"If I'd been wise, I'd have done just what poor Denis told me to – burned the picture and the body-grasping hair at once and without curiosity – but I was too shaken to be wise. I suppose I muttered foolish things over my boy – and then I remembered that the night was wearing on and that the servants would be back in the morning. It was plain that a matter like this could never be explained, and I knew that I must cover things up and invent a story.
"That coil of hair around Marsh was a monstrous thing. As I poked at it with a sword which I took from the wall I almost thought I felt it tighten its grip on the dead man. I didn't dare touch it – and the longer I looked at it the more horrible things I noticed about it. One thing gave me a start. I won't mention it – but it partly explained the need for feeding the hair with queer oils as Marceline had always done.
"In the end I decided to bury all three bodies in the cellar – with quicklime, which I knew we had in the storehouse. It was a night of hellish work. I dug three graves – my boy's a long way from the other two, for I didn't want him to be near either the woman's body or her hair. I was sorry I couldn't get the coil from around poor Marsh. It was terrible work getting them all down to the cellar. I used blankets in carting the woman and the poor devil with the coil around him. Then I had to get two barrels of lime from the storehouse. God must have given me strength, for I not only moved them but filled all three graves without a hitch.
"Some of the lime I made into whitewash. I had to take a stepladder and fix over the parlour ceiling where the blood had oozed through. And I burned nearly everything in Marceline's room, scrubbing the walls and floor and heavy furniture. I washed up the attic studio, too, and the trail and footprints that led there. And all the time I could hear old Sophy's wailing in the distance. The devil must have been in that creature to let her voice go on like that. But she always was howling queer things. That's why the field niggers didn't get scared or curious that night. I locked the studio door and took the key to my room. Then I burned all my stained clothes in the fireplace. By dawn the whole house looked quite normal so far as any casual eye could tell. I hadn't dared touch the covered easel, but meant to attend to that later.
"Well, the servants came back the next day, and I told them all the young folks had gone to St. Louis . None of the field hands seemed to have seen or heard anything, and old Sophonisba's wailing had stopped at the instant of sunrise. She was like a sphinx after that, and never let out a word of what had been on her brooding brain the day and night before.
"Later on I pretended that Denis and Marsh and Marceline had gone back to Paris and had a certain discreet agency mail me letters from there – letters I had fixed up in forged handwriting. It took a good deal of deceit and reticence in several things to various friends, and I knew people have secretly suspected me of holding something back. I had the deaths of Marsh and Denis reported during the war, and later said Marceline had entered a convent. Fortunately Marsh was an orphan whose eccentric ways had alienated him from his people in Louisiana . Things might have been patched up a good deal better for me if I had had the sense to burn the picture, sell the plantation, and give up trying to manage things with a shaken and overstrained mind. You see what my folly has brought me to. Failing crops – hands discharged one by one – place falling apart to ruin – and myself a hermit and a target for dozens of queer countryside stories. Nobody will come around here after dark anymore – or any other time if it can be helped. That's why I knew you must be a stranger.
"And why do I stay here? I can't wholly tell you that. It's bound up too closely with things at the very rim of sane reality. It wouldn't have been so, perhaps, if I hadn't looked at the picture. I ought to have done as poor Denis told me. I honestly meant to burn it when I went up to that locked studio a week after the horror, but I looked first – and that changed everything.
"No – there's no use telling what I saw. You can, in a way, see for yourself presently; though time and dampness have done their work. I don't think it can hurt you if you want to take a look, but it was different with me. I knew too much of what it all meant.
"Denis had been right – it was the greatest triumph of human art since Rembrandt, even though still unfinished. I grasped that at the start, and knew that poor Marsh had justified his decadent philosophy. He was to painting what Baudelaire was to poetry – and Marceline was the key that had unlocked his inmost stronghold of genius.
"The thing almost stunned me when I pulled aside the hangings – stunned me before I half knew what the whole thing was. You know, it's only partly a portrait. Marsh had been pretty literal when he hinted that he wasn't painting Marceline alone, but what he saw through her and beyond her.
"Of course she was in it – was the key to it, in a sense – but her figure only formed one point in a vast composition. She was nude except for that hideous web of hair spun around her, and was half-seated, halfreclining on a sort of bench or divan, carved in patterns unlike those of any known decorative tradition. There was a monstrously shaped goblet in one hand, from which was spilling fluid whose colour I haven't been able to place or classify to this day – I don't know where Marsh even got the pigments.
"The figure and the divan were in the left-hand foreground of the strangest sort of scene I ever saw in my life. I think there was a faint suggestion of its all being a kind of emanation from the woman's brain, yet there was also a directly opposite suggestion – as if she were just an evil image or hallucination conjured up by the scene itself.
"I can't tell you know whether it's an exterior or an interior – whether those hellish Cyclopean vaultings are seen from the outside or the inside, or whether they are indeed carven stone and not merely a morbid fungous arborescence. The geometry of the whole thing is crazy – one gets the acute and obtuse angles all mixed up.
"And God! The shapes of nightmare that float around in that perpetual daemon twilight! The blasphemies that lurk and leer and hold a Witches' Sabbat with that woman as a high-priestess! The black shaggy entities that are not quite goats – the crocodile-headed beast with three legs and a dorsal row of tentacles – and the flat-nosed aegipans dancing in a pattern that Egypt's priests knew and called accursed!
"But the scene wasn't Egypt – it was behind Egypt ; behind even Atlantis; behind fabled Mu, and mythwhispered Lemuria. It was the ultimate fountainhead of all horror on this earth, and the symbolism shewed only too clearly how integral a part of it Marceline was. I think it must be the unmentionable R'lyeh, that was not built by any creatures of this planet – the thing Marsh and Denis used to talk about in the shadows with hushed voices. In the picture it appears that the whole scene is deep under water – though everybody seems to be breathing freely.
"Well – I couldn't do anything but look and shudder, and finally I saw that Marceline was watching me craftily out of those monstrous, dilated eyes on the canvas. It was no mere superstition – Marsh had actually caught something of her horrible vitality in his symphonies of line and color, so that she still brooded and hated, just as if most of her weren't down in the cellar under quicklime. And it was worst of al when some of those Hecate-born snaky strands of hair began to lift themselves up from the surface and grope out into the room toward me.