The clatter of metal against china brought me about with a start. Cassie had dropped her fork from fingers that seemed suddenly paralyzed. She stared at me with unseeing eyes and one slim hand raised in a futile gesture of protest. Her colorless lips trembled.
“No! You mustn’t….” A gnawing fear sprang into the emptiness of her gaze; she made as if to rise, and, in an instant, all life seemed to flood from her body. She slid soundlessly to the floor.
What I did then was done with the unconscious habit of a medical man; training overshadowed the sick, watery weakness of my legs. Somehow, I got Cassandra to our bed chamber on the second floor. Her exquisite face had a whiteness that whispered of death, but breath came in uneasy, whimpering shudders. I chafed her wrists, an agony of doubt whirling in my brain. Thunder slithered across the sky, crashing insanely over Heath House; the storm broke. Dark eyes were suddenly wide in Cassie’s pale face. Her hand clutched mine so violendy that her nails bit into the flesh.
“You can’t go in there…. Nobody can go in there, ever again. You hear? Nobody… ever again…!”
“It’s all right, darling. Try to relax. Tell me what’s frightened you….
Her head shook dully.
“I can’t…. I can never tell you. You've got to trust me. You can’t ever go into that room; don’t ever try. I’ve locked the door. You mustn’t ask me for the key. Please! Promise me you won’t!.. Please!”
I promised.
I heard myself saying the words over and over in a thick monotone. They seemed not to reach her. Her lips hung loosely, fear twisting the beauty from her face, leaving nothing but unreasoning hysteria. She went on pleading, unable to hear my reassurances. The sedative I gave her was not a weak one. My hands shook as I prepared it. I had to work in the dark. Our storage batteries had given out.
There was nothing but pitch-blackness and the babbling fury of the elements, chewing at Heath House mercilessly. Perhaps it was only my nerves; once I could have sworn that there, in the pulsing gloom, an overpowering stench, an effluvium that was almost tangible, brushed against me.
At length, Cassandra’s whimpering died away; she sank into a deep fitful sleep. Lightning crashed maniacal brightness into the room; for an instant it washed Cassie’s face and throat. There was a delicate, gold-dipped chain around her neck; on it she had strung the key to the library.
You cannot always give reason to your actions. That night I could have stolen the key. I could have gone down the hall through the darkness, and into the damnable chamber that held a secret ungodly enough to press my wife to the brink of madness. If I had, things might have worked out differently. Maybe I was a coward, afraid of the antediluvian horror that awaited me beyond the massive carven door. Maybe I did not want to know the truth. I told myself I had made a promise to Cassandra. I left the key where it was, and stumbled downstairs in the stygian blackness. Screeching banshees of rain begged entrance at the streaming casements; a fire burned fitfully in the sitting room grate. I found a decanter of rum in the cabinet by the window. I do not remember how long I paced the floor, torturing myself with doubt and fear, trying to believe that Cassie was sane, wondering what puling monstrosity lay hidden in Lazarus Heath’s book-room. I sank into an armchair and swallowed another mouthful of rum; the storm seemed to have drawn far away from me. The rum bottle tinkled against the glass as I poured; I drank. I lay my head back. Lightning pulsed through my optic nerves, but sound was only a blurred pungent, rum-soaked whirlpool. Then, there was only darkness. I slept.
It was the dull angry thumping that woke me; consciousness seeped through the ragged slit it made in the forgetfulness of sleep. I got unsteadily to my feet and stood in the center of the room until the whirling darkness righted itself. Something new had sifted into the room; the fire still sputtered doggedly, and yet, there was a dampness it could not dispel. A chilled whisper of sea-air sighed along the floor. I went into the foyer; coldness washed over me in a tidal wave. The front door flapped back and forth on its heavy hinges; rain pelted in a drooling puddle in the hallway. I swore and slammed the door, throwing the dead-latch. Then, I stood very still. Cassie! The name blazed like a neon sign in my brain. I think I knew in that moment that she was gone.
The search was something careening from a dream gone mad, a terrifying nightmare in which the geometry has gone all wrong. I wanted to scream or cry, but dry fear clamped my throat. Everything twisted crazily in my head; Cassie’s empty bed, the heart-like drumming of the open front door; myself, stumbling through the brutal onslaught of a northeaster, calling her name again and again, finally reaching Eb Linder’s place and getting half the people of the Strand out of sane beds to wander the hellish night in search of Cassandra. It must have gone on for hours; I cannot remember except in vague snatches. There was a stolid, gray-faced fisherman who muttered something about the sea claiming its own. At dream-like intervals Solly-Jo wandered in and out of the rain. Eb Linder’s sister made coffee for me, and got me to change my drenched clothes. She kept telling me it would be all right. The men, with Doctor Ambler leading them, had been over every inch of the Strand and found nothing. Miss Linder kept right on saying it would work out all right. At 3:30 a kid came in, dripping with rain. He said they’d found Cassandra in the cove behind Heath House.
She wasn’t dead. When I reached the house, Ambler had her in bed, covered with numberless blankets. Her clothes lay in a sopping lump on the floor. Ambler poured me a drink, and I think I cried. He waited until I had got it out of my system. I kept watching to see if Cassie was breathing; she looked pale and dead.
“I can’t figure it,” Ambler said quietly, after a while. “We went over that cove so many times, I’d swear it was impossible for anything or anyone to be there. Then, Linder came across her, lying at the water’s edge, on her father’s grave. She was all… all matted with seaweed… I…. He stared at me. The numbing horror that froze my insides must have shown in my eyes. “What’s the matter, man!” “Seaweed!” I choked.
I didn’t hear any more of what he said. I went to the bed and looked at Cassandra closely for the first time. Her skin shone faintly in the uncertain substitute of candlelight — as though it were covered with flaky, gossamer scales! On either side of her throat, I made out two pale, bluish streaks. My head spun; I felt as if I were going to be sick. Rising insidiously from the mucky pile of clothing on the floor, a vile, decadent stench flooded the chamber. From a tremendous distance, a voice whispered gently; “I come, O, Yoth Kala! Your bride has heard your call! Through night and storm, I come!” The voice was Cassandra’s.
“It’s nothing to worry about, man,” Ambler was saying kindly. “Just a case of exposure…. She’ll be all right….”
“Yes,” I nodded dully. “She’ll be all right….”
The last hope of happiness drained from me; I felt weak and lost in a plummeting void of unspeakable horror. There were times, in the days that followed, when I had the sensation of living in an alien, frightening world, a world in which lay hidden the blasphemous secrets of death and the grave, a world that sang with the strange, blood-craving incantations of lost and murderous cults. There was nothing human in the terror that held me prisoner. You can fight evil if it is concrete. This was something that could not be touched or seen, yet, something always at my heels, its stinking, flesh-rotting breath burning against my neck.
I hid my doubts from Cassandra, trying to be cheerful. She convalesced slowly under Ambler’s care. For days at a time she would seem to be herself; she would smile and talk of how it would be when she was well again. And, then, abruptly, her mood would swerve into one of black secrecy that made her eyes blank and hostile. She whimpered in her sleep, and took to humming the weird threnody that had been Lazarus Heath’s swan song.