She Walks in Shadows(20)

“Henley was mad for it — what were the old gods? What were these magicks? But Olumbi did not answer him. These were not part of the story that he knew. Near sundown, the guides left the ruins to get wood for torches. Henley pried loose a small stone with a carving on it of a thing with snakes for a face, and slipped it into his bag. He jumped when he saw that I was watching him, for we both knew he had been told to never take anything from the ruins, never, never.

“‘Say nothing, Sima,’ he whispered to me. I worried about it, what he had done, but ... it was one little stone, just the size of his hand and as thick. There were hundreds of the snake-faced creature carvings all over the ruins. What calamity, I thought, could come from just one of so many going missing? And yet ... as we walked to the village, I felt a cold wind at our backs, and no birds sang.

“He left a few days later, promising extravagant gifts and tales the next time he returned. But his doom was already upon him. We all saw it. He was pale as the moon; he could not sleep. In the night, he walked and wandered instead, and talked to himself. During the day he seemed his normal self, and laughed and ate with us, and boasted of his adventures. But he was restless. He could not meet the eye. He avoided the fire. It was another three years before he rode back and he was so ill I wondered how he had made the trip. He was half his weight; he looked like a drought-stricken animal about to die. At first, I did not even recognize him. I thought how surprising it was that another white man had come to us. The chief sent for the best healers he knew. Where before, Henley would have waved them away like flies, he lay in the chief’s hut without moving except to weep.

“Of myself, he asked for news of the area. Nothing, I said. The hunts are well, our gardens grow. Many babies have been born. There have been dust storms, stripping away the vegetation at Sun Stones. But the old women say there have been storms like that before. ‘There have been no noises? Earthquakes? No cries in the night? No blood on your sand?’ ‘No, no,’ I promised him.

“He had come at midday. When night fell, I thought he would surely die while we slept, but he did not; in fact, he rose and dressed, and woke me. ‘Sima, my only friend,’ he whispered. ‘Help me. You must. I am cursed; I carried home a curse with me.’ I did not know what a curse was, but I knew what ‘help’ meant and I could not say no. By the time we reached the ruins, I was nearly carrying him. It was so frightening, Mr. Greene — he weighed nothing; it was like carrying a child. We came in through one of the small side gates, moving quickly, for the trees and brush had all been blown down and killed by the wind. He directed me to the center of the ruins — it took hours, as we had not brought light with us and the moonlight was treacherous. Finally, we stopped, and he withdrew from his satchel the ugly carving I had seen him remove all those years before. He put it back in place and looked at it for a long time. I gasped as the ground moved and made a noise, like a lion’s roar but under our feet. ‘May this end; may this end,’ he said to the wall. ‘Give me my freedom, though it is not deserved.’

“He did not recover, though he stayed for a long time. When he left, he called together my family to ask if I could come with him. ‘If it is her wish,’ said my father. ‘She has a heart, for which we do not speak.’ I had never been so excited in my life, Mr. Greene. I agreed at once; we married in Italy a short while later.”

“So, he died from his affliction?” I said, astonished. “We knew him as the heartiest, the most robust of men. What was it? Malaria? Yellow Fever?”

“It did not seem that way,” she said, looking up at the map. “He wrote to Miskatonic University and they sent professors to talk to him; he was on the telephone at all hours. He even made a trip up there, carrying his notes from Africa. When he returned, he had copied out great reams from one of their old books — a medical book, I took it to be, not knowing any better — and stayed up late for weeks, reciting from it. I could barely sleep, hearing his voice all night, imagining the house was shaking. But then he did recover. He began to do his exercises again. He began to eat and write letters again. He slept soundly. He even began to speak of the adventures we would have again — all the places we would go together. I felt hunted; I dismissed it. His doom was with us, though. I did not realize what he was doing until it was too late. I did not believe he would do such a thing. I learned the word penance. A word we had no concept of in my language.”

“Mrs. Penhallick,” I said, when she gave no signs of speaking again, though I dreaded to ask, “... how did he die?”

She looked down at me, her great doe eyes suddenly hard and wary. “You’ll think me mad.”

“No!”

“The old gods who could not speak,” she said. “He had struck a devil’s deal with them and the cost was his life. They sent a shoggoth for him in the night. To collect payment.”

I stared at her. Yes, quite mad, I thought. Her head had been filled with these stories. The old man had made it worse, for a young girl from a land far away whose mind eventually snapped from living here, alone in the great house …. After a moment, I said, weakly, “I see.”

“Don’t put that in your article, Mr. Greene.”

I was beginning to wonder if I had an article at all now, but shrugged and said, “As you wish.”

As she was showing me out, I said, unthinkingly, “What a great pity that the man died without issue; my deepest sympathies for that, in addition to your great loss.”