Read The Lonely Shadows: Tales of Horror and the Cthulhu Mythos for Free Online Page B

quite clearly, the imprint of feet on the damp ground.
    Calder’s mind was a shrieking confusion of divided impulses, with the overriding one a dominant rush of fear. He wanted to turn and run, run back along that slippery winding path into the trees and then through the tangled undergrowth back to the gate and out onto the road where everything would be sane and normal again. But something held him rooted to the spot. His legs seemed paralysed, unable to move. Only his breath, rasping in his throat made any sound in the awful stillness. He felt like a man in a daydream, who knew that he was dreaming and yet could not awaken; repelled and at the same time oddly fascinated by what he saw. Then Woodbridge moved. He thrust himself forward with a muttered sound, whether oath or prayer it was impossible for Calder to determine, and disappeared inside the dark opening. The lawyer stood quite still outside, listening to the other moving around inside the dark tomb of the vault, saw the flashes of the torch as the other flicked the beam around the dripping, putrescent walls.
    From where he stood, he could see the grossly distorted outlines of other things shadowed upon the walls and although he wanted desperately to close his eyes and yell at the other to come out, he could not do so. There was the inescapable feeling that no matter what had happened already, worse was still to come and the realisation unnerved him. It seemed an eternity before Woodbridge came out into the moonlight again and the expression on his face was one that Calder could not define.
    “What is it?” he asked thinly. “Is there something wrong in there?”
    “There is.” Woodbridge put up his right hand to his eyes as if to wipe away the image of something he had seen. “It’s worse than I thought. We have to go up to the house right away if we are to stand any chance at all of stopping them.”
    “But what is it?” Calder managed to get the words out before the other came forward, seized him by the arm, and pulled him, unresisting, along the path, back in the direction of the house, just visible beyond the tall trees.
    “I’ll explain on the way to the house,” went on the other hurriedly. “There isn’t a moment to lose. Perhaps it may be too late already.”
    * * * * * * *
    It was almost midnight now. The moon was high in the sky, riding just above the storm clouds sweeping in from the west and although it had lost its lurid red colour, the house seemed to pick something out of the moonlight, to transmute it into something terrible and evil. The broken chimneys stretched up like hands to the heavens and the eyeless sockets of the windows staring intently along the twisting drive towards the road.
    This was how it had been for more than forty years, a place of dark and lonely shadows; and if there were lights and noises from the rooms, the villagers, passing on a cold November night, merely crossed themselves and hurried on, praying that the locks was strong on the gates of the vaults atop the hill, caring little of what might be happening to Charles Belstead, alone in that house with whatever horrors that might be beside.
    Now, on that particular night, there was a peculiar waiting quality over it. The rooms were not empty and Charles Belstead was not alone. There were shadows in the house, eldritch things, the apotheosis of the unnameable. On the floor of the library at the rear of the house, the strange cabalistic designs glowed with an eerie, devilish light. There was a flickering inside the room as of corpse candles, a cold radiance, a manifestation of the aura of evil that had never left the place, which was crystallised inside its very walls....
    * * * * * * *
    As they came out of the trees onto the edge of the rambling lawn, the moon was swallowed up by the storm clouds, which had been moving in from the west, covering most of the sky. A few stars still showed to the north, but soon they too, would be engulfed by the blackness. There was