There was nothing I could do but indicate my willingness.
He shuffled to an old and battered rolltop desk. From it he took a heavy manuscript, tied with cord. “The facts are there,” he said, “but I am poor at the tricks of writing. I wonder if you …”
He waited for me to say it and I did. “I’ll look it over,” I told him. “If I can be of any help I’ll do it gladly.”
I was about to ask him about the subject matter when he asked me if I had heard about his servant. I told him I had heard that the old man had died.
“That’s all?” he asked.
“That’s all,” I said.
Adams sat down heavily in his chair. “He was found dead,” he told me, “and I understood there have been some lurid stories making the rounds of the neighborhood.”
I was about to reply when a sound froze me in the chair. Something was sniffing at the door that opened on the porch.
Adams must not have heard it—either that or he must have heard it so often on previous occasions that he no longer paid attention to it, for he went on talking. “They found him out in the north pasture, at the end of the ridge. He was rather badly mangled.”
“Mangled!” I whispered and I couldn’t have spoken another word nor uttered it aloud had I been paid for it, for the creature was back at the door again, sniffing and snorting. At any moment I expected to hear the sound of nails clawing at the wood.
“Some animal must have got to him before he was found,” said Adams.
I sat there, gooseflesh coming out on me, listening to the thing sniffing up and down the door crack. Once or twice it whined. But Adams still did not hear it or pretended not to hear it, for he went on talking, telling me about the manuscript.
“It’s not completed,” he said. “There is a final chapter, but I’ll have the information soon and then I can finish it. There’s just a little more research, just a little more. I am very, very close.”
Now, for the first time, I saw it although I must have been staring at it ever since I came into the room—the thing upon the wall that was not the way it should be.
Now, for the first time, I saw it plainly and knew it for what it was—a crucifix turned upside down—turned upside down and nailed to the wall.
I stumbled to my feet, clutching the manuscript beneath my arm, muttering that I must go, that I had forgotten something, that I must go at once.
Behind me, as I left the room, I heard the shrill whimpering eagerness of the animal whining at the door, the sound of claws ripping at the wood, trying to get in.
My scalp was crawling and I know I must have run. Even now, thinking back on it, I have no apology to make. For the sounds at the door were sounds of fear deep graven in Man’s soul, reaching back to the dim obscurity of the days when Man crouched in a cave and listened to the padding and snuffling and the whining of the things outside in the dark.
I reached the car and stood there, one hand on the door, ready to get in. Now that I had reached safety I suddenly was brave. I saw that the house was nothing more than an old farmhouse, that there was nothing in the world to be afraid of either in or out of it.
I opened the door, walked over and put one foot on the car’s running-board. As I did I glanced downward and it was then I saw the tracks. Tracks like those a cow would make but smaller, more like the tracks of a goat perhaps. I wondered for a moment if Adams might keep goats and I knew instinctively that he didn’t. Although it was entirely possible that some animals from adjoining farms might have broken through a fence and wandered here.
Now I saw that the barren trampled ground was a solid network of those cloven tracks and I remembered the night of the storm when something that sounded like a creature with hoofs had trailed me down the road.
I got into the car and slammed the door behind me and as if the sound of the slamming door were a signal a dog came around the corner of the house. He was big and black and sleek and as he walked I saw the muscles knotting and flowing beneath his shining hide. There was a sense of strength and speed about him as he slouched along.
He turned his head toward me and I saw his eyes. I shall not forget them—ever. They were filled with a terrible evil, an utter cynicism, and they were not a dog’s eyes.
I stepped on the starter and put the accelerator to the boards. Ten miles later I finally stopped my shaking.
Home at last, I broke out a bottle and sat in the late autumn sunlight on the porch, drinking steadily and by myself, something I had never done before but have done often since that day.
When darkness fell, I went indoors and looked through Adams’ manuscript, and it was the very thing that I had expected. It was a history of torture and of punishment, all the vast historic evidence of man’s inhumanity to man. There were sketches and drawings and minute specifications concerning the construction and operation of every infernal machine the mind of man had been able to invent. The development of torture was traced with studious exactitude and each method was discussed in its many variations, with all the little trivial details of procedure carefully annotated.
And there were tortures listed that are very little known and almost never spoken of and scarcely fit to print.
Skimming through the pages I came to Chapter XLVIII and I saw that the writing ended there, that there was only the beginning of a paragraph upon the page.
It read—
But the ultimate torture, the torture that goes on and on, eternally, always just short of madness and of death, is found only in the depths of Hell and until now no mortal being has ever held the knowledge, prior to death, of the torments of the Pit …
I laid the manuscript on the table and reached for the bottle. But the bottle was empty and I hurled it across the room and it struck the fireplace and was smashed into flying shards that twinkled in the lamplight. I sat hunched in my chair and felt the hairy hands of Hell stretch out for me and not quite reach me and the perspiration ran down my body and my heart was in my throat.
For Adams knew—he either knew or meant to know. He had said that there was just a little research needed for him to complete the book, just a little information he still must get. And I remembered the tracks out in the yard and the dog with eyes that were not a dog’s eyes and the creature, possibly the dog, that had been scratching at the door during my visit.
I sat there for a long time but finally I got out of the chair and went to my desk. From a drawer I took a gun that had been there for a long time and I checked its action and saw that it was loaded. Then I got out the car and drove like a madman down the night road toward a madman’s retreat.
Scudding clouds covered the dying moon that lay above the western ridges when I reached the Smith farmhouse and the house itself reared up like a ghostly creation in the pre-dawn silence that lay across the hills.
Nothing stirred and there were no lighted windows. The wind came fresh and cold across the river valley and there was frost upon the fields. The porch boards creaked as I crossed them and knocked at the door—but there was no answer. I knocked again and yet again and there was still no answer, so I turned the knob and the door came softly open.
The moaning had been too soft and faint to hear through the door but it was there, waiting for me, when I came into the entryway that led into the kitchen.
It was a mewling rather than a moan, as if the tongue that made it belonged to a mindless creature. It sounded as if it had been much louder only a little time before, but now had dwindled through sheer physical exhaustion.
I found the gun in my pocket and my hand was shaking as I pulled it out. I wanted to run, I wanted very much to run. But I couldn’t run, for I had to know. I had to know that whatever it might be was not as bad as I imagined it.