Page:Weird Tales Volume 8 Number 3 (1926-09).djvu/121

 with some secret mirth. “You wouldn’t dare——”

“That is sufficient!” cried out the doctor, his voice raised with high authority. “Go home, Gretel! Go to your room. Sit down, think”

“She’s coming to herself,” interrupted Gretel, those sly eyes now on Bessie’s wide hazel orbs. “Did you hear what I said, Bessie Gillespie? Well, I’ll say more. I’m sorry Dale came when he did, and the next time I come to you, Bessie, I won’t come so gently,” croaked the doctor’s wife venomously.

“Oh!” cried out Bessie, appealing to Dale with anxious face.

“This man whom you think so wonderful, Bessie, is the cause of my —of my being—what I am.” Gretel broke into wild sobbing, beating the air with clawlike fingers while great tears tumbled down her working face. “He can’t deny it,” she choked out. “I was an innocent, unsuspecting girl, and he”

“Oh, my God!” cried the baited physician in a kind of dogged despair. “Will you go home, Gretel?”

“Is it your fault? Tell her that, at least!” snarled his wife, tears and sobs ceasing with as much abruptness as they had begun.

There was a moment’s silence. Bessie, sitting on the floor, her eyes going from one to the other, now sought the doctor’s face, and his gaze, deep and melancholy, rested on her questioning but trustful countenance. At last he spoke, heavily:

“It was my fault, but”

“You hear that?” Gretel shrieked exultantly. “He made me the Thing I have become, and now he wants to shut me up in one room until I die,” she relapsed whiningly, and cringed before the darkness of her husband’s lowering eyes.

Dale went across the room and extended his hands to Bessie, helping her to her feet and then to a chair. He scratched a match and soon the cheery, comforting yellow glow of the kerosene lamp brightened the eery shadows in the room, so that what had happened in that dancing half-light, what had been said even, appeared all at once a fantasy.

"I’m going,” said Mrs. Armitage shortly, to her husband. “I’m—I’m sorry—in a way—for what has occurred tonight.” Her eyes went to Bessie’s still pale face in a peculiar fashion.

“Gretel, to hear you say you are sorry,” began the doctor, when she spoke again, hastily.

“I was too precipitate,” she murmured, hatefully. “I should have waited for a better opportunity,” and she laughed vindictively.

“Go home, Gretel, before you anger me beyond my power of control,” commanded the doctor, pointing to the door.

“You trust me to go alone, Dale? Aren’t you afraid I may?”

“You dare not!” he snapped at her sharply.

A wild cachinnation pealed from the red lips. The pointed little tongue moistened Gretel’s mouth, protruding from the white pointed teeth with the lightning rapidity of a serpent’s forked one. Her shoulders shook with her ugly mirth, its malignant undertones making Bessie shudder

“So I am to go on home, with the agreeable prospect ahead of me of being immured for life?” said she. “And I am to leave my husband here with his new, his latest, fancy?” she finished scathingly, stabbing at Bessie with her light, pointed words. “Well, my dear, you are welcome to him, if you want him. He ’ll be mine, eventually. And in the meantime, I’d far rather have your complaisant, unsophisticated brother,” she finished, with another peal of strange, eery laughter, as she went out into the night through the open cabin door. “But do not forget. Dale isn’t too