第 八 章 · 第8章

Then at length the darkness, having thus laboriously conceived, brought

forth--a figure. It drew forward into the zone of uncertain light where

fire and shadows mingled, not ten feet away; then halted, staring at

them fixedly. The same instant it started forward again with the

spasmodic motion as of a thing moved by wires, and coming up closer to

them, full into the glare of the fire, they perceived then that--it was

a man; and apparently that this man was--Défago.

Something like a skin of horror almost perceptibly drew down in that

moment over every face, and three pairs of eyes shone through it as

though they saw across the frontiers of normal vision into the Unknown.

Défago advanced, his tread faltering and uncertain; he made his way

straight up to them as a group first, then turned sharply and peered

close into the face of Simpson. The sound of a voice issued from his

lips--

"Here I am, Boss Simpson. I heered someone calling me." It was a faint,

dried up voice, made wheezy and breathless as by immense exertion. "I'm

havin' a reg'lar hellfire kind of a trip, I am." And he laughed,

thrusting his head forward into the other's face.

But that laugh started the machinery of the group of waxwork figures

with the wax-white skins. Hank immediately sprang forward with a stream

of oaths so farfetched that Simpson did not recognize them as English at

all, but thought he had lapsed into Indian or some other lingo. He only

realized that Hank's presence, thrust thus between them, was

welcome--uncommonly welcome. Dr. Cathcart, though more calmly and

leisurely, advanced behind him, heavily stumbling.

Simpson seems hazy as to what was actually said and done in those next

few seconds, for the eyes of that detestable and blasted visage peering

at such close quarters into his own utterly bewildered his senses at

first. He merely stood still. He said nothing. He had not the trained

will of the older men that forced them into action in defiance of all

emotional stress. He watched them moving as behind a glass that half

destroyed their reality; it was dreamlike; perverted. Yet, through the

torrent of Hank's meaningless phrases, he remembers hearing his uncle's

tone of authority--hard and forced--saying several things about food and

warmth, blankets, whisky and the rest ... and, further, that whiffs of

that penetrating, unaccustomed odor, vile yet sweetly bewildering,

assailed his nostrils during all that followed.

It was no less a person than himself, however--less experienced and

adroit than the others though he was--who gave instinctive utterance to

the sentence that brought a measure of relief into the ghastly situation

by expressing the doubt and thought in each one's heart.

"It _is_--YOU, isn't it, Défago?" he asked under his breath, horror

breaking his speech.

And at once Cathcart burst out with the loud answer before the other had

time to move his lips. "Of course it is! Of course it is! Only--can't

you see--he's nearly dead with exhaustion, cold and terror! Isn't _that_

enough to change a man beyond all recognition?" It was said in order to

convince himself as much as to convince the others. The overemphasis

alone proved that. And continually, while he spoke and acted, he held a

handkerchief to his nose. That odor pervaded the whole camp.

For the "Défago" who sat huddled by the big fire, wrapped in blankets,

drinking hot whisky and holding food in wasted hands, was no more like

the guide they had last seen alive than the picture of a man of sixty is

like a daguerreotype of his early youth in the costume of another

generation. Nothing really can describe that ghastly caricature, that

parody, masquerading there in the firelight as Défago. From the ruins of

the dark and awful memories he still retains, Simpson declares that the

face was more animal than human, the features drawn about into wrong

proportions, the skin loose and hanging, as though he had been subjected

to extraordinary pressures and tensions. It made him think vaguely of

those bladder faces blown up by the hawkers on Ludgate Hill, that change

their expression as they swell, and as they collapse emit a faint and

wailing imitation of a voice. Both face and voice suggested some such

abominable resemblance. But Cathcart long afterwards, seeking to

describe the indescribable, asserts that thus might have looked a face

and body that had been in air so rarified that, the weight of atmosphere

being removed, the entire structure threatened to fly asunder and

become--_incoherent_....

It was Hank, though all distraught and shaking with a tearing volume of

emotion he could neither handle nor understand, who brought things to a

head without much ado. He went off to a little distance from the fire,

apparently so that the light should not dazzle him too much, and shading

his eyes for a moment with both hands, shouted in a loud voice that held

anger and affection dreadfully mingled:

"You ain't Défaygo! You ain't Défaygo at all! I don't give a--damn, but

that ain't you, my ole pal of twenty years!" He glared upon the huddled

figure as though he would destroy him with his eyes. "An' if it is I'll

swab the floor of hell with a wad of cotton wool on a toothpick, s'help

me the good Gawd!" he added, with a violent fling of horror and disgust.

It was impossible to silence him. He stood there shouting like one

possessed, horrible to see, horrible to hear--_because it was the

truth_. He repeated himself in fifty different ways, each more

outlandish than the last. The woods rang with echoes. At one time it

looked as if he meant to fling himself upon "the intruder," for his hand

continually jerked towards the long hunting knife in his belt.

But in the end he did nothing, and the whole tempest completed itself

very shortly with tears. Hank's voice suddenly broke, he collapsed on

the ground, and Cathcart somehow or other persuaded him at last to go

into the tent and lie quiet. The remainder of the affair, indeed, was

witnessed by him from behind the canvas, his white and terrified face

peeping through the crack of the tent door flap.

Then Dr. Cathcart, closely followed by his nephew who so far had kept

his courage better than all of them, went up with a determined air and

stood opposite to the figure of Défago huddled over the fire. He looked

him squarely in the face and spoke. At first his voice was firm.

"Défago, tell us what's happened--just a little, so that we can know

how best to help you?" he asked in a tone of authority, almost of

command. And at that point, it _was_ command. At once afterwards,

however, it changed in quality, for the figure turned up to him a face

so piteous, so terrible and so little like humanity, that the doctor

shrank back from him as from something spiritually unclean. Simpson,

watching close behind him, says he got the impression of a mask that was

on the verge of dropping off, and that underneath they would discover

something black and diabolical, revealed in utter nakedness. "Out with

it, man, out with it!" Cathcart cried, terror running neck and neck with

entreaty. "None of us can stand this much longer ...!" It was the cry of

instinct over reason.

And then "Défago," smiling _whitely_, answered in that thin and fading

voice that already seemed passing over into a sound of quite another

character--

"I seen that great Wendigo thing," he whispered, sniffing the air about

him exactly like an animal. "I been with it too--"

Whether the poor devil would have said more, or whether Dr. Cathcart

would have continued the impossible cross examination cannot be known,

for at that moment the voice of Hank was heard yelling at the top of his

voice from behind the canvas that concealed all but his terrified eyes.

Such a howling was never heard.

"His feet! Oh, Gawd, his feet! Look at his great changed--feet!"

Défago, shuffling where he sat, had moved in such a way that for the

first time his legs were in full light and his feet were visible. Yet

Simpson had no time, himself, to see properly what Hank had seen. And

Hank has never seen fit to tell. That same instant, with a leap like

that of a frightened tiger, Cathcart was upon him, bundling the folds of

blanket about his legs with such speed that the young student caught

little more than a passing glimpse of something dark and oddly massed

where moccasined feet ought to have been, and saw even that but with

uncertain vision.

Then, before the doctor had time to do more, or Simpson time to even

think a question, much less ask it, Défago was standing upright in front

of them, balancing with pain and difficulty, and upon his shapeless and

twisted visage an expression so dark and so malicious that it was, in

the true sense, monstrous.

"Now _you_ seen it too," he wheezed, "you seen my fiery, burning feet!

And now--that is, unless you kin save me an' prevent--it's 'bout time

for--"

His piteous and beseeching voice was interrupted by a sound that was

like the roar of wind coming across the lake. The trees overhead shook

their tangled branches. The blazing fire bent its flames as before a

blast. And something swept with a terrific, rushing noise about the

little camp and seemed to surround it entirely in a single moment of

time. Défago shook the clinging blankets from his body, turned towards

the woods behind, and with the same stumbling motion that had brought

him--was gone: gone, before anyone could move muscle to prevent him,

gone with an amazing, blundering swiftness that left no time to act. The

darkness positively swallowed him; and less than a dozen seconds later,

above the roar of the swaying trees and the shout of the sudden wind,

all three men, watching and listening with stricken hearts, heard a cry

that seemed to drop down upon them from a great height of sky and

distance--

"Oh, oh! This fiery height! Oh, oh! My feet of fire! My burning feet of

fire ...!" then died away, into untold space and silence.

Dr. Cathcart--suddenly master of himself, and therefore of the

others--was just able to seize Hank violently by the arm as he tried to

dash headlong into the Bush.

"But I want ter know,--you!" shrieked the guide. "I want ter see! That

ain't him at all, but some--devil that's shunted into his place ...!"

Somehow or other--he admits he never quite knew how he accomplished

it--he managed to keep him in the tent and pacify him. The doctor,

apparently, had reached the stage where reaction had set in and allowed

his own innate force to conquer. Certainly he "managed" Hank admirably.

It was his nephew, however, hitherto so wonderfully controlled, who gave

him most cause for anxiety, for the cumulative strain had now produced a

condition of lachrymose hysteria which made it necessary to isolate him

upon a bed of boughs and blankets as far removed from Hank as was

possible under the circumstances.

And there he lay, as the watches of that haunted night passed over the

lonely camp, crying startled sentences, and fragments of sentences, into

the folds of his blanket. A quantity of gibberish about speed and height

and fire mingled oddly with biblical memories of the classroom. "People

with broken faces all on fire are coming at a most awful, awful, pace

towards the camp!" he would moan one minute; and the next would sit up

and stare into the woods, intently listening, and whisper, "How terrible

in the wilderness are--are the feet of them that--" until his uncle came

across to change the direction of his thoughts and comfort him.

The hysteria, fortunately, proved but temporary. Sleep cured him, just

as it cured Hank.

Till the first signs of daylight came, soon after five o'clock, Dr.

Cathcart kept his vigil. His face was the color of chalk, and there were

strange flushes beneath the eyes. An appalling terror of the soul

battled with his will all through those silent hours. These were some of

the outer signs ...

At dawn he lit the fire himself, made breakfast, and woke the others,

and by seven they were well on their way back to the home camp--three

perplexed and afflicted men, but each in his own way having reduced his

inner turmoil to a condition of more or less systematized order again.