Acolytes of Cthulhu

THE CRIB OF HELL

BY ARTHUR PENDRAGON

WHAT DARK SECRET HAD DRIVEN LAURENCE CULLUM TO THE edge of nervous hysteria? What unutterable obligation had forced him to cry out for succor like an agonized madman? These and other questions relevant to the desperate condition of the master of Cullum House perplexed Doctor Nathan Buttrick as he clucked his team homeward through Penaubsket Bridge on the fringe of Sabbathday in northern New England. In other circumstances, he might have been dozing, lulled by the cries of the nighthawks aloft and the peace of an upland twilight. But now, although his body craved sleep, his mind was vitally awake.

Doctor Buttrick was baffled by the peculiar malady which made each day a living horror for Cullum. All of the sedatives of the 1924 pharmacopeia had failed to quell the anxiety which gnawed at the mind of his patient. In his frustration at the failure of the tablets and injections, the physician had even resorted to folk remedies whispered by black-gummed grandmothers in the hills back from the sea. Infusions of tea and henbane, petals of amaryllis held under the tongue—he had tried all the high-country nostrums which once he held in professional scorn. They were as futile in calming Cullum as the most advanced drugs the age could offer.

As the feeble lights of Sabbathday came into view around the granite mass of Gallowglass Hill, Buttrick reviewed once again the particulars of the case. Laurence Cullum, age 47. Afflicted with a cerebral aneurism, a soft patch in a brain artery which might burst tomorrow, in five years, or never. He was the last of the Cullum line, a prominent family begun by Draper Cullum, the leader of the 1706 expedition which struck northward from Dunstable to find, on an August Sunday, the protected harbor on the North Atlantic around which would grow the seacoast town of Sabbathday.

The Cullums had always been influential in the town, yet oddly retiring. Laurence was the most hermitic of the lot. Since the death of his sister Emma and the diagnosis of his aneurism, he had shut himself up in the gray New England Gothic mansion at the end of Windham Road. His controlling hand was still felt on many of the town’s business affairs, but this was merely the ghost of the man. His physical presence was sequestered behind the grotesque archway of Cullum House—two enormous jawbones of a sperm whale, erected during the tenancy of the last patriarch, Captain Hugh.

These facts and the few pleasantries that Buttrick had exchanged with Cullum during the man’s infrequent visits to town were all that the doctor knew of the Cullum heir before treatments for the aneurism began. Except for the grim scene on the night of Emma’s death two years before. The physician had been in attendance, accompanied by Cullum and most of the household staff. Buttrick would never forget the last words of Emma, spoken as she clutched her brother’s arm in a white-knuckled hand.

“Laurence, you will keep—the guardianship?”

“I—I shall, my dear,” Cullum replied as a mad, trapped look appeared in his eyes. Then the life of the frail spinster eked out its last heartbeat, and Buttrick’s usefulness had ended.

The doctor heard nothing of Laurence Cullum for a year and a half after his sister’s demise. Then came the midnight telephone call. Buttrick rolled groggily from his bed, expecting a summons to the side of any one of three wives who were awaiting childbirth. Instead, he was shocked into full awareness by an almost hysterical voice begging him to administer relief. Although years of medical practice had somewhat jaded his sensibility to human pain, Buttrick heard a voice so filled with a frantic tension that the listener himself became afraid in an unconscious resonance with the pleading tones. He whipped his team across the surly Penaubsket River and along Windham Road, guided only by the chill light of a three-quarter moon. At the end of the headlong ride he found Cullum in a state of extreme anxiety within the mouldering drawing room of the mansion. The earpiece of the telephone was still off its hook as the man cowered in a great wing chair, whimpering like an injured child in shocking contrast to the manliness of his six-foot frame.

Although he was wrapped in a dressing gown, Cullum’s trouser cuffs bore traces of drying mud.

Buttrick quickly administered the standard dosage of a sedative. It had no effect. A second injection calmed Cullum, or rather removed the physical manifestations of his hysteria. But even as the drug subdued his trembling, Cullum retained a spark of horror in his eyes.

Repeatedly Buttrick questioned the sufferer about the cause of his alarming discomposure. And each time the gaunt-faced Cullum had burrowed deeper into the plush of the wing chair, mumbling under the sedation, “Can’t say—mustn’t say. No one must ever know. The guardianship!” Despite himself the physician felt a growing fear at the recurrence of that ominous term first uttered in his hearing by the dying lips of Emma Cullum.

At last the opiate calmed the man’s chaotic nerves. With the aid of Amadee, an aged Acadian man-servant, the doctor wrestled the drugged weight onto a settee near the fire. He left a vial of tablets with the servant, and the assurance that he would visit his master on the next day. Then Buttrick returned to town exhausted physically but unable to quell the incessant questioning of his curiosity. What event or obsession could explain the mental disintegration of Cullum? What arcane significance had that curious term muttered by Laurence even in his narcotic stupor?

During the months of treatment which followed the first nighttime summons, the doctor had learned little else about the trouble at Cullum House. He had diagnosed the aneurism, but was certain that his patient’s extreme nervousness and loss of weight were by no means related to his physical affliction. Rather there was some obligation, burden, perhaps something in the house itself, under whose presence the mind of the Cullum heir was slowly crumbling.

Besides the strange term spoken by both Emma and Laurence, there was one other fact which increased the peculiarity of the case. Buttrick had noticed that Cullum always avoided approaching a large tapestry hanging in the drawing room, another remnant of the patriarchy of Captain Hugh. The subject and rendition were unsettling at first glance—a highly realistic depiction of a Witches’ Sabbath. The naked bodies of cabalistic women were ruddy in the glow from a fire which also illumined a bleeding victim. After a few visits, Buttrick had inured himself to the grisly scene. But Cullum would never pass within five feet of the cloth. Sometimes the doctor had the uncomfortable conviction that his patient was listening to the tapestry, as though hearing the whickering laughter of the coven.

Gradually Buttrick resigned himself to the frustration of trying to quell a malady of the spirit by chemical means. A difficult task, at best. With such a secretive, uncooperative patient, it was almost an impossibility.

Such were the reflections of the toil-worn leech of Sabbathday as he reined his team before the weathered frame bungalow from which his father had practiced before him. After stabling the horses he ate a light supper, then willingly gave himself to his mattress with a sighed hope that no major illnesses or accidents would befall the populace of the village that night. His last conscious thought was not a prayer to his Creator, but a mindless repetition of the eldritch phrase so full of puzzlement and, in Emma’s tones, a taint of evil: “The guardianship.”

In late afternoon of the following day Buttrick stood beneath the whale-jaw archway of Cullum House, marvelling at the curving bone monoliths of this striking manifestation of the family’s eccentricity. It was one of the two days of the week on which Cullum was treated both for his aneurism and for the frenzy attacking his nerves. Amadee was waiting behind the door. He ushered the doctor into the dank coolness of the mansion. Once inside the entry-way, the aged Acadian drew close to Buttrick and seized his elbow in a surprisingly strong grip, a liberty he had never before taken.

“M’sieur le docteur,” he said hoarsely, “do not be surprise’ if the master, he tell to you some strange thing’ today.” There was a smile on the seamed lips, but the coldness of Amadee’s eyes removed all traces of amiability from his manner. “It is some time now that the master, he has been saying strange thing’ that you should not believe. C’est la maladie—it is the sickness, nothing more.”

Buttrick was repelled by the servant’s familiarity. During his visits to the house he had found Amadee a strange figure, given to eavesdropping impassively as Cullum made pitiful attempts at conversation with his physician. For some inexplicable reason, the presence of the Acadian always put Buttrick on his guard as though the stooped valet carried with him a hint of evil. Certainly the man added to the foreboding gloom of Cullum House.

Buttrick pried his arm out of Amadee’s grip and strode quickly into the drawing room. As was his habit, Cullum was seated as far away from the tapestry as was physically possible. He rose unsteadily as the doctor entered the room.

“So—so good of you to come, Nathan,” he said. Although his mind was on the verge of splintering into a thousand shards of madness, automatically the heir preserved the vestiges of a courtesy reserved for calmer spirits.

Buttrick placed his bag on a richly damasked ottoman, inspecting his patient’s appearance with a quick, professional glance. He was appalled by Cullum’s decline since the last visit. The man was wrapped in a crimson sitting-robe that seemed made for a larger frame, so grievously had his body wasted under the bearing of his mental burden. The eyes were preternaturally bright, staring from dark sockets. Cullum nervously plucked at the cord of the gown with a hand which shocked Buttrick by its resemblance to Emma’s—blanched, and with yellowed nails. The doctor had seen patients harboring within them vile malignancies fall into such decay. But Cullum’s dissolution was the result of a mental cancer which threatened to destroy both mind and body. It was moot which—soul or flesh—would perish first.

Now the man seemed inflamed by a strange eagerness. He motioned Buttrick to close his bag, and cleared his throat nervously.

“I fear, Nathan, that I have not been the best of patients. All your medications, all your attentions—useless.” He dismissed them with a wave of his blue-veined hand. “Nothing will relieve me. Nothing can ease the weight of this hideous charge I labor under…” Cullum stopped briefly and seemed to listen to the tapestry. Recovering his train of thought, he continued. “Unless—unless I somehow ease my mind of this guardianship!” He spat the word out in mingled tones of fear and loathing.

“Unless I tell the secret I shall die, and the secret shall die with me. And if I tell the secret, the secret shall die, and I shall die with it. Almost a conundrum, eh Buttrick? A true gnomic riddle, eh my friend?”

The physician rose to steady Cullum, for his speech was assuming the peculiar cadence of madness. The man rallied, mumbling, “Not yet—not yet.” In a moment his face took on a grave cast as he spoke in cooler, more ominous tones.

“You must have suspected, Nathan, that the cause of my agony was exceedingly strange. The aneurism,” he tapped his temple, “it is nothing. We Cullums have suffered more unusual maladies than that. My trouble lies deeper than the fragile flesh.” The heir paused reflectively, then continued. “I—I have stood it as long as I could, endured under this hideous burden longer than I thought possible. I am not as strong as Emma was. Not so much of a Cullum, perhaps. She was like my father, Captain Hugh, amazingly strong-willed. The secret of our family horror—I know no other name for it—was safe with her while she lived. But I—two years, man! Two years of ceaseless anxiety. And the last few months have been a waking terror!”

Buttrick had been engrossed by Cullum’s narration. But suddenly he started. A sound, a muffled moan or cry, had issued from the direction of the cabalistic tapestry. Cullum saw the doctor’s apprehensive glance.

“Not yet, my friend. Later you shall know all. For now, Nathan, hear me out.” He flicked his hand at Amadee, who was loitering in the door of the drawing-room. “That will be all, Amadee. Go to your duties.” The Acadian shuffled reluctantly into the bowels of the house. When his footsteps no longer sounded off the flaking walls of the passage, Cullum resumed his monologue.

“It is now time, Nathan, that you knew the well-kept secret of this house, for I shall tell you or die in the attempt. Only by sharing this intolerable weight have I any chance of keeping my sanity.” His lips trembled as he fought to maintain calmness. “It is n-not easy to disburden oneself of such knowledge, but I must, despite the warning, or I shall most surely go mad. Be patient, Nathan, and let me tell it in my own way.”

Buttrick settled uneasily into a sofa. For a moment he felt a sudden impulse to deny Cullum the opportunity to tell his tale. Why should he, Nathan Buttrick, participate in this secret? His precinct was the body, not the diseased mind. With its austere inhabitants and wild setting between the forest wastes and the sullen North Atlantic, Sabbathday was eerie enough without compounding it by a knowledge of the secret of Cullum House.

But gradually Buttrick’s professional instincts exerted themselves. If Cullum did not gain some mental relief, either the torments he underwent would render him mad, or his aneurism would burst under the strain. The doctor settled back and accepted a dark sherry from his patient’s trembling hand.

“Nathan,” said Cullum, “have you ever heard the name—Ligea?”

“Ligea was the… second wife, I believe, of your father, Captain Hugh,” answered Buttrick.

“Yes, if she can be called—a wife!”

Immediately Buttrick knew the reason for Cullum’s bitter statement. The doctor had been only a child when Ligea came to Sabbathday, yet the bizarre tales the townspeople told about her were preserved in his memory. After the death of his first wife, the mother of Laurence and Emma, Captain Hugh Cullum had consigned his children to the care of a relative. He then embarked on his last voyage as master of the steamer Ogunquit to the Baltic port of Riga. When he returned to Sabbathday almost two years later, he brought with him the numerous spoils of Yankee trading and a mistress for Cullum House, the dark Ligea.

Grotesque rumors about this woman soon sprang up amidst the villagers. Perhaps some originated in the mouths of goodwives who envied her exotic charms. For Ligea was oddly beautiful—a tall woman, with a luminous Eastern complexion, sinuous in her movements, heavily accented in her speech. Ligea’s most distinctive feature was her long raven hair of a black deeper than the northern forest night.

Whatever their origin, the stories about Ligea soon were the common coin of conversation around the hearths of Sabbathday. It was said that she had brought the nighthawks to Cullum House. Before her coming, these nocturnal flyers had soared only over the backlands far from town. Now they roosted in the trees of the estate, trembling the night air with the beat of wings.

More serious, some reported that Ligea had been seen on Walpurgis Night wantoning naked through the woods at the fringe of town. One individual who had been abroad at that hour swore that a glowing cloud had passed in from the sea over Sabbathday, and that voices could be heard mumbling in strange tongues from within the floating mass. An ancient dame who dwelt alone near Gallowglass Hill averred that Ligea had spent many afternoons with the few Indian sachems still alive, the degenerate remainder of the Pequot tribe. This nearly extinct race, it was said, held powers over air and sea.

The more intelligent of the townsfolk dismissed these tales as fantasies. Yet all knew that Ligea exerted a strange hold on Captain Hugh. The gruff skipper was quite deferential to her in public, a far cry from his callous treatment of his first wife. There were some who even noticed more than a touch of fear in his attitude toward the tall woman whom he bore on his arm.

However, in her public behavior the woman was impeccable—haughty of mien, knowledgeable in the social graces, distant yet polite. During the couples’ visits to town she comported herself as befitted the wife of a monied landowner. Only a few noted that occasionally she exchanged knowing glances with the most depraved of the town’s moral outcasts.

A year after her arrival in Sabbathday, Ligea was big with child. At this time Hugh Cullum ceased his frequent visits to town and seemed to enter retirement at the end of Windham Road. The village believed that he had secluded himself in deference to his wife’s condition. Not a soul understood that behind the captain’s bluff facade lay a spirit sorely harried by some knowledge which he could impart to no other person.

Several days after her confinement was due to end the news reached Sabbathday that both Ligea and her babe had perished in childbirth. The father of Nathan Buttrick had been in attendance. In answer to the many queries he replied that there was nothing he could have done, and divulged no other details of the tragedy. Nathan recalled that his father had been unusually silent for days after the event, as though meditating on some incomprehensible problem. Once he had told his son that if he aspired to be a physician, there was something about the Cullums that he should know in the future. But then the normal course of town life was resumed. The remains of Ligea were cremated and transported to her native land as she had wished. The small casket of the child took its place among the Cullum ancestors in the family crypt. And Nathan Buttrick never heard the Cullum secret from the lips of his father, for the man died of a heart seizure a few months later.

“She was a witch, damn her eyes!” cried Cullum. The heir had become noticeably less calm toward the end of Buttrick’s narration of the few facts he knew of Ligea. Now a torrent of suppressed emotion broke forth. “And it is not dead, do you hear? Not dead!”

Buttrick leapt to restrain Cullum, who seemed ready to run from the room. At the same moment a hideous clamor issued from the direction of the tapestry, a scarcely human screeching accompanied by thudding impacts as though a body were hurling itself at the wall.

“It heard—it heard!” raved Cullum. He swung around and faced the cloth. “You cannot hold me in bondage any longer. The guardianship is at an end! At last, an end…” His final words choked off in a sob. Cullum pitched into a faint on the settee.

The vicious sounds from the tapestry grew in intensity until the cloth and the wall behind it trembled. Amadee entered the room on the run, his features contorted with rage. Apparently he had overheard the entire scene.

“The weak pig,” he snarled, “he has doom’ us all—we are dead men, M’sieur, dead men!” He vanished down the hall, his footsteps giving way to the grind of a heavy door being swung on its hinges. In a few moments Buttrick heard the crack of a bullwhip over the horrid ululations. A note of pain entered the screams. They tapered off into piteous whimpers, until silence returned to Cullum House.

Buttrick knelt beside the heir, struggling to revive him. For a moment he feared the aneurism had burst. But the eyelids trembled, and slowly the man regained his senses.

“Ah, the relief, Nathan,” Cullum sighed. “No longer a prisoner in my own house. No longer keeper of the vile heritage Emma passed on to me.”

“Great God, Laurence,” cried Buttrick, “what have you hidden behind that wall?”

“I could not describe it,” he answered. “Walk to the tapestry. You shall see it for yourself.”

Buttrick moved unsteadily toward the rich cloth, his breathing suspended in anticipation of whatever was to occur.

“Open the tapestry with the cord by your hand,” directed Cullum.

The doctor grasped the weighted end of the cord. He closed his eyes for a moment, opened them, then tugged at the cord. The tapestry slid back smoothly across the wall. Beneath it, the wall was discolored but blank, except for a small glassed orifice at eye level. Buttrick hesitated. He glanced at Laurence, who feebly motioned to him from the settee, then fixed his eye to the peephole. A low moan escaped the physician’s lips as his hand came up to clutch his throat.

The orifice gave a view through the thick wall into a smaller chamber behind the drawing room. Immediately opposite was a heavy steel door, with a similar peephole and a sturdy grating at the bottom through which a man might crawl, were it open. Gnawed bones and a basin of water lay before the grill, which was apparently an opening for inserting food into the chamber. A grayish light emanated from tiny clerestory windows along two sides beneath the ceiling. Knots of thread-like filaments—black, brown, and yellow—littered the floor.

Crouched in the far corner was the tenant of this chamber, a spectre so inhuman that Buttrick’s vision momentarily blurred from the shock. It hulked panting on its hands, a living human torso, if such a distortion of man’s form can be designated thusly. Raven hair fell in hanks and tangles from a misshapen skull. Bright, feverish eyes glared out from beneath the shaggy brows. From the face projected only a rudimentary nose, its nostrils dilating as an animal would breathe. The lips were tensed in a snarl, revealing discolored teeth more like the fangs of a carnivore.

The thing was naked save for a ragged breechclout tied about its middle. The torso showed superhuman muscular development—arms as thick as fenceposts, a barrel chest partly covered by a pelt. The lower extremities were piteously withered, dragging behind the upper body. Yet that monstrous form carried itself to and fro in the chamber with remarkable agility, supporting its weight on the arms and talon-like hands. As it lunged from one corner to the other, the creature sounded an ominous murmur from deep within its dark breast.

“Oh my dear God,” whispered Buttrick, unbelieving before the grisly sight. He had seen men mangled by awful accidents in the logging camps, and even the pitiable distortions of infant bodies in stillbirths. But never had the physician’s entire consciousness writhed before such a gross malformation of the human body. He slumped weakly against the wall beside the peephole.

“What is it, Laurence?” he asked. “Where—where did it come from?”

“Now you realize the desperate burden I have carried these months, Nathan,” replied Cullum. “That thing has been in our charge since the death of my father’s second wife. It is—Ligea’s Hell-Child!”

As he watched Buttrick’s reaction to the spectacle behind the tapestry, a transformation overcame Cullum. He seemed more in control of himself, as though the sharing of the secret with another not in the bloodline had relieved a great pressure within his spirit. Seeing Buttrick’s revulsion, Cullum had the presence of mind to fill another glass from the squat ship’s decanter and offer the stimulant to the doctor, who had moved slowly away from the wall like a sleepwalker.

“Sit down, Nathan, and calm yourself,” ordered the heir. “I’m sure you must have many questions about our—bad seed.”

When Buttrick had composed himself, Cullum spoke volubly about the origin of the chamber-dweller. The doctor listened as his host told him of Ligea’s dying threat to the house of Cullum. Unless they maintained her infant in secrecy until its maturity, they would perish. The Guardianship, as she called it, must be passed from member to member. Only death could release a guardian, who was responsible for the care and nourishment of the creature. They would know, Ligea said, when the child no longer needed their protection.

Captain Hugh Cullum had always scoffed at superstitions and curses. But suddenly the occult had come under his own eaves in the presence of that incredible child, surrounded by a brooding evil even then in its infancy. He knew that he had not fathered such a monster. Gradually the conviction grew within his mind that Ligea had consorted with a spirit of darkness, and that the babe was the token of their devilish love.

Captain Hugh would allow the child no baptism. It was placed in the strong-room behind the main parlor, a chamber which the guardians came to call, sardonically, the Crib. From that time forward, the tenant of that dark room behind the tapestry was known as the Hell-Child.

“And so, Nathan, if Ligea’s words were true, then you are listening to a dead man. The guardian who betrays the secret must die, you know.”

“Superstitious nonsense!” cried Buttrick, who had recovered from his initial shock. “Why, look at you, man. You’re more relaxed than I’ve seen you in months. Now, Laurence, I can’t yet explain that thing in there, or why it’s survived so long despite its grave malformation. But it must have a natural explanation. I admit that at first I was shocked. It’s a hideous thing. Yet I can see nothing that you should fear in it. Perhaps we can arrange for an institution to take over its care, relieving you of the burden. As to its being a Hell-Child—really, Laurence, I’d expect this type of thinking more of an upland farmer than the Cullum heir!”

“That is because you do not fully understand the terrible threat of the creature!” cried Cullum. “It must be destroyed, Nathan, before it can commit more of its evil. It’s just begun, I tell you!”

Buttrick put out his hand to steady Cullum, who was becoming agitated again. “What evil? What are you talking about, Laurence?”

“Do you remember that first night I called you—how frantic I was?” The doctor nodded. “And do you remember Rupel Oldham?”

Buttrick involuntarily winced. Oldham had been found lying in a foot of stagnant water near a fire-road through Mohegan Swamp. Buttrick had signed the death-certificate of the aged muskrat trapper. The body had been badly mutilated, and a look of utter horror was indelibly stamped on its face.

“You don’t mean—that?” asked Buttrick, pointing toward the wall.

Cullum nodded. “It broke out,” he said helplessly. “We had underestimated its strength, and it burst through the wooden door which the steel door you saw later replaced. Amadee and I followed it as quickly as we could. It was dark. The spring rains had muddied the ground.” Cullum’s voice became dreamy as he relived the gruesome event.

“At first Amadee and I didn’t know where to look. We stood in the drive, he with the bullwhip and myself carrying the lantern. It could have gone off in any direction. But then—then we heard the nighthawks crying over Mohegan Swamp in the valley behind the estate. A terrible, fierce sound, Nathan. They were swarming as though mad.

“We ran through the forest on the fire-road. The sound of the birds got louder, more shrill, until we could see against the gray sky the place over which they were swarming. I remember wishing that I had had the presence of mind to bring a pistol. But then the light from the lantern showed us its form ahead. Oh Nathan, Oldham had come down to check his traps, and it caught him there in the mud and scummy water. When we ran up it was—feeding!

“Amadee lashed it with the whip, and it drew back. I saw that we could do nothing for Oldham. The expression on his face—terrible. Between the two of us we drove the creature back to the house and into the Crib. It was more docile then, feared the bite of the whip more than now.” Cullum paused and wet his lips with the sherry. “But the atrocity so unsettled me that I had to call you for relief, or I would have lost my mind.

“We should have recognized this murderous act as an unmistakable sign that it was approaching its maturity, Nathan. But we thought the killing of Oldham was an accident, a chance encounter. No more than a month later, Arnold, my groundskeeper, passed away. He was the last of the servants, save Amadee. At night the beast broke out again. I was awakened by the nighthawks massing over the house. The coffin lay within the parlor. That thing had overturned it, and was tearing, slashing…” Cullum clenched his fists in agony. “Do you understand what I’ve been living with, Nathan? Do you wonder that my nerves are gone?”

Buttrick stirred uncomfortably. He was being drawn into the macabre web of Cullum’s narration. The doctor began to feel unsafe sitting only a few yards away from the tapestry. How may times had he entered the decaying drawing-room to treat the master of Cullum House, oblivious to the existence of a horror separated from him by only a few inches of plaster and lath?

“We then knew,” continued Cullum, “that its ghastly appetite had been whetted. We realized that these events were not mere chance. The evil thing mothered by my father’s second wife—I cannot call her my stepmother—had reached its maturity. For a week after we interred Arnold it screamed. I shall hear its cries until my ears are stopped by death. Ravenous, ferocious howls which sounded even beyond the walls of the house. Amadee and his bullwhip could not control it. I stuffed my ears with cotton, took laudanum, drank myself into unconsciousness—everything failed. That hideous keening could not be suppressed. It was then, at the end of my wits, that I made the decision for which, if ever a man were damned, I shall be. I had to stop the screaming, Nathan, do you understand that?”

Buttrick shook his head slowly, scarce daring to consider what awful revelation he would hear next.

“I ordered Amadee—ah, even now I cannot bring myself to pronounce the words!” Cullum fought visibly to control his rising emotion. He sprang from the settee and paced the room. “Amadee, in addition to being my only servant, is also,” he blurted the words out, “custodian of the Sabbathday Burial Ground. Do you understand my meaning?”

“Then the bones in the chamber, and those fibers—hanks of hair?” Buttrick asked incredulously.

“How many evenings have I slumped in that very chair, listening to that beast at its unholy supper! How often have I considered suicide, anything to free me of this vile guardianship. Even Amadee has become infected by it—I truly believe he enjoys tending the creature and disciplining it with his bullwhip. He derives a sense of power from those duties. The old man thinks me weak and scorns me because my nerves cannot stand the strain. But what a burden—God help me, I am the protector of a ghoul!”

A long silence followed the impassioned confession. The room had become oppressively thick-atmosphered. Buttrick opened the French doors which led to a terrace and thence the drive. The sky was yet aglow, and only the drone of frogs at Mohegan Swamp heralded the approach of night. The birds roosting in the trees about the house had not yet begun their darkling flights.

The doctor turned and addressed Cullum. “Is there any danger that it will break out again, Laurence?”

“The steel door has thus far resisted its attempts,” he replied. “Occasionally it hurls itself at the door for an hour at a time. Its ferocity is appalling. But the door and its frame remain fast.” The heir sighed deeply. “Yet a mere steel door cannot be sufficient to hold such a malignant evil. It must be destroyed, Nathan, and quickly. I can no longer protect the town from its appetite. And now that I have discovered the Cullum secret to you, I feel that if we do not act soon the thing will be at large, with no one to stop it. For it heard me betray it, I am sure, and craves my death.”

Buttrick was convinced. Now his mind no longer operated in accord with the civilized virtues of reason and mercy. His own experience that day at Cullum House, and his host’s desperate words, had brought to life within him the savage’s fear of the unknown. He agreed to assist in the extermination of the creature, and swore that no word of the proceedings would ever pass his lips.

Since Cullum assured him that he could spend another night in the house with the Hell-Child, Buttrick decided to return to Sabbathday. On the morrow he would return to the estate to plan the destruction and interment of the beast, for they would need daylight to dig its unholy resting place.

On the portico of the mansion beneath the arched jawbones, Cullum seized Buttrick’s hand in a firm grip. “I only wish my father had taken this course in the beginning,” he said. “Then perhaps he, Emma, and myself would have been spared the blight which has sapped our lives.” He ran his hand along the cool ivory of the curving white monoliths. “I know that wherever he is, my father approves the action we must take.”

Buttrick nodded in silent agreement. He bade the heir a good night, and turned his team onto the darkness of Windham Road. As he left the grounds of the estate, the nighthawks were beginning their evening clamor. Their rasping cries banished the peace of the autumn evening. After his return to the bungalow the doctor lay sleepless, distracted by vivid mental phantasms of what he had heard and witnessed that evening. Each time he closed his eyes the scene in the Crib flashed across the screen of his conscious mind in all its loathsome detail. He could not erase from his memory the glowering countenance of the Hell-Child, a face so evil it seemed impossible that flesh and bone could be tortured into receiving the stamp of such malignancy. Buttrick could well understand why Captain Hugh had disclaimed parentage of the child.

And now Buttrick himself had been drawn into the Cullum horror. He had sworn to aid in the destruction of the thing which might still bear within it a spark of humanity, despite Cullum’s heated denials and the mystery of its parentage. Vicious, instinctively homicidal, yes; but was this enough, he asked himself, enough cause to betray a greater oath—that one which bound Nathan Buttrick to use his skills only for the preservation of life? It was a quandary, and the man writhed under the weight of his contradictory obligations.

The doctor had thus lain staring at the slowly rising patch of moonlight on his wall for three hours, when the telephone beside his bed rang. With a sudden clairvoyance Buttrick knew that this was no ordinary call summoning him to the sickbed of a villager. He swung out of the bed and snatched the earpiece from the hook. The voice of Laurence Cullum dinned in his ear.

“Nathan, come quickly, man. We can’t hold it. It’s breaking out of the Crib!”

Over Cullum’s voice came the sound of splintering wood and a ravening ululation such as never sprang from human throat. The telephone crashed to the floor as Buttrick leapt to struggle into his clothes. He vaulted across the yard to the barn, scarce feeling the bite of the early hoarfrost. With frantic speed he harnessed the team and urged them out of their warm quarters into the chill darkness of the road where the moon hardly penetrated the roof of overhanging trees.

Five minutes after the call, the wild-eyed horses lunged through the shadows of Penaubsket Bridge onto the gravel of Windham Road. Although the doctor was a good master to his animals, now he whipped them cruelly. He called the two mares by name, hurling imprecations foreign to his lips in an effort to gain more speed. Black masses of maple and oak lashed by, their sharp twig-ends striking blood from Buttrick’s face when the surrey veered too close to the road’s edge. Twice it seemed that all—horses, surrey, and driver—must surely fall to perdition, so headlong was their flight in rounding curves where granite outcroppings changed the road’s direction. If a goodman of the town had been abroad at that hour, he would have crossed himself in utter terror at the approach of the flying team and whipman.

It seemed an age to Buttrick, but at last the lights of Cullum House glimmered through the thickets ahead. At the stone pillars which marked the entrance to the estate the horses shied, nearly throwing the doctor from his seat. The whip cracked once, twice, but they would not enter. The team stood ready to bolt in the face of a terror which their senses could detect even at that far remove.

Cursing, Buttrick leapt down from the surrey and made for the house afoot. The rains of early autumn had washed innumerable gullies into the clay of the drive. Several times he stumbled, almost twisting an ankle beneath him. Over the sound of his labored breathing came a confusion of high-pitched cries. The nighthawks were swarming above the house in a dense cloud. Their mass eclipsed the light of the moon as they climbed to an apogee, plummeted suicidally toward the ground, then arced upwards. All about him the doctor heard the beat of their wings.

Nearing the great house Buttrick saw that the French doors which he had opened in another world, it seemed, were still ajar. The parlor within was lighted. Sobbing from his exertions he lurched onto the terrace and leaned against the door frame. “Laurence,” he cried. “Laurence, where are you?”

The doctor’s gaze slowly swept the room. The ottoman on which he had set his bag that afternoon lay on its side, the stuffing exposed through a long rent in the fabric. On the far wall the tapestry hung in folds from one of its corners. Beneath, the discolored area of the wall framed a gaping hole partially obstructed with shards of plaster and fang-like laths. By main force, the captive behind that wall had clawed and butted its way out of the Crib.

Buttrick stepped into the room, aghast at the wreckage of the once-sumptuous chamber. From behind an overturned sofa a moan broke the stillness, more like a sigh than an expression of pain. Cullum lay crumpled against the wall, hurled there by the inhuman force of the thing as it rushed from its confinement.

“Laurence! Are you all right, man?” cried the physician. There was a deep gash on Cullum’s brow.

“See—see to Amadee. In the hall. I—I’m afraid it caught him, Nathan.”

Buttrick found the Acadian halfway down the hallway which led to the steel door of the Crib. The Hell-Child had seized him at his middle, and dashed him fatally against the floor. Beside the dead servant lay the bullwhip, a puny weapon against a force of such unutterable malevolence.

The doctor returned quickly to attend Cullum. The shock of the events could prove dangerous to the aneurism. The weak spot of the brain artery might rupture from the slightest stress. But the heir indicated dazedly that he was unharmed except for the head wound.

“It went outside,” whispered Cullum. “I could hear it scrabbling about on the portico before you came. Thank God it’s stopped screaming. I could not bear that sound another minute.”

“Are there any firearms in the house?” asked Buttrick.

“Only an ancient pistol which failed me.” Cullum pointed to an old handgun lying at the middle of the floor. “I tried to fire at it as it came through the wall, but the mechanism was rusty from age. The beast flicked me off like a doll and went for Amadee, perhaps because he took so much pleasure in whipping it. But it will return to finish me, Nathan, because it has now matured, and needs its guardian no longer.” Cullum smiled weakly as a wistful expression fixed itself upon his pallid face. “If death is the price of freedom from that child of the Pit, then I shall pay it gladly,” he said.

Buttrick suddenly stiffened. Somewhere beyond the open doors of the entry-way he heard the sound of deep, animal respirations. A growl loosed itself from a savage throat.

“I must close and bar those doors,” the doctor muttered to himself, for Cullum had lapsed into an almost trance-like state. He grasped a heavy poker and walked carefully through the hall. “If it comes at me,” he thought, “I must slash at the eyes. The eyes.”

The main doors of the house stood thrown open to the night. Although it now rode the treetops, the moon illumined the steps up which Buttrick would have raced had he not entered through the French doors. The cries of the ominous birds had ceased. They roosted in the elms and oaks, as though awaiting a climactic event.

The doctor peered out onto the lawn, keeping well within the shadows of the entry-way. Nothing stirred. He stepped into the doorframe and quickly scanned right and left. Again there was only the wash of moonlight on the lawn and long-deserted walks. No sound was audible except an occasional chirrup from the trees.

Buttrick exhaled slowly. It seemed that the thing had run off, perhaps to Mohegan Swamp where it had claimed its first victim. This was work for a search party in the morning, not for a middle-aged physician unarmed except for a poker.

Wiping his brow against his sleeve, Buttrick stepped onto the portico beneath the massive jawbones. The moon caught the whiteness of the eccentric archway. He ran his palm along the ivory smoothness, grateful for a touch of cool solidity. Standing there for a moment, the man seemed to gain strength from the contact of his hand with the curving pillars of bone. On the steps of the mansion he took a final surveying glance over the grounds, unwilling to stray farther from the light. All was quiet. “We will run the beast to earth in the bogs come sunup,” he thought. “Surely it cannot escape us there.”

Suddenly the trees at the edge of the estate swayed at their tops as the nighthawks again winged aloft. The doctor’s calmness left him. He started up the steps to regain the relative security of the house. But as he mounted the last step his eyes caught a dark mass hulking at the very top of the arch where the whalebones intersected. At the same moment a guttural cry which seemed to tremble the entire portico pealed down at him. Buttrick’s head snapped up. On the peak of the arch, balanced on its claw-like hands, crouched the Hell-Child! Its long, snarled hair cascaded down over the joint where the tops of the bones were clamped together. The fantastically developed shoulder and arm muscles knotted as the creature prepared to hurl itself downward upon Buttrick.

In the split-second it took his arm to bring the poker up, he realized that the thing had expected him to enter through the main door when he arrived in answer to Cullum’s call for help. It had climbed to the top of the arch, hidden there by the shadow of the eaves, in order to fall upon him as he entered the house. Then all thought ceased for Nathan Buttrick as he saw the macabre figure let go the top of the arch and launch itself at him with a bellow.

The poker flashed sideways in a vicious arc, aimed at the point in space where the eyes should have been at that moment. But it smote the empty air. For as Buttrick began his stroke the long, raven hair of the beast caught in the ironwork which braced the top of Hugh Cullum’s arch. The momentum of its lunge carried the Hell-Child clear of the ivory columns. It plummeted downward for the merest fraction of a heartbeat—then a terrible jerk ceased its plunge. It swung between the columns like a grotesque marionette, hanging by its own matted hair.

The doctor could not breathe as he gaped at the frantic contortions of the creature. The cruel arms flailed and beat the air as it struggled to haul itself back to the top of the arch. From that brutish throat came a scream of incredible fury. The face grimaced from pain and rage. Flecks of foam spotted the snarling lips. For a moment it seemed that the hair surely must part, unable to support such a weight. But then a report like a muffled gunshot stilled the writhing of that hideous form. Its neck broken, the Hell-Child hung limply above the steps of the house it had terrorized through the long decades.

Unstrung by the terrible self-execution he had witnessed, Buttrick fell to his knees on the floor of the portico. For minutes he sagged there, his fingers still gripping the haft of the useless poker. The trembling which shook his entire frame gradually subsided. Suddenly remembering the wounded heir who lay inside, he roused himself and entered the house.

Cullum was sitting as before, propped against the wall. His face was ashen, but his eyes glimmered with surprise as Buttrick knelt beside him. “You—you are alive, Nathan!” he whispered. “Does the beast still live?”

The doctor quickly related the grisly death of the Hell-Child. It was apparent to him that his friend was falling into a decline from which he would never recover. The aneurism had been fatally disturbed by the night’s events.

“Then I am free!” cried Cullum. “At long last free of that terrible presence. Ah, liberty. Blessed, blessed liberty…” The voice of the heir trailed off in a final sob. Buttrick gently placed a pillow beneath the still head, and closed the eyes. The master of Cullum House, the last guardian of the Hell-Child, was dead.

For a long time the physician stood in the shambles of the parlor, trying to fathom some meaning in what he had experienced. Two corpses lay in that silent mansion. Beneath the whalejaw archway hung the carcass of the family’s child of darkness, claimed by this architectural whim of its first guardian. The grim sequence of events was too unsettling to comprehend.

But now it was time for action. Impelled by some allegiance which endured even the death of the last Cullum, the doctor resolved never to divulge the horror in which he had participated. Crawling into the Crib through the broken wall, he cleaned the chamber of all traces of the Hell-Child’s occupancy. On the portico he cut down the monstrous body and loaded it onto the surrey.

Buttrick inched the surrey down the dark fire-road to Mohegan Swamp. In a desolate reach of the bog he interred the remains of the vicious life which had brought Cullum House to ruin. Only then did he call the Sabbathday constable.

The account which that officer received was deliberately intended to excite no undue curiosity. As Buttrick told it, he had received a nighttime call from the heir requesting medication for his condition. Near the end of their conversation the line abruptly went dead. Upon his arrival at the house he found that apparently a burglar of considerable strength had slain Amadee. Cullum had been struck once, as the single gash on his brow testified. The blow had fatally aggravated his aneurism. Foiled by the steel door of the strongroom behind the parlor, the thief and murderer had broken through the wall into the chamber. But he found no treasure, for the room had not been used for years.

No person in Sabbathday, not even the investigating constable, questioned the veracity of the doctor’s explanation. Nathan Buttrick hid within himself the memory of that ghastly night at Cullum House until death eased him of the woeful burden.

* * *

Now, residents of the village rarely speak of the Cullum tragedy. Since there were no heirs, the great house reverted to Windham County and was razed for its timbers. In the town cemetery the Cullum family crypt is sealed forever and the Sabbathday Burial Ground is a place of peace, embraced on all sides by the northern forest.

But in Mohegan Swamp, the nighthawks disturb the twilight calm. They have inhabited the lowlands since the pulling down of Cullum House. At sundown, while the main flock wheels and cries over the brackish water, a few night-fliers roost atop a curious mound near the shoulder of a fire-road through the swamp. Each year the mound grows somewhat higher.

The forest warden who first noticed the growth believed it to be merely a subterranean tangle of living willow roots sent out by the trees which overhang the bog. Yet the birds who frequent the hillock utter strange, fervid cries as if urging on the evolution of something within the peculiar pile. It is unlikely that the mound will stir the curiosity of the townsfolk. Whatever phenomenon is at work will reach completion undisturbed.