My mind sliding backward over the beach-comber’s whispered tale, I arranged a small kit with strangely unsteady hands. Cassandra Heath stood silently by the door. I wondered if Solly-Jo’s story had been something more than the weird fiction of an overworked imagination. The defiance in the girl’s voice argued that the legend of Heath House was known and feared by more than this one insignificant wanderer; so much feared that it might frighten a stranger away.
Even without such a veil of mystery swathing her life, Cassandra Heath would have been a striking person. As it was, I was fascinated.
We had walked some distance before the girl spoke again. The moon had risen and phantom rocks glistened in its watery glow. The ocean pounded choppily on a rain-sodden beach and our feet left moist rubbery prints that disappeared as quickly as they were made. Moving with long graceful strides, Cassandra Heath talked in a level monotone.
“I suppose you’ve heard tales about my father. You can’t live in Kalesmouth any length of time without hearing about old Lazarus Heath….” Grim humor touched the warm lips.
“Solly-Jo did a bit of talking,” I admitted.
“You mustn’t believe everything you hear, Doctor. My father is ill. He has been for some years. We prefer to keep to ourselves at Heath House. When people can’t talk to you, they talk about you…. They tell stories about father….”
“Miss Heath,” I ventured. “Do you think that your father…”
“Is insane?” the girl supplied. “Two years ago… last year, even, I should have said ‘no.’… Now, I can’t be certain. My father has led a strange life, Doctor… a strenuous one…. Here of late, he’s been given to brooding. He was always moody and quiet, but this is something different. He… he’s afraid of something, I think…. Then, too, there are the disappearances….”
“Disappearances?”
“He’s taken to wandering off at night…. Four times in the last couple of months I searched the whole length of the Strand and couldn’t find him….”
“Maybe, he’d gone to the mainland…
“I think not; someone would have seen him. No… he went somewhere… somewhere much farther away….” For the first time, a note of puzzled fear crept into Cassandra Heath’s voice. “… Much farther…She seemed to come back with an effort. “He did that tonight, Doctor. Just before the storm broke…. I… I found him later… hours later… wandering in a small cove beyond the house. He was talking strangely… and singing…. A funny little tune. He’s in his room, now… still talking… still singing that song….”
Onyx eyes flashed up to meet mine; in that brief moonlit instant, I saw all the doubtful terror, the puzzled anxiety that Cassandra Heath would not admit, even to herself. I had no time to question her further, to attempt to link together her last broken phrases so that I could guess at the real meaning that lay hidden in them. Kalesmouth Strand had suddenly narrowed, and now, on either side of us, midnight ocean licked possessively at the land. A tortuous path, tangled with sea brambles and rocks, snaked to the shadow-choked veranda of Heath House. Weather-wasted planks groaned in protest under unaccustomed footsteps.
At a gentle pressure of Cassandra’s hand the ponderous mahogany door swung back soundlessly. Even before I stepped into the candlelit, gloom-encrusted hallway, I could smell it — that loathsome, clinging effluvium of rotting marine flesh of which Solly-Jo had muttered. It swirled sickeningly in the clammy atmosphere of a foyer that was like the dusty nave of some forgotten cathedral, rising along lushly paneled walls to the sightless dark far above. A wide, twisting staircase wound upward to some higher labyrinth, and as I followed Cassandra Heath up stairs whose ancient gray carpet was worn thin by the tread of forgotten feet, the fetor became ever more powerful, more noisome.
Through dream-like corridors, I followed the fitful glow of the candelabrum the girl carried. Another door opened, then closed behind me. I stood in a chamber that seemed drawn from the dark maw of lost aeons. Tremendous oaken furniture dwarfed the figure sprawled limply on a dais-raised bed, and, though the small-paned casements stood wide, chilling sea-fog swirling through them into the room, the stench was overpowering. Cassandra set the candelabrum on an antique cabinet-de-nuit; an eerie luster flickered across Lazarus Heath’s wasted visage.
During his professional lifetime, a brain specialist is called upon to diagnose countless horrible cases, yet they are the horrors of the nighted mind, or of blindness caused by a tumor. They are medical things, and can be understood. You cannot diagnose a fetid malignancy that goes beyond medical knowledge, rooting itself in the black soil of ancient hells. There was nothing medical knowledge could do for Lazarus Heath.
Pushing back revulsion, I made a thorough examination. The massive body, little more than skin and bones, now, gave off a reeking aura of putrefaction, and yet there were no sores. Sopping clothes that hung in tatters, were tangled with dull-green seaweed, stained with ocean salt. But, it was the face that caught and held my attention. The skin, taut and dry, was the color of aged jade, covered with minute, glistening scales. Staring into the candlelight, Lazarus Heath’s pale eyes bulged horribly, and as the great bony head lolled spasmodically from side to side, I made out two faint bluish streaks, about four inches in length, running along each side of the scaly neck, just below the jawline. The lines pulsed thickly with the air- sucking motions of his salt-parched lips. Watery incantations bubbled upward into the dank stillness.
“They call…. They call for Lazarus Heath…. Zoth Syra bewails her lost one; she bids me come home. You hear? The Great Ones of the Green Abyss hail me! I come, O, beauteous Zoth Syra! Your lost one returneth, O, Weeping Goddess of the Green Nothingness…!”
Sudden power energized the lax skeleton, so that I had no easy time in holding him to the bed. Pallid eyes stared beyond this world, and Lazarus Heath’s cracked lips warped in a hideous smile. Then, as suddenly, he was calm; the ponderous cranium cocked pathetically to one side, in a grotesque listening attitude.
“You hear?” the hollow voiced gurgled. “She sings to me! The Song of Zoth Syra!” Inane laughter tittered weakly. Heath’s rasping voice dribbled into a strangely haunting threnody, a song that at once attracted and repelled with its subtly evil intonations.
“Father!”
Cassandra’s voice was scarcely more than a distraught gasp, but at the sound of it, the odious, hypnotic smile froze on Heath’s parchment-pale face, then, slowly, decomposed into a twisted mask of sick horror. For the first time something like terrified reason seeped into those oddly protuberant eyes.
“Cassie! Cassandra!” Heath stared about him frantically like a child lost in the dark; once again he tried to raise himself, but, before I could restrain him, crumpled backward into a voiceless coma.
Half an hour later, standing in the shadows of the decaying patio, looking eastward to the moon-scorched desert of the Atlantic, I told Cassandra that there was nothing wrong with her father’s mind. Perhaps I should have phrased it more coldly and added: “Nothing that medical science can cure.” But, sensing the free, vibrant life that flowed in the girl’s body and brain, I could not bring myself to tell her that I thought Lazarus Heath was going mad. Too, I was not at all sure of my own diagnosis.
I told Cassandra that I wanted time to observe her father more closely, and she seemed greatly relieved to know that I would consider the old man’s case. For myself, I confess I could not have done otherwise. Despite the malignant shadow that shrouded Heath House in ageless mystery, I knew that I would come back again and again, not only because I was curious about the singular aspects that accompanied Heath’s apparent twilight madness, but because, as I left her that night, Cassandra held out her hand, and I took it in mine. It was a simple, friendly gesture, and we both smiled. From that moment on, I was completely, irrevocably in love with Cassandra Heath.
Looking backward, it seems to me that our brief moment of happiness was like some minor miracle, rising as it did through a choking miasma of brooding evil to touch, if only for an instant, a clean, sunlit world known only to lovers. Somehow, we managed to transcend the haunting omnipresent ghost of Lazarus Heath’s illness. It is true that the old man returned to normalcy during that final fortnight of his troubled existence, and for a time Cassandra
