_14. Enid_ Lanark's guess was wrong; Enid Mandifer had not retreated westward up the gulley. She had stared, all in a heart-stopping chill, as Lanark made for the thing that terrified her. As though of themselves, her hands reached down to the earth, found her dress, and pulled it over her head. She thrust her feet into her shoes. Then she moved, at only a fast walk, after Lanark. There was really nothing else she could have done, and Lanark might have known that, had he been able to take thought in the moments that followed. Had she fled, she would have had no place to go save to the house where once her stepfather had lived; and it would be no refuge, but a place of whispering horror. Too, she would be alone, dreadfully alone. It took no meditation on her part to settle the fact that Lanark was her one hope of protection. As a matter of simple fact, he would have done well to remain with her, on the defensive; but then, he could not have foreseen what was waiting in the shadowed woods beyond. She did carry something that might serve as a weapon--the hand-mirror. And in a pocket of her dress lay the Bible, of which she had once told Lanark. She had read much in it, driven by terror, and I daresay it was as much a talisman to her as was the _Long Lost Friend_ to Jager. Her lips pattered a verse from it: "Deliver me from mine enemies, O my God ... for lo, they lie in wait for my soul." It was hard for her to decide what she had expected to find within the rim of trees beyond the clearing. Lanark was not in sight, but a commotion had risen some little distance ahead. Enid moved onward, because she must. She heard Lanark's pistol shot, and then what sounded like several men struggling. She tried to peer and see, but there was only a swirl of violent motion, and through it the flash of steel--that would be Lanark's saber. She crouched behind a wide trunk. "That is useless," said an accented voice she knew, close at her elbow. She spun around, stared and sprang away. It was not her stepfather that stood there. The form was human to some degree--it had arms and legs, and a featureless head; but its nakedness was slimy wet and dark, and about it clung a smell of blood. "That is useless," muttered once more the voice of Persil Mandifer. "You do not hide from the power that rules this place." Behind the first dark slimness came a second shape, a gross immensity, equally black and foul and shiny. Larue? "You have offered yourself," said Persil Mandifer, though Enid could see no lips move in the filthy-seeming shadow that should have been a face. "I think you will be accepted this time. Of course, it cannot profit me--what I am now, I shall be always. Perhaps you, too----"