“The school is beneath ground,” Thorne said, as if prompting him. “Remember.”
“Yes, beneath ground. No light must come. It would destroy what is taught. Once there, the scholar remains until he has been taught, or—goes away in the dark.”
“The school book has letters of cold fire,” prompted Thorne.
“Letters of cold fire,” echoed the thin voice. “They may be read in the dark. Once a day—once a day—a trap opens, and a hand shaggy with dark hairs thrusts in food. I finished—I was in that school for seven years—or a hundred!” He broke off, whimpering. “Who can say how long?”
“Give me your book,” insisted Thorne. “It is here somewhere.”
The man who would not be called Cavet Leslie rose on an elbow. It was a mighty effort for his fleshless body. He still held his eyes tight shut, but turned his face to Thorne’s. “How do you know?”
“It’s my business to know. I say certain spells—and certain voices whisper back. They cannot give me the wisdom I seek, but they say that it is in your book. Give me the book.”
“Not even to you, Rowley Thorne. You are of the kidney of the Deep School, but the book is only for those who study in buried darkness for years. For years—”
“The book!” said Thorne sharply. His big hand closed on the bony shoulder, his finger-ends probed knowingly for a nerve center. The man who had been in the Deep School wailed.
“You hurt me!”
“I came for the book. I’ll have it.”
“I’ll call on spirits to protect me—Tobkta—”
What else he may have said was muddled into a moan as Thorne shifted his hand to clamp over the trembling mouth. He prisoned the skinny jaw as a hostler with a horse, and shoved Cavet Leslie’s head down against the mattress. With his other thumb he pried up an eyelid. Convulsively the tormented one freed his mouth for a moment.
“Oooooooh!” he whined. “Don’t make me see the light—not after so many years—”
“The book. If you’ll give it up, hold up a finger.”
A hand trembled, closed—all but the forefinger. Thorne released his grip.
“Where?”
“In the mattress—”
At once, and with all his strength, Thorne chopped down with the hard edge of his hand, full at the bobbing, trembling throat. It was like an axe on a knotted log. The man who had been Cavet Leslie writhed, gasped, and slackened abruptly. Thorne caught at a meager wrist, his fingers seeking the pulse. He stood silent for a minute, then nodded and smiled to himself.
“Finished,” he muttered. “That throat-chop is better than a running noose.”
He tumbled the body from the cot, felt quickly all over the mattress. His hand paused at a lump, tore at the ticking. He drew into view a book, not larger than a school speller. It was bound in some sort of dark untanned hide, on which grew rank, coarse hair, black as soot.
Thorne thrust it under his coat and went out.
* * *
John Thunstone sat alone in his study. It was less of a study than a lounge—no fewer than three chairs were arranged on the floor, soft, well-hollowed chairs within easy reach of bookshelf, smoking stand and coffee table. There was a leather-covered couch as well. For Thunstone considered work of the brain to be as fatiguing as work of the body. He liked physical comfort when writing or researching.
Just now he sat in the most comfortable of the three chairs, facing a grate in which burned one of the few authentic fires of New York. He was taller than Rowley Thorne and quite as massive, perhaps even harder of body though not as dense. His face, with its broken nose and small, trim mustache, might have been that of a very savage and physical-minded man, except for the height of the well-combed cranium above it. That made his head the head of a thinker. His hands were so large that one looked twice to see that they were fine. His dark eyes could be brilliant, frank, enigmatic, narrow, or laughing as they willed.
Open on his lap lay a large gray book, with a backing of gilt-lettered red. He pondered a passage on the page open before him:
Having shuffled and cut the cards as here described, select one at random. Study the device upon it for such time as you count a slow twenty. Then fix your eyes on a point before you, and gaze unwinkingly and without moving until it seems that a closed door is before you, with upon its panel the device of the card you have chosen. Clarify the image in your mind, and keep it there until the door seems to swing open, and you feel that you can enter and see, hear or otherwise experience what may happen beyond that door…
Similar, pondered John Thunstone, to the Chinese wizard-game of Yi King, as investigated and experimented upon by W. B. Seabrook. He was glad that he, and not someone less fitted for such studies, had happened upon the book and the strange cards in that Brooklyn junk-shop. Perhaps this was an anglicized form of the Yi King book—he said over in his mind the strange, archaic doggerel penned by some unknown hand on the fly-leaf:
This book is mine, with many more,
Of evilness and dismal lore.
That I may of the Devil know
And school myself to work him woe.
Such lore Saint Dunstan also read,
So that the Cross hath firmer stead.
My path with honor aye hath been—
No better is than that, I ween.
Who had written it? What had befallen him, that he sold his strange book in a second-hand store? Perhaps, if the spell would open a spirit-door, Thunstone would know.
He cut the cards on the stand beside him. The card he saw was stamped with a simple, colored drawing of a grotesque half-human figure, covered with spines, and flaunting bat-wings. Thunstone smiled slightly, sagged down in the chair. His eyes, narrowing, fixed themselves in the heart of the red flame…
The illusion came sooner than he had thought. At first it was tiny, like the decorated lid of a cigar-box, then grew and grew in size and clarity—shutting out, it seemed, even the firelight into which Thunstone had stared. It seemed green and massive, and the bat-winged figure upon it glowed dully, as if it were a life-size inlay of mother of pearl. He fixed his attention upon it, found his eyes quartering the door surface to seek the knob or latch. Then saw it, something like a massive metal hook. After a moment, the door swung open, as if the weight of his gaze had pushed it inward.
He remembered what the book then directed: Arise from your body and walk through the door. But he felt no motion, physical or spiritual. For through the open door he saw only his study—the half of his study that was behind his back, reflected as in a mirror. No, for in the mirror left would become right. Here was the rearward part of the room exactly as he knew it.
And not empty!
A moving, stealthy blackness was there, flowing or creeping across the rug between a chair and a smoking stand like an octopus on a sea-bottom.
Thunstone watched. It was not a cloud nor a shadow, but something solid if not clearly shaped. It came into plainer view, closer, at the very threshold of the envisioned door. There it began to rise, a towering lean manifestation of blackness—
It came to Thunstone’s mind that, if the scene within the doorway was faithfully a reproduction of the room behind him, then he could see to it almost the exact point where his own chair was placed. In other words, if something dark and indistinct and stealthy was uncoiling itself there, the something was directly behind where he sat.
He did not move, did not even quicken his breath. The shape—it had a shape now, like a leafless tree with a narrow starved stem and moving tendril-like branches—aspired almost to the ceiling of the vision-room. The tendrils swayed as if in a gentle wind, then writhed and drooped. Drooped toward the point where might be the head of a seated man—if such a thing were truly behind him, it was reaching toward his head.