Part 3

The schoolmaster's hands trembled like those of a man with the ague.

"Explain!" he said hoarsely.

"Alone and unassisted, these primal forces cannot come to us," Lamontaine told him. "They must be aided by someone who is already here--someone who has the vitality to support them for the nonce. It must be one with mediumistic powers. Now do you understand?"

The little schoolmaster crossed himself again.

"It is unbelievable, horrible!" he said. Then, leaning forward, his voice dropped to a hoarse whisper:

"I would willingly give my life, doctaire, in order to save the woman I love. You, who know everything, perhaps can show me the way."

Lamontaine combed his long beard with his fingers, reflectively.

"My books have already told me that much," he said after a brief pause. "If you ... care to take ... the chance."

The other nodded, a hectic spot appearing in each cheek.

"Proceed!" he commanded hoarsely.

Lamontaine rose and, walking to the little medicine cabinet, filled a hypodermic with clear, colorless liquid.

"An injection of this liquid will lower your vitality to a point where you will be an easy victim," he said quietly; "far easier than Evelyn, who is strong and healthy and able to resist it. Why? Because you are already a sick man. I have a plan to trap this thing--it must be a secret between us--if you are willing to trust me and take the only way out."

For an instant there was silence. Then the little schoolmaster bared his frail arm to the needle.

2. The Thing

Rum-guzzler though he was, a soldier of fortune--a wild, barbaric throw-back, born a hundred years too late--Doctor Hugo Lamontaine was yet an occultist of international reputation and a physician of extraordinary ability. Possessed of a fortune which made him independent of his fellow-men, he followed the dictates of his own conscience, caring not a whit for the conventions. To him the esoteric practises of voodoo, obeah and demonology were open books; to study them he had followed his beard to the end of the world.

Tall and broad-shouldered, his hair as red as the blood that he had shed on a dozen foreign fields, possessing the whiskers of a Viking, slovenly in his attire, constantly spoiling for a fight or a frolic, he was a man to be reckoned with under any conditions.

His insatiable craving for knowledge had brought him to the little village of La Foubelle. Slumbering at the very edge of the gigantic morass, uncontaminated by the presence of outsiders, its French-Creole inhabitants had clung, leech-like, to the customs and superstitions of their ancestors. Close association with the blacks who, brought from West India as slaves at an early day, had revolted and fled to the interior of the swamp, had intensified these weird beliefs. La Foubelle was a virgin vein of folklore and heterodoxies, witchcraft and bizarre customs. Lamontaine had deliberately thrown himself into the midst of the lives of these near-barbarians. He had ingratiated himself to them and, by degrees, had been accepted as one of them. Eventually he had become not only their physician, but their confessor as well.

The day had brought more than its accustomed load of suffering. The heat had made the afflicted ones worse. Making his evening rounds, Lamontaine was filled with a premonition of death lurking close at hand. He had the narrow street to himself. Men and women talked in low, hushed whispers, huddling together, sheep-like, fearful of the darkness that had dropped like a pall. Frightened children clung to their mothers' skirts, their black eyes beady with terror. From inside a tiny cottage came the sound of muffled sobs as a young mother rocked her first-born, slowly wasting away.

The bell in the little schoolhouse at the end of the lane clanged dolefully. Lamontaine halted in his tracks, his broad shoulders drooping like those of a defeated man. For the schoolhouse was also the church.

"Bong! ... bong! ... bong! ... bong!"

He counted the strokes. When they passed sixteen, he breathed a deep sigh of relief. It meant that little Evelyn l'Brest was not the victim.

"Bong! ... bong! ... bong!"

He counted on until the strokes passed fifty. Then, as they continued their doleful monody, he lifted his shoulders and took up his walk again. It would be old Kenny Tolan, he told himself--Kenny Tolan, eighty-two and long ago marked as a victim by the grim reaper.

And deep in his pagan heart, Doctor Hugo Lamontaine breathed a little prayer of thanksgiving.

Evelyn l'Brest, the schoolmaster's sweetheart, still lived. There was yet a chance.

Again he was halted by an agonized scream. It came from a cottage close at hand--the abode of Jacques d'Arcy, at the end of the side road. He whirled and dashed through the darkness in the direction of the low, thatched house with its single lighted window. A white, scared face stared at him through the darkness as a man rushed around the corner, his gun drawn, almost colliding with him in his mad rush. It was Pierre Le Front, the village constable.

"Mon Dieu!" the little man exclaimed. "You heard it, doctaire?"

Lamontaine nodded grimly. The constable by his side, he padded noiselessly over the soft earth between the rows of trees, covered with Spanish moss, that led to the d'Arcy home.