The Watchers Out of Time (25 page)

There was plainly no short-cut to information about my great-uncle to be had; unlike the subject of my doctoral dissertation, there were no references in libraries—other than my great-uncle’s own, to which I repaired at once, only to find there an almost solid array of books, both ancient and modern, on the subject of sorcery and witchcraft and allied superstitions—the
Malleus Maleficarum,
for example, and very old books by Olaus Magnus, Eunapius, de Rochas, and others. Few titles meant anything to me; I had never heard of Anania’s
De Natura Daemonum
or De Vignate’s
Quaestio de Lamiis
or Stampa’s
Fuga Satanae.

It was evident that my great-uncle had read his books, for they were marked up with annotations—principally cross-references jotted down for his easy use. I had no difficulty reading the often ancient printing, but it was all on related themes—my great-uncle’s interest ran not only to the ordinary practices of witchcraft and demonology, but to a persistent fascination with succubi, the retention of the “essence” from one existence to another—not, apparently, a reference to reincarnation, familiars, the wreaking of vengeance by means of sorcery, incantations, and the like.

I had no intention of studying the books, but I took time to follow through some of his references on the “essence,” and found myself led from book to book from a discussion of the “essence” or “soul” or “life-force,” as it was variously called, through chapters on transmigration and possession, to a dissertation on taking over a new body by driving out the life-force within and substituting one’s own essence—the sort of rigmarole which might conceivably have appealed to an aging man on the threshold of death.

I was still at work among the books when Rhoda called from Boston.

“Boston!” I was astonished. “You didn’t get very far.”

“No,” she said. “I just began to think about your great-uncle and stopped off here at the Widener to look at some of their rare books.”

“Not on sorcery?” I hazarded a guess.

“Yes. Adam, I think you ought to get out of that house.”

“And just throw a tidy little inheritance over my shoulder? Not a chance.”

“Please don’t be stubborn. I’ve been doing some research. I know what a closed mind you have, but believe me,” she said earnestly, “your uncle was up to no good when he made that stipulation. He wants you there for a definite reason. Are you all right, Adam?”

“Perfectly.”

“Has anything happened?”

I told her in detail what had taken place.

She listened in silence. When I had finished, she said again, “I think you ought to leave, Adam.”

As she spoke, I was conscious of a growing irritation with her. Her possessiveness, her assumption of the right to tell me what I ought to do—which did, certainly, postulate her conviction of knowing better than I what served my welfare, angered me.

“I’m staying, Rhoda,” I said.

“Don’t you see, Adam—that shadow in the attic—some monstrous thing came in by way of that hole and blasted that shadow there,” she said.

I’m afraid I laughed. “I’ve always said women simply aren’t rational creatures.”

“Adam—this isn’t a man-woman thing. I’m scared.”

“Come back,” I said. “I’ll protect you.”

Resigned, she rang off.

IV

That night was memorable for what I chose then to believe pure hallucination. It began, literally, with a step on the stair some time after I had gone to bed. I listened for a moment, to hear it again; then I slipped out of bed, made my way in the dark to the door, and opened it just enough to enable me to look out.

The cleaning woman had just passed my door, bound for the ground floor. I backed into my room at once, fumbled my way to my dressing-gown in my bag—I had not had occasion to use it before—and let myself out of the room, bent upon facing the woman at her work.

I moved quietly in the darkness down the stairs, though the dark was alleviated somewhat by the iridescence of moonlight flowing into the house from outside. Not quite midway down, I experienced that curious sensation I had known previously—of being watched.

I turned.

There in the well of glowing darkness behind and a little above me hung the spectral likeness of Great-uncle Uriah Garrison—something as ephemeral as air—the heavy bearded face distorted a little by the moonlight’s iridescence, the burning eyes, the shock of touseled hair, the high bones of his cheeks with the parchment skin tight over them—seen for an instant so unmistakably—then it collapsed like a pricked balloon and vanished, save for a thin, serpentine coil or rope of some dark substance which seemed to flow writhing and turning, down the stairs to where I stood, until it, too, disappeared like smoke.

I stood frozen with terror until reason reasserted control. I told myself I had had an hallucination of a kind not to be entirely unexpected, in view of my concern during the day about my great-uncle and his curious preoccupations, though I should have thought this far more likely to have occurred in a dream than in a vision while awake. But at this moment, too, I questioned the degree of my wakefulness. I had to think what I was doing on the stairs, and remembered the cleaning woman. I had an impulse to return to my room and go to sleep, but I would not. I pulled myself together and went on.

There was a light in the kitchen—a lamp burning dimly and low, by the glow of it. I crept silently toward the kitchen and stood where I could look in.

The woman was there, cleaning, as always. Now was the time to front her directly and demand an accounting of her presence.

But something held me where I was. Something about the woman repelled me. Something other stirred my memories, and I remembered that other woman I had seen there in the years of my childhood. Slowly, certainly, I became aware that they were one and the same; the woman’s impassive, expressionless face was unchanged over twenty years or more, her actions were mechanical, and she seemed even to be wearing the same clothing!

And intuitively I knew that this was the woman whose body I had felt beside me on the bed in the night!

My reluctance to face her grew. But I forced myself to step into the room just over the threshold, on the tip of my tongue the demand for an accounting of her presence.

But no word left my lips. She turned and for but a brief few moments our eyes met—and I looked into pools of glowing fire, eyes that were hardly eyes at all but so much more—the epitome of passion and hunger, the apex of evil, the embodiment of the unknown. In every other respect the confrontation was no different from what it had been in the earlier years—she did not move, her face save for her eyes remained expressionless. Then I lowered my eyes, unable to gaze into hers any longer, and stepped back across the threshold into the darkness behind me.

And fled up the stairs to my room, where I stood trembling, my back to the door, my thoughts confused, for I knew that what I had seen was something more than a woman, but I did not know what, something in bondage to my dead uncle, something bound to return night after night and perform these rites. Where she came from remained unknown.

It was while I still stood there that I heard her once again on the stairs starting up from below. For a few moments I thought her bound for my room—as once before—and I felt myself grow cold with fear—but her steps carried her past, on to the stairs that led to the attic.

As the sound of her steps receded, my courage returned, and, emboldened, I opened the door and looked out.

All was in darkness. But no—up at the top of the stairs, out from under the attic door, shone a blue glow.

Even as I mounted to the attic, the blue glow began to fade.

I stood with my ear pressed to the door, listening. There was no sound.

Pressed by mounting courage, I threw open the door. There was no sign of the woman. But over against the floor, where the angle of the roof joined it, the blue light I had noticed under the door was flowing out like water through the mouse-hole there! And the painted lines all around the hole glowed as with a light all their own, which faded even as I watched.

I lit a match and held it high.

The clothing the woman had worn lay as before, on the chair. And the mask.

I crossed to the chair and touched the mask.

It was warm.

The match burned my fingers and went out.

All was now black as pitch. But from the direction of the mouse-hole I felt such a drawing power as must I fling myself on my knees and try to follow the blue light, if I did not at once escape—a pulsing, sensate evil—and once again the earth seemed to stop in its turning, there was a lurch in time, and a great cloud of paralyzing fear enveloped me.

I stood as if transfixed.

Then, from the mouse-hole, a drift of blue light like smoke came seeping into the attic. The sight of it burgeoning there broke the spell that held me—I ran, crouching, to the door, and flung myself out of the attic. I raced down the stairs to my room, looking back as if I expected some eldritch thing to be hot on my heels.

There was nothing but blackness, nothing but the dark.

I went into my room and threw myself upon the bed, fully clothed, and there I lay, waiting apprehensively, for whatever might come—knowing I should do as Rhoda had asked, yet curiously reluctant to leave the house on Aylesbury Street—not because it was my inheritance, but for a frightening kind of bondage, almost kinship, that kept me there.

I waited in vain for even the ghost of a sound to disturb the quiet. Nothing whatsoever came to ear but the natural sounds the house made on a windy night, for a wind had come up—and the occasional keening of a screech owl from the direction of Hangman’s Hill.

And presently I slept, fully clothed as I was, and in my sleep I dreamed—dreamed that the blue light burgeoned and mushroomed into the attic, came flowing down the stairs and into the room where I lay, and out of the mouse-hole at the apex of the angle of roof and floor came to swell and grow the figures of the cleaning woman, now clad and rubber-masked, now hideous with age, now naked and beautiful as a young woman, and beside her my great-uncle Uriah Garrison, invading the house and the room and at last me—a dream from which I woke bathed in perspiration on the edge of dawn which lay pale blue in the room before it gave way to the roseate hue of the morning sky.

What kept me awake, exhausted as I was, was the pounding at the outside door. I struggled to my feet and made my way to the door.

Rhoda stood there.

“Adam!” she cried. “You look terrible.”

“Go away,” I said, “We don’t need you.”

I was momentarily shocked to hear my own words, but in a few moments I was resigned to them, I began to understand that I meant them, I resented Rhoda’s interference—as if she thought I could not take care of myself.

“So—I’m too late then,” she said.

“Go away,” I said again. “Just leave us alone.”

She pushed past me and strode into the house. I went after her. She was bound for the study, and when she got there she put together my notes and manuscript for my Hardy dissertation and confronted me with them.

“You won’t need these any more, will you?” she asked.

“Take them,” I said. “Take them all.”

She took them. “Goodbye, Adam,” she said.

“Goodbye, Rhoda,” I said.

I could hardly believe the evidence of my eyes, but Rhoda went, as meek as any lamb. And though I was still vaguely troubled by it, I was aware of a secret satisfaction at the way things were turning out.

V

I spent most of the rest of that day just relaxing and, in a sense, waiting upon the events of that night. It is impossible now to describe my frame of mind. All fear had left me, and I was consumed with a vivid curiosity, even with a kind of eagerness.

The day dragged. I slept through part of it. I ate very little. My appetite now was for something no food could satisfy, and it did not trouble me that this was so.

But the night and darkness came at last, and I set myself to waiting with keen anticipation for whatever might come from that room in the attic. I waited at first down stairs, but at last I understood that it was the room above—my great-uncle Uriah’s old room—where I must wait upon the events of night in the house; so I went there and sat in the darkness.

I waited while the night grew older, hearing the old clock downstairs strike the hours of nine and ten and eleven. I expected to hear, soon, the step of the woman on the stair, the woman called Lilith, but it was the blue light that came first, seeping in under the door—as in my dream.

But I was not sleeping, I was not dreaming.

The blue light came, filling the room until I could just faintly see the naked form of the woman and the shaping form of Great-uncle Uriah looming up, with a writhing, twisting, serpentine coil reaching out from where he was taking shape to where I sat on the bed….

And then something more, something that filled me with sudden terror. I smelled smoke—and I heard the crackling of flames.

And from outside came Rhoda’s voice calling, “Adam! Adam!”

The vision collapsed. The last thing I saw was the expression of terrible rage on my great-uncle’s spectral face, the fury on the face of the woman changing in that light from that of a lissome girl to that of an ancient hag. Then I flung myself to the window and opened it.

“Rhoda!” I cried.

She had taken no chances. There was a ladder up against the windowsill.

The house burned to the ground with everything in it.

Its burning did not affect my great-uncle’s will. As Mr. Saltonstall put it, I had been fulfilling his condition when circumstances beyond my control made it impossible to continue. So I did inherit the property, and I sold it, and Rhoda and I were married.

In spite of her insistently feminine delusions.

“I set fire to it myself,” she said. She had spent the day after she had left with my papers and books at the library of Miskatonic University, famed for its collection of arcane books, studying witchcraft lore. She had concluded that the spirit animating the house and responsible for the events in it was that of Great-uncle Uriah Garrison, and that his sole reason for the condition that I must live there was to place me within his reach so that he could usurp my own life-force and take possession of my body. The woman was a succubus, perhaps his mistress. The mouse-hole obviously an opening into another dimension.