The Jade God by Alan Sullivan (snow like ashes series txt) 📕

went. Then I knew that it⁠—that they would not let me remain away, so I had to come back.” She gazed round this well-remembered room and seemed to signal that she acknowledged its potency.

Derrick looked at the littered desk and into the mask-like face. Her eyes were alight now, and not those of a lonely woman. She was, as it were, surrounded by friends. He wondered if they would ever be his friends.

“Do you mind talking like this? I think I understand, but most people wouldn’t.”

“It makes me happier. For two years there have been no living words about it. I could never find anyone who understood at all since it happened, and Miss Millicent would not speak.” She hesitated, and sent him the faintest smile. “For the last two days the house has been amused.”

“How?” he demanded. Beech Lodge seemed to be stirring about him, and with slow palpitations of a monstrous life, throbbing in one vast pulse on which Perkins kept a cool, knowledgeable finger. It moved and breathed.

“It was at the men who came to take the inventory. They were such children; though one of them, and he was quite old, guessed at something in a general way. The other could never hear or see anything.”

He nodded and, turning, caught a yellow flicker that touched the portrait into a strange similitude of life. Millicent’s eyes were speaking now, strange things to which he had no key. But only for a little while. The key was not far away. There came over Derrick the profound conviction that this was all arranged. It belonged to the cycle of appointed things. The stage was all set. If he could but keep his ears tuned to the elusive vibrations that permeated this solitary dwelling, he might decipher its mystery. And Perkins was part of it.

“Is that like Mr. Millicent?”

She nodded, with no surprise that he should know whose portrait it was. “Yes, and there was something about him very like you, sir. Not in appearance, but the other thing. He once told me that he began to hear and understand a little while he was a child. They commenced to talk before he left his first school. I’m glad, sir, that Miss Derrick does not understand.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because she told me not to be lonely, as if one could. She thinks I’m a little mad, and that’s why I’m willing to stay here and not ask high wages.”

He did not answer, beginning now to perceive why he had been led to this isolated spot. Millicent stared down at him, and he was persuaded that from the picture proceeded a thin appeal for help⁠—or was it for revenge?⁠—Millicent whose life had been so suddenly snuffed out⁠—Millicent who had been afraid before he died. Afraid of what?

“You’re not afraid too, sir, are you? It’s no use if you are.”

He shook his head, scanning thoughtfully the books, the prints, the dull paneling, and heavy oaken floor.

“You believe,” he said slowly, “that all this has sucked in year after year something from mortality, something that is never quite lost, till, in time, wood and stone and paper become something much more than this, and radiate back to us, if we can only catch it, the wisdom and courage and love and evil they have so long absorbed. You believe all this, Perkins?”

Her eyes opened wide, filling with a strange light. She was no longer an impassive, middle-aged woman, the servant of the house, but a creature vibrant with feeling, as one who has unleashed her soul. Her lips moved inaudibly, as at some mystic shrine.

“Wisdom and courage and love and evil,” she repeated in an awed whisper. “Yes, yes, that’s it, all of it. Last time it was evil in Beech Lodge. The evil had been here for months and years, growing stronger and stronger. It began when Mr. Millicent got back from the East, and it never stopped. I tried to silence it but failed, and then it silenced him. The evil was too strong.”

“But it’s over now,” said Derrick steadily.

“No, it’s here yet, in this room,” she pointed to the portrait. “He knows. He’s been trying to tell me but cannot.”

“From whom does it come?”

“Wait, sir; you’re not ready yet. Nothing is quite ready, but it will be soon. That’s why you came. The others will come, too.”

He experienced a remarkable sensation of having lost all physical weight, and seemed to catch a low singing note as of a myriad of tiny voices, the far murmur of those who approached from the unknown. He could see Perkins, still motionless, and feel his own body, but this had no significance. As the wireless operator tunes his set till it abstracts from the invisible only that which is carried by its own individual wavelength and remains unaffected by all others, so Derrick began to pick up a series of vibrations that in a queer and remote fashion he recognized, but could not as yet interpret. Then he caught his own tones.

“So this air is full of that which can never die or disappear, and may save or destroy as it is written. It destroyed Millicent and may be the undoing of others unless it is brought to naught.”

“How else could it be?” Perkins covered her pale face, bent her head, and disappeared.

Derrick stared at the portrait, his features transfigured with something that was not altogether wonder. It was all unreal yet enormously real. What surprised him most was that he should be admitted so readily to this “no man’s land” where mystery, like a cloaked figure, moved among the shadows of tragedy. How much was here? How much of it was his own fancy? Who was the real Millicent, the man within the man who had been afraid before he died? How and why did Millicent die? Did evil take on an embodiment and, emerging like an apparition from the unknown, butcher him where he sat? Derrick pictured him, shrinking back into his chair with