1 The Thing in the Waters
Graham Dean nervously crushed out his cigarette and met Doctor Hedwig’s puzzled eyes.
“I’ve never been troubled like this before,” he said. “These dreams are so oddly persistent. They’re not the usual haphazard nightmares. They seem—I know it sounds ridiculous—they seem planned.”
“Dreams planned? Nonsense.” Doctor Hedwig looked scornful. “You, Mr. Dean, are an artist, and naturally of impressionable temperament. This house at San Pedro is new to you, and you say you’ve heard wild tales. The dreams are due to imagination and overwork.”
Dean glanced out of the window, a frown on his unnaturally pale face.
“I hope you’re right,” he said, softly. “But dreams shouldn’t make me look like this. Should they?”
A gesture indicated the great blue rings beneath the young artist’s eyes. His hands indicated the bloodless pallor of his gaunt cheeks.
“Overwork has done that, Mr. Dean. I know what has happened to you better than you do yourself.”
The white-haired physician picked up a sheet covered with his own scarcely decipherable notes and scrutinized it in review.
“You inherited this house at San Pedro a few months ago, eh? And you moved in alone to do some work.”
“Yes. The sea-coast there has some marvelous scenes.” For a moment Dean’s face looked youthful once more as enthusiasm kindled its ashy fires. Then he continued, with a troubled frown. “But I haven’t been able to paint, lately—not seascapes, anyway. It’s very odd. My sketches don’t seem quite right any more. There seems to be a quality in them that I don’t put there——”
“A quality, did you say?”
“Yes. A quality of malignness, if I can call it that. It’s indefinable. Something behind the picture takes all the beauty out. And I haven’t been over-working these last weeks, Doctor Hedwig.”
The doctor glanced again at the paper in his hand.
“Well, I disagree with you there. You might be unconscious of the effort you expend. These dreams of the sea that seem to worry you are meaningless, save as an indication of your nervous condition.”
“You’re wrong.” Dean rose, suddenly. His voice was shrill.
“That’s the dreadful part of it. The dreams are not meaningless. They seem cumulative; cumulative and planned. Each night they grow more vivid, and I see more of that green, shining place under the sea. I get closer and closer to those black shadows swimming there; those shadows that I know aren’t shadows but something worse. I see more each night. It’s like a sketch I’d block out, gradually adding more and more until——”
Hedwig watched his patient keenly. He suggested “Until——?”
But Dean’s tense face relaxed. He had caught himself just in time. “No, Doctor Hedwig. You must be right. It’s overwork and nervousness, as you say. If I believed what the Mexicans had told me about Morella Godolfo—well, I’d be mad and a fool.”
“Who is this Morella Godolfo? Some woman who has been filling you with foolish tales?”
Dean smiled. “No need to worry about Morella. She was my great-great-grand-aunt. She used to live in the San Pedro house and started the legends, I think.”
Hedwig had been scribbling on a slip of paper. “Well, I see, young man! You heard these legends; your imagination ran riot; you dreamed. This prescription will fix you up.”
“Thanks.”
Dean took the paper, lifted his hat from the table, and started for the door. In the doorway he paused, smiling wryly.
“But you’re not quite correct in thinking the legends started me dreaming, Doctor. I began to dream before I learned the history of the house.”
And with that he went out.
Driving back to San Pedro, Dean tried to understand what had happened to him. But always he came up against a blank wall of impossibility. Any logical explanation wandered off into a tangle of fantasy. The one thing he could not explain—which Doctor Hedwig had not been able to explain—was the dreams.
The dreams started soon after he came into his legacy; this ancient house north of San Pedro, which had so long stood deserted. The place was picturesquely old, and that attracted Dean from the first. It had been built by one of his ancestors when the Spaniards still ruled California. One of the Deans—the name was Dena, then—had gone to Spain and returned with a bride. Her name was Morella Godolfo, and it was this long-vanished woman about whom all the subsequent legends centered.
Even yet there were wrinkled, toothless Mexicans in San Pedro who whispered incredible tales of Morella Godolfo—she who had never grown old and who had a weirdly evil power over the sea. The Godolfos had been among the proudest families of Granada, but furtive legends spoke of their intercourse with the terrible Moorish sorcerers and necromancers. Morella, according to these same hinted horrors, had learned uncanny secrets in the black towers of Moorish Spain, and when Dena had brought her as his bride across the sea she had already sealed a pact with dark Powers and had undergone a change.
So ran the tales, and they further told of Morella’s life in the old San Pedro house. Her husband had lived for ten years or more after the marriage, but rumors said that he no longer possessed a soul. It is certain that his death was very mysteriously hushed up by Morella Godolfo, who went on living alone in the great house beside the sea.
The whispers of the peons were hereafter monstrously augmented. They had to do with the change in Morella Godolfo; the sorcerous change which caused her to swim far out to sea on moonlit nights so that watchers saw her white body gleaming amidst the spray. Men bold enough to gaze from the cliffs might catch glimpses of her then, sporting with queer sea-creatures that gamboled about her in the black waters, nuzzling her with shockingly deformed heads. These creatures were not seals, or any known form of submarine life, it was averred; although sometimes bursts of chuckling, gobbling laughter could be heard. It is said that Morella Godolfo had swum out there one night, and that she never came back. But thereafter the laughter was louder from afar, and the sporting amidst the black rocks continued, so that the tales of the early peons had been nourished down to the present day.
Such were the legends known to Dean. The facts were sparse and inconclusive. The old house had fallen into decrepitude, and was only occasionally rented through the years. These rentals had been as short as they were infrequent. There was nothing definitely wrong with the house between White’s Point and Point Fermin, but those who had lived there said that the crashing of the surf sounded subtly different when heard through windows that overlooked the sea, and, too, they dreamed unpleasantly. Sometimes the occasional tenants had mentioned with peculiar horror the moonlit nights, when the sea became altogether too clearly visible. At any rate, occupants often vacated the house hastily.
Dean had moved in immediately after inheriting, because he had thought the place ideal for painting the scenes he loved. He had learned the legend and the facts behind it later, and by this time his dreams had started.
At first they had been conventional enough, though, oddly, all centered about the sea which he so loved. But it was not the sea he loved that he knew in sleep.
The Gorgons lived in his dreams. Scylla writhed hideously across dark and surging waters, where harpies flew screaming. Weird creatures crawled sluggishly up from the black, inky depths where eyeless, bloated sea-beasts dwelt. Gigantic and terrible leviathans leapt and plunged, while monstrous serpents squirmed a strange obeisance to a mocking moon. Foul and hidden horrors of the sea’s depths engulfed him in sleep.
This was bad enough, but it was only a prelude. The dreams began to change. It was almost as though the first few formed a definite setting for the greater terrors to come. From the mythic images of old sea-gods another vision emerged. It was inchoate at first, taking definite form and meaning very slowly over a period of several weeks. And it was this dream which Dean now feared.
It had occurred generally just before he awoke—a vision of green, translucent light, in which dark shadows swam slowly. Night after night the limpid emerald glow grew brighter, and the shadows twisted into a more visible horror. These were never clearly seen, although their amorphous heads held a strangely repellent recognizable quality for Dean.
Presently, in this dream of his, the shadow-creatures would move aside as though to permit the passage of another. Swimming into the green haze would come a coiling shape—whether similar to the rest or not Dean could not tell, for his dream always ended there. The approach of this last shape always caused him to awake in a nightmare paroxysm of terror.
He dreamt of being somewhere under the sea, amidst swimming shadows with deformed heads; and each night one particular shadow was coming closer and closer.
Each day, now, when he awoke with the cold sea-wind of early dawn blowing through the windows, he would lie in a lazy, languid mood till long past daybreak. When he rose these days he felt inexplicably tired, and he could not paint. This particular morning the sight of his haggard face in the mirror had forced him to visit a physician. But Doctor Hedwig had not been helpful.
Nevertheless Dean filled the prescription on the way home. A swallow of the bitter, brownish tonic strengthened him somewhat, but as he parked his car the feeling of depression settled down on him again. He walked up to the house still puzzled and strangely afraid.
Under the door was a telegram. Dean read it with a puzzled frown.
JUST LEARNED YOU ARE LIVING IN SAN PEDRO HOUSE STOP VITALLY IMPORTANT YOU VACATE IMMEDIATELY STOP SHOW THIS CABLE TO DOCTOR MAKOTO YAMADA 17 BUENA STREET SAN PEDRO STOP AM RETURNING VIA AIRPLANE STOP SEE YAMADA TODAY
MICHAEL LEIGH
Dean read the message again, and a flash of remembrance came to him. Michael Leigh was his uncle, but he had not seen the man for years. Leigh had been a puzzle to the family; he was an occultist, and spent most of his time delving in far corners of the earth. Occasionally he dropped from sight for long periods of time. The cable Dean held was sent from Calcutta, and he supposed that Leigh had recently emerged from some spot in the interior of India to learn of Dean’s inheritance.
Dean searched his mind. He recalled now, that there had been some family quarrel about this very house years ago. The details were no longer clear, but he remembered that Leigh had demanded the San Pedro house be razed. Leigh had given no sane reasons, and when the request was refused he had dropped out of sight for a time. And now came this inexplicable cablegram.
Dean was tired from his long drive, and the unsatisfactory interview with the doctor had irritated him more than he had realized. Nor was he in the mood to follow his uncle’s cabled request and undertake the long journey to Buena Street, which was miles away. The drowsiness which he felt, however, was normal healthy exhaustion, unlike the languor of recent weeks. The tonic he had taken was of some value after all.
He dropped into his favorite chair by the window that overlooked the sea, rousing himself to watch the flaming colors of the sunset. Presently the sun dropped below the horizon, and gray dusk crept in. Stars appeared, and far to the north he could see the dim lights of the gambling-ships off Venice. The mountains shut off his view of San Pedro, but a diffused pale glow in that direction told him that the New Barbary was wakening into roaring, brawling life. Slowly the face of the Pacific brightened. A full moon was rising above the San Pedro hills.
For a long time Dean sat quietly by the window, his pipe forgotten in his hand, staring down at the slow swells of the ocean, which seemed to pulse with a mighty and alien life. Gradually drowsiness crept up and overwhelmed him. Just before he dropped into the abyss of sleep there flashed into his mind da Vinci’s saying, “The two most wonderful things in the world are a woman’s smile and the motion of mighty waters.”
He dreamed, and this time it was a different dream. At first only blackness, and a roaring and thundering as of angry seas, and oddly mingled with this was the hazy thought of a woman’s smile... and a woman’s lips... pouting lips, softly alluring... but strangely the lips were not red—no! They were very pale, bloodless, like the lips of a thing that had long rested beneath the sea....
The misty vision changed, and for a flashing instant Dean seemed to see the green and silent place of his earlier visions. The shadowy black shapes were moving more quickly behind the veil, but this picture was of but a second’s duration. It flashed out and vanished, and Dean was standing alone on a beach; a beach he recognized in his dream—the sandy cove beneath the house.
The salt breeze blew coldly across his face, and the sea glistened like silver in the moonlight. A faint splash told of a sea-thing that broke the surface of the waters. To the north the sea washed against the rugged surface of the cliff, barred and speckled with black shadows. Dean felt a sudden, inexplicable impulse to move in that direction. He yielded.
As he clambered over the rocks he was suddenly conscious of a strange sensation, as though keen eyes were focussed upon him—eyes that watched and warned! Vaguely in his mind rose up the gaunt face of his uncle, Michael Leigh, the deep-set eyes glowing. But swiftly this was gone, and he found himself before a deeper niche of blackness in the cliff face. Into it he knew he must go.
He squeezed himself between two jutting points of rock, and found himself in utter, dismal darkness. Yet somehow he was conscious that he was in a cave, and he could hear water lapping near by. All about him was a musty salt odor of sea-decay, the fetid smell of sunless ocean caves and holds of ancient ships. He stepped forward, and, as the floor shelved sharply downward, stumbled and fell headlong into icy, shallow water. He felt, rather than saw, a flicker of swift movement, and then abruptly hot lips were pressed against his.
Human lips, Dean thought, at first.
He lay on his side in the chill water, his lips against those responsive ones. He could see nothing, for all was lost in the blackness of the cave. The unearthly lure of those invisible lips thrilled through him.
He responded to them, pressed them fiercely, gave them what they were avidly seeking. The unseen waters crawled against the rocks, whispering warning.
And in that kiss strangeness flooded him. He felt a shock and a tingling go through him, and then a thrill of sudden ecstasy, and swift on its heels came horror. Black loathsome foulness seemed to wash his brain, indescribable but fearfully real, making him shudder with nausea. It was as though unutterable evil were pouring into his body, his mind, his very soul, through the blasphemous kiss on his lips. He felt loathsome, contaminated. He fell back. He sprang to his feet.
And Dean saw, for the first time, the ghastly thing he had kissed, as the sinking moon sent a pale shaft of radiance creeping through the cave mouth. For something rose up before him, a serpentine and seal-like bulk that coiled and twisted and moved toward him, glistening with foul slime; and Dean screamed and turned to flee with nightmare fear tearing at his brain, hearing behind him a quiet splashing as though some bulky creature had slid back into the water....