The trees reached out and took them in, circling about them in a massed formation. They were in the darkness of Briony Wood now, a darkness that was unrelieved by any light except the pale intermittent glow of the sky that filtered through the bowed branches of the trees. The unceasing storm rumbled in the leaves above them, and the incessant drip of water sounded about them as they lurched over broken branches, stones, unbared roots, and washed-out hollows. Far above the moist darkness through which they struggled Dreeme thought he could hear a faint humming, the sound of wind, perhaps, flowing along the tilted tops of the taller trees. His labored breath chimed with it. Walden Slater was lurching along doggedly beside him now, no longer ahead, but shoulder to shoulder with him except when the unevenness of the road they took caused them to stumble apart. It was good to feel his sturdy shoulder as it struck against him occasionally. It was like a tower filled with armed men who were always on guard. It was a fortress against evil and chance. The farmer was silent, conserving his strength for the difficult journey through the wood, and Dreeme, taking a lesson from him, refrained from speech, although questions were beginning to boil up in his restless mind. His intelligence was clarifying although he was still in a riot of fear over the situation in which Deborah must be. Images appeared and dissolved before his eyes. Deborah lying on the rainy ground bound and gagged. Deborah insensible in some secret retreat where George Burroughs, his sallow face aflame with malice, bowed over her and blasphemously intoned Biblical phrases that were twisted to serve the devil’s purpose. Deborah sitting wide-eyed in an hypnotic trance while Jeffrey Westcott stood before her, his cloven head bared to the rain and the wind. Deborah gazing into the heavy-lidded remorseless eyes of Martha Westcott while the taciturn farmers, muttering to one another, gathered about a great dripping stone in the heart of Nigger Swamp.

The humming in the air increased steadily above the two travelers now until it seemed as though a hundred and one far-away aeroplane engines were singing their way through the darkness and rain like a swarm of huge and unbelievable mosquitoes. Dreeme’s labored breath sucked in his throat as he pushed the entangling spiky vines aside and thrust his tired body forward. His bare feet were bruised and cut, but they seemed devoid of all sensation, blotches of white meat that lifted and fell with a maddening regularity. He was not sure that the humming he heard was more than the blood pounding in his ear-drums and throbbing in his temples. Yet it seemed to be more than that, to be, in fact, an ominous and steadily-increasing warning of the approach of mysterious and frightful things. It would not have surprised him to see a host of devils and witches suddenly sweep through the tree-tops screaming and laughing to one another. He could imagine them calling to one another gross phrases, turning their red-rimmed eyes downward at him, pointing with long-nailed hands and bursting into gales of infernal laughter. Then he realized that his imagination was slipping from his control and he strove to concentrate on Deborah, to save himself from his own madness through the memory of her. He pitched forward over oozy hummocks. The fierce thorns of clutching vines ripped along his legs and arms. Malicious branches lashed murderously at his face. Water sucked and gurgled about his naked feet. But he pressed forward half-blindly, hardly conscious of the direction in which he was proceeding, knowing only that Walden Slater’s shoulder struck against his from time to time, and that a desperate and imperative necessity was urging them into the depths of the marshy wood. Some small beast scurried beneath his feet, and he screamed at the nervous tension of the moment. He heard laboring branches crack and groan above his head and the hollow sound where a dislodged stone rolled down an incline and landed in a huge puddle. The humming had developed into a roar about him. It was so dark that he could not see Walden Slater. He could not even hear the heavy thud of the farmer’s boots. Suddenly he became conscious that a devastating delirium of fear was engulfing him and rendering him incapable of any action, “This is horrible!” he sobbed in his throat. He stopped dead in his tracks, straightened his body, and gazed upward until the faint glow of the stormy sky pierced his dulled eye-sight. It came slowly, a gradual light, a milky hue against which the silhouettes of the black branches cut sharply. Gazing steadfastly he strove to quiet the tempest that shook his mind. He thought for a moment that he could see small winking lights scurrying across the surface of that milky sky, but, forcing himself to gaze fixedly, he decided that these lights were no more than optical illusions or the small sparks that rise in tired and over-strained eyes. His heart was beating like a loud trip-hammer and he pressed one hand against it tightly. Standing so for several seconds he experienced a slowing of his nervous faculties, a sensation of again being master of himself and not the victim of an unreasonable fear that was, perhaps, self-implanted by a too imaginative mind. It was with actual surprise that he felt Walden Slater’s sturdy arm about his shoulder urging him forward. Clear-headed now he resumed the laborious toil of the journey.

This is New England, he thought. This is the tired land of forgotten pioneer enterprises. This is the land of machinery and shoe factories and canned goods and ice-skates. It is everything that is material and dispiriting and “up-to-date” and unlovely. It is the land of lean farms and thin mouths, too. It is a land of humming commercial cities, of great businesses, of the New Day. But it is more than this, as well. How if all this glittering commercial civilization is no more than a huge shell, an incrustation of years, beneath which lurk the old pagan madnesses that were corollaries of the Puritan repression? How if the ancient Dionysiac urge did not perish but remained like an ominous monster in a deep cavern biding its time and waiting its day? Suppose that the May Pole of Merry Mount and the Witches’ Sabaoths of Salem were to be reborn with disastrous consequences because of their long suppression? Might not the humming wind be saying, “The day is coming! The Black Man is coming! The May Pole of Merry Mount is to be reared again on the site of the factory! The witches and warlocks are to rule! The cities are to be laid waste for this huge shell of civilization is no more than a pasteboard affair and it is only the ancient furies and instincts that count in the long run!” Dreeme permitted his imagination to go to whatever lengths it pleased as he plunged through the forest with Walden Slater. He was fully aware of the fancifulness and impossibility of his thoughts, but they seemed to act as a release-valve for the feelings that boiled within him.

Walden Slater suddenly clutched his wrist in a huge gripping hand. He drew the young doctor to one side, and as he did so Dreeme became aware of the tiny bobbing jewel of light before them, a spark of yellow that disappeared behind trees only to reappear again. The farmer did not slack his pace but kept on rapidly, but Dreeme noted that there was a tenseness in his walk. The light bobbed before them and they gained on it. It grew in dimensions and before they had traveled many rods Dreeme, by straining his eyes, perceived that it was a lantern carried by a dark figure. He grew aware at the same time that other figures were slipping noiselessly through the trees before them. He even heard the subdued mutter of a voice somewhere to the right of him. Still holding the young doctor by the wrist, Walden Slater made a detour to the left and they circled the bobbing lantern. Keeping their eyes turned toward the lantern they drew abreast of it, passed it, and then Walden Slater uttered an exclamation as he bumped into a sluggishly moving figure in the shadow of a huge over-arching tree. “At Dagon,” said a low voice. An inspiration came to Dreeme. In a calm subdued tone he answered, “For the Master.” The figure fell away into the darkness of the trees and as they forged ahead Dreeme could feel Walden Slater’s fingers tighten on his wrist in an approving manner. The ground was growing more marshy and their feet sank into the soft soil as they pressed forward. The young doctor suspected that they were reaching that portion of Briony Wood that degenerated into Nigger Swamp and that their objective was not so far before them now. Walden Slater appeared to sense the same thing for his pace quickened automatically. They moved rapidly now, their feet making a distinct sucking sound as they lifted them from the muddy earth. The incline turned downward and as its slope increased the two men found themselves wading through good-sized pools of water and tall scratchy reeds that tore against their legs. Their feet sank deeper in slushy mire and occasionally the sleepy croak of a frog sounded in the darkness beyond them.

Although the journey was harder now, a painful lifting of one foot after the other, Dreeme’s weariness seemed to fall from him. He was like an eager hunter hot on the scent with the quarry almost in view. Any moment, he thought to himself, I may turn a corner and see a ring of dim lanterns about a huge stone and know that I am at the end of my journey and that I have seen what no other stranger in this valley has ever seen. The thought exhilarated him. So, too, did the memory that he had passed other mysterious figures in Briony Wood, for it meant that he was not late, that Deborah would be unharmed when he reached Dagon. How she was to be taken away from the group of fanatics who gathered in the swamp he did not know, but he trusted partially to the skill of the silent Walden Slater and partially to the inspiration of the moment. There would be a way, for he would make one. He was pleased to think that there was no fear in his heart now, that his brain had cleared, and that his nerves were steady. He had lost his madness in Briony Wood, and that was good. There was nothing but a clear flame of determination in him.

Walden Slater’s mouth was close to his ear.

“We’re not quite in the swamp yet,” he said. “There’s a road. We’ve got to find it.”

He turned and started to walk rapidly at right angles to their previous direction and Dreeme followed him.

There seemed to be nothing but swampy land, and in certain sunken places the slimy water rose to their knees. The drizzling rain continued to spit about them.

“We should have followed the lantern,” said Dreeme in a low voice.

“We’ll find the road all right,” replied Slater.

They trudged for some minutes through the water and mud and then Walden Slater emitted a low ejaculation of satisfaction. At the same moment Dreeme stumbled upward from the sucking mud to a firm elevation. Turning again in the direction which they had previously followed the two men followed this elevation which appeared to extend in a long narrow ribbon into the darkness before them. It was the road all right, and it ended at Dagon. Some distance ahead of them they could see the bobbing lantern, and looking back Dreeme observed another lantern coming down from the higher ground upon which stood Briony Wood. There were farmers before him and behind them, and the only way in which they might hope to avoid them would mean taking off into the swamp on either side of the narrow road. Walden Slater, as though in answer to an unasked question from Dreeme, said:

“The muck is up to your waist on either side. Don’t step off the road.”

The trees had thinned out, although a few grotesquely-twisted forms loomed up about them. The eery glow in the sky swept across the long desolate expanse, but it was not bright enough for the young doctor to make out anything with any degree of accuracy. All that he could see were great motionless shapeless shadows, bulks that squatted on the marshy ground like prehistoric beasts. In the daytime they would probably dwindle into nothing more menacing than bushes. But now there was something sinister about them. They sat on huge haunches and watched the two men travel along the narrow lifted road that ran through the flooded land. Dreeme could almost imagine great sleepy eyelids beneath which peered motionless eyes. He was neither frightened nor moved by his thoughts. Instead of excitement the slow blood of determination ran through his cold veins. He lifted his hand and brushed the wet matted hair from his forehead and rubbed his straining eyes. He could feel how set his face was, how the lines had deepened in his cheeks, how tight his jaw was set. He could not make out Walden Slater’s face in the deceiving rainy light, but he imagined that it was set like his own, reflecting a determination that would be ruthless and unescapable when the time for action came.