Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 6 (1925-12).djvu/72

seeming to take delight in showing me how little she cared for what she had done to me.

"That night just before 12 o'clock she called to me. I was sitting in the library in a state of mental lethargy, but I realized that her voice was sharp with some unusual emotion. I went to her quickly. She said she had a horrible pain at the pit of her stomach. Her face was drawn, and little beads of perspiration stood out on her forehead. carried water to her by the glassful—but she couldn't seem to get enough. I suggested going for a doctor, but she wouldn't let me leave her. She grew weaker, but the pain abated and she said she was getting better. In a few hours she went into a state of coma in which she died without regaining consciousness.

"I didn't seem to realize what had happened. I didn't even know when or where she was buried. There was a spell laid over me that I couldn't break. I forgot the book entirely. I think I forgot life itself. All the impulse I had was to get away, to isolate myself beyond the sight and sound of my kind. To wear out my suffering alone.

"I took what money I needed for the purpose, came up here and built this cabin. I have been here ever since. The first year I was simply an automaton, going about over the hills, not seeing, hearing, tasting or feeling.

"Then one day I went to town for provisions. I saw a windowful of books—gray books lettered in gold. I dropped my bundles in the street, rushed into the store and bought a copy, the very copy you have there in your hand. I ran all the way out of town with that book gripped tight to my heart. I slept out under the pines with it that night—the house couldn't hold me. And there under the pines the ice melted away. I knew them once more, my passion and air and fire. The next morning I wrote the first poem that had come to me in fourteen months!

"After that the years flew. I have written, read, dreamed and created. There's enough manuscript in there to make six volumes of poems. And through it all—I have paid.

"I made a solemn compact with God. I should stay here on this mountain top shut off from the world till someone from the world of affairs should seek me out. Someone of my own clan. Someone who would stay with me as a kindly guest for the night, eating dinner with me upon my place of immolation. Someone who would eat mushrooms I had gathered and cooked. And that was to be a sign from God that my penance was done. Perhaps you will call it the distorted fancy of a twisted brain, but I believe God took me at my word. He has kept me here for ten years.

"And though I had planned mightily what I would do when I was released from my self-imposed penance, I did not plan that the man who came to release me would be an author hunting a story! You have your story, Mr. Blondin. Very well. Good-bye—and good luck." And he turned to go back to the cabin.

I caught him by the arm. "Not so fast, Wytten, please," I said. You see I hadn't quite got it. "What do you mean—penance?"

He paused for a moment and stood searching the moss with brooding eyes. Then his gaze fell on the thing he sought. He stepped to the base of a huge pine and pulled from the needle-covered moss a great mushroom. Stalk, gills and top of it were a spotless white. Crumbling from the flange, fragile as gossamer, was a flocculent web and a deep snowy cup curled gracefully about the base of the stem. It was exquisitely beautiful. He held it toward me, and as he