2 “Fear Is Calling for You, Clay!”
The stone house was old. It had been old when I was a child; but now it had changed. Now it seemed to me that nameless evil had sprung, since I had gone, from festering roots sunk deep into its grim antiquity. For the age of it then had been mellow, aloof, austere, even kindly; now it was a leering, gibbering horror. It was as if the house had died since my departure, and was now a restless specter, haunting its own hollow corpse.
Sarah Kyle met us in the hall, standing motionless under vast, grimy roof-beams two centuries old. Seven years had changed her. Her teeth were gone. Her face was narrowed, sharpened, shriveled. Her eyes were sunken, curiously bright. She was stooped, until her posture suggested some queer, bright-eyed bird.
She took my hand in her horny claw, and welcomed me with a cackling laugh. Then she began to make apologies for the poverty of her house, and to hint transparently for news of my business in the Orient.
“May I see the doctor?” I said.
Her bird-like eyes fixed me, with their uncanny glitter.
“You had better see him, Clay, if you have come to marry Valyne,” her cracked voice shrilled. “And ye had better take his warning. Don’t walk too near the edge of hell!”
I stepped back, startled, demanding:
“Mother Kyle! What do you mean?”
“Latham will tell you,” she said, “if your own strange blood hasn’t written it on your soul!”
“Where’s the doctor?”
Her white head jerked sharply.
“Latham’s still at work,” she told me, “in his study in the attic. He’s busy on his great book.”
“His book?” I said, wondering.
“He is writing a history of the demonolatries of Creston.”
“I want to talk to him right away.”
“You can see him after supper.” Her thin nose jerked at me emphatically, like the beak of a bird. “He’ll give you reason enough why you can’t marry Valyne, and drag her soul to hell!”
Valyne rescued me from her cackling strangeness, and led me up to my old room.
There I met the two servants of the house. They, Eben Hand and his wife Josepha, were setting up my bedstead.
Eben Hand was a fat, panting man. There was no color in his blond hair, his vague pale eyes, or his pasty skin. Mute, he expressed himself very swiftly to his wife with white, pliable fat hands.
She was a big, dark woman. Her eyes were wide and sharp and black. Her raven hair was coiled into glistening, oily ropes. Her upper lip bore a thick, dark fuzz. She was doing the most of the work, issuing commands to her silent husband in a coarse, mannish voice.
She bowed to me, oddly, as I entered with Valyne and set down my light bag. Her dark avid eyes remained fastened on my face, while she told her husband:
“Eben, this is Clay. Ye remember little Claiborne Coe, Eben, that used to run through the village. Well, this is him, come back to take our Valyne away. Clay got rich, Eben, in them furrin parts!”
At that last sentence, Eben Hand’s small, pale eyes shifted suddenly from his wife to me. They searched my person, and seized upon my modest gold ring. His white fingers made some swift, covert reply.
When they had gone, I said to Valyne:
“I don’t like them—or this house! Can’t we stay somewhere else, tonight?”
“There’s no hotel in Creston,” she told me. “And it would look strange if we went away tonight. Besides, you must stay to talk with Doctor Kyle. I promised him.”
But even the electric warmth of her kiss couldn’t thaw out the chill of my forebodings.
Doctor Kyle came down at last from his attic room.
He was a big man. Although his body and his limbs remained massively powerful, his head had become curiously fleshless. His yellow cheeks were hollow, his dark flaming eyes were very deeply sunken. His head had become almost completely bald, so that it gave the disconcerting impression of a yellowed skull.
We met at the foot of the stairs. His hand was very cold, as if he had been working too long without a fire in his attic study.
No smile broke the solemn preoccupation of his cadaverous face.
“You are welcome to your old home, Clay,” said his deep, hollow voice. “I’m very glad to see you, but”—his shrunken face changed curiously—“I had hoped that you would heed the warning of my letter, and never come for Valyne.”
“I have come for her,” I told him bluntly. “And I’m going to take her away, in spite of anything you tell me.”
His gaunt head shook.
“Clay,” he said, “you were always queer and reckless. But I know that you aren’t reckless, madly selfish, enough to drag Valyne away to a living hell! Not after you have heard; for there must be one drop of human blood left in your veins!”
“Of course I wouldn’t hurt Valyne,” I told him. “Go ahead and tell me; I’ve had enough vague hints.”
But Josepha Hand was setting supper on the table, and Valyne came toward us at the foot of the stair.
“Doctor,” she said, smiling, “you’ve worked too late again! You know you shouldn’t——”
Her light voice was swept away by his hissing whisper:
“Later, Clay. But it is a crime that God forbids!”
Valyne caught his arm, and mine, and drew us toward the table.
Sitting beside Valyne, so that sometimes my arm touched the firm warmth of hers, I wondered vainly what he could have to say. What demoniac purpose sought to bar me from her? What eldritch madness lurked in this ancient house?
As we ate, the man Eben Hand appeared suddenly in a doorway. He looked disturbed, his white hands fluttered agitatedly at his wife. And she called in a tone of startled dread:
“Doctor! You must go, Doctor! He can’t get it quiet!”
Doctor Kyle’s yellow, tight-skinned face grew a little paler. He rose hastily and followed Eben Hand through the doorway which, I remembered, led to the cellar stair.
Silently, the doctor’s toothless, wrinkled wife watched the door with her too-bright eyes. She listened. Presently we heard a sound from below. It was a low scream—of tortured, animal agony.
When she heard it, Sarah Kyle relaxed as if with relief. Her bright eyes came back to the table; her brown, claw-like hands buttered a piece of bread. Her thin voice asked me:
“Clay, what business was ye in, in China?”
“One and another,” I told her, absently. “The last was copper and tin, in the province of Szechwan.”
I was looking at Valyne.
Her violet eyes were on her plate; her face was very pale. She was trembling; her even teeth were sunk deep into her full red lip.
“Valyne!” I whispered. “What is it, darling?”
She merely shook her head a little. She didn’t speak or lift her eyes.
“Copper and tin?” Sarah Kyle’s cracked voice was repeating. “And ye found it profitable?”
Doctor Kyle silently resumed his place.
His wife asked some inaudible question, and I caught his whispered reply:
“It’s restless—hungry, perhaps. Jud is late, today.”
His dark, brilliant eyes looked across at me.
“I must beg your pardon for this mystery, Clay. Please finish your supper. Later you will understand.” Then he asked, as if to launch a conversation, “Have you any collection of Chinese art?”
“No,” I said jerkily. “Yes, a few pieces of good jade.”
I had too much else to think about.
Before the meal was done, there was a rapping at the back door. Answering it, Josepha Hand called:
“Doctor, it’s Jud.”
His haggard face was relieved.
“Let him in,” he called. “Let him take it down to Eben.”
The man Jud Geer passed across the end of the room, carrying a milk can. There was more fresh blood on his overalls. A stained bandage was wrapped around his head, to cover his lips where my fist had pulped them.
His glassy, bulging eyes rolled toward me. They rested for a moment upon Valyne’s still-bowed head, and I caught a lewd glitter in them.
He went out toward the cellar. The doctor and his wife listened anxiously. I heard an eager, bestial whining, and the sound of thickly splashing liquid.
Jud Geer came back into the room. He stopped by Doctor Kyle’s chair, so close to me that I could hear the tick of his cheap watch. He held out his great, reddened hand, and muttered something through his bandage. But his filmed eyes were looking not at the doctor, but at Valyne.
Doctor Kyle dropped some coins into his palm, and he put them into his pocket, without taking his eyes off the girl.
Josepha Hand had opened the back door. At her impatient word, the gigantic butcher abruptly jerked his eyes away. He picked up his milk can, and went out.
It was after he had gone that I looked at the floor where the can had rested. On the bare pine boards was a circle of dark red. I knew that its contents had been blood.
Before I had time to digest that disturbing discovery, Eben Hand appeared again. His puffy face was strained and ashen; his colorless lips were twitching; his fat fingers nervously spelled out some hasty message.
“What is it?” Doctor Kyle’s hollow voice was apprehensive.
“He says it won’t touch it,” said Josepha Hand. “It won’t taste it. And he can’t get it quiet. It keeps whimpering. He thinks it knows he’s in the house. He thinks it’s calling for him.”
With that last word, her dark head jerked at me.
Doctor Kyle’s deep-sunk, flaming eyes came wonderingly to my face.
“It couldn’t remember,” he whispered faintly, as if to himself. “It couldn’t know Clay, after all these years.”
Again, from the cellar, I heard that eager, feral whining.
“It does,” whispered Josepha Hand. “It wants him!”
And I perceived suddenly that all eyes were fixed upon me, glazed and distended with horror, as if I had been some ghastly apparition. In that abrupt and fearful silence, Valyne’s fork rattled shockingly on the floor.