The Place Called Dagon by Herbert Gorman

"Not that way," said Dreeme hastily as Deborah instinctively turned up the Leeminster Road toward the Saccarac River.

Everybody seemed to head in that direction as though there were a magnet at the end of the road attracting them irresistibly. He would change the scheme of things by facing another way, by facing an opposite direction than that in which lay the Westcott farm, the burned mill, the trampled bank of the river, and the creaking bridge that had groaned with the weight of the coroner's buggy. She wheeled on her small feet and followed him obediently and they passed the dark front of his little house and the tarnished brass plate upon which was inscribed "Dr. Daniel Dreeme. " A moment later they were walking side by side through the main street of Marlborough, a main street that speedily opened into a tiny square faced by the small church, the post office and general store, and Mrs. Larkin's boarding house where nobody ever boarded. The blank fronts of the scattered buildings gloomed at them incuriously. Though this was the heart of the community Dreeme could not hear a single beat. The heart had stopped pulsing for the night and even in the daylight it functioned but sluggishly. No lights glimmered from the windows of the houses for all the inhabitants had long ago crept into their beds and stretched out beneath their homemade quilts to wait uneagerly for another early rising. Yet the moon flooded the square and made it as bright as day and in that crystal bath they walked slowly, feeling the cold light run along their faces and ripple over their arms.