Then with a cry Colby fell to his knees, the skull slipping from his hands. He choked, grasping for it, and from the darkness of the stair behind him another form darted forward, small and slim, and stooped to snatch up the talisman skull of the terrible ancestor who had ruled this place.
"Ygnaiih, ygnaiih Yog-Sothoth!" cried a woman's voice, high and powerful, filling the hideous chamber, and the darkness that had surged forward toward her seemed for a moment to close in as it had closed around the old man on the altar, then to fall back. By the queer, actinic luminosity of the skull I could see the woman's face, and recognized her as Judith Delapore, niece and granddaughter of the madmen who ruled Depewatch. Yet how different from the sweet countenance painted on Colby's miniature! Like the ivory mask of a goddess, cold and lined with concentration, she bent her eyes on the heaving swirl of nightmare that surrounded her, not even glancing at her lover, who lay gasping, twisting in convulsions at her feet. In a high, hard voice she repeated the dreadful words of the incantations, and neither flinched nor wavered as the dreadful things flittered and crawled and bounced in the darkness.
Only when the hideous rite was ended, and the unspeakable congregation had trickled away through the blasphemous angle of the inner walls, did the young woman lower the skull she held. She stood in her black gown, outlined in the gleam of the niter on the walls, staring into the abyss from which those dreadful unhuman things had come, barely seeming to notice me as I stumbled and staggered down the last of the stairs.
Of the old man's body that had lain upon the altar nothing whatsoever remained. A thick layer of slime covered the stone and ran down onto the floor, which was perhaps half an inch deep in a brownish liquid that glistened in the feeble blue gleam of the niter. Having seen Burnwell Colby engulfed by that wriggling darkness I staggered to where he had lain with some confused idea of helping him, but as I dropped to my knees I saw that only a lumpy mass of half-dissolved flesh and bones remained. The bones themselves had the appearance of being charred, almost melted. I looked up in horror at the woman with the skull and her eyes met mine, clear golden hazel, like other eyes I could not quite recall. Her eyes widened and filled with anger and hate:
"You," she whispered. "So you did not take him after all?"
I only shook my head, her words making no sense to me in my shaken state, and she went on, "As you have seen, Uncle, it is I, now, and not Grandfather-Grandfather who has not existed for over fifty years-who rules now here." And to my horror she held out her hand toward that hideously anomalous angle of the walls where the darkness lay waiting. "Y'bfnk-ng'haiie…"
I cried out. At the same instant light blazed up on the stairway that led to the upper and innocent realms of the ignorant world: blue-white incandescence, like lightning, and the crackle of ozone filled the reeking air.
"My dear Miss Delapore," said Holmes, "if you will pardon my interruption, I fear you are laboring under a misapprehension." He came down the last of the stair, bearing in one hand a metal rod, from which a flickering corona of electricity seemed to sparkle, flowing back to a similar rod held up by Carnaki, who followed him down the stair. Carnaki wore a sort of pack or rucksack upon his back, of the kind one sees porters in Constantinople carrying; a dozen wires joined it to the rod in his hand, and lightnings leaped from that rod to Holmes', seeming to surround the two men in a deadly nimbus of light. The cold glare blanched all color from his face, so that his eyebrows stood out nearly black, like a man who has received a mortal blow and bleeds within.
Looking down at me he asked, as if we shared a cup of tea at Baker Street, "What was your wife's favorite flower?"
Miss Delapore, startled, opened her mouth to speak, but I cried in a convulsion of grief: "How can you ask that, Holmes? How can you speak of my Mary in this place, after what we have seen? Her life was all goodness, all joy, and it was for nothing, do you understand? If this-this blasphemy-this monstrous abyss underlies all of our world, how can any good, any joy exist in safety? It is a mockery-love, care, tenderness… it means nothing, and we are all fools for believing in any of it…"
"Watson!" thundered Holmes, and again Miss Delapore turned her eyes to him in astonishment.
"Watson?" she whispered.
His gaze held mine, and he asked again: "What was Mrs. Watson's favorite flower?"
"Lily of the valley," I said, and buried my face in my hands. Even as I did so I saw-such was the horror and strangeness of my dream-that they were the hands of an elderly man, thin and twisted with arthritis, and the wedding-band that I had never ceased to wear with my Mary's death was gone. "But none of it matters now, nor ever will again, knowing what I now know of the true nature of this world."
Through my weeping I heard Carnaki say softly, "We'll have to switch off the electrical field. I don't think we can get him up the stairs."
"You will be safe," said Miss Delapore's voice. "I command Them now-as did my grandfather, or the thing that for so many years passed itself off as my grandfather. I knew his goal-its goal-was to take over Burnwell's body, as it had taken over my grandfather's fifty years ago. He despised my uncle, as he despised my father, and as he despised me as a woman, thinking us all too weak to withstand the power raised by the Rite of the Book of Eibon. Why else did he bring me home from school, save to lure that poor American to his fate?"
"With a letter blotted with tears," said Holmes drily. "Even in the margins, and the blank upper portion by the address. Hardly the places where a girl's tears would fall while writing, but it's difficult to keep drops from spattering there when they're dipped from a bedroom pitcher with the fingers."
"Had I not written that letter," she replied, "it would be I, not Grandfather, who was given to the Hooded One tonight. At least by luring Burnwell to me I was able to give him poison-brown spider-mushroom, that does not take effect for many days. Grandfather would have had him, one way or another-he does not give up easily."
"And was it you who sent for him, to meet your grandfather in Brighton?"
"No. But I knew it would come. When Grandfather-when Lord Rupert's vampire spirit-entered poor Burnwell's body, that body was already dying, though none knew it but I. I knew Uncle Carstairs had mastered the technique too, of crossing from body to body-I assume it is you who were his target, and not your friend."
"Even so," said Holmes, and his voice was quiet and bitterly cold. "He underestimated me-and both underestimated you, it seems."
And there was the smallest touch of defiance in her voice as she replied, "Men do. Yourself included, it seems."
The snapping hiss of the electricity ceased. I opened my eyes to see them kneeling around me, in the horror of that nighted cavern: Holmes and Carnaki, holding their electrical rods to either of my hands, and Miss Delapore looking into my eyes. Somehow despite the darkness I could see her clearly, could see into her golden eyes, as one can in dreams. What she said to me I do not remember, lost as it was in the shock and cold when Carnaki touched the switch…
I opened my eyes to summer morning. My head ached; when I brought my hand up to touch it, I saw that my wrists were bruised and chafed, as if I had been bound. "You were off your head for much of the night," said Holmes, sitting beside the bed. "We feared you would do yourself an injury-indeed, you gave us great cause for concern."
I looked around me at the simple wall-paper and white curtains of my bedroom at the Cross of Gold in High Clum. I stammered, "I don't remember what happened…"