It was just the right place for an encounter with an enchantress. There was a long stretch of shining beach, with a sand dune towering up behind it, and in the near distance a high white steeple and the sun-gilded roofs of a small New England village from which I had just departed for a dip in the sea. It was vacation time, always a good time to be a guest at an inn that you like straight off, if only because not a single jarring note accompanies your arrival with a worn and battered suitcase and an eye for oak paneling that dates back a century or more.
The village seemed sleepy and unchanged, always a splendid thing in midsummer when you’ve had yqur fill of city noises and smoke and bustle and the intolerable encroachments of the “do this” and “do that” brigade.
I’d seen her at breakfast time, with her two small children, a boy and a girl, taking up all of her attention until I sat down at a table a short distance away and stared steadily at her for a moment. I couldn’t help it. She would have drawn all eyes in a parade of glamorous models. A widow? I wondered. A divorcee? Or — banish the thought — a happily married woman whose thoughts never strayed?
It was impossible to know, of course. But when she looked up and saw me she nodded slightly and smiled, and for a moment nothing seemed to matter but the fear that she was so very beautiful my stare would reveal my inmost thoughts.
New arrivals at small village inns are often greeted with a smile and a nod by the kindly disposed, solely to put them at their ease and make them feel that they are the opposite of outsiders. I wasn’t deceived on that score. But still—
Meeting her now, between the dune and the sea, with her children still on opposite sides of her, I was unprepared for more than another smile and nod. I had emerged from around the dune, coming into view so abruptly that she might well have looked merely startled, and it made the explicit nature of her greeting seem astonishing indeed.
She raised her arm and waved to me, and called out: “Oh, hello! I didn’t expect to see anyone from the inn here so early. You can be of great help to me.”
“In what way?” I asked, trying to keep from looking as flustered as I felt and crossing to her side in several not-too-hurried strides.
“I cut my hand rather badly just now on a razor-sharp shell,” she said. “But I’m not in the least worried. It’s just that — it was terribly stupid of me, and I haven’t a handkerchief. If you have one—”
“Of course,” I said. “We’ll get it bound up in short order. But you’d better let me look at it first.”
Her hand was velvety soft in my clasp, and so beautiful that for a moment I hardly noticed the cut on her palm. It was bleeding a little but not profusely, even though it wasn’t exactly a scratch. It took me only a moment to wrap a handkerchief twice around the middle of her hand and knot it securely just below her wrist.
“That should take care of it,” I said. “For now. If you’re not returning to the inn soon you can take the bandage off when the bleeding stops and douse it in seawater. There’s no better antiseptic. A rusty nail and a seashell are worlds apart, antiseptically speaking.”
“You’ve been most helpful,” she said, seeming not to care that I was taking my time in releasing her hand. “I’m more grateful than I can say.”
The children were fidgeting about with their toes turned in, looking reproachfully from their mother to me and back again. There is nothing children resent more than to be totally ignored when an introduction can be achieved in a matter of seconds. The gulf that yawns between a child and an adult can be spanned to an incredible extent at times with no more than & gesture, and most children are wise enough to know when they are being cheated of an enriching experience for no reason at all.
It seemed suddenly to occur to her that she had failed even to introduce herself, and she made amends quickly in a threefold way. “I’m Helen Rathbourne,” she said. “When my husband died I didn’t think I’d ever find myself at the inn again. I felt that coming here would bring back — well, too many things. But I do love this place. Everything about it is irresistibly enchanting. The children adore it too.
She patted her son on the shoulder and took a strand of her daughter’s windblown hair and twined it about her finger. “John is eight and Susan is six,” she said. “John is a young explorer. When he goes adventuring every land is a far land, no matter how near it may be geographically.”
She smiled. “He prefers simple weapons. A bow and a sheaf of arrows suit him quite well. He has slain some incredible beasts just through the accuracy of his aim.”
“I don’t doubt that for a moment,” I said. “Hello, John.”
He had seemed a little on the shy side, but there was no trace of shyness in the prideful way he held himself when we shook hands. It was as if, in some hidden recess of his mind, he believed every word his mother had just said about him.
“Susan’s quite different,” she went on, her eyes crinkling in a wholly enchanting way. “Most of her adventuring is done on ‘wings of bright imagining,’ as some poet must have phrased it sometime in the past, perhaps far back in the Victorian age. I’m not good at making such lines up.”
“I’m sure you’re mistaken,” I told her. “I read a great deal of poetry, both traditional and avant-garde, and I can’t recall ever having encountered that particular line.”
“ ‘Stumbled over’ would be better,” she said.
“It’s a little grandiose,” I conceded. “But when you say it, it doesn’t sound that way at all. I know exactly what you have in mind. Susan likes to dream away the hours sitting by a window ledge, with potted geraniums obscuring just a little of the view — a seascape or rolling hills with a snow-capped mountain looming in the distance.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I can shoot down a compliment like that faster than you might suspect, as a rule, armed with just one of John’s arrows. But when you say it—”
We both laughed.
“Susan’s not a tomboy,” she added thoughtfully. “But she won’t take any guff from John or any of his friends. You should have seen how fast she was running along the beach just now, outdistancing him in a few seconds. They are both children to be proud of, don’t you think?”
“Indeed I do,” I assured her. “I sensed that straight off. It doesn’t really need to be pointed up in any way.”
“Thank you again,” she said. “I must confess that, on rare occasions, I have a few doubts. But it’s amazing how quickly children can make an adult change his mind about them when forgiveness becomes of paramount importance—”
I should have known that if what she had said about her son’s exploring urge was true — and I had no reason to doubt it — it would have been impossible to keep him still for more than a moment or two. But I was not prepared for the harm he did to our conversation just as it was reaching a most rewarding stage by turning about and dashing off so abruptly that concern for his safety drove every other thought from her mind.
“John, come back here!” she called. “Right this minute.1"
She had followed him out across the beach, almost running, before I saw what had alarmed her. He had not merely bypassed the surf line and headed for a section of the beach strewn with the wreckage of a recent storm. He had climbed up on rotting boards of a washed-ashore, storm-shattered breakwater and was staring down at a side channel of swirling dark water which almost bisected the beach at precisely that point. Just below where he stood on one of the boards, precariously perched, the water had widened out into a pool that was unrippled by the wind and had a deep, black, extremely ominous look. It had been made more hazardous by the way the wreckage extended out over it here and there, with edges so jagged a pitchfork would have seemed far less menacing.
I caught up with her before she could quite accomplish what her son had achieved with close to miraculous speed. There is no accounting for the swift way a small boy can travel from place to place when some wildly impulsive notion takes firm root in his mind.
“Don’t be alarmed,” I urged, hurrying along at her side. “Kids his age do reckless things at times simply because they just don’t think. But we do, and it will take only a moment to get him down.”
“He’s not listening to me!” she protested. “That’s what alarms me. I’ve never known him to be so stubborn.”
“He’ll listen to me," I assured her. “He may just be starting to feel the need for some stern father-to-son talk. If a kid has to go without something he’s once known too long—”
“I don’t want him to fall!” she said, as if she hadn’t heard me, and before I could go on. “I’m so terribly worried.”
“You can stop worrying,” I assured her. “He’ll climb straight down the instant I raise my voice.”
I was far from sure that he would. But it wasn’t just an idle boast to impress her. I was genuinely concerned for the boy’s safety, and there was no excuse for what he was doing now. He could, I felt, have at least answered his mother’s almost frantic appeals. Refusing to obey was one thing, totally ignoring her concern quite another.
When I reached the piled-up mass of wreckage he had moved even closer to the edge of the demolished breakwater, and the board on which he was standing seemed rickety in the extreme. It was so rotted away in spots that the swirling dark tides just beyond the almost rippleless pool were visible through the warped and nearly vertical far end of it. Something about the shape of it struck a chill to my heart. The supporting beams of a gallows might well have had just such a look, with both vertical and horizontal aspects, to the blurring vision of a condemned man awaiting swift oblivion.
Being parentally harsh is very difficult for me, because I’ve always felt that the young are frequently justified in their rebellion, and as often as not I find myself on their side. But now I was very angry and felt not the slightest trace of sympathy for a boy who could cause his mother so much unnecessary anguish.
“John, get down!” I shouted at him. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”
I suddenly felt that shouting was not needed and went on just loudly enough to make sure he’d catch every word. “I see I was wrong in believing everything your mother told me about you. No courageous explorer I’ve ever known took meaningless risks with his life. You’ve got to think of other people. How can you be so cruel, so thoughtless? Your mother—”
I stopped abruptly, noticing for the first time that there was a faraway look in his eyes and that he did not appear to be listening. He was clasping something in his right hand, and suddenly he opened his fingers and stared down at it, as if only the object mattered, and everything I had said had gone unheeded.
And that was when it happened. That was when the terrible mistake I’d made by not climbing up without saying a word and grabbing hold of him dawned on me. But perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered. Even if he failed to put up a struggle, just my added weight on the board might have caused it to collapse anyway.
It collapsed with a dreadful splintering sound. The warped and upended, almost rotted away, portion fell first into the dark beach- bisecting channel, followed quickly by the part of it on which he had been standing. He went with that part so swiftly into the water that no slightest sound came from below the wreckage for ten full seconds. Then I heard only the gurgling of the water as it subsided, the initial splash having been a great deal louder. Despite that loudness I was quite sure that if he had made some outcry before vanishing I would have heard it.
My immediate, overwhelming emotion was one of horror, mingled with disbelief and a sudden gratefulness. The gratefulness was due solely to the fact that I had come to the beach to go swimming, and wore only bathing trunks beneath a light summer bathrobe.
I kicked off my sneakers first and discarded the bathrobe almost simultaneously with my swift ascent of the wreckage adjacent to the vanished part of the storm-shattered breakwater. I had no way of knowing how deep the water might be at that particular spot, but when a narrow channel widens out into a pool it is likely to have a greater depth as well, and I was nine-tenths sure it was the opposite of shallow.
I remained for a moment staring down at that dark expanse of water, until I became convinced that no bobbing young head seemed likely to send a great wave of relief surging over me, for more additional seconds than I cared to risk wasting.
To have dived in would have risked a stunning blow to my head from the cluttered wreckage, which projected out over the pool in a dozen directions. So I let myself down slowly and cautiously before swimming out into the sluggishly moving current.
I abandoned my overhand strokes to plunge into the depths at about the spot where it seemed most likely John had been swallowed up. The farther I descended the less sluggish the current became, and I was soon being carried erratically back and forth in a tide-buffeted fashion.
It was my first attempt to save anyone from drowning, and I was lacking in all of the qualities that can make such a rescue attempt quickly successful.
I began to fear I would have to come up for air and descend a second time when I saw him, through a blurry film of dark water. Only vaguely at first and then more distinctly, revolving slowly about as if on some small underwater treadmill that was causing him neither to rise nor to descend farther.
Fortunately he did not struggle when I got to him, as close-to- drowning people are supposed to do unless you caution them in the open air where your voice carries. In another moment I had a tight grip on his arm and was ascending with him through what now seemed a depth of at least twenty fathoms.
Five minutes later he was lying stretched out on the sand at the base of the wreckage, with his mother bending over him. She was sobbing softly and looking up at me, her eyes shining with gratefulness.
No seven-year-old could have looked more capable of summoning to his aid all the innate vitality of the very young of sturdy constitution. The color was flooding back into his cheeks, and his eyes were fluttering open with the stubborn, resolute look of a young explorer who refuses to give up, despite the worst buffetings that fate can inflict.
I suppose I should have felt nothing but relief and sympathy. But I was still angry, and the first words I spoke to him were so harsh that 1 almost instantly found myself regretting them.
“You should have known better than to put your mother through something like this. It’s a good thing you’re not my son. If you were there would be no baseball or anything else for you for one solid month. You’d just have to sit at the window and call down to your friends. Probably they are as bad as you are. Unruly, selfish, totally undisciplined kids run together in wolf cub packs.”
The instant I stopped his eyes opened very wide, and he stared up at me without the slightest trace of hostility or resentment in his gaze. It was as if he realized I had spoken like the kind of person I wasn’t and really could never be.
“I couldn’t help it,” he said. “There was something there I knew I’d find if I looked around for it. I didn’t want to find it. But you can’t help it when you dream about something you don’t want to find, and you can’t wake up in time—”
“You dreamed about it?”
“Not like when I go to sleep. I was just thinking about what it would look like when I found it.”
“And that’s why you ran off the way you did, without warning your mother that you were about to do something dangerous?”
“I couldn’t help it. It was like something was pulling me.”
“You were looking at it when I spoke to you,” I said. “So you must have found it. It’s too bad you lost it when you fell into the water. If you still had it, what you want us to believe might make a little more sense. Not much — but a little.”
“I didn’t lose it,” he said. “It’s right here in my hand.”
“But that’s impossible.”
“No, it isn’t,” his mother said, interrupting us for the first time. “Look how tightly clenched his right hand is.”
I could hardly believe it, if only because it made far more sense to assume that the hands of a boy falling from a collapsing board would have opened and closed many times in a desperate kind of grasping, first at the empty air and then at a smothering wall of water rushing in upon him. What I had failed to recognize was that in such an extremity one may hold on to some small object that has just been picked up — a pebble or a shell — even more tightly.
There might even be — more to it than that. Not only adult men and women, but not a few children, had endured unspeakable torments without relinquishing, even in death, some small object precious to them, or feared by them in some terrible secret way. The Children’s Crusade—
It was hard for me to imagine what could have put such thoughts into my mind, for I hadn’t as much as caught a glimpse of the object which John had seemingly found very quickly. Surely what he had said about it could be dismissed as childish prattle. A dreamlike compulsion, coming upon him suddenly, and forcing him to go in search of it, as if drawn by a magnet. Powerless to resist, unable to break that mysterious binding influence. Not wanting to find it at all, but aware that he had been given no choice. Not wanting—
Susan had joined us beneath the wreckage, ignoring the wishes of her mother, who had waved her back to make her son’s recovery less of a problem. Another small child, hopping about in the sand, would have made it difficult for her to give all of her attention to what I’d just been saying to her son.
But now she was looking at me as if I had added a new, unexpected complication by my two full minutes of silence.
“Let him see what it was you picked up, John,” she said. “Just open your hand and show it to him. You’re making some strange mystery out of it, and so is he. I’d like to see it too. Then we’ll all be happier.”
“I can’t,” John said.
“You can’t what?” I demanded, startled by the look of astonishment and pain that had come into his eyes.
“I can’t move my fingers,” he said. “I just found out. I didn’t try before.”
“Oh, that’s nonsense,” I said. “Listen to me, before you say anything even more foolish. You must have at least tried to move your fingers a dozen or more times before I rescued you. Just as often afterward.”
He shook his head. “That’s not true.”
“It has to be true. That’s your right hand. You use it all the time. Everyone does.”
“I can’t move my fingers,” he reiterated. “If I’d opened my hand it would have fallen out—”
“I know all that,” I said. “But you could have at least found out before this whether you could so much as move your fingers. It would have been a natural thing to do.”
It had been difficult for me to think of his mother in a very special way, so overwrought had she become since I had gone to his rescue. But something of the beach-temptress look had returned when her son had opened his eyes and had seemed no worse for the tragedy that had almost overtaken him. But now she looked distraught again. Sudden fear flamed in her eyes.
“Could it be — hysterical paralysis?” she asked. “It can happen, I’ve been told, in quite young children.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Just try to stay calm. We’ll know in a moment.”
I took her son’s hand, raised it, and looked at it closely. He made no protest. The fingers could not have been more tightly clenched. The nails, I felt, must be biting painfully into the flesh of his palms. His knuckles looked bluish.
I began to work on his fingers, trying my best to force them open. I had no success for a moment. Then, gradually, they seemed to become more flexible and some of the stiffness went out of them.
Quite suddenly his entire hand opened, as if my persistent tugging at each individual finger in turn had broken some kind of spell.
The small object which rested on his palm did not seem to have been compressed or injured in any way by the tight constriction to which it had been subjected. I thought at first it was of metal, so brightly did it gleam in the sunlight. But when I picked it up and looked at it closely I saw that it was of some rubbery substance with merely the sheen of metal.
I had never before looked at any inanimate object quite so horrible. Superficially it resembled a tiny many-tentacled octopus, but there was something about it which would have made the ugliest of sea monsters seem merely fishlike in a slightly repulsive way. It had a countenance, of a sort, a shriveled, sunken old man’s face that was no more than suggestively human. Not a human face at all, really, but the suggestion was there, a hint, at least, of anthropoid intelligence of a wholly malignant nature. But the longer I stared at it the less human it seemed, until I began to feel that I had read into it something that wasn’t there. Intelligence, yes— awareness of some kind, but so much the opposite of anthropoid that my mind reeled at trying to imagine what intelligence would be like if it was as cold as the dark night of space and could exercise a wholly merciless authority over every animate entity in the universe of stars.
I looked at Helen Rathbourne and saw that she was trembling and had turned very pale. I had lowered my hand just enough to enable her to see it clearly, and I knew that her son had seen it again too. He said nothing, just looked at me as if, young as he was, the thought that such an object had been taken from his hand made him feel in some strange way contaminated.
“You picked it up without knowing,” I wanted to shout at him. “Forget it, child — blot it from your mind. I’ll take it to the pool you almost drowned in and let it sink from sight, and we’ll forget we ever saw it.”
But before I could say a word to John or his mother, something began to happen to my hand. It began to happen even before I realized the object was attached to a rusted metal chain and had clearly been designed to be worn as an amulet around someone’s neck.
My fingers closed over it, contracting more and more until I was holding it in as tight a grip as John had done. I couldn’t seem to open them again or hurl the object from me as I suddenly wanted to do.
Something happened then to more than just my hand. Everything about me seemed subtly to change, the contours of near objects becoming less sharply silhouetted against the sky and more distant objects not only losing their sharpness, but seeming almost to dissolve. There was a roaring in my ears, and a strange, terrifying feeling of vastness, of emptiness — I can describe it in no other way — swept over me.
Nothing actually vanished, nothing was gone, but I had the feeling that I was in two places at once — suspended in some vast abyss of emptiness wider than the universe of stars, and still on the beach beneath the wreckage, with Helen Rathbourne, John, and Susan all looking at me in alarm.
They were staring in alarm because I was moving, I felt, in some strange, almost unnatural way, as men and women were not supposed to move. Like some mindless automaton perhaps, a robot shape with no way of preserving its balance because its cybernetic brain had exploded into fragments and it could only stagger about in the grip of an utter mindlessness that was about to cause it to go crashing to the sand.
Then my perceptions steadied a little, and when I looked down over myself I saw that no change had taken place in my physical body at least. But I had swung about and was walking toward the surf line.
Nearer and nearer I came to it, and suddenly I was not alone. John had gotten to his feet, and both children were pursuing me across the sand. Their mother was following them, frantic with concern, but unable to catch up with them because they, were running so fast to join me before I started wading out into the waves that were cresting into foam a few feet from shore.
The instant they reached my side, my hand went out toward Susan and her small trembling fingers crept between mine. I could not give John my other hand, but he was not in need of support. He had become his sturdy young self again and was striding along very rapidly at my side. The water was swirling about my ankles, and Susan was stumbling a little because it had risen to her knees when I spoke the words that had not even formed in my mind, in a voice that I did not recognize as my own:
“The Deep Ones await their followers, and we must not fail to be present at the Great Awakening. It is written that all shall arise and join. We who carry the emblem and those who have looked upon it. From the ends of the earth the summons, the call has come and we must not delay.
“In watery R’lyeh Great Cthulhu is stirring. Shub-Niggurath! Yog-Sothoth! Ia! The Goat with a Thousand Young!”
“He will be all right now,” the young resident physician was saying. “I am sure he will be all right. It was your son who deserves all of the credit by prying that lost amulet from his hand just as he was about to go under, after lifting your daughter above the waves.”
I could hear the voices clearly, although my head was still in a whirl. The crisp white hospital sheets had been so stiffly starched that they cut into the flesh of my throat when I tried to raise my head. So I gave up trying, and went on listening instead.
“It’s strange,” came in a voice I would have recognized if nothing had been left of me but a hollow shell, on the darkest of days, “how quickly children can become attached to a total stranger. Susan risked her life to save him, and so did my son. When he took that hideous thing from my son’s hand and I saw it, I thought I was going to faint. I can’t begin to tell you how unnerving it was.”
“He didn’t know about—”
“How it came to be there? Apparently not. He just arrived at the inn this morning. Since it happened two weeks ago everyone had stopped talking about it. It was so horrible a thing that it doesn’t surprise me in the least.”
“The man was a member of an esoteric cult, I understand. A halfcrazed, uncouth fellow with a waist-length beard. There were eight or ten of them roaming about here at one time, but now they have all disappeared. After what happened, it’s not in the least surprising, as you say.”
“I can’t bear to think about it, even now. His body was dismembered, and horribly mangled. One of his legs was missing. He was found right where my son picked up the amulet, so it must have belonged to him. Of course everyone has a ready explanation for such horrors. Sheriff Wilcox believes that where the channel widens out by that demolished breakwater there is sufficient depth of water to provide a kind of swimming pool for a shark. And if he had stumbled and fallen—”
“Do you think he did?”
“You either have to believe that, or that he went down deliberately into the water. Are you familiar with the writings of H. P. Lovecraft? He was a genius, of a sort. He resided in Providence until his death in 1937.”
“Yes, I’ve read a few of his stories.”
“Those bearded, uncouth cult members you mention must have read them all. Perhaps that’s why they’ve disappeared. Perhaps they made the mistake of taking Lovecraft’s stories a little too seriously.”
“You can’t really believe that.”
“I don’t quite know what I believe. Just suppose — Lovecraft didn’t put everything he knew or suspected into his stories. That would have left a quite wide margin for future exploration.”
“Ah, yes,” the resident physician said. “That’s what he claimed before I gave him that second seconal injection. I’m sure he’ll feel quite differently about all of this when he wakes up.”
“I hope he doesn’t feel differently about Susan’s heroic, close to sacrificial act. Love for a total stranger. It’s curious, but do you know — I can understand just why Susan felt that way about him.”
It was what I’d been waiting to hear. I closed my eyes and started humming softly to myself, waiting for the second seconal to work.
But when it drew me down, the seconal felt like water. Something like a shriveled face came floating up from immeasurable distances, and I remembered my own words: “It is written that all shall arise and join — we who carry the emblem and those who have looked upon it…”