Yonder on Calvary's mount outpoured,
There where the blood of the Lamb was spilt.'
The rug had been rolled up; Sarr and Deborah were on their knees on the bare plank floor, watched by three of the cats. Their hands were clasped before them; their eyes were shut tight. They seemed to be beseeching something they could see inside their heads.
'Dark is the stain that we cannot hide,
What can avail to wash it away?'
Their voices rose louder and louder as they worked themselves into the song.
'Look! there is flowing a crimson tide;
Whiter than snow you may be today.'
Briefly Sarr thought of Carol in the next room; her crimson hair would be pressed against the whiteness of the pillow.
'Grace, grace, God's grace,
Grace that will pardon and cleanse within…'
He threw himself into the song, singing all the louder to regain the feeling that was gone.
'Grace, grace, God's grace,
Grace that is greater than all of our sin.'
Carol had been almost asleep when the singing started. She roused for a moment, but she was so tired – curious, she couldn't remember the last time she'd been so tired – that moments later she was slipping again into sleep, incorporating the words of the hymn into her dream.
'There are days so dark that I seek in vain
For the face of my Friend above…'
Jeremy's face… Sarr's face, his dark probing eyes… a black thing watching from a tree…
She started awake, thought briefly of the Dynnod, and drifted back to sleep -
'But tho' darkness hide,
He is there to guide
With the touch of His hand and His love.'
– back to sleep, with Sarr's hand, Jeremy's hand, the hand of God on hers.
The room smelled faintly of insecticide. He had put away the can and decided to call it a night. Now he sat morosely on his bed, listening to the voices drift across the lawn to the outbuilding. They made him feel even lonelier. The others were all there, together in the farmhouse, and he was alone out here, exiled till dawn.
He wondered if Carol was singing with them. He doubted it, though it was hard to make out individual voices; she was probably already in bed. Wonder if she's thinking of me. I'd give anything to be inside there with her…
Suddenly the singing stopped. He could picture the two of them climbing into bed and envied them, their warm familiar bodies pressed together, the mattress sagging softly beneath them. All was silent now, except for the crickets.
Unfortunately, he wasn't very tired. In fact, he was still restless and on edge. The sick feeling left by the wine had finally worn off.
Maybe a dip into someone else's mind would do the trick. He undressed and got into his bathrobe. Glancing around for a book to read, his eye fell on the faded yellow covers of the one Carol had brought him. Seating himself at his desk, he ran through what he knew of its author. Machen had been a Welsh minister's son who went to London and lived alone for many years, nearly starving, haunted by fantasies of weird pagan rites and longing for the green hills he'd left behind. Lovecraft, in a survey of the field, had praised him highly.
Freirs flipped through the yellowed pages, searching for the story the old man had recommended, 'The White People.' It was near the center; the book fell open easily to it. Someone – perhaps old Rosie himself, hadn't he been scribbling something that day? – had written in pencil just above the tide, Only effective if read by moonlight.
Too bad the moon was blocked by clouds tonight; it might almost have been worth a try. Just for fun, of course. By way of experiment he snapped off the desk lamp. Surprisingly, moonlight was now streaming into the room, falling onto the bed and a strip of the floor with a radiance far brighter than he'd imagined, though the table he was using as his desk was still in shadow. Peering out the window, he saw that the clouds had begun to part; the moon was shining down now unimpeded.
Leaving his chair, he seated himself on the edge of the bed and laid the book on the windowsill. He discovered that, by squinting, he could just make out the words. It might be amusing, he decided, to try and absorb the story this way. Maybe it would ease him into a dream.
Holding the book open by the moonlight, he began to read.
His eyes were moving faster. They felt as if they were darting back and forth as rapidly as insects, yet his vision seemed glazed, as if he were no longer reading the words but was instead being read by them, carried along like the beetle he'd seen kicking in the swiftly flowing stream, borne by the current… toward what rapids?
The story's prologue, a framing device, had confused him, with all its high-flown talk about the human soul and the Meaning of Sin, and he wasn't even sure exactly where the tale was set – somewhere in the countryside, that's all he could be certain of, with a big house near a forest, and secret places, hills and pools and glades.
But the main portion of the story, the extract from a young girl’s notebook, was staggering, overwhelming. It was as if it spoke to him aloud.
' I looked before me into the secret darkness of the valley, and behind me was the great high wall of grass, and all around me were the hanging woods that made the valley such a secret place…'
He couldn't read it rapidly enough: the air of pagan ecstasy, the rites one doesn't dare describe, the malevolent little faces peering from the shadows and the leaves. It was, he felt certain, the most persuasive story ever written. He found himself whispering the lines as he read them, the words coming faster and faster -
' I knew there was nobody here at all besides myself, and thai no one could see me… Sol said the other words, and made the signs'
– and by the time he'd finished he was half convinced he heard another voice, one softer and more ancient than his own, whispering an even stranger story in his head, a story in a language he seemed dimly to remember.
He had no idea how much time had elapsed. It might have been days. His head was still spinning from the rush of words, or maybe it was only from the effort of reading in so faint a light. A pair of flies, trapped in the darkened room, were crashing into the window screens around him; the crickets droned their song; frogs piped madly by the brook, but he no longer heard them. Still in the story's spell, he felt himself slip off the robe and walk slowly across the room, opening the door to the lawn outside and stepping into the darkness.
But it wasn't dark. It was a different night he stepped into, one almost as bright as a stage. Every rock was visible, every blade of grass; every object cast a shadow. The clouds had rolled back, the sky had opened up, and the full moon now shone forth onto the yard with all its power. Pale light seemed to pour from the sky, revealing things not meant to be seen, the secret night side of the planet. He felt the wet grass beneath his feet, and small wet things that moved, and things both hard and sharp, but he didn't pull away. He felt himself drawn like a dancer across the lawn, past the back of the farmhouse and the line of dark rosebushes standing like sentries along one side, the house itself sleeping in the moonlight, its windows dark. And still he was drawn back, toward where the bubbling stream made sucking noises at him, back toward the massive shape of the barn, the moonlight so strong now he could see his own shadow floating over the grass, floating toward the gnarled old willow that grew against the barn. And his own shadow yearned toward the shadow of the tree, and he watched it and felt himself follow, past the corner of the barn, moving inexorably toward the dark branches. And at last his shadow touched the other, merged with it, was absorbed in it; and still, not knowing what he did, he followed.
Deborah caught her breath in wonder. Beside her, two of the cats looked up and regarded her curiously, then settled back to sleep.
She too had been asleep, but she'd been awakened by the shift in the clouds and the bright moonlight which had suddenly flooded the room. There were no curtains on the windows; their people didn't hold with them, feeling it correct to get up with the sun. Unable to go back to sleep, she had been sitting up in bed and gazing absently out the window, head still spinning from the wine and the pictures of the Dynnod, when suddenly Freirs' door had swung open, down there in the yard, and now Freirs himself emerged into the light, his body pale against the lawn.
Her eyes widened. He was naked.
