The Place Called Dagon

a veiled being whose veil was flesh, a detached spirit wandering in a commonplace world. Dreeme thought of her as he saw her standing at the window and listening and it seemed to him now that she was like a person standing at a door she hesitated to open and yet must open. It was impossible to analyze her in any way, to say that her heavy-lidded eyes were the result of too much sunlight or too much snow, that her bloodred mouth had grown so weary from an endless loneliness, that her quietness was the quietness of a shunned person. She existed beyond her flesh and yet her flesh, too, so cool and yet so stirred with a still life, existed beyond the flesh of other people. How she had become Jeffrey Westcott’s wife and who she was, from what family in the valley she had sprung, were mysteries as yet, mysteries that, perhaps, Humphrey Lathrop, if he were goaded hard enough, might solve, but even the solution of these temporal gestures would hardly clarify her. Dreeme was amazed at his reactions to Martha Westcott and a small voice of reason kept thrusting into his thoughts and arguing a sudden fascination. But Dreeme knew that this fascination was not the usual type of blind worship. He had not fallen in love at first sight and there was no question of his ever falling in love with Martha Westcott. It was something else altogether that compelled him to surmise in such mystical terms about the farmer’s wife. There was a power in her mere presence that unsettled him and he did not strive too arduously to make it clear to himself for he knew that it would be impossible.

His mind was growing into a hungry octopus now and it stretched out a dozen and one tentacles that grasped feebly to right and left, adventuring weakly in search of enlightenment. But the clear illumination for which he sought was not to be found. Vague lights like indistinct marsh-lights glittered wanly for a moment and then were enveloped by the tenebrosities of a sheer ignorance that was maddening in itself. He was seeking for something that was hardly to be found without the most obvious clues. And there were no clues. Nothing but endless speculation, surmises, unreasonable intuitions, objectless guesses. Though he might ponder on the Westcotts and the life they followed it all led to nothing. For a moment he doubted his own rationality, pointing out to himself with a mocking elaboration of mental gesture that he was spinning mysteries out of the imbroglio of his disconcerted mind. There was really nothing to go on, no abrupt transitions from the normalities of existence, no vindictive flashes of evil lighting up this valley as lightning might illuminate it, no ominous gestures revealing the unsuspected. There was nothing about the Westcotts to suggest the uncleanness of being which he associated with them. It was all in his own mind, in his restless intuitions. He felt these things and feeling them he could do no more than give full vent to his morbid fancies. He might be a fool⁠ ⁠… it was very possible that he was⁠ ⁠… but even this humiliating reflection failed to subdue that uneasiness of spirit that shook him when he brooded upon Marlborough and the Westcotts. It was as though a far-off and forgotten voice was speaking somewhere in the jungle of his intelligence telling him the most terrible things in the most deliberate manner. He could not gather the sense of the message. He could not even hear the voice. But somehow he knew that it was there and speaking. It was like a small obsession making itself more and more evident as he brooded more and more about it. There was no escape from it now. He would have to make up his mind to that, at least. No escape.⁠ ⁠…

Dreeme lifted his head, rising like a swimmer from the turbid waters of his thoughts, and saw half-concealed in the trees ahead of him the shapeless mass of the Westcott farmhouse. He stopped instantly and stood indecisively in the road meditating whether to go on or to turn in his tracks and retrace his steps to Marlborough. Even as he meditated he knew that he had wandered along this road with only one purpose and that he would not achieve any ease of mind, if, indeed, he did then, until he had fulfilled it. Turning aside he left the road and strode through the bushes into the field, Bidwell’s meadow, that bordered on Westcott’s property. The dry grass crackled beneath his feet and great grasshoppers leaped industriously about the crushed growth. He could hear a locust grinding its rasping note. Otherwise it was still⁠ ⁠… a hot windless stillness that caused him to pant slightly as he forced his way toward the twisting stone-fence that guarded Westcott’s land. Reaching it he sank in the tall dry grass by a crumbling breach where the stone had pitched forward into the farmer’s yard. From this vantage point he could see the blank side of the house, once a dirty white but now a streaked colorlessness. A thin curl of smoke rose from the chimney of the built-on kitchen. The curtains of the windows were drawn against the sun. A solitary rooster crooked sleepily as he turned a glassy sidelong eye at the stone-fence and the man concealed behind it. Dreeme could see the uneven rocky path by which he had circled the house the night before. He was surprised to discover that it was much shorter than he had thought it to be in the darkness. Darkness was like that. It lengthened things and translated them. For fifteen minutes or so the young doctor squatted in the grass and spied upon the house and the empty yard. He could feel the hot press of the sun on the back of his head and the sharp thrusts of the dry stalks beneath him. He