Page:Weird Tales volume 36 number 01.djvu/47

Rh and a big sooty crow suddenly flapped from a dead limb, rancously crying.

, Julia had been crazy about the place. The sprawling white house on a hilltop had seemed exactly what they were looking for. The land itself was considerably run-down, but for that reason rather wild, very charmingly diversified, and not really like a farm at all.

Cliff Lathrop had joked to their friends about their recently-acquired thirty-acre "estate." It had, he proudly boasted, a hill, a gully, a house, a red barn, a private road, an orchard (no good), a strip of woods (second growth), and a private, spring-fed lake.

Yes, the pond (really a lake to their city-bred eyes) had just about clinched the sale. It lay in a hollow behind the house and at the base of the hill—far enough away so that they were not really troubled with mosquitoes that must have bred in the strip of swamp that surrounded the pond.

The swamp didn't matter, for it was not unsightly. Thick rhododendron grew there, a mass of pink bloom in the late spring. And there were trees and ferns and purple iris. In the muddy shallows of the water grew thin, tall sedge-grass, water-lilies and graceful cat-tails. A shallow ridge of cleared, dry ground—maybe once an old wagon-road—led from the house itself down through the woods to a small floating dock built by some previous owner.

They had planned such a grand summer, but Julia was beginning, now, to hate the place. Even in the bright sunlight she would remember suddenly, and shiver wondering if, after all, the place were really some sort of trap in which, slowly, sanity slipped away until at last you came to accept as a matter of course that which was beyond reason or credibility.

Virginia...

What was happening—what in heaven's name was wrong with the child? From the first, just as they had hoped, she had blossomed happily in the clean country air—frolicked and played from dawn to dusk. But Julia, watchful and puzzled, alert to every nuance of strangeness in Gin's behavior, could no longer deny to herself that there was something weirdly wrong with the child. For either Gin had become obsessed with some vast, elaborate and very complicated kind of lying, or else—

But the alternative she refused, steadfastly, to permit herself to believe, even yet.

"But why be upset?" Cliff asked innocently when, at last, Julia brought herself to speak to him about Gin's lying. "Kid's are always making up things—it's only harmless imagination working overtime."

"It isn't—exactly," Julia said slowly, choosing her words with a certain amount of care. "And you musn't scold her about it—it has the strangest effect. She gets upset, terribly unnerved. And it frightens me because—well, because I can see that she really believes in this imaginary playmate. Oh, you don't know what it's been like! It frightens me—but I didn't want to say anything to you until I was really sure!"

Cliff's mouth opened. He looked at his wife curiously.

"Sure of what? Of her belief, you mean? Well, suppose she does believe, sort of, in this fictitious Tommy? Maybe she's lonely—maybe he's real, in a sort of way, to her childish imaginations—you know, the way people in fairy-tales were real to her, when she was younger? It's just a fad, and she'll outgrow it—maybe get tired of the game when she sees we don't take it very seriously. Seems to me that's the thing to do—tease her out of it, not pull a long face and get all wrought up about something that doesn't even exist—"

But at dinner Cliff's teasing brought unexpected results.

"Well, I hear Virginia's got a beau, eh,