She had been out to the
end of High Street to call on the couple, and had seen a car shoot
briskly out of the drive with Edward's oddly confident and almost
sneering face above the wheel. Ringing the bell, she had been told by
the repulsive wench that Asenath was also out; but had chanced to look
up at the house in leaving. There, at one of Edward's library windows,
she had glimpsed a hastily withdrawn face--a face whose expression
of pain, defeat, and wistful hopelessness was poignant beyond
description. It was--incredibly enough in view of its usual domineering
cast--Asenath's; yet the caller had vowed that in that instant the sad,
muddled eyes of poor Edward were gazing out from it. *       *       *       *       *

Edward's calls now grew a trifle more frequent, and his hints
occasionally became concrete. What he said was not to be believed,
even in centuried and legend-haunted Arkham; but he threw out his
dark lore with a sincerity and convincingness which made one fear
for his sanity. He talked about terrible meetings in lonely places,
of cyclopean ruins in the heart of the Maine woods beneath which vast
staircases led down to abysses of nighted secrets, of complex angles
that led through invisible walls to other regions of space and time,
and of hideous exchanges of personality that permitted explorations
in remote and forbidden places, on other worlds, and in different
space-time continua. He would now and then back up certain crazy hints by exhibiting objects
which utterly nonplussed me--elusively colored and bafflingly textured
objects like nothing ever heard of on earth, whose insane curves and
surfaces answered no conceivable purpose and followed no conceivable
geometry. These things, he said, came "from outside"; and his wife knew
how to get them. Sometimes--but always in frightened and ambiguous
whispers--he would suggest things about old Ephraim Waite, whom he
had seen occasionally at the college library in the old days. These
adumbrations were never specific, but seemed to revolve around some
especially horrible doubt as to whether the old wizard were really
dead--in a spiritual as well as corporeal sense. At times Derby would halt abruptly in his revelations, and I wondered
whether Asenath could possibly have divined his speech at a distance
and cut him off through some unknown sort of telepathic mesmerism--some
power of the kind she had displayed at school. Certainly, she suspected
that he told me things, for as the weeks passed she tried to stop his
visits with words and glances of a most inexplicable potency. Only with
difficulty could he get to see me, for although he would pretend to be
going somewhere else, some invisible force would generally clog his
motions or make him forget his destination for the time being. His
visits usually came when Asenath was away--"away in her own body," as
he once oddly put it. She always found out later--the servants watched
his goings and comings--but evidently she thought it inexpedient to do
anything drastic. 4


Derby had been married more than three years on that August day when I
got that telegram from Maine. I had not seen him for two months, but
had heard he was away "on business". Asenath was supposed to be with
him, though watchful gossip declared there was someone upstairs in
the house behind the doubly curtained windows. They had watched the
purchases made by the servants. And now the town marshal of Chesuncook
had wired of the draggled madman who stumbled out of the woods with
delirious ravings and screamed to me for protection. It was Edward--and
he had been just able to recall his own name and address. Chesuncook is close to the wildest, deepest, and least explored forest
belt in Maine, and it took a whole day of feverish jolting through
fantastic and forbidding scenery to get there in a car. I found Derby
in a cell at the town farm, vacillating between frenzy and apathy. He
knew me at once, and began pouring out a meaningless, half-incoherent
torrent of words in my direction. "Dan--for God's sake! The pit of the shoggoths! Down the six thousand
steps ... the abomination of abominations.... I never would let her
take me, and then I found myself there--Iä! Shub-Niggurath!--The shape
rose up from the altar, and there were five hundred that howled--the
Hooded Thing bleated 'Kamog! Kamog!' --that was old Ephraim's secret
name in the coven--I was there, where she promised she wouldn't take
me--A minute before I was locked in the library, and then I was there
where she had gone with my body--in the place of utter blasphemy, the
unholy pit where the black realm begins and the watcher guards the
gate--I saw a shoggoth--it changed shape--I can't stand it--I'll kill
her if she ever sends me there again--I'll kill that entity--her, him,
it--I'll kill it! I'll kill it with my own hands!" [Illustration: "The pit of the shoggoths! Down the six thousand
steps ... the abomination of abominations."] It took me an hour to quiet him, but he subsided at last. The next
day I got him decent clothes in the village, and set out with him
for Arkham. His fury of hysteria was spent, and he was inclined to
be silent, though he began muttering darkly to himself when the car
passed through Augusta--as if the sight of a city aroused unpleasant
memories. It was clear that he did not wish to go home; and considering
the fantastic delusions he seemed to have about his wife--delusions
undoubtedly springing from some actual hypnotic ordeal to which he had
been subjected--I thought it would be better if he did not. I would, I
resolved, put him up myself for a time, no matter what unpleasantness
it would make with Asenath. Later I would help him get a divorce, for
most assuredly there were mental factors which made this marriage
suicidal for him. When we struck open country again Derby's muttering
faded away, and I let him nod and drowse on the seat beside me as I
drove. During our sunset dash through Portland the muttering commenced again,
more distinctly than before, and as I listened I caught a stream of
utterly insane drivel about Asenath. The extent to which she had
preyed on Edward's nerves was plain, for he had woven a whole set
of hallucinations around her. His present predicament, he mumbled
furtively, was only one of a long series. She was getting hold of him,
and he knew that some day she would never let go. Even now she probably
let him go only when she had to, because she couldn't hold on long at
a time. She constantly took his body and went to nameless places for
nameless rites, leaving him in her body and locking him upstairs--but
sometimes she couldn't hold on, and he would find himself suddenly in
his own body again in some far-off, horrible and perhaps unknown place. Sometimes she'd get hold of him again and sometimes she couldn't. Often
he was left stranded somewhere as I had found him; time and again he
had to find his way home from frightful distances, getting somebody to
drive the car after he found it.