V
Jake’s Story
Sigrid, with Jake in attendance as usual, had left New York on the morning after Varduk’s reading of Ruthven. They had driven in the car Jake had helped Davidson to buy, and thus they avoided the usual throngs of Sigrid’s souvenir-demanding public, which would have complicated their departure by train. At Dillard Falls Junction, Varduk himself awaited them, having come up on a night train. Jake took time to mail me a ticket and money, then they drove the long, shadowy way to the theater.
Lake Jozgid, as most rural New Yorkers know, is set rather low among wooded hills and bluffs. The unevenness of the country and the poverty of the soil have discouraged cultivation, so that farms and villages are few. As the party drove, Varduk suggested an advantage in this remoteness, which suggestion Jake later passed on to Judge Pursuivant and me; where a less brilliant or more accessible star might be ignored in such far quarters, Sigrid would find Lake Jozgid to her advantage. The world would beat a path to her box office, and treasure a glimpse of her the more because that glimpse had been difficult of attainment.
The theater building itself had been a great two-story lodge, made of heavy logs and hand-hewn planks. Some sporting-club, now defunct, had owned it, then abandoned it when fish grew scarce in the lake. Varduk had leased it cheaply, knocked out all partitions on the ground floor, and set up a stage, a lobby and pew-like benches. The upper rooms would serve as lodgings for himself and his associate Davidson, while small outbuildings had been fitted up to accommodate the rest of us.
Around this group of structures clung a thick mass of timber. Sigrid, who had spent her girlhood among Sweden’s forests, pointed out that it was mostly virgin and inquired why a lumber company had never cut logs here. Varduk replied that the property had been private for many years, then changed the subject by the welcome suggestion that they have dinner. They had brought a supply of provisions, and Jake, who is something of a cook in addition to his many other professions, prepared a meal. Both Sigrid and Jake ate heartily, but Varduk seemed only to take occasional morsels for politeness’ sake.
In the evening, a full moon began to rise across the lake. Sitting together in Varduk’s upstairs parlor, the three saw the great soaring disk of pale light, and Sigrid cried out joyfully that she wanted to go out and see better.
“Take a lantern if you go out at night,” counseled Varduk over his cigar.
“A lantern?” Sigrid repeated. “But that would spoil the effect of the moonlight.”
Her new director blew a smooth ring of smoke and stared into its center, as though a message lay there. Then he turned his brilliant eyes to her. “If you are wise, you will do as I say,” he made answer.
Men like Varduk are masterful and used to being obeyed. Sometimes they lose sight of the fact that women like Sigrid are not used to being given arbitrary commands without explanation. She fell silent and a little frigid for half an hour—often I had seen her just as Jake was describing her. Then she rose and excused herself, saying that she was tired from the morning’s long drive and would go to bed early. Varduk rose and courteously bowed her to the stairs. Since her sleeping-quarters, a cleverly rebuilt woodshed, were hardly a dozen steps from the rear of the lodge building itself, neither man thought it necessary to accompany her.
Left alone, Varduk and Jake carried on an idle conversation, mostly about publicity plans. Jake, who in the show business had done successfully almost everything but acting, found in his companion a rather penetrating and accurate commentator on this particular aspect of production. Indeed, Varduk debated him into a new attitude—one of restraint and dignity instead of novel and insistent extravagance.
“You’re right,” Jake announced at length. “I’m going to get the releases that go out in tomorrow’s mail. I’ll cut out every ‘stupendous’ and ‘colossal’ I wrote into them. Good night, Mr. Varduk.”
He, too, trotted downstairs and left the main building for his own sleeping-room, which was the loft of an old boathouse. As he turned toward the water, he saw a figure walking slowly and dreamily along its edge—Sigrid, her hands tucked into the pockets of the light belted coat she had donned against possible night chills, her head flung back as though she sought all of the moonlight upon her rapt face.
Although she had wandered out to the brink of the sandy beach and so stood in the open brightness, clumps of bushes and young trees grew out almost to the lake. One tufty belt of scrub willow extended from the denser timber to a point within a dozen feet of Sigrid. It made a screen of gloom between Jake’s viewpoint and the moon’s spray of silver. Yet, he could see, light was apparently soaking through its close-set leaves, a streak of soft radiance that was so filtered as to look murky, greenish, like the glow from rotting salmon.
Even as Jake noticed this flecky glimmer, it seemed to open up like a fan or a parasol. Instead of a streak, it was a blot. This extended further, lazily but noticeably. Jake scowled. And this moved lakeward, without leaving any of itself at the starting-point.
With its greatening came somewhat of a brightening, which revealed that the phenomenon had some sort of shape—or perhaps the shape was defining itself as it moved. The blot’s edges grew unevenly, receding in places to swell in others. Jake saw that these swellings sprouted into pseudopodal extensions (to quote him, they “jellied out”), that stirred as though groping or reaching. And at the top was a squat roundness, like an undeveloped cranium. The lower rays of light became limbs, striking at the ground as though to walk. The thing counterfeited life, motion—and attention. It was moving toward the water, and toward Sigrid.
Jake did not know what it was, and he says that he was suddenly and extremely frightened. Yet he does not seem to have acted like one who is stricken with fear. What he did, and did at once, was to bawl out a warning to Sigrid, then charge at the mystery.
It had stolen into the moonlight, and Jake encountered it there. As he charged, he tried to make out the details; but what little it had had of details in the darkness now went misty, as its glow was conquered in the brighter flood of moonglow. Yet it was there, and moving toward Sigrid. She had turned from looking across the water, and now shrank back with a tremulous cry, stumbling and recovering herself ankle-deep in the shallows.
Jake, meanwhile, had flung himself between her and what was coming out of the thicket. He did not wait or even set himself for conflict, but changed direction to face and spring upon the threatening presence. Though past his first youth, he fancied himself as in fairly tough condition, and more than once he had won such impromptu fistfights as spring up among the too-temperamental folk of the theater. He attacked as he would against a human adversary, sinking his head between his shoulders and flinging his fists in quick succession.
He got home solidly, against something tangible but sickeningly loose beneath its smooth skin or rind. It was like buffeting a sack half full of meal. Though the substance sank in beneath his knuckles, there was no reeling or retreat. A squashy return slap almost enveloped his face, and his spectacles came away as though by suction. At the same time he felt a cable-like embrace, such as he had imagined a python might exert. He smelled putrescence, was close to being sick, and heard, just behind him, the louder screaming of Sigrid.
The fresh knowledge of her danger and terror made him strong again. One arm was free, and he battered gamely with his fist. He found his mark, twice and maybe three times. Then his sickness became faintness when he realized that his knuckles had become slimy wet.
A new force dragged at him behind. Another enemy … then a terrible voice of command, the voice of Varduk:
“Let go at once!”
The grasp and the filthy bulk fell away from Jake. He felt his knees waver like shreds of paper. His eyes, blurred without their thick spectacles, could barely discern, not one, but several lumpy forms drawing back. And near him stood Varduk, his facial phosphorescence out-gleaming the rotten light of the creatures, his form drawn up sternly in a posture of command.
“Get out!” cried Varduk again. “By what power do you come for your victim now?”
The uncouth shapes shrank out of sight. Jake could not be sure whether they found shelter behind bushes and trees or not; perhaps they actually faded into invisibility. Sigrid had come close, stepping gingerly in her wet shoes, and stooped to retrieve Jake’s fallen glasses.
“We owe you our lives,” she said to Varduk. “What were those—”
“Never mind,” he cut her off. “They will threaten you no more tonight. Go to your beds, and be more careful in the future.”
This was the story that Jake told me as we drove the final miles to the Lake Jozgid Theater.
He admitted that it had all been a desperate and indistinct scramble to him, and that explanation he had offered next morning when Varduk laughed and accused him of dreaming.
“But maybe it wasn’t a dream,” Jake said as he finished. “Even if it was, I don’t want any more dreams like it.”