which they danced, and he became as elemental as these, creatures from the blue-lit limestone cavern under the earth…which he knew now had been no dream.
The woman-shapes trouped around him, unearthly in their beauty, breathing the breath of ecstasy into their song. They bent above him, caressing…
* * * *
A single light glowed in the living-room window of the Drake house, where Beverly, worried and alone, tried to read a magazine. John had been gone all afternoon and evening…it was nearly midnight.
She fought against the clammy fingers of cold fear that persisted in gripping her. John had gone off today into the thicket…as Tom Ellers had gone…she cast the thought out of her mind. John would have had no reason to stay this long in such a wild place, she told herself. He could have come out of the thicket at any one of a hundred different places. Perhaps he had taken a notion to stroll over to the Harrian’s…the silent telephone mocked her. She could comfort herself, at least, with the thought that perhaps he had. If she called and found that he had not…her heart stilled…then raced at sound of a step on the porch. The door rattled in its frame, and a feeling of glad relief thrust through her. Then a natural caution asserted itself. John would be proud of her for her discretion if she called out first…
“Who’s there?”
Totally unexpected, Zuelda’s voice answered her, muffled by the heavy panel of the door.
“It’s Ben and Zuelda, Bev. Let us in, please…quickly!” Zuelda’s voice was not loud, but distraught. Beverly opened up. Zuelda hurled herself into the room, followed clos
ely by her tall, handsome husband.
“When I first heard your knock, I thought…” Beverly began.
“You thought it was Jack!” Zuelda cried. “We know he’s gone. Bev…something terrible is happening…”
Beverly felt her throat contract.
“Has something…happened to John…?”
She felt faint. She groped behind her for the davenport and collapsed, stricken, horror staring out of her eyes.
Ben was briskly reassuring. “Not at all, Beverly! Jack’s all right, do you hear me?”
The meaning of his words slowly sank in and color returned to Beverly’s cheeks. She gulped. Ben’s voice was soothing, gentle, curiously lulling.
Ben turned to Zuelda. “Don’t excite her, dear. Would you like a drink?” he asked Bev.
Beverly shook her head wordlessly, wide-eyed. She sat up straight.
“What about…John? Tell me!”
Ben looked at slim, well-kept hands. Zuelda fluttered like a small, frightened bird. She flew to Beverly’s side, twittering almost, comforting with her arms.
“What I have to say is going to be difficult for you to understand, Bev. You must forget everything you have been taught as truth and fact…and remember that the scientists do not yet have the universe trapped in a test tube and wrapped up in a coil of wire.
“A long, long time ago, Bev, the world was much different from the world you know. I don’t mean it was less civilized, or anything like that, which you know well enough. Perhaps I can make it plain this way—from childhood, you have been familiar with so-called fables and myths of the ancient world…of gods and goddesses, pixies, fairies, fauns, and so on. You must believe me when I say that the fables are founded on solid fact.”
Beverly looked puzzled. “What has this to do with John?”
“I am getting to that. You must understand this part first. In the very long ago of which I was speaking, men knew the truth of these things I am telling you, because they actually associated with the beings who later became known as gods, goddesses, and so on.
The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister Page 18