restlessly from room to room, staring blindly from one fog-curtained casement after another. During those last days, I had grown to anticipate a storm with a terrible, choking fear, for Cassandra’s moods seemed more sullen and morbid as the easterly wind lashed angry rain or snow about the tiny cove behind the house. She would stand for hours gazing at the water-eaten mound that housed a thing that I could recall only with a tremor of disgust, a wave of nausea that balled itself like lead in the pit of my stomach. I had seen her doing that all that morning; she muttered something about how lonely he must be out there, and then walked slowly down the hall. I heard her door-lock click behind her. I had given up trying to understand her oblique remarks, brief whispers that seemed not meant for me, but rather, vague thoughts, personal and awesome, spoken aloud only by accident.
When Ambler had completed his examination in the privacy of Cassandra’s chamber, he plodded heavily down the twisting staircase. I offered him a drink, muttering something about its being a raw night. It was only a pretense of civility with me, until, in the firelight of the sitting room, I saw the new expression that had crept into Ambler’s eyes. I had seen many expressions there, after such sessions with Cassandra; expressions of doubt or bewilderment, or of professional satisfaction at her apparent recovery, but, now, there was something almost like pleasure in those soft gray eyes. I poured him a glass of sherry. He gulped it and winked.
“You’ve been wise people, you and your wife, Doctor,” he said, after a pause. The eyes were actually twinkling.
“Wise?” His good humor had begun to irritate me.
“Of course! Nothing could have been more intelligent…. I don’t like to seem personal, but after all, it’s been fairly obvious that you and Cassandra… well, something’s come between you…. But, now, this…. Certainly, a child is just the thing to bring you together again…. It’ll make all the difference in the world in this gloomy old place….”
I suppose I hadn’t really been listening to him. I remember packing my pipe, absently, and scratching a match on the box. It made a tiny, lost noise in the shadowy bleakness of the room. Then, he made that crack about a child, and 1 just stood there, staring at him, the match flickering in my hand. There was nothing but a hollow numbness in me; afterward, I found a scorched scar on the skin of my thumb and forefinger.
I realized dully that Ambler was chuckling; his hand was on my shoulder.
“Well, don’t look so confused, old man,” he said heartily. “I guess Cassandra wanted to surprise you herself, and now I’ve gone and spoiled it for her by blurting it out….”
“She never said a word…
Ambler laughed and I think I managed a watery grin; he gave me that line about the husband always being the last to know. We had another glass of sherry. I tried to act natural. The wine spread hazily through my puzzlement; a warmth swirled in my head, as I saw Ambler to the door, a vague, unreasonable anger. I was hurt at the silent wall Cassandra had erected between us; it seemed impossible, almost inhuman, that she could have known such a thing, and deliberately kept it hidden from me.
When Ambler had disappeared into the maw of the storm, I bolted the door. Our lights had given out again, and I walked unsteadily. The anger throbbed in my temples now; it kept time with the flickering of the candelabra light as I slowly climbed the winding staircase to Cassandra’s room.
The door was locked. My shadow cast a dark blot against its panels, a ghost that wavered drunkenly into the half-light. My hand was perspiring; the candelabrum kept slipping in my grasp. I knocked, listening to the leaden echo it made in the subterranean catacombs of the house. There was no answer. I called:
“Cassie!” My tongue felt thick and dry. I waited.
“I’m lying down, darling. I’ve a headache…Cassie’s voice was brittly light, controlled with an effort.
“I want to talk to you.” Anger cut through my tone.
For a long moment, there was nothing but the spectral whisper of the waxed candlewicks as they sputtered anxiously; then, a murmur of footsteps beyond, and the key turned in its socket. I let myself in, closing the door behind me.
Cassandra was standing by the fireplace; the instant I saw her, anger ebbed from my mind. There was something terribly small and frightened about her lovely, small body in the gossamer softness of a negligee. I set the candelabrum on a table and went to her; my hands trembled at the warmth of her shoulders. She did not draw away; she did not move at all.
“Ambler told me about the baby,” I said gently.
It was then that she turned; she was smiling, and in that moment, all the falseness had gone out of her face. A quiet warmth touched it. She traced my lips with her fingertips.
“I wanted to tell you myself….”
I did not realize, then, that the taut sham was still in her voice. I kissed her. I told her it was wonderful. I said all the foolish things a man has a right to say at such a time. And, then, suddenly as I had begun, I stopped. Her mask had slipped; the warm tenderness was gone. A wall of nothingness blotted out the walls of her eyes. Cassandra twisted violently from me.
“It’s no good,” she whispered hoarsely. “It’s no good!”
“Cassie…. I don’t understand…. I…”
She spun to face me; blurred stains of tears streaked the sallowness of her cheeks. In the jaundiced candleglow, her eyes were abnormally bright.
“Can’t you see? Do you have to be told?” Trembling lips twisted in a coarse sneer. Her small, even teeth seemed somehow vicious. “You’re not wanted here! Just go away and let me be! I never want to see you again!” The hard grin widened and unstable laughter bubbled hysterically in her throat. “Your child! Do you think I’d bear your child! Can’t you see I’ve changed? Don’t you know you’ve lost me… that I belong to him now… ever since that night I went to the cove… to the Abyss…. I’ll always belong to him…. Always! Always! The bride of Yoth Kala…!”
The maniacal laughter cracked off as I gripped her shoulders; my fingers chewed into her flesh. I could feel her breath against my face, hot and sobbing.
“Cut it out!” I snapped. “Stop it, Cassie!”
She stood there for an eternity, staring at me; the mood whirled and twisted and childlike, bewildered fear was in her eyes again. She began to cry, her slight frame shuddering pitifully.
“It’s true, I tell you,” she gasped. “It’s not your child. You don’t believe me… you think I’m crazy…. You needn’t believe me…. Just go away… before he comes for me…. He said he would come…. I don’t want him to hurt you…. I don’t want them to make you like me… like my father….” She was babbling senselessly, the words tumbling from her lips.. Yoth Kala will come…. I hear his voice… he sings You hear?… Calling me… his bride… the mother of his child I come, O, husband of the Green Void…. I come…
It wasn’t easy to hold her. I still have four parallel scars on my right cheek where her nails bit in frantically. She twisted with a strength that was nothing human, her lips muttering, her high, cracked voice shrilling that loathsome melody that meant death and horror and endless unrest to any who heard it. Finally, I won. Quite suddenly, she stopped struggling, she peered childishly into the darkness beyond us, her head cocked pathetically to one side, listening. She took an uncertain step toward the window before she fell. There was no sound save the rustle of her negligee as she crumpled at my feet. A thread of crawling spidery fog snaked in through the halfopen casement, lingering like a shroud over her body. The stench was something from the bottomless watery depths of the sepulchre, a vile effluvium that was somehow the embodiment of every malevolent terror that stalked Heath House.
Cassandra and I were shadows playing a part against a papier- mache background in a scene from the opiate-deep nightmares of Poe. I did things without stopping to wonder why. I can recall carrying her to the bed, and touching her pulse with fingers so numbed by horror that they could scarcely detect the fluttering heart-beat beneath them.
That was the night I came to an end of it. You can take just so much; you can go on hoping things will change, that you will awaken from this monstrous dream of falling through a void of unutterable terror. Then, you hit bottom. Staring at the chalky stillness of my wife’s face, lost in the whiteness of the pillows, I knew I would have to break through. If I was to save her at all, I had to get to the bottom, I had to take this noisome fear in my hands and tear it out by the roots.
I had to open the cancerous sore of the secret that ate at Cassandra’s mind, the secret that lay buried in Lazarus Heath’s book-room.
