Page:Weird Tales Volume 27 Number 02 (1936-02).djvu/99

226 she believes you are going to get to the point of actually seeing hallucinations. You will have to be looked after, but we won’t have you looking after your baby any more. But where—where is Norn?”

"When you fell asleep” I began.

"I fainted,” he corrected me irritably. "Your quarreling with Norn was too much for me. Don’t do it again.”

"I won’t!” I promised light-heartedly. I was becoming increasingly sure that Norn would never return. Something about the house told me so—my own house again, protecting and sheltering me and my child. The very look of the morning sunlight, the sound of the birds in the tall, whispering trees, were telling me good tidings. I felt sure the monsters would never come back—would never come back. I felt sure

"After you became entirely unconscious, Mr. Wolf, Dorothy and Norn all went outside—I suppose they wanted to look at the moon. It was beautiful last night.

"Little Mary Rose ran out too, and was running away, and we all went after her. But Norn, Dorothy and Mr. Wolf got into an argument. Dorothy slipped off somewhere by herself—but I left Norn and Mr. Wolf fighting it out, down the path toward the wood. I caught up with Mary Rose and brought her back. I left them fighting”

My father made one more effort at command.

"Don’t say ’fighting’. Show some respect. Mr. Wolf has been Norn’s good and lifelong friend, and if they had a disagreement”

"They had!” I interrupted blithely. "Somehow, I believe you’ll have a chance to know where they went if you’ll walk down the wood path. Please do. I will get breakfast.”

He went away grumbling, and I set the table—for three. But only little Mary Rose and I could eat. It was horrible, what my father found down there, and the events of the next few days were sad and gruesome. But I could not be sorry, and they did not take my appetite. I had been through too much for that.

He found my aunt and her old friend, Mr. Wolf, literally torn to pieces beside the wood path. Some huge animals, escaped from God knew where—there was never a theory advanced to account for the marks on their bodies.

And the little yellow fox never was seen again, nor was my cousin Dorothy. Police searched for months for the yellow-haired girl, and Aunt Mugsie still writes to me sorrowfully about her. I am sorry, desperately sorry for Aunt Mugsie. Even to think of losing a child of one’s own

that I ought to close this record with a word of explanation; not to explain away what actually happenednot to throw up a smoke screen, to pretend to offer any alternate theory to the dreadful conjectures such things force upon the unwilling mind. There is no sense in such an attempt. I know now, of course, just what is meant by lycanthropy. I know how the old, discredited legends first came into being, on what desperately true phenomena they were based.

I do not know, I do not pretend to know, the exact mechanics of such dire transmutations of being as I unwillingly witnessed. I do not know how far the inner nature of man molds his body, the atoms of which are all thrown off and changed, replaced and altered in their entirety, every seven years. I do not know to what extent the mere giving of one’s self to evil may in rare instances effect the working out of alterations beyond anything we have ever suspected or dreamed of.