New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

Beneath the table Harry stretched out a leg towards hers, felt something cold and hairy arching against his calf as might a cat. A cat, yes, it must be one of the local cats, fresh in from mousing in the evening fields. He edged the thing to one side with his foot... but she was already on her feet, smiling, holding out a hand to him.

They danced, and he discovered gypsy in her, and strangeness, and magic. She bought him a red mask and positioned it over his face with fingers that were cool and sure. The wine began to go down that much faster...

It came almost as a surprise to Harry to find himself in the car, in the front passenger seat, with the girl driving beside him. They were just pulling away from the bright lights of the Schiitzenfest, but he did not remember leaving the great barn. He felt more than a little drunk - with pleasure as much as with wine.

'What's your name?' he asked, not finding it remarkable that he did not already know. Only the sound of the question seemed strange to him, as if a stranger had spoken the words.

'Cassilda,' she replied.

'A nice name,' he told her awkwardly. 'Unusual.'

'I was named after a distant... relative.'

After a pause he asked: 'Where are we going, Cassilda?'

'Is it important?'

'I'm afraid we can't go to Szolyhaza - ' he began to explain.

She shrugged, 'My... home, then.'

'Is it far?'

'Not far, but -'

'But?'

She slowed the car, brought it to a halt. She was a shadowy silhouette beside him, her perfume washing him in warm waves. 'On second thoughts, perhaps I had better take you straight back to your hotel - and leave you there.'

'No, I wouldn't hear of it,' he spoke quickly, seeing his hopes for the night crumbling about him, sobered by the thought that she could so very easily slip out of his life. The early hours of the morning would be the time enough for slipping away - and he would be doing it, not the girl. 'You'd have to walk home, for one thing, for I'm afraid I couldn't let you take the car...' To himself he added: And I know that taxis aren't to be found locally.

'Listen,' he continued when she made no reply, 'you just drive yourself home. I'll take the car from there back to my hotel.'

'But you do not seem steady enough to drive.'

'Then perhaps you'll make me a cup of coffee?' It was a terribly juvenile gambit, but he was gratified to see her smiling behind her mask.

Then, just as quickly as the smile had come, it fell away to be replaced by a frown he could sense rather than detect in the dim glow of the dashboard lights.

'But you must not see where I live.''Why on earth not?'

'It is not... a rich dwelling.'

'I don't care much for palaces.'

'I don't want you to be able to find your way back to me afterward. This can be for one night only...'

Now this, Harry thought to himself, is more like it! He felt his throat going dry again. 'Cassilda, it can't possibly be for more than one night,' he gruffly

answered. Tomorrow I leave for Budapest.' 'Then surely it is better that -' 'Blindfold me!' 'What?'

'Then I won't be able to see where you live. If you blindfold me I'll see nothing except... your room.'

He reached across and slipped his hand inside her silk blouse, caressing a breast.

She reached over and stroked his neck, then pulled gently away. She nodded knowingly in the darkness: 'Yes, perhaps we had better blindfold you, if you insist upon handling everything that takes your fancy!'

She tucked a black silk handkerchief gently down behind his mask, enveloping him in darkness.

Exposed and compromised as she did this, she made no immediate effort to extricate herself as he fondled her breasts through the silk of her blouse. Finally, breathing the words into his face, she asked: 'Can you not wait?' 'It's not easy.'

'Then I shall make it easier.' She took his hands away from her body, sat back in her seat, slipped the car into gear and pulled away. Harry sat in total darkness, hot and flushed and full of lust.

'We are there,' she announced, rousing him from some peculiar torpor. He was aware only of silence and darkness. He felt just a trifle queasy and told himself that it must be the effect of being driven blindfolded over poor roads. Had he been asleep? What a fool he was making of himself;

'No,' she said as he groped for the door handle. 'Let's just sit here for a moment or two. Open a bottle, I'm thirsty.'

'Bottle? Oh, yes!' Harry suddenly remembered the two bottles of wine they had brought with them from the Schiitzenfest. He reached into the back seat and found one of them. 'But we have no glasses. And why should we drink here when it would be so much more comfortable inside?'

She laughed briefly. 'Harry. I'm a little nervous...' Of course! French courage! - or was it Dutch?

What odds? If a sip or two would help get her into the right frame of mind, why not? Silently he blessed the manufacturers of screw-top bottles and twisted the cap free. She took the wine from him, and he heard the swishing of liquid. Her perfume seemed so much stronger, heady as the scent of poppies. And yet beneath it he sensed.... something tainted?

She returned the bottle to him and he lifted it to parched lips, taking a long deep draft. His head immediately swam, and he felt a joyous urge to break into wild laughter. Instead, discovering himself the victim of so strange a compulsion, he gave a little grunt of surprise.

When he passed the bottle back to her, he let his hand fall to her breast once more - and gasped at the touch of naked flesh, round and swelling! She had opened her blouse to him - or she had removed it altogether! With trembling fingers he reached for his mask and the handkerchief tucked behind it.

'No,' she said, and he heard the slither of silk. 'There, I'm covered again. Here, finish the bottle and then get out of the car. I'll lead you...'

'Cassilda,' he slurred her name. 'Let's stop this little game now and - '

'You may not take off the blindfold until we are in my room, when we both stand naked.' He was startled by the sudden coarseness of her voice - the lust he could now plainly detect - and he was also fired by it. He jerked violently when she took hold of him with a slender hand, working her fingers expertly, briefly, causing him to gabble some inarticulate inanity.

Momentarily paralysed with nerve-tingling pleasure and shock, when finally he thought to reach for her she was gone. He heard the whisper of her dress and the click of the car door as she closed it behind her.

Opening his own door he almost fell out, but her hand on his shoulder steadied him. øthe other bottle,' she reminded him.

Clumsily he found the wine, then stumbled as he turned from the car. She took his free hand, whispering: 'Ssh! Quiet!' and gave a low guttural giggle.

Blind, he stumbled after her across a hard, faintly familiar surface. Something brushed against his leg, cold, furry, and damp. The fronds of a bushy plant, he suspected.

'Lower your head,' she commanded. 'Carefully down the steps. This way. Almost there...'

'Cassilda,' he said, holding tightly to her hand. 'I'm dizzy.'

'The wine!' she laughed.

'Wait, wait!' he cried, dragging her to a halt. 'My head's swimming.' He put out the hand that held the bottle, found a solid surface, pressed his knuckles against it and steadied himself. He leaned against a wall of sorts, dry and flaky to his touch, and gradually the dizziness passed.

This is no good, he told himself: I'll be of no damn use to her unless I can control myself! To her he said, 'Potent stuff, your local wine.'

'Only a few more steps,' she whispered.

She moved closer and again there came the sound of sliding silk, of garments falling. He put his arm around her, felt the flesh of her body against the back of his hand. The weight of the bottle slowly pulled down his arm. Smooth firm buttocks - totally unlike Julia's, which sagged a little - did not flinch at the passing of fingers made impotent by the bettie they held.

'God!' he whispered, throat choked with lust. 'I wish I could hold on to you for the rest of my life...'

She laughed, her voice hoarse as his own, and stepped away, pulling him after her. 'But that's your second wish,' she said.

Second wish ... Second wish? He stumbled and almost fell, was caught and held upright, felt fingers busy at his jacket, the buttons of his shirt. Not at all cold, he shivered, and deep inside a tiny voice began to shout at him, growing louder by the moment, shrieking terrifying messages into his inner ear.His second wish!

Naked he stood, suddenly alert, the alcohol turning to water in his system, the unbelievable looming real and immense and immediate as his four sound senses compensated for voluntary blindness.

'There,' she said. 'And now you may remove your blindfold!'

Ah, but her perfume no longer masked the charnel musk beneath; her girl's voice was gone, replaced by the dried-up whisper of centuries-shrivelled lips; the hand he held was -

Harry leapt high and wide, trying to shake off the thing that held his hand in a leathery grip, shrieking his denial in a black vault that echoed his cries like lunatic laughter. He leapt and cavorted, coming into momentary contact with the wall, tracing with his burning, supersensitive flesh the tentacled monstrosity that gloated there in bas-relief, feeling its dread embrace!

And bounding from the wall he tripped and sprawled, clawing at the casket which, in his mind's eye, he saw where he had last seen it at the foot of her couch. Except that now the lid lay open!

Something at once furry and slimy-damp arched against his naked leg - and again he leapt frenziedly in darkness, gibbering now as his mind teetered over vertiginous chasms.

Finally, dislodged by his threshing about, his blindfold - the red mask and black silk handkerchief he no longer dared remove of his own accord - slipped from his face ... And then his strength became as that of ten men, became such that nothing natural or supernatural could ever have held him there in that nighted cave beneath black ruins.

Herr Ludovic Debrec heard the roaring of the car's engine long before the beam of its headlights swept down the black deserted road outside the inn. The vehicle rocked wildly and its tyres howled as it turned an impossibly tight corner to slam to a halt in the inn's tiny courtyard.

Debrec was tired, cleaning up after the day's work, preparing for the morning ahead. His handful of guests were all abed, all except the English Herr. This must be him now, but why the tearing rush?

Peering through his kitchen window, Debrec recognized the car - then his weary eyes widened and he gasped out loud. But what in the name of all that... ? The Herr was naked!

The Hungarian landlord had the door open wide for Harry almost before he could begin hammering upon it - was bowled to one side as the frantic, gasping, bulge-eyed figure rushed in and up the stairs - but he had seen enough, and he crossed himself as Harry disappeared into the inn's upper darkness.

'Mein Gott!' he croaked, crossing himself again, and yet again. 'The Herr has been in that place!'

Despite her pills, Julia had not slept well. Now, emerging from unremembered, uneasy dreams, temples throbbing in the grip of a terrific headache, she pondered the problem of her awakening. A glance at the luminous dial of her wristwatch told her that the time was ten after two in the morning.

Now what had startled her awake? The slamming of a door somewhere? Someone sobbing?

Someone crying out to her for help? She seemed to remember all of these things.

She patted the bed beside her with a lethargic gesture. Harry was not there. She briefly considered this, also the fact that his side of the bed seemed undisturbed. Then something moved palely in the darkness at the foot of the bed.

Julia sucked in air, reached out and quickly snapped on the bedside lamp. Harry lay naked, silently writhing on the floor, face down, his hands beneath him.

'Harry!' she cried, getting out of bed and going to him. With a bit of a struggle she turned him on to his side, and he immediately rolled over on his back.

She gave a little shriek and jerked instinctively away from him, revulsion twisting her features. His eyes were screwed shut now, lips straining back from teeth in unendurable agony. His hands held something to his straining chest, something black and crumbly.

Even as Julia watched, horrified, his eyes wrenched open, his face went slack, he stopped breathing.

Then his hands fell away from his chest. In one of them the disintegrating black thing seemed burned into the flesh of his palm and fingers. It was unmistakably a small mummified hand!

She began to back away from him across the floor, and as she did so something came from behind, moving sinuously as it brushed against her. She saw it and scuttled even faster, her mouth working silently as she came up against the wall of the room.

The - creature - went to Harry, took the shrivelled hand from him, turned away, and then, as if on an afterthought, turned back. It arched against him for a moment, then quickly sank sharp teeth into the flesh of his leg, the short feelers about its mouth writhing greedily as it did so. In the next instant the thing was gone, but Julia did not see where it went.

Unable to tear her eyes away she saw Harry's leg where he had been bitten turn black, withering visibly. She saw the blackness spreading like a devouring fire over his whole body, melting it into dully glittering lumps.

Then, ignoring the insistent knocking now sounding at the door, she drew breath into starved lungs, drew breath until she thought she must surely burst - and finally expelled it all in one vast eternal scream...

Dark Awakening by FRANK BELKNAP LONG

It was just the right place for an encounter with an enchantress. There was a long stretch of shining beach, with a sand dune towering up behind it, and in the near distance a high white steeple and the sun-gilded roofs of a small New England village from which I had just departed for a dip in the sea.

It was vacation time, always a good time to be a guest at an inn that you like straight off, if only because not a single jarring note accompanies your arrival with a worn and battered suitcase and an eye for oak panelling that dates back a century or more.

The village seemed sleepy and unchanged, always a splendid thing in midsummer when you've had your fill of city noises and smoke and bustle and the intolerable encroachments of the 'do this' and

'do that' brigade.

I'd seen her at breakfast time, with her two small children, a boy and a girl, taking up all of her attention until I sat down at a table a short distance away and stared steadily at her for a moment. I couldn't help it. She would have drawn all eyes in a parade of glamorous models. A widow. I wondered.

A divorcee? Or banish the thought - a happily married woman whose thoughts never strayed?

It was impossible to know, of course. But when she looked up and saw me she nodded slightly and smiled, and for a moment nothing seemed to matter but the fear that she was so very beautiful my stare would reveal my inmost thoughts.

New arrivals at small village inns are often greeted with a smile and a nod by the kindly disposed, solely to put them at their ease and make them feel that they are the opposite of outsiders. I wasn't deceived on that score. But still -

Meeting her now, between the dune and the sea, with her children still on opposite sides of her, I was unprepared for more than another smile and nod. I had emerged from around the dune, coming into view so abruptly that she might well have looked merely startled, and it made the explicit nature of her greeting seem astonishing indeed.

She raised her arm and waved to me, and called out: 'Oh, hello! I didn't expect to see anyone from the inn here so early. You can be of great help to me.'

'In what way?' I asked, trying to keep from looking as flustered as I felt and crossing to her side in several not-too-hurried strides.

'I cut my hand rather badly just now on a razorsharp shell,' she said. 'But I'm not in the least worried.

It's just that - it was terribly stupid of me, and I haven't a handkerchief. If you have one -'

'Of course,' I said. 'We'll get it bound up in short order. But you'd better let me look at it first.'

Her hand was velvety soft in my clasp, and so beautifu. 1 that for a moment I hardly noticed the cut on her palm. It was bleeding a little but not profusely, even though it wasn't exactly a scratch. It took me only a moment to wrap a handkerchief twice around the middle of her hand and knot it securely just below her wrist.

That should take care of it,' I said. 'For now. If you're not returning to the inn soon you can take the bandage off when the bleeding stops and douse it in seawater. There's no better antiseptic. A rusty nail and a seashell are worlds apart, antiseptically speaking.'

'You've been most helpful,' she said, seeming not to care that I was taking my time in releasing her hand. 'I'm more grateful than I can say.'

The children were fidgeting about with their toes turned in, looking reproachfully from their mother to me and back again. There is nothing children resent more than to be totally ignored when an introduction can be achieved in a matter of seconds. The gulf that yawns between a child and an adult can be spanned to an incredible extent at times with no more than a gesture, and most children are wise enough to know when they are being cheated of an enriching experience for no reason at all.

It seemed suddenly to occur to her that she had failed even to introduce herself, and she made amends quickly in a threefold way. 'I'm Helen Rathbourne,' she said. 'When my husband died I didn't think I'd ever find myself at the inn again. I felt that coming here would bring back - well, too many things. But I do love this place. Everything about it is irresistibly enchanting. The children adore it too.'

She patted her son on the shoulder and took a strand of her daughter's windblown hair and twined it about her finger. 'John is eight and Susan is six,' she said. 'John is a young explorer. When he goes adventuring every land is a far land, no matter how near it may be geographically.'

She smiled. 'He prefers simple weapons. A bow and a sheaf of arrows suit him quite well. He has slain some incredible beasts just through the accuracy of his aim.'

'I don't doubt that for a moment,' I said. 'Hello, John.'

He had seemed a little on the shy side, but there was no trace of shyness in the prideful way he held himself when we shook hands. It was as if, in some hidden recess of his mind, he believed every word his mother had just said about him.

'Susan's quite different,' she went on, her eyes crinkling in a wholly enchanting way. 'Most of her adventuring is done on "wings of bright imagining,~ as some poet must have phrased it sometime in the past, perhaps far back in the Victorian age. I'm not good at making such lines up.'

'I'm sure you're mistaken,' I told her. 'I read a great deal of poetry, both traditional and avant-garde, and I can't recall ever having encountered that particular line .'

'"Stumbled over would be better,' she said.

'It's a little grandiose,' I conceded. 'But when you say it, it doesn't sound that way at all. I know exactly what you have in mind. Susan likes to dream away the hours sitting by a window ledge, with potted geraniums obscuring just a little of the view - a seascape or rolling hills with a snow-capped mountain looming in the distance.'

Thank you,' she said. 'I can shoot down a compliment like that faster than you might suspect, as a rule, armed with just one of John's arrows. But when you say it-'

We both laughed.

'Susan's not a tomboy,' she added thoughtfully. 'But she won't take any guff from John or any of his friends. You should have seen how fast she was running along the beach just now, outdistancing him in a few seconds. They are both children to be proud of, don't you think?'

'Indeed I do,' I assured her. 'I sensed that straight off. It doesn't really need to be pointed up in any way.'

Thank you again,' she said. 'I must confess that, on rare occasions, I have a few doubts. But it's amazing how quickly children can make an adult change his mind about them when forgiveness becomes of paramount importance -'

I should have known that if what she had said about her son's exploring urge was true - and I had no reason to doubt it - it would have been impossible to keep him still for more than a moment or two.

But I was not prepared for the harm he did to our conversation just as it was reaching a most rewarding stage by turning about and dashing off so abruptly that concern for his safety drove every other thought from her mind.

'John, come back here!' she called. 'Right this minute!'

She had followed him out across the beach, almost running, before I saw what had alarmed her. He had not merely bypassed the surf line and headed for a section of the beach strewn with the wreckage of a recent storm. He had climbed up on rotting boards of a washed-ashore, storm-shattered breakwater and was staring down at a side channel of swirling dark water which almost bisected the beach at precisely that point. Just below where he stood on one of the boards, precariously perched, the water had widened out into a pool that was unrippled by the wind and had a deep, black, extremely ominous look. It had been made more hazardous by the way the wreckage extended out over it here and there, with edges so jagged a pitchfork would have seemed far less menacing.

I caught up with her before she could quite accomplish what her son had achieved with close to miraculous speed. There is no accounting for the swift way a small boy can travel from place to place when some wildly impulsive notion takes firm root in his mind.

'Don't be alarmed,' I urged, hurrying along at her side. 'Kids his age do reckless things at times simply because they just don't think. But we do, and it-will take only a moment to get him down.'

'He's not listening to me!' she protested. 'That's what alarms me. I've never known him to be so stubborn.'

'He'll listen to me,' I assured her. 'He may just be starting to feel the need for some stern father-to-son talk. If a kid has to go without something he's once known too long -'

'I don't want him to fall!' she said, as if she hadn't heard me, and before I could go on. 'I'm so terribly worried.'

'You can stop worrying,' I assured her. 'He'll climb straight down the instant I raise my voice.'

I was far from sure that he would. But it wasn't just an idle boast to impress her. I was genuinely concerned for the boy's safety, and there was no excuse for what he was doing now. He could, I felt, have at least answered his mother's almost frantic appeals. Refusing to obey was one thing, totally ignoring her concern quite another.

When I reached the piled-up mass of wreckage he had moved even closer to the edge of the demolished breakwater, and the beard on which he was standing seemed rickety in the extreme. It was so rotted away in spots that the swirling dark tides just beyond the almost rippleless pool were visible through the warped and nearly vertical far end of it. Something about the shape of it struck a chill to my heart. The supporting beams of a gallows might well have had just such a look, with both vertical and horizontal aspects, to the blurring vision of a condemned man awaiting swift oblivion.

Being parentally harsh is very difficult for me, because I've always felt that the young are frequently justified in their rebellion, and as often as not I find myself on their side. But now I was very angry and felt not the slightest trace of sympathy for a boy who could cause his mother so much unnecessary anguish.

'John, get down!' I shouted at him. 'You ought to be ashamed of yourself!'

I suddenly felt that shouting was not needed and went on just loudly enough to make sure he'd catch every word. 'I see I was wrong in believing everything your mother told me about you. No courageous explorer I've ever known took meaningless risks with his life. You've got to think of other people. How can you be so cruel, so thoughtless? Your mother -'

I stopped abruptly, noticing for the first time that there was a faraway look in his eyes and that he did not appear to be listening. He was clasping something in his right hand, and suddenly he opened his fingers and stared down at it, as if only the object mattered, and everything I had said had gone unheeded.

And that was when it happened. That was when the terrible mistake I'd made by not climbing up without saying a word and grabbing hold of him dawned on me. But perhaps it wouldn't have mattered. Even if he failed to put up a struggle, just my added weight on the board might have caused it to collapse anyway.

It collapsed with a dreadful splintering sound. The warped and upended, almost rotted away, portion fell first into the dark beach-bisecting channel, followed quickly by the part of it on which he had been standing. He went with that part so swiftly into the water that no slightest sound came from below the wreckage for ten full seconds. Then I heard only the gurgling of the water as it subsided, the initial splash having been a great deal louder. Despite that loudness I was quite sure that if he had made some outcry before vanishing I would have heard it.

My immediate, overwhelming emotion was one of horror, mingled with disbelief and a sudden gratefulness. The gratefulness was due solely to the fact that I had come to the beach to go swimming, and wore only bathing trunks beneath a light summer bathrobe.

I kicked off my sneakers first and discarded the bathrobe almost simultaneously with my swift ascent of the wreckage adjacent to the vanished part of the storm-shattered breakwater. I had no way of knowing how deep the water might be at that particular spot, but when a narrow channel widens out into a pool it is likely to have a greater depth as well, and I was ninetenths sure it was the opposite of shallow.

I remained for a moment staring down at that dark expanse of water, until I became convinced that no bobbing young head seemed likely to send a great wave of relief surging over me, for more additional seconds than I cared to risk wasting.

To have dived in would have risked a stunning blow to my head from the cluttered wreckage, which projected out over the pool in a dozen directions. So I let myself down slowly and cautiously before swimming out into the sluggishly moving current.

I abandoned my overhand strokes to plunge into the depths at about the spot where it seemed most likely John had been swallowed up. The farther I descended the less sluggish the current became, and I was soon being carried erratically back and forth in a tidebuffeted fashion.

It was my first attempt to save anyone from drowning, and I was lacking in all of the qualities that can make such a rescue attempt quickly successful.

I began to fear I would have to come up for air and descend a second time when I saw him, through a blurry film of dark water. Only vaguely at first and then more distinctly, revolving slowly about as if on some small underwater treadmill that was causing him neither to rise nor to descend farther.

Fortunately he did not struggle when I got to him, as close-to-drowning people are supposed to do unless you caution them in the open air where your voice carries. In another moment I had a tight grip on his arm and was ascending with him through what now seemed a depth of at least twenty fathoms.

Five minutes later he was lying stretched out on the sand at the base of the wreckage, with his mother bending over him. She was sobbing softly and looking up at me, her eyes shining with gratefulness.

No seven-year-old could have looked more capable of summoning to his aid all the innate vitality of the very young of sturdy constitution. The colour was flooding back into his cheeks, and his eyes were fluttering open with the stubborn, resolute look of a young explorer who refuses to give up, despite the worst buffetings that fate can inflict.

I suppose I should have felt nothing but relief and sympathy. But I was still angry, and the first words I spoke to him were so harsh that I almost instantly found myself regretting them.

'You should have known better than to put your mother through something like this. It's a good thing you're not my son. If you were there would be no baseball or anything else for you for one solid month.

You'd just have to sit at the window and call down to your friends. Probably they are as bad as you are.

Unruly, selfish, totally undisciplined kids run together in wolf cub packs.'

The instant I stopped his eyes opened very wide, and he stared up at me without the slightest trace of hostility or resentment in his gaze. It was as if he realized I had spoken like the kind of person I wasn't and really could never be.

'I couldn't help it,' he said. 'There was something there I knew I'd find if I looked around for it. I didn't want to find it. But you can't help it when you dream about something you don't want to find, and you can't wake up in time -'

'You dreamed about it?'

'Not like when I go to sleep. I was just thinking about what it would look like when I found it.'

'And that's why you ran off the way you did, without warning your mother that you were about to do some,thing dangerous?'

'I couldn't help it. It was like something was pulling me.'

'You were looking at it when I spoke to you,' I said. 'So you must have found it. It's too bad you lost it when you fell into the water. If you still had it, what you want us to believe might make a little more sense. Not much - but a little.'

'I didn't lose it,' he said. 'It's right here in my hand.' 'But that's impossible.'

'No, it isn't,' his mother said, interrupting us for the first time. 'Look how tightly clenched his right hand is.'

I could hardly believe it, if only because it made far more sense to assume that the hands of a boy falling from a collapsing board would have opened and closed many times in a desperate kind of grasping, first at the empty air and then at a smothering wall of water rushing in upon him. What I had failed to recognize was that in such an extremity one may hold on to some small object that has just been picked up - a pebble or a shell - even more tightly.

There might even be - more to it than that. Not only adult men and women, but not a few children, had endured unspeakable torments without relinquishing, even in death, some small object precious to them, or feared by them in some terrible secret way. The Children's Crusade -

It was hard for me to imagine what could have put such thoughts into my mind, for I hadn't as much as caught a glimpse of the object which John had seemingly found very quickly. Surely what he had said about it could be dismissed as childish prattle. A dreamlike compulsion, coming upon him suddenly, and forcing him to go in search of it, as if drawn by a magnet. Powerless to resist, unable to break that mysterious binding influence. Not wanting to find it at all, but aware that he had been given no choice.

Susan had joined us beneath the wreckage, ignoring the wishes of her mother, who had waved her back to make her son's recovery less of a problem. Another small child, hopping about in the sand, would have made it difficult for her to give all of her attention to what I'd just been saying to her son.

But now she was looking at me as if I had added a new, unexpected complication by my two full minutes of silence.

'Let him see what it was you picked up, John,' she said. 'Just open your hand and show it to him.

You're making some strange mystery out of it, and so is he.

I'd like to see it too. Then we'll all be happier.''I can't,' John said.

'You can't what?' I demanded, startled by the look of astonishment and pain that had come into his eyes.

'I can't move my fingers,' he said. 'I just found out. I didn't try before.'

'Oh, that's nonsense,' I said. 'Listen to me, before you say anything even more foolish. You must have at least tried to move your fingers a dozen or more times before I rescued you. Just as often afterward.'He shook his head. 'That's not true.'

'It has to be true. That's your right hand. You use it all the time. Everyone does.'

'I can't move my fingers,' he reiterated. 'If I'd opened my hand it would have fallen out -'

'I know all that,' I said. 'But you could have at least found out before this whether you could so much as move your fingers. It would have been a natural thing to do.'

It had been difficult for me to think of his mother in a very special way, so over~vrought had she become since I had gone to his rescue. But something of the beach-temptress look had returned when her son had opened his eyes and had seemed no worse for the tragedy that almost overtaken him. But now she looked distraught again. Sudden fear flamed in her eyes.

'Could it be - hysterical paralysis?' she asked. 'It can happen, I've been told, in quite young children.'

'I don't think so,'. I said. 'Just try to stay calm. We'll know in a moment.'

I took her son's hand, raised it, and looked at it closely. He made no protest. The fingers could not have been more tightly clenched. The nails, I felt, must be biting painfully into the flesh of his palms. His knuckles looked bluish.

I began to work on his fingers, trying my best to force them open. I had no success for a moment.

Then, gradually, they seemed to become more flexible and some of the stiffness went out of them.

Quite suddenly his entire hand opened, as if my persistent tugging at each individual finger in turn had broken some kind of spell.

The small object which rested on his palm did not seem to have been compressed or injured in any way by the tight constriction to which it had been subjected. I thought at first it was of metal, so brightly did it gleam in the sunlight. But when I picked it up and looked at it closely I saw that it was of some rubbery substance with merely the sheen of metal.

I had never before looked at any inanimate object quite so horrible. Superficially it resembled a tiny many-tentacled octopus, but there was something, about it which would have made the ugliest of sea monsters seem merely fishlike in a slightly repulsive way. It had a countenance, of a sort, a shrivelled, sunken old man's face that was no more than suggestively human. Not a human face at all, really, but the suggestion was there, a hint, at least, of anthropoid intelligence of a wholly malignant nature. But the longer I stared at it the less human it seemed, until I began to feel that I had read into it something that wasn't there. Intelligence, yes - awareness of some kind, but so much the opposite of anthropoid that my mind reeled at trying to imagine what intelligence would be like if it was as cold as the dark night of space and could exercise a wholly merciless authority over every animate entity in the universe of stars.

I looked at Helen Rathbourne and saw that she was trembling and had turned very pale. I had lowered my hand just enough to enable her to see it clearly, and I knew that her son had seen it again too. He said nothing, just looked at me as if, young as he was, the thought that such an object had been taken from his hand made him feel in some strange way contaminated.

'You picked it up without knowing,' I wanted to shout at him. 'Forget it, child - blot it from your mind.

I'll take it to the pool you almost drowned in and let it sink from sight, and we'll forget we ever saw it.'

But before I could say a word to John or his mother, something began to happen to my hand. It began to happen even before I realized the object was attached to a rusted metal chain and had clearly been designed to be worn as an amulet around someone's neck.

My fingers closed over it, contracting more and more until I was holding it in as tight a grip as John had done. I couldn't seem to open them again or hurl the object from me as I suddenly wanted to do.

Something happened then to more than just my hand. Everything about me seemed subtly to change, the contours of near objects becoming less sharply silhouetted against the sky and more distant objects not only losing their sharpness, but seeming almost to dissolve. There was a roaring in my ears, and a strange, terrifying feeling of vastness, of emptiness - I can describe it in no other way - swept over me.