Meanwhile it snowed. The ground was covered two feet deep about the cave. Up in the higher altitudes the blizzards raged perpetually, and the air was filled with dismal moanings. All hope of Dr. Shonto’s returning to the Valley of Arcana, except in an aeroplane, had vanished.
And the idiot sat at the door of the Cave of Hypocritical Frogs and drooled, staring through his hanging hair!
Never before had Charmian Reemy known fear, but now she suffered abject terror. All about her was ice and snow, and she shivered when a new note came in the monotonous roar of the waterfall. No longer sang the silver-throated choir boys. The high-pitched chorus that her fancy had once named theirs became the sinfully gleeful giggling of malicious sprites as they triumphed over her great disaster. The rollicking songs that the male quartet had sung changed to the bellowing of Satan, as when the angel of the Lord came down from heaven with the key to the bottomless pit and chained him for a thousand years. Wrapped in her blankets, nightmares came to her so that she was afraid to sleep without the flickering light of a pine knot near her. Often she awoke screaming, gripped by an icy, throat-contracting fear. And once the nightmare took upon itself reality—and Madame Destrehan’s prophecy was fulfilled.
There were fingers at her throat, long, curving talons that were black with dirt. Maniacal eyes looked into hers through a screen of hanging hair. Wet lips were close to her face, seen through a mat of unkempt beard, and from them lolled a tongue, black and swollen.
She thought that she fainted—she did not know. But for a space of time—how great she never knew—the flickering pine-knot torch was gone and an icy wave swept over her. Then she was up, shrieking, struggling madly, hers the strength of half a dozen women. She hurled the ogre away from her, striking, clawing, pushing, and it crashed against a wall of the cave and sank to the floor in a disorderly heap.
Panting, one hand clutching her breast, she gazed at it, huddled there, inert, breathing asthmatically. Then it moved, half rose, reclined once more in a posture more human and natural.
For an hour she watched, while the cold pierced her bones. Then, mustering her courage, she stole past IT to the outer chamber of the cave, where she collected blankets, brought them back, and threw them over the prostrate figure of what once had been Andrew Jerome. With her own blankets wrapped about her she remained in a sitting position, stark awake, until the cold, feeble light of another day in the Valley of Arcana crept in.
He was not injured. He merely had lost in a twinkling the brief flicker of energy that had returned to him, perhaps in a dream. Perhaps he had been asleep throughout, and his subconscious mind had revived and energized him where his conscious mind had failed to function. Perhaps her fierce defence had awakened him and had caused him to lapse back. He dragged himself up when it was light, and she guided him to his customary seat at the mouth of the cave.
Her daily needs served eventually to turn her mind on necessary tasks, which helped her to forget the horror of her days and nights. She must conserve the jerked meat, which together they had smoked so carefully over the smouldering fires, and attend to the traps. She trudged away through the snow, forced to leave Andy to his fate, gaping there at the mouth of the Cave of Hypocritical Frogs. But when she reached the first dead-fall and found a dead jackrabbit beneath the fallen stone she let it lie. One by one she visited other traps, springing them when she found no little dead body, and releasing live quail caught in the quail traps. She would eat the jerky, and when that was gone— Well, then she would find something else. She could not kill!
Sometimes she was almost tempted to pray that something might happen to Andy—that he might rouse himself and try to wander somewhere through the rocks, and meet with a fall that would end in instant death. He was almost helpless. She had brought herself to wash his hands and face, shuddering with repulsion, and whacked off the offensive claws. She wanted to shave him, but was afraid that she did not know how, and shrank from the task. As yet he was able to feed himself, but in a manner that was wolfish when it was not like the food-cramming of a two-year-old; and she turned her back and never ate with him. The firewood was plentiful, and she had only to cut it or break it with the hunter’s axe. All day long she kept the smoke of the signal fire streaming aloft, but she imagined that it was dispersed by the blizzards sweeping overhead, and would serve no purpose even were the doctor trying to reach her.