At noon Bruce showed up for lunch, seemingly preoccupied and puzzled about something. I wondered what further stories he had succeeded in getting out of Lyle Wilson. I suddenly remembered, too, something I had intended to ask Bruce, but had forgotten. So, half facetiously, I asked: “Well, did you dream last night?”
Eb Corey, who had come in from the fields, looked at me curiously but not angrily. Mrs. Corey, however, shot me a look that made me wish I hadn’t asked the question. Nevertheless we all awaited Bruce’s answer—she most anxiously of all.
“Yes,” he said, “I did. And that’s peculiar, because I usually never dream. Maybe it was because I was up pretty late reading in those books…”
At the mention of the books Mrs. Corey looked at Bruce quickly, quizzically.
“Oh,” Bruce said. “I’m sorry if I wasn’t suppose to look at them, but you see I’m interested in that kind of lore.”
“It’s all right. Please go on.”
“Sure,” I reminded him, “what about the dream? But I suppose you don’t remember it. Most people don’t…”
“But I do. It was just a fragment of a dream really, but too vivid for me to forget. It seemed that I was walking somewhere in a sort of mist. Down a narrow dirt road. There was a rusty wire fence to my right, and I came to a gap in it. Automatically I turned and passed through it, and walked down a path behind a large house…” Bruce turned to me and smiled, as though he were reciting a fairy story to a child. “All this while, mind you, something was drawing me—I wasn’t walking of my own volition. I knew I should make an effort to run back, but at the same time, paradoxically, I seemed very anxious to get to whatever was drawing me. Well… the path was tangled with coarse grass and weeds, and suddenly I saw where I was walking: in a graveyard. All around me were tombstones, but not stones really, for most of them were ancient nameboards of wood, inclining at all angles and overgrown with weeds and brambles. Then—right before me—I saw a low cement tomb. It was cracked and moss-covered, but the wooden door was still solid, and the huge iron hinges, though rusty, were still intact. I stood a moment before that door; now I felt a very strong attraction, almost an affinity, to—to whatever lay beyond. I don’t doubt that I would have entered—in fact, I was just about to—but at that moment I awoke. I was lying on my cot upstairs and a cool breeze was coming in the window at my head. I closed the window and went back to sleep, but I didn’t dream any more.”
I glanced at Mrs. Corey. She had sat there taut and silent as Bruce talked. Now she was biting her lips as though to keep from screaming, but the scream showed in her eyes. She rose in sudden agitation and left the room.
Her husband continued eating for a moment in silence. Then he looked up, unperturbed, and said: “Martha’s easy upset. But maybe there’s good reason. You see, she had a sister that slept in that room once, and she dreamed that same dream, and then—she just disappeared. No trace ever found of her. Before that, it was the Munroe boy—I remember it like it was yesterday.”
“Yes, Lyle Wilson was telling me about the Munroe boy’s disappearance,” said Bruce. “Do you know anything about it?”
“Nothing except he was playing out in the fields near the ravine, and he disappeared. We searched, but no trace of him. Then—it must have been all of a week later—his younger brother came running home and said he’d seen Willie’s face, with a lot of others.”
“His face!” Bruce sat bolt upright. “Is that what he said?”
“Yep, that’s all he could say. He’d seen his brother’s face, with a lot of others. Said he’d been playing down in the ravine, but he didn’t know just where.”
Bruce looked at me, and he wasn’t smiling now. Corey seemed to take everything stoically. “Of course,” he went on, “it used to be horses and cattle that disappeared—no trace. This all happened some few years ago. The land was pretty bad, then, too, but hasn’t been so bad since. Not ’til just recent.”
“What do you think of all this, Eb?”
Eb Corey looked at Bruce stolidly. “Mr. Tarleton, you’re a scientific man. I’m just trying to make a living here off of land that—that ain’t right, somehow. You said that books like them upstairs is a kind of hobby of yours. Then you oughta know more about all of this than I do. I looked into one of them books once—just once. I can say this: I didn’t understand much of it, but I know such studyin’ won’t bring you to no good end. But that’s your affair. Me—I just try not to think too much about it.” That’s the longest speech I ever heard Eb Corey make, and it seemed definite enough. Bruce apparently thought so, too, for he said, “I think I’ll come out there a little later this afternoon and take a look at your soil.”
“Wish you would, Mr. Tarleton, wish you would. You’ll find me down on the south end.”
I had listened to all this in silence, but something was bothering me, almost haunting me. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Bruce’s dream. I arose from the table and left them there, still talking; and went upstairs, wondering just what it was about that dream that bothered me. The path across the old graveyard… the ancient tomb… something drawing him on…
On a sudden impulse I entered that room where Bruce had slept. A faded green blind was still drawn over the single window. I raised the blind. Even before I looked, I knew. Then I looked and saw. The scene swept across my brain like a dash of icy water. As I stood there momentarily paralyzed, I felt the first hint of the cosmic horror that was soon to engulf both Bruce and myself, and come near to blasting my mind.
There was the narrow dirt road, to the left. There was the rusty wire fence. The broken gap. There was the grass-tangled path, and the fallen tombstones in the ancient graveyard just behind this house. And there was the cracked cement tomb, just as Bruce had described it from his dream, only a short distance away from this window…
* * *
A few hours later, as we walked across the fields, I told Bruce what I had discovered—the graveyard behind the house, and the exact parallel to his dream. He wasn’t surprised, said he’d seen it, too.
“I suppose you’re beginning to think that what I experienced wasn’t a dream at all—that I actually walked down that path toward the tomb. Well, you’re wrong. It was nothing but a dream; I know I never left my room…” He seemed for a moment about to tell me more, then changed his mind.
But I was, by now, very curious; not with the avidity of a student of the ancient lores such as Bruce displayed, but with a certain skepticism. “Did Lyle Wilson tell you any more stories? What about that diary—I know you were dying to see it?”
“I saw it—but not enough of it. He brought it out and read me certain parts. Remember his saying he had a certain hankerin’ sometimes? Well, I told him I often had a sort of hankerin’, too. Then he brought out the diary.”
“A hankerin’ for what, in heaven’s name?”
“I don’t know—but I’m afraid it isn’t in heaven’s name. Whatever he was talking about. That’s what I wanted to find out.”
“And did you?”
“Very little. I got too curious, I guess, and Lyle got suspicious. Still, he read me quite a few passages from that diary of Hans Zickler’s, and I’m beginning to piece things together. Remember Corey saying his grandfather built this house, and added the back wing later? Well, that’s right. Maybe you noticed the wing brings that room pretty close to the edge of the graveyard?”
“What about the diary?” I insisted.
“Well, I learned this much. Old Zickler used to sit at the window of that upstairs back room, in the late evenings, and mumble a kind of gibberish. That window’s easily visible from the road; neighbors passing by soon got the idea that Zickler was crazy. Lyle Wilson says that he was just a young man then, but he remembers seeing old Zick sitting there—could hear him, too—and he was certainly a wild sight. Well… it seems that there was something in that tomb, and Zickler suggested that it had answered him—but in a strange way. Not audibly, but mentally. A sort of unearthly telepathy, I guess. Old Zick couldn’t explain it quite right. All I can gather is that it was teaching Zickler something, and that occasionally it thanked him for something. I’d certainly like to read more in that part of the diary, but old Lyle is too shrewd.