From a pocket in the folds of her skirt, she produced a white scrap. Lanark accepted it from her. Jager came close to look.
“Writing,” growled Jager. “In what language is that?”
“It’s English,” pronounced Lanark, “but set down backward—from right to left, as Leonardo da Vinci wrote.”
The young woman nodded eagerly at this, as though to say that she had already seen as much.
“Have you a mirror?” Jager asked her, then came to a simpler solution. He took the paper and held it up to the light, written side away from him. “Now it shows through,” he announced. “Will one of you try to read? I haven’t my glasses with me.”
Lanark squinted and made shift to read:
“ ‘Any man may look lightly into heaven, to the highest star; but who dares require of the bowels of Earth their abysmal secrets?’ ”
“That is my stepfather’s handwriting,” whispered Enid, her head close to Lanark’s shoulder.
He read on: “ ‘The rewards of Good are unproven; but the revenges of Evil are great, and manifest on all sides. Fear will always vanquish love.’ ”
He grinned slightly, harshly. Jager remembered having seen that grin in the old army days, before a battle.
“I think we’re being warned,” Lanark said to his old sergeant. “It’s a challenge, meant to frighten us. But challenges have always drawn me.”
“I can’t believe,” said Enid, “that fear will vanquish love.” She blushed suddenly and rosily, as if embarrassed by her own words. “That is probably beside the point,” she resumed. “What I began to say was that the sight of my stepfather’s writing—why is it reversed like that?—the sight, anyway, has brought things back into my mind.”
“What things?” Jager demanded eagerly. “Come into the house, Miss Mandifer, and tell us.”
“Oh, not into the house,” she demurred at once. “It’s dark in there—damp and cold. Let’s go out here, to the seat under the tree.”
She conducted them to the bench whither Lanark had accompanied her the day before.
“Now,” Jager prompted her, and she began:
“I remember of hearing him, when I was a child, as he talked to his son Larue and they thought I did not listen or did not comprehend. He told of these very things, these views he has written. He said, as if teaching Larue, ‘Fear is stronger than love; where love can but plead, fear can command.’ ”
“A devil’s doctrine!” grunted Jager, and Lanark nodded agreement.
“He said more,” went on Enid. “He spoke of ‘Those Below,’ and of how they ‘rule by fear, and therefore are stronger than Those on High, who rule by weak love.’ ”
“Blasphemy,” commented Jager, in his beard.
“Those statements fit what I remember of his talk,” Lanark put in. “He spoke, just before we fought the guerrillas, of some great evil to come from flouting Those Below.”
“I remember,” nodded Jager. “Go on, young woman.”
“Then there was the box.”
“The box?” repeated both men quickly.
“Yes. It was a small case, of dark gray metal, or stone—or something. This, too, was when I was little. He offered it to Larue, and laughed when Larue could not open it.”
Jager and Lanark darted looks at each other. They were remembering such a box.
“My stepfather then took it back,” Enid related, “and said that it held his fate and fortune; that he would live and prosper until the secret writing within it should be taken forth and destroyed.”
“I remember where that box is,” Lanark said breathlessly to Jager. “In the old oven, at—”
“We could not open it, either,” interrupted the preacher.
“He spoke of that, too,” Enid told them. “It would never open, he told Larue, save in the ‘place of the Nameless One’—that must be where the house burned—and at midnight under a full moon.”
“A full moon!” exclaimed Lanark.
“There is a full moon tonight,” said Jager.
XI
Return of the Sacrifice
Through the crosshatching of new-leafed branches the full moon shone down from its zenith. Lanark and Enid Mandifer walked gingerly through the night-filled timber in the gulley beyond which, they knew, lay the ruins of the house where so much repellent mystery had been born.
“It’s just eleven o’clock,” whispered Lanark, looking at his big silver watch. He was dressed in white shirt and dark trousers, without coat, hat or gloves. His revolver rode in the front of his waistband, and as he limped along, the sheath of Jager’s old cavalry saber thumped and rasped his left boot-top. “We must be almost there.”
“We are there,” replied Enid. “Here’s the clearing, and the little brook of water.”
She was right. They had come to the open space where first they had met. The moonlight made the ground and its new grass pallid, and struck frosty-gold lights from the runlet in the very center of the clearing. Beyond, to the west, lay menacing shadows.
Enid stooped and laid upon the ground the hand-mirror she carried, “Stand to one side,” she said, “and please don’t look.”
Lanark obeyed, and the girl began to undress.
The young man felt dew at his mustache, and a chill in his heart that was not from dew. He stared into the trees beyond the clearing, trying to have faith in Jager’s plan. “We must make the devils come forth and face us,” the sergeant-preacher had argued. “Miss Mandifer shall be our decoy, to draw them out where we can get at them. All is very strange, but this much we know—the unholy worship did go on; Miss Mandifer was to be sacrificed as part of it; and, when the sacrifice was not completed, all these evil things happened. We have the hauntings, the blue fire of the house, the creature that attacked Mr. Lanark, and a host of other mysteries to credit to these causes. Let us profit by what little we have found out, and put an end to the Devil’s rule in this country.”
It had all sounded logical, but Lanark, listening, had been hesitant
