The Place Called Dagon

Doctor Dreeme, turning sleepily on his pillow, heard the clatter of a horse’s hoofs coming down the steep Leeminster Road. The steely clash on the rock-path tore abruptly through his semi-trance and he opened his eyes, scowling vaguely at the milky blur of ceiling. The horse stopped with a rough grating of hoofs below the window and the doctor sighed. Marlborough was like that. It was undoubtedly another farmer with a pain in his back who might just as well wait until morning. It was at night that his taciturn neighbors were most obsessed with the somber consequences of their lonely ailments. In daylight they would bear them with the dumb equanimity of animals, sitting behind drawn curtains or plodding painfully over their stony fields. But they were horribly afraid of dying at night. The bell clanked feebly. The doctor threw back his quilted coverlet of great square patches, rose in the darkness of the room, and strode over to the window. He leaned out, straining his eyes to see who stood in the gray mist of the moon outside his door.

“Who is it?” he called sharply. “Who, in the name of Heaven⁠ ⁠… at this time of night.⁠ ⁠…”

A boyish treble answered him.

“Doctor Dreeme? I’m Miles, Jeffrey Westcott’s hired boy. Mr. Westcott’s taken something awful. He wants for you to come and help him right away. He’s shot himself and.⁠ ⁠…”

“I’ll be right down,” snapped the doctor.

He fumbled about the room, lit a kerosene oil-lamp, and hastily dressed himself, drawing his trousers on over his rumpled pyjamas.

“My dear doctor,” he began, “I am afraid you will have to.⁠ ⁠…”

“What is it, Jeff?” inquired a feminine voice, low and husky, behind them.

Both men turned at this unexpected sound. Westcott was plainly put out and for a moment his large eyes glittered angrily. Dreeme gazed upward at the woman who had so quietly entered the room with a curiosity which almost instantly merged into amazement. There are women who at a first glance arrest the attention not so much by any ulterior beauty or unique qualities of bearing as by an inward spirit which seems to beat fiercely against the thin walls of flesh and strive vehemently to liberate itself from its entangling disguises. These women may not be beautiful in the fleshy sense of the word, but somehow they achieve more than the semblance of beauty in the eyes of the sensitive observer. Dreeme saw such a woman before him and knew instantly and instinctively that it was not alone the comeliness of her features that so casually and indifferently subdued and betrayed the deliberate impartiality of his reason. He saw immediately an extraordinary inward impulse that climbed in her bosom and all but trembled on her bloodred mouth. It was her eyes and mouth that first seized his imagination. These eyes were dark and they glowed beneath large white lids that drooped somewhat as with the ennui of identical days. They seemed endless in depth like half-concealed forest springs and yet a quickening spark glimmered in these unfathomable lakes of hushed amber fire.

She had given up the attempt to picture the Westcott supper with any degree of vividness. She said:

“After supper, we rose from the table without a word. Wagner hurried away. He went like a ghost. I heard the door close softly behind him. Mr. Westcott heard it, too, for it seemed to be a signal for him to go into his room of books. He said to Mrs. Westcott, ‘Leave me alone now. I’ll see you tomorrow.’ She said, ‘Don’t make a fool of yourself.’ He smiled at that and said, ‘That’s your prerogative.’ Then he went into the library and closed the door behind him. I helped wash dishes. Pretty soon Mr. Burroughs came. He slid into the house humming to himself. He loitered about the kitchen for a while and talked to Mrs. Westcott about what sort of a year it was, and how he was going to preach Leeminster way on Sunday. Mrs. Westcott just laughed in her husky way. ‘Preach!’ she said. ‘You’re an insane humorist, George.’ He smiled, too, and looked at me in that sly still way. ‘Watch out for my little Paschal Lamb,’ he said, nodding at me. Then he went to the door of the library and knocked, and pretty soon he went in, leaving the door ajar. I could hear him talking with Mr. Westcott. I continued to work about the kitchen, but the door that led into the sitting room was open, and so, too, was the door to the library, ajar, I mean. I could hear men’s voices, but it was hard to distinguish the words. I didn’t notice when Mrs. Westcott went away, but when I looked for her to ask her about something, she was gone. Once I heard Mr. Westcott’s voice raised. He cried out, ‘I tell you she’ll do, George. At the place called Dagon.⁠ ⁠…’

Nevertheless he mounted the incline at a trot, his exertions and the sun covering his face with a freely running river of perspiration. The dry red sand puffed about his feet and sifted into his shoes. As he turned the arc of the road by the burned mill he saw a knot of men standing by the river below the bridge. They were leaning forward, their shoulders almost touching. He scrambled down the bank, the wiry weeds catching at his clothes and thrusting up his coat-sleeves as he half-slid and half-stumbled toward the low baked bank of the river. The men drew apart at the sound of his scrambling feet, and a freckled-faced youth with a bobbing Adam’s apple, whom he recognized as Simon Barnson, turned to him as he approached the group.

“It’s Wagner, Westcott’s man,” he called in a shrill voice.

Dreeme waved the men aside and approached the limp bundle of clothes that huddled before him. Wagner lay on his side, his heavy-booted feet sunk in the muddy ooze of the Saccarac River. One arm was twisted across his face. The two or three farmers who stood in a knot conversing in low tones, observed Dreeme curiously as he went methodically about his task of investigating the condition of the corpse. It was only by a violent effort that the young doctor moved Wagner’s bulky upflung arm sufficiently to study the dead man’s face. He started back with an exclamation of horror at the sight.

As Dreeme, racing close at the heels of Walden Slater, circled the Westcott farmhouse, he glanced up curiously at the windows. There was no light. The building gloomed in its cluster of trees just as it had that first night when he had stumbled after the boy Miles along the uneven path and entered through the back door. It was like a house of the dead, a dwelling-place from which the rose-colored actualities of living had long ago vanished. Around it, the tall dark trees kept their somber watch, standing like ghostly sentinels. The spark of Walden Slater’s lantern sent strange beasts of shadows scurrying into the underbrush that lined the hummocky path. At the back door the farmer set down his light and hammered upon the wood with the butt of his revolver. The sound seemed to echo inside the house. It was like the echo that comes from a musty tomb when the iron grille that guards its dead from the living world is shaken. If there was anything in back of the wood against which Walden Slater was hammering so vigorously, that shape or being or spectre was standing mute.

“Of course not,” muttered the farmer. With a fierce kick of his heavy boot he crashed the door open and it smashed against the wall on broken hinges. The intruder entered slowly, holding the lantern before him in one hand and grasping his cocked revolver in the other. Dreeme followed at his heels.