Part 3

I wished that the summer--and my son's Harvard vacation--would come, so that we could get Edward to Europe. He was not, I soon saw, mending as rapidly as I had hoped he would; for there was something a bit hysterical in his occasional exhilaration, while his moods of fright and depression were altogether too frequent. The old Derby house was ready by December, yet Edward constantly put off moving. Though he hated and seemed to fear the Crowninshield place, he was at the same time queerly enslaved by it. He could not seem to begin dismantling things, and invented every kind of excuse to postpone action. When I pointed this out to him he appeared unaccountably frightened. His father's old butler--who was there with other re-acquired servants--told me one day that Edward's occasional prowlings about the house, and especially down cellar, looked odd and unwholesome to him. I wondered if Asenath had been writing disturbing letters, but the butler said there was no mail which could have come from her.

It was about Christmas that Derby broke down one evening while calling on me. I was steering the conversation toward next summer's travels when he suddenly shrieked and leaped up from his chair with a look of shocking, uncontrollable fright--a cosmic panic and loathing such as only the nether gulfs of nightmare could bring to any sane mind.

"My brain! My brain! God, Dan--it's tugging--from beyond--knocking--clawing--that she-devil--even now--Ephraim--Kamog! Kamog!--The pit of the shoggoths--Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!...

"The flame--the flame--beyond body, beyond life--in the earth--oh, God!..."

I pulled him back to his chair and poured some wine down his throat as his frenzy sank to a dull apathy. He did not resist, but kept his lips moving as if talking to himself. Presently I realized that he was trying to talk to me, and bent my ear to his mouth to catch the feeble words.

"----again, again--she's trying--I might have known--nothing can stop that force; not distance, nor magic, nor death--it comes and comes, mostly in the night--I can't leave--it's horrible--oh, God, Dan, _if you only knew as I do just how horrible it is_!..."

When he had slumped down into a stupor I propped him with pillows and let normal sleep overtake him. I did not call a doctor, for I knew what would be said of his sanity, and wished to give nature a chance if I possibly could. He waked at midnight, and I put him to bed upstairs, but he was gone by morning. He had let himself quietly out of the house--and his butler, when called on the wire, said he was at home pacing restlessly about the library.

6

Edward went to pieces rapidly after that. He did not call again, but I went daily to see him. He would always be sitting in his library, staring at nothing and having an air of abnormal _listening_. Sometimes he talked rationally, but always on trivial topics. Any mention of his trouble, of future plans, or of Asenath would send him into a frenzy. His butler said he had frightful seizures at night, during which he might eventually do himself harm.

I had a long talk with his doctor, banker, and lawyer, and finally took the physician with two specialist colleagues to visit him. The spasms that resulted from the first questions were violent and pitiable--and that evening a closed car took his poor struggling body to the Arkham Sanitarium. I was made his guardian and called on him twice weekly--almost weeping to hear his wild shrieks, awesome whispers, and dreadful, droning repetitions of such phrases as "I had to do it--I had to do it--it'll get me--it'll get me--down there--down there in the dark--Mother! Mother! Dan! Save me--save me----"

How much hope of recovery there was, no one could say, but I tried my best to be optimistic. Edward must have a home if he emerged, so I transferred his servants to the Derby mansion, which would surely be his sane choice. What to do about the Crowninshield place with its complex arrangements and collections of utterly inexplicable objects I could not decide, so left it momentarily untouched--telling the Derby household to go over and dust the chief rooms once a week, and ordering the furnace man to have a fire on those days.

The final nightmare came before Candlemas--heralded, in cruel irony, by a false gleam of hope. One morning late in January the sanitarium telephoned to report that Edward's reason had suddenly come back. His continuous memory, they said, was badly impaired; but sanity itself was certain. Of course he must remain some time for observation, but there could be little doubt of the outcome. All going well, he would surely be free in a week.

I hastened over in a flood of delight, but stood bewildered when a nurse took me to Edward's room. The patient rose to greet me, extending his hand with a polite smile; but I saw in an instant that he bore the strangely energized personality which had seemed so foreign to his own nature--the competent personality I had found so vaguely horrible, and which Edward himself had once vowed was the intruding soul of his wife. There was the same blazing vision--so like Asenath's and old Ephraim's--and the same firm mouth! and when he spoke I could sense the same grim, pervasive irony in his voice--the deep irony so redolent of potential evil. This was the person who had driven my car through the night five months before--the person I had not seen since that brief call when he had forgotten the old-time door-bell signal and stirred such nebulous fears in me--and now he filled me with the same dim feeling of blasphemous alienage and ineffable cosmic hideousness.

He spoke affably of arrangements for release--and there was nothing for me to do but assent, despite some remarkable gaps in his recent memories. Yet I felt that something was terribly, inexplicably wrong and abnormal. There were horrors in this thing that I could not reach. This was a sane person--but was it indeed the Edward Derby I had known? If not, who or what was it--and where was Edward? Ought it to be free or confined--or ought it to be extirpated from the face of the earth? There was a hint of the abysmally sardonic in everything the creature said--the Asenath-like eyes lent a special and baffling mockery to certain words about the early liberty earned by an _especially close confinement_! I must have behaved very awkwardly, and was glad to beat a retreat.

All that day and the next I racked my brain over the problem. What had happened? What sort of mind looked out through those alien eyes in Edward's face? I could think of nothing but this dimly terrible enigma, and gave up all efforts to perform my usual work. The second morning the hospital called up to say that the recovered patient was unchanged, and by evening I was close to a nervous collapse--a state I admit, though others will vow it colored my subsequent vision. I have nothing to say on this point except that no madness of mine could account for _all_ the evidence.

7

It was in the night--after that second evening--that stark, utter horror burst over me and weighted my spirit with a black, clutching panic from which it can never shake free. It began with a telephone call just before midnight. I was the only one up, and sleepily took down the receiver in the library. No one seemed to be on the wire, and I was about to hang up and go to bed when my ear caught a very faint suspicion of sound at the other end. Was someone trying under great difficulties to talk? As I listened I thought I heard a sort of half-liquid bubbling noise--"_glub ... glub ... glub_"--which had an odd suggestion of inarticulate, unintelligible word and syllable divisions. I called, "Who is it?" But the only answer was "_glub-glub ... glub-glub_." I could only assume that the noise was mechanical; but fancying that it might be a case of a broken instrument able to receive but not to send, I added, "I can't hear you. Better hang up and try Information." Immediately I heard the receiver go on the hook at the other end.

This, I say, was just before midnight. When that call was traced afterward it was found to come from the old Crowninshield house, though it was fully half a week from the housemaid's day to be there. I shall only hint what was found at that house--the upheaval in a remote cellar storeroom, the tracks, the dirt, the hastily rifled wardrobe, the baffling marks on the telephone, the clumsily used stationery, and the detestable stench lingering over everything. The police, poor fools, have their smug little theories, and are still searching for those sinister discharged servants--who have dropped out of sight amidst the present furor. They speak of a ghoulish revenge for things that were done, and say I was included because I was Edward's best friend and adviser.

Idiots! do they fancy those brutish clowns could have forged that handwriting? Do they fancy they could have brought what later came? Are they blind to the changes in that body that was Edward's? As for me, _I now believe all that Edward Derby ever told me_. There are horrors beyond life's edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man's evil prying calls them just within our range. Ephraim--Asenath--that devil called them in, and they engulfed Edward as they are engulfing me.

Can I be sure that I am safe? Those powers survive the life of the physical form. The next day--in the afternoon, when I pulled out of my prostration and was able to walk and talk coherently--I went to the madhouse and shot him dead for Edward's and the world's sake, but can I be sure till he is cremated? They are keeping the body for some silly autopsies by different doctors--but I say he must be cremated. _He must be cremated--he who was not Edward Derby when I shot him._ I shall go mad if he is not, for I may be the next. But my will is not weak--and I shall not let it be undermined by the terrors I know are seething around it. One life--Ephraim, Asenath, and Edward--who now? I _will not_ be driven out of my body ... I _will not_ change souls with that bullet-ridden lich in the madhouse!

But let me try to tell coherently of that final horror. I will not speak of what the police persistently ignored--the tales of that dwarfed, grotesque, malodorous thing met by at least three wayfarers in High Street just before two o'clock, and the nature of the single footprints in certain places. I will say only that just about two the door-bell and knocker waked me--door-bell and knocker both, plied alternately and uncertainly in a kind of weak desperation, _and each trying to keep to Edward's old signal of three-and-two strokes_.

Roused from sound sleep, my mind leaped into a turmoil. Derby at the door--and remembering the old code! That new personality had not remembered it ... was Edward suddenly back in his rightful state? Why was he here in such evident stress and haste? Had he been released ahead of time, or had he escaped? Perhaps, I thought as I flung on a robe and bounded downstairs, his return to his own self had brought raving and violence, revoking his discharge and driving him to a desperate dash for freedom. Whatever had happened, he was good old Edward again, and I would help him!

* * * * *

When I opened the door into the elm-arched blackness a gust of insufferably fetid wind almost flung me prostrate. I choked in nausea, and for a second scarcely saw the dwarfed, humped figure on the steps. The summons had been Edward's, but who was this foul, stunted parody? Where had Edward had time to go? His ring had sounded only a second before the door opened.

The caller had on one of Edward's overcoats--its bottom almost touching the ground, and its sleeves rolled back yet still covering the hands. On the head was a slouch hat pulled low, while a black silk muffler concealed the face. As I stepped unsteadily forward, the figure made a semi-liquid sound like that I had heard over the telephone--"_glub ... glub_"--and thrust at me a large, closely written paper impaled on the end of a long pencil. Still reeling from the morbid and unaccountable fetor, I seized the paper and tried to read it in the light from the doorway.

Beyond question, it was in Edward's script. But why had he written when he was close enough to ring--and why was the script so awkward, coarse and shaky? I could make out nothing in the dim half-light, so edged back into the hall, the dwarf figure clumping mechanically after but pausing on the inner door's threshold. The odor of this singular messenger was really appalling, and I hoped (not in vain, thank God!) that my wife would not wake and confront it.

Then, as I read the paper, I felt my knees give under me and my vision go black. I was lying on the floor when I came to, that accursed sheet still clutched in my fear-rigid hand. This is what it said:

"Dan--go to the sanitarium and kill it. Exterminate it. It isn't Edward Derby any more. She got me--it's Asenath--_and she has been dead three months and a half_. I lied when I said she had gone away. I killed her. I had to. It was sudden, but we were alone and I was in my right body. I saw a candlestick and smashed her head in. She would have got me for good at Hallowmass.

"I buried her in the farther cellar storeroom under some old boxes and cleaned up all the traces. The servants suspected next morning, but they have such secrets that they dare not tell the police. I sent them off, but God knows what they--and others of the cult--will do.

"I thought for a while I was all right, and then I felt the tugging at my brain. I knew what it was--I ought to have remembered. A soul like hers--or Ephraim's--is half detached, and keeps right on after death as long as the body lasts. She was getting me--making me change bodies with her--_seizing my body and putting me in that corpse of hers buried in the cellar_.

"I knew what was coming--that's why I snapped and had to go to the asylum. Then it came--I found myself choked in the dark--in Asenath's rotting carcass down there in the cellar under the boxes where I put it. And I knew she must be in my body at the sanitarium--permanently, for it was after Hallowmass, and the sacrifice would work even without her being there--sane, and ready for release as a menace to the world. I was desperate, _and in spite of everything I clawed my way out_.

"I'm too far gone to talk--I couldn't manage to telephone--but I can still write. I'll get fixed up somehow and bring this last word and warning. _Kill that fiend_ if you value the peace and comfort of the world. _See that it is cremated._ If you don't, it will live on and on, body to body for ever, and I can't tell you what it will do. Keep clear of black magic, Dan--it's the devil's business. Good-bye--you've been a great friend. Tell the police whatever they'll believe--and I'm damnably sorry to drag all this on you. I'll be at peace before long--this thing won't hold together much more. Hope you can read this. _And kill that thing--kill it._

"Yours--ED."

It was only afterward that I read the last half of this paper, for I had fainted at the end of the third paragraph. I fainted again when I saw and smelled what cluttered up the threshold where the warm air had struck it. The messenger would not move or have consciousness any more.

The butler, tougher-fibered than I, did not faint at what met him in the hall in the morning. Instead, he telephoned the police. When they came I had been taken upstairs to bed, but the--other mass--lay where it had collapsed in the night. The men put handkerchiefs to their noses.

What they finally found inside Edward's oddly-assorted clothes was mostly liquescent horror. There were bones, too--and a crushed-in skull. Some dental work positively identified the skull as Asenath's.