"These dark forests have hidden fearful things, Clay! It may shock you to learn that for four hundred years every generation of your family has dealt in every manner of Satanism, black magic, and demon-worship. "Your grandfather, Eliakim Coe, was the last and the most powerful of a line of wizards. But he paid a fearful price for his power. He paid his daughter, Elizabeth, who was your mother." "My mother!" I was bewildered and shocked. "Your true father, Clay," continued that ringing, hypnotic chant, "was not the distant cousin, Esmond Coe, who married your mother over your grandfather's protests, and was found stabbed to death beside her on the morning of the bridal night. No! That crime was but the beginning of a frightful ceremony. And Eliakim Coe took his daughter, on the night following, to a circle of stones about an ancient altar on the summit of the mountain----" "Once," the shuddering whisper was wrung from me, "I saw that altar!" "And there," that dread, compelling voice throbbed on, "that diabolical ceremony was carried to its blasphemous completion. Stripped and bound, the virginal body of your mother was laid across the blackened altar. In response to the esoteric forbidden rituals of the wizard, a Dark Power came to claim the offering. "And Eliakim Coe brought his daughter back, crippled and maddened, to give birth to you, Clay--and to your twin!" "What"--I forced out the faint whisper--"what do you mean?" Doctor Latham Kyle snapped his jaws together. His yellow lips were tight and hard as a mummy's. His deep eyes flamed at me. The boom of his hollow voice was startling. "Clay," he said, "there are forces, powers, entities, that science has never glimpsed--because they are too colossal. But you must sense the tremendous shadows that fall upon our tiny earth from the frigid voids of space. Clay, you must know the fearful rulers of the fourth dimension! Your own dark blood must whisper to you----" I had to nod, in spite of the outraged protest clamoring in my brain. For in the mystic Orient, as well as in my strange childhood, I had seen things that science and sanity could not account for. "Then----" The dry, husky whisper crept like an odious reptile past my lips. "Then--my father was not a man? And I'm not entirely--human?" The yellow skull nodded solemnly; the hollow voice intoned: "That is the hideous truth, Clay, that I have feared to tell you." Panic was rushing through my heart, like a black and frozen wind. "So that's why," I breathed, "I've always felt--different! That's why I've always been a stranger among men! It's that evil blood that seizes my body when I fight, like a destroying demon----"