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Narrative of Hugh Lambert, B. S., M.Sc., F. A. G. S., F. R. G. S., etc.

Court Stone is the salt of the earth and a wizard with the scalpel, but he’s a damnable fussbudget about his patients. I had a devil of a time getting it into his head that I had a job to attend to and couldn’t be bothered nursing a couple of scratches.

Perhaps I’m being unfair to him. Whom has he treated, after all, but a pack of soft and flabby city dwellers emasculated by the countless comforts of civilization? Could he understand how little the loss of a quart or so of blood meant to a man who’d fought a hundred and fifty miles of Chaco Arica jungle with his arm and side shredded to rags by a jaguar’s claws; who, deafened and blinded and maddened by fever, had driven by curses across ten days of burning desert a caravan of Touaregs while they meditated his murder as an act of devotion to their deity?

I was sorely tempted, I’ll confess, to let the argument slide. I’ve had a pretty tough time of it, working my way through Dartmouth and batting around the world’s waste spaces ever since. Lying around, relaxed and catered to and pampered, made that study of Doc’s a little bit of Heaven.

It had its angel too. Ann Doring.

All my life I’d been searching for something. Not the ruins and fossils and artifacts of peoples who were already civilized when my own ancestors still gnawed raw meat from the bones of mastadons, but something more personal, the fulfillment of some lack in me, some indefinable, but poignant hunger.

I had never known, what it was, however, till I saw Dick Doring, grinning all over himself, dragging his sister up to my table in the mess hall. Then I knew that I’d found it. Ann Doring did something to me, in the few seconds Dick blurted out an introduction I didn’t hear, that no woman had ever done before.

It was nothing I could put words to, but it had tingled in my palm when Ann’s palm met it, and it throbbed between us, there in that room.

I had her all day to look at and dream about. I had Court Stone in the evening to engage me in man talk, his clipped Vandyke bristling, his eyes growing bright as he told me of the daily battles against death, battles as bitterly waged, and often with as much peril, as any of my own fights against ravening savages. But I was restless and uneasy, and the walls of the house seemed like the walls of a prison.

I had on my mind, of course, that we were in the last two weeks of the season, when the staff goes quietly mad with the need for keeping routine going, while preparations for breaking up become more and more febrile. If anything went wrong now it might wreck my hopes of wangling Tony Wagner into financing the diggings at Peth Akhor in Mesopotamia, where the fate of certain theories of mine as to prehistory lies buried under some hundred yards of detritus. But I was also vaguely aware of an urgent necessity for me to go back to Wanooka, a demand for my presence there that inexplicably seemed to have nothing to do with my responsibilities.

Peculiarly enough this feeling was not nearly as powerful while I was fully awake as it became when, as a result of my weakness I suppose, I would drift into a dreamy half-doze. It bothered me a lot, because I couldn’t understand it.

I have always slept dreamlessly, but now I would come awake at night, and lie wide-eyed, desperately endeavoring to recall some nightmare that had slipped into oblivion at the instant of consciousness’ return.

I stood two days of that. On Saturday morning I announced to Court that he and all Albany’s police force together couldn’t make me stay put any longer.

He spread his pudgy arms, at whose end those slim surgeon’s fingers of his seemed so incongruous, and yielded with the physician’s invariable formula: “All right, Hugh. I can’t keep you here against your will but I won’t be responsible for the results.”

None of my protests would avail to keep Ann from accompanying me. At that they were perhaps none too vigorous.

Doc evidently had phoned ahead, for Nurse Horne met our car at the gate and packed me right off to the infirmary shack. Lord! I’d rather try to get my own way from ten Cairo dragomen, indubitably the most mulish males in this large world, than one red-headed gal with a conscience and me the subject-matter of that conscience.

Show Edith a patient and the devil himself won’t stop her from taking care of him. She’d laid down the law to us before she’d been in camp two hours, and made us like it. Made us like her too, man to man, because she did her job without fuss and feathers, and because she asked for nothing in the way of special privilege on account of her being a woman.

Yes, that gal was a good soldier. The kind you could take along on a trek into the wilds and never have to worry about her going soft or, which is more important when there’s business to attend to, flirtatious. All of which is to explain why, after all the mischief I’d raised to get here, I meekly let her bundle me up in bed and as meekly swallowed the sedative she handed me.

That potion was a mistake. It put me to sleep, all right, but it didn’t keep me from dreaming. I don’t recall much of what I dreamed, but for the first time bits of it stayed with me.

The sense of something drawing me was in it somewhere, not satisfied with my being at Wanooka but still dragging at me, wanting me to do something I could not understand. There was a crystal wall, metal bars and levers screwed to it in an orderly sort of jumble, much like one of those switchboard panels of gray slate one sees in electric power houses. Hands, white and slender and definitely feminine moved along those levers, but they seemed puzzled, uncertain.

Remembering those hands afterward, I realized that I had accepted as natural, like one does in a dream, something quite unnatural about them. Between each finger there had been a translucent membrane, expanding and contracting as the web of a frog’s feet do.

I recall one thing else out of that dream. A face that made it a nightmare!

It was a little blurred as though it were looking at me from the other side of a window of slightly impure glass. I had the impression that the glass was more of a barrier to its vision than to mine, so that it could not quite make one out, and that the rage that darkened its eyes was due to this fact.

It was a narrow face, sharp-featured as a falcon’s and as soullessly cruel. The eyes were fierce black lights within slitted, lashless lids. The mouth was a tight gash in its swarthy, leather-textured skin, yet something about their shape made me feel that behind those compressed lips were not teeth but sharp fangs. There was rage in that face, as I’ve said, but there was also ineffable threat. Confronted by it, I knew the meaning of terror, I who can say without boasting that never before had I really known what fear is.

I awoke from that dream trembling and bathed in cold sweat.

I stared at the darkness till it grayed with the dawn, and when Edith came in to see how I was, I demanded my clothing, telling her I was through with being a pampered invalid once and for all. I must have spoken to her pretty sharply, for she flung them at me and went out of the room without a word of objection.

I was at once sorry for that. I had been angry at myself for a blithering sap and I had taken it out on the first person I saw. Which, again, was utterly unlike my usual self.

I overtook her on the way down to breakfast, apologized to her, and felt better. The clean, sharp tang of the pines was pulling into my lungs, the needle-carpeted earth was springy underfoot and the chill morning wind was grateful on my cheeks. This was what I needed to make me whole again. I’d been cooped up in a house too long.

Edith put her hand on my sweater sleeve. “It’s all right, Hugh. We’ll forget it. But take care of yourself. Please.”

I laughed. “I’ve been doing that for a long time,” I said, “and I think I can manage it without help for a little while longer. Quit worrying about my few lacerations, will you?”

“It isn’t that.” She wasn’t laughing with me, as she ordinarily did.

“What is it, then? What’s got you looking so washed out? I’ll be blessed if there aren’t dark circles under your eyes. Look here!” A thought struck me. “There hasn’t been a measles or whooping cough case out in the junior bunks while I’ve been laid up? Or something like that?”

“No.” She pulled away from me. “No, you fool.” And then she was running away from me, down the path to the mess house.

I might have gone after her, tried to find out what was jangling her, if Ed Hard hadn’t barged out of the councillor’s bunk just then, roaring a welcome at me in his gentle way. After that, mess call blew and I forgot all about the incident.

I got a thrill out of the way the kids cheered when they saw me at the head table. It was the real thing, no mistake, and it meant a lot. I’d been a strict disciplinarian, and once or twice I’d wondered whether those brats out of rich homes didn’t hate me for it. The way they yelled told me.

Ann got it, too. I knew that by the way she looked at me, starry-eyed. “You can’t fool boys,” she whispered to me as I sat down after getting a little thank-you speech past the lump in my throat. “I’ve got a brother and I know.”

I got into harness right after that meal was over. It was Sunday and outside of their swim the campers were free to entertain their relatives, who started flocking in about ten, but I had plenty of work cut out for me. Besides an accumulation of mail only I could attend to that had piled up on my desk, there was the schedule of activities for the final fortnight to work out with Ed, arrangements for baggage packing and transportation to the city to get under way, the last Saturday entertainment and the break-up banquet to be planned, and the Lord alone knows what else.

I drove my assistants and my office staff hard, but I drove myself harder. There were a hundred interruptions, of course. Fond papas came in with checks (the more money a man has the longer he likes to hold on to it) and had to be chatted with. Fonder mamas came in with complaints (the better satisfied a kid is the more his mother finds to kick about) and had to be mollified. Giggling sisters and cousins came in for no good reason at all and had to be combed out of my hair. Just before lunch Dick Doring showed up and got me aside in a corner.

“Listen, Uncle Hugh,” he whispered. “Sis don’t want to be bothered with autograph signing and such, so she’s keeping out of sight till this mob of visitors beats it. She don’t even want them to know she’s here, so will you please ask the staff not to say anything? I’ve already tipped off the fellows, and they’ve clammed up.”

“Oke,” I grinned, knuckling his cheek. “Mum’s the word.” He’s a well set-up lad, the tallest of our youngsters, clean-limbed and frank-eyed. “Now run along and have fun.” I passed the word around, decided to have my lunch in the office so that I should have at least one hour’s work in peace.

We got back to normal at camp Monday morning, and I had the office work going well enough so that I decided I could be spared for a swim with Ann during the boys’ afternoon rest hour. I warned her to keep inside the line of buoys that marks off a space sufficiently large for even the strongest swimmer.

“The sun warms the water enough,” I told her, “in this end of the lake where it’s fairly shallow, but the rest is icy. It can be negotiated, but it’s no fun, and it’s dangerous, so we just don’t swim beyond the markers, and even keep our canoes within reach of them.”

Her dive cut into the lake without the hint of a splash. I contrived to match it. We raced for the big raft. She was a marvel of graceful speed and I beat her only by five feet. I was a little miffed at that. My face must have shown it, because her clear, merry laugh rang out as she clutched the raft ropes.

“If I had my health,” I grinned, “it would be different.” The echo of Ann’s laugh came back from the mountain, coarsened so that it did not seem her laugh at all. Someone indistinguishable called from a canoe farther out. I shoved the soles of my feet against the side of the raft, straightened, rolled over, filled my lungs and dove to swim back under water.

It seemed colder than usual as my arms pumped. The imprisoned air tore at my chest. I have always made the distance easily, and an idea glimmered in my mind that perhaps I had been foolhardy to go in so early in my convalescence. I plunged up to the surface, whooshed the air from my lungs, glanced up to see how near I was to the float.

I wasn’t anywhere near it! I had veered, somehow, under water and had been swimming up the lake, parallel with the shore, and was already well beyond the buoys. No wonder the water was so cold! I’d have to get back, and quickly, too.

I started swimming again. But I did not turn. I wanted to. I sent the message to my muscles, or thought I did, but I kept right on pumping toward the far end of Wanooka. The icy water seethed along my sides, and the cold seeped deep into me. I was numbed, lost all sense of feeling. I thought: stop it, turn around, make for the shore; and swam straight on, not even slowing, though I should have with my muscles freezing.

The cold got to my brain and I did not think any longer. I was conscious of nothing but the urge, the terrible urge, to get to the north end of the lake. Yes. Somewhere deep inside of me there was still a kernel of awareness that I was swimming to my death. It seemed some other person who knew that.

My arms beat, my legs threshed, my body cut through the water. Faster. Faster. ... My hand hit something hard! My head bumped it.

A voice screamed at me. For a moment it was just shrill sound, then it made words: “Hugh! What are you trying to do?” It was Edith Horne’s voice. “You fool. You unutterable fool. Are you trying to kill yourself?”

My head cleared a bit. I became aware that it was a canoe into which I had bumped. Edith was in it and she was yelling at me. She had been out on the lake and she had cut across my suicidal course.

“I—I don’t know....” I gasped. “Cold.”

“I should say you must be cold. Get in here, quick.”

I was so numbed that it was almost an impossible job, but I managed it somehow with Edith helping me. Her paddle slashed down, driving the canoe to shore.

Her face was sultry, her eyes blazing. “You’ve got yourself a case of pneumonia now,” she stormed, “you unmitigated ass. What made you do it?”

“I didn’t mean to. A current had hold of me and I couldn’t fight it,” I lied. There had been no current. There had been nothing palpable about the thing that had drawn me to inevitable disaster.

I suspect that Edith knew I lied, but the canoe’s bow crunched on ground and saved me from further lies. “Jump out and run up to the infirmary as fast as you can go,” she commanded. “We’ve got to get your blood circulating.”

I jumped, and ran. Her voice was like a whip, lashing me. “Faster! Run faster!” I couldn’t go very quickly, I was so frozen, and she kept right behind me. “Faster!” It irritated me, but I obeyed. It would have been senseless to do otherwise.

I glimpsed Ann standing on the raft, watching us, her hand to her mouth as if she had just realized the implication of what she had thought a bit of bravado. I waved her in signal that I was all right, but Edith wouldn’t let me stop. Anger flared in my skull.

In the infirmary she flung an armful of towels at me. “Get into that room, strip and rub yourself down. Hard. Tear the skin off. Then get into bed.”

I did as I was told. Then Edith piled heated blankets over me, raged at me till I downed a tumbler of hot whiskey, and went out, slamming the door. The heated liquor knocked me out, so that I was in a dreamless sleep almost at once.

When I awoke I knew it was very late. The infirmary is set a little away from the camp. From my window I could see only the woods, and through their trunks the north end of Lake Wanooka, but from the position of the stars I could tell it was well on toward dawn.

The moonglow glimmered on the water, silvery except where that queer circular path of light showed; about which I had often wondered. Was I mistaken, or had it moved nearer the bank? Much nearer?

I had always meant to investigate the thing, but the routine of the camp had kept me too busy. Now I was sorry I had not, for, from nowhere, I got the idea that it was the source of the strange attraction that had bothered me ever since my return from Court Stone’s and that was stronger than ever tonight.

A strange thing, that vague, intangible drag at me. Hard to describe. It was something like the Whisper in Kipling’s Explorer. Remember?

Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges—

Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!

Yes, it was like that, except that it was I that was lost, and the hidden Something was calling me back to it.

And that instead of a promise there was an element—of dread in that call.

Suddenly I stopped pondering it and shoved up on my elbow. The high, rank weeds down near the lake edge were rustling in a straight line, as though something were threading through them. Then they were quiet. But there was movement under the trees through which the moonlight was sifting. The movement of shadows.

There were shadows, but there was nothing to cast them. Not even a rabbit. A little muscle twitched in my cheek.

There was something eerie about those drifting shadows, something nape-pricking. ... Lord, I was getting jittery! They could be nothing but the shadows of branches stirred by some vagrant breeze in the treetops. I made myself lie down, and closed my eyes.

And I was dreaming once more. Of a city of strange, squat buildings on which a weird light lay though there was no sun in a sky I could not see. Of a topless crystal shaft within which, although it was solid, rainbow-hued clouds swirled and billowed so that it seemed informed with an awesome other life divested of all mortality. Of the terrifying dark face again, more vulpine than before, shrewder, somehow, with a reptilian shrewdness.

I saw another face, too, this one small and winsome, tight black curls capping it, fathomless gray eyes wide-pupiled and puzzled and afraid. The face of a maid over whom some brooding fear hovered.

I knew, in my dream, that her name was Leeahlee.

Clipping from the Albany Gazette, August 23, 1934:

The authorities at the Postgraduate Hospital are puzzled by two cases of a hitherto unknown malady that have been brought to them for treatment during the past week. The first, Adath Jenks, 48, of Four Corners, was admitted August 13th; the second, Job Grant, 57, a farmer living some five miles northeast of Lake Wanooka, on Tuesday, August the 21st.

These cases resemble encephalitis lethargica, sleeping sickness, in that both men have been continually unconscious since they first became ill, but the germs of that disease have not been found in their cerebral fluid. Their strength is being steadily sapped, however, and Jenks is at the point of death.

Dr. Courtney Stone, of the hospital staff, said when interviewed that progress is being made in diagnosing these two cases, and that there is no cause for alarm as no indication has been found that the illness from which they are suffering is contagious. He suggests, however, that the inhabitants of the Helderberg Mountain region boil all their drinking water as a precaution.

Hugh Lambert’s Narrative, resumed:

Rather grudgingly I shall have to admit that Edith Horne’s treatment was efficacious, for I suffered no ill effects from my adventure. I was hard at work again at once and the countless demands upon me gave no time for sickly maundering. No time even for Ann, except in the evenings.

We spent those in the rec hall. Edith must have talked to our visitor, for Ann insisted on our remaining indoors, despite my persistent suggestions that we stroll along the lake in the moonlight. That redhead was making a pest of herself, taking my temperature morning and night, giving me the devil when I forgot my sweater on a cloudy day, and behaving altogether like a hen with one chick. I found myself wishing that a couple of mild cases of grippe or something would show up among the boys, to take her mind off me, but they remained disgustingly healthy.

Ann was a trump. She kept out from underfoot during the day, and took one big load off my shoulders and that of the dramatic councillor.

To make Wanooka different from other, cheaper camps, I had organized it along the lines of a nation of primitive men instead of an Indian tribe. Our different age-groups were called clans, the office was the Kave of the King, and so on. Pretty childish stuff, but the brats ate it up. For the last Saturday night I had devised a Tribal Council Dance, drawing both on memory and imagination for its details. I had the arts and crafts councillor building a big hide-headed drum, the nature councillor cutting out fur costumes from some hairy hides I’d purchased, and everybody busy with something or other.

Ann took over rehearsing the kids in the dance that was to be the grand finals, and did they hop to it for her! The free period wasn’t enough for them; they begged me to let them go at it again between supper and taps, and I consented.

That meant I had only about an hour alone with her, and it wasn’t enough. Something had come between us. I don’t know whether it was my own irascibility or what. We’d fuss around wordlessly in the dim, vast reaches of the big social hall, and often as not I would jump up, stride to the window and stand staring out at the lake.

She’d put a record on the phonograph when I did that. The first time it was some crashing jazz tune, and I whirled around, snarling at her to take it off. Which was queer too, because that was the only kind of music I liked.

“What do you want then?” she came back at me. “Wagner?”

“Go ahead,” I answered, ashamed of the way I was behaving but perversely continuing. “It couldn’t be worse than that blare. There are some Wagner records in the corner.”

I could just see the luminous disk at the end of the lake. It was very close to the shore now. Curse these women anyway, I thought. If it wasn’t for them I could go down there right now and figure out what made the light come up through the water like that.

Then I heard the Ride of the Valkyries begin behind me. The first sonorous notes took hold of me and lifted me up and I soared away on the tumbling, fierce rush of its wild stream. For the first time I appreciated the breadth and the depth and the swift impetuosity of that master music. When it was finished I demanded more.

After that there was no more jazz in the rec hall after taps, but Wagner. All of it was soothing magic to me, but it was the Song of the Rhine Maidens I demanded most: the sirens chanting from beneath the waters of the treasure they guarded, of the mysteries beneath the blue depths. Listening to it, the pounding in my wrists would subside, and the ache behind my brow fade away.

The record would come to an end. Ann would say, “That’s enough for tonight, Hugh. It’s ten o’clock, and Edith says you must get your rest.”

Rest. There was no more rest for me. I wasn’t sleeping. I didn’t tell Edith that or she would have thrown a conniption fit, but that was the crux of what ailed me. I’d climb the hill to my room behind the office, so exhausted that I stumbled as I walked; get undressed and get into bed; and then lie there wide awake, wondering if I was going crazy.

I had cause enough for thinking that. I was seeing things! At first they were no more than the shadows of Monday night. As the week wore on, however, they became more distinct until every now and then, peering from behind a tree, dodging behind a rock, I would glimpse a little man. A man not more than a foot tall!

I saw them only at night, and only fleetingly, so I knew nothing about them except that they were so incredibly small. But I shouldn’t have known that much about them. I shouldn’t have seen them at all. They could not be real. They could exist only in my mind.

I dared to speak to no one about them. I dared not test out whether they were visible to me alone. I knew what the answer would be, and I knew what it would mean.

There was the call of the lake, too, clamorous now in the long dark hours. Tugging at me, tearing at me to come to it. It was part of my madness, of course. Part of this thing that had happened to me.

I tell you, I was glad when morning would come and the numberless petty details calling for my attention would help me to forget the night. I welcomed every paper thrust at me, every question the councillors had to ask, every one of the thousand and one problems that would come up for me to solve. It was hard work; and ordinarily I should have hated it with every atom of my being, but it kept me from thinking. I resented the smoothness with which matters were going. I should have liked it better if the railroad had wired that cars wouldn’t be available to take us to the city, or the expressman that baggage trucks could not be obtained. That would have given me an excuse to get away from camp.

That was what I wanted most of all. I had a notion, reasonable enough, that as soon as I got away from camp I should be back to normal. As soon as I got away from the lake.

But nothing like that happened. There was one incident, though, that was disquieting enough. Saturday morning Ed Hard came to tell me that Jim Symes, on night patrol, had seen a rather rough-looking man prowling about in the woods back of camp. Jim had called to him and he’d run away.

There isn’t much about Wanooka worth anyone’s stealing, except what’s locked in the safe in my room, but one doesn’t overlook a report like that when one is responsible for the welfare of a bunch of youthful heirs to fortunes aggregating billions. I told Ed to see that the councillors kept all the kids in sight at all times, and to have them take shifts patrolling the camp borders by day as well as by night.

We had the canoe and swimming regatta that afternoon. I had to go down to judge it and distribute prizes, though I had shunned the cribs since Monday. I was rather glad I did so. Cribs and floats were gay with bunting, the sun was bright as midsummer and there was certainly nothing ominous about the lake. Edith, crisp in a new white uniform, forgot to pester me and Ann grew hoarse with cheering, especially when Dick won both his Senior Life Saving Badge and the canoe tourney.

Dick was proud as Punch, and Ann was pleased and gay.

Right after that there was a fifteen minute intermission, and I took the opportunity to walk up to the end of the lake with Bob Falk, who was to relieve Hen Corbin on the patrol we were maintaining even through the gala. Hen looked a little perturbed as we approached. Close to the shore when he saw us coming, he bent and picked something up.

“Look here, Mr. Lambert!” he exclaimed as we reached him. “Look at this!”

He shoved his hand at me. There was something on his palm, a brown-furred little animal, not two inches long. It was alive, as I could see by its heaving flanks, but its legs were tied together by bits of string.

“What’s that?” I asked, wondering at Hen’s none-too-well repressed excitement. “A field mouse?”

“No, sir. It’s a muskrat.”

“A muskrat? Maybe you’re nature councillor, but you’re way off this time. No muskrats are this small, even new-born, and whatever this is, it’s adult.”

“It’s a muskrat,” he insisted. “What’s more, I think I saw it get as small as that, though I still can’t believe it. I was in the bushes here, heard it splashing out in the water and watched it. It was full size then and it was swimming toward shore. Just as I saw it, it got into that—that kind of slick place there, and it got small, all of a sudden. I caught it as it scrambled out on the land and tied it up.”

“Nonsense,” I grunted. “The muskrat you saw dived, and this pigmy one came up just at the same time.” But I was looking at the “slick place” he had mentioned and my throat was dry. Tangent to the bank, it was circular in outline, and I knew that by night it would glow with a peculiar violet light. “Come on back to the cribs and forget about it.”

Maybe he would forget about it, but I would not.

It was dusk by the time the regatta was over. I plodded up the hill between Ann and Edith, trying my best to comprehend their chatter. Abruptly two blasts of a councillor’s whistle shrilled from the north end of the camp grounds. In our code that meant trouble. I muttered some excuse to the girls, started away. Ed Hard angled to meet me. We held ourselves to a fast walk until shrubbery screened us from the youngsters and then broke into a run.

Bob Falk had hold of the arms of a lean, blue-jeaned man. “Found this fellow sneaking through the woods, Mr. Lambert,” the councillor gasped, “and copped him.”

“Good work,” I panted. And then I demanded from his prisoner, “What are you up to here? Can’t you read those signs? Can’t you see these grounds are posted?”

“Yeah,” he grunted. He wasn’t struggling. He was standing quite still, with his arms pinioned behind him and his eyes on the ground. “I know it’s posted, but you ain’t never kept us farmers around here from berrying and fishing on it.”

“You have no pail and no rod, so you were neither berrying nor fishing, and I have my doubts about your being a farmer.”

“I farmed on Waley Road when you wasn’t dry yet behind the ears. You can ask anybody about who Jeremiah Fenton is.”

I had hard work understanding him. His voice was a thick-tongued mumble oddly taut with—was it pain? Desperation? But what was once Waley Road is now the numbered highway into which the camp road descends and only an old resident would know its former name. I moderated the harshness of my tone.

“All right,” I said. “You’re a farmer then. What were you doing here?” His shoulders hunched, as a balky mule’s will, but he remained silent. “Come on,” I growled. “Spit it out.”

Fenton’s head came up. Tiny muscles crawled under the wind-seamed leather of his countenance and hysteria jittered in his eyes. His grimly defiant face seemed vaguely familiar.

“Rats!” Ed Hard grunted, behind me. “There’s only one thing to do with the guy. Turn him over to the cops.”

“That’s right, Mr. Lambert,” Bob acquiesced. “They’ll make him talk.”

“No!” the farmer yelled, and wrenched out of Falk’s grip. His lanky length fairly hurtled away from us, up the hill. Bob whirled to go after him; Ed plunged past me. And then both halted. Fenton had snatched up a fist-sized stone from the ground, was crouched, an animal at bay, his lips snarling back from discolored teeth, his nostrils flaring.

“Let him go, boys,” I called. “No use getting your skulls cracked.” But I was wondering why he had stopped. There was no one between him and the road and that unexpected leap of his had taken him far enough away to make it improbable that we could overtake him. “Go on, Fenton. Get off the camp grounds and stay off.”

The farmer gave no sign of having heard me. He wasn’t looking at me. He wasn’t looking at Ed or Bob. He looked past us, at the lake...

And startlingly he hurled himself through the narrow space between the two councillors, pelted down the hill, straight for those frigid waters! Realization blazed through me that he was going to throw himself into Wanooka’s bottomless depths. My muscles exploded. I ran. I caught his shoulder barely in time.

“You fool!” His arm swung back, the rock clenched in his gnarled fingers. My own free hand spatted, open-palmed, against his cheek.

The stone dropped to the ground. I felt a long shudder run through the farmer, saw sense come back into his eyes. His mouth twisted.

“It almost got me. The hankering. It almost pulled me into the lake. I couldn’t stand it no more.”

My palms went moist, suddenly, and a pulse pounded in my temples.

Ed came up. “He tried to conk you.” Ed’s fist closed on Fenton’s one arm, Bob’s on the other. “It’s the police for him, all right.”

“No,” I said, very quietly. “Let go of him, Bob. Let go, Ed. Please get my car from the garage and run it up into the woods so that we can get to it without the whole camp seeing us. I’m taking Mr. Fenton home.”

Hard looked at me queerly, but his hand dropped away. “All right,” he said, “I’ll tell Jim to take charge of camp till I get back.”

“That won’t be necessary,” I told him. “I’m going alone.” He started to protest. “I said I’m going alone.”

Maybe I was sick. Maybe I was crazy. But I still could get out that top sergeant’s roar that makes them jump. Ed went off without another word.

“You’ll say nothing about what happened here,” I told Bob Falk, and then I was moving away from him, climbing up through the woods toward the road. Fenton went with me, quiet again, docile, all the hysteria, all the ferocity, gone from him.

Here was someone else to whom the lake called, I was thinking. He had fought its mysterious spell till he could fight no longer. I had to talk to him. I had to question him, alone.

But, driving him home, I could get nothing much out of Jeremiah Fenton, except that the “hankering” had come on him only recently, “about the day Ad Jenks was took sick,” and that it had been getting “worse and worse” ever since. I hinted about the Little Men without result, but my efforts in that direction brought from the farmer a strange tale.

I may have given the incident of which he told me, and his own interpretation of it, too much importance. If so, that is because of a rather heretical theory to which I incline that the advance of civilization and science has obscured almost as much from the knowledge of mankind as it has revealed. Is it not possible that those who live close to the soil, who work with Nature and commune with her, may be aware of eternal truths we have lost the capacity to even comprehend? Once, in the Haitian hills....

But I digress. The story Jeremiah Fenton told me, then, haltingly, gropingly, was this:

He was a bachelor and lived alone in the ramshackle, sprawling farmhouse where I left him eventually, since his twin brother Elijah, also unmarried, had been drowned in Lake Wanooka the preceding winter. Jeremiah told me the two had been engaged in their nightly game of chess when the sleighs that were carrying a gay party to undreamed-of tragedy drew up at their gate and called them out.

“I had the Black,” Fenton recalled, “and all I had left was my King, on his Queen’s Bishop’s two. Elijah’s King were on his Queen’s fourth, his Queen on King’s eighth, his Bishop on King Bishop’s five, and it were White’s move. I seen I was licked. ‘You’ll get me in six, ten more moves,’ I said. ‘I resign.’

“ ‘Six moves nothing,’ Elijah says, ‘I’ll mate you in two moves.’

“Well, I thought he was talking through his hat and dared him to do it. He ponders a minute, lays his pipe on the table and stretches out his hand to his Queen. Just then Jethro Parker bust in, hollering for us to hurry up.

“Elijah didn’t make his move. ‘We’ll finish when we get back,’ he said. Jethro was making so much noise Elijah even left his pipe lyin’ there. Well, he never come back to finish pipe or game. The lake ice broke and—”

“Yes,” I broke in. “I know what happened.”

“I left the board lie just the way it was, pieces and pipe and all. Taking them away would of been kind of like—like pulling down the shade on my recollection of him! Like—”

“I understand,” I murmured, wondering what all this was leading up to.

“It was just like that a week ago tonight. I finished my supper and went out in the front yard to pump a pail of water for washing the dishes. I was gone maybe five, ten minutes. When I got back there was a smell of tobacco in the kitchen. I don’t ever smoke till after the dishes is done. I looked over to the little table where the chessboard sets, half expecting to see Elijah waiting for me to come and start our game.

“He wasn’t there of course. But I saw right away that one of the pieces had been moved. It was the White Queen and it was resting on White Queen’s Knight’s fifth now.”

I know a little about chess, enough to understand what that meant. “Black King has to go to his Queen’s square, and White Queen mates in the next move. Clever!”

“Clever’s right. But who had moved that Queen? There wasn’t no one in the kitchen.”

“You had done it yourself, without thinking. You had been milling the problem over and did it mechanically.”

“Maybe,” Fenton said slowly. “Maybe. But I saw by marks in dust that Elijah’s pipe had been moved too, and when I touched it, it was hot. I didn’t light it and not even no tramp would of touched that black old corncob. Nor they ain’t nobody around here good enough at chess to figure out that move. No. I get a notion that Elijah, not being buried in consecrated ground, can’t rest, and that his hankering for me brought him back to where I was, just like my hankering for him is drawing me to Lake Wanooka. We was like as two peas, and that close....”

I didn’t hear the rest. I didn’t listen to it. Fenton’s mention of a tramp had given me the clue to the resemblance that bothered me. It was the tramp I had run down of whom he reminded me.

Was there any connection between my injuries that night and what had been happening to me ever since? Doc Stone had been evasive about just what they were. Edith would know. I dropped Fenton yards from his gate, wheeled the car around and went back to camp as fast as I dared drive.

A shout to one of the boys brought the information that Edith was in the infirmary. I pounded in there, stiff-legged, saw her checking a shelf of supplies, grabbed her arm and twisted her around to me.

“What did that accident do to me beside cutting my leg and arm?” I demanded. “What are you and Court keeping from me? Was I hit on the head?”

Her eyes went wide, and her face gray. “You’re hurting me, Hugh.”

“All right, I’m hurting you,” I growled, but relaxed my hold slightly. “Now tell me about it. Hurry up. Tell me what happened. I’ve got to know. Do you understand? I’ve got to.”

She told me—about the transfusion and about the tramp’s disappearance. It didn’t make sense. But then nothing since had made sense. I was as much in the dark as ever.

The rest of that afternoon, supper that evening, went by with me in a daze. But I pulled myself together afterwards, because the Tribal Council was beginning and I wasn’t going to have the boys’ big night ruined. The contests, the games, went off slickly. Then came the moment when I climbed the platform that had been erected a little back from the shore and draped to simulate a high boulder. This was the Medicine Rock, and I was the medicine man who was to drum for the dance.

The boys, faces grotesquely painted, furred skins thrown over their shoulders, took their places below me. In the wavering, red light of a huge bonfire they seemed indeed a gathering of cave men.

I picked up the padded drum stick, started to beat on the tomtom. The shuffling, shambling dance Ann had rehearsed began. The mountains took the hollow boom, boom of the drum and multiplied it, so that the whole bowl within which Lake Wanooka lies was filled with measured thunder.

It beat back at me, beat into my blood. My blood was beating in tune with it, in a runic rhythm that went faster and faster, in a thumping, cadenced frenzy that was the ancient pulse of the world, the systole and diastole of the world’s hot core. This measure I beat was not the one I had rehearsed. This dance, this prancing, savage interlacing of skin-clad primordial brutes below me, was not the dance they had been taught. Something spoke to us, something older than antiquity, of the death of summer. It spoke to us of the cold death from which this time, this time, this time the trees in which we hid, and the grasses upon which we fed, might never come alive again.

It wasn’t I who beat upon that drum. It was something within me, some ancient memory within me, that beat the booming rhythm these mountains had not heard for uncounted centuries. It was fear that pound, pound, pound fought; fear of the gigantic beasts that roved the forest; fear of the flying things that darkened the sky and pounced upon us to devour us. But above all fear of the Little Men who brought to us a terror the more awful because we could not understand wherein it lay.

There they are, the Little Men, coming up out of the lake, coming on to the land on either side, just beyond the fire’s red glare. They do not see them, my dancing tribesmen, but I see them; I, the Medicine Man; I, the one to whom the dread night has whispered its secrets. But they will all see them soon, they all will know the terror the Little Men bring, unless I drive them back, drive them back by the furious boom the magic boom, boom, boom of my drum.

They are retreating, step by step, inch by inch. They are fading into the trees, into the lake, unable to withstand my power, the power of my furiously beaten drum. There is only one left, their leader, hawk-faced, vulture-eyed. He stands there just without the circle of light and defies me. Him too I am driving back, by the power of my arm and my primitive drum.

No! It is not I who drive him back. He has sensed that one among us has wandered off into the night beyond the fire and the protecting sound of my drum. He has darted after her....

A scream comes to me, almost drowned by the thunder of that drum! Ann’s scream!

“Take it, Ed!” I shouted, remembering even then, even in that instant of my recovery from the strange spell that had seized me, that the boys must not be alarmed.

Then I leaped from the back of the platform and was racing up the hill.

Afterward I realized that I alone had heard it because I was higher than the rest and so the hill had not blanketed it from me. But now it did not occur to me to wonder why no one went with me as I raced to Ann’s rescue. I was aware only that she had screamed to me and that I was going to her.

I saw figures in front of the deserted rec hall; two men; one with his hand on Ann’s arm; the other’s head hunched forward, fists knuckling at his sides. I shouted, and left the ground in a flying leap that ended with the smack of my knuckles on a hard jaw, and the pound of a sodden body on the ground. I whirled to the second man.

“Hugh!” Ann shrilled. “Hugh! It’s all right. I’m all right. Stop, Hugh. Don’t hit him.”

“No, it ain’t all right, lady,” the fellow on the ground groaned. “He’s broke my jaw.”

Ann clung to me, holding my arms, half-laughing, half-crying. “What is this?” I panted. “What’s going on here?”

“They’re from the company,” she jabbered. “From World Pictures. The man you hit is a private detective who traced me here, and this is Frank Jennings, vice president in charge of the Eastern office.”

“But you screamed—”

“Yes, I did. Irving Ball, who’s on patrol tonight, came down and told me they were waiting for me at the gate. They had wandered into camp, and popped out at me unexpectedly from behind this house, and I did scream. But it was just because I was overwrought by your drumming and was startled.”

“Listen, Miss Doring,” Jennings intervened. “We haven’t got any time for all this talk. If we start out right away we’ll just about have time to make the first plane out of Newark in the morning.”

“But I’m not going,” Ann replied. “I’m staying right here.”

“Do you realize it’s costing the company ten grand a day to keep that stage waiting for you?”

“World Pictures can afford it. I’ve made enough for them.”

“All right. But how about the fifty or a hundred extras you’ll do out of a couple of weeks’ work if the picture’s cancelled? How about the other leads, and the technical people?”

Ann’s expression changed at that from obduracy to indecision.

She looked at me. “What shall I do, Hugh?”

I didn’t want her to go. Lord, how I wanted her to stay! She had been my only hold on sanity, with her alone I had found a little peace. If she went now—“It’s your job, Ann,” I said quietly. “You have to go.”

She winced at that, and the light died out of her eyes. “All right. I’ll go.” Then her hands flung out. “But you’ll come to me, Hugh. You’ll come as soon as you can.”

“As soon as I can,” I promised. But I knew that it would not be soon. I also had a job to do. It would take me half around the world and keep me there for two years at least, two years I knew would be a hell of longing.