The noises of the spring night drifted in her open window.
Then she became aware of a distant mewing, coming from the lower floor. She got up, put on a robe and slippers, and descended the staircase. At the library door, she clicked on the light switch and entered the room.
Directly before her stood Kuching, her back arched, her tail stiffened, her head lifted upward. Even as she watched, the cat began to move forward like a creature in slow motion.
“Kuching!” called Miss Rhodes softly.
The Siamese swung and hissed, then turned uncertainly and headed for the pillow in the alcove. Miss Rhodes followed and bent down. Only three kittens were there. The fourth was missing.
She was in the midst of a search of the room when Edith Halbin entered.
“I thought I heard something,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“One of the kittens is missing,” replied Miss Rhodes. “It must be around here somewhere.”
But a complete investigation of the room failed to reveal the animal. Then Edith Halbin pointed to one of the small, open windows above the wall book shelves. Her voice betrayed her shock and dismay.
“Something must have come in there and carried it off. Poor Kuching!”
Miss Rhodes followed her gaze and her lips tightened. For some reason, she did not tell her friend that height made entrance or exit by the window impossible; nor did she show her what she saw now by the table midway across the room — the horrible tuft of blood-clotted fur, almost invisible in the shadows against the dark of the floor.
Next day, the two women embarked on a project which they hoped would lighten the mood into which they had both lapsed — the painting of Edith Halbin’s portrait. Miss Rhodes, genuinely concerned about her friend, reasoned that sitting for a picture would at least take her away from Horatio Lear’s book collection, for which the Bristol girl had displayed a strange and unhealthy interest.
To Miss Rhodes, everything about the collection was unhealthy — from the ancient mouldering covers to the quasi-factual, half mystical content, steeped in folklore and superstition. There was, for example, a copy of Gantley’s Hydrophinnae, containing some of the most hideous and horrible illustrations she had ever seen. There was a first edition of Dwellers in the Depths by Gaston Le Fe who, the foreword stated quite blandly, had died insane. And there was a pirated manuscript of the German Unter Zee Kulten, all copies of which had supposedly been destroyed in the seventeenth century.
It was the cumulative effect these books had upon Edith Halbin that worried Miss Rhodes. She herself had spent an hour with the volumes, and had come away all but overwhelmed with loathing and shattered nerves.
But perhaps the portrait would change all that….
Against her better judgement, Miss Rhodes consented to Edith’s request that she do the portrait against the background of the aquarium. Try though she would, however, to keep the likeness of the container of shells subdued, it persisted, by some trick of pigment or brush stroke, in standing forth in parallel importance to the figure in the painting.
Moreover, the effect of water in the tank was not at all realistic. A heavy shadow was concentrated here which no amount of reworking seemed able to lighten.
After two weeks, the portrait was done. Seeking relief from the finished task, Miss Rhodes strolled into the little yard behind the house, unmindful of the mizzling rain that dripped from a leaden sky. Presently, she became aware of a man on a stepladder on the adjoining property. It was Lucius Bates. She crossed over and bade him good morning.
“But a wet, gloomy one,” he said, resting his saw in the branch of the plane tree he had been trimming. “It seems one bad day follows another.”
They exchanged idle talk. “You still haven’t got rid of that stone monstrosity, I see,” he said.
“Monstros? Oh, you mean the aquarium! But why…?”
Bates adjusted his oversized spectacles. “You have a rather nice library. That oversized tank is out of taste. I’ve often wondered why Horatio put it there in the first place.”
“Presumably because it was close to his place of work.” “Fiddlesticks! I should think a dry table would have been as good a place to keep his shell specimens on. But then, Horatio was a little touched.”
Miss Rhodes was going to mention Lear’s queer papers and books when she thought better of it. Instead she said, “In what way — touched, I mean?”
Bates smiled slightly. “Well, for one thing, his pet theory about a form of undersea life. He had some wild idea that somewhere in the unplumbed ocean depths there exists a highly developed kind of mollusk capable of emulating certain characteristics of those life forms it devours.
“That was his original theory. In later years he apparently cloaked it with a pattern of demonology and what amounted to a modern adaptation of prehistoric superstition and folklore. He believed that these super undersea species are the incarnation of those Elder Gods who ruled the antediluvian deep and whose existence has been brought down to us in the dark myths and legends of a primitive past; that commanded by the great Cthulhu, they have lain dormant these eons in the sunken city of Flann, awaiting the time they would rise again to feed and rule. He believed further that this metempsychosis of the Elder Gods carried with it a latent incredible power and that if he could aid them to their destiny some of that power would be transmitted to him. Oh, Horatio really went all out in this mystic fol-de-rol. I even overheard him promise his brother, Edmund, all kinds of maledictions if he continued to ridicule his beliefs.”
“Curious,” said Miss Rhodes. “How old a man was Horatio?”
“Old enough to know better. Somewhere near fifty, I should say.”
To Miss Rhodes’ disappointment, the painting of the portrait had little effect on Edith Halbin. The Bristol girl continued to haunt the library, lost in the conchologist’s deep-sea world of print. The more fantastic, the more macabre, the books and manuscripts were, the more absorbed she became in them. When she went about her everyday household tasks she did so mechanically, her mind obviously far removed from work. Yet Miss Rhodes refused to become unduly alarmed. Edith had always been an impressionable person. The artist reasoned that her friend would return to normalcy as soon as her fancy passed.
It was about this time that the sound began. It began as a subdued murmur, with only her vague awareness at first, so low that she took it to be another manifestation of the high blood pressure which had mildly troubled her for some time. Day by day it continued sporadically, now growing, now lessening in intensity; at times it would be gone and she thought with relief she was rid of it. Then it would return louder and more persistent than before. When she asked Edith if she heard anything unusual, the Bristol girl only looked blank.
The physician in Harley Street she finally consulted gave her a routine examination. “I can find nothing wrong with you,” he said. “The auditory canals seem normal in all respects. A murmuring sound, you say?”
Miss Rhodes nodded. “Yes. A low throbbing as if… well, as if a large hollow shell were placed against the ear and held there…
He looked a little puzzled, went into a vague discourse on psychosomatic symptoms and ended by prescribing a mild sedative.
April slipped into May, the sound continued, and Miss Rhodes’ companion grew more restive. She became careless in her dress and forgetful in her speech. What was worse, she took to sleep-walking. On three successive nights Miss Rhodes, always a light sleeper, was awakened by the sound of steps on the uncarpeted floor of the outer corridor. The last night, tiptoeing to her door, she had seen Edith walk slowly, stiffly past and with robot-like movements descend the staircase to the ground floor. At the entrance of the library in the dim glow of the night light she paused a moment before entering.