Several days after her confinement was due to end the news reached Sabbathday that both Ligea and her babe had perished in childbirth. The father of Nathan Buttrick had been in attendance. In answer to the many queries he replied that there was nothing he could have done, and divulged no other details of the tragedy. Nathan recalled that his father had been unusually silent for days after the event, as though meditating on some incomprehensible problem. Once he had told his son that if he aspired to be a physician, there was something about the Cullums that he should know in the future. But then the normal course of town life was resumed. The remains of Ligea were cremated and transported to her native land as she had wished. The small casket of the child took its place among the Cullum ancestors in the family crypt. And Nathan Buttrick never heard the Cullum secret from the lips of his father, for the man died of a heart seizure a few months later.
“She was a witch, damn her eyes!” cried Cullum. The heir had become noticeably less calm toward the end of Buttrick’s narration of the few facts he knew of Ligea. Now a torrent of suppressed emotion broke forth. “And it is not dead, do you hear? Not dead!”
Buttrick leapt to restrain Cullum, who seemed ready to run from the room. At the same moment a hideous clamor issued from the direction of the tapestry, a scarcely human screeching accompanied by thudding impacts as though a body were hurling itself at the wall.
“It heard—it heard!” raved Cullum. He swung around and faced the cloth. “You cannot hold me in bondage any longer. The guardianship is at an end! At last, an end…” His final words choked off in a sob. Cullum pitched into a faint on the settee.
The vicious sounds from the tapestry grew in intensity until the cloth and the wall behind it trembled. Amadee entered the room on the run, his features contorted with rage. Apparently he had overheard the entire scene.
“The weak pig,” he snarled, “he has doom’ us all—we are dead men, M’sieur, dead men!” He vanished down the hall, his footsteps giving way to the grind of a heavy door being swung on its hinges. In a few moments Buttrick heard the crack of a bullwhip over the horrid ululations. A note of pain entered the screams. They tapered off into piteous whimpers, until silence returned to Cullum House.
Buttrick knelt beside the heir, struggling to revive him. For a moment he feared the aneurism had burst. But the eyelids trembled, and slowly the man regained his senses.
“Ah, the relief, Nathan,” Cullum sighed. “No longer a prisoner in my own house. No longer keeper of the vile heritage Emma passed on to me.”
“Great God, Laurence,” cried Buttrick, “what have you hidden behind that wall?”
“I could not describe it,” he answered. “Walk to the tapestry. You shall see it for yourself.”
Buttrick moved unsteadily toward the rich cloth, his breathing suspended in anticipation of whatever was to occur.
“Open the tapestry with the cord by your hand,” directed Cullum.
The doctor grasped the weighted end of the cord. He closed his eyes for a moment, opened them, then tugged at the cord. The tapestry slid back smoothly across the wall. Beneath it, the wall was discolored but blank, except for a small glassed orifice at eye level. Buttrick hesitated. He glanced at Laurence, who feebly motioned to him from the settee, then fixed his eye to the peephole. A low moan escaped the physician’s lips as his hand came up to clutch his throat.
The orifice gave a view through the thick wall into a smaller chamber behind the drawing room. Immediately opposite was a heavy steel door, with a similar peephole and a sturdy grating at the bottom through which a man might crawl, were it open. Gnawed bones and a basin of water lay before the grill, which was apparently an opening for inserting food into the chamber. A grayish light emanated from tiny clerestory windows along two sides beneath the ceiling. Knots of thread-like filaments—black, brown, and yellow—littered the floor.
Crouched in the far corner was the tenant of this chamber, a spectre so inhuman that Buttrick’s vision momentarily blurred from the shock. It hulked panting on its hands, a living human torso, if such a distortion of man’s form can be designated thusly. Raven hair fell in hanks and tangles from a misshapen skull. Bright, feverish eyes glared out from beneath the shaggy brows. From the face projected only a rudimentary nose, its nostrils dilating as an animal would breathe. The lips were tensed in a snarl, revealing discolored teeth more like the fangs of a carnivore.
The thing was naked save for a ragged breechclout tied about its middle. The torso showed superhuman muscular development—arms as thick as fenceposts, a barrel chest partly covered by a pelt. The lower extremities were piteously withered, dragging behind the upper body. Yet that monstrous form carried itself to and fro in the chamber with remarkable agility, supporting its weight on the arms and talon-like hands. As it lunged from one corner to the other, the creature sounded an ominous murmur from deep within its dark breast.
“Oh my dear God,” whispered Buttrick, unbelieving before the grisly sight. He had seen men mangled by awful accidents in the logging camps, and even the pitiable distortions of infant bodies in stillbirths. But never had the physician’s entire consciousness writhed before such a gross malformation of the human body. He slumped weakly against the wall beside the peephole.
“What is it, Laurence?” he asked. “Where—where did it come from?”
“Now you realize the desperate burden I have carried these months, Nathan,” replied Cullum. “That thing has been in our charge since the death of my father’s second wife. It is—Ligea’s Hell-Child!”
As he watched Buttrick’s reaction to the spectacle behind the tapestry, a transformation overcame Cullum. He seemed more in control of himself, as though the sharing of the secret with another not in the bloodline had relieved a great pressure within his spirit. Seeing Buttrick’s revulsion, Cullum had the presence of mind to fill another glass from the squat ship’s decanter and offer the stimulant to the doctor, who had moved slowly away from the wall like a sleepwalker.
“Sit down, Nathan, and calm yourself,” ordered the heir. “I’m sure you must have many questions about our—bad seed.”
When Buttrick had composed himself, Cullum spoke volubly about the origin of the chamber-dweller. The doctor listened as his host told him of Ligea’s dying threat to the house of Cullum. Unless they maintained her infant in secrecy until its maturity, they would perish. The Guardianship, as she called it, must be passed from member to member. Only death could release a guardian, who was responsible for the care and nourishment of the creature. They would know, Ligea said, when the child no longer needed their protection.
Captain Hugh Cullum had always scoffed at superstitions and curses. But suddenly the occult had come under his own eaves in the presence of that incredible child, surrounded by a brooding evil even then in its infancy. He knew that he had not fathered such a monster. Gradually the conviction grew within his mind that Ligea had consorted with a spirit of darkness, and that the babe was the token of their devilish love.
Captain Hugh would allow the child no baptism. It was placed in the strong-room behind the main parlor, a chamber which the guardians came to call, sardonically, the Crib. From that time forward, the tenant of that dark room behind the tapestry was known as the Hell-Child.
“And so, Nathan, if Ligea’s words were true, then you are listening to a dead man. The guardian who betrays the secret must die, you know.”
“Superstitious nonsense!” cried Buttrick, who had recovered from his initial shock. “Why, look at you, man. You’re more relaxed than I’ve seen you in months. Now, Laurence, I can’t yet explain that thing in there, or why it’s survived so long despite its grave malformation. But it must have a natural explanation. I admit that at first I was shocked. It’s a hideous thing. Yet I can see nothing that you should fear in it. Perhaps we can arrange for an institution to take over its care, relieving you of the burden. As to its being a Hell-Child—really, Laurence, I’d expect this type of thinking more of an upland farmer than the Cullum heir!”