Tom Kent caught a lovely sneak thief in his room, but when he saw what was on her back he went with her with fists clenched for battle
TOM Kent is my name. I have always been a man with an ambition to get a certain special something out of life. Most men want women, or money, or to be the big-shot in their business, or something that everyone else wants. Well, I want all those things, too, but I have a desire over and above such general ambitions.
Beyond the empty dullness that we call "life," beyond the rows of houses full of nearly identical people doing nearly identical things, lies, to my mind, a pathway.
Over the hills of vain wants and empty hoping; over the ill-formed mountains of partial fulfillments of futile desires ... to a further range of mountains, greater and vastly more beautiful barricades that shut mere man off from the thing I call the "edge."
This path I take in my daydreamings, and waiting at the end of that path is the witchmaid!
This lovely daughter of a wise, but somehow sinister mother is an ensorceling mystery. Her soft white arms are to me vastly more enticing than the real arms of any earthborn female.
About her a living, breathing, writhing aura-mist of awful beauty tells of the powerful magic which is her heritage. About her coil those plants, blooming and somehow bearing upon their twisted limbs the fruit and the strange flowers of fearful truths.
Those deadly flowers, with their brilliant red blood-petals, are the materials from which she brews a terrible, irresistible potion.
That drink brings a man a new and terrific life, a life whose pleasures are so great that mere mortal life no longer can be borne.
All these things and a multitude of other enticements, wait at the "edge," beyond those barrier mountains.
And those barriers are the time a man spends in pursuit of ordinary, unworthy goals. To drop such pursuit and pursue instead the white body, the lightning of the witch-maid's eyes; to pursue the oblivious ectsasy that can be found only in her night-black hair; that is a lure that is always with me.
But I am sane! I know better, and such dreamlike maunderings of my mind I put aside somehow for long walks in the descending darkness, along the waterfronts of this city, along the endless and ugly but somehow to me weirdly fascinating streets of the slums of this old city of Baltimore.
This night I was doing just that, indulging my dream desires, and dropping off all the more practical cares of this world in the conjuring up of the face of the witch-maid who waits beyond the edge for me: that fearfully lovely woman who can and will give a man vastly more pleasure than any mortal maid can hope to give.
Of course I know it isn't true, and I know that nothing of the kind of life I see in my dreams can exist. But I even know her name: "Kyra". I know every inch of her face as if it was a face I had engraved upon metal a million times, somewhere, sometime.
WALKING home, this night, the sky dripped blood from a gloomy horizon. The sun, apparently suffering a mortal wound, sank despairingly into the bay. It was hot, too!
I climbed the grimly stairs to my rooms. Their old wood creaked. The air, heavy with the mould and dust of a century of other sad feet climbing as wearily seemed to cling to my face smotheringly. I started to unlock my door, but it wasn't necessary. The maid had left it unlocked ...
As I crossed the darkened room to the dresser, loosening my tie, I half-heard a silken sigh of movement. But it didn't register fully on my tired mind. I stood in front of the mirror, looking at that face and wondering if everyone I had faced today had found that face as unsatisfying as I did now. That face that we must wear at some unknown one's behest—oh well, maybe he had an ugly face himself.
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