Part 7

But as he picked it up, he saw that it had a lid. What had Enid overheard from her stepfather, so long ago? "... that he would live and prosper until the secret writing should be taken forth and destroyed ... it would never open, save at the place of the Nameless One, at midnight under a full moon."

With his thumbnail he pried at the lid, and it came open easily. The box seemed full of darkness, and when he thrust in his hands he felt something crumble, like paper burned to ashes. That was what it was--ashes. He turned the case over, and let the flakes fall out, like strange black snow.

From somewhere resounded a shriek, or chorus of shrieks. Then a woman weeping--that would be Enid--and a cry of "God be thanked!" unmistakably from Jager. The blue light died away all around Lanark, and his legs were cool. The old basement had fallen strangely dark. Then he was aware of great fatigue, the trembling of his hands, the ropy weakness of his lamed leg. And he could not climb out again, until Jager came and put down a hand.

* * * * *

At rosy dawn the three sat on the front stoop of Jager's cabin. Enid was pouring coffee from a serviceable old black pot.

"We shall never know all that happened and portended," said Jager, taking a mouthful of home-made bread, "but what we have seen will tell us all that we should know."

"This much is plain," added Lanark. "Persil Mandifer worshipped an evil spirit, and that evil spirit had life and power."

"Perhaps we would know everything, if the paper in the box had not burned in the fire," went on Jager. "That is probably as well--that it burned, I mean. Some secrets are just as well never told." He fell thoughtful, pulled his beard, and went on. "Even burned, the power of that document worked; but when the ashes fell from their case, all was over. The bodies of the guerrillas were dry bones on the instant, and as for the skinless things that moved and spoke as Mandifer and his son----"

He broke off, for Enid had turned deathly pale at memory of that part of the business.

"We shall go back when the sun is well up," said Lanark, "and put those things back to rest in their grave."

He sat for a moment, coffee-cup in hand, and gazed into the brightening sky.

To the two items he had spoken of as plainly indicated, he mentally added a third; the worship carried on by Persil Mandifer--was that name French, perhaps Main-de-Fer?--was tremendously old. He, Persil, must have received teachings in it from a former votary, his father perhaps, and must have conducted a complex and secret ritual for decades.

The attempted sacrifice rite for which Enid had been destined was something the world would never know, not as regards the climax. For a little band of Yankee horsemen, with himself at their head, had blundered into the situation, throwing it completely out of order and spelling for it the beginning of the end.

The end had come. Lanark was sure of that. How much of the power and motivity of the worship had been exerted by the Nameless One that now must continue nameless, how much of it was Persil Mandifer's doing, how much was accident of nature and horror-hallucination of witnesses, nobody could now decide. As Jager had suggested, it was probably as well that part of the mystery would remain. Things being as they were, one might pick up the threads of his normal human existence, and be happy and fearless.

But he could not forget what he had seen. The two Mandifers, able to live or to counterfeit life by creeping from their skins at night, had perished as inexplicably as they had been resurrected. The guerrillas, too, whose corpses had challenged him, must be finding a grateful rest now that the awful semblance of life had quitted their slack, butchered limbs. And the blue fire that had burst forth in the midst of the old battle, to linger ghostwise for years; the horned image that Jager had broken; the seeming powers of the _Long Lost Friend_, as an amulet and a storehouse of charms--these were items in the strange fabric. He would remember them for ever, without rationalizing them.

He drank coffee, into which someone, probably Enid, had dropped sugar while he mused. Rationalization, he decided, was not enough, had never been enough. To judge a large and dark mystery by what vestigial portions touched one, was to err like the blind men in the old doggerel who, groping at an elephant here and there, called it in turn a snake, a spear, a tree, a fan, a wall. Better not to brood or ponder upon what had happened. Try to be thankful, and forget.

"I shall build my church under Fearful Rock," Jager was saying, "and it shall be called Fearful Rock no more, but Welcome Rock."

Lanark looked up. Enid had come and seated herself beside him. He studied her profile. Suddenly he could read her thoughts, as plainly as though they were written upon her cheek.

She was thinking that grass would grow anew in her front yard, and that she would marry Kane Lanark as soon as he asked her.

THE END