This was Nigger Swamp at last. The dark road ran like a pencil line across the level expanse that waved in the rainy wind its monotonous host of thin reeds. These reeds clacked together with a tiny rippling sound that was half-drowned in the sturdier bluster of the lessening gale. Rain still fell in a dispiriting manner, cold, large-dropped, maddening in its relentless evenness. Dreeme felt the rain no longer, for, soaked to the skin and numbed to the bone, the surface of his body had lost all sensation. Even his feet were senseless now. He followed the lurching beat of Walden Slater’s boots like a man in a trance. Yet his faculties were alert. Though he experienced no physical sensation he realized that his brain was clearing and capable of swift action. It was like a live intelligence in a dead body. It was this live intelligence that noted, even before the phlegmatic Walden Slater, that the bobbing lantern ahead of them had stopped. The young doctor touched the farmer on the arm.
“Look!” he whispered. “The man ahead has stopped.”
Both of them paused in their tracks and observed the stationary light with some unrest. Dreeme glanced behind him and saw that the light which was following them was steadily approaching nearer. He remembered Walden Slater’s warning: “The muck is up to your waist on either side.”
“What shall we do?” he whispered to Walden Slater, indicating the approaching stranger in their rear. The farmer said nothing but opened his coat a bit and loosened the revolver in his belt. He glanced first at the stationary light before them and then at the approaching light behind them. After that, he spat reflectively into the swamp at his side.
“We don’t want to kick up a fuss till we locate Deborah,” he said mildly.
Even as he spoke the stationary lantern before them began to return on its tracks, to approach them from the front even as the other lantern approached them from the rear. They were caught between two fires now.
“Perhaps we can hide our faces,” whispered Dreeme. “Perhaps we can pass them as we passed those other fellows back in Briony Wood.”
“Perhaps,” said Walden Slater noncommittally.
“Shall we stand out in the swamp?” asked Dreeme suddenly.
Walden Slater shook his head.
“You’d never pull yourself out of it again,” he said.
The light before them returned ten or twelve yards on its own track, and then suddenly disappeared to the right, vanishing completely from sight. Walden Slater grunted.
“They missed the cross path,” he said. “It’s a lucky thing for us.”
He started forward, accelerating his pace as much as the hummocky road would permit, and Dreeme, suddenly relieved from the tenseness that had held him like a coiled steel spring, followed with agility. It was remarkable how refreshed he felt after that brief halt. He even forgot the lantern that was following at his heels, perhaps fifty yards behind him in the rainy gloom, a dancing midge in the deceptive air. The road dipped a bit as they proceeded forward, and soon Dreeme observed low bushes lining it, bushes that rose in height as they stumbled along over the increasing unevenness. They were entering another expanse of wooded territory, this time, without a doubt, the center of the swamp. Trees shot up out of the mist about them and the road assumed the aspect of a funnel that dwindled to nothingness before them. Walden Slater walked very slowly now inspecting the bushes at the right of the road. Soon the misty light vanished behind the climbing shrubbery and trees and the farmer cursed softly to himself.
“Whereabouts did that lantern turn in?” he inquired of the night in general. Dreeme did not attempt an answer, but went down and felt the dark ground, fumbling about for possible footprints.
“You can’t find anything that way,” said the farmer ungraciously. He blundered along close to the bushes, sometimes stepping through only to catch himself just in time from toppling into the sunken mire from which the soggy growths sprang. It was intensely dark now and they could perceive nothing before them. Dreeme, lifting up his hand a foot from his face, could not make it out. They were in an alley of small trees and bushes that met above them.
“The lantern came back from here,” muttered Walden Slater. “I’ll swear to that.”
He turned on his heel and retraced his steps.
“Look!” whispered Dreeme.
The lantern that had been following them was now less than thirty yards before them. It approached slowly, its feeble spark illuminating a small circle of milky haze. Who held it or how many were in the party could not be made out. Walden Slater stopped by the side of the path and Dreeme paused beside him. The lantern approached deliberately at such a speed as to indicate that the person carrying it was walking very slowly. The stranger, or strangers, were evidently studying the right side of the road even as Walden Slater and Dreeme had studied it, searching for an ingress into the swamp, for a concealed road that would take them off at an angle from this main path.
“If they miss the road they won’t miss us,” murmured Dreeme.
The farmer said nothing but waited mutely for what might happen. When the lantern was within ten yards of them it paused for an instant and then disappeared. Walden Slater crept forward slowly. Dreeme followed close at his heels. Reaching the spot where the lantern had disappeared the farmer went over and fumbled at the ground. The charred trunk of a tree met his hand. He grunted and stepped by it, almost sliding as he struck a sharp incline, and then caught his balance on a narrow ribbon of hard soil. The lantern had disappeared entirely, but the farmer and Dreeme, stepping tentatively, discovered that the tiny footpath they were now on curved steadily. They walked very silently now, stepping as gently as they could along the path, a path covered with the soaked dead leaves of many seasons. Their instincts told them that they were reaching the end of their journey, that the time would soon come for any action that they might plan. Dreeme felt a momentary inclination to ask the farmer what he intended to do, but he repressed it, feeling that Slater desired silence now. Like two Indians they stole forward through the bushes and small trees, disturbing only an occasional frog that croaked dismally from the swamp about them. A musty smell of rotting vegetation was in their nostrils, of green-scummed water disturbed by violent rains, of disintegrating animal life.
After some minutes walk the underbrush thinned sufficiently to permit the pale reflection of the cloudy sky to reach them. It had practically stopped raining, the unceasing drizzle dwindling into no more than an occasional flutter of large cold drops that dashed against their faces. The few trees dripped disconsolately, however, and whenever the uneven road caused them to lurch against a bush they were covered by a tiny unpleasant downfall. Some distance ahead of them they caught unfrequent glimpses of the tiny lantern, glimpses that immediately winked out as the road turned and followed the narrow ribbon of raised territory. Something hard and cold cut against Dreeme’s naked foot and he bent over and picked it up. Holding it up to the faint light he could dimly make it out. A surprised and agitated exclamation broke from him, and he turned to Walden Slater who had paused.
“Look,” he said, handing the object to the farmer.
Walden Slater turned it over slowly in his large dripping hand. His long upper lip drew downward as he recognized it and handed it back without a word to Dreeme. The young doctor stared at it again. It was a brooch. A brooch upon which was the finely-cut cameo of a goat’s head. Deborah’s brooch. The brooch he had seen hanging on her bosom that evening before when they had walked through the quiet street of Marlborough and had told each other so much. She had passed along ahead of them, then, and was already at the place called Dagon. There could be no time to lose now. Walden Slater, who had not said a word, was walking along as rapidly as he could on the narrow uncertain road. Dreeme, close at his heels and sometimes abreast with him when the road permitted, kept pace with the farmer.
They were back among trees again. The young doctor had never realized the extent of Nigger Swamp before. He had always pictured it as a small circumscribed area of loathsome water and rotting bushes but now he understood that it covered a vast expanse of territory. It was either very large or the deceptive path they followed wound round and round it in a spiral. Perhaps they had circled Dagon. Perhaps the path was a maze that took the ignorant wanderer round and round until, by some lucky chance, the riddle was solved and he stood at the heart. As Dreeme labored onward his imagination drew into the dark void about them the first descendants of the fugitive Salem witches who had settled in this part of the world. He pictured to himself a breed of silent, mad-eyed men in steeple-crowned hats and baggy knee-breeches and homespun stockings and square-toed buckled shoes lurching along this immemorial road. On their shoulders they bore heavy bell-mouthed muskets and stands upon which to rest these muskets when they fired at enemies. Powder horns swung from their shoulders and bags of round bullets. There were women, too, sharp-faced, hawk-nosed women in white caps and dull gray dresses, hurrying along and laughing hysterically at the storm for there was no secrecy in those days, no reasons for quietude in the unspoilt wilderness, no one to watch them except the lean Indians in their breech-clouts of deer-skin, their proud fierce faces crowned by the scalp-lock and the turkey-feather peering from behind the trees in superstitious wonder. The startled deer crashed through the underbrush and the brown bears lumbered away from the flares of the torches and the old-fashioned lanterns. All this had died away, had been erased by Time, had vanished into the nothingness of dead and unwritten history.
Then, decades and decades and decades later, Uriah Carrier, by the maps in his black book, had found the lost place called Dagon and he had worked on the slumbering instincts of the people about him, appealing to the madness that slept in their subconscious memories, bringing them again to the secret stone and the place where the crumbled bones rested. He had probably promised them dominion over their days, the power of exerting their wills and destroying their enemies, the joys of the liberation of their darkest instincts. It sounded impossible enough on the face of it, like some insane fairytale that a sick imagination might bring forth, and yet it must have been a fact for here he was, a sane doctor in the twentieth century, stumbling through the rotting vegetation of an untraveled swamp in search of a madman and the fanatical minds he had released from the kindly bondage of reason. It was like a nightmare.
Walden Slater halted abruptly. The road had grown somewhat wider now and they had been walking abreast. About them the trees rose to an imposing stature and the ground to right and left of them seemed higher and firmer than that through which they had toiled for the last half-hour. Dreeme imagined that they had reached a sort of island in the middle of the swamp and his conviction was intensified when, after peering right and left, before him and behind, Walden Slater stepped from the road and began to thread a slow circuitous advance through the trees. The ground as he stepped on it seemed softer than safety might desire but the young doctor followed with alacrity. His bare feet sank to the ankles in the soft ooze but following Walden Slater’s example and stepping close to the trunks of the trees he discovered that the walking was not so difficult after all. They appeared to be in a tall woodland now where the thin trees rose straight out of a soggy soil, a soil in which the rotting stumps of lightning-blasted growths and scattered boulders cluttered up and made difficult any swift passage. The boulders seemed unusual and Dreeme wondered about them. They possibly were evidence of a strata of rock, the slice of some prehistoric glacier, that thrust upward out of the marshy soil here. Walden Slater walked warily, taking care to step on no dead branches or to crash through none of the small undergrowths that sprang up between the slender trees. Dreeme followed suit.
They had walked through this woodland for a few minutes only before the young doctor observed a faint glow among the trees that faced them. He instinctively hastened his pace a little and soon was several feet in front of Walden Slater. The farmer plodded along doggedly exhibiting no excitement or unrest. Dreeme, clutching Deborah’s brooch in his hand, was about to break into a stumbling run when the wiry hand of the farmer jerked his shoulder back. A trifle angry but aware of the wisdom of the rebuke the young doctor adjusted his pace to the farmer’s steady progression and they moved forward toward the faint glow, a glow that brightened perceptibly as they neared it. The rain had stopped altogether, even the large infrequent drops disappearing into the mist of the night. In those few minutes while Dreeme crept forward beside the farmer a dozen and one thoughts flashed through his mind, plans of rescue, schemes of attack, possibilities of tactics to be employed. Would they rush into the group of farmers, and, while Walden Slater held them back with the menace of his revolver, would he snatch up Deborah and make away with her along the exhausting road which he had been traveling for nearly an hour? What could they hope to do against a dozen or more men who were mad? He wanted to ask Walden Slater what he thought but the farmer was so evidently bent on silence that he did not venture a word. The glow was quite bright now and it seemed to come upward from the earth, from a hollow beyond them that was masked by crowded tree-trunks. There were many lanterns in that hollow and there were many men. Deborah was there, too. Perhaps at this very moment she was a part of the unclean ceremonies that were taking place. It seemed an eternity to the young doctor while they crept slowly and silently through the last ring of trees, stepping gingerly over the protruding boulders and rotting branches and mouldering stumps. Walden Slater now carried his revolver in his hand. Leaving the last of the trees behind them and facing the yellow glow of the invisible light that formed a strange fan of color against the milky atmosphere they crept up an inclined bank toward a ring of low intertangled bushes. The subdued hum of voices reached their strained ears. Walden Slater carefully pushed aside one of the branches of the bushes against which they now rested and cautiously thrust his face forward. For a second he looked downward. Then he drew back and putting his mouth very close to Dreeme’s ear said:
“This is the place called Dagon.”
The young doctor, his blood beating furiously, crept up to the bush, drew the branch aside, thrust his face forward, and looked downward.