The Place Called Dagon

boy Miles. What was there about Miles that was unusual? He was small, warped in body, large-headed, and obviously older than his size suggested. His face was twisted, his eyes were of a greenish hue, and he had a disconcerting way of answering questions. That was all. The queerness of Miles might be attributed to incipient epilepsy. And then Dreeme recalled Humphrey Lathrop’s remark about these people intermarrying from generation to generation. Did he mean incest? Dreeme had heard of such practices in the lonelier quarters of New England where the deserted farms were far from communal centers and a savage ingrowth, physical and spiritual, persisted. But Marlborough was a fairly good-sized community and it was difficult to imagine that Lathrop really meant that. What he undoubtedly meant was that the original families (and there might have been dozens of them to start with) intermarried and did not welcome unions with strangers who wandered by chance into the valley. Miles was possibly of an old breed that had worn thin. He was just an eccentric and stupid boy who knew no more than the loneliness of hard labor on an avoided farm and who, therefore, was a stranger in a strange land when he discoursed with strangers. Dreeme decided that there was nothing to be gotten out of an analysis of Miles. Well, there was Wagner, the shaggy, red-bearded hired man. Wagner was obviously the hard-worker on the Westcott farm. It was he who developed the soil and raised the few crops and tore the boulders up and did all the excessive heartbreaking manual labor that warped the shoulders, lengthened the arms, bowed the legs, and tanned the red leathery skin. He was the packhorse, the human brute in action. He could be dismissed, after all, as a grown-up Miles, a laboring animal of excessive stupidity who talked so seldom that his voice had rusted in his throat. There was little to glean from these lesser figures and Dreeme’s thoughts, held rigorously back, now turned to the Westcotts themselves.

Of course there was Jeffrey Westcott to start with. Dreeme drew a long breath as he turned from his inspection of the water and proceeded along the bridge to the Leeminster Road, walking slowly and gazing casually at the flickering glimpses of houses through the trees on either side of him. It was not enough to say that Westcott avoided and was avoided. That was merely the beginning. Now that Dreeme had seen the farmer in his house and heard his voice he suspected that there was much more behind this, much, perhaps, that might be explained easily if the answers were forthcoming but much again for which there was no answer. Westcott, first of all, was a cultured man, apparently a scholar. He spent less time tilling the soil than he did poring through his huge books. He was an unlikeable person. There was no doubt of that in Dreeme’s mind. There was an oily menace in him, a soft snarl in his speech, a barely-concealed cruelty of demeanor that was emphasized by the superficial polish of the man. His whole being was dominated by an unclean spirit. As Dreeme thought of Westcott’s appearance, his cloven head and black sparkless eyes, a slow wave of fear, impossible to restrain, crept up his flesh. Yet there was nothing that the young doctor could actually adduce as evidence of any evil on the farmer’s part. Considered logically Westcott was no more than a man who desired to be left alone with his books. He troubled no one and he wanted no one to trouble him. That was reasonable enough. But logic meant little so far as Westcott was concerned. There are bodies out of which souls speak without words and Dreeme had seen one of them in Westcott. He had sensed an unclean atmosphere about the farmer just as he had sensed an atmosphere of evil emanating from the huge volumes that lined the farmer’s room. These things were matters of instinct and intuition and Dreeme could not dismiss them by any logical explanations or deductions. Something fierce and fanatic and commanding lurked inside Westcott’s sturdy body and watched the world with a slow maliciousness. What this spirit was could not be deduced by any casual study of the man. It had a purpose, Dreeme was sure, and that purpose was monstrous in its intent and merciless in the steps which it took toward its ordained objective. So much bespoke a fanatic and Dreeme was sure that if he could ferret out the reason for this fanaticism he would be well on the way toward solving the mystery of Marlborough. The young doctor was not conscious of any logical chain of reasoning by which he tied the secret purpose of Jeffrey Westcott up with Marlborough but was convinced that the tie between the community and the man was close and unbreakable. There were moments when all this seemed like the wildest reasoning of an imaginative boy to him and he strove, even in the midst of his revery, to laugh at his assumptions but something stifled the ridicule in his throat. Though he might brood about secret objectives and fanatical purposes and buried evils and unclean spirits without the slightest proof to bolster them up he found himself incapable of raising his head and scattering all these thoughts as the misgivings of a neurotic romanticism that was the result of a too lonely living among dour people. No, there was something there. And Dreeme, unable to restrain himself, proceeded with his thoughts even as he proceeded with his stroll up the Leeminster Road.

There was Martha Westcott to be considered. Even as her name thrust itself into Dreeme’s consciousness a slight giddiness took him and he experienced a brief choking sensation in his throat. It was as though a thin vapor had suddenly risen in the air beside him and drifted across his face. At least, she was unexplainable. She was a walking mystery,