Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 4 (1925-04).djvu/66

Rh the ancient wisdom of the Old World along these lines to the superstitious tales of ignorant peasants.

I know from my own experience that these entities are not figments of the fevered imagination. I know that they have arrayed themselves against those who know them and would give them battle. I myself am in deadly peril of their bitter enmity, and one thought only can uphold and strengthen me: God is more powerful than all the combined forces of evil, and while I have a message to give the world, no harm can come to me. When that message has been delivered, my work shall have been finished, and I shall be ready to go, to take up the good fight on another plane of existence.

If I were to relate the whole story in a few terse lines, I am sure that I would be marked down at once as mentally unbalanced and thus my effort to gain the ear of those who can understand would have failed. I must not shear the tale, then, of any of the trifling incidents, the petty happenings, that will unfortunately give my tale the earmarks of fiction for the uninstructed, but must equally place it beyond cavil as a recital of facts in the opinion of the initiated. I shall try, therefore, even at the cost of seeming tedious, to relate even the slightest things that may throw light on an as yet comparatively unknown subject upon the existence of which my claim to sanity, as well as that of my niece Portia and that of Owen Edwardes, depends.

The strange and inexplicable disappearance of two police officers from their station; the unsuccessful attack upon a third; the disappearance of a girl of twelve; these incidents may perhaps be recalled to the memory of citizens of the suburban town where they took place, when they read this explanation of those mysterious happenings. It is of course necessary to disguise to a certain extent the names of the principals in the affair, as well as the name of the town itself; I am not writing to satisfy anyone’s morbid curiosity or to make Lynbrook—let me call it that—a place of pilgrimage. My sole incentive is to notify the "initiated" in America of what has actually taken place in this New World, of this invasion by the evil powers of the Old World’s waste places. This accomplished, I shall feel more than repaid for the effort which it is for me, a woman unaccustomed to writing more than a friendly note, to pen this story which I have an intuition may prove a long one.

Since the heroic deaths, in the World War, of my niece and of Lieutenant Owen Edwardes, I have often debated within myself the advisability of setting down an account of those strange and awful happenings, and at last it was borne in upon me that I must carry on Portia’s work as far as it was possible for me to do so. I lost no time in getting to work, once persuaded where my duty lay.

easy to begin, because my part in it really started with Portia’s letter inviting me to make my home with her in Lynbrook.

Portia was the only child of my brother Chester, who was killed with his wife in an automobile accident in a day when automobiles were a rarity and not as perfect in their mechanism as they are nowadays. Portia was fifteen at that time. She was left an orphan with little or no means of support, as Chester, manager of the sales department of the Wilton Front Lace Corset Company, had lived up to his income to the last penny. I was, I suppose, the only living relative the child had here in the East, and when I found by inquiry that her mother’s people were far from well-to-do ranchers in Montana and that Portia had scholarly ambitions, I decided to take