As it was, it was Enid Lynch who called the dog off and came to open the gates for me. She was wearing an ankle-length satin dressing-gown in electric blue, with a white boa collar. Her hair was pinned back and fastened with diamante combs. She looked like Jean Harlow in Dinner At Eight. The only trouble was, I didn't feel very much like Wallace Beery.
'You decided to take Mr Evelith up on his offer?' she said, lifting one of her thinly-plucked eyebrows, and locking the gates behind me.
'Are you surprised?'
'I'm not sure. I would have thought you were the kind of man who would have preferred to stay at a Howard Johnson's.'
I followed her up the steps to the front door. 'I'm not sure whether I ought to take that as a compliment or not.'
She showed me upstairs to my suite of rooms. There was a large drawing-room, furnished with comfortable but stuffy old sofas and chairs, and carpeted in dark brown. On the walls were oil paintings of the Dracut County forests and the Miskatonic River; and next to the fireplace there were shelves packed with leather-bound books on geology and physics. There was a decent-sized bedroom, with a brass bed, and a huge gilt-framed mirror on the wall; and next to the bedroom there was an old-fashioned bathroom, with a shower that had obviously been dripping steadily for years, judging by the green stain on the tiles.
'I will tell Mr Evelith that you have arrived when he has finished his afternoon sleep.'
'It's evening already. Does he usually sleep this long?'
'It depends on his dreams. Sometimes he will fall asleep during the afternoon, and not wake up until early the following morning. He says he does as much work in dreams as he does when he is awake.'
'I see,' I said, setting down my suitcase.
Enid said, 'You may call me if there is anything that you need.'
'I'm fine for the moment. There's just one thing, though: a friend of mine is visiting me later this evening. Miss Gilly McCormick. I hope that's going to be all right.'
'Perfectly. Quamus will let her in.'
'Quamus isn't here right now?'
Enid stared at me oddly, as if the question wasn't even worth a reply. I snapped open the latches of my case, and tried to look as if I was engrossed in taking out my slippers. Enid said, 'We usually eat at nine o'clock. You like beef?'
'Certainly. That'll be marvelous.'
'Good. In the meantime, please make yourself at home. Mr Evelith said you were to have free access to the library.'
'Thank you. I'll, uh… see you later.'
I unpacked my shirts and my underwear and put them away in the deep sour-smelling drawers of the bureau in my bedroom. Then I wandered around my rooms, picking up books and statuettes, and peering out of the windows. My drawing-room had a view of the back garden, which was almost a forest in itself. It was too dark to see it properly, but I could make out the distant shapes of hundred-foot pines, and, closer to the house, a huge Os-age orange. There was no television in the room, and I made a mental note to myself to bring in a portable set tomorrow.;
Just as the clock on my mantelpiece chimed eight-thirty, ' and I was sitting with my feet up on one of the sofas trying to get myself engrossed in Stresses In The Mohorovicic Discontinuity, my door opened and old man Evelith walked in. He was fully dressed for dinner in a tuxedo and black tie, and his thinning gray hair was combed back with what smelled like lavender oil. He came up to me, and shook my hand, and then sat down next to me, smiling rather distantly, and turned over the cover of my book with his long chalk-nailed finger, to see what it was I was reading. 'Mmh,' he said. 'Do you know anything at all about Moho?'
'Moho?'
'Geological slang. If you did know anything about Moho, you'd know what it was. Still, I suppose we all have to start our studies somewhere. You could have picked a better place. That book Understanding Geology is probably more up your street.'
Thank you,' I said. ‘I’ll… dip into it.'
Duglass Evelith looked at me fixedly. Then he said, 'I wasn't sure that you would come. Well, not entirely sure. I told Enid that it would depend on how violently your dead wife has been haunting you.'
'Why should it have depended on that?'
'Let me put it this way,' said Duglass Evelith. 'You're not involved in this search for the David Dark for archaeological motives; neither are you involved in it for profit. You have been haunted by your dead wife, as many people in Granitehead have been haunted before you; and you want to get to the cause of that haunting, and root it out.'
'That's right,' I nodded. 'My sole interest in the David Dark begins and ends with Mictantecutli.'
Duglass Evelith took off his half-glasses and folded them up, tucking them into the breast pocket of his tuxedo. 'Because of that, Mr Trenton, you and I have an interest in common. Oh, of course I'm fascinated by the archaeological possibilities of the David Dark. It's going to be one of the most important finds in American maritime history. But the copper vessel that lies within its hold is a hundred times more important to me than the rotten wood which surrounds it. It is Mictantecutli that I want.'
'Any special reason?' I asked him. I knew it could be an impertinent question, but if our interests in the raising of the David Dark were so closely aligned, then I believed that it was important for me to know why he wanted to lay his hands on Mictantecutli. It might also give me some idea of what Evelith intended to do with the demon once he'd gotten hold of it, and how I could possibly set it free.
'The reason is simple to explain but difficult to believe,' said old man Evelith. 'During the Salem witch-trials, it was my ancestor Joseph Evelith who was among the most fervent of all the jurors; and it was he who alone believed that the witches were truly possessed, even after the hysteria was over, and the David Dark had been sent away from Salem and sunk. After the trials, Joseph attempted in vain to have all the remaining suspects executed, pleading with everybody in Salem that the witch-trials had not been a mistake; that in fact they had helped to purge Salem of a terrible evil, and to save the souls who had been hung of a fate far worse than the gallows. The only person who really believed him, of course, was Esau Hasket, and Hasket tried to help him leave Massachusetts to escape the anger of those who had once been his friends and co-prosecutors. But a party of burghers caught him as he was leaving Salem on the Swampscott Road, dressed as a woman, and he was imprisoned. His fate was to be secret and terrible. He was to be taken to the forest and there given as a sacrifice to the Naumkeag Indians, who for some years had been suffering poor harvests and blighted crops. A Naumkeag wonder-worker gave Joseph Evelith to the Spirit of the Future, a servant of Mictantecutli who in Aztec society was called Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror. My ancestor did not «die» at the hands of Tezcatlipoca, in the accepted sense of the word. He became its slave for all eternity, suffering agonies of humiliation and torture. Tezcatlipoca is thoroughly eviclass="underline" it wears a snake's-head dangling from one nostril, so the Aztecs say, and its conjuring wand is the amputated arm of a woman who died in childbirth.'
I said nothing: I had seen enough hideous magic to believe that what Duglass Evelith was telling me was wholly or partly true. Hadn't the wreck of the David Dark been located, just where he had said it was?
He went on, 'Tezcatlipoca has run riot since Mictantecutli has been lying powerless on the bed of the ocean. It is the devil of disease and pestilence; and you can lay every major epidemic that has swept the United States squarely at its door. Legionnaire's disease, cancer, every type of influenza, and its latest little joke, herpes.'