A Man's Frightful Adventure
in an Ancient Tomb
The INCUBUS
By HAMILTON CRAIGIE
Fear beset Gerald Marston at the very moment of his entry into the chamber—an intense, gripping horror which laid an icy hand upon his forehead and fingers of a damp coldness about his heart.
It was as if one invisible from within had reached forth to make him prisoner to its atmosphere, which, heightened physically by the slimy walls, the velvet darkness, and the ceaseless, slow dripping of liquid upon stone, chilled his soul with a nameless foreboding, a daunting menace of unutterable dread.
And yet that Something, as he told himself, was behind him—his victim, the man whom he had killed.
Even now It walked, rather, upon the surface of the oily night, felt, but unseen, driving him forward inexorably, pitilessly—so that now he stood in the entrance to this leaser blackness, his huge bulk shaking in an anguish of uncertainty but one degree removed from the panic which had ridden him until, at length, distraught and near to madness, he had stumbled into this subterranean oubliette in his frantic flight.
It seemed a week since he, together with Professor Pillsbury, had descended into this whispering labyrinth of tombs—long galleries of Aztec construction vying in completeness with the catacombs of early Rome—sinuous corridors crossing and re-crossing in a maze of underground warrens of apparently interminable extent.
It had been the Professor himself, an archaeologist whose devotion to his calling amounted almost to an obsession, who had suggested the exploration—nay, insisted on it—nor had he, in his singleness of purpose, remembered that it had been Marston, his friend, who had, as it were, with a very triumph of casualness, implanted in his mind the first tiny seed of suggestion.
Scarecely a month before Marston had felicitated his friend upon the latter's engagement to Lucille Westley, beautiful and imperious, but there had been death in his heart. Perhaps, however, he had fancied, with the perverted hope which had grown in his heart like a green and pallid flame of lust, that, given his chance, he might have possessed this incomparable creature for his own.
And so, like a destroying fire, his obsession had mounted until, with the cunning of his twisted brain, he had evolved a plan, or, rather, deep within his consciousness, had spawned a thought: foul, slimy, furtive—even to himself half-born—an abortion, in truth, and yet. . . .
As they had passed from the clean sunlight into the Stygian darkness of the cavern, somehow, unbidden, there had arisen in Marston’s mind an echo of the classroom—a fugitive whisper which, he could have
