The Place Called Dagon by Herbert Gorman

He stared into a hollow that was filled with shifting forms, moving figures that were slices of darkness before the lanterns. Faces passed and repassed before his curious gaze, paused, bent forward, turned, leaned toward one another, disappeared, and it was some minutes before he could make them out, could recognize them as human faces that he had once viewed vacantly in the quiet lanes of Marlborough. He had not expected so much light, so much action. As his eyes adjusted themselves to the scene before them he began to perceive the spectacle as a whole, almost as a painting whose component parts might be observed and then relegated to their proper order. He sensed Walden Slater creeping into the bush beside him but he made no gesture of comprehension, merely shifting his position a trifle so that the farmer, too, might see what was going on in the hollow. For his own part, he was intent on the spectacle before him, watching eagerly for the one face of all faces and subconsciously deliberating in his mind what he should do when he did see that face. The hollow was large and level and the ground upon which these people walked was dark and firm. There was no grass, no growths of any sort. It stretched like a black carpet to the ring of bushes that hemmed it on all sides. It was a natural amphitheater, an arena formed by chance. Circling this expanse of black soil was a series of lanterns, perhaps twenty of them, placed at regular intervals and lighting up the scene as though it were a stage and they were footlights. The beams of yellow glowed upward, striking the lower portions of faces and distorting them. Chins and nostrils and the undersides of cheekbones were crazily illuminated in this unnatural light. In the center of the hollow loomed a large flat-topped rock, perhaps five feet high. It was black stone glittering now with moisture, with the rain that had fallen so steadily on it all through the day and night. There was something ominous about this stone, something unclean, and the young doctor studied it with intense loathing. Its slimy black sides were like the skin of some great horrid toad, smooth yet studded with offensive warts that caught the glow of the lanterns and flung them back again to the misty night. Dreeme wondered if it were true that crumbling bones were buried in the dark soil beneath this rock which seemed so immovable, so placed there by time in the center of this secret amphitheater. The rock appeared as old as the ages. It seemed riven immutably into the earth. Yet it was unmistakably the Devil Stone and from its moist toad-like surface the Black Man had preached his blasphemous sermons in times past, had conducted the orgiastic liturgies of the Witches' Sabbat and the Esbat. There was no one near the stone now. It stood malevolently, a shunned phenomenon in the hollow. "Rock of Ages. " Yes, this was the Rock that George Burroughs meant when he hummed monotonously the old church tune.

Dreeme's eyes drifted over the faces that moved about in the hollow. There were, perhaps, twenty people present, all men. The low hum of their subdued voices reached him distinctly. They walked about slowly, clutching their raincoats closely to their tall bodies, their heavy boots falling heavily on the dark soil. Something feverish and repressed in their movements injected a tense note into the assemblage. They seemed uncertain of themselves, a little hysteric and desperately straining to conceal the hysteria that quickened their blood and plucked at their nerves. There was doubt here, a doubt that sickly denied itself. Sober faces gazed blankly at one another and sunken fanatical eyes glittered in the lantern glow like wet beetles. The young doctor observed one tall figure that walked round and round just within the circle of lanterns ceaselessly, pausing before no one but moved apparently by an interior restlessness that would not permit him to stop. As the man passed a short distance from where the young doctor lay hidden he recognized him as Bidwell, the farmer whose land adjoined Westcott's toward the Saccarac River. Bidwell's mouth was moving steadily as though he were talking rapidly to himself. And now as Dreeme's eyes became accustomed to the scene he recognized more faces. There was Lacy, the postmaster and proprietor of the general store, a stork-like man with a carbuncular nose, and Winship, one of the selectmen, stout, worried-looking, and somewhat at a loss, and Titubit, the dark hawk-nosed farmer who was supposed to have Indian blood in his veins, and Corey, the tanned white-haired owner of Corey's Acres on the lower road. Dreeme had attended all of these men at some time or other for minor ailments and he viewed them now with a disbelieving wonder, half-suspecting that any minute the whole scene would vanish in thin air and he would wake up in bed sweating from a nightmare. Yet here they were, and others whose faces he dimly recognized but whose names he could not place, strolling nervously about the dark hollow, waiting restlessly and suspiciously for some evil thing to happen, stirred by some daemon of hereditary madness that had been wakened in their blood and brains after sleeping for years. Dreeme crouched lower in the bushes and watched them attentively. His few garments were saturated with water and the cold wind blew across his back yet his pulses were beating fast enough and the warmth of excitement shuddered along his drenched flesh. Beside him he could feel the heavy shoulders of Walden Slater.