Page:Weird Tales volume 36 number 01.djvu/88

114 I followed out my resolution but nothing happened—nothing. I slept a deep, dreamless sleep and had the first really good night I had had since I saw Harvey dreaming of the Lost Goddess—to give the Dream Woman her proper title.

Harvey entered the mud hut as I finished my breakfast.

One look at him and I knew something unusual had happened. He was seething with excitement.

"Irene, it's all true," he exclaimed. "Every word Juan said. Last night I dreamed—not of her"—the way he said the pronoun made me crawl with jealousy —"but of him, the Lost God. He came to me and told me what to do. You must help me, Irene. Think how wonderful it will be to see those shining ones in the flesh—to bring them back to rule the world!"

"I like the world as it is—Oh, Harvey!" I caught his hands. "Can't we forget all this? It's an ordinary legend and it's preyed on your mind to the extent you did dream of him but that doesn't mean there's truth, in the dream or the story. It's too utterly fantastic."

"The picture and the jewels were real."

He had me there.

"Don't you see, Irene? This is my mission in life. What I was born for—to be the opener of the way. That's why I've always dreamed of her. I understand now why I have been a man tortured and divided by loving two women. It was to spur me on. I will always worship the Lost Goddess but it is you that I really love. I know mortals cannot mate with Gods. But I can serve her; so can you. We can worship them together—will you, Irene?"

"Yes, Harvey," I heard myself saying. I could never resist the pleading in his voice. I didn't remind him that his Goddess had urged him to kill me, because I had decided in one swift moment I would rather die than go on sharing Harvey with her. Besides if he did as his dreams commanded and nothing happened the ghost would be laid. And if the Gods materialized I had faith in the man-God to manage his wife. The Lost God's face had haunted me ever since I had seen it pictured on the wall. It had drawn me with a strange fascination that I struggled against and even now would not admit. I loved Harvey but my heart beat faster at the thought of actually seeing the Lost God.

Somehow I was no longer afraid.

E GOT back to Mexico City without any further happening worth recording.

Harvey continued to dream. Each night the God came to him and gave him instruction as to what he was to do, all of which Harvey wrote down and kept from me. To my great satisfaction the Goddess didn't ever figure in his dreams. Nor did he seem to miss her presence. I began to hope. We motored back with the family and the Mexican custom officers little suspected the precious antiques we were smuggling out of their country, which we hid under the hood of our car.

We settled in our new house on father's estate at Locust Valley. Harvey took two emeralds from the girdle of the Goddess which I still wore, and sold them for a fabulous sum on the Dream God's instructions. What the other stones and the necklace would be worth was almost beyond comprehension. With part of the money Harvey bought land on the ocean front between Southampton and Quogue. Ostensibly he began to build a summer home. Only he and I knew it was a home for the Lost Gods, built entirely on their specifications. I was not to see it until it was ready for Harvey and I to perform the last final ceremony for the opening of the way.

Harvey was calmer and less mystical than I had ever seen him. He clung to me and we were quite happy. By tacit consent