with the knife in its breast! But then, with a little whimpering cry, she ran to Ethredge, knelt beside him, pillowed his head in her arms. Her lips moved tremblingly.
"Oh Charles! Charles dearest!"
Peters stooped above them both.
"Call him, Mary!" he whispered. "Call him back—from close to death! The spirit of that—thing on the floor is sucking the life from him!"
Mary did not, could not, understand. But her lips were touching Ethredge's forehead, his eyes, his mouth.
"Charles! Charles!" she pleaded brokenly. "It's—it's your Mary! Speak to me, beloved; speak to me!"
Peters watched. And, although the expression on Ethredge's face did not change, in some way beyond human explanation Peters knew that he had heard, as if from far, far away, Mary's voice.
"Charles, Charles! It's Mary, your Mary! Come back to me, beloved!"
Ethredge's glazed eyes were upon Mary's face. And, with infinite slowness, a trace of sanity began to waver through the madness in them. His lips quivered.
"Charles! Charles!"
Fleetingly as the passing of a breath across a window-pane, his lips formed the name, "Mary!"
"By Heaven!" Peters gritted exultantly, "she's beating the thing! She's making him resist—it can't feed upon him!"
The minutes passed. And then, suddenly, that strange sixth sense that had awakened in Peters that day told him that the invisible, lecherous spirit was withdrawing, baffled. The thread that bound it to that dead body on the floor was dissolving.
Had it absorbed sufficient ectoplasm from Ethredge to begin a new life, or had the mists claimed it?
Then, like the snapping off of an ultraviolet light, the malign presence was gone, leaving behind it a curious tingling of frustration and despair.
And, oddly, Peters knew that this time the thing had not cheated Fate, that this time it had been swallowed in the silences and the mists of eternity. . . .
As though a sudden weight had been lifted from his shoulders, Peters exhaled a long pent-up breath, got shakingly to his feet. And then a scream tightened in his throat!
He saw the pool, the pool of colorless, gelatinous stuff, inches deep, faintly shimmering, extending across the floor in a great still blob from which exuded an odor as elusive as that of unpicked mushrooms—and as delicately sweetish. . . .
That pool of still, gelatinous stuff, in the midst of which lay a woman's garments!
13. Nick Joins the Dead
Hours later they stepped into the clean sunlight—Peters and Mary supporting Ethredge, pale and weak, between them. Ethredge's sedan still stood at the curb; Peters helped Mary and her fiancé into the rear seat, slid behind the wheel. With a strange chill prickling his body he placed the newspaper-wrapped bundle containing a woman's clothing and hand-bag on the seat beside him. He wondered, somberly, if he would ever forget those moments he had spent cleaning up that still, gelatinous mess. . . .
Ethredge's head lay against Mary's shoulder; her whole soul hovered over him, mothering him, protecting him.
Peters, adjusting himself comfortably behind the wheel of Ethredge's car, felt something smooth and bulky pressing against his left hip. It was the flask of Marilyn Des Lys' drugged brandy. And Peters, with the feel of that dead ooze
