The lodge door slammed shut with a sudden, interrupting bang. The lock grated, and Henry Duryea’s footsteps sounded on the planked floor.
Arthur shook himself from the bed. He had only time to fling that haunting book into the Gladstone bag before he sensed his father standing in the doorway.
“You—you’re not shaving, Arthur.” Duryea’s words, spliced hesitantly, were toneless. He glanced from the table-top to the Gladstone, and to his son. He said nothing for a moment, his glance inscrutable. Then, “It’s blowing up quite a storm outside.”
Arthur swallowed the first words which had come into his throat, nodded quickly. “Yes, isn’t it? Quite a storm.” He met his father’s gaze, his face burning. “I—I don’t think I’ll shave, Dad. My head aches.”
Duryea came swiftly into the room and pinned Arthur’s arms in his grasp. “What do you mean—your head aches? How? Does your throat—”
“No!” Arthur jerked himself away. He laughed. “It’s that French stew of yours! It’s hit me in the stomach!” He stepped past his father and started up the stairs.
“The stew?” Duryea pivoted on his heel. “Possibly. I think I feel it myself.”
Arthur stopped, his face suddenly white. “You—too?”
The words were hardly audible. Their glances met—clashed like dueling-swords.
For ten seconds neither of them said a word or moved a muscle; Arthur, from the stairs, looking down; his father below, gazing up at him. In Henry Duryea the blood drained slowly from his face and left a purple etching across the bridge of his nose and above his eyes. He looked like a death’s-head.
Arthur winced at the sight and twisted his eyes away. He turned to go up the remaining stairs.
“Son!”
He stopped again; his hand tightened on the banister.
“Yes, Dad?”
Duryea put his foot on the first stair. “I want you to lock your door tonight. The wind would keep it banging!”
“Yes,” breathed Arthur, and pushed up the stairs to his room.
Doctor Duryea’s hollow footsteps sounded in steady, unhesitant beats across the floor of Timber Lake Lodge. Sometimes they stopped, and the crackling hiss of a sulfur match took their place, then perhaps a distended sigh, and, again, footsteps…
Arthur crouched at the open door of his room. His head was cocked for those noises from below. In his hands was a double-barrel shotgun of violent gage… thud… thud… thud…
Then a pause, the clinking of a glass and the gurgling of liquid. The sigh, the tread of his feet over the floor…
“He’s thirsty,” Arthur thought—Thirsty!
Outside, the storm had grown into fury. Lightning zigzagged between the mountains, filling the valley with weird phosphorescence. Thunder, like drums, rolled incessantly.
Within the lodge the heat of the fireplace piled the atmosphere thick with stagnation. All the doors and windows were locked shut, the oil-lamps glowed weakly—a pale, anemic light.
Henry Duryea walked to the foot of the stairs and stood looking up.
Arthur sensed his movements and ducked back into his room, the gun gripped in his shaking fingers.
Then Henry Duryea’s footstep sounded on the first stair.
Arthur slumped to one knee. He buckled a fist against his teeth as a prayer tumbled through them.
Duryea climbed a second step… and another… and still one more. On the fourth stair he stopped.
“Arthur!” His voice cut into the silence like the crack of a whip. “Arthur! Will you come down here?”
“Yes, Dad.” Bedraggled, his body hanging like cloth, young Duryea took five steps to the landing.
“We can’t be zanies!” cried Henry Duryea. “My soul is sick with dread. Tomorrow we’re going back to New York. I’m going to get the first boat to open sea… Please come down here.” He turned about and descended the stairs to his room.
Arthur choked back the words which had lumped in his mouth. Half dazed, he followed…
In the bedroom he saw his father stretched face-up along the bed. He saw a pile of rope at his father’s feet.
“Tie me to the bedposts, Arthur,” came the command. “Tie both my hands and both my feet.”
Arthur stood gaping.
“Do as I tell you!”
“Dad, what for—”
“Don’t be a fool! You read that book! You know what relation you are to me! I’d always hoped it was Cecilia, but now I know it’s you. I should have known it on that night twenty years ago when you complained of a headache and nightmares… Quickly, my head rocks with pain. Tie me!”
Speechless, his own pain piercing him with agony, Arthur fell to that grisly task. Both hands he tied—and both feet… tied them so firmly to the iron posts that his father could not lift himself an inch off the bed.
Then he blew out the lamps, and without a further glance at that Prometheus, he reascended the stairs to his room, and slammed and locked his door behind him.
He looked once at the breech of his gun, and set it against a chair by his bed. He flung off his robe and slippers, and within five minutes he was senseless in slumber.
* * *
He slept late, and when he awakened his muscles were as stiff as boards, and the lingering visions of a nightmare clung before his eyes. He pushed his way out of bed, stood dazedly on the floor.
A dull, numbing cruciation circulated through his head. He felt bloated… coarse and running with internal mucus. His mouth was dry, his gums sore and stinging.
He tightened his hands as he lunged for the door. “Dad,” he cried, and he heard his voice breaking in his throat.
Sunlight filtered through the window at the top of the stairs. The air was hot and dry, and carried in it a mild odor of decay.
Arthur suddenly drew back at that odor—drew back with a gasp of awful fear. For he recognized it—that stench, the heaviness of his blood, the rawness of his tongue and gums… Age-long it seemed, yet rising like a spirit in his memory. All of these things he had known and felt before.
He leaned against the banister, and half slid, half stumbled down the stairs…
His father had died during the night. He lay like a waxen figure tied to his bed, his face done up in knots.
Arthur stood dumbly at the foot of the bed for only a few seconds; then he went back upstairs to his room.
Almost immediately he emptied both barrels of the shotgun into his head.
The tragedy at Timber Lake was discovered accidentally three days later. A party of fishermen, upon finding the two bodies, notified state authorities, and an investigation was directly under way.
Arthur Duryea had undoubtedly met death at his own hands. The condition of his wounds, and the manner in which he held the lethal weapon, at once foreclosed the suspicion of any foul play.
But the death of Doctor Henry Duryea confronted the police with an inexplicable mystery; for his trussed-up body, unscathed except for two jagged holes over the jugular vein, had been drained of all its blood.
The autopsy protocol of Henry Duryea laid death to “undetermined causes,” and it was not until the yellow tabloids commenced an investigation into the Duryea family history that the incredible and fantastic explanations were offered to the public.
Obviously such talk was held in popular contempt; yet in view of the controversial war which followed, the authorities considered it expedient to consign both Duryeas to the crematory…
THE SEVENTH INCANTATION
BY JOSEPH PAYNE BRENNAN
“Of these black prayers or incantations there be seven, three for ordinarie charmes and aides, and the like number for the unholie and compleat destruction of alle enemies. But of the seventh the curious in alle these partes are warned. Let not the last incantation be recited, unlesse ye desire the sight of moste aweful deamon. Although it be said the deamon shews not unlesse the wordes be spake by the bloodie altar of the Olde Ones, yet it were well to beware. For it be knowne that the Saracene sorcerer, Mai Lazal, dide wantonlie chante the dire wordes and the deamon dide come—and not finding a bloodie offering did rage at the wizard and rende him exceedinglie. The life bloode of a childe or chaste maid be best, yet a beaste, a goode ox or sheep, is said sufficient. But beware lest the beaste be dead when the bloode be taken, for then shall the deamon’s rage be dire. If the offering be well, the deamon shall give unholie power, so that the servant grow riche and reache above alle his neighbors.”