Page:Weird Tales Volume 10 Number 4 (1927-10).djvu/66



ERITAGE had passed the stage where he was conscious of hunger. Indeed, there was an almost complete and ascetic severance of mental and physical consciousness, a serene exhilaration in which his mind functioned with amazing clarity.

Questions for whose answer he had often groped blindly were now revealed to him as vividly as a strange countryside is photographed upon the brain at night by a flash of lightning. He did not ponder on futile puzzles whose answer is a matter of numerals or statistical details, but for the first time he was able to grasp the meaning of eternity without beginning or end, of an universe without boundaries. Such a childish device as our Time conception amused him. He perceived the reasonableness of the Fourth Dimension, of other dimensions beyond.

Meanwhile, as he passed through the darkness, it seemed to him that he was immensely tall, his head among the stars, and that instead of walking he remained fixed in space while past him, on either hand, fled the trees and fields, the little hills and the scattered farmsteads. He realized that such a state could not long endure; that his mind was nicely balanced on a thin blade of consciousness from which the slightest breath would overbalance it and plunge him into dark hallucinations. He must eat soon, or delirium would claim him.

It was therefore with a fierce joy that at last, amid all these miles of darkened houses, he beheld a little house whose every window blazed with lights. Candle-lights; for as he drew near he observed that lighted candles stood in rows on every sill.

Candles are in cathedrals, and coffee-houses. They are lighted in joy and sorrow. They grace austere old houses where are much worn silver and old books and solid furniture polished by generations of hands, and frowning portraits on faded walls. They burn in thieves' cellars. They are gay, arrogant, furtive. Seen in this isolated house, and long past midnight, they could indicate but one occasion: death!

Heritage, forgetting his first impulse to ask for food, was moved to pause here to pay his respects to the dead. With the urbanity of famine, he would salute the still one, old man, woman, child, with a hail and farewell.

He entered in; and as he thrust open the unlocked door, a venerable man rose and bowed. "I have been waiting," he said simply. "I knew you would come."

"How could you know, when I only took this road, a strange one to me, by chance?"

The old man smiled. "There is no such thing as chance. Of course, I could not know that it would be you, in particular. But someone was bound to come. I need an acolyte, that I may complete my task."

He looked down upon a little trestleboard over which had been thrown a gaudy red tablecloth, and upon which lay a long roll of fine white linen cloth, like a cocoon, with two large candles burning at each end.

The old man, Heritage noted as his eyes became accustomed to the flicker of many little candle flames, wore across his shoulders what appeared to be one of a pair of velour