The Best Horror Stories of

The Fear That Follows

The smile of a child was on her lips--oh, smile of a last long rest.

My arm went up and my arm went down and the dagger pierced her breast.

Silent she lay--oh still, oh still!--with the breast of her gown turned red.

Then fear rose up in my soul like death and I fled from the face of the dead.

The hangings rustled upon the walls, velvet and black they shook, And I thought to see strange shadows flash from the dark of each door and nook.

Tapestries swayed on the ghostly walls as if in a wind that blew; Yet never a breeze stole through the rooms and my black fear grew and grew.

Moonlight dappled the pallid sward as I climbed o'er the window sill; I looked not back at the darkened house which lay so grim and still.

The trees reached phantom hands to me, their branches brushed my hair, Footfalls whispered amid the grass, yet never a man was there.

The shades loomed black in the forest deeps, black as the doom of death; Amid the whispers of shapes unseen I stole with bated breath, Till I came at last to a ghostly mere bordered with silver sands; A faint mist rose from its shimmering breast as I knelt to lave my hands.

The waters mirrored my haggard face, I bent close down to see--

Oh, Mother of God! A grinning skull leered up from the mere at me!

With a gibbering scream I rose and fled till I came to a mountain dim And a great black crag in the blood-red moon loomed up like a gibbet grim.

Then down from the great red stars above, each like a misty plume, There fell on my face long drops of blood and I knew at last my doom.

Then I turned me slow to the only trail that was left upon earth for me, The trail that leads to the hangman's cell and the grip of the gallows tree.

The Spirit of Tom Molyneaux

Many fights are won and lost by the living, but this is a tale of one which was won by a man dead over a hundred years. John Taverel, manager of ring champions, sitting in the old East Side A.C. one cold wintry day, told me this story of the ghost that won the fight and the man who worshipped the ghost. Let John Taverel tell the tale in his own words, as he told it to me: You remember Ace Jessel, the great negro boxer whom I managed. An ebony giant he was, four inches over six feet in height, his fighting weight two hundred and thirty pounds. He moved with the smooth ease of a gigantic leopard and his pliant steel muscles rippled under his shiny skin. A clever boxer for so large a man, he carried the smashing jolt of a trip hammer in each huge black fist.

Yet for all that, the road over which I, as his manager, steered him, was far from smooth and at times I despaired, for Ace seemed to lack a fighting heart. Courage he had plenty, courage to stand up to a vicious beating and to keep on going after his face had been pounded and battered to a bloody mass, as he proved in that terrible battle with Maul Finnegan, which became almost mythical in boxing annals.

Courage he had, but not the aggressiveness which drives the perfect fighter ever to the attack, nor the killer instinct which sends him plunging after the reeling, bloody and beaten foe. And a boxer who lacks these qualities is likely to fail when put to the supreme test.

Ace was content to box mostly, outpointing his opponents and piling up just enough lead to keep from losing. And the public was never fond of these tactics. Therefore they jeered and booed him every so often, but though their taunts angered me, they only broadened Ace's good-natured grin. And his fights still drew great crowds because on the rare occasions when he was stung out of his defensive role, or when he was matched with a clever man whom he had to knock out in order to win, the fans saw a real battle that thrilled their blood. And even so, time and again he stepped away from a sagging foe, giving the beaten man time to recover and return to the attack, instead of finishing him--while the crowd raved and I tore my hair.

Now Ace Jessel, indifferent drifter, happy-go-lucky wastrel though he seemed, had one deep and abiding emotion, and that was a fanatical worship for one Tom Molyneaux, first champion of America and sturdy fighting man of color--according to some authorities, the greatest black ringman that ever lived.

Tom Molyneaux died in Ireland a hundred years ago but the memory of his valiant deeds in America and Europe was Ace Jessel's direct incentive to action. Reading an account of Tom's life and battles was what started Ace on the fistic trail which led from the wharves where he toiled as a young boy, to--but listen to the story.

Ace's most highly prized possession was a painted portrait of the old battler. He had discovered this--a rare find indeed, since even woodcuts of Molyneaux are rare--among the collections of a London sportsman, and had prevailed on the owner to sell it. Paying for it had taken every cent that Ace made in four fights but he counted it cheap at the price. He removed the original frame and replaced it with a frame of solid silver, a slim elegant work of art which, considering that the portrait was full length and life size, was rather more than extravagant. But no honor was too expensive for "Misto Tom" and Ace simply tripled the number of his bouts to meet the cost.

So finally my brains and Ace's mallet fists had cleared us a road to the top of the game. Ace loomed up as a heavyweight menace and the champion's manager was ready to sign with us when an interruption came.

A form hove into view on the fistic horizon which dwarfed and overshadowed all other contenders, including my man. This was Mankiller Gomez. He was all which his name implies. Gomez was his ring name, given him by the Spaniard who discovered him and brought him to America. His real name was Balanga Guma and he was a full-blooded Senegalese from the West Coast of Africa.

Once in a century ring fans see a man like Gomez in action. Once in a hundred years there rises a fighter like the Senegalese--a born killer who crashes through the general ruck of fighters as a buffalo crashes through a thicket of dead wood. He was a savage, a tiger. What he lacked in actual skill, he made up by ferocity of attack, by ruggedness of body and smashing power of arm. From the time he landed in New York, with a long list of European victories behind him, it was inevitable that he should batter down all opposition, and at last the white champion looked to see the black savage looming above the broken forms of his victims. The champion saw the writing on the wall, but the public was clamoring for a match and whatever else his faults, the title holder was a fighting champion.

Ace Jessel, who alone of all the foremost challengers had not met Gomez, was shoved into discard, and as early summer dawned on New York, a title was lost and won, and Mankiller Gomez, son of the black jungle, rose up king of all fighting men.

The sporting world and the public at large hated and feared the new champion. Boxing fans like savagery in the ring, but Gomez did not confine his ferocity to the ring. His soul was abysmal. He was ape-like, primordial--the very spirit of that morass of barbarism from which mankind has so tortuously climbed, and toward which men look with so much suspicion.

There went forth a search for a White Hope, but the result was always the same. Challenger after challenger went down before the terrible onslaught of the Mankiller and at last only one man remained who had not crossed gloves with Gomez--Ace Jessel.

I hesitated in throwing my man in with a battler like Gomez, for my fondness for the great good-natured negro was more than the friendship of manager for fighter. Ace was something more than a meal-ticket to me for I knew the real nobility underlying Ace's black skin, and I hated to see him battered into a senseless ruin by a man I knew in my heart to be more than Jessel's match. I wanted to wait awhile, to let Gomez wear himself out with his terrific battles and the dissipations that were sure to follow the savage's success. These super-sluggers never last long, any more than a jungle native can withstand the temptations of civilization.

But the slump that follows a really great title holder's gaining the belt was on, and matches were scarce.

The public was clamoring for a title fight, sports writers were raising Cain and accusing Ace of cowardice, promoters were offering alluring purses, and at last I signed for a fifteen round go between Mankiller Gomez and Ace Jessel.

At the training quarters I turned to Ace.

"Ace, do you think you can whip him?"

"Misto John," Ace answered, meeting my eye with a straight gaze, "Ah'll do mah best, but Ah's mighty afeard Ah cain't do it. Dat man ain't human." I knew this was bad; a man is more than half whipped when he goes into the ring in that frame of mind.

Later I came into Ace's room for something and halted in the doorway in amazement. I had heard the battler talking in a low voice as I came up, but had supposed one of the handlers or sparring partners was in the room with him. Now I saw that he was alone. He was standing before his idol--the portrait of Tom Molyneaux.

"Misto Tom," he was saying humbly, "Ah ain't nevah met no man yet what could even knock me off mah feet, but Ah reckon dat nigguh can. Ah's gwine to need help mighty bad, Misto Tom."

I felt almost as if I had interrupted a religious rite. It was uncanny--had it not been for Ace's evident deep sincerity, I would have felt it to be unholy. But to Ace, Tom Molyneaux was something more than a saint.

I stood in the doorway in silence, watching the strange tableau. The artist who painted the picture so long ago had wrought with remarkable skill. The short black figure seemed to stand out boldly from the faded canvas. A breath of bygone days, it seemed, clad in the long tights of that other day, the powerful legs braced far apart, the knotted arms held stiffly and high, just as Molyneaux had appeared when he fought Tom Cribb of England so long ago.

Ace Jessel stood before the painted figure, head sunk upon his mighty chest as if listening to some dim whisper inside his own soul. And as I watched, a curious and fantastic thought came into my brain--the memory of an age-old superstition. You know it has been said by delvers into the occult that the carving of statues or the painting of pictures has power to draw back from the void of Eternity souls long flown, and to recreate them in shadowy semblance. I wondered if Ace had ever heard of this superstition and thought by doing obeisance to Molyneaux's portrait to conjure the dead man's spirit out of the realms of the dead for advice and aid. I shrugged my shoulders at this ridiculous idea and turned away. As I did, I glanced again at the picture before which Ace still stood like a great image of black basalt, and was aware of a peculiar illusion; the canvas seemed to ripple slightly, like the surface of a lake across which a faint breeze is blowing.

However I forgot all this as the day of the fight drew near.

The great crowd cheered Ace to the echo as he climbed in the ring; cheered again, not so heartily, as Gomez appeared. They afforded a strange contrast, those two negroes, alike in color but how different in all other aspects!

Ace was tall, clean-limbed and rangy, long and smooth of muscle, clear of eye and broad of forehead.

Gomez seemed stocky by comparison, though he stood a good six feet two. Where Jessel's sinews were long and smooth like great cables, his were knotty and bulging. His calves, thighs, arms and shoulders stood out in great bunches of muscles. His small bullet head was set squarely between gigantic shoulders, and his forehead was so low that his kinky wool seemed to lower over his small bestial and bloodshot eyes. On his chest was a thick grizzle of matted black hair.

He grinned cavernously, thumped his breast and flexed his mighty arms with the insolent assurance of the savage. Ace, in his corner, grinned at the crowd, but an ashy tint was on his dusky face and his knees trembled.

The usual remarks were made, instructions given by the referee, weights announced--230 for Ace, 248

for Gomez--then over the great stadium the lights went off save for those over the ring where two black giants faced each other like men alone on the ridge of the world.

At the gong Gomez whirled in his corner and came out with a breath-taking roar of pure ferocity. Ace, frightened though he must have been, rushed to meet him with the courage of a cave man charging a gorilla, and they met headlong in the center of the ring.

The first blow was the Mankiller's, a left swing that glanced Ace's ribs. Jessel came back with a long left to the face and a straight right to the body that stung. Gomez bulled in, swinging both hands and Ace, after one futile attempt to mix it with him, gave back. The champion drove him across the ring, sending in a savage left to the body as Ace clinched. As they broke Gomez shot a terrible right to the chin and Ace reeled into the ropes. A great "Ahhh!" went up from the crowd as the champion plunged after him like a famished wolf, but Ace managed to dive between the lashing arms and clinch, shaking his head to clear it.

Gomez sent in a left, largely smothered by Ace's clutching arms, and the referee warned the Senegalese.

At the break Ace stepped back, jabbing swift and cleverly with his left, and the round ended with the champion, bellowing like a buffalo, trying to get past that rapier-like arm.

Between rounds I cautioned Ace to keep away from infighting as much as possible, where Gomez's superior strength would count heavily, and to use his footwork to avoid punishment as much as he could.

The second round started much like the first, Gomez rushing and Ace using all his skill to stave him off and avoid those terrible smashes. It's hard to get a shifty boxer like Ace in a corner, when he is fresh and unweakened and at long range had the advantage of his superior science over Gomez, whose one idea was to get in close and batter down his foes by sheer strength and ferocity. Still, in spite of Ace's speed and skill, just before the gong sounded Gomez got the range and sank a vicious left to the wrist in Ace's midriff and the tall negro weaved slightly as he walked to his corner. I could see the beginning of the end.

The vitality and power of Gomez seemed endless; there was no wearing him down and it would not take many of his blows, landed, to rob Ace of his speed of foot and accuracy of eye. Then, forced to stand and trade punches, he was done.

Gomez, seeing he had stung his man, came plunging out for the third round with murder in his eye. He ducked a straight left, took a hard right uppercut square in the face and hooked both hands to the body, then straightened with a terrific right to the chin, which Ace robbed of most of its force by swaying with the blow. And while the champion was still off balance, Ace measured him coolly and shot in a fierce right hook flush on the chin. Gomez's head flew back as if hinged to his shoulders and he was stopped in his tracks, but even as the crowd rose, hands clenching, lips parted, in hopes he would go down, the champion shook his bullet head and came in roaring. The round ended with both men locked in a clinch in the center of the ring.

At the beginning of the fourth round Gomez attacked and drove Ace about the ring before a shower of blows which he could not seem to wholly avoid. Stung and desperate, Ace made a stand in a neutral corner and sent Gomez back on his heels with a left and right to the body, but took a savage left to the face in return. Then suddenly the champion crashed through with a deadly left to the solar plexus and as Ace staggered, shot a killing right to the chin. Ace fell back into the ropes, instinctively raising his hands and sinking his chin on his chest. Gomez's short fierce smashes were partly blocked by his shielding gloves and suddenly, pinned on the ropes as he was, and still dazed from the Mankiller's attack, Ace went into terrific action and, slugging toe to toe with the champion, beat him off and drove him back across the ring!

The crowd went insane but, crouching behind Ace's corner, I saw the writing on the wall. Ace was fighting as he had never fought before, but no man on earth could stand the pace the champion was setting.

Battling along the ropes, Ace sent a savage left to the body and a right and left to the face but was repaid by a right-hand smash to the ribs that made him wince in spite of himself, and just at the gong Gomez landed another of those deadly left-handers to the body.

Ace's handlers worked over him swiftly, for I saw that the tall black was weakening. A few more rounds of this would spell the end.

"Ace, can't you keep away from those body smashes?"

"Misto John, suh, Ah'll try," he answered.

The gong! Ace came in with a rush, his magnificent body vibrating with dynamic energy. Gomez met him, his iron muscles bunching into a compact fighting unit. Crash--crash--and again, crash! A clinch. And as they broke, Gomez drew back his great right arm and launched a terrible blow to Ace's mouth. The tall negro reeled--he went down! Then, without stopping for the count which I was screaming for him to take, he gathered his long steely legs under him and was up with a bound, blood gushing down his black chest.

Gomez leaped in and Ace, with the fury of desperation, met him with a terrific right, square to the jaw.

And Gomez crashed to the canvas on his shoulder blades! The crowd rose screaming! In the space of ten seconds both men had been floored for the first time in the life of each!

"One! Two! Three! Four!" the referee's arm rose and fell.

Gomez was up, unhurt, wild with fury. Roaring like a wild beast, he plunged in, brushed aside Ace's hammering arms and crashed his right hand with the full weight of his mighty shoulder behind it, full into Ace's midriff. Jessel went an ashy color--he swayed like a tall tree, and Gomez beat him to his knees with rights and lefts which sounded like the blows of caulking mallets.

"One! Two! Three! Four!--"

Ace was writhing on the canvas, striving to get his legs beneath him. The roar of the fans was a torrent of sound, an ocean of noise which drowned out all thought.

"Five! Six! Seven!--"

Ace was up! Gomez came charging across the stained canvas, gibbering his pagan fury. His blows beat upon the staggering challenger like a hail of sledges. A left--a right--another left which Ace had not strength to duck.

"One! Two! Three! Four! Five! Six! Seven! Eight!--"

Again Ace was up, weaving, staring blankly, helpless. A swinging left hurled him back into the ropes and rebounding from them he went to his knees--the gong!

As his handlers and I sprang into the ring Ace groped blindly for his corner and dropped limply upon the stool.

"Ace, he's too much for you."

A grin bent Jessel's bloody lips and an indomitable spirit looked out of his bloodshot eyes.

"Misto John, please suh, don't t'row in de sponge. Must Ah take it, Ah takes it standin'. Dat boy cain't last at dis pace all night, suh."

No, but neither could Ace Jessel, in spite of his remarkable vitality and his marvelous recuperative powers which sent him back up for the next round, with a show of renewed strength and freshness, at least.

The sixth and seventh were comparatively tame. Perhaps Gomez really was fatigued from the terrific pace he had been setting. At any rate, Ace managed to make it more or less of a sparring match at long range and the crowd was treated to an exhibition showing how long a man, out on his feet, can stand off and keep away from a slugger bent solely on his destruction. Even I marveled at the brand of boxing which Ace was showing, even though I knew that Gomez was fighting cautiously, for him. He had sampled the power of Ace's right hand in that frenzied fifth round and perhaps he was wary of a trick.

For the first time in his life he had sprawled on the canvas. He knew he was winning, and I think he was content to rest a couple of rounds, take his time for a space and gather his energies for a final onslaught.

This began as the gong sounded for the eighth round. Gomez launched his usual sledge hammer attack, drove Ace about the ring and floored him in a neutral corner. His style of fighting was such that when he was determined on a foe's destruction, skill, speed and science could not avert but only postpone the eventual outcome. Ace took the count of nine and rose, back-pedalling. But Gomez was after him; the champion missed twice with his left and then sank a right under the heart that turned Ace ashy. A left to the jaw made his knees buckle and he clinched desperately. On the break-away Ace sent a straight left to the face and right hook to the chin, but the blows lacked their old force and Gomez shook them off and sank his left wrist deep in Ace's midsection. Ace again clinched but the champion shoved him away and drove him across the ring with savage hooks to the body. At the gong they were slugging along the ropes.

Ace reeled to the wrong corner, and when his handlers led him to his own, he sank down on the stool, his legs trembling and his great dusky chest heaving from his superhuman exertions. I glanced across at the champion who sat glowering at his foe. He too was showing signs of the fray, but he was much fresher than Ace. The referee walked over, looked at Jessel hesitantly and then spoke to me.

Through the mists which veiled his bruised brain, Ace realized the import of his words and struggled to rise, a kind of fear flaming in his eyes.

"Misto John, don' let him stop it, suh! Don' let him do it! Ah ain't hu't nuthin' like dat 'ud hu't me!"

The referee shrugged his shoulders and walked back to the center of the ring, and I turned to one of the trainers and bade him bring me the flat bundle I had brought with me into the stadium.

There was little use giving advice to Ace. He was too battered to understand--in his numbed brain there was room only for one thought--to fight and fight, and keep on fighting--the old primal instinct that is stronger than all things save death.

At the sound of the gong he reeled out to meet his doom with an indomitable courage that brought the crowd to its feet yelling. He struck, a wild aimless left, and the champion plunged in hitting with both hands until Ace went down. At "nine" he was up and back-pedalled instinctively until Gomez reached him with a long straight right and sent him down again. Again he took "nine" before he reeled up and now the crowd was silent. Not one voice was raised in an urge for the kill. This was butchery, primitive slaughter, and the courage of Ace Jessel took their breath as it gripped my heart.

Ace fell blindly into a clinch, and another and another, till the Mankiller, furious, shook him off and sank his right to the body. Ace's ribs gave way like rotten wood, with a dry crack heard distinctly all over the stadium--a strangled cry went up from the crowd and Jessel gasped thickly and fell to his knees.

"--Seven! Eight!--" and the great black form was writhing on the canvas.

"--Nine!" and the miracle had happened and Ace was on his feet, swaying, jaw sagging, arms hanging limply.

Gomez glared at him, not in pity, but as if unable to understand how his foe could have risen again, then came plunging in to finish him. Ace was in dire straits. Blood blinded him and his feet slipped in great smears of it on the canvas--his blood. Both eyes were nearly closed, and when he breathed gustily through his smashed nose, a red haze surrounded him. Deep cuts gashed cheek and cheek bones and his left side was a mass of battered red flesh. He was going on fighting instinct alone now, and never again would any man doubt that Ace Jessel had a fighting heart.

Yet a fighting heart alone is not enough when the body that holds it is broken and battered and mists of unconsciousness veil the brain. Ace sank down before Gomez's panting onslaught and this time the crowd knew that it was final.

When a man has taken the beating that Ace had taken, something more than body and heart must come into the game to carry him through. Something to inspire and stimulate the dazed brain, to fire it to heights of super-human achievement. I had planned to furnish this inspiration, if the worst came to the worst, in the only way which I knew would touch Ace.

Before leaving the training quarters, I had, unknown to Ace, removed the picture of Tom Molyneaux from its frame, and brought it to the stadium with me, carefully wrapped. I now took this, and as Ace's eyes, instinctively and without his own volition, sought his corner, I held the portrait up, just outside the glare of the ring lights, so while illumined by them, it appeared illusive and dim. It may be thought that I acted wrongly and selfishly, to thus seek to bring to his feet for more punishment a man almost dead from the beating, but the outsider cannot fathom the souls of the children of the fight game, to whom winning is greater than life, and losing, worse than death.

All eyes were glued on the prostrate form in the center of the ring, on the wind-blown champion sagging against the ropes, on the arm of the referee, which rose and fell with the regularity of doom. I doubt if four men in the audience saw my action, but Ace Jessel saw. I caught the gleam that came into his bloodshot and dazed eyes. I saw him shake his head violently. I saw him begin sluggishly to gather his long legs under him. It seemed a long time; the drone of the referee rose as it neared its climax--then, by all the gods, Ace Jessel was up! The crowd went insane and screaming.

I saw his eyes blaze with a strange wild light. And as I live today, the picture in my hands shook suddenly and violently!

A cold wind passed like death across me and I heard the man next to me shiver involuntarily as he drew his coat closer about him. But it was no cold wind that gripped my soul as I looked, wide-eyed and staring, into the ring where the greatest drama the boxing world has ever known was being enacted.

There was Ace Jessel, bloody, terrible, throbbing and pulsing with new dynamic life, fired by a superhuman power--there was Mankiller Gomez, speechless with amazement at his foe's new burst of fury--there was the immobile-faced referee--and to my horror I saw that there were four men in that ring!

And the fourth--a short, massive black man, barrel-chested and mighty-limbed, clad in the long tights of another day. And as I looked I saw that this man was not as other men for beyond him I saw the ropes of the ring and dimly, the ring lights, as if I were looking through a dark mist--as if I were looking through him.

His mighty arm was about Ace Jessel's waist as my fighter crashed upon the weary and disheartened Gomez; his bare hard fists fell with Ace's on the head and body of the desperate Mankiller. Whether Gomez saw or realized he saw this Stranger, I do not know. Dazed by the unnaturalness of Ace's sudden comeback, by the uncanny strength of Ace who should have been fainting on the canvas, Gomez staggered, weakening; bewildered and mazed he was unable to decide upon a stand to make, and before he could rally was beaten down, crashed and battered down and out by long straight smashes sent in with the speed and power of a pile driver. And the last blow, a straight right that would have felled an ox, and did fell Mankiller Gomez, was driven not alone by the power of Ace's mighty shoulder, but by the aid of a shadowy black hand on Jessel's wrist. As I live today, that Fourth Man guided Ace's hand to Gomez's chin and backed the blow with the power of his own tremendous shoulders.

A moment the strange tableau burned itself into my brain. The astounded referee counting over the prostrate champion, and Ace Jessel, standing, head lowered and arms dangling, supported by a short, mighty figure in long ring tights. Then this figure faded before my very gaze and, as the portrait of Tom Molyneaux fell from my nerveless fingers, I felt it shake as if it shuddered.

As I climbed into the ring with the roar of the insane fans thundering in my brain, I wondered dazedly as I wonder today--was I given to see that sight alone of all that throng because I held the picture in my hands?

The crowd saw only a miracle, a man beaten nearly to death coming back with unexplainable strength and vitality to conquer his conqueror. They did not see the Fourth Man. Nor did Mankiller Gomez.

Ace Jessel? A negro never talks on some subjects and I have never asked him any questions on that matter. But as he collapsed in his corner, I bent over him and heard him murmur as he lost consciousness:

"Misto Tom--he done it, suh--his han' was on mah wrist--when--Ah--dropped--Gomez."

That old superstition is justified as far as I am concerned. Hereafter I will not doubt that deep devotion coupled with the possession of a life-like portrait, can conjure back from the unknown voids of the astral world, the soul or spirit or ghost which inhabited the living body of which the portrait is a likeness. A door perhaps, a portrait is, through which astral beings pass back and forth between this world and the next--whatever that world may be.

But when I said no man save Ace Jessel and I saw the Fourth Man, I am not altogether correct. After the bout the referee, a steely-nerved, cold-eyed son of the old-time school, said to me:

"Did you notice in that last round that a cold wind seemed to blow across the ring? Now tell me straight, am I going crazy or did I see a dark shadow hovering about Ace Jessel when he dropped Gomez?"

"You did," I answered. "And unless we are all insane, the ghost of Tom Molyneaux was in that ring tonight."

Casonetto's Last Song

I eyed the package curiously. It was thin and flat, and the address was written clearly in the curving elegant hand I had learned to hate--the hand I knew to now be cold in death.

"You had better be careful, Gordon," said my friend Costigan. "Sure, why should that black devil be sending you anything but something to do you harm?"

"I had thought of a bomb or something similar," I answered, "but this is too thin a package to contain anything like that. I'll open it."

"By the powers!" Costigan laughed shortly. "'Tis one of his songs he's sending you!"

An ordinary phonograph record lay before us.

Ordinary, did I say? I might say the most extraordinary record in the world. For, to the best of our knowledge, it was the only one which held imprisoned in its flat bosom the golden voice of Giovanni Casonetto, that great and evil genius whose operatic singing had thrilled the world, and whose dark and mysterious crimes had shocked that same world.

"The death cell where Casonetto lay awaits the next doomed one, and the black singer lies dead," said Costigan. "What then is the spell of this disc that he sends it to the man whose testimony sent him to the gallows?"

I shrugged my shoulders. By no art of mine, but purely through accident had I stumbled upon Casonetto's monstrous secret. By no wish of mine had I come upon the cavern where he practiced ancient abominations and offered up human sacrifices to the devil he worshipped. But what I had seen I told in court, and before the hangman adjusted the noose, Casonetto had promised me such a fate as no man had ever experienced before.

All the world knew of the atrocities practiced by the inhuman demonic cult of which Casonetto had been high priest; and now that he was dead, records made of his voice were sought by wealthy collectors, but according to the terms of his last wishes, all of these had been destroyed.

At least I had thought so, but the thin round disc in my hand proved that at least one had escaped the general destruction. I gazed at it, but the surface in the center was blank and without title.

"Read the note," suggested Costigan.

A small slip of white paper had been contained in the package also. I scanned it. The letters were in Casonetto's handwriting.

"To my friend Stephen Gordon, to be listened to alone in his study."

"That's all," I said, after reading this curious request aloud.

"Sure, and 'tis more than enough. Is it not black magic he's trying to make on you? Else why should he wish you to listen to his caterwauling alone?"

"I don't know. But I think I'll do it."

"You're a fool," said Costigan frankly. "If ye will not be taking my advice and throwing the thing into the sea, it's myself will be with you when you put it on your talking machine. And that's final!"

I did not try to argue. Truly, I was somewhat apprehensive of Casonetto's promised vengeance, though I could not see how this was to be accomplished by the mere rendition of a song heard on a phonograph.

Costigan and I repaired to my study and there placed on the machine the last record of Giovanni Casonetto's golden voice. I saw Costigan's jaw muscles bulge belligerently as the disc began to whirl and the diamond point to spin down the circling grooves. I involuntarily tensed myself as if for a coming struggle. Clear and loud a voice spoke.

"Stephen Gordon!"

I started in spite of myself and almost answered! How strange and fearful it is to hear your name spoken in the voice of a man you know to be dead!

"Stephen Gordon," the clear, golden and hated voice went on, if you hear this I shall be dead, for if I live I shall dispose of you in another manner. The police will soon be here, and they have cut off every avenue of escape. There is nothing for me to do but stand my trial, and your words will put a noose about my neck. But there is time for one last song!

"This song I shall imprison in the disc which now rests upon my recording machine, and before the police arrive I shall send it to you by one who will not fail me. You will receive it through the mails the day after I am hanged.

"My friend, this is a suitable setting for the last song of the high priest of Satan! I am standing in the black chapel where you first surprised me when you came blundering into my secret cavern, and my clumsy neophytes let you escape.

"Before me stands the shrine of the Unnamable and before it the red-stained altar where many a virgin soul has gone winging up to the dark stars. On all sides hover dark mysterious things, and I hear the swish of mighty wings in the gloom.

"Satan, lover of darkness, gird my soul with evil and strike chords of horror in my golden song.

"Stephen Gordon, harken ye!"

Full, deep and triumphant, the golden voice surged up, lifted in a strange rhythmic chant, indescribably haunting and weird.

"Great God!" whispered Costigan. "He's singing the invocation from the Black Mass!"

I did not reply. The uncanny notes of that song seemed to stir my very heart within me. In the darksome caverns of my soul, something blind and monstrous moved and stirred like a dragon waking from slumber. The room faded and grew indistinct as I fell under the mesmeric power of the chant. About me inhuman forces seemed to glide and I could almost sense the touch of bat-like wings brushing my face in their flight--as though by virtue of his singing, the dead man had summoned up ancient and horrible demons to haunt me.

I saw again the sombre chapel, lit by a single small fire that flickered and leaped on the altar, behind and above which brooded the Horror, the Unnamable horned and winged thing to which the devil worshippers bowed. I saw again the red-dyed altar, the long sacrificial dagger raised in the hand of the black acolyte, the swaying robed forms of the worshippers.

The voice rose and rose, swinging into a triumphant booming. It filled the room--the world, the sky, the universe! It blotted out the stars with a tangible veil of darkness! I staggered from it as from a physical force.

If ever hate and evil were incarnated in sound I heard and felt it then. That voice bore me down to the deeps of Hell undreamed. Abysses loathsome and endless yawned before me. I had hints and glimpses of inhuman voids and unholy dimensions outside of all human experience. All the concentrated essence of Purgatory flowed out at me from that whirling disc, on the wings of that wonderful and terrible voice.

Cold sweat stood out on my body as I realized the feelings of a victim bound for the sacrifice. I was the victim, I lay on the altar and the hand of the slayer hovered above me, gripping the dagger.

From the whirling disc the voice surged on, sweeping me irresistably to my doom, swinging higher and higher, deeper and deeper, tinged with insanity as it approached the climax.

I realized my danger. I felt my brain crumbling before the onslaught of those spears of sound. I sought to speak, to scream! But my mouth gaped without sound. I tried to step forward, to shut off the machine, to break the record. But I could not move.

Now the chant rose to heights unnamable and unbearable. A hideous triumph swept its notes; a million mocking devils screamed and bellowed at me, taunting me through that flood of demon-music, as if the chant were a gate through which the hordes of Hell came streaming, red-handed and roaring.

Now it swept with dizzy speed toward the point where, in the Black Mass, the dagger drinks the life of the sacrifice, and with one last effort that strained fading soul and dimming brain, I broke the mesmeric chains--I screamed! An inhuman, unearthly shriek, the shriek of a soul being dragged into Hell--of a mind being hurled into insanity.

And echoing my screech came the shout of Costigan as he leaned forward and crashed his sledge hammer fist down on the top of the machine, smashing it, and shattering into oblivion that terrible, golden voice forever.

The Touch of Death

As long as midnight cloaks the earth

With shadows grim and stark,

God save us from the Judas kiss

Of a dead man in the dark.

Old Adam Farrel lay dead in the house wherein he had lived alone for the last twenty years. A silent, churlish recluse, in his life he had known no friends, and only two men had watched his passing.

Dr. Stein rose and glanced out the window into the gathering dusk.

"You think you can spend the night here, then?" he asked his companion.

This man, Falred by name, assented.

"Yes, certainly. I guess it's up to me."

"Rather a useless and primitive custom, sitting up with the dead," commented the doctor, preparing to depart, "but I suppose in common decency we will have to bow to precedence. Maybe I can find some one who'll come over here and help you with your vigil."

Falred shrugged his shoulders. "I doubt it. Farrel wasn't liked--wasn't known by many people. I scarcely knew him myself, but I don't mind sitting up with the corpse."

Dr. Stein was removing his rubber gloves and Falred watched the process with an interest that almost amounted to fascination. A slight, involuntary shudder shook him at the memory of touching these gloves--slick, cold, clammy things, like the touch of death.

"You may get lonely tonight, if I don't find anyone," the doctor remarked as he opened the door. "Not superstitious, are you?"

Falred laughed. "Scarcely. To tell the truth, from what I hear of Farrel's disposition, I'd rather be watching his corpse than have been his guest in life."

The door closed and Falred took up his vigil. He seated himself in the only chair the room boasted, glanced casually at the formless, sheeted bulk on the bed opposite him, and began to read by the light of the dim lamp which stood on the rough table.

Outside the darkness gathered swiftly, and finally Falred laid down his magazine to rest his eyes. He looked again at the shape which had, in life, been the form of Adam Farrel, wondering what quirk in the human nature made the sight of a corpse not only so unpleasant, but such an object of fear to many.

Unthinking ignorance, seeing in dead things a reminder of death to come, he decided lazily, and began idly contemplating as to what life had held for this grim and crabbed old man, who had neither relatives nor friends, and who had seldom left the house wherein he had died. The usual tales of miser-hoarded wealth had accumulated, but Falred felt so little interest in the whole matter that it was not even necessary for him to overcome any temptation to pry about the house for possible hidden treasure.

He returned to his reading with a shrug. The task was more boresome than he had thought for. After a while he was aware that every time he looked up from his magazine and his eyes fell upon the bed with its grim occupant, he started involuntarily as if he had, for an instant, forgotten the presence of the dead man and was unpleasantly reminded of the fact. The start was slight and instinctive, but he felt almost angered at himself. He realized, for the first time, the utter and deadening silence which enwrapped the house--a silence apparently shared by the night, for no sound came through the window. Adam Farrel had lived as far apart from his neighbors as possible, and there was no other house within hearing distance.

Falred shook himself as if to rid his mind of unsavory speculations, and went back to his reading. A sudden vagrant gust of wind whipped through the window, in which the light in the lamp flickered and went out suddenly. Falred, cursing softly, groped in the darkness for matches, burning his fingers on the hot lamp chimney. He struck a match, relighted the lamp, and glancing over at the bed, got a horrible mental jolt. Adam Farrel's face stared blindly at him, the dead eyes wide and blank, framed in the gnarled gray features. Even as Falred instinctively shuddered, his reason explained the apparent phenomenon: the sheet that covered the corpse had been carelessly thrown across the face and the sudden puff of wind had disarranged and flung it aside.

Yet there was something grisly about the thing, something fearsomely suggestive--as if, in the cloaking dark, a dead hand had flung aside the sheet, just as if the corpse were about to rise....

Falred, an imaginative man, shrugged his shoulders at these ghastly thoughts and crossed the room to replace the sheet. The dead eyes seemed to stare at him malevolently, with an evilness that transcended the dead man's churlishness in life. The workings of a vivid imagination, Falred knew, and he re-covered the gray face, shrinking as his hand chanced to touch the cold flesh--slick and clammy, the touch of death.

He shuddered with the natural revulsion of the living for the dead, and went back to his chair and magazine.

At last, growing sleepy, he lay down upon a couch which, by some strange whim of the original owner, formed part of the room's scant furnishings, and composed himself for slumber. He decided to leave the light burning, telling himself that it was in accordance with the usual custom of leaving lights burning for the dead; for he was not willing to admit to himself that already he was conscious of a dislike for lying in the darkness with the corpse. He dozed, awoke with a start and looked at the sheeted form of the bed.

Silence reigned over the house, and outside it was very dark.

The hour was approaching midnight, with its accompanying eery domination over the human mind. Falred glanced again at the bed where the body lay and found the sight of the sheeted object most repellent. A fantastic idea had birth in his mind and grew, that beneath the sheet, the mere lifeless body had become a strange, monstrous thing, a hideous, conscious being, that watched him with eyes which burned through the fabric of the cloth. This thought--a mere fantasy, of course--he explained to himself by the legends of vampires, undead, ghosts and such like--the fearsome attributes with which the living have cloaked the dead for countless ages, since primitive man first recognized in death something horrid and apart from life.

Man feared death, thought Falred, and some of his fear of death took hold on the dead so that they, too, were feared. And the sight of the dead engendered grisly thoughts, gave rise to dim fears of hereditary memory, lurking back in the dark corners of the brain.

At any rate, that silent, hidden thing was getting on his nerves. He thought of uncovering the face, on the principle that familiarity breeds contempt. The sight of the features, calm and still in death, would banish, he thought, all such wild conjectures as were haunting him in spite of himself. But the thought of those dead eyes staring in the lamplight was intolerable; so at last he blew out the light and lay down. This fear had been stealing upon him so insidiously and gradually that he had not been aware of its growth.

With the extinguishing of the light, however, and the blotting out of the sight of the corpse, things assumed their true character and proportions, and Falred fell asleep almost instantly, on his lips a faint smile for his previous folly.

He awakened suddenly. How long he had been asleep he did not know. He sat up, his pulse pounding frantically, the cold sweat beading his forehead. He knew instantly where he was, remembered the other occupant of the room. But what had awakened him? A dream--yes, now he remembered--a hideous dream in which the dead man had risen from the bed and stalked stiffly across the room with eyes of fire and a horrid leer frozen on his gray lips. Falred had seemed to lie motionless, helpless; then as the corpse reached a gnarled and horrible hand, he had awakened.

He strove to pierce the gloom, but the room was all blackness and all without was so dark that no gleam of light came through the window. He reached a shaking hand toward the lamp, then recoiled as if from a hidden serpent. Sitting here in the dark with a fiendish corpse was bad enough, but he dared not light the lamp, for fear that his reason would be snuffed out like a candle at what he might see. Horror, stark and unreasoning, had full possession of his soul; he no longer questioned the instinctive fears that rose in him.

All those legends he had heard came back to him and brought a belief in them. Death was a hideous thing, a brain-shattering horror, imbuing lifeless men with a horrid malevolence. Adam Farrel in his life had been simply a churlish but harmless man; now he was a terror, a monster, a fiend lurking in the shadows of fear, ready to leap on mankind with talons dipped deep in death and insanity.

Falred sat there, his blood freezing, and fought out his silent battle. Faint glimmerings of reason had begun to touch his fright when a soft, stealthy sound again froze him. He did not recognize it as the whisper of the night wind across the window-sill. His frenzied fancy knew it only as the tread of death and horror.

He sprang from the couch, then stood undecided. Escape was in his mind but he was too dazed to even try to formulate a plan of escape. Even his sense of direction was gone. Fear had so stultified his mind that he was not able to think consciously. The blackness spread in long waves about him and its darkness and void entered into his brain. His motions, such as they were, were instinctive. He seemed shackled with mighty chains and his limbs responded sluggishly, like an imbecile's.

A terrible horror grew up in him and reared its grisly shape, that the dead man was behind him, was stealing upon him from the rear. He no longer thought of lighting the lamp; he no longer thought of anything. Fear filled his whole being; there was room for nothing else.

He backed slowly away in the darkness, hands behind him, instinctively feeling the way. With a terrific effort he partly shook the clinging mists of horror from him, and, the cold sweat clammy upon his body, strove to orient himself. He could see nothing, but the bed was across the room, in front of him. He was backing away from it. There was where the dead man was lying, according to all rules of nature; if the thing were, as he felt, behind him, then the old tales were true: death did implant in lifeless bodies an unearthly animation, and dead men did roam the shadows to work their ghastly and evil will upon the sons of men. Then--great God!--what was man but a wailing infant, lost in the night and beset by frightful things from the black abysses and the terrible unknown voids of space and time? These conclusions he did not reach by any reasoning process; they leaped full-grown into his terror-dazed brain. He worked his way slowly backward, groping, clinging to the thought that the dead man must be in front of him.

Then his back-flung hands encountered something--something slick, cold and clammy--like the touch of death. A scream shook the echoes, followed by the crash of a falling body.

The next morning they who came to the house of death found two corpses in the room. Adam Farrel's sheeted body lay motionless upon the bed, and across the room lay the body of Falred, beneath the shelf where Dr. Stein had absent-mindedly left his gloves--rubber gloves, slick and clammy to the touch of a hand groping in the dark--a hand of one fleeing his own fear--rubber gloves, slick and clammy and cold, like the touch of death.

Out of the Deep

A Tale of Faring Town

Adam Falcon sailed at dawn and Margeret Deveral, the girl who was to marry him, stood on the wharfs in the cold vagueness to wave a good-bye. At dusk Margeret knelt, stony eyed, above the still white form that the crawling tide had left crumpled on the beach.

The people of Faring town gathered about, whispering:

"The fog hung heavy; mayhap she went ashore on Ghost Reef. Strange that his corpse alone should drift back to Faring harbor--and so swiftly."

And an undertone:

"Alive or dead, he would come to her!"

The body lay above the tide mark, as if flung by a vagrant wave; slim, but strong and virile in life, now darkly handsome even in death. The eyes were closed, strange to say, so it appeared that he but slept.

The seaman's clothes he wore dripped salt water and fragments of sea-weed clung to them.

"Strange," muttered old John Harper, owner of the Sea-lion Inn and the oldest ex-seaman of Faring town. "He sank deep, for these weeds grow only at the bottom of the ocean, aye, in the cold green caves of the sea."

Margeret spoke no word, she but knelt, her hands pressed to her cheeks, eyes wide and staring.

"Take him in your arms, lass, and kiss him," gently urged the people of Faring, "for 'tis what he would have wished, alive."

The girl obeyed mechanically, shuddering at the coldness of his body. Then as her lips touched his, she screamed and recoiled.

"This is not Adam!" she shrieked, staring wildly about her.

The people nodded sadly to each other.

"Her brain is turned," they whispered, and then they lifted the corpse and bore it to the house wherein Adam Falcon had lived--where he had hoped to bring his bride when he returned from his voyage.

And the people brought Margeret along with them, caressing her and soothing her with gentle words. But the girl walked like one in a trance, her eyes still staring in that strange manner.

They laid the body of Adam Falcon on his bed with death candles at the head and feet, and the salt water from his garments trickled off the bed and splashed on the floor. For it is a superstition in Faring town as on many dim coasts, that monstrously bad luck will follow if a drowned man's clothes are removed.

And Margeret sat there in the death room and spoke to none, staring fixedly at Adam's dark calm face.

And as she sat, John Gower, a rejected suitor of hers, and a moody, dangerous man, came and looking over her shoulder, said:

"Sea death brings a curious change, if that is the Adam Falcon I knew." Black looks were passed his way, whereat he seemed surprized, and men rose and quietly escorted him to the door.

"You hated Adam Falcon, John Gower," said Tom Leary. "And you hate Margeret because the child preferred a better man than you. Now, by Satan, you'll not be torturing the girl with your calloused talk.

Get out and stay!"

Gower scowled darkly at this, but Tom Leary stood up boldly to him, and the men of Faring town backed him, so John turned his back squarely upon them and strode away. Yet to me it had seemed that what he had said had not been meant as a taunt or an insult, but simply the result of a sudden, startling thought.

And as he walked away I heard him mutter to himself:

"--Alike, and yet strangely unlike him--"

Night had fallen on Faring town and the windows of the houses blinked through the darkness; through the windows of Adam Falcon's house glimmered the death candles where Margeret and others kept silent watch until dawn. And beyond the friendly warmth of the town's lights, the dusky green titan brooded along the strand, silent now as if in sleep, but ever ready to leap with hungry talons. I wandered down to the beach and, reclining on the white sand, gazed out over the slowly heaving expanse which coiled and billowed in drowsy undulations like a sleeping serpent.

The sea--the great, grey, cold-eyed woman of the ages. Her tides spoke to me as they have spoken to me since birth--in the swish of the flat waves along the sand, in the wail of the ocean-bird, in her throbbing silence. I am very old and very wise (brooded the sea), I have no part of man; I slay men and even their bodies I fling back upon the cowering land. There is life in my bosom but it is not human life (whispered the sea), my children hate the sons of men.

A shriek shattered the stillness and brought me to my feet, gazing wildly about me. Above the stars gleamed coldly and their scintillant ghosts sparkled on the ocean's cold surface. The town lay dark and still, save for the death lights in Adam Falcon's house--and the echoes still shuddered through the pulsating silence.

I was among the first to arrive at the door of the death room and there halted aghast with the rest.

Margeret Deveral lay dead upon the floor, her slender form crushed like a slim ship among shoals, and crouching over her, cradling her in his arms, was John Gower, the gleam of insanity in his wide eyes. And the death candles still flickered and leaped, but no corpse lay on Adam Falcon's bed.

"God's mercy!" gasped Tom Leary. "John Gower, ye fiend from Hell, what devil's work is this?"

Gower looked up.

"I told you," he shrieked. "She knew--and I knew--'twas not Adam Falcon, that cold monster flung up by the mocking waves! 'Tis some demon inhabiting his corpse! Hark--I sought my bed and tried to sleep, but each time there came the thought of this soft girl sitting beside that cold inhuman thing she thought her lover, and at last I rose and came to the window. Margeret sat, drowsing, and the others, fools that they were, slept in other parts of the house. And as I watched--"

He shook as a wave of shuddering passed over him.

"As I watched, Adam's eyes opened, and the corpse rose swift and stealthy from the bed where it lay. I stood without the window, frozen, helpless, and the ghastly thing stole upon the unknowing girl, with frightful eyes burning with Hellish light and snaky arms outstretched. Then, she woke and screamed and then--oh Mother of God!--the dead man lapped her in his terrible arms and she died without a sound."

Gower's voice died out into incoherent gibberings and he rocked the dead girl gently to and fro like a mother with a child.

Tom Leary shook him:

"Where is the corpse?"

"He fled into the night," said John Gower tonelessly.

Men looked at each other bewildered.

"He lies," muttered they, deep in their beards. "He has slain Margeret himself and hidden the corpse somewhere to bear out his ghastly tale."

A sullen snarl shook the throng and as one man they turned and looked where, on Hangman's Hill overlooking the bay, Lie-lip Canool's bleached skeleton glimmered against the stars.

They took the dead girl from Gower's arms, though he clung to her, and laid her gently on the bed between the candles meant for Adam Falcon. Still she lay and white, and men and women whispered that she seemed more like one drowned than one crushed to death.

We bore John Gower through the village streets, he not resisting but seeming to walk in a daze, muttering to himself. But in the square, Tom Leary halted.

"This is a strange tale Gower told us," said he. "And doubtless a lie. Still, I am not a man to be hanging another without certainty. Therefore let us place him in the stocks for safe-keeping, while we search for Adam's corpse. Time enough for hanging afterwards."

So this was done and as we turned away I looked back upon John Gower who sat, head bowed upon his breast, like a man who is weary unto death.

So under the dim wharfs and in the attics of houses and among stranded hulls we searched for Adam Falcon's corpse. Back up into the hills behind the town our hunt led us, where we broke up into groups and couples and scattered out over the barren downs.

My companion was Michael Hansen, and we had gotten so far apart that the darkness cloaked him from me, when he gave a sudden shout. I started toward him and then the shout broke into a shriek and the shriek died off into grisly silence. Michael Hansen lay dead on the earth and a dim form slunk away in the gloom as I stood above the corpse, my flesh crawling.

Tom Leary and the rest came on the run and gathered about, swearing that John Gower had done this deed also.

"He has escaped, somehow, from the stocks," said they, and we legged it for the village at top speed.

Aye, John Gower had escaped from the stocks and from his townsmen's hate and from all the sorrows of life. He sat as we had left him, head bowed upon his breast, but One had come to him in the darkness and, though all his bones were broken, he seemed like a drowned man.

Then stark horror fell like a thick fog on Faring town. We clustered about the stocks, struck silent, till shrieks from a house on the outskirts of the village told us that the horror had struck again and, rushing there, we found red destruction and death. And a maniac woman who whimpered before she died that Adam Falcon's corpse had broken through the window, flaming-eyed and horrible, to rend and slay. A green slime fouled the room and fragments of sea-weed clung to the window sill.

Then fear, unreasoning and shameless, took possession of the men of Faring town and they fled to their separate houses where they locked and bolted doors and windows and crouched behind them, weapons trembling in their hands and black terror in their souls. For what weapon can slay the dead?

And through that deathly night, horror stalked through Faring town, and hunted the sons of men. Men shuddered and dared not even look forth when the crash of a door or window told of the entrance of the fiend into some wretch's cottage, when shrieks and gibberings told of its grisly deeds therein.

Yet there was one man who did not shut himself behind doors to be there slaughtered like a sheep. I was never a brave man, nor was it courage that sent me out into the ghastly night. No, it was the driving power of a Thought, a Thought which had birth in my brain as I looked on the dead face of Michael Hansen. A vague and illusive thing it was, a hovering and an almost-being, but not quite. Somewhere at the back of my skull It lurked and I could not rest until I had proved or disproved that which I could not even formulate into a concrete theory.

So with my brain in strange and chaotic condition I stole through the shadows, warily. Mayhap the sea, strange and fickle even to her chosen, had whispered something to my inner mind, had betrayed her own.

I know not.

But all through the dark hours I prowled along the beach and when, in the first grey light of the early dawn, a fiendish shape came striding down to the shore, I was waiting there.

To all seeming it was Adam Falcon's corpse, animated by some horrid life, which fronted me there in the grey gloom. The eyes were open now and they glimmered with a cold light, like the reflections of some deep-sea Hell.

And I knew that it was not Adam Falcon who faced me.

"Sea fiend," I said in an unsteady voice, "I know not how you came by Adam Falcon's apparel. I know not whether his ship went upon the rocks, or whether he fell overboard, or whether you climbed up the strake and over the rail and dragged him from his own deck. Nor do I know by what foul ocean magic you twisted your devil's features into a likeness of his.

"But this I know: Adam Falcon sleeps in peace beneath the blue tides. You are not he. That I suspected--now I know. This horror has come upon the earth of yore--so long ago that all men have forgotten the tales--all except such as I, whom men name fool. I know, and knowing, I fear you not, and here I slay you, for though you are not human, you may be slain by a man who does not fear you--even though that man be only a youth and considered strange and foolish. You have left your demon's mark upon the land; God alone knows how many souls you have reft, how many brains you have shattered this night. The ancients said your kind could do harm only in the form of men, on land. Aye, you tricked the sons of men--were borne into their midst by kind and gentle hands--by men who knew not they carried a monster from the abysses.

"Now, you have worked your will, and the sun will soon rise. Before that time you must be far below the green waters, basking in the accursed caverns that human eye has never looked upon save in death.

There lies the sea and safety; I bar the way alone."

He came upon me like a towering wave and his arms were like green serpents about me. I knew they were crushing me, yet I felt as if I were drowning instead, and even then understood the expression that had puzzled me on Michael Hansen's face--that of a drowned man.

I was looking into the inhuman eyes of the monster and it was as if I gazed into untold depths of oceans--depths into which I should presently tumble and drown. And I felt scales--

Neck, arm and shoulder he gripped me, bending me back to break my spine, and I drove my knife into his body again--and again--and again. He roared once, the only sound I ever heard him make, and it was like the roar of the tides among the shoals. Like the pressure of a hundred fathoms of green water was the grasp upon my body and limbs and then, as I thrust again, he gave way and crumpled to the beach.

He lay there writhing and then was still, and already he had begun to change. Mermen, the ancients named his kind, knowing they were endowed with strange attributes, one of which was the ability to take the full form of a man if lifted from the ocean by the hands of men. I bent and tore the human clothing from the thing. And the first gleams of the sun fell upon a slimy and moldering mass of sea-weed, from which stared two hideous dead eyes--a formless bulk that lay at the water's edge, where the first high wave would bear it back to that from which it came, the cold jade ocean deeps.

A Legend of Faring Town

Her house, a moulting buzzard on the Hill

Loomed gaunt and brooding over Faring town;

Behind, there sloped away the barren down

And at its foot an ancient, crumbling mill.

And often in the evening bleak and still,

With withered limbs wrapped in a sombre gown

And leathery face set in a sombre frown,

She sat in silence on her silent sill.

She came to Faring town long years ago--

With her a winsome child, the ancients said,

She vanished, where, the people did not know--

Meg mended ropes for ocean vessels' sails

And let the people think the child was dead--

She did not speak, but there were darksome tales.

One night the village flamed with sudden red--

From off Meg's roof we saw the cinders stream.

She came not forth--we entered--and in the gleam,

Saw her crouching, like a thing of dread,

Above a skeleton within her bed.

"Child slayer!" I still hear the women scream--

High a red and cinder spitting beam;

We hanged her and the flames consumed the dead.

A book we found, and written piteously

In Meg's sad scrawl: "Today my darling died

"But she shall sleep forever by my side--

"They shall not give her to the cruel sea."

We cringed and gazed in terror and in shame

Where still a form swung black against the flame.

Restless Waters

As if it were yesterday, I remember that terrible night in the Silver Slipper, in the late fall of 1845.

Outside, the wind roared in an icy gale and the sleet drove with it, till it rattled against the windows like the knucklebones of a skeleton. As we sat about the tavern fire, we could hear, booming above the wind and the sleet, the thunder of the white surges that beat frenziedly against the stark New England coast.

The ships in the harbor of the little seaport town lay double anchored, and the captains sought the warmth and companionship to be found in the wharf-side taverns.

There in the Silver Slipper that night were four men and I, the tap boy. There was Ezra Harper, the host; John Gower, captain of the Sea-Woman; Jonas Hopkins, a lawyer out of Salem; and Captain Starkey of The Vulture. These four men sat about the heavy oaken table in front of the great fire which roared in the fireplace, and I scurried about the tavern attending to their wants, filling mugs, and heating spiced drinks.

Captain Starkey sat with his back to the fire facing a window whereon the sleet beat and rattled. Ezra Harper sat at his right, at the end of the table, Captain Gower sat at the other end, and the lawyer, Jonas Hopkins, sat directly opposite Starkey, with his back to the window and facing the fire.

"More brandy!" Starkey roared, hammering the table with his great knotty fist. He was a rough giant of a man in middle life, with a short thick black beard and eyes that gleamed from beneath heavy black brows.

"A cold night for them that sail the sea," said Ezra Harper.

"A colder night for the men that sleep below the sea," said John Gower moodily. He was a tall rangy man, dark and saturnine of countenance, a strange wayward man of whom dark tales were told.

Starkey laughed savagely. "If you're thinking of Tom Siler, you'd best save your sympathy. Earth is the gainer for his going, and the sea is no better for it. A vile, murdering mutineer!" he roared the last in a sudden fury and smote the table resoundingly, glaring about as if to challenge any to dispute him.

A mocking smile flitted across the sinister countenance of John Gower, and Jonas Hopkins leaned forward, his keen eyes boring into Starkey's. Like all of us, he knew the story of Tom Siler, as told by Captain Starkey: how Siler, first mate aboard The Vulture, had sought to incite the crew to mutiny and piracy, had been tricked by Starkey and hanged at sea. Those were hard days and the captain's word was law at sea.

"Strange," said Jonas Hopkins, with his thin colorless face thrust at Captain Starkey. "Strange that Tom Siler should turn out bad, and him such a law abiding lad before this."

Starkey merely grunted disdainfully and emptied his cup. He was already drunk.

"When does your niece, Betty, marry Joseph Harmer, captain?" asked Ezra Harper, seeking to change the subject into safer channels. Jonas Hopkins sank back in his seat and turned his attention to his rum.

"Tomorrow," snarled Starkey.

Gower laughed shortly. "Is it a wife or a daughter Joe Harmer wants that he's marrying a girl so much younger than he?"

"John Gower, you'll oblige me by attending to your own cursed business!" roared Starkey. "The hussy should be overjoyed to be marrying a man like Harmer, who is one of the wealthiest ship owners in New England."

"But Betty doesn't think so, does she?" persisted John Gower, as if intent on stirring up trouble. "She's still sorrowing for Dick Hansen, isn't she?"

Captain Starkey's hairy hands clenched into fists and he glared at Gower as if this questioning of his private affairs was too much. Then he gulped down his rum and slammed the mug down on the board.

"There's no accounting for the whims of a girl," he said moodily. "If she wants to waste her life lamenting a wastrel who ran away and got himself drowned, that's her business. But it's my affair to see she marries properly."

"And how much is Joe Harmer paying you, Starkey?" asked John Gower bluntly.

This passed the point of civility and discretion. Starkey's huge body heaved up out of his seat and, with a bellow, he leaned across the table, eyes red with drink and fury, and his iron fist lifted. Gower did not move, but sat smiling up at him slit-eyed and dangerous.

"Sit down, Starkey!" Ezra Harper interposed. "John, the devil's in you tonight. Why can't we all take our liquor together friendly-like--"

This philosophical discourse was cut short abruptly. The heavy door was suddenly thrown open, a rush of wind made the candle dance and flicker wildly, and in the swirl of sleet that burst in, we saw a girl standing. I sprang forward and shut the door behind her.

"Betty!"

The girl was slim, almost frail. Her large dark eyes stared wildly, and her pretty pale face was streaked with tears. Her hair fell loose about her slender shoulders and her garments were soaked and battered by the gale through which she had battled her way.

"Betty!" roared Captain Starkey. "I thought you were at home in bed! What are you doing here--and on a night like this?"

"Oh, uncle!" she cried, holding her arms out to him blindly, oblivious to the rest of us. "I came to tell you again! I can't marry Joseph Harmer tomorrow! I can't! It's Dick Hansen! He's calling to me through the wind and the night and the black waters! Alive or dead, I'm his till I die, and I can't--I can't--"

"Get out!" roared Starkey, stamping and brandishing his arms like a maniac. "Out with you and back to your room! I'll attend to you later! Be silent! You'll marry Joe Harmer tomorrow or I'll beat you to death!"

With a whimper she sank to her knees before him, and with a bellow he raised his huge fist as if to strike her. But with one cat-like movement John Gower was out of his seat and had hurled the enraged captain back upon the table.

"Keep your hands off me, you damned pirate!" shouted Starkey furiously.

Gower grinned bleakly. "That's yet to be proven," said he. "But lay a finger on this child and we'll see how quick a 'damned pirate' can cut the heart out of an honest merchantman who's selling his own blood and kin to a miser."

"Let be, John," Ezra Harper interposed. "Starkey, don't you see the girl's in a fair way to collapse?

Here, honey," he bent and lifted her gently, "come with old Ezra. There's a warm fire in an upper room, and my wife shall give you some dry clothes. It's a bitter night for a girl to be out in. You'll stay with us till morning, dearie."

He went up the stair, half carrying the girl; and Starkey, after staring after them for a moment, returned to the table. There was silence awhile, and then Jonas Hopkins, who had not moved out of his seat, said:

"Strange tales making the rounds, Captain Starkey."

"And what might they be?" asked Starkey defiantly.

Jonas Hopkins stuffed his long slim-stemmed pipe with Virginia tobacco before he answered.

"I talked with some of your crew today."

"Huh!" Starkey spat out an oath. "My ship makes port this morning and before night the gossips are at work."

Hopkins beckoned me for a coal for his pipe. I obliged, and he took several long puffs.

"Mayhap they have something to work on this time, Captain Starkey."

"Speak up, man!" said Starkey angrily. "What are you driving at?"

"They say on board The Vulture that Tom Siler was never guilty of mutiny. They say that you trumped up the charges and hanged him out of hand in spite of the protests of the crew."

Starkey laughed savagely but hollowly. "And what basis for this wild tale?"

"They say that as he stood on the threshold of Eternity, Tom Siler swore that you were murdering him because he had learned what became of Dick Hansen. But before he could say more, the noose shut off his words and his life."

"Dick Hansen!" Starkey's face was pale, but his tone still defiant. "Dick Hansen was last seen on the wharfs of Salem one night over a year ago. What have I to do with him?"

"You wanted Betty to marry Joe Harmer, who was ready to buy her like a slave from you," answered Jonas Hopkins calmly. "This much is known by all."

John Gower nodded agreement.

"She was to marry Dick Hansen, though, and you had him shanghaied on board a British whaler bound on a four year cruise. Then you spread the report that he had been drowned and tried to rush Betty into marrying Harmer against her will, before Hansen could return. When you learned that Siler knew and would tell Betty, you became desperate. I know that you are on the verge of bankruptcy. Your only chance was the money Harmer had promised you. You murdered Tom Siler to still his mouth."

Another silence fell. Outside in the black night, the wind rose to a shriek. Starkey twisted his great fingers together and sat silent and brooding.

"And can you prove all this?" he sneered at last.

"I can prove that you are nearly bankrupt and that Harmer promised you money; I can prove that you had Hansen done away with."

"But you can't prove that Siler was not contemplating mutiny," shouted Starkey. "And how can you prove Hansen was shanghaied?"

"This morning I received a letter from my agent who had just arrived in Boston," said Hopkins. "He had seen Hansen in an Asiatic seaport. The young man said that he intended deserting ship at the first opportunity, and returning to America. He asked that Betty be acquainted with the fact that he was alive and still loved her."

Starkey rested his elbows on the table and sank his chin on his fists, like a man who sees his castles falling about him and red ruin facing him. Then he shook his mighty shoulders and laughed savagely. He drained his cup and reeled to his feet, bellowing with sudden laughter.

"I've still a card or two in my hand!" he shouted. "Tom Siler's in Hell with a noose around his neck, and Dick Hansen's across the world! The girl's my ward and a minor, and she'll marry whoever I say. You can't prove what you say about Siler. My word's law on the high seas, and you can't call me to account for anything I do aboard my own ship. As for Dick Hansen--my niece will be safely married to Joe Harmer long before that young fool gets back from his cruise. Go tell her if you like. Go tell her Dick Hansen still lives!"

"That's what I intend to do," said Jonas Hopkins, rising. "And should have done so before now, had I not wished to face you with the facts first."

"Great good it will do!" yelled Starkey like a wild man. He seemed like some savage beast at bay, defying us all. His eyes flamed terribly from under his craggy brows, and his fingers were crooked like talons. He snatched a goblet of liquor from the table and waved it.

"Aye, go tell her! She'll marry Harmer, or I'll kill her. Contrive and plot, you yellow-spined swine, no living man can balk me now, and no living man can save her from being the wife of Joe Harmer!

"Here's a toast, you cringing cowards! I'll drink to Tom Siler, sleeping in the cold white sea with the noose about his traitor's neck. Here's to my mate, Tom Siler, a-spinning and a-twirling from the cross-trees--"

This was insanity; I shrank back from the blast of the man's hideous triumph, and even from John Gower's face the smile was missing.

"To Tom Siler!" The winds answered the roar. The sleet drummed with frantic fingers on the window as if the black night itself sought entrance. I shrank near to the fire behind Captain Starkey's back, yet an unearthly coldness stole over me, as if through a suddenly opened door, a wind from some other sphere had breathed upon me.

"To Tom Siler--" Captain Starkey's arm went up with the goblet, his eyes, following the motion, rested on the window that separated us from the outer darkness. He froze, eyes starting from his head. The goblet dropped unheeded from his hand, and with one deathly scream he pitched forward across the table--dead!

What killed him? Too much drink and the fire in his evil brain, they said. Yet--Jonas Hopkins had turned toward the stairs and John Gower's eyes were fixed on Starkey's face. Only I looked toward the window and saw there what blasted Captain Starkey's brain and blew out his life as a witch blows out a candle. And the sight has haunted me to this day and will haunt me to the day of my death.

The window was rimed with frost and the candles gleamed illusively against it, for a moment I saw it clearly: a shadowy, nebulous shape that was like the reflection of a man's form in restless water. And the face was that of Tom Siler, and about the neck was a shadowy noose!

The Shadow of the Beast

As long as evil stars arise

Or moonlight fires the East,

May God in Heaven preserve us from

The Shadow of the Beast!

The horror had its beginning in the crack of a pistol in a black hand. A white man dropped with a bullet in his chest and the negro who had fired the shot turned and fled, after a single hideous threat hurled at the pale-faced girl who stood horror-struck close by.

Within an hour grim-faced men were combing the pine woods with guns in their hands, and on through the night the grisly hunt went on, while the victim of the hunted lay fighting for his life.

"He's quiet now; they say he'll live," his sister said, as she came out of the room where the boy lay. Then she sank down into a chair and gave way to a burst of tears.

I sat down beside her and soothed her much as one would a child. I loved her and she had shown that she returned my affection. It was my love for her that had drawn me from my Texas ranch to the lumber camps in the shadow of the pine woods, where her brother looked after the interests of his company.

"Give me the details of all this," I said. "I haven't been able to get a coherent account of it. You know I arrived after Harry had been shot."

"There isn't much to tell," she answered listlessly. "This negro's name is Joe Cagle and he's bad--in every sense of the word. Twice I've seen him peering in my window, and this morning he sprang out from behind a pile of lumber and caught me by the arm. I screamed and Harry rushed up and struck him with a club. Then Cagle shot my brother, and snarling like a wild beast, promised to revenge himself on me, also. Then he dashed away among the trees on the edge of the camp, looking like a great black ape with his broad back and stooping gait."

"What threats did he make against you?" I asked, my hands involuntarily clenching.

"He said he'd come back and get me some night when the woods were dark," she answered wearily, and with a fatalism that surprized and dismayed me she added, "He will, too. When a negro like him sets his mind on a white girl, nothing but death can stop him."

"Then death will stop him," I said harshly, rising. "Do you think I'm going to sit here and let that black beast menace you? I'm going to join the posse. Don't you leave this house tonight. By morning Joe Cagle will be past harming any girl, white or black."

As I went out of the house I met one of the men who had been searching for the negro. He had sprained his ankle on a hidden root in the darkness and had returned to the camp on a borrowed horse.

"Naw, we ain't found no trace yet," he replied to my question. "We've done combed the country right around the camp, and the boys are spreading out towards the swamp. Don't look reasonable that he coulda got so far away with the short start he had, and us right after him on horse back, but Joe Cagle's more of a varmint than he is a man. Looks like one uh these gorillas. I imagine he's hidin' in the swamp and if he is, it may take weeks to rout him out. Like I said, we've done searched the woods close by--all except the Deserted House, uh course."

"Why not there?--And where is this house?"

"Down the old tote road what ain't used no more, 'bout four miles. Aw, they ain't a black in the country that'd go near that place, to save his life, even. That negro that killed the foreman a few years ago, they chased him down the old tote road and when he seen he was goin' to have to go right past the Deserted House, he turned back and give up to the mob. No sir, Joe Cagle ain't nowheres near that house, you can bet."

"Why has it such a bad name?" I asked curiously.

"Ain't nobody lived in it for twenty years. Last man owned it leaped, fell or was thrown out of a upstairs window one night and was killed by the fall. Later a young travellin' man stayed there all night on a bet and they found him outside the house next mornin', all smashed up like he'd fell a long ways. A backwoodsman who'd passed that way late in the night swore he'd heard a terrible scream, and then seen the travellin' man come flyin' out of a second story window. He didn't wait to see no more. What give the Deserted House the bad name in the first place was--"

But I was in no mood to listen to a long drawn-out ghost story, or whatever the man was about to tell me. Almost every locality in the South has its "ha'nted" house and the tales attached to each are numberless.

I interrupted him to ask where I would be likely to find the part of the posse which had penetrated most deeply into the pine woods, and having gotten instructions, I mounted the horse he had ridden back and rode away, first getting his promise that he would keep watch over the girl, Joan, until I had returned.

"Don't get lost," he shouted after me. "Them piney woods is risky business for a stranger. Watch for the light of the posse's torches through the trees."

A brisk canter brought me to the verge of a road which led into the woods in the direction I wished to go, and there I halted. Another road, one which was little more than a dimly defined path, led away at right angles. This was the old tote road which went past the Deserted House. I hesitated. I had none of the confidence that the others had shown, that Joe Cagle would shun the place. The more I thought of it, the more I felt it likely that the negro would take refuge there. From all accounts, he was an unusual man, a complete savage, so bestial, so low in the scale of intelligence that even the superstitions of his race left him untouched. Why then should not his animal craft bid him hide in the last place his pursuers would think of looking, while that same animal-like nature caused him to scorn the fears possessed by the more imaginative of his race?

My decision reached, I reined my steed about and started down the old road.

There is no darkness in the world so utterly devoid of light as the blackness of the pine woods. The silent trees rose like basaltic walls about me, shutting out the stars. Except for the occasional eery sigh of the wind through the branches, or the far away, haunting cry of an owl, the silence was as absolute as the darkness. The stillness bore heavily upon me. I seemed to sense, in the blackness about me, the spirit of the unconquerable swamplands, the primitive foe of man whose abysmal savagery still defies his vaunted civilization. In such surroundings anything seems possible. I did not then wonder at the dark tales of black magic and voo-doo rites attributed to these horrid depths, nor would I have been surprized to hear the throb of the tomtom, or to see a fire leap up in the dark, where naked figures danced about a cannibalistic feast.

I shrugged my shoulders to rid myself of such thoughts. If voo-doo worshippers secretly held their fearsome rites in these woods, there were none tonight with the vengeful white men combing the country.

As my mount, bred in the pine country and sure-footed as a cat in the darkness, picked his way without my aid, I strained my senses to catch any sound such as a man might make. But not one stealthy footfall reached me, not a single rustle of the scanty underbrush. Joe Cagle was armed and desperate. He might be waiting in ambush; might spring on me at any moment, but I felt no especial fear. In that veiling darkness, he could see no better than I, and I would have as good a chance as he in a blind exchange of shots. And if it came to a hand-to-hand conflict, I felt that I, with my two hundred and five pounds of bone and sinew, was a match for even the ape-like negro.

Surely I must be close to the Deserted House by now. I had no idea of knowing the exact time, but far away in the east a faint glow began to be apparent through the masking blackness of the pines. The moon was rising. And on that instant, from somewhere in front of me, rattled a sudden volley of shots, then silence fell again like a heavy fog. I had halted short and now I hesitated. To me it had sounded as if all the reports had come from the same gun, and there had been no answering shots. What had happened out there in the grim darkness? Did those shots spell Joe Cagle's doom, or did they mean that the negro had struck again? Or did the sounds have any connection with the man I was hunting? There was but one way to find out and nudging my mount's ribs, I started on again at a swifter gait.

A few moments later a large clearing opened and a gaunt dark building bulked against the stars. The Deserted House at last! The moon glimmered evilly through the trees, etching out black shadows and throwing an illusive witch-light over the country. I saw, in this vague light, that the house had once been a mansion of the old colonial type. Sitting in my saddle for an instant before I dismounted, a vision of lost glory passed before my mind--a vision of broad plantations, singing negroes, aristocratic Southern colonels, balls, dances--gallantry--

All gone now. Blotted out by the Civil War. The pine trees grew where the plantation fields had flourished, the gallants and the ladies were long dead and forgotten, the mansion crumbled into decay and ruin--and now what grim threat lurked in those dark and dusty rooms where the mice warred with the owls?

I swung from my saddle, and as I did, my horse snorted suddenly and reared back violently upon his haunches, tearing the reins from my hand. I snatched for them again, but he wheeled and galloped away, vanishing like a goblin's shadow in the gloom. I stood struck speechless, listening to the receding thunder of his hoofs, and I will admit that a cold finger traced its way down my spine. It is rather a grisly experience to have your retreat suddenly cut off, in such surroundings as I was in.

However, I had not come to run away from danger, so I strode boldly up to the broad veranda, a heavy pistol in one hand, an electric flash-light in the other. The massive pillars towered above me; the door sagged open upon broken hinges. I swept the broad hallway with a gleam of light but only dust and decay met my eyes. I entered warily, turning the light off.

As I stood there, trying to accustom my eyes to the gloom, I realized that I was doing as reckless a thing as a man could do. If Joe Cagle were hiding somewhere in the house, all he had to do would be to wait until I turned on my light and then shoot me full of lead. But I thought again of his threats against the weak and helpless girl I loved, and my determination was steeled. If Joe Cagle was in that house, he was going to die.

I strode toward the stairs, instinctively feeling that if there, the fugitive would be somewhere in the second story. I groped my way up and came out on a landing, lit by the moonlight which streamed in at a window. The dust lay thick on the floor as if undisturbed for two decades and I heard the whisper of bats' wings and the scampering of mice. No foot prints in the dust betrayed a man's presence but I felt sure that there were other stairways. Cagle might have come into the house through a window.

I went down the hallway, which was a horrible system of black lurking shadows and squares of moonlight--for now the moon had risen high enough to flood in at the windows. There was no sound save the cushioned tread of my own feet in the deep dust on the floor. Room after room I passed, but my flashlight showed only moldered walls, sagging ceilings and broken furniture. At last, close to the end of the corridor, I came to a room whose door was shut. I halted, an intangible feeling working upon me to steel my nerves and send the blood racing through my veins. Somehow, I knew that on the other side of that door lay something mysterious and menacing.

Cautiously I turned on the light. The dust in front of the door was disturbed. An arc of the floor was brushed bare, just in front. The door had been open; had been closed only a short time before. I tried the knob warily, wincing at the rattle it made and expecting a blast of lead through the door. Silence reigned.

I tore the door open and leaped quickly aside.

There was no shot, no sound. Crouching, gun cocked, I peered about the jamb and strained my eyes into the room. A faint acrid scent met my nostrils--gun powder--was it in this room that had been fired those shots I had heard?

Moonlight streamed over a broken window sill, lending a vague radiance. I saw a dark bulky form, that had the semblance of a man, lying close to the center of the floor. I crossed the threshold, bent over the figure and turned my light full into the upturned face.

Joan need never fear Joe Cagle's threats again, for the shape on the floor was Joe Cagle and he was dead.

Close to his outstretched hand lay a revolver, the chambers of which were filled with empty shells. Yet there was no wound upon the negro--at whom had he fired and what had killed him? A second glance at his distorted features told me--I saw that look once before in the eyes of a man struck by a rattlesnake, who died with fear before the reptile's venom could kill him. Cagle's mouth gaped, his dead eyes stared hideously; he had died of fright, but what grisly thing had caused that fright? At the thought cold sweat started out on my brow and the short hairs prickled at the base of my skull. I was suddenly aware of the silence and solitude of the place and the hour. Somewhere in the house a rat squeaked and I started violently.

I glanced up, then halted, frozen. Moonlight fell on the opposite wall and suddenly a shadow fell silently across it--I bounded to my feet, whirling toward the outer door as I did so. The doorway stood empty. I sprang across the room and went through another door, closing it behind me. Then I halted, shaken. Not a sound broke the stillness. What was it that had stood for an instant in the doorway opening into the hall, throwing its shadow into the room where I had stood? I was still trembling with a nameless fear. The thought of some desperate man was bad enough, but the glance I had had of that shadow had left upon my soul an impression of something strange and unholy--inhuman!

The room in which I now was also opened in the hallway. I started to cross to the hall door and then hesitated at the thought of pitting my powers against whatever lurked in the outer darkness. The door sagged open--I saw nothing, but to my soul-freezing horror, a hideous shadow fell across the floor and moved toward me!

Etched blackly in the moonlight on the floor, it was as if some frightful shape stood in the doorway, throwing its lengthened and distorted shade across the boards to my feet. Yet I swear that the doorway was empty!

I rushed across the room and entered the door that opened into the next room. Still I was adjacent to the hallway. All these upstairs rooms seemed to open into the hall. I stood, shivering, my revolver gripped so tightly in my sweating hand that the barrel shook like a leaf. The pounding of my heart sounded thunderously in the silence. What in God's name was this horror which was hunting me through these dark rooms? What was it that threw a shadow, when its own substance was unseen? Silence lay like a dark mist; the ghostly radiance of the moon patterned the floor. Two rooms away lay the corpse of a man who had seen a thing so unnamably terrible that it had shattered his brain and taken away his life.

And here stood I, alone with the unknown monster.

What was that? The creak of ancient hinges! I shrank back against the wall, my blood freezing. The door through which I had just come was slowly opening! A sudden gust of wind shuddered through. The door swung wide, but I, nerving myself to meet the sight of some horror framed in the opening, saw nothing!

Moonlight, as in all of the rooms on this side of the hall, streamed through the hall door and lay on the opposite wall. If any invisible thing was coming from that adjoining room, the moonlight was not at its back. Yet a distorted shadow fell across the wall which shone in the moonlight and moved forward.

Now I saw it clearly, though the angle at which it was thrown deformed it. A broad, shambling figure, stooped, head thrust forward, long man-like arms dangling--the whole thing was hideously suggestive of the human, yet fearsomely unlike. This I read in the approaching shadow, yet saw no solid form that might throw this shadow.

Then panic seized me and I jerked the trigger again and again, filling the empty house with crashing reverberations and the acrid smell of powder, aiming first at the doorway in front of me, then in desperation sending the last bullet straight into the gliding shadow. Just so Joe Cagle must have done in the last terrible moment which preceded his death. The hammer fell hollowly on a discharged shell and I hurled the empty gun wildly. Not an instant had halted the unseen thing--now the shadow was close upon me.

My back-flung hands encountered the door--tore at the knob. It held! The door was locked! Now on the wall beside me, the shadow loomed up black and horrific. Two great treelike arms were raised--with a scream I hurled my full weight against the door. It gave way with a splintering crash and I fell through into the room beyond.

The rest is nightmare. I scrambled up without a glance behind me and rushed into the hall. At the far end I saw, as through a fog, the stair landing and toward it I rushed. The hall was long--it seemed endless. It seemed as though it stretched into Eternity and that I fled for hours down that grisly corridor. And a black shadow kept pace with me, flying along the moonlit wall, vanishing for an instant in black darkness, reappearing an instant later in a square of moonlight, let in by some outer window.

Down the hall it kept by my side, falling upon the wall at my left, telling me that whatever thing threw that shadow, was close at my back. It has long been said that a ghost will fling a shadow in the moonlight, even when it itself is invisible to the human sight. But no man ever lived whose ghost could throw such a silhouette. Such thoughts as these did not enter my mind tangibly as I fled; I was in the grip of unreasoning fear, but piercing through the fogs of my horror, was the knowledge that I was faced by some supernatural thing, which was at once unearthly and bestial.

Now I was almost at the stair; but now the shadow fell in front of me! The thing was at my very back--was reaching hideous unseen arms to clutch me! One swift glance over my shoulder showed me something else: on the dust of the corridor, close upon the footprints I left, other footprints were forming! Huge misshapen footprints, that left the marks of talons! With a terrible scream I swerved to the right, leaping for an open outer window as a drowning man seizes a rope--without conscious thought.

My shoulder struck the side of the window; I felt empty air under my feet--caught one whirling, chaotic glimpse of the moon, sky and the dark pine trees, as the earth rushed up to meet me, then black oblivion crashed about me.

My first sensation of returning consciousness was of soft hands lifting my head and caressing my face. I lay still, my eyes closed, trying to orient myself--I could not remember where I was, or what had happened. Then with a rush it all came back to me. My eyes flared open and I struggled wildly to rise.

"Steve, oh Steve, are you hurt?"

Surely I was insane, for it was the voice of Joan! No! My head was cradled in her lap, her large dark eyes, bright with tears, gazed down into mine.

"Joan! In God's name, what are you doing here?" I sat up, drawing her into my arms. My head throbbed nauseatingly; I was sore and bruised. Above us rose the stark grim wall of the Deserted House, and I could see the window from which I had fallen. I must have lain senseless for a long time, for now the moon lay red as blood close to the western horizon, glimmering in a scarlet wallow through the tops of the pines.

"The horse you rode away came back riderless. I couldn't stand to sit and wait--so I slipt out of the house and came here. They told me you'd gone to find the posse, but the horse came back the old tote road. There wasn't anyone to send so I slipt away and came myself."

"Joan!" the sight of her forlorn figure and the thought of her courage and love took hold of my heart and I kissed her without speaking.

"Steve," her voice came low and frightened, "what happened to you? When I rode up, you lay here unconscious, just like those other two men who fell from those windows--only they were killed."

"And only pure chance saved me, despite my powerful frame and heavy bones," I answered. "Once out of a hundred times a fall like that fails to injure a man--Joan, what happened in that house twenty years ago to throw a curse upon it?"

She shivered. "I don't know. The people who owned it before the war had to sell it afterwards. The tenants let it fall into disrepair, of course. A strange thing happened there just before the death of the last tenant. A huge gorilla escaped from a circus which was passing through the country and took refuge in the house. He fought so terribly when they tried to recapture him that they had to kill him. That was over twenty years ago. Shortly after that, the owner of the house fell from an upstairs window and was killed.

Everyone supposed he committed suicide or was walking in his sleep, but--"

"No!" I broke in with a shudder. "He was being hunted through those horrible rooms by a thing so terrible that death itself was an escape. And that travelling man--I know what killed him--and Joe Cagle--"

"Joe Cagle!" she started violently. "Where--"

"Don't worry, child," I soothed. "He's past harming you. Don't ask me any more. No, I didn't kill him; his death was more horrible than any I could have dealt. There are worlds and shadows of worlds beyond our ken, and bestial earth-bound spirits lurk in the dark shadows of our world, it may be. Come, let us go."

She had brought two horses with her, and had tethered them a short distance from the house. I made her mount and then, despite her protests and pleas, I returned to the house. I went only as far as a first story window and I stayed only a few moments. Then I also mounted, and together we rode slowly down the old tote road. The stars were paling and the east was beginning to whiten with the coming morn.

"You have not told me what haunts that house," said Joan in an awed voice, "but I know it's something frightful; what are we to do?"

For answer I turned in my saddle and pointed. We had rounded a bend in the old road and could just glimpse the old house through the trees. As we looked, a red lance of flame leaped up, smoke billowed to the morning sky, and a few minutes later a deep roar came to us, as the whole building began to fall into the insatiate flames I had started before we left. The ancients have always maintained that fire is the final destroyer, and I knew as I watched, that the ghost of the dead gorilla was lain, and the shadow of the beast forever lifted from the pine lands.

The Dead Slaver's Tale

Dim and grey was the silent sea,

Dim was the crescent moon;

From the jungle back of the shadowed lea

Came a tom-tom's eerie croon

When we glutted the waves with a hundred slaves

From a Jekra barracoon.

Our way to bar, a man of war

Was sailing with canvas full;

So the doomed men up from the hold we bore,

Hacked them to pieces and hurled them o'er,

And we heard the grim sharks as they tore

The flesh from each sword-cleft skull.

Then fast we fled toward the rising sun

But we could not flee the dead

And ever behind our flying ship

Wavered a trail of red.

She sank like a stone off Calabar

With all of her bloody crew.

There was no breeze to shake a spar,

No reef her hull to hew.

But dusky hands rose out of the deep,

And dragged her under the blue.

Dermod's Bane

If your heart is sick in your breast and a blind black curtain of sorrow is between your brain and your eyes so that the very sunlight is pale and leprous--go to the city of Galway, in the county of the same name, in the province of Connaught, in the country of Ireland.

In the grey old City of Tribes, as they call it, there is a dreamy soothing spell that is like enchantment, and if you are of Galway blood, no matter how far away, your grief will pass slowly from you like a dream, leaving only a sad sweet memory, like the scent of a dying rose. There is a mist of antiquity hovering over the old city which mingles with sorrow and makes one forget. Or you can go out into the blue Connaught hills and feel the salt sharp tang of the wind off the Atlantic, and life seems faint and far away, with all its sharp joys and bitter sorrows, and no more real than the shadows of the clouds which pass.

I came to Galway as a wounded beast crawls back to his lair in the hills. The city of my people broke upon my gaze for the first time, but it did not seem strange or foreign. It seemed like a homecoming to me, and with each day passing the land of my birth seemed farther and farther away and the land of my ancestors closer.

I came to Galway with an aching heart. My twin sister, whom I loved as I never loved anyone else, had died. Her going was swift and unexpected. It seemed to my mazed agony that one moment she was laughing beside me with her cheery smile and bright grey Irish eyes, and the next, the cold bitter grass was growing above her. Oh, my soul to God, not your Son alone endured crucifixion.

A black cloud like a shroud locked about me and in the dim borderland of madness I sat alone, tearless and speechless. My grandmother came to me at last, a great grim old woman, with hard haunted eyes that held all the woes of the Irish race.

"Let you go to Galway, lad. Let you go to the ould land. Maybe the sorrow of you will be drowned in the cold salt sea. Maybe the folk of Connaught can heal the wound that is on you--"

I went to Galway.

Well, the people were kind there--all those great old families, the Martins, the Lynches, the Deanes, the Dorseys, the Blakes, the Kirowans--families of the fourteen great families who rule Galway.

Out on the hills and in the valleys I roved and talked with the kindly, quaint country folk, many of whom still spoke the good old Erse language which I could speak haltingly.

There, on a hill one night before a shepherd's fire I heard again the old legend of Dermod O'Connor. As the shepherd unfolded the terrible tale in his rich brogue, interlaced with many Gaelic phrases, I remembered that my grandmother had told me the tale when I was a child, but I had forgotten the most of it.

Briefly the story is this: there was a chief of the Clan na O'Connor and his name was Dermod, but people called him the Wolf. The O'Connors were kings in the old days, ruling Connaught with a hand of steel.

They divided the rule of Ireland with the O'Briens in the South--Munster--and the O'Neills in the North--Ulster. With the O'Rourkes they fought the MacMurroughs of Leinster and it was Dermot MacMurrough, driven out of Ireland by the O'Connors, who brought in Strongbow and his Norman adventurers. When Earl Pembroke, whom men called Strongbow, landed in Ireland, Roderick O'Connor was king of Ireland in name and claim at least. And the clan O'Connor, fierce Celtic warriors that they were, kept up their struggle for freedom until at last their power was broken by a terrible Norman invasion. All honor to the O'Connors. In the old times my people fought under their banners--but each tree has a rotten root. Each great house has its black sheep. Dermod O'Connor was the black sheep of his clan and a blacker one never lived.

His hand was against all men, even his own house. He was no chieftain, fighting to regain the crown of Erin or to free his people; he was a red-handed reaver and he preyed alike on Norman and Celt; he raided into The Pale and he carried torch and steel into Munster and Leinster. The O'Briens and the O'Carrolls had cause to curse him, and the O'Neills hunted him like a wolf.

He left a trail of blood and devastation wherever he rode and at last, his band dwindling from desertions and constant fighting, he alone remained, hiding in caves and hills, butchering lone travellers for the sheer lust of blood that was on him, and descending on lonely farmers' houses or shepherds' huts to commit atrocities on their women folk. He was a giant of a man and the legends make of him something inhuman and monstrous. It must be truth that he was strange and terrible in appearance.

But his end came at last. He murdered a youth of the Kirowan clan and the Kirowans rode out of the city of Galway with vengeance in their hearts. Sir Michael Kirowan met the marauder alone in the hills--Sir Michael, a direct ancestor of mine, whose very name I bear. Alone they fought with only the shuddering hills to witness that terrible battle, till the clash of steel reached the ears of the rest of the clan who were riding hard and scouring the countryside.

They found Sir Michael badly wounded and Dermod O'Connor dying with a cleft shoulder bone and a ghastly wound in his breast. But such was their fury and hatred, that they flung a noose about the dying robber's neck and hanged him to a great tree on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea.

"And," said my friend the shepherd, stirring the fire, "the peasant folk still point out the tree and call it Dermod's Bane, after the Danish manner, and men have seen the great outlaw o' nights, and him gnashing his great tushes and spouting blood from shoulder and breast and swearin' all manner o' ill on the Kirowans and their blood for all time to come.

"And so, sir, let you not walk in the cliffs over the sea by night for you are of the blood he hates and the same name of the man who felled him is on you. For let you laugh if so be your will, but the ghost of Dermod O'Connor the Wolf is abroad o' dark night and the moon out of the sky, and him with his great black beard and ghastly eyes and boar tushes."

They pointed me out the tree, Dermod's Bane, and strangely like a gallows it looked, standing there as it had stood for how many hundred years I do not know, for men live long in Ireland and trees live longer.

There were no other trees near and the cliff rose sheer from the sea for four hundred feet. Below was only the deep sinister blue of the waves, deep and dark, breaking on the cruel rocks.

I walked much in the hills at night for when the silence of the darkness was on the world and no speech or noises of men to hold my thoughts, my sorrow was dark on my heart again and I walked on the hills where the stars seemed close and warm. And often my mazed brain wondered which star she was on, or if she had turned to a star.

One night the old, sharp agony returned unbearably. I rose from my bed--for I was staying at the time in a little mountain inn--and dressed and went into the hills. My temples throbbed and there was an unbearable weight about my heart. My dumb frozen soul shrieked up to God but I could not weep. I felt I must weep or go mad. For never a tear had passed my eyelids since--

Well, I walked on and on, how long or how far I do not know. The stars were hot and red and angry and gave me no comfort that night. At first I wanted to scream and howl and throw myself on the ground and tear the grass with my teeth. Then that passed and I wandered as in a trance. There was no moon and in the dim starlight the hills and their trees loomed dark and strange. Over the summits I could see the great Atlantic lying like a dusky silver monster and I heard her faint roaring.

Something flitted in front of me and I thought that it was a wolf. But there have been no wolves in Ireland for many and many a year. Again I saw the thing, a long low shadowy shape. I followed it mechanically.

Now in front of me I saw a cliff overlooking the sea. On the cliff 's edge was a single great tree that loomed up like a gibbet. I approached this.

Then in front of me, as I neared the tree, a vague mist hovered. A strange fear spread over me as I watched stupidly. A form became evident. Dim and silky, like a shred of moon-mist, but with an undoubted human shape. A face--I cried out!

A vague, sweet face floated before me, indistinct, mist-like--yet I made out the shimmery mass of dark hair, the high pure forehead, the red curving lips--the serious soft grey eyes--

"Moira!" I cried in agony and rushed forward, my aching arms spread wide, my heart bursting in my bosom.

She floated away from me like a mist blown by a breeze; now she seemed to waver in space--I felt myself staggering wildly on the very edge of the cliff, whither my blind rush had led me. As a man wakes from a dream I saw in one flashing instant the cruel rocks four hundred feet below, I heard the hungry lapping of the waves--as I felt myself falling forward I saw the vision, but now it was changed hideously.

Great tusk-like teeth gleamed ghoulishly through a matted black beard. Terrible eyes blazed under penthouse brows; blood flowed from a wound in the shoulder and a ghastly gash in the broad breast--

"Dermod O'Connor!" I screamed, my hair bristling. "Avaunt, fiend out of Hell--"

I swayed out for the fall I could not check, with death waiting four hundred feet below. Then a soft small hand closed on my wrist and I was drawn irresistibly back. I fell, but back on the soft green grass at the lip of the cliff, not to the keen-edged rocks and waiting sea below. Oh, I knew--I could not be wrong.

The small hand was gone from my wrist, the hideous face gone from the cliff edge--but that grasp on my wrist that drew me back from my doom--how could I fail to recognize it? A thousand times had I felt the dear touch of that soft hand on my arm or in my own hand. Oh Moira, Moira, pulse of my heart, in life and in death you were ever at my side.

And now for the first time I wept and lying on my face with my face in my hands, I poured my racked heart out in scalding, blinding and soul-easing tears, until the sun came up over the blue Galway hills and limned the branches of Dermod's Bane with a strange new radiance.

Now, did I dream or was I mad? Did, in truth, the ghost of that long-dead outlaw lead me across the hills to the cliff under the death-tree, and there assume the shape of my dead sister to lure me to my doom?

And did in truth the real hand of that dead sister, brought suddenly to my side by my peril, hold me back from death?

Believe or disbelieve as you will. To me it is a fact. I saw Dermod O'Connor that night and he led me over the cliff; and the soft hand of Moira Kirowan dragged me back and its touch loosened the frozen channels of my heart and brought me peace. For the wall that bars the living from the dead is but a thin veil, I know now, and so sure as a dead woman's love conquered a dead man's hate, so sure shall I some day in the world beyond, hold my sister in my arms again.

The Hills of the Dead

I

VOODOO

The twigs which N'Longa flung on the fire broke and crackled. The upleaping flames lighted the countenances of the two men. N'Longa, voodoo man of the Slave Coast, was very old. His wizened and gnarled frame was stooped and brittle, his face creased by hundreds of wrinkles. The red firelight glinted on the human finger-bones which composed his necklace.

The other was a white man and his name was Solomon Kane. He was tall and broad-shouldered, clad in black close garments, the garb of the Puritan. His featherless slouch hat was drawn low over his heavy brows, shadowing his darkly pallid face. His cold deep eyes brooded in the firelight.

"You come again, brother," droned the fetish-man, speaking in the jargon which passed for a common language of black man and white on the West Coast. "Many moons burn and die since we make blood-palaver. You go to the setting sun, but you come back!"

"Aye." Kane's voice was deep and almost ghostly. "Yours is a grim land, N'Longa, a red land barred with the black darkness of horror and the bloody shadows of death. Yet I have returned--"

N'Longa stirred the fire, saying nothing, and after a pause Kane continued.

"Yonder in the unknown vastness"--his long finger stabbed at the black silent jungle which brooded beyond the firelight--"yonder lie mystery and adventure and nameless terror. Once I dared the jungle--once she nearly claimed my bones. Something entered into my blood, something stole into my soul like a whisper of unnamed sin. The jungle! Dark and brooding--over leagues of the blue salt sea she has drawn me and with the dawn I go to seek the heart of her. Mayhap I shall find curious adventure--mayhap my doom awaits me. But better death than the ceaseless and everlasting urge, the fire that has burned my veins with bitter longing."

"She call," muttered N'Longa. "At night she coil like serpent about my hut and whisper strange things to me. Ai ya! The jungle call. We be blood-brothers, you and I. Me, N'Longa, mighty worker of nameless magic. You go to the jungle as all men go who hear her call. Maybe you live, more like you die. You believe in my fetish work?"

"I understand it not," said Kane grimly, "but I have seen you send your soul forth from your body to animate a lifeless corpse."

"Aye! Me N'Longa, priest of the Black God! Now watch, I make magic."

Kane gazed at the black man who bent over the fire, making even motions with his hands and mumbling incantations. Kane watched and he seemed to grow sleepy. A mist wavered in front of him, through which he saw dimly the form of N'Longa, etched black against the flames. Then all faded out.

Kane awoke with a start, hand shooting to the pistol in his belt. N'Longa grinned at him across the flame and there was a scent of early dawn in the air. The fetish-man held a long stave of curious black wood in his hands. This stave was carved in a strange manner, and one end tapered to a sharp point.

"This voodoo staff," said N'Longa, putting it in the Englishman's hand. "Where your guns and long knife fail, this save you. When you want me, lay this on your breast, fold your hands on it and sleep. I come to you in your dreams."

Kane weighed the thing in his hand, highly suspicious of witchcraft. It was not heavy, but seemed hard as iron. A good weapon at least, he decided. Dawn was just beginning to steal over the jungle and the river.

II

RED EYES

Solomon Kane shifted his musket from his shoulder and let the stock fall to the earth. Silence lay about him like a fog. Kane's lined face and tattered garments showed the effect of long bush travel. He looked about him.

Some distance behind him loomed the green, rank jungle, thinning out to low shrubs, stunted trees and tall grass. Some distance in front of him rose the first of a chain of bare, somber hills, littered with boulders, shimmering in the merciless heat of the sun. Between the hills and the jungle lay a broad expanse of rough, uneven grasslands, dotted here and there by clumps of thorn-trees.

An utter silence hung over the country. The only sign of life was a few vultures flapping heavily across the distant hills. For the last few days Kane had noticed the increasing number of these unsavory birds. The sun was rocking westward but its heat was in no way abated.

Trailing his musket he started forward slowly. He had no objective in view. This was all unknown country and one direction was as good as another. Many weeks ago he had plunged into the jungle with the assurance born of courage and ignorance. Having by some miracle survived the first few weeks, he was becoming hard and toughened, able to hold his own with any of the grim denizens of the fastness he dared.

As he progressed he noted an occasional lion spoor but there seemed to be no animals in the grasslands--none that left tracks, at any rate. Vultures sat like black, brooding images in some of the stunted trees, and suddenly he saw an activity among them some distance beyond. Several of the dusky birds circled about a clump of high grass, dipping, then rising again. Some beast of prey was defending his kill against them, Kane decided, and wondered at the lack of snarling and roaring which usually accompanied such scenes. His curiosity was roused and he turned his steps in that direction.

At last, pushing through the grass which rose about his shoulders, he saw, as through a corridor walled with the rank waving blades, a ghastly sight. The corpse of a black man lay, face down, and as the Englishman looked, a great dark snake rose and slid away into the grass, moving so quickly that Kane was unable to decide its nature. But it had a weird human-like suggestion about it.

Kane stood over the body, noting that while the limbs lay awry as if broken, the flesh was not torn as a lion or leopard would have torn it. He glanced up at the whirling vultures and was amazed to see several of them skimming along close to the earth, following a waving of the grass which marked the flight of the thing which had presumably slain the black man. Kane wondered what thing the carrion birds, which eat only the dead, were hunting through the grasslands. But Africa is full of never-explained mysteries.

Kane shrugged his shoulders and lifted his musket again. Adventures he had had in plenty since he parted from N'Longa some moons agone, but still that nameless paranoid urge had driven him on and on, deeper and deeper into those trackless ways. Kane could not have analyzed this call; he would have attributed it to Satan, who lures men to their destruction. But it was but the restless turbulent spirit of the adventurer, the wanderer--the same urge which sends the gipsy caravans about the world, which drove the Viking galleys over unknown seas and which guides the flights of the wild geese.

Kane sighed. Here in this barren land seemed neither food nor water, but he had wearied unto death of the dank, rank venom of the thick jungle. Even a wilderness of bare hills was preferable, for a time at least. He glanced at them, where they lay brooding in the sun, and started forward again.

He held N'Longa's fetish stave in his left hand, and though his conscience still troubled him for keeping a thing so apparently diabolic in nature, he had never been able to bring himself to throw it away.

Now as he went toward the hills, a sudden commotion broke out in the tall grass in front of him, which was, in places, taller than a man. A thin, high-pitched scream sounded and on its heels an earth-shaking roar. The grass parted and a slim figure came flying toward him like a wisp of straw blown on the wind--a brown-skinned girl, clad only in a skirt-like garment. Behind her, some yards away but gaining swiftly, came a huge lion.

The girl fell at Kane's feet with a wail and a sob, and lay clutching at his ankles. The Englishman dropped the voodoo stave, raised his musket to his shoulder and sighted coolly at the ferocious feline face which neared him every instant. Crash! The girl screamed once and slumped on her face. The huge cat leaped high and wildly, to fall and lie motionless.

Kane reloaded hastily before he spared a glance at the form at his feet. The girl lay as still as the lion he had just slain, but a quick examination showed that she had only fainted.

He bathed her face with water from his canteen and presently she opened her eyes and sat up. Fear flooded her face as she looked at her rescuer and she made to rise.

Kane held out a restraining hand and she cowered down, trembling. The roar of his heavy musket was enough to frighten any native who had never before seen a white man, Kane reflected.

The girl was a much higher type than the thick-lipped, bestial West Coast negroes to whom Kane had been used. She was slim and finely formed, of a deep brown hue rather than ebony; her nose was straight and thin-bridged, her lips were not too thick. Somewhere in her blood there was a strong Berber strain.

Kane spoke to her in a river dialect, a simple language he had learned during his wandering, and she replied haltingly. The inland tribes traded slaves and ivory to the river people and were familiar with their jargon.

"My village is there," she answered Kane's question, pointing to the southern jungle with a slim, rounded arm. "My name is Zunna. My mother whipped me for breaking a cooking-kettle and I ran away because I was angry. I am afraid; let me go back to my mother!"

"You may go," said Kane, "but I will take you, child. Suppose another lion came along? You were very foolish to run away."

She whimpered a little. "Are you not a god?"

"No, Zunna. I am only a man, though the color of my skin is not as yours. Lead me now to your village."

She rose hesitantly, eyeing him apprehensively through the wild tangle of her hair. To Kane she seemed like some frightened young animal. She led the way and Kane followed. She indicated that her village lay to the southeast, and their route brought them nearer to the hills. The sun began to sink and the roaring of lions reverberated over the grasslands. Kane glanced at the western sky; this open country was no place in which to be caught by night. He glanced toward the hills and saw that they were within a few hundred yards of the nearest. He saw what seemed to be a cave.

"Zunna," said he haltingly, "we can never reach your village before nightfall and if we bide here the lions will take us. Yonder is a cavern where we may spend the night--"

She shrank and trembled.

"Not in the hills, master!" she whimpered. "Better the lions!"

"Nonsense!" His tone was impatient; he had had enough of native superstition. "We will spend the night in yonder cave."

She argued no further, but followed him. They went up a short slope and stood at the mouth of the cavern, a small affair, with sides of solid rock and a floor of deep sand.

"Gather some dry grass, Zunna," commanded Kane, standing his musket against the wall at the mouth of the cave, "but go not far away, and listen for lions. I will build here a fire which shall keep us safe from beasts tonight. Bring some grass and any twigs you may find, like a good child, and we will sup. I have dried meat in my pouch and water also."

She gave him a strange, long glance, then turned away without a word. Kane tore up grass near at hand, noting how it was seared and crisp from the sun, and heaping it up, struck flint and steel. Flame leaped up and devoured the heap in an instant. He was wondering how he could gather enough grass to keep a fire going all night, when he was aware that he had visitors.

Kane was used to grotesque sights, but at first glance he started and a slight coldness traveled down his spine. Two black men stood before him in silence. They were tall and gaunt and entirely naked. Their skins were a dusty black, tinged with a gray, ashy hue, as of death. Their faces were different from any negroes he had seen. The brows were high and narrow, the noses huge and snout-like; the eyes were inhumanly large and inhumanly red. As the two stood there it seemed to Kane that only their burning eyes lived.

He spoke to them, but they did not answer. He invited them to eat with a motion of his hand, and they silently squatted down near the cave mouth, as far from the dying embers of the fire as they could get.

Kane turned to his pouch and began taking out the strips of dried meat which he carried. Once he glanced at his silent guests; it seemed to him that they were watching the glowing ashes of his fire, rather than him.

The sun was about to sink behind the western horizon. A red, fierce glow spread over the grasslands, so that all seemed like a waving sea of blood. Kane knelt over his pouch, and glancing up, saw Zunna come around the shoulder of the hill with her arms full of grass and dry branches.

As he looked, her eyes flared wide; the branches dropped from her arms and her scream knifed the silence, fraught with terrible warning. Kane whirled on his knee. Two great black forms loomed over him as he came up with the lithe motion of a springing leopard. The fetish stave was in his hand and he drove it through the body of the nearest foe with a force which sent its sharp point between the negro's shoulders. Then the long, lean arms of the other locked about him, and white man and black man went down together.

The talon-like nails of the black were tearing at his face, the hideous red eyes staring into his with a terrible threat, as Kane writhed about and, fending off the clawing hands with one arm, drew a pistol. He pressed the muzzle close against the black's side and pulled the trigger. At the muffled report, the negro's body jerked to the concussion of the bullet, but the thick lips merely gaped in a horrid grin.

One long arm slid under Kane's shoulders, the other hand gripped his hair. The Englishman felt his head being forced back irresistibly. He clutched at the other's wrist with both hands, but the flesh under his frantic fingers was as hard as wood. Kane's brain was reeling; his neck seemed ready to break with a little more pressure. He threw his body backward with one volcanic effort, breaking the deathly hold.

The black was on him and the talons were clutching again. Kane found and raised the empty pistol, and he felt the black man's skull cave in like a shell as he brought down the long barrel with all his strength.

And once again the writhing lips parted in fearful mockery.

And now a near panic clutched Kane. What sort of man was this, who still menaced his life with tearing fingers, after having been shot and mortally bludgeoned? No man, surely, but one of the sons of Satan!

At the thought Kane wrenched and heaved explosively, and the close-locked combatants tumbled across the earth to come to a rest in the smoldering ashes before the cave mouth. Kane barely felt the heat, but the mouth of his foe gaped, this time in seeming agony. The frightful fingers loosened their hold and Kane sprang clear.

The black man with his shattered skull was rising on one hand and one knee when Kane struck, returning to the attack as a gaunt wolf returns to a wounded bison. From the side he leaped, landing full on the black giant's back, his steely arms seeking and finding a deadly wrestling hold; and as they went to the earth together he broke the negro's neck, so that the hideous dead face looked back over one shoulder.

The black man lay still but to Kane it seemed that he was not dead even then, for the red eyes still burned with their grisly light.

The Englishman turned, to see the girl crouching against the cave wall. He looked for his stave; it lay in a heap of dust, among which were a few moldering bones. He stared, his brain reeling. Then with one stride he caught up the voodoo staff and turned to the fallen negro. His face set in grim lines as he raised it; then he drove it through the black breast. And before his eyes, the giant body crumbled, dissolving to dust as he watched horror-struck, even as had crumbled he through whom Kane had first thrust the stave.

III