Абрахам Меррит - Creep, Shadow!

I began to feel a strong interest in this Dr. de Keradel. The name was Breton, like my own, and as unusual. Another recollection flitted through my mind. There was a reference to the de Keradels in the chronicles of the de Carnacs, as we were once named. I looked it up. There had been no love lost between the two families, to put it mildly. Altogether, what I read blew my desire to meet Dr. de Keradel up to fever point.

I was half an hour late getting to Dr. Lowell's. The butler showed me into the library. A girl got up from a big chair and came toward me with hand outstretched.

"Hello, Alan," she said.

I blinked at her. She wasn't so tall, but her body had all the lovely contours the sculptors of Athens' Golden Age gave their dancing girls. The provocative dress of filmy black she wore hid none of them. Her hair was burnished copper and helmeted her small head. The heavy chignon at the nape of her neck showed she had resisted the bob. Her eyes were golden amber, and tilted delicately. Her nose was small and straight and her chin rounded. Her skin was not the creamy white that so often goes with redheads, but a delicate golden. It was a head and face that might have served as the model for one of Alexander's finest golden coins. Faintly archaic, touched with the antique beauty. I blinked again. I blurted:

"You're never – Helen!"

Her eyes sparkled, the impishness that my experience with the hornets had set indelibly in my memory danced over her face. She took my hands, and swayed close to me; she sighed:

"The same, Alan! The same! And you – oh, let me look at you! Yes, still the hero of my girlhood! The same keen, dark face – like – like – I used to call you Lancelot of the Lake, Alan – to myself of course. The same lithe, tall, and slender body – I used to call you the Black Panther, too, Alan. And do you remember how like a panther you leaped when the hornets stung you?" She bent her head, her rounded shoulders shaking. I said: "You little devil! I always knew you did that deliberately."

She said, muffled:

"I'm not laughing, Alan. I'm sobbing."

She looked up at me, and her eyes were indeed wet, but I was sure not with any tears of regret. She said:

"Alan, for long, long years I've waited to know something. Waited to hear you tell me something. Not to tell me that you love me, darling – No, No! I always knew that you were going to do that, sooner or later. This is something else!"

I was laughing, but I had a queer mixed feeling, too.

I said:

"I'll tell you anything. Even that I love you – and maybe mean it."

She said:

"Did you find those snakes in your bed? Or did they crawl out before you got in?"

I said again: "You little devil!"

She said:

"But were they there?"

"Yes, they were."

She sighed contentedly:

"Well, there's one complex gone forever. Now I know. You were so damned superior at times I just couldn't help it."

She held her face up to me:

"Since you're going to love me, Alan, you might as well kiss me."

I kissed her, properly. She might have been fooling with me about having been her girlhood hero, but there was no fooling about my kiss – nor the way she responded to it. She shivered and laid her head on my shoulder. She said, dreamily: "And there's another complex gone. Where am I going to stop?"

Somebody coughed at the doorway. Somebody else murmured, apologetically: "Ah, but we intrude."

Helen dropped her arms from around my neck, and we turned. In a way, I realized that the butler and another man were standing at the door. But all I could focus my eyes upon was the girl – or woman.

You know how it is when you're riding in the subway, or at the theater, or at a race track and suddenly one face, for some reason or no reason, thrusts itself out from the crowd, and it's as though your mental spotlight were turned on it and every other face gets misty and recedes into the background. That often happens to me. Something in the face that stirs some old forgotten memory, no doubt. Or stirs the memory of our ancestors whose ghosts are always peering through our eyes. Seeing this girl was like that, only far more so. I couldn't see anything else – not even Helen.

She had the bluest eyes I've ever seen, or rather eyes of a curious deep violet. They were big and unusually wide apart, with long curling black lashes and slimly penciled black eyebrows that almost met above her high-arched but delicately modeled nose. You felt, rather than saw, their color. Her forehead was broad, but whether it was low I could not tell, for it was coifed with braids of palest gold, and there were little ends of hair that curled up all over her head, and they were so fine and silken that the light in the hall shining through them made a queer silver-gilt aureole around her head. Her mouth was a bit large, but beautifully formed and daintily sensuous. Her skin was a miracle, white, but vital – as though moon fires shone behind it.

She was tall almost as I, exquisitely curved, deep bosomed. Her breasts echoed the betrayal of her lips. Her head and face and shoulders came like a lily out of the calyx of a shimmering sea-green gown.

She was exquisite – but I had swift understanding that there was nothing heavenly about the blue of her eyes. And nothing saintly about the aureole about her head.

She was perfection – and I felt a swift hatred against her, understanding, as the pulse of it passed, how one could slash a painting that was a masterpiece of beauty, or take a hammer and destroy a statue that was another such masterpiece if it evoked such hatred as that which I, for that fleeting moment, felt.

Then I thought:

Do I hate you – or do I fear you?

It was all, mind you, in a breath.

Helen was moving by me, hand outstretched. There was no confusion about Helen. Our embrace that had been interrupted might have been a simple handshake. She said, smiling and gracious:

"I am Helen Bennett. Dr. Lowell asked me to receive you. You are Dr. de Keradel, aren't you?"

I looked at the man who was bending over her hand, kissing it. He straightened, and I felt a queer shock of bewilderment. Bill had said I was to meet Dr. de Keradel and his daughter. But this man looked no I older than the girl – if she was his daughter. True, the silver in the gold of his hair was a little paler; true, the blue of his eyes had not the violet-purple of hers…

I thought: But neither of them has any age! And on top of that I thought, rather savagely: What the hell's the matter with me anyway?

The man said:

"I am Dr. de Keradel. And this is my daughter."

The girl – or woman – seemed now to be regarding both Helen and me with faint amusement. Dr. de Keradel said with, I thought, curious precision:

"The Demoiselle Dahut d'Ys," he hesitated, then finished – "de Keradel."

Helen said:

"And this is Dr. Alan Caranac."

I was looking at the girl – or woman. The name of Dahut d'Ys fingered half-forgotten chords of memory. And as Helen named me, I saw the violet eyes dilate, become enormous, the straight brows contract until they met above the nose in a slender bar. I felt the glance of her eyes strike and encompass me. She seemed to be seeing me for the first time. And in her eyes was something threatening – possessive. Her body tensed. She said, as though to herself: "Alain de Carnac… ?"

She glanced from me to Helen. There was calculation in that glance, appraisal. Contemptuous indifference, too – if I read it aright. A queen might so have looked upon some serving wench who had dared to lift eyes to her lover.

Whether I read the glance aright or not, Helen evidently got something of the same thought. She turned to me and said sweetly:

"Darling, I'm ashamed of you. Wake up!"

With the side of her little high-heeled slipper she gave me a surreptitious and vigorous kick on the shin.