Page:Weird Tales volume 42 number 04.djvu/54

 I don't know whether it is peculiar to me, but these strange tense evenings of summer always set my imagination working more actively than the chilly autumn and winter nights beloved of the gothically romantic poets.

Keats would begin "In a drear-nighted December ," and Poe's Ulalume would be carried to her tomb in "the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir" on a "night in the lonesome October" and as for the same gentleman's Raven who quoth "Nevermore!"—"Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December"

No, the winter was merely physically uncomfortable. A hot thundery night like this made me mentally uncomfortable. Uneasily, I sensed the imminence of—something. I felt the electric charge slowly but unrelentingly building itself up in the air afbout me, forming something unknown but black and inimical, growing both in power and in consciousness of its power, awaiting with evil excitement the hour of its unleashing.

Damn it, I thought, I have been thinking too much upon these things. This was the last novel I would write about the occult. The trouble with such an occupation was that the story becomes real to you as you write it, and you are disposed to picture warlocks and werewolves as things you might find in a dark corner of the coal-cellar at some unlucky moment. Especially when you have deliberately retired to solitude to "get into" your book.

The glow of my self-esteem had now died somewhere among these unhealthy thoughts. I had walked too far and become over-tired. The haven of my cottage seemed suddenly desirable, and I forced my heavy feet to quicken their lagging pace.

Here now was the pinewood, like a blot of India ink on the lesser darkness of the night. One hundred yards within it lay the cottage, but despite my impatience they were the slowest hundred yards I traversed that night. Charon himself would have tripped over something in the pitch-blackness of the wood. Nothing of the distant flickering of the lightning penetrated here. I had literally to feel my way along the path.

HEN all of a sudden 1 stopped in surprise, my hand on the bole of a pine. Somewhere ahead of me glimmered a faint patch of light—green light.

As I watched it, it moved back and forth with a sort of dreadful deliberate slowness. Then it stood still, and as I peered at it I discovered a black cross, as it were, intersecting it. Abruptly the light disappeared, and left me with the realization that the black cross had been the silhouette of the center of the cottage window's frame.

Somebody—or something—was in the cotttagecottage [sic]. My heart started going like a two-stroke engine.

Then the human habit of rationalizing unaccountable things came to the fore. It had been a firefly or a jack-o'-lantern of marsh gas from the stagnant pond not far beyond the cottage. Or again—this was the sort of weather that generated those globes of ball lightning which sometimes pop down chimneys and float around inside rooms. Or maybe a tramp was searching either for a bed for the night or for the money for one. But—with a green light?

I waited a while, but there was no return of the phenomenon. I hoped that, whatever it was, it had gone away. Then I fumbled my way through the last few yards to the door and let myself in.

In the darkness within I lit a match and by its feeble light surveyed the room. The words "Is anybody there?" died in my mouth, for it was manifest that there was nobody.

I conveyed the flame to the oil lamp, and the room became bright and cheerful; the shelves of books still in their original colored dust jackets gladdened my eye, as the sight of them always did, and the model galleon, the vase of marigolds, the shining pewter tankards were all familiar and reassuring things.

Nevertheless, I poured myself a scotch and soda before I settled down in the armchair by the tireless hearth to read over and polish the thousands of words I had scribbled that day.