I think that Sarah Kyle tried to follow me up Blue Squaw Mountain. But desperation had lent me frantic wings. Her shrill voice fell behind, screaming: "Wait for me, Clay! I can calm it! It always understood----" The night was moonless and frosty and still. It was very dark beneath the gnarled and ancient trees, upon that rugged mountain slope. And it was many years since I had trod it. Again and again I sprawled and fell in the thorny tangles of undergrowth, or blundered heavily into the boles of gigantic trees. And once I rose, fingering my lacerated, bleeding face, to realize that I was lost. But grim urgency brought back youthful memories with the effect of preternatural vision. And obscure instincts brought me at last, breathless and fearful, to the leafy edge of that forbidden glade that since childhood I had apprehensively shunned. There horror struck me motionless. Red tongues of malevolent flame set lurid shadows into a fantastic demon dance against the surrounding dark wall of forest. Glowing sinister scarlet outlined the circle of rough-hewn monolithic stones, standing twice a man's height. Within that cabalistic circle I could see the low, blood-darkened altar--burdened with madness and terror! Valyne Kirk lay across it, on her back, between two wan and ghastly fires. She was stripped nearly nude; her alabaster loveliness was bare to the red, mounting flames. Her wrists and ankles were bound with rope. She was motionless, and, I thought, unconscious. Crouching over her, looming colossal and grotesque and hideous in the sinister gleam of the altar fires, was the monster I had glimpsed in the cellar dungeon--that dread creature of my own dark blood. It brought back those haunting lines from Poe: They are neither man nor woman-- They are neither brute nor human-- It was gigantic, yet vaguely man-like in outline. It was horned. Its long, angular legs ended in cloven hoofs. Its body was heavy, bulging, hideously gross. It was covered with coarse, dark hair. The stench of it came to me where I stood, an odor overwhelmingly nauseating as that of a reptile's den. The red flames burst higher, on either side of Valyne's helpless body, and suddenly I saw its face. To my mind came that other line: They are Ghouls. There are things that words cannot describe, even by suggestion. I can say that its face was grossly broad, and yet made savage with an angular gauntness; that it was noseless, queerly hairy, livid; that its eyes were crimson lakes of flaming hell. But the demon that glared from it escapes the words. It is enough to say that when I looked into that creature's face, and knew that its blood was mine--then I realized that my promise to Valyne had been mad folly. If the blood of that beast was in my veins, then it must be spilled before its pollution touched another human soul.