The mark of the monster

Beyond the miserable poverty of Creston, its squalid ignorance and its rotting antiquity, there is something more appalling—something that has always seemed to me like a colossal, invisible spider, gloating over the broken victims in its intangible, unbreakable web. I had escaped it once; now I dared it again to set free Valyne Kirk. Brakes shrieking, the antiquated bus pitched down the rutted mountain road. Carrying away all the sanity of the modern world, it left me alone and oppressed amid the sinister shadows of the time-crushed village. I shuddered, for I felt that Creston was the unhappy ghost of a town, sprawling dead in this desolate vale. Its narrow, high-peaked houses were bleached and gray as decaying skulls; their broken windows leered like vacant eyeholes at the gloomy, frowning hills. The spirited young all have fled from Creston. No children laugh in the ancient, cobbled streets. And I found nothing new in the years since I had gone—unless it was this spirit of festering evil, come to haunt the old town's tomb. Valyne Kirk had promised to meet me; for I had come with seven years' earnings, to take her away from Creston, for ever. Eagerly I looked for her, up and down the unkempt squalor of the narrow street. After seven years, the sweet memory of her burned still like a sacred flame within my soul. The picture of her quiet, violet-eyed face, framed in dark and shining hair, remained etched into my heart. But she didn't come. And somber premonitions rose to cloud my joy. For in my pocket was that strange letter from Doctor Kyle, my aged adopted father. Upon my very heart was graven its puzzling and sinister warning: My son, you write that you are coming home to marry Valyne Kirk. I shall not, I dare not, tell you why—but may God in his mercy forbid that so monstrous a crime should be! Have you never felt the strangeness in you, Clay? Have you never sensed the stain upon your soul? Are you never conscious of the black venom flowing in your blood? Much as Sarah and I long to see you, we both prefer that you should live and die in your new foreign home, than that you should wed Valyne, and drench her life in terror. Heed this warning—you must sense its truth, like a cold serpent coiled around your heart! And…