By then I was
comfortably near the road, on the high place from which the roof of
the distant house was clearly visible above its encircling trees; and
just as I expected, thick clouds of smoke were billowing out of the
attic dormers and curling upward into the leaden heavens. I thanked the
powers of creation that an immemorial curse was about to be purged by
fire and blotted from the earth. But in the next instant came that second backward look in which I
glimpsed two other things--things that canceled most of the relief
and gave me a supreme shock from which I shall never recover. I have
said that I was on a high part of the drive, from which much of the
plantation behind me was visible. This vista included not only the
house and its trees but some of the abandoned and partly flooded flat
land beside the river, and several bends of the weed-choked drive I
had been so hastily traversing. In both of these latter places I now
beheld sights--or suspicions of sights--which I wish devoutly I could
deny. It was a faint, distant scream which made me turn back again, and as I
did so I caught a trace of motion on the dull gray marshy plain behind
the house. At that distance human figures are very small; yet I thought
the motion resolved itself into two of these, pursuer and pursued. I
even thought I saw the dark-clothed leading figure overtaken and seized
by the bald, naked figure in the rear--overtaken, seized, and dragged
violently in the direction of the now burning house. But I could not watch the outcome, for at once a nearer sight obtruded
itself--a suggestion of motion among the underbrush at a point some
distance back along the deserted drive. _Unmistakably, the weeds and
bushes and briars were swaying as no wind could sway them; swaying as
if some large, swift serpent were wriggling purposefully along on the
ground in pursuit of me._

       *       *       *       *       *

That was all I could stand. I scrambled along madly for the gate,
heedless of torn clothing and bleeding scratches, and jumped into the
roadster parked under the great evergreen tree. It was a bedraggled,
rain-drenched sight, but the works were unharmed and I had no trouble
in starting the thing. I went on blindly in the direction the car was
headed for. Nothing was in my mind but to get away from that frightful
region of nightmares and cacodemons--to get away as quickly and as far
as gasoline could take me. About three or four miles along the road a farmer hailed me--a kindly,
drawling fellow of middle age and considerable native intelligence. I was glad to slow down and ask directions, though I knew I must
present a strange enough aspect. The man readily told me the way to
Cape Girardeau, and inquired where I had come from in such a state at
such an early hour. Thinking it best to say little, I merely mentioned
that I had been caught in the night's rain and had taken shelter at a
near-by farmhouse, afterward losing my way in the underbrush trying to
find my car. "At a farmhouse, eh? Wonder whose it coulda ben. Ain't nothin' standin'
this side o' Jim Ferris' place acrost Barker's Crick, an' that's all o'
twenty miles by the rud." I gave a start, and wondered what fresh mystery this portended, then
asked my informant if he had overlooked the large ruined plantation
house whose ancient gate bordered the road not far back. "Funny ye sh'd recolleck that, stranger! Musta ben here afore sometime. But that house ain't there now. Burnt down five or six years ago--and
they did tell some queer stories about it." I shuddered. "You mean Riverside--ol' man de Russy's place. Queer goin's on there
fifteen or twenty years ago. Ol' man's boy married a gal from abroad,
and some folks thought she was a mighty odd sort. Didn't like the
looks of her. Then she and the boy went off sudden, and later on the
ol' man said he was kilt in the war. But some o' the niggers hinted
queer things. Got around at last that the ol' fellow fell in love with
the gal himself and kilt her and the boy. That place was sure enough
ha'nted by a black snake, mean that what it may. "Then five or six years ago the ol' man disappeared and the house
burned down. Some do say he was burnt up in it. It was a mornin'
after a rainy night just like this, when lots o' folks heard an awful
yellin' acrost the fields in ol' de Russy's voice. When they stopped
and looked, they see the house goin' up in smoke quick as a wink--that
place was all like tinder anyhow, rain or no rain. Nobody never seen
the ol' man agin, but onct in a while they tell of the ghost of that
big black snake glidin' aroun'. "What d'you make of it, anyhow? You seem to hev knowed the place. Didn't ye ever hear tell of the de Russys? What d'ye reckon was the
trouble with that gal young Denis married? She kinder made everybody
shiver and feel hateful, though ye couldn't never tell why." I was trying to think, but that process was almost beyond me now. The
house burned years ago? Then where, and under what conditions, had I
passed the night? And why did I know what I knew of these things? Even
as I pondered I saw a hair on my coat sleeve--the short, gray hair of
an old man. In the end I drove on without telling anything. But I did hint that
gossip was wronging the poor old planter who had suffered so much. I
made it clear--as if from distant but authentic reports wafted among
friends--that if anyone was to blame for the trouble at Riverside it
was the woman, Marceline. She was not suited to Missouri ways, I said,
and it was too bad that Denis had ever married her. More I did not intimate, for I felt that the de Russys, with their
proudly cherished honor and high, sensitive spirits, would not wish me
to say more. They had borne enough, God knows, without the countryside
guessing what a demon of the pit, what a gorgon of the Elder
blasphemies, had come to flaunt their ancient and stainless name. Nor was it right that the neighbors should know that other horror which
my strange host of the night could not bring himself to tell me--that
horror which he must have learned as I learned it, from details in the
lost masterpiece of poor Frank Marsh. It would be too hideous if they knew that the one-time heiress of
Riverside--the accursed gorgon or lamia whose hateful crinkly coil
of serpent-hair must even now be brooding and twining vampirically
around an artist's skeleton in a lime-packed grave beneath a charred
foundation--was faintly, subtly, yet unmistakably the scion of
Zimbabwe's most primal grovelers. No wonder she owned a link with
the old witchwoman Sophonisba--for, though in deceitfully slight
proportion, Marceline was a loathsome, bestial thing, and her forebears