Абрахам Меррит - Creep, Shadow!

Dahut said:

"You brought the bracelet I gave you?"

Passively, I thrust my hand into my pocket, drew out the bracelet and gave it to her. She fastened it around my wrist. The red symbol on the pebble gleamed as though traced in lines of fire. She said:

"You have forgotten I gave you that… long and long and long ago… lover I loved above all men… lover I have hated above all men. And you have forgotten the name it bears. Well, hear that name once more, Alain de Carnac… and remember what you ask me to forgive."

She spoke a name. Hearing it, a million sparks seemed to burst in my brain – fireflies dissipating the cold fog that gripped it.

She spoke it again, and the shadows within the green tapestries rushed to the surface of the waves, twined arms, locked hands…

Round and round and round the walls they danced… faster and ever faster… shadows of women and of men. Hazily, I thought of the dancing girls in the "House of the Heart's Desire," dancing in a circle to the drums of the Senussi sorcerers… as these shadows were dancing to the luting of Dahut.

Faster and faster the shadows spun, and then they, too, began to sing; in faint whispering voices, shadows of voices… and in the green tapestries the shifting colors became the surge and withdrawal of great waves, and the shadow singing became the murmuring of waves, and then their song, and then a clamorous shouting.

Again Dahut spoke the name. The shadows sprang out of the tapestries and ringed me… closer and closer. The shouting of the waves became the roaring of a tempest, beating me down and down – out and out.

Hurricane-roaring and clamor of the sea dwindled into the ordered beat of great waves breaking against some barrier. I was standing at a window in some high place looking out over a white-capped, stormy sea. The sunset was red and sullen. It made a wide path of blood across the waters. I leaned out the window, eyes straining to the right to find something that ought still to be visible in the gathering dusk. I found it. A vast plain covered with immense upright stones, hundreds of them, marching from every side to a squat, rock-built temple like the hub of a gigantic wheel of which the monoliths were the spokes. They were so far away that they looked like boulders. Then suddenly by some trick of mirage they quivered and swam close. The rays of the dying sun painted them and they seemed splashed with blood and the squat temple to drip blood.

I knew that this was Carnac, of which I was the Lord. And that the squat temple was the Alkar-Az where the Gatherer in the Cairn came at the evocation of Dahut the White and the evil priests.

And that I was in ancient Ys.

Then the mirage quivered again and was gone. The dusk blotted out Carnac. I looked down upon Cyclopean walls against which long combers broke, shouting. They were enormously thick and high here, these walls; jutting into the ocean like the prow of some ship of stone; they lessened as they fell back toward the mainland through shallows which were bare sands when the tides ebbed.

I knew the city well. A fair city. Temples and palaces of sculptured stone with tiled and painted roofs red and orange and blue and green adorned it, and dwellings of lacquered wood utterly unlike the rude homes of my clan. It was filled with hidden gardens where fountains whispered and strange flowers bloomed. It was clustered, this city, between the wave-beaten walls as though the land upon which it stood was a deck of a ship and the walls the bulwarks. They had built it on a peninsula that stretched far out into the sea. The sea menaced it always, and always was held at bay by the walls, and by the sorcery of Ys. Out of the city ran a wide road, straight over the sands to the mainland, and straight to the evil heart of the circling monoliths – where my people were sacrificed.

They who had built Ys were not my people. But it was not they who had raised the stones of Carnac. Our grandmothers had said their grandmothers had told that long and long ago the people who built Ys had come sailing in strangely shaped ships, fortified the neck of the peninsula and settled there; and now we were in thrall to them; and they had taken Carnac and on the trunk of its dark ritual had grafted branches that bore the fruit of unnameable evil. I had come to Ys to lop those branches. And if I lived thereafter to put ax to trunk.

Bitterly did I hate these people of Ys, sorcerers and sorceresses all, and I had a plan to destroy them, one and all; to end the dreadful rites of the Alkar-Az and rid the temple forever of That which came in the wake of torment and death to my own people at the summoning of Dahut and the priests of Ys. I thought all that while knowing at one and the same time I was the Lord of Carnac and also Alan Caranac who had allowed himself to be caught by the wiles of the Demoiselle de Keradel, and was seeing only what she was willing him to see. At least, Alan Caranac knew that, but the Lord of Carnac did not.

I heard the sweetness of a lute touched lightly; heard laughter like little heartless waves, and a voice – the voice of Dahut!

"Lord of Carnac, the dusk hides your lands. And have you not looked long enough on the sea, beloved? Her arms are cold – mine are warm."

I turned from the window, and for a moment ancient Carnac and ancient Ys seemed fantastic dream. For I was still in that tower from which I had thought the dancing shadows had thrust me. It was the same room; rose-lighted, octagonal, hung with the same tapestries in which green shadows waxed and waned; and upon a low stool sat Dahut, lute in hand, draped in the same sea-green web, her braids falling between her breasts.

I said:

"You are true a witch, Dahut – to trap me like that again." And turned to the window to look upon the familiar lights of New York.

But that was not what I said, nor did I turn. I found myself walking straight toward her, and instead of the words I had thought to speak, I heard myself saying:

"You are of the sea, Dahut… and if your arms are warmer, your heart is as merciless."

And suddenly I knew that whether dream or illusion, this was Ys, and while the part of me that was Alan Caranac could see through the eyes, hear with the ears, and read the thought of this other part of me which was Lord of Carnac, I was powerless to control him and he was unaware of me. Yet I must abide by what he did. Something like an actor watching himself go through a play – but with the quite important difference that I knew neither the lines nor the situations. A most disturbing condition. I had a swift thought that Dahut ought either to have laced me under better hypnotic control or passed me up entirely. I felt a faint disappointment in her. That idea shot out of my mind like a rocket.

She looked up at me, and her eyes were wet. She loosed her braids and covered her face with her hair and she wept behind its curtain. I said, coldly:

"Many women have wept as you do… for men you have slain, Dahut."

She said:

"Since you rode into Ys from Carnac a month ago, I have had no peace. There is a flame in my heart that eats it. What to me or to you are the lovers who have gone before, since until you came never did I know love? I kill no more – I have banished my shadows."

I asked, grimly:

"What if they do not accept their banishment?"

She threw back her hair; looked at me, sharply:

"What do you mean by that?"

I answered:

"I make serfs. I train them to serve me well and to acknowledge no other master. I feed and house them. Suppose, then, I feed them no longer, deny them shelter. Banish them. What will my hungry, homeless serfs do, Dahut?"

She said, incredulously:

"You mean my shadows may rebel against me?" She laughed, then her eyes narrowed, calculatingly: "Still there is something in what you say. And what I have made, I can unmake."