Geoffrey Arnold saw this and had time, even in his extreme of utter terror, to wonder at it. But time only for that.- In the next moment, converging, those great pythons of alien matter reared up, swept upon him and layered him like lacquer where he stood and screamed. Quickly he turned black as the stuff thickened on him, and his shrill screams were soon shut off as the horror closed over his face.
Then he danced — a terrible dance of agony — and finally fell, a bloated blot, to the mist-tortured earth. For long seconds he jerked, writhed-and twisted, and at last lay still.
Benjamin Gifford had watched all of this, and yet for all that he was a devotee of evil had gained little pleasure from it. Wizard and necromancer though he was, still he knew that there were far greater sources of evil. And for Great Evil there is always Great Good. The balance is ever maintained.
Now Gifford stopped laughing, his mouth slowly closing, the short hairs rising at the back of his neck. He sniffed like a hound at some suspicious odour; he sensed that things were far from right; he questioned what had happened or rather, the way it had happened — and he grew afraid. His body, naked now and slenderer far than when The Black shrouded him, shivered in the spiralling mists.
Those mists, for example: he had thought them part of Arnold's conjuring, a curious side-effect. But no, for Arnold was finished and still the reeking, strangely twisting mists poured upward from the ruins of the old house. The ruins of Titus Crow's old house .. .
And why had The Black chosen to split and deflect around that smoking perimeter of ruin? Unless —
'No!' Gifford croaked, the dark iron vanished now from his voice. 'No, that can't be!' It could not be . . . could it
No slightest vestige of life remained in Arnold now The Black lifted en masse from his body where it lay contorted in death's rigors, lifted like a jagged hole torn in normal space and paused, hovering at the edge of the ruins of Blowne House. And slowly that cloud of living evil formed into two serpents, and slowly they retraced their paths around the ruins.
Menacing they were, in their slow, sentient approach. And at last Gifford thought he knew why. Crow was long gone but the protections he had placed about Blowne House remained even now, would stay here until time itself was extinct and all magics — black and white —gone forever. The place was a focal point for good, genius loci for all the great benevolent powers which through all the ages men have called God! And those powers had not waned with Crow's passing but had fastened upon this place and waxed ever stronger.
To have called The Black here, now, in this place was a blasphemy, and the caller had paid in full. But to have brought The Black here — to have worn it like a mantle, to have been Yibb-Tstll's priest — that were greater blasphemy far. This place was sacrosanct, and it would remain that way.
'No!' Gifford croaked one last time, an instant before The Black fell upon him. Priest no more, be was borne under...
***
When the mists ceased their strange spiralling the ruins of Blowne House lay as before, silvered under a cleansing moon. Except that now there were corpses in the night. Pitiful shapes crumpled under the moon, where morning would find them chill as the earth where they lay.
But the earth would have a soul . . .