Page:Stirring Science Stories, March 1942.djvu/52

 me. He leaped across the distance between us, his face desperate and contorted, whispering: "We're going to some hotel. I'll come back and see you tonight. Have to explain. You don't know—"

"Coffee!" gaily announced Mrs. Leonard, carrying in the tray.

I rose gallantly, and very much surprised. "How in Heaven's name did you make it so quickly?" I demanded.

"You don't think I made it with that fancy glass thing of yours, do you?" she laughed. "I have more sense than that."

"But you couldn't have had time to boil the water!"

"Silly—there was a pan of water seething. Oh!" Her hand flew to her mouth. "I hope there wasn't salt or anything in it!" I seemed to remember something about water boiling—perhaps I had meant to prepare a hot cloth for my ankle before going to meet the bus.

"And this," she said, pouring, "is Iowa pan coffee the way my grandmother made it in a covered wagon."

I got a mouthful of grounds and swallowed convulsively. "Those pioneers had courage," I said inanely.

ORKING on a learned monograph revealing factors in the sociology of the Bronx that Fordham University had not even touched, I was baffled by what I had written a few months later. It was done in the style peculiar to some textbooks and degree themes; that is, it was no style at all but an attempt to set down without emotion or effect certain facts in their natural order.

That was the effect which Mac's talk with me that night had. He had come about nine o'clock panting from the climb up the stairs and perspiring profusely. He wouldn't take anything to drink but water.

"It was partly drink that got me into trouble in Council Bluffs," he said. "I'm never going to touch it again." He looked up at the indirect light from the ceiling and blinked. "Would you mind—?" he asked inarticulately. "Eyestrain—"

I turned off the big light and lit a table-lamp which spread a bright pool on the console, leaving the rest of the room obscured. "Now shoot," I said. "And I'm not making any promises about anything tonight. Not one way or another."

"Don't worry," he almost snarled. "I'm not after your damned money." As I started up angrily—and God knows I had a right to be angry—he buried his face in his hands. I sank back into my chair inexpressibly shocked to hear him weeping.

"Easy," I muttered. "No need to go on like that, Mac. What would Nicholas Butler say to hear a Columbia man crying?" The ridiculous joke didn't stop him; he sobbed like a child. No; sobbed like a man, from the diaphragm, where it hurts as if your ribs are being torn out one by one.

He looked up, his eyes streaming, and wiped his face. Returning the handkerchief to his breast pocket he said in a very steady voice: "It isn't the dreams that get you; it's when you know you're awake and they keep on coming."

"Yes?" I asked, leaning back. I thought he was delirious.

"Shut up. I'm telling you everything—don't you see? It's your fault anyway—waking me up when I was dreaming James Branch Cabell—showing me the way things happen."

"Go on," I said after a long pause. He didn't seem to hear me, for it was an equally long time before he made a curious choking sound and said:

"I think I have been in Hell for the past few years, old ink-blotter. But I recall a very special chapter of the book. Allow me to describe it. There is, first of all, a large, rocky cavern." He paused again and leaned back, speaking in a very faint, rasping voice, as though he could not bear the sounds of the words he was saying.

"And there is very foolish talk going on. There are people in the cavern who think they are Satanists, or something like it. They have prepared fantastic things—a long table, various dyes and pigments. Very foolish. They are well-dressed people; it is true, as a rule, that the poor are on the side of God.

"One of the foolish, wealthy people is a woman. She finds it necessary to undress and begin to dance as the others clap their hands. Did I mention that there were fires lighting this cavern? She spins close by the fires, one by one, and makes it a point to burn herself badly in various places. Then, as she falls to the floor, another, a man, has reasons for doing, essentially, what she has done. But the man wears a chain about his neck which he does not remove, and from this chain hangs a small medallion. When the man is very badly burned another woman makes a fool of herself in the same manner, and after her a man.

"Would you believe it if I told you that in all twenty-four people willingly subjected themselves to wide-spread first-degree burns? After hours of this folly they sat in a circle, still without their clothes and mumbled gibberish for twenty minutes or more.

"At that point they had conjured up Satan, theoretically. My guess is that they did nothing of the sort. The incarnation of Evil? No! He would not have let them live or praise him. Something they did conjure up. What it was I do not know, but this is what happened.

"There was, first of all, a noticeable diminution of the firelight. Then appeared a definite blue glow at what would be the apex of the cone about whose basal circumference they were sitting. As that glow grew the fires went out. There was definitely a Presence there

"I don't know what to call it. It was not Satan. There