The Place Called Dagon

faced them. He instinctively hastened his pace a little and soon was several feet in front of Walden Slater. The farmer plodded along doggedly exhibiting no excitement or unrest. Dreeme, clutching Deborah’s brooch in his hand, was about to break into a stumbling run when the wiry hand of the farmer jerked his shoulder back. A trifle angry but aware of the wisdom of the rebuke the young doctor adjusted his pace to the farmer’s steady progression and they moved forward toward the faint glow, a glow that brightened perceptibly as they neared it. The rain had stopped altogether, even the large infrequent drops disappearing into the mist of the night. In those few minutes while Dreeme crept forward beside the farmer a dozen and one thoughts flashed through his mind, plans of rescue, schemes of attack, possibilities of tactics to be employed. Would they rush into the group of farmers, and, while Walden Slater held them back with the menace of his revolver, would he snatch up Deborah and make away with her along the exhausting road which he had been traveling for nearly an hour? What could they hope to do against a dozen or more men who were mad? He wanted to ask Walden Slater what he thought but the farmer was so evidently bent on silence that he did not venture a word. The glow was quite bright now and it seemed to come upward from the earth, from a hollow beyond them that was masked by crowded tree-trunks. There were many lanterns in that hollow and there were many men. Deborah was there, too. Perhaps at this very moment she was a part of the unclean ceremonies that were taking place. It seemed an eternity to the young doctor while they crept slowly and silently through the last ring of trees, stepping gingerly over the protruding boulders and rotting branches and mouldering stumps. Walden Slater now carried his revolver in his hand. Leaving the last of the trees behind them and facing the yellow glow of the invisible light that formed a strange fan of color against the milky atmosphere they crept up an inclined bank toward a ring of low intertangled bushes. The subdued hum of voices reached their strained ears. Walden Slater carefully pushed aside one of the branches of the bushes against which they now rested and cautiously thrust his face forward. For a second he looked downward. Then he drew back and putting his mouth very close to Dreeme’s ear said:

“This is the place called Dagon.”

The young doctor, his blood beating furiously, crept up to the bush, drew the branch aside, thrust his face forward, and looked downward.

X

He stared into a hollow that was filled with shifting forms, moving figures that were slices of darkness before the lanterns. Faces passed and repassed before his curious gaze, paused, bent forward, turned, leaned toward one another, disappeared, and it was some minutes before he could make them out, could recognize them as human faces that he had once viewed vacantly in the quiet lanes of Marlborough. He had not expected so much light, so much action. As his eyes adjusted themselves to the scene before them he began to perceive the spectacle as a whole, almost as a painting whose component parts might be observed and then relegated to their proper order. He sensed Walden Slater creeping into the bush beside him but he made no gesture of comprehension, merely shifting his position a trifle so that the farmer, too, might see what was going on in the hollow. For his own part, he was intent on the spectacle before him, watching eagerly for the one face of all faces and subconsciously deliberating in his mind what he should do when he did see that face. The hollow was large and level and the ground upon which these people walked was dark and firm. There was no grass, no growths of any sort. It stretched like a black carpet to the ring of bushes that hemmed it on all sides. It was a natural amphitheater, an arena formed by chance. Circling this expanse of black soil was a series of lanterns, perhaps twenty of them, placed at regular intervals and lighting up the scene as though it were a stage and they were footlights. The beams of yellow glowed upward, striking the lower portions of faces and distorting them. Chins and nostrils and the undersides of cheekbones were crazily illuminated in this unnatural light. In the center of the hollow loomed a large flat-topped rock, perhaps five feet high. It was black stone glittering now with moisture, with the rain that had fallen so steadily on it all through the day and night. There was something ominous about this stone, something unclean, and the young doctor studied it with intense loathing. Its slimy black sides were like the skin of some great horrid toad, smooth yet studded with offensive warts that caught the glow of the lanterns and flung them back again to the misty night. Dreeme wondered if it were true that crumbling bones were buried in the dark soil beneath this rock which seemed so immovable, so placed there by time in the center of this secret amphitheater. The rock appeared as old as the ages. It seemed riven immutably into the earth. Yet it was unmistakably the Devil Stone and from its moist toad-like surface the Black Man had preached his blasphemous sermons in times past, had conducted the orgiastic liturgies of the Witches’ Sabbat and the Esbat. There was no one near the stone now. It stood malevolently, a shunned phenomenon in the hollow. “Rock of Ages.” Yes, this was the Rock that George Burroughs meant when he hummed monotonously the old church tune.

Dreeme’s eyes drifted over the faces that moved about in the hollow. There were, perhaps, twenty people present, all men. The low hum of their subdued voices