Brood of the Witch-Queen

Robert Cairn looked out across the quadrangle. The moon had just arisen, and it softened the beauty of the old college buildings, mellowed the harshness of time, casting shadow pools beneath the cloisteresque arches to the west and setting out the ivy in stronger relief upon the ancient walls. The barred shadow on the lichened stones beyond the elm was cast by the hidden gate; and straight ahead, where, between a quaint chimney-stack and a bartizan, a triangular patch of blue showed like spangled velvet, lay the Thames. It was from there the cooling breeze came.

But Cairn’s gaze was set upon a window almost directly ahead, and west below the chimneys. Within the room to which it belonged a lambent light played.

Cairn turned to his companion, a ruddy and athletic looking man, somewhat bovine in type, who at the moment was busily tracing out sections on a human skull and checking his calculations from Ross’s Diseases of the Nervous System.

“Sime,” he said, “what does Ferrara always have a fire in his rooms for at this time of the year?”

Sime glanced up irritably at the speaker. Cairn was a tall, thin Scotsman, clean-shaven, square jawed, and with the crisp light hair and grey eyes which often bespeak unusual virility.

“Aren’t you going to do any work?” he inquired pathetically. “I thought you’d come to give me a hand with my basal ganglia. I shall go down on that; and there you’ve been stuck staring out of the window!”

“It was delightfully still,” Cairn resumed. “A water rat rose within a foot of me and a kingfisher was busy on a twig almost at my elbow. Twilight was just creeping along, and I could hear nothing but faint creakings of sculls from the river and sometimes the drip of a punt-pole. I thought the river seemed to become suddenly deserted; it grew quite abnormally quiet⁠—and abnormally dark. But I was so deep in reflection that it never occurred to me to move.

“Then the flotilla of swans came round the bend, with Apollo⁠—you know Apollo, the king-swan?⁠—at their head. By this time it had grown tremendously dark, but it never occurred to me to ask myself why. The swans, gliding along so noiselessly, might have been phantoms. A hush, a perfect hush, settled down. Sime, that hush was the prelude to a strange thing⁠—an unholy thing!”

Cairn rose excitedly and strode across to the table, kicking the skull out of his way.

“It was the storm gathering,” snapped Sime.

“It was something else gathering! Listen! It got yet darker, but for some inexplicable reason, although I must have heard the thunder muttering, I couldn’t take my eyes off the swans. Then it happened⁠—the thing I came here to tell you about; I must tell somebody⁠—the thing that I am not going to forget in a hurry.”

He began to knock out the ash from his pipe.

“Go on,” directed Sime tersely.

“The big swan⁠—Apollo⁠—was within ten feet of me; he swam in open water, clear of the others; no living thing touched him.

“That seemed to work a change in me,” he continued rapidly; “I recognised there was something behind this disgusting manifestation, something directing it; and I recognised, too, that the next move was up to me. I went back to my room. The odour was not so pronounced, but as I stood by the table, waiting, it increased, and increased, until it almost choked me. My nerves were playing tricks, but I kept a fast hold on myself. I set to work, very methodically, and fumigated the place. Within myself I knew that it could do no good, but I felt that I had to put up some kind of opposition. You understand, sir?”

“Quite,” replied Dr. Cairn quietly. “It was an organised attempt to expel the invader, and though of itself it was useless, the mental attitude dictating it was good. Go on.”

“The clocks had chimed eleven when I gave up, and I felt physically sick. The air by this time was poisonous, literally poisonous. I dropped into the easy-chair and began to wonder what the end of it would be. Then, in the shadowy parts of the room, outside the circle of light cast by the lamp, I detected⁠—darker patches. For awhile I tried to believe that they were imaginary, but when I saw one move along the bookcase, glide down its side, and come across the carpet, towards me, I knew that they were not. Before heaven, sir”⁠—his voice shook⁠—“either I am mad, or tonight my room was filled with things that crawled! They were everywhere; on the floor, on the walls, even on the ceiling above me!

He dreamt that he was awakened by the sound of a gentle rapping. Opening his eyes, he peered through the cloudy netting. He started up, and wrenched back the curtain. The rapping was repeated; and peering again across the room, he very distinctly perceived a figure upon the balcony by the open window. It was that of a woman who wore the black silk dress and the white yashmak of the Muslim, and who was bending forward looking into the room.

“Who is there?” he called. “What do you want?”

“S⁠—sh!”

The woman raised her hand to her veiled lips, and looked right and left as if fearing to disturb the occupants of the adjacent rooms.

Dr. Cairn reached out for his dressing-gown which lay upon the chair beside the bed, threw it over his shoulders, and stepped out upon the floor. He stooped and put on his slippers, never taking his eyes from the figure at the window. The room was flooded with moonlight.

He began to walk towards the balcony, when the mysterious visitor spoke.

“You are Dr. Cairn?”

The words were spoken in the language of dreams; that is to say, that although he understood them perfectly, he knew that they had not been uttered in the English language, nor in any language known to him; yet, as is the way with one who dreams, he had understood.

“I am he,” he said. “Who are you?”

Dr. Cairn nodded, and without more ado proceeded to strip off his coat, an example which was followed by Sime. It was as he stooped and placed his hat upon the little bundle of clothes at his feet that Dr. Cairn detected something which caused him to stoop yet lower and to peer at that dark object on the ground with a strange intentness.

“What is it?” jerked Sime, glancing back at him.

Dr. Cairn, from a hip pocket, took out an electric lamp, and directed the white ray upon something lying on the splintered fragments of granite.

It was a bat, a fairly large one, and a clot of blood marked the place where its head had been. For the bat was decapitated!

As though anticipating what he should find there, Dr. Cairn flashed the ray of the lamp all about the ground in the vicinity of the entrance to the pyramid. Scores of dead bats, headless, lay there.

“For God’s sake, what does this mean?” whispered Sime, glancing apprehensively into the black entrance beside him.

“It means,” answered Cairn, in a low voice, “that my suspicion, almost incredible though it seems, was well founded. Steel yourself against the task that is before you, Sime; we stand upon the borderland of strange horrors.”