Page:Weird Tales volume 36 number 01.djvu/92

118 and the present, knew that far back beyond the minds of men I had loved him and because a Goddess cannot love a human I had been taken from earth by the jealous God who loved me. Knew that I had put off my Godhead to come back to earth to find my lover age after age and that as Irene I had found him and won him. But he had in his soul remembered the Goddess he had loved in the past and he had gone to find her and as things were ordained discovered the one thing that could bring her back. Now he had called my Godhead to life again and fused together the twin parts. I was a woman and a Goddess, and both woman and Goddess loved him. Strange that I never guessed.

"Harvey!" I called and my ears hardly knew my own voice, it had become so mellow and lovely. "Harvey, my love"

He looked up. "Most glorious!" he cried, then more puzzled: "Irene—Irene, are you—you are the Lost Goddess!"

I wish I could have seen myself at that moment.

I smiled at him and my smile promised all things. "Come to me, my beloved."

He started forward. As he came I caught a reflection of myself in the copper bowl and saw that I was beautiful with an unreal brilliance that was indescribable. I was still human enough to be pleased and to relish the homage in Harvey's eyes.

"It is true. You are the Goddess. No wonder I loved you," Harvey cried.

"Come my beloved, come!" I stretched out my arms to him.

He stumbled across the inner circle and into my arms.

"To touch you—" he whispered, "to see your face—"

I clasped him in my arms. I pressed my lips to his and kissed him. It was a wonderful kiss, the perfect reunion of two lovers, separated for eons. But as it ended I felt him go limp in my arms. I lowered him to the floor and bent closer to him. He lay white and still and the awful truth came to me. The force that was in me had killed my lover! Gods and humans cannot mate, or even kiss.

As this agonizing knowledge came to me I heard a low laugh and a new voice beat on my ears: "At last—at last!"

I had forgotten the Lost God!

There he stood in the inner circle on the other side of Harvey's prostrate body fastening the belt around his waist. Tall, majestic, with the same unearthly beauty that I possessed illuminating his countenance. But his was the cold beauty of a statue. There was no warm, pulsing humanity to temper it. I wondered how I could ever have been drawn to him even in my thoughts.

"So we meet again, my Goddess," he said, "and I owe the meeting to your lover." He touched Harvey's inanimate body with his foot.

I straightened up. "Stop or I will send you back whence you came!"

It must have been no idle threat for I saw him pause. "We will go back together," he said, "there is nothing in this cold, bleak world to hold us. We should never have left it for it was better in the old days. But I had to take you from him. I was wrong then. I should have annihilated him but I didn't know a Goddess would stoop to put aside her Godhead for a creature such as this." He looked at Harvey again.

"I loved him then, I love him now," I said simply. "You were cruel, you still are, Eater of Blood. My hate for you survives."

"He is lost to you now. You have repaid his love with death. A kindly death with your lips on his. I should be jealous but I am not. Come, we waste time. Ever since you left me I have schemed to find you but I couldn't mate with mortal. You had to resume your Godhead before you