Hiero felt an intensification of the smothering, clinging feeling which had announced the Dweller’s coming. His mind, his body, his inner processes, his center of being, felt steadily constricted and squeezed, as well as feeling a constant drain of energy. In addition, however, a subtle feeling of pleasure was projected at the same time, a sense that the Dweller meant all that was good and beneficial, both to his physical and to his spiritual well-being. There was a subtle biological side effect, sexual in nature, which filled Hiero’s mind with mingled loathing and delight at one and the same time. The overall attack was very powerful. The psychic energy of the swamp-thing seemed almost a visible aura around its shrouded head, the bulk and shape of which, even under its wrappings, looked all wrong and somehow not physically possible or proper.
One hand clutching the Cross and Sword on his breast, the priest fought grimly back. The part of his total being which was being seduced by the promise of unspeakable pleasures he concentrated on memories of strength and austerity. Such were the Abbey choir services of the motet evenings, the mental courts where novices battled one another in silent struggles of the mind. He had obtained just enough time before the Dweller’s net was cast to start reciting the table of logarithms with yet another part of his brain. Long ago, the Abbey masters had learned that the ancient mathematical formulas were a strong defense against mental attack. Based as they were on logic, repetition, and disciplined series, they formed a strong barrier, when properly utilized, against the illogic and confusion which, of necessity, were the chief mental weapons of the Unclean. Yet it was a struggle which Hiero felt to be steadily going against him. The draining power of the Dweller seemed inexhaustible. Each time the priest blocked off an avenue into his mind by which it tried to lure him into acquiescence, another similar attack would commence on some other flaw in his psyche. And the steady compression of what Hiero felt to be a net never ceased its remorseless constriction as well. The appeals to his gross senses and the black, strangling clutch at his thought processes seemed more and more hopeless to combat.
Yet, even as his will seemed to him to weaken, his courage and resolution actually flared higher in response to the danger. And an unexpected help came, unrealized in fact at this time, from the dead mind of S’nerg, whom the priest had slain. His struggle with the adept had given Hiero’s own dormant powers a new strength of which he had as yet no conception. He battled on, therefore, no hint of yielding in his soul, determined that if this nightmare from the swamp murk were to conquer him, it would only be at the price of his death!
