“Look,” he said, handing the object to the farmer.
Walden Slater turned it over slowly in his large dripping hand. His long upper lip drew downward as he recognized it and handed it back without a word to Dreeme. The young doctor stared at it again. It was a brooch. A brooch upon which was the finely-cut cameo of a goat’s head. Deborah’s brooch. The brooch he had seen hanging on her bosom that evening before when they had walked through the quiet street of Marlborough and had told each other so much. She had passed along ahead of them, then, and was already at the place called Dagon. There could be no time to lose now. Walden Slater, who had not said a word, was walking along as rapidly as he could on the narrow uncertain road. Dreeme, close at his heels and sometimes abreast with him when the road permitted, kept pace with the farmer.
They were back among trees again. The young doctor had never realized the extent of Nigger Swamp before. He had always pictured it as a small circumscribed area of loathsome water and rotting bushes but now he understood that it covered a vast expanse of territory. It was either very large or the deceptive path they followed wound round and round it in a spiral. Perhaps they had circled Dagon. Perhaps the path was a maze that took the ignorant wanderer round and round until, by some lucky chance, the riddle was solved and he stood at the heart. As Dreeme labored onward his imagination drew into the dark void about them the first descendants of the fugitive Salem witches who had settled in this part of the world. He pictured to himself a breed of silent, mad-eyed men in steeple-crowned hats and baggy knee-breeches and homespun stockings and square-toed buckled shoes lurching along this immemorial road. On their shoulders they bore heavy bell-mouthed muskets and stands upon which to rest these muskets when they fired at enemies. Powder horns swung from their shoulders and bags of round bullets. There were women, too, sharp-faced, hawk-nosed women in white caps and dull gray dresses, hurrying along and laughing hysterically at the storm for there was no secrecy in those days, no reasons for quietude in the unspoilt wilderness, no one to watch them except the lean Indians in their breech-clouts of deerskin, their proud fierce faces crowned by the scalp-lock and the turkey-feather peering from behind the trees in superstitious wonder. The startled deer crashed through the underbrush and the brown bears lumbered away from the flares of the torches and the old-fashioned lanterns. All this had died away, had been erased by Time, had vanished into the nothingness of dead and unwritten history.
Then, decades and decades and decades later, Uriah Carrier, by the maps in his black book, had found the lost place called Dagon and he had worked on the slumbering instincts of the people about him, appealing to the madness that slept in their subconscious memories, bringing them again to the secret stone and the place where the crumbled bones rested. He had probably promised them dominion over their days, the power of exerting their wills and destroying their enemies, the joys of the liberation of their darkest instincts. It sounded impossible enough on the face of it, like some insane fairytale that a sick imagination might bring forth, and yet it must have been a fact for here he was, a sane doctor in the twentieth century, stumbling through the rotting vegetation of an untraveled swamp in search of a madman and the fanatical minds he had released from the kindly bondage of reason. It was like a nightmare.
Walden Slater halted abruptly. The road had grown somewhat wider now and they had been walking abreast. About them the trees rose to an imposing stature and the ground to right and left of them seemed higher and firmer than that through which they had toiled for the last half-hour. Dreeme imagined that they had reached a sort of island in the middle of the swamp and his conviction was intensified when, after peering right and left, before him and behind, Walden Slater stepped from the road and began to thread a slow circuitous advance through the trees. The ground as he stepped on it seemed softer than safety might desire but the young doctor followed with alacrity. His bare feet sank to the ankles in the soft ooze but following Walden Slater’s example and stepping close to the trunks of the trees he discovered that the walking was not so difficult after all. They appeared to be in a tall woodland now where the thin trees rose straight out of a soggy soil, a soil in which the rotting stumps of lightning-blasted growths and scattered boulders cluttered up and made difficult any swift passage. The boulders seemed unusual and Dreeme wondered about them. They possibly were evidence of a strata of rock, the slice of some prehistoric glacier, that thrust upward out of the marshy soil here. Walden Slater walked warily, taking care to step on no dead branches or to crash through none of the small undergrowths that sprang up between the slender trees. Dreeme followed suit.
They had walked through this woodland for a few minutes only before the young doctor observed a faint glow among the trees that
