The Best Horror Stories of

The Symbol

Eons before Atlantean days in the time of the world's black dawn, Strange were the kings and grim the deeds that the pallid moon looked on.

When the great black cities split the stars and strange prows broke the tide, And smoke went up from ghastly shrines where writhing victims died.

Black magic raised its serpent head, and all things foul and banned, Till an angry God hurled up the sea against the shuddering land.

And the grisly kings they read their doom in the wind and the rising brine, And they set a pillar on a hill for a symbol and a sign.

Black shrine and hall and carven wall sank to eternal sleep, And dawn looked down on a silent world and the blue unbroken deep.

Now men go forth in their daily ways and they reck not of the feel Of the veil that crushed, so long ago, the world beneath its heel.

But deep in the seaweed-haunted halls in the green unlighted deep, Inhuman kings await the day that shall break their chains of sleep.

And far in a grim untrodden land on a jungle-girded hill,

A pillar stands like a sign of Fate, in subtle warning still.

Carved in its blind black face of stone a fearful unknown rune Leers in the glare of the tropic sun and the cold of the leprous moon.

And it shall stand for a symbol mute that men are weak and blind, Till Hell roars up from the black abyss and horror swoops behind.

For this is the screed upon the shaft, oh, pallid sons of men:

"We that were lords of all the earth, shall rise and rule again."

And dark is the doom of the tribes of earth, that hour wild and red, When the ages give their secrets up and the sea gives up its dead.

The Valley of the Lost

As a wolf spies upon its hunters, John Reynolds watched his pursuers. He lay close in a thicket on the slope, a red inferno of hate seething in his heart. He had ridden hard; up the slope behind him, where the dim path wound up out of Lost Valley, his crank-eyed mustang stood, head drooping, trembling, after the long run. Below him, not more than eighty yards away, stood his enemies, fresh come from the slaughter of his kinsmen.

In the clearing fronting Ghost Cave they had dismounted and were arguing among themselves. John Reynolds knew them all with an old, bitter hate. The black shadow of feud lay between them and himself.

The feuds of early Texas have been neglected by chroniclers who have sung the feuds of the Kentucky mountains, yet the men who first settled the Southwest were of the same breed as those mountaineers.

But there was a difference; in the mountain country feuds dragged on for generations; on the Texas frontier they were short, fierce and appallingly bloody.

The Reynolds-McCrill feud was long, as Texas feuds went--fifteen years had passed since old Esau Reynolds stabbed young Braxton McCrill to death with his bowie knife in the saloon at Antelope Wells, in a quarrel over range rights. For fifteen years the Reynoldses and their kin, the Brills, Allisons and Donnellys, had been at open war with the McCrills and their kin, the Killihers, the Fletchers and the Ords. There had been ambushes in the hills, murders on the open range, and gun-fights on the streets of the little cow-towns. Each clan had rustled the other's cattle wholesale. Gunmen and outlaws called in by both sides to participate for pay had spread a reign of terror and lawlessness throughout the vicinity.

Settlers shunned the war-torn range; the feud was become a red obstacle in the way of progress and development--a savage retrogression which was demoralizing the whole countryside.

Little John Reynolds cared. He had grown up in the atmosphere of the feud, and it had become a burning obsession with him. The war had taken fearful toll on both clans, but the Reynoldses had suffered most.

He was the last of the fighting Reynoldses, for old Esau, the grim old patriarch who ruled the clan, would never again walk or sit in a saddle, with his legs paralyzed by McCrill bullets. John had seen his brothers shot down from ambush or killed in pitched battles.

Now the last stroke had well-nigh wiped out the waning clan. John Reynolds cursed as he thought of the trap into which they had walked in the saloon at Antelope Wells, where without warning their hidden foes had opened their murderous fire. There had fallen his cousin, Bill Donnelly; his sister's son, young Jonathon Brill; his brother-in-law, Job Allison; and Steve Kerney, the hired gunman. How he himself had shot his way through and gained the hitching-rack, untouched by that blasting hail of lead, John Reynolds hardly knew. But they had pressed him so closely he had not had time to mount his long-limbed rangy bay, but had been forced to take the first horse he came to--the crank-eyed, speedy, but short-winded mustang of the dead Jonathon Brill.

He had distanced his pursuers for a while--had gained the uninhabited hills and swung back into mysterious Lost Valley, with its silent thickets and crumbling stone columns, seeking to double back over the hills and gain the country of the Reynoldses. But the mustang had failed him. He had tied it up the slope, out of sight of the valley floor, and crept back, to see his enemies ride into the valley. There were five of them--old Jonas McCrill, with the perpetual snarl twisting his wolfish lips; Saul Fletcher, with his black beard and the limping, dragging gait that a fall in his youth from a wild mustang had left him; Bill Ord and Peter Ord, brothers; the outlaw Jack Solomon.

Jonas McCrill's voice came up to the silent watcher: "And I tell yuh he's a-hidin' somewhere in this valley. He was a-ridin' that mustang and it didn't never have no guts. I'm bettin' it give plumb out on him time he got this far."

"Well"--it was the hated voice of Saul Fletcher--"what're we a-standin' 'round pow-wowin' for? Why don't we start huntin' him?"

"Not so fast," growled old Jonas. "Remember it's John Reynolds we're achasin'. We got plenty time--"

John Reynolds' fingers hardened on the stock of his single-action .45. There were two cartridges unfired in the cylinder. He pushed the muzzle through the stems of the thicket in front of him, his thumb drawing back the wicked fanged hammer. His grey eyes narrowed and became opaque as ice as he sighted down the long blue barrel. An instant he weighed his hatred, and chose Saul Fletcher. All the hate in his soul centered for an instant on that brutal black-bearded face, and the limping tread he had heard a night he lay wounded in a besieged corral with his brother's riddled corpse beside him, and fought off Saul and his brothers.

John Reynolds' finger crooked and the crash of the shot broke the echoes in the sleeping hills. Saul Fletcher swayed back, flinging his black beard drunkenly upward, and crashed face-down and headlong.

The others, with the quickness of men accustomed to frontier warfare, dropped behind rocks, and their answering shots roared back as they combed the slope blindly. The bullets tore through the thickets, whistling over the unseen killer's head. High up on the slope the mustang, out of the sight of the men in the valley but frightened by the noise, screamed shrilly and, rearing, snapped the reins that held him and fled away up the hill path. The drum of his hoofs on the stones dwindled in the distance.

Silence reigned for an instant, then Jonas McCrill's wrathful voice: "I told yuh he was a-hidin' here!

Come outa there--he's got clean away."

The old fighter's rangy frame rose up from behind the rock where he had taken refuge. Reynolds, grinning fiercely, took steady aim, then some instinct of self-preservation held his hand. The others came out into the open.

"What are we a-waitin' on?" yelled young Bill Ord, tears of rage in his eyes. "Here that coyote's done shot Saul and's ridin' hell-for-leather away from here, and we're a-standin' 'round jawin'. I'm a-goin'

to--" He started for his horse.

"Yuh're a-goin' to listen to me!" roared old Jonas. "I warned yuh-all to go slow--but yuh would come lickety-split along like a bunch of blind buzzards, and now Saul's layin' there dead. lf we ain't careful John Reynolds'll kill all of us. Did I tell yuh-all he was here? Likely stopped to rest his horse. He can't go far. This here's a long hunt, like I told yuh at first. Let him get a good start. Long as he's ahead of us, we got to watch out for ambushes. He'll try to git back onto the Reynolds range. Well, we're a-goin' after him slow and easy and keep him hazed back all the time. We'll be a-ridin' the inside of a big half-circle and he can't get by us--not on that short-winded mustang. We'll just foller him and gather him in when his horse can't do no more. And I purty well know where he'll come to bay at--Blind Horse Canyon."

"We'll have to starve him out, then," growled Jack Solomon.

"No, we won't," grinned old Jonas. "Bill, yuh high-tail it back to Antelope and git five or six sticks of dynamite. Then you git a fresh horse and follow our trail. If we catch him before he gits to the canyon, all right. If he beats us there and holes up, we'll wait for yuh, and then blast him out."

"What about Saul?" growled Peter Ord.

"He's dead," grunted Jonas. "Nothin' we can do for him now. No time to take him back." He glanced up at the sky, where already black dots wheeled against the blue. His gaze drifted to the walled-up mouth of the cavern in the steep cliff which rose at right angles to the slope up which the path wandered.

"We'll break open that cave and put him in it," he said. "We'll pile up the rocks again and the wolves and buzzards can't git to him. May be several days before we git back."

"That cave's ha'nted," uneasily muttered Bill Ord. "The Injuns always said if yuh put a dead man in there, he'd come a-walkin' out at midnight."

"Shet up and help pick up pore Saul," snapped Jonas. "Here's your own kin a-layin' dead, and his murderer a-ridin' further away every second, and you talk about ha'nts."

As they lifted the corpse, Jonas drew the long-barreled six-shooter from the holster and shoved the weapon into his own waist-band.

"Pore Saul," he grunted. "He's shore dead. Shot plumb through the heart. Dead before he hit the ground, I reckon. Well, we'll make them damned Reynoldses pay for it."

They carried the dead man to the cave and, laying him down, attacked the rocks which blocked the entrance. These were soon torn aside, and Reynolds saw the men carry the body inside. They emerged almost immediately, minus their burden, and mounted their horses. Young Bill Ord swung away down the valley and vanished among the trees, and the rest cantered up the winding trail that led up into the hills.

They passed within a hundred feet of his refuge and John Reynolds hugged the earth, fearing discovery.

But they did not glance in his direction. He heard the dwindling of their hoofs over the rocky path, then silence settled again over the ancient valley.

John Reynolds rose cautiously, looked about him as a hunted wolf looks, then made his way quickly down the slope. He had a very definite purpose in mind. A single unfired cartridge was all his ammunition; but about the dead body of Saul Fletcher was a belt well filled with .45 calibre cartridges.

As he attacked the rocks heaped in the cave's mouth, there hovered in his mind the curious dim speculations which the cave and the valley itself always roused in him. Why had the Indians named it the Valley of the Lost, which white men shortened to Lost Valley? Why had the red men shunned it? Once in the memory of white men, a band of Kiowas, fleeing the vengeance of Bigfoot Wallace and his rangers, had taken up their abode there and fallen on evil times. The survivors of the tribe had fled, telling wild tales in which murder, fratricide, insanity, vampirism, slaughter and cannibalism had played grim parts.

Then six white men, brothers, Stark by name, had settled in Lost Valley. They had reopened the cave which the Kiowas had blocked up. Horror had fallen on them and in one night five died by one anothers'

hands. The survivor had walled up the cave mouth again and departed, where none knew, though word had drifted through the settlements of a man named Stark who had come among the remnants of those Kiowas who had once lived in Lost Valley and, after a long talk with them, had cut his own throat with his bowie knife.

What was the mystery of Lost Valley, if not a web of lies and legends? What the meaning of those crumbling stones which, scattered all over the valley, half hidden in the climbing growth, bore a curious symmetry, especially in the moonlight, so that some people believed when the Indians swore they were the half-destroyed columns of a prehistoric city which once stood in Lost Valley? Reynolds himself had seen, before it crumbled into a heap of grey dust, a skull unearthed at the base of a cliff by a wandering prospector, which seemed neither Caucasian nor Indian--a curious, peaked skull, which but for the formation of the jaw-bones might have been that of some unknown antediluvian animal.

Such thoughts flitted vaguely and momentarily through John Reynolds' mind as he dislodged the boulders, which the McCrills had put back loosely, just firmly enough to keep a wolf or buzzard from squeezing through. In the main his thoughts were engrossed with the cartridges in dead Saul Fletcher's belt. A fighting chance! A lease on life! He would fight his way out of the hills yet--would gather the remnants of his clan and strike back. He would bring in more gunmen and cutthroats to reinforce the thinning ranks.

He would flood the whole range with blood and bring the countryside to ruin, if by those means he might be avenged. For years he had been the moving factor in the feud. When even old Esau had weakened and wished for peace, John Reynolds had kept the flame of hate blazing. The feud had become his one driving motive--his one interest in life and reason for existence. The last boulders fell aside.

John Reynolds stepped into the semi-gloom of the cavern. It was not large but the shadows seemed to cluster there in almost tangible substance. Slowly his eyes accustomed themselves; an involuntary exclamation broke from his lips--the cave was empty! He swore in bewilderment. He had seen men carry Saul Fletcher's corpse into the cave and come out again, empty handed. Yet no corpse lay on the dusty cavern floor. He went to the back of the cave, glanced at the straight, even wall, bent and examined the smooth rock floor. His keen eyes, straining in the gloom, made out a dull smear of blood on the stone. It ended abruptly at the back wall, and there was no stain on the wall.

Reynolds leaned closer, supporting himself by a hand propped against the stone wall. And suddenly and shockingly the sensation of solidity and stability vanished. The wall gave way beneath his propping hand, a section swung inward, precipitating him headlong through a black gaping opening. His catlike quickness could not save him. It was as if the yawning shadows reached tenuous and invisible hands to jerk him headlong into the darkness.

He did not fall far. His outflung hands struck what seemed to be steps carved in the stone, and on them he scrambled and floundered for an instant. Then he righted himself and turned back to the opening through which he had fallen. The secret door had closed and only a smooth stone wall met his groping fingers. He fought down a rising panic. How the McCrills had come to know of this secret chamber he could not say, but quite evidently they had placed Saul Fletcher's body in it. And there, trapped like a rat, they would find John Reynolds when they returned. Then in the darkness a grim smile curled Reynolds' thin lips. When they opened the secret door, he would be hidden in the darkness, while they would be etched against the dim light of the outer cave. Where could he find a more perfect ambush? But first he must find the body and secure the cartridges.

He turned to grope his way down the steps and his first stride brought him to a level floor. It was a sort of narrow tunnel, he decided, for though he could not touch the roof, a stride to the right or the left and his outstretched hand encountered a wall, seemingly too even and symmetrical to have been a work of nature. He went slowly, groping in the darkness, keeping in touch with the walls and momentarily expecting to stumble on Saul Fletcher's body. And as he did not, a dim horror began to grow in his soul.

The McCrills had not been in the cavern long enough to carry the body so far back into the darkness. A feeling was rising in John Reynolds that the McCrills had not entered the tunnel at all--that they were not aware of its existence. Then where, in the name of sanity, was Saul Fletcher's corpse?

He stopped short, jerking out his six-shooter. Something was coming up the dark tunnel--something that walked upright and lumberingly.

John Reynolds knew it was a man, wearing high-heeled riding boots; no other foot-wear makes the same stilted sound. He caught the jingle of the spurs. And a dark tide of nameless horror moved sluggishly in John Reynolds' mind as he heard that halting tread approach, and remembered the night when he had lain at bay in the old corral, with his younger brother dying beside him, and heard a limping, dragging footstep endlessly circle his refuge, out in the night where Saul Fletcher led his wolves and sought for a way to come upon his back.

Had the man only been wounded? These steps sounded stiff and blundering, such as a wounded man might make. No--John Reynolds had seen too many men die; he knew that his bullet had gone straight through Saul Fletcher's heart--possibly tearing the heart clear out, certainly killing him instantly. Besides, he had heard old Jonas McCrill declare the man was stone-dead. No--Saul Fletcher lay lifeless somewhere in this black cavern. It was some other lame man who was coming up that silent tunnel.

Now the tread ceased. The man was fronting him, separated only by a few feet of utter blackness. What was there in that to quicken the iron pulse of John Reynolds, who had unflinchingly faced death times without number?--what to make his flesh crawl and his tongue freeze to his palate?--to awake sleeping instincts of fear as a man senses the presence of an unseen serpent, and make him feel that somehow the other was aware of his presence with eyes that pierced the darkness?

In the silence John Reynolds heard the staccato pounding of his own heart. And with shocking suddenness the man lunged. Reynolds' straining ears caught the first movement of that lunge and he fired point-blank. And he screamed--a terrible animal-like scream. Heavy arms locked upon him and unseen teeth worried at his flesh, but in the frothing frenzy of his fear, his own strength was superhuman. For in the flash of the shot he had seen a bearded face with slack hanging mouth and staring dead eyes. Saul Fletcher! The dead, come back from Hell.

As in a nightmare Reynolds knew that fiendish battle in the dark, where the dead sought to drag down the living. He felt himself hurled to and fro in the grip of the clammy hands. He was flung with bone-shattering force against the stone walls. Dashed to the floor, the silent horror squatted ghoul-like upon him, its horrid fingers sinking deep into his throat.

In that nightmare, John Reynolds had no time to doubt his own sanity. He knew that he was battling a dead man. The flesh of his foe was cold with a charnel-house clamminess. Under the torn shirt he had felt the round bullet-hole, caked with clotted blood. No single sound came from the loose lips.

Choking and gasping, John Reynolds tore the strangling hands aside and flung the thing off, reeling. For an instant the darkness again separated them; then the horror came hurtling toward him again. As the thing lunged Reynolds caught blindly and gained the wrestling hold he wished; and hurling all his power behind his attack, he dashed the horror headlong, falling upon it with his full weight. Saul Fletcher's spine snapped like a rotten branch and the tearing hands went limp, the straining limbs relaxed. Something flowed from the lax body and whispered away through the darkness like a ghostly wind, and John Reynolds instinctively knew that at last Saul Fletcher was truly dead.

Panting and shaken, Reynolds rose. The tunnel remained in utter darkness. But down it, in the direction from which the walking corpse had come stalking, there whispered a faint throbbing that was hardly sound at all, yet had in its pulsing a dark weird music. Reynolds shuddered and the sweat froze on his body. The dead man lay at his feet in the thick darkness and faintly to his ears came that unbearably sweet, unbearably evil echo, like devil-drums beating faint and far in the dim caverns of Hell.

Reason urged him to turn back--to fight against that blind door until he burst its stone, if human power could burst it. But he realized that reason and sanity had been left behind him. A single step had plunged him from a normal world of material realities into a realm of nightmare and lunacy. He decided that he was mad, or else dead and in Hell. Those dim tom-toms drew him--they tugged at his heart-strings eerily.

They repelled him and filled his soul with shadowy and monstrous conjectures, yet their call was irresistible. He fought the mad impulse to shriek and fling his arms wildly aloft and run down the black tunnel as a rabbit runs down the prairie dog's burrow into the jaws of the waiting rattler.

Fumbling in the dark, he found his revolver and still fumbling, he loaded it with cartridges from Saul Fletcher's belt. He felt no more aversion now at touching the body than he would have felt at handling any dead flesh. Whatever unholy power had animated the corpse, it had left it when the snapping of the spine had unraveled the nerve centers and disrupted the roots of the muscular system.

Then, revolver in hand, John Reynolds went down the tunnel, drawn by a power he could not fathom, toward a doom he could not guess.

The throb of the tom-toms grew only slightly in volume as he advanced. How far below the hills he was he could not know, but the tunnel slanted downward and he had gone a long way. Often his groping hands encountered doorways--corridors leading off the main tunnel, he believed. At last he was aware that he had left the tunnel and had come out into a vast open space. He could see nothing, but he somehow felt the vastness of the place. And in the darkness a faint light began. It throbbed as the drums throbbed, waning and waxing in time to their pulsing, but it grew slowly, casting a weird glow that was more like green than any color Reynolds had ever seen, but was not really green, nor any other sane or earthly color.

Reynolds approached it. It widened. It cast a shimmering radiance over the smooth stone floor, illuminating fantastic mosaics. It cast its sheen high in the hovering shadows, but he could see no roof.

Now he stood bathed in its weird glow, so that his flesh looked like a dead man's. Now he saw the roof, high and vaulted, brooding far above him like a dusky midnight sky, and towering walls, gleaming and dark, sweeping up to tremendous heights, their bases fringed with squat shadows from which glittered other lights, small and scintillant.

He saw the source of the illumination--a strange carven stone altar on which burned what appeared to be a giant jewel of an unearthly hue, like the light it emitted. Greenish flame jetted from it; it burned as a bit of coal might burn, but it was not consumed. Just behind it a feathered serpent reared from its coils, a fantasy carven of some clear crystalline substance the tints of which in the weird light were never the same, but which pulsed and shimmered and changed as the drums--now on all sides of him--pulsed and throbbed.

Abruptly something alive moved beside the altar and John Reynolds, though he was expecting anything, recoiled. At first he thought it a huge reptile which slithered about the altar, then he saw that it stood upright as a man stands. As he met the menacing glitter of its eyes, he fired point-blank and the thing went down like a slaughtered ox, its skull shattered. Reynolds wheeled as a sinister rustling rose on his ears--at least these beings could be killed. Then he checked the lifted muzzle. The drums had never ceased. The fringing shadows had moved out from the darkness at the base of the walls and drawn about him in a wide ring. And though at first glance they possessed the semblance of men, he knew they were not human.

The weird light flickered and danced over them, and back in the deeper darkness the soft, evil drums whispered their accompanying undertone everlastingly. John Reynolds stood aghast at what he saw.

It was not their dwarfish figures which caused his shudder, nor even the unnaturally made hands and feet--it was their heads. He knew, now, of what race was the skull found by the prospector. Like it, these heads were peaked and malformed, curiously flattened at the sides. There was no sign of ears, as if their organs of hearing, like a serpent's, were beneath the skin. The noses were like a python's snout, the mouth and jaws much less human in appearance than his recollection of the skull would have led him to suppose. The eyes were small, glittering and reptilian. The squamous lips writhed back, showing pointed fangs, and John Reynolds felt that their bite would be as deadly as a rattlesnake's. Garments they wore none, nor did they bear any weapons.

He tensed himself for the death-struggle, but no rush came. The snake-people sat about him in a great cross-legged circle, and beyond the circle he saw them massed thick. And now he felt a stirring in his consciousness, an almost tangible beating of wills upon his senses. He was distinctly aware of a concentrated invasion of his innermost mind, and realized that these fantastic beings were seeking to convey their commands or wishes to him by medium of thought. On what common plane could he meet these inhuman creatures? Yet in some dim, strange, telepathic way they made him understand some of their meaning, and he realized with a grisly shock that whatever these things were now, they had once been at least partly human, else they had never been able to so bridge the gulf between the completely human and the completely bestial.

He understood that he was the first living man to come into their innermost realm--the first to look on the shining serpent, the Terrible Nameless One who was older than the world; that before he died, he was to know all which had been denied to the sons of men concerning the mysterious valley, that he might take this knowledge into Eternity with him, and discuss these matters with those who had gone before him.

The drums rustled, the strange light leaped and shimmered, and before the altar came one who seemed in authority--an ancient monstrosity whose skin was like the whitish hide of an old serpent, and who wore on his peaked skull a golden circlet, set with weird gems. He bent and made suppliance to the feathered snake. Then with a sharp implement of some sort which left a phosphorescent mark, he drew a cryptic triangular figure on the floor before the altar, and in the figure he strewed some sort of glimmering dust.

From it reared up a thin spiral which grew to a gigantic shadowy serpent, feathered and horrific, and then changed and faded and became a cloud of greenish smoke. This smoke billowed out before John Reynolds' eyes and hid the serpent-eyed ring, and the altar, and the cavern itself. All the universe dissolved into the green smoke, in which titanic scenes and alien landscapes rose and shifted and faded, and monstrous shapes lumbered and leered.

Abruptly the chaos crystallized. He was looking into a valley which he did not recognize. Somehow he knew it was Lost Valley, but in it towered a gigantic city of dully gleaming stone. John Reynolds was a man of the outlands and the waste places. He had never seen the great cities of the world. But he knew that nowhere in the world today such a city reared up to the sky.

Its towers and battlements were those of an alien age. Its outline baffled his gaze with its unnatural aspects; it was a city of lunacy to the normal human eye, with its hints of alien dimensions and abnormal principles of architecture. Through it moved strange figures, human, yet of a humanity definitely different from his own. They were clad in robes, their hands and feet were less abnormal, their ears and mouths more like those of normal humans, yet there was an undoubted kinship between them and the monsters of the cavern. It showed in the curious peaked skull, though this was less pronounced and bestial in the people of the city.

He saw them in the twisting streets, and in their colossal buildings, and he shuddered at the inhumanness of their lives. Much they did was beyond his ken; he could understand their actions and motives no more than a Zulu savage might understand the events of modern London. But he did understand that these people were very ancient and very evil. He saw them enact rituals that froze his blood with horror, obscenities and blasphemies beyond his understanding. He grew sick with a sensation of pollution, of contamination. Somehow he knew that this city was the remnant of an outworn age--that this people represented the survival of an epoch lost and forgotten.

Then a new people came upon the scene. Over the hills came wild men clad in hides and feathers, armed with bows and flint-tipped weapons. They were, Reynolds knew, Indians, and yet not Indians as he knew them. They were slant-eyed, and their skins were yellowish rather than copper-colored. Somehow he knew that these were the nomadic ancestors of the Toltecs, wandering and conquering on their long trek before they settled in upland valleys far to the south and evolved their own special type and civilization. These were still close to the primal Mongolian root-stock, and he gasped at the gigantic vistas of time this realization evoked.

Reynolds saw the warriors move like a giant wave on the towering walls. He saw the defenders man the towers and deal death in strange and grisly forms to the invaders. He saw them reel back again and again, then come on once more with the blind ferocity of the primitive. This strange evil city, filled with mysterious people of a different order, was in their path and they could not pass until they had stamped it out.

Reynolds marveled at the fury of the invaders who wasted their lives like water, matching the cruel and terrible science of an unknown civilization with sheer courage and the might of man-power. Their bodies littered the plateau, but not all the forces of Hell could keep them back. They rolled like a wave to the foot of the towers. They scaled the walls in the teeth of sword and arrow and death in ghastly forms.

They gained the parapets. They met their enemies hand-to-hand. Bludgeons and axes beat down the lunging spears, the thrusting swords. The tall figures of the barbarians towered over the smaller forms of the defenders.

Red hell raged in the city. The siege became a street battle, the battle a rout, the rout a slaughter. Smoke rose and hung in clouds over the doomed city.

The scene changed. Reynolds looked on charred and ruined walls from which smoke still rose. The conquerors had passed on, the survivors gathered in the red-stained temple before their curious god--a crystalline carven serpent on a fantastic stone altar. Their age had ended; their world crumbled suddenly.

They were the remnants of an otherwise extinct race. They could not rebuild their marvelous city and they feared to remain within its broken walls, a prey to every passing tribe. Reynolds saw them take up their altar and its god and follow an ancient man clad in a mantle of feathers and wearing on his head a gem-set circlet of gold. He led them across the valley to a hidden cave. They entered and squeezing through a narrow rift in the back wall, came into a vast network of caverns honeycombing the hills.

Reynolds saw them at work exploring these labyrinths, excavating and enlarging, hewing the walls and floors smooth, enlarging the rift that let into the outer cavern and setting therein a cunningly hung door, so that it seemed part of the solid wall.

Then an ever-shifting panorama denoted the passing of many centuries. The people lived in the caverns, and as time passed they adapted themselves more and more to their surroundings, each generation going less frequently into the outer sunlight. They learned to obtain their food in shuddersome ways from the earth. Their ears grew smaller, their bodies more dwarfish, their eyes more catlike. John Reynolds stood aghast as he watched the race changing through the ages.

Outside in the valley the deserted city crumbled and fell into ruins, becoming prey to lichen and weed and tree. Men came and briefly meditated among these ruins--tall Mongolian warriors, and dark inscrutable little people men call the Mound Builders. And as the centuries passed, the visitors conformed more and more to the type of Indian as he knew it, until at last the only men who came were painted red men with stealthy feet and feathered scalp-locks. None ever tarried long in that haunted place with its cryptic ruins.

Meanwhile, in the caverns, the Old People abode and grew strange and terrible. They fell lower and lower in the scale of humanity, forgetting first their written language, and gradually their human speech.

But in other ways they extended the boundaries of life. In their nighted kingdom they discovered other, older caverns, which led them into the very bowels of the earth. They learned lost secrets, long forgotten or never known by men, sleeping in the blackness far below the hills. Darkness is conducive to silence, so they gradually lost the power of speech, a sort of telepathy taking its place. And with each grisly gain they lost more of their human attributes. Their ears vanished; their noses grew snout-like; their eyes became unable to bear the light of the sun, and even of the stars. They had long abandoned the use of fire, and the only light they used was the weird gleams evoked from their gigantic jewel on the altar, and even this they did not need. They changed in other ways. John Reynolds, watching, felt the cold sweat bead his body. For the slow transmutation of the Old People was horrible to behold, and many and hideous were the shapes which moved among them before their ultimate mold and nature were evolved.

Yet they remembered the sorcery of their ancestors and added to this their own black wizardry developed far below the hills. And at last they attained the peak of that necromancy. John Reynolds had had horrific inklings of it in fragmentary glimpses of the olden times, when the wizards of the Old People had sent forth their spirits from their sleeping bodies to whisper evil things in the ears of their enemies.

A tribe of tall painted warriors came into the valley, bearing the body of a great chief, slain in tribal warfare.

Long eons had passed. Of the ancient city only scattered columns stood among the trees. A landslide had laid bare the entrance of the outer cavern. This the Indians found and therein they placed the body of their chief with his weapons broken beside him. Then they blocked up the cave mouth with stones and took up their journey, but night caught them in the valley.

Through all the ages, the Old People had found no other entrance or exit to or from the pits, save the small outer cave. It was the one doorway between their grim realm and the world they had so long abandoned. Now they came through the secret door into the outer cavern, whose dim light they could endure, and John Reynolds' hair stood up at what he saw. For they took the corpse and laid it before the altar of the feathered serpent, and an ancient wizard lay upon it, his mouth against the mouth of the dead, and above them tom-toms pulsed and strange fires flickered, and the voiceless votaries with soundless chants invoked gods forgotten before the birth of Egypt, until inhuman voices bellowed in the outer darkness and the sweep of monstrous wings filled the shadows. And slowly life ebbed from the sorcerer and stirred the limbs of the dead chief. The body of the wizard rolled limply aside and the corpse of the chief stood up stiffly; and with puppet-like steps and glassy staring eyes it went up the dark tunnel and through the secret door into the outer cave. The dead hands tore aside the stones and into the starlight stalked the Horror.

Reynolds saw it walk stiffly under the shuddering trees while the night things fled gibbering. He saw it come into the camp of the warriors. The rest was horror and madness, as the dead thing pursued its former companions and tore them limb from limb. The valley became a shambles before one of the braves, conquering his terror, turned on his pursuer and hewed through its spine with a stone axe.

And even as the twice-slain corpse crumpled, Reynolds saw, on the floor of the cavern before the carved serpent, the form of the wizard quicken and live as his spirit returned to him from the corpse he had caused it to animate.

The soundless glee of incarnate demons shook the crawling blackness of the pits, and Reynolds shrank before the verminous fiends gloating over their new-found power to deal horror and death to the sons of men, their ancient enemies.

But the word spread from clan to clan, and men came not to the Valley of the Lost. For many a century it lay dreaming and deserted beneath the sky. Then came mounted braves with trailing war-bonnets, painted with the colors of the Kiowas, warriors of the north, who knew nothing of the mysterious valley.

They pitched their camps in the very shadows of those sinister monoliths which were now no more than shapeless stones.

They placed their dead in the cavern. Reynolds saw the horrors that took place when the dead came ravening by night among the living to slay and devour--and to drag screaming victims into the nighted caverns and the demoniac doom that awaited them. The legions of Hell were loosed in the Valley of the Lost, where chaos reigned and nightmare and madness stalked. Those who were left alive and sane walled up the cavern and rode out of the hills like men riding from Hell.

Once more Lost Valley lay gaunt and naked to the stars. Then again the coming of men broke the primal solitude and smoke rose among the trees. And John Reynolds caught his breath with a start of horror as he saw these were white men, clad in the buckskins of an earlier day--six of them, so much alike that he knew they were brothers.

He saw them fell trees and build a cabin in the clearing. He saw them hunt game in the mountains and begin clearing a field for corn. And all the time he saw the vermin of the hills waiting with ghoulish lust in the darkness. They could not look from their caverns with their nighted eyes, but by their godless sorcery they were aware of all that took place in the valley. They could not come forth in their own bodies in the light, but they waited with the patience of night and the still places.

Reynolds saw one of the brothers find the cavern and open it. He entered and the secret door hung open.

The man went into the tunnel. He could not see, in the darkness, the shapes of horror that stole slavering about him, but in sudden panic he lifted his muzzle-loading rifle and fired blindly, screaming as the flash showed him the hellish forms that ringed him in. In the utter blackness following the vain shot they rushed, overthrowing him by the power of their numbers, sinking their snaky fangs into his flesh. As he died he slashed half a dozen of them to pieces with his bowie knife, but the poison did its work quickly.

Reynolds saw them drag the corpse before the altar; he saw again the horrible transmutation of the dead, which rose grinning vacantly and stalked forth. The sun had set in a welter of dull crimson. Night had fallen. To the cabin where his brothers slept, wrapped in their blankets, stalked the dead. Silently the groping hands swung open the door. The horror crouched in the gloom, its bared teeth shining, its dead eyes gleaming glassily in the starlight. One of the brothers stirred and mumbled, then sat up and stared at the motionless shape in the doorway. He called the dead man's name--then he shrieked hideously--the Horror sprang--

From John Reynolds' throat burst a cry of intolerable horror. Abruptly the pictures vanished, with the smoke. He stood in the weird glow before the altar, the tom-toms throbbing softly and evilly, the fiendish faces hemming him in. And now from among them crept, on his belly like the serpent he was, the one which wore the gemmed circlet, venom dripping from his bared fangs. Loathsomely he slithered toward John Reynolds, who fought the inclination to leap upon the foul thing and stamp out its life. There was no escape; he could send his bullets crashing through the swarm and mow down all in front of the muzzle, but those would be as nothing beside the hundreds which hemmed him in. He would die there in the waning light, and they would send his corpse blundering forth, lent a travesty of life by the spirit of the wizard, just as they had sent Saul Fletcher. John Reynolds grew tense as steel as his wolf-like instinct to live rose above the maze of horror into which he had fallen.

And suddenly his human mind rose above the vermin who threatened him, as he was electrified by a swift thought that was like an inspiration. With a fierce inarticulate cry of triumph, he bounded sideways just as the crawling monstrosity lunged. It missed him, sprawling headlong, and Reynolds snatched from the altar the carven serpent and, holding it on high, thrust against it the muzzle of his cocked pistol. He did not need to speak. In the dying light his eyes blazed madly. The Old People wavered back. Before them lay he whose peaked skull Reynolds' pistol had shattered. They knew a crook of his trigger-finger would splinter their fantastic god into shining bits.

For a tense space the tableau held. Then Reynolds felt their silent surrender. Freedom in exchange for their god. It was again borne on him that these beings were not truly bestial, since true beasts know no gods. And this knowledge was the more terrible, for it meant that these creatures had evolved into a type neither bestial nor human, a type outside of nature and sanity.

The snakish figures gave back on each side, and the waning light sprang up again. As he went up the tunnel they were close at his heels, and in the dancing uncertain glow he could not be sure whether they walked as a man walks or crawled as a snake crawls. He had a vague impression that their gait was hideously compounded of both. He swerved far aside to avoid the sprawling bulk that had been Saul Fletcher, and so, with his gun muzzle pressed hard against the shining brittle image borne in his left hand, he came to the short flight of steps which led up to the secret door. There they came to a standstill. He turned to face them. They ringed him in a close half-circle, and he understood that they feared to open the secret door lest he dash out through the cavern into the sunlight, where they could not follow, with their image. Nor would he set down the god until the door was opened.

At last they withdrew several yards, and he cautiously set the image on the floor at his feet where he could snatch it up in an instant. How they opened the door he never knew, but it swung wide, and he backed slowly up the steps, his gun trained on the glittering god. He had almost reached the door--one back-thrown hand gripped the edge--the light went out suddenly and the rush came. A volcanic burst of effort shot him backward through the door which was already rushing shut. As he leaped he emptied his gun full into the fiendish faces that suddenly filled the dark opening. They dissolved in red ruin and as he raced madly from the outer cavern he heard the soft closing of the secret door, shutting that realm of horror from the human world.

In the glow of the westering sun John Reynolds staggered drunkenly, clutching at the stones and trees as a madman clutches at realities. The keen tenseness that had held him when he fought for his life fell from him and left him a quivering shell of disrupted nerves. An insane titter drooled involuntarily through his lips, and he rocked to and fro in ghastly laughter he could not check.

Then the clink of hoofs on stone sent him leaping behind a cluster of boulders. It was some hidden instinct which led him to take refuge. His conscious mind was too dazed and chaotic for thought or action.

Into the clearing rode Jonas McCrill and his followers and a sob tore through Reynolds' throat. At first he did not recognize them--did not realize that he had ever seen them before. The feud, with all other sane and normal things, lay lost and forgotten far back in dim vistas beyond the black tunnels of madness.

Two figures rode from the other side of the clearing--Bill Ord and one of the outlaw followers of the McCrills. Strapped to Ord's saddle were several sticks of dynamite, done into a compact package.

"Well, gee whiz," hailed young Ord, "I shore didn't expect to meet yuh-all here. Did yuh git him?"

"Naw," snapped old Jonas, "he's done fooled us again. We come up with his horse, but he wasn't on hit.

The rein was snapped like he'd had hit tied and it'd broke away. I dunno where he is, but we'll git him.

I'm a-goin' on to Antelope to git some more of the boys. Yuh-all git Saul's body outa that cave and foller me as fast as yuh can."

He reined away and vanished through the trees, and Reynolds, his heart in his mouth, saw the other four approach the cavern.

"Well, by God!" exclaimed Jack Solomon fiercely. "Somebody's done been here! Look! Them rocks are tore down!"

John Reynolds watched as one paralyzed. If he sprang up and called to them they would shoot him down before he could voice his warning. Yet it was not that which held him as in a vise; it was sheer horror which robbed him of thought and action and froze his tongue to the roof of his mouth. His lips parted but no sound came forth. As in a nightmare he saw his enemies disappear into the cavern. Their voices, muffled, came back to him.

"By golly, Saul's gone!"

"Look here, boys, here's a door in the back wall!"

"By thunder, it's open!"

"Let's take a look!"

Suddenly from within the bowels of the hills crashed a fusillade of shots--a burst of hideous screams. Then silence closed like a clammy fog over the Valley of the Lost.

John Reynolds, finding voice at last, cried out as a wounded beast cries, and beat his temples with his clenched fists, which he brandished to the heavens, shrieking wordless blasphemies.

Then he ran staggeringly to Bill Ord's horse which grazed tranquilly with the others beneath the trees.

With clammy hands he tore away the package of dynamite and, without separating the sticks, he punched a hole in the end of the middle stick with a twig. Then he cut a short--a very short--piece of fuse, and slipped a cap over one end which he inserted into the hole in the dynamite. In a pocket of the rolled-up slicker bound behind the saddle he found a match, and lighting the fuse he hurled the bundle into the cavern. Hardly had it struck the back wall when with an earthquake roar it exploded.

The concussion nearly hurled him off his feet. The whole mountain rocked and with a thunderous crash the cave roof fell and tons and tons of shattered rock crashed down to obliterate all marks of Ghost Cave, and to shut the door to the pits forever.

John Reynolds walked slowly away, and suddenly the whole horror swept upon him and the earth seemed hideously alive under his feet, the sun foul and blasphemous over his head. The light was sickly, yellowish and evil, and all things were polluted by the unholy knowledge locked in his skull, like hidden drums beating ceaselessly in the blackness beneath the hills.

He had closed one Door forever but what other nightmare shapes might lurk in hidden places and the dark pits of the earth, gloating over the souls of men? His knowledge was a reeking blasphemy which would never let him rest, for ever in his soul would whisper the drums that throbbed in those dark pits where lurked demons that had once been men. He had looked on ultimate foulness, and his knowledge was a taint because of which he could never stand clean before men again or touch the flesh of any living thing without a shudder. If man, molded of divinity, could sink to such verminous obscenities, who could contemplate his eventual destiny unshaken? And if such beings as the Old People existed, what other horrors might not lurk beneath the visible surface of the universe? He was suddenly aware that he had glimpsed the grinning skull beneath the mask of life and that that glimpse made life intolerable. All certainty and stability had been swept away, leaving a mad welter of lunacy, nightmare and stalking horror.

John Reynolds drew his gun and his horny thumb drew back the heavy hammer. Thrusting the muzzle against his temple, he pulled the trigger. The shot crashed echoing through the hills and the last of the fighting Reynoldses pitched headlong.

Old Jonas McCrill, galloping back at the sound of the blast, found him where he lay, and wondered that his face should be that of an old, old man, his hair white as hoar-frost.

The Hoofed Thing

Marjory was crying over the loss of Bozo, her fat Maltese who had failed to appear after his usual nightly prowl. There had been a peculiar epidemic of feline disappearances in the neighborhood recently, and Marjory was disconsolate. And because I never could stand to see Marjory cry, I sallied forth in search of the missing pet, though I had little hope of finding him. Every so often some human pervert gratifies his sadistic mania by poisoning animals of which people are fond, and I was certain that Bozo and the score or more of his kind which had vanished in the past few months had fallen victims to some such degenerate.

Leaving the lawn of the Ash home, I crossed several vacant weed-grown lots and came to the last house on that side of the street--a run-down, rambling estate which had recently been occupied--though not rejuvenated--by a Mr. Stark, a lonely, retiring sort of a man from the East. Glancing at the rambling old house, rising among the great oak trees and set back a hundred yards or so from the street, it occurred to me that Mr. Stark might possibly be able to cast some light on the present mystery.

I turned into the sagging, rusty iron gate and went up the cracked walk, noting the general dilapidation of the place. Little was known about the owner, and though he had been a neighbor of mine for some six months, I had never seen him at close range. It was rumored that he lived alone, even without servants, though he was a cripple. An eccentric scholar of taciturn nature and with money to indulge his whims, was the general opinion.

The wide porch, half covered with ivy, crossed the whole front of the house and flanked both sides. As I prepared to lift the old-fashioned door knocker, I heard a limping, dragging step and turned to face the owner of the house who came hobbling about the corner of the porch. He was a striking figure, despite his deformity. His face was that of an ascetic and a thinker, with a high magnificent forehead, heavy black brows that almost met, and shaded deep dark eyes, piercing and magnetic. His nose was thin and high-bridged, hooked like the beak of some bird of prey, his lips were thin and firmly set, his jaw massive and jutting, almost brutal in its lines of uncompromising resolution. He was not a tall man, even had he stood erect, but his thick short neck and massive shoulders promised power denied by his posture. For he moved slowly and with apparent difficulty, leaning on a crutch, and I saw that one leg was drawn up in an abnormal way, and on the foot he wore a shoe such as is worn on a club-foot.

He looked at me inquiringly and I said, "Good morning, Mr. Stark, sorry to have troubled you. I'm Michael Strang. I live in the last house on the other side of the street. I just dropped in to learn if you'd seen anything of a big Maltese cat recently."

His eyes bored into me.

"What makes you think I might know anything about a cat?" he asked in a deep-timbered voice.

"Nothing," I confessed, feeling rather foolish. "It's my fiance's cat, though, and she's broken-hearted over losing it. As you're her closest neighbor on this side, I thought there was a bare chance that you might have seen the animal."

"I understand," he smiled pleasantly. "No, I'm very sorry I can't help you. I heard some cats caterwauling among my trees last night--in fact, I heard them too distinctly, for I had one of my spells of insomnia--but I've seen nothing of the cat you mention. I am sorry to hear of its loss. Won't you come in?"

Rather curious to know more of my neighbor, I accepted his invitation and he showed me into a study redolent of tobacco and book leather. I glanced curiously at the volumes which lined the walls to the ceiling, but had no opportunity to examine their titles, as my host proved surprisingly talkative. He seemed glad of my call and I knew that his visitors were very rare, if any at all. I found him a highly cultured man, a charming conversationalist, and a most courteous host. He produced whiskey-and-soda from an antique lacquered cabinet whose door seemed to consist of a highly-polished, solid silver plate, and as we sipped our drinks he talked of various subjects in a most interesting manner. Learning from a chance remark that I was deeply interested in the anthropological researches of Professor Hendryk Brooler, he discussed the subject at some length and clarified several points on which I was extremely hazy.

Fascinated by the man's evident erudition, it was nearly an hour before I could tear myself away, though I felt exceedingly guilty when I thought of poor Marjory waiting for news of the missing Bozo. I took my departure, promising to return soon, and as I went out the front door, it occurred to me that, after all, I had learned nothing about my host. He had carefully kept the conversation in impersonal channels. I also decided that though he knew nothing about Bozo, the presence of a cat in the house might be an advantage. Several times as we talked, I had heard the scampering of something overhead, though on second thought the noise had not particularly resembled the movements of rodents. It had sounded more like a tiny kid or lamb, or some other small hoofed animal, walking across the floor.

A thorough search of the neighborhood revealing no trace of the missing Bozo, I reluctantly returned to Marjory, bearing, as a partial consolation, a waddling, bench-legged bulldog with a face like a gargoyle and as loyal a heart as ever beat in a canine breast. Marjory wept over the lost cat and christened her new vassal Bozo in memory of the departed, and I left her romping with him on the lawn as if she had been ten instead of twenty.

The memory of my conversation with Mr. Stark remained very vivid in my mind and I visited him again next week. Again I was impressed at the deep and varied knowledge which was his. I purposely led the conversation into many different channels, and in each he showed himself master of the subject, going a little deeper into each than I had ever heard anyone go. Science, the arts, economics, philosophy, he was equally versed in all of them. Charmed as I was by his flow of conversation, I nevertheless found myself listening for the curious noise I had heard before, and I was not disappointed. Only this time the tapping sound was louder than before and I decided that his unknown pet was growing. Perhaps, I thought, he kept it in the house fearing it would meet the same fate as the vanished cats, and as I knew the house had no basement or cellar, it was natural that he would keep it in some attic room. A lonely and friendless man, it was probable that he felt a great deal of affection for it, whatever it might be.

We talked late into the night, and indeed, it was nearing dawn before I forced myself to take my leave.

As before, he urged me to repeat the visit soon. He apologized for his inability to return my call, as he said his infirmity prevented his doing more than limp about his estate for a little exercise early in the morning before the heat of the day set in.

I promised to call again soon, but in spite of my desire to do so, business prevented me for some weeks, during which time I became aware of one of those minor neighborhood mysteries which occasionally spring up in some restricted locality, usually to die away unsolved. Dogs, hitherto unmolested by the unknown destroyer of the cats, now began to vanish likewise and their owners were in constant fury.

Marjory picked me up in her little roadster as I was walking up from town, and I knew something had occurred to upset her. Bozo, her constant companion, grinned dragonishly at me and jovially lapped my face with a long wet tongue.

"Somebody tried to kidnap Bozo last night, Michael," she said, her deep dark eyes shadowed with worry and indignation. "I just bet it was the horrid beast who's been doing away with people's pets--"

She gave me the details and it appeared that the mysterious prowler had found Bozo too much of a handful. The family had heard a sudden uproar late in the night, and the sound of a savage struggle, mingled with the maddened roaring of the big dog. They sallied forth and arrived at Bozo's kennel, just too late to apprehend the visitor whose sounds of flight they distinctly heard. The dog was straining his chain, his eyes blazing, every hair on his body standing on end, and his deep throat thundering his defiance. But of the attacker there was no trace; he had evidently broken away and escaped over the high garden wall.

I think the incident must have made Bozo suspicious toward strangers, for it was only the next morning that I was called on to rescue Mr. Stark from him.

As I have said, the Stark house was the last one on his side of the street, and mine was the last on my side. It was, in fact, the last house on the street, lying some three hundred yards from the lower corner of Stark's wide, tree-covered lawn. On the other corner that faced the street--the corner toward the Ash home--there stood a grove of small trees in one of the vacant lots which separated the Stark estate from the Ash place. As I was passing this grove on my way to the Ash home, I heard a sudden outcry--a man's voice shouting for help and the infuriated snarling of a dog.

Plunging through the clump I saw a huge dog leaping repeatedly up at a figure which clung to the lower branches of one of the trees. The dog was Bozo and the man was Mr. Stark, who, in spite of his crippled condition, had managed to scramble up into the tree just out of reach. Horrified and astounded, I sprang to the rescue and hauled Bozo away from his intended victim with some difficulty and sent him sulkily homeward. I sprang to assist Mr. Stark out of the tree, and hardly had he touched the earth when he collapsed completely.

However, I could find no sign of injury on him, and he breathlessly assured me--between gasps--that he was quite all right except for the shock of fright and exhaustion. He said that he was resting in the shade of the grove, having tired himself by too long a walk about his estate, when the dog suddenly appeared and attacked him. I apologized profusely for Bozo, assured him it would not happen again, and helped him to his study where he reclined on a divan and sipped a whiskey-and-soda which I prepared for him from ingredients found in the lacquered cabinet. He was very reasonable about the matter, assured me that no harm had been done, and attributed the attack to the fact that he was a stranger to the dog.

Suddenly, as he talked, I again heard the tap-tap of hoofs upstairs, and I was startled; the sound was so much heavier than before, though somewhat muffled. It was such a sound as a yearling might make walking about over a rug-covered floor. My curiosity was so much aroused I could hardly keep from inquiring as to the source of the noise, but naturally refrained from such presumption, and feeling that Mr.

Stark needed rest and quiet, I left as soon as he was comfortable.

It was about a week later that the first of the blood-chilling mysteries took place. Again it was an unexplained disappearance, but this time it was no cat or dog. It was a three-year-old tot who was seen playing in a lot near its own yard just before sun-down, and was seen no more by mortal eyes. No need to say that the town was up in alarm. Some people had thought to see a malevolent meaning behind the disappearance of the animals, and now this pointed indisputably to some sinister hand working out of sight.

The police scoured town and country, but no trace of the missing child was found, and before the fortnight was over, four more had vanished in various parts of the city. Their families received no letters demanding ransom, no sign of any hidden enemy taking this revenge. The silence simply yawned and swallowed the victims and remained unbroken. Frantic people appealed to the civil authorities in vain, since they had done all they could and were as helpless as the public.

There was talk of asking the governor to send soldiers to patrol the city, and men began to go armed and to hasten back to their families long before nightfall. Dark whispers of supernatural agencies began to make the rounds, and folk said forebodingly that no mortal man could so snatch away children and remain unsuspected and unknown. But there was no insurmountable mystery in their abducting. It was impossible to patrol every inch of a large city and to keep an eye always on every child. They played in the lonely parks and stayed out until after dusk at work or play, despite warnings and commands, and ran home through the gathering darkness. It was no supernatural thing for the unknown kidnapper, skulking in the shadows, to reach an arm from among the trees or bushes of park or playground and snatch a child strayed from its playmates. Even on lonely streets and dim back-alleys the thing could be done. The horror lay, not so much in the method of stealing, but in the fact that they were stolen. No sane or normal motive seemed to lie behind it all. An aura of fear hung like a pall over the city, and through this pall shot an icy wave of shuddering horror.

In one of the more secluded parks near the outskirts of the city, a young couple, indulging in what is popularly known as a "petting party," were frozen by a terrible scream from a black clump of trees, and not daring to move, saw a stooped and shadowy figure emerge, bearing on its back the unmistakable body of a man. The horror vanished among the trees, and the couple, frenzied with terror, started their auto and raced wildly for the lights of town. They tremblingly gasped out their story to the chief of police and in a short time a cordon of patrolmen had been thrown about the park. But it was too late; the unknown murderer had made good his--or its--escape. In the grove from which the slayer had been seen to emerge was found a disreputable old hat, crumpled and blood-stained, and one of the officers recognized it as one which had been worn by a vagabond picked up by him the day before and subsequently released. The wretch must have been sleeping in the park when doom fell upon him.

But no other clue was found. The hard springy soil and thick grass gave up no footprint, and the mystery was as much a mystery as ever. And now the fear that hung over the whole city grew almost unbearable in its intensity. I often thought of Mr. Stark, living alone and crippled in that sombre old house, practically isolated, and often feared for him, I made it a point to drop by his place almost every day to assure myself that he was safe. These visits were very brief. Mr. Stark seemed preoccupied, and though he was affable enough, I felt it better not to intrude myself upon him. I did not, indeed, enter his house at all during this period, as I invariably found him hobbling about the lawn or reclining in a hammock between two great oak trees. Either his infirmity was troubling him more than usual, or the horrid mystery which hung over the town had affected him likewise. He seemed tired most of the time, and his eyes were deeply shadowed as if from mental stress or physical weariness.

A few days after the disappearance of the tramp, the city authorities warned all citizens to be on their guard, as, calculating from past events, it was feared that the unknown killer would strike again soon, possibly that night. The police force had been increased to nearly twice its regular number, and a score of citizens were sworn in as special deputies. Grim-faced men patrolled the streets heavily armed, and as night fell, a suffocating tension settled over the whole city.

It was shortly after dark when my telephone rang. It was Stark.

"I wonder if you'd mind coming over," he said, and his voice sounded rather apologetic. "My cabinet door is jammed and I can't get it open. I wouldn't have bothered you, but it's too late to get a workman here to open it--all the shops are closed. My sleeping powders are in the cabinet, and if I can't get them, I'll spend a wretched night; I feel all the symptoms of an attack of insomnia."

"I'll be right over," I promised.

A brisk walk took me to his door, where he let me in with much apologies.

"I'm frightfully sorry to have caused you all this trouble," he said, "but I haven't the physical strength to pry the door open, and without my sleeping powders, I'd toss and tumble the whole night through."

There was no electric wiring in his house, but several large candles on the table shed sufficient light. I bent before the lacquered cabinet and began to wrestle with the door. I have mentioned the silver plate of which the door appeared to be made. As I worked my gaze fell on this plate which was so highly polished it reflected objects like a mirror. And suddenly my blood chilled. Over my shoulder I saw the reflected countenance of John Stark, unfamiliar and hideously distorted. He held a mallet in his hand which he lifted as he stealthily approached me. I rose suddenly, wheeling to face him. His face was as inscrutable as ever, except for an expression of faint surprise at my abruptness. He extended the mallet.

"Perhaps you might use this," he suggested.

I took it without a word, still keeping my eyes on him, and striking one terrific blow, literally burst the cabinet door open. His eyes widened in surprise, and for a moment we faced each other unspeaking.

There was an electric tenseness in the air, then above my head I heard again the clumping of hoofs. And a strange chill, like a nameless fright, stole over me--for I could have sworn that it was nothing smaller than a horse which tramped about in the rooms overhead!

Throwing the mallet aside, I turned without a word and hastened out of the house, nor did I breathe entirely easy until I had gained my own library. There I sat pondering, my mind a chaotic jumble. Had I made a fool of myself? Had not that look of fiendish craft on John Stark's face as he stole up behind me been merely a distortion of reflection? Had my imagination run away with me? Or--and here dark fears whispered at the back of my brain--had the reflection in that silver plate been all that saved my life? Was John Stark a madman? I shook with a ghastly thought. Was it he who was responsible for the recent detestable crimes? The theory was untenable. What possible reason could a refined, elderly scholar have in abducting children and murdering tramps? Again my fears whispered that there might be a motive--whispered shuddersomely of a ghastly laboratory where a crazed scientist carried out horrible experiments with human specimens.

Then I laughed at myself. Even supposing John Stark to be a madman, the recent crimes were physically beyond his power. Only a man of almost superhuman strength and agility could carry off strong young children soundlessly and bear the corpse of a murdered man on his shoulders. Certainly no cripple could do it, and it was up to me to go back to Mr. Stark's house and apologize for my foolish actions--and then a sudden thought struck me like a dash of ice-cold water--something which at the time had impressed itself on my subconscious mind, but which I had not consciously noticed--when I had turned to face John Stark before the lacquered cabinet, he had been standing upright, without his crutch.

With a bewildered shake of my head, I dismissed the matter from my mind and, picking up a book, settled myself to read. The volume, selected at random, was not one calculated to rid my mind of haunting shadows. It was the extremely rare Dusseldorf edition of Von Junzt's Nameless Cults, called the Black Book, not because of its iron-clasped leather bindings, but because of its dark contents.

Opening the volume at random, I began idly to read the chapter on the summoning of daemons out of the Void. More than ever I sensed a deep and sinister wisdom behind the author's incredible assertions as I read of the unseen worlds of unholy dimensions which Von Junzt maintains press, horrific and dimly guessed, on our universe, and of the blasphemous inhabitants of those Outer Worlds, which he maintains at times burst terribly through the Veil at the bidding of evil sorcerers, to blast the brains and feast on the blood of men.

Reading, I drowsed, and from my doze awoke with a cold fear lying upon my soul like a cloud. I had dreamed fitfully and in my dream I had heard Marjory calling to me faintly, as if from across misty and terrible abysses, and in her voice was a blood-freezing fear as if she were menaced by some horror beyond all human understanding. I found myself shaking as with ague and cold sweat stood upon my body as in a nightmare.

Taking up the telephone, I called up the Ash home. Mrs. Ash answered and I asked to speak to Marjory.

Her voice came back over the wire tinged with anxiety, "Why, Michael, Marjory has been gone for more than an hour! I heard her talking over the phone, and then she told me you wanted her to meet you by the grove on the corner of the Stark place, to take a ride. I thought it was funny that you didn't drive by the house as you always do, and I didn't like the idea of her going out alone, but I supposed you knew best--you know we always put so much faith in you, Michael--so I let her go. You don't think--anything--anything--"

"Oh no!" I laughed, but my laughter was hollow, my throat dry. "Nothing's happened, Mrs. Ash. I'll bring her home, right away."

As I hung up the receiver and turned away, I heard a sound outside the door--a scratching sound accompanied by a low whimper. Such a small thing can be vested with unknown fear at times--my hair prickled and my tongue clove to my palate. Expecting to see I knew not what, I flung open the door. A cry broke from my lips as a dusty, blood-stained shape limped in and staggered against my legs. It was Marjory's dog, Bozo. He had evidently been brutally beaten. One ear was split open and his hide had been bruised and torn in half a dozen places.

He seized my trouser leg and pulled me toward the door, growling deep in his throat. My mind a seething hell, I prepared to follow him. The thought of a weapon entered my mind, and at the same instant I remembered I had loaned my revolver to a friend who feared to traverse the streets at night unarmed.

My gaze fell upon a great broadsword hanging on the wall. The weapon had been in the family for eight centuries and had let blood on many a battlefield since it first hung at the girdle of a Crusading ancestor.

I tore it from the scabbard where it had rested undisturbed for a hundred years and the cold blue steel glimmered unstained in the light. Then I followed the growling dog into the night. He ran staggeringly but swiftly, and I was hard put to keep up with him. He went in the direction my inmost intuition had told me he would go--toward the house of John Stark.

We approached the corner of the Stark estate and I caught Bozo's collar and drew him back, as he started across the crumbling wall. I knew enough. John Stark was the fiend incarnate who had laid the cloud of terror over the city. I recognized the technique--a telephone call which lured the victim forth. I had walked into his trap, but chance had intervened. So he had chosen the girl--it would not be difficult to imitate my voice. Homicidal maniac or crazy experimenter, whatever he might be, I knew that somewhere in that dark house Marjory lay, a captive or a corpse. And I did not intend that Stark should have the opportunity to shoot me down as I walked in upon him openly. A black fury gripped me, bringing with it the craft that extreme passion often brings. I was going into that dark house, and I was going to hew John Stark's head from his body with the blade that in old times had severed the necks of Saracens and pirates and traitors.

Ordering Bozo to keep behind me, I turned from the street and went swiftly and cautiously along the side wall until I was even with the back part of the house. A glow above the trees to the east warned me that the moon was coming up, and I wished to get into the house before the light might betray me to any watcher. I climbed the tumble-down wall, and with Bozo following me like a shadow, I crossed the lawn, keeping close under the shadows of the trees.

Silence gripped the dark house as I stole up upon the rear porch, my blade ready. Bozo sniffed at the door and whined deep in his throat. I crouched, waiting for anything. I knew not what peril lurked in that mysterious unlighted building, or whether I was daring one lone madman or a gang of murderers. I lay no claim to courage, but the black rage in my brain swept all thought of personal fear away. I tried the door cautiously. I was not very familiar with the house, but believed the door led into a store-room. It was locked on the inside. I drove my sword-point between the door and the jamb and pried, carefully but powerfully. There was no such thing as breaking the ancient blade, forged with forgotten craft, and as I exerted all my strength, which is not inconsiderable, something had to give. It was the old-fashioned lock.

With a groan and crash that seemed horribly loud in the stillness, the door sagged open.

I strained my eyes into the utter blackness as I stole forward. Bozo passed me silently and vanished in the gloom. Utter silence reigned, then the clink of a chain sent a chill of nameless fear through me. I swung about, hair bristling, sword lifted--and then I heard the muffled sound of a woman sobbing.

I dared to strike a match. Its flare showed me the great dusty room, piled high with nondescript junk--and showed me a pitiful girlish form crumpled in a corner. It was Marjory and Bozo was whining and licking her face. Stark was nowhere to be seen, and the one other door leading from the store-room was closed. I stepped to it quickly and slid the old-fashioned bolt. Then I lighted a stump of a candle which I found upon a table, and went quickly to Marjory. Stark might come in upon us unexpectedly through the outer door, but I trusted to Bozo to warn me of his coming. The dog showed no signs of nervousness or anger to indicate the near presence of a lurking enemy, but now and then he looked up toward the ceiling and growled deep and ominously.

Marjory was gagged and her hands tied behind her. A small chain about her slim waist shackled her to a heavy staple in the wall, but the key was in the lock. I freed her in an instant and she threw her arms convulsively about me, shaking as with an ague. Her wide dark eyes stared unseeingly into mine with a horror that shook my soul and froze my blood with a nameless grisly premonition.

"Marjory!" I panted. "What in God's name has happened? Don't be afraid. Nothing shall harm you.

Don't look like that! In Heaven's name, girl--"

"Listen!" she whispered shuddering. "The tramp--the terrible tramp of the hoofs!"

My head jerked up, and Bozo, every bristle on end, cringed, sheer terror blazing in his eyes. Above our heads sounded the clomping of hoofs. But now the footfalls were gigantic--elephantine. The house trembled to their impact. A cold hand touched my spine.

"What is it, in God's name?" I whispered.

She clung closer to me.

"I don't know! I dare not try to guess! We must go! We must run away! It will come down for us--it will burst its prison. For hours I've listened to it--"

"Where is Stark?" I muttered.

"Up--up there!" she shuddered. "I'll tell you quickly--then we must run! I thought your voice sounded strange when you called me up, but I came to meet you, as I thought. I brought Bozo with me because I was afraid to go out in the dark alone. Then when I was in the shadow of the grove, something sprang upon me. Bozo roared and leaped, but he struck him down with a heavy club and struck him again and again as he lay writhing in the dust. All the time I was struggling and trying to scream, but the creature had gripped my throat with a great gorilla-like hand, and I was half-strangled. Then he flung me over his shoulder and carried me through the grove and across the wall into the Stark estate. I was only half-conscious and it was not until he had brought me into this room that I saw it was John Stark. But he did not limp and he moved with the agility of a great ape. He was dressed in dark close-fitting garments which blended so well with the darkness as to render him almost invisible.

"He gagged me while I pleaded in vain for mercy, and bound my hands. Then he chained me to the wall, but left the key in the lock as if he intended taking me away soon. I believe he was mad--and afraid, too.

There was an unearthly blaze in his eyes and his hands shook as with palsy. He said, 'You wonder why I have brought you here? I will tell you, because what you know will not matter anyhow, since within an hour you will be beyond all knowledge!

"'Tomorrow the papers will scream in headlines that the mysterious kidnapper has struck again, under the very noses of the police! Well, they'll soon have more to worry them than an occasional disappearance, I fear. A weaker personality than mine might well feel some vanity in outwitting the authorities as I have done--but it has been so easy to evade the stupid fools. My pride is fed on greater things. I planned well. When I brought the thing into being, I knew it would need food--much food. That is why I came out where I was not known and feigned lameness and weakness, I who have the strength of a giant in my thews. None has suspected me--unless it is Michael Strang. Tonight I read doubt in his eyes--I should have struck anyhow, when he turned to face me--should have taken the chance of mortal combat with him, powerful as he is--

"'You do not understand. I see in your eyes that you do not understand. But I will try to make you understand. Men think I am deeply cultured; little do they guess how deep my knowledge is. I have gone further than any man in the arts and sciences. They were toys for paltry brains, I found. I went deeper. I experimented with the occult as some men experiment with science. I found that by certain grim and ancient arts a wise man could tear aside the Veil between the universes and bring unholy shapes into this terrestrial plane. I set to work to prove this thing. You might ask me, why? Why does any scientist make experiments? The proving of the theory is reason enough--the acquiring of knowledge is the end that justifies the means. Your brain would wither and crumble away were I to describe to you the incantations and spells and strange propitiations with which I drew a mewling, squalling, naked thing out of the Void.

"'It was not easy. For months I toiled and studied, delving deep into the ungodly lores of blasphemous books and musty manuscripts. Groping in the blind dark Outer chasms into which I had projected my bodiless will, I first felt the existence and presence of unhallowed beings, and I worked to establish contact with them--to draw one, at least, into this material universe. For long I could only feel it touching the dark borderlands of my own consciousness. Then with grim sacrifices and ancient rituals, I drew it across the gulfs. First it was but a vast anthropomorphic shadow cast upon a wall. I saw its progression from nothingness into the mold and being of this material sphere. I saw when its eyes burned in the shadow, and when the atoms of its nonterrestrial substance swirled and changed and clarified and shrank, and in shrinking, crystallized and became matter as we know it.

"'And there on the floor before me lay the mewling, squalling, naked thing from out the Abyss, and when I saw its nature, even I blenched and my resolution almost failed me.

"'At first it was no bigger than a toad. But I fed it carefully, knowing that it would thrive only on fresh blood. To begin with I fed it living flies and spiders, insects which draw blood from other things. At first it grew slowly--but it grew. I increased its food. I fed it mice--rats--rabbits; then cats. Finally a full-grown dog was none too large a meal for it.

"'I saw where this was leading, but I was determined not to be balked. I stole and gave it a human infant, and after that it would touch no other food. Then for the first time, a thrill of fear touched my soul. The thing began to grow and expand appallingly on its feasts of human blood. I began to fear it. I no longer looked upon it with pride. No longer I delighted in watching it feed upon the prey I caught for it. But now I found I was caught in a trap of my own making. When even temporarily deprived of its food, the thing grew dangerous to me. It demanded its food oftener; I was forced to take desperate chances to obtain that food.

"'Tonight by the barest chance, your lover escaped the fate which has befallen you. I hold Michael Strang no ill-will. Necessity is a cruel taskmaster. I will take no pleasure in laying you, alive and writhing, before the monster. But I have no other choice. To save myself, I must continue to gorge it on human blood, lest it take me for its prey. You might ask me, why do I not destroy that which I have created? It is a question I ask myself. I dare not try. I doubt if human hands can slay it. My mind is no longer my own. I, who was once its master, am become no more than a slave to provide it food. Its terrible non-human intelligence has robbed me of my will-power and enslaved me. Come what may, I must continue to feed it!

"'It may keep on growing until it bursts its prison and stalks slavering and ravening forth into the world.

Each time it has fed of late, it has grown spans in height and girth. There may be no limit to its growth.

But I dare not refuse it the food it craves.'

"Here he started as the house trembled to the impact of a great lumbering tread somewhere upstairs. He turned pale. 'It has awakened and is hungry!' he hissed. 'I will go to it--tell it it is too soon to be fed!' He took the candle which was burning on the table and hurried away, and I heard him ascend the stairs--"

she sunk her face in her hands and a shudder shook her slim frame.

"One terrible scream burst forth," she whimpered, "then silence, save for a hideous rending, crunching sound, and the tramp--tramp--tramp of the terrible hoofs! I lay here--it seemed for ages. Once I heard a dog whining and scratching at the outer door and knew that Bozo had recovered consciousness and followed me here, but I couldn't call to him, and soon he went away--and I lay here alone--listening--listening--"

I shuddered as if a cold wind were blowing upon me from outer space. And I rose, gripping the ancient sword. Marjory sprang up and seized me with convulsive strength.

"Oh, Michael, let us go!"

"Wait!" I was in the grip of an unconquerable depriving urge. "Before I go I must see what hides in those upstairs rooms."

She screamed and clung to me frantically.

"No, no, Michael! Oh, God, you don't know what you're saying! It is some terrible thing not of this earth--some ghastly being from outside! Human weapons cannot harm it. Don't--don't, for my sake, Michael, don't throw away your life!"

I shook my head.

"This is not heroism, Marjory, nor is it mere curiosity. I owe it to the children--to the helpless people of this city. Did not Stark say something about the thing breaking out of its prison? No--I must go against it now, while it is cornered in this house."

"But what can you do with your puny weapon?" she wailed, wringing her hands.

"I don't know," I answered, "but this I do know--that demoniac lust is no stronger than human hate, and that I will match this blade, which in old days slew witches and warlocks and vampires and werewolves, against the foul legions of Hell itself. Go! Take the dog and run home as fast as you can!"

And in spite of her protests and pleas, I disengaged her clinging arms and pushed her gently out the door, closing it in the face of her despairing wail. Then taking up the candle, I went swiftly into the hallway on which the store-room abutted. The stair showed dark and forbidding, a black well of shadows, and suddenly a faint draught of wind blew out the candle in my hand, and groping in my pockets, I found I had no matches to relight it. But the moon shone faintly through the small high-set windows, and in its dim light I went grimly up the dark stairs, driven irresistibly by some force stronger than fear, the sword of my warrior-ancestors gripped in my hands.

All the time overhead, those gargantuan hoofs blundered to and fro and their ponderous fall froze the very blood in my veins, and on my clammy flesh, cold sweat froze. I knew no earthly feet made those sounds. All the dim horror-ridden shadows beyond ancestral fears clawed and whispered at the back of my mind, all the vague phantasmal shapes that lurk in the subconsciousness rose titanic and terrible, all the dim racial memories of grisly prehistoric fears awoke to haunt me. Every reverberation of those lumbering footfalls roused, in the slumbering deeps of my soul, horrific, mist-veiled shapes of near-memory. But on I went.

The door at the head of the stairs was furnished with a snap lock--evidently within as well as without, since after I had drawn back the outer catch, the massive portal still held firm. And within I heard that elephantine tread. In a frenzy, lest my resolution give way to screaming black panic, I heaved up my sword and splintered the panels with three mighty blows. Through the ruins I stepped.

The whole upstairs space consisted of one great room, now faintly illuminated by the moonlight which streamed in through the heavily barred windows. The place was vast and spectral, with bars of white moonlight and floating oceans of shadow. And an involuntary, unhuman cry broke from my dry lips.

Before me stood the Horror. The moonlight illuminated vaguely a shape of nightmare and lunacy. Twice as tall as a man, its general outline was not unlike that of a human; but its gigantic legs terminated in huge hoofs and instead of arms, a dozen tentacles writhed like snakes about its huge bloated torso. Its color was a leprous, mottled reptilian hue, and the crowning horror came when it turned its loose slavering blood-stained jowls toward me and fixed me with its sparkling million-faceted eyes which glittered like bits of fire. There was nothing of the human about that pointed, malformed head--and God help me, there was nothing of the bestial either, as human beings understand the beasts. Tearing my eyes from that grisly head for the sake of my sanity, I was aware of another horror, intolerable in its unmistakable implication.

About those giant hoofs lay the dismembered and fang-torn fragments of a human body, and a bar of moonlight fell upon the severed head which lay staring upward with glassy dead eyes of horror--the head of John Stark.

Fear can become so intense it defeats itself. Now as I stood frozen, and out of that shambles the ghastly fiend came lumbering toward me, my fear was swept away by a red blaze of berserker fury. Swinging up my sword I leaped to meet the horror and the whistling blade sheared off half its tentacles which fell to the floor, writhing like serpents.

With an abhorrent high-pitched squeal, the monster bounded high above my head and stamped terribly downward. The impact of those frightful hoofs shattered my upflung arm like matchwood and dashed me to the floor, and with a soul-shaking bellow of triumph the monster leaped ponderously upon me in a ghastly death-dance that made the whole building groan and sway. Somehow I twisted aside and escaped those thunderous hoofs, that else had hammered me into a red pulp, and rolling aside, gained my feet, one thought uppermost in my mind--drawn from the shapeless void and materialized into concrete substance, the fiend was vulnerable to material weapons. And with my one good hand I gripped the sword that a saint had blessed in old times against the powers of darkness, and the red wave of battle-lust surged over me.

The monster wheeled unwieldily toward me, and roaring a wordless warcry I leaped, whirling the great sword through the air with every ounce of my powerful frame behind it. And straight through the pulpy unstable bulk it sheared, so that the loathsome torso fell one way and the giant legs the other. Yet the creature was not dead, for it writhed toward me on its tentacles, rearing its ghastly head, its eyes blazing fearfully, its forked tongue spitting venom at me. I swung up my sword and struck again and again, hacking the monstrosity into bits, each of which squirmed and writhed as if endowed with separate life--until I had hewed the head into pieces, and then I saw the scattered bits changing in form and substance. There seemed to be no bones in the thing's body. Except for the huge hard hoofs and the crocodile-like fangs, all was disgustingly flabby and pulpy, like a toad or a spider.

And now as I watched, I saw the fragments melt into a viscous black stenching fluid which flowed over the fragments of what had been John Stark. And in that black tide those fragments of flesh and bone crumbled and dissolved, as salt melts in water, faded and vanished--became one with the black abhorrent pool which whirled and eddied in the center of the room, showing a million facets and gleams of light, like the burning eyes of a myriad huge spiders. And I turned and fled downstairs.

At the foot of the stairs I stumbled over a soft heap, and a familiar whine woke me from the mazes of unutterable horror into which I had fallen. Marjory had not obeyed me; she had returned to that house of horror. She lay at my feet in a dead faint, and Bozo stood faithfully over her. Aye, I doubt not, if I had lost that grim battle, he would have given up his life to save his mistress when the monster came lurching down the stairs. With a sob of horror I caught up the girl, crushing her limp form to me; then Bozo cringed and snarled, gazing up the moon-flecked stairs. And down these stairs I saw a black glittering tide flowing sluggishly.

I ran from that house as I would flee from Hell, but I halted in the old store-room long enough to sweep a hasty hand over the table where I had found the candles. Several burnt matches littered the table, but I found one unstruck. And I struck it hurriedly and tossed it blazing into a heap of dusty papers near the wall. The wood was old and dry; it caught quickly and burned fiercely.

And as, with Marjory and Bozo, I watched it burn, I at least knew what the awakened townspeople did not guess; that the horror which had hovered over the city and the countryside was vanishing in those flames--I most devoutly hope, forever.

The Noseless Horror

Abysses of unknown terror lie veiled by the mists which separate man's everyday life from the uncharted and unguessed realms of the supernatural. The majority of people live and die in blissful ignorance of these realms--I say blissful, for the rending of the veil between the worlds of reality and of the occult is often a hideous experience. Once have I seen the veil so rent, and the incidents attendant thereto were burned so deeply into my brain that my dreams are haunted to this day.

The terrible affair was ushered in by an invitation to visit the estate of Sir Thomas Cameron, the noted Egyptologist and explorer. I accepted, for the man was always an interesting study, though I disliked his brutal manner and ruthless character. Owing to my association with various papers of a scientific nature, we had been frequently thrown together for several years, and I gathered that Sir Thomas considered me one of his few friends. I was accompanied on this visit by John Gordon, a wealthy sportsman to whom, also, an invitation had been extended.

The sun was setting as we came to the gate of the estate, and the desolate and gloomy landscape depressed me and filled me with nameless forebodings. Some miles away could be faintly seen the village at which we had detrained and between this, and on all sides, the barren moors lay stark and sullen. No other human habitation could be seen, and the only sign of life was some large fen bird flapping its lonely way inland. A cold wind whispered out of the east, laden with the bitter salt tang of the sea; and I shivered.

"Strike the bell," said Gordon, his impatience betraying the fact that the repellent atmosphere was affecting him, also. "We can't stand here all night."

But at that moment the gate swung open. Let it be understood that the manor house was surrounded by a high wall which entirely enclosed the estate. It was at the front gate that we stood. As it opened, we looked down a long driveway flanked by dense trees, but our attention at the present was riveted on the bizarre figure which stood to one side to let us pass. The gate had been opened by a tall man in Oriental dress. He stood like a statue, arms folded, head inclined in a manner respectful, but stately. The darkness of his skin enhanced the scintillant quality of his glittering eyes, and he would have been handsome save for a hideous disfiguration which at once robbed his features of comeliness and lent them a sinister aspect. He was noseless.

While Gordon and I stood silent, struck speechless by this apparition, the Oriental--a Sikh of India, by his turban--bowed and said in almost perfect English: "The master awaits you in his study, sahibs."

We dismissed the lad who had brought us from the village, and, as his cart wheels rattled away in the distance, we started up the shadowed driveway, followed by the Indian with our bags. The sun had set as we waited at the gate, and night fell with surprising suddenness, the sky being heavily veiled by gray misty clouds. The wind sighed drearily through the trees on each side of the driveway and the great house loomed up in front of us, silent and dark except for a light in a single window. In the semi-darkness I heard the easy pad-pad of the Oriental's slippered feet behind us, and the impression was so like a great panther stealing upon his victim that a shudder shook me.

Then we had reached the door and were being ushered into a broad, dimly-lighted hallway, where Sir Thomas came striding forth to greet us.

"Good evening, my friends," his great voice boomed through the echoing house. "I have been expecting you! Have you dined? Yes? Then come into my study; I am preparing a treatise upon my latest discoveries and wish to have your advice on certain points. Ganra Singh!"

This last to the Sikh who stood motionless by. Sir Thomas spoke a few words to him in Hindustani, and, with another bow, the noseless one lifted our bags and left the hall.

"I've given you a couple of rooms in the right wing," said Sir Thomas, leading the way to the stairs. "My study is in this wing--right above this hall--and I often work there all night."

The study proved to be a spacious room, littered with scientific books and papers, and queer trophies from all lands. Sir Thomas seated himself in a vast armchair and motioned us to make ourselves comfortable. He was a tall, heavily-built man in early middle life, with an aggressive chin masked by a thick blond beard, and keen, hard eyes that smoldered with pent energy.

"I want your help as I've said," he began abruptly. "But we won't go into that tonight; plenty of time tomorrow, and both of you must be rather fatigued."

"You live a long way from anywhere," answered Gordon. "What possessed you to buy and repair this old down-at-the-heels estate, Cameron?"

"I like solitude," Sir Thomas answered. "Here I am not pestered with small brained people who buzz about one like mosquitoes about a buffalo. I do not encourage visitors here, and I have absolutely no means of communicating with the outside world. When I am in England I am assured of quiet in which to pursue my work here. I have not even any servants; Ganra Singh does all the work necessary."

"That noseless Sikh? Who is he?"

"He is Ganra Singh. That's all I know about him. I met up with him in Egypt and have an idea that he fled India on account of some crime. But that doesn't matter; he's been faithful to me. He says that he served in the Anglo-Indian army and lost his nose from the sweep of an Afghan tulwar in a border raid."

"I don't like his looks," said Gordon bluntly. "You have a great deal of valuable trophies in this house; how can you be sure of trusting a man whom you know so little?"

"Enough of that," Sir Thomas waved the matter aside with an impatient gesture. "Ganra Singh is all right; I never make mistakes in reading character. Let us talk of other things. I have not told you of my latest researches."

He talked and we listened. It was easy to read in his voice the determination and ruthless driving power which made him one of the world's foremost explorers and research men, as he told us of hardships endured and obstacles overcome. He had some sensational discoveries to disclose to the world, he said, and he added that the most important of his findings consisted of a most unusual mummy.

"I found it in a hitherto undiscovered temple far in the hinterlands of Upper Egypt, the exact location of which you shall learn tomorrow when we consult my notes together. I look to see it revolutionize history, for while I have not made a thorough examination of it, I have at least found that it is like no other mummy yet discovered. Differing from the usual process of mummification, there is no mutilation at all.

The mummy is a complete body with all parts intact just as the subject was in life. Allowing for the fact that the features are dried and distorted with the incredible passage of time, one might imagine that he is looking upon a very ancient man who recently died, before disintegration has set in. The leathery lids are drawn down firmly over the eye sockets, and I am sure when I raise those lids I shall find the eyeballs intact beneath.

"I tell you, it is epoch making and overthrows all preconceived ideas! If life could by some manner be breathed into that withered mummy, it would be as able to speak, walk, and breathe as any man; for, as I said, its parts are as intact as if the man had died yesterday. You know the usual process--the disembowelling and so on--by which corpses are made mummies. But no such things have been done to this one. What would my colleagues not give to have been the finder! All Egyptologists will die from pure envy! Attempts have already been made to steal it--I tell you, many a research worker would cut my heart out for it!"

"I think you overvalue your find, and undervalue the moral senses of your co-workers," said Gordon bluntly.

Sir Thomas sneered. "A flock of vultures, sir," he exclaimed with a savage laugh. "Wolves! Jackals!

Sneaking about seeking to steal the credit from a better man! The laity have no real conception of the rivalry that exists in the class of their betters. It's each man for himself--let everyone look to his own laurels, and to the devil with the weaker. Thus far I've more than held my own."

"Even allowing this to be true," retorted Gordon, "you have scant right to condemn your rivals' tactics in the light of your own actions."

Sir Thomas glared at his outspoken friend so furiously that I half expected him to commit bodily assault upon him; then the explorer's mood changed, and he laughed mockingly and uproariously.

"The affair of Gustave Von Honmann is still on your mind, doubtless. I find myself the object of scathing denunciations wherever I go since that unfortunate incident. It is, I assure you, a matter of complete indifference to me. I have never desired the mob's plaudits, and I ignore its accusations. Von Honmann was a fool and deserved his fate. As you know, we were both searching for the hidden city of Gomar, the finding of which added so much to the scientific world. I contrived to let a false map fall into his hands and sent him away on a wild goose chase into Central Africa."

"You literally sent him to his death," Gordon pointed out. "I admit that Von Honmann was something of a beast, but it was a rotten thing to do, Cameron. You knew that all the chances in the world were against him escaping death at the hands of the wild tribesmen into whose lands you sent him."

"You can't make me angry," answered Cameron imperturbably. "That's what I like about you, Gordon; you're not afraid to speak out your mind. But let's forget Von Honmann; he's gone the way of all fools.

The one camp follower who escaped the general massacre and made his way back to civilization's outpost said that Von Honmann, when he saw the game was up, realized the fraud and died swearing to avenge himself on me, living or dead, but that has never worried me. A man is living and dangerous, or dead and harmless; that's all. But it's growing late and doubtless you are sleepy; I'll have Ganra Singh show you to your rooms. As for myself, I shall doubtless spend the rest of the night arranging the notes of my trip for tomorrow's work."

Ganra Singh appeared at the door like a giant phantom, and we said good night to our host and followed the Oriental. Let me here say that the house was built in shape like a double ended L. There were two stories and between the two wings was a sort of court upon which the lower rooms opened. Gordon and I had been assigned two bedrooms on the first floor in the left wing, which let into this court. There was a door between them, and, as I was preparing to retire, Gordon entered.

"Strange sort of a chap, isn't he?" nodding across the court at the light which shone in the study window.

"A good deal of a brute, but a great brain, marvelous brain."

I opened the door which let into the court for a breath of fresh air. The atmosphere in these rooms was crisp and sharp, but musky as if from unuse.

"He certainly doesn't have many visitors." The only light visible, besides those in our two rooms, was that in the upstairs study across the court.

"No." Silence fell for a space; then Gordon spoke abruptly, "Did you hear how Von Honmann died?"

"No."

"He fell into the hands of a strange and terrible tribe who claim descent from the early Egyptians. They are past masters at the hellish art of torture. The camp follower who escaped said that Von Honmann was killed slowly and fiendishly, in a manner which left him unmutilated, but shrunk and withered him until he was unrecognizable. Then he was sealed into a chest and placed in a fetish hut for a horrible relic and trophy."

My shoulders twitched involuntarily. "Frightful!"

Gordon rose, tossed away his cigarette, and turned toward his room.

"Getting late, good night--what was that? "

Across the court had come a faint crash as if a chair or table had been upset. As we stood, frozen by a sudden vague premonition of horror, a scream shuddered out across the night.

"Help! Help! Gordon! Slade! Oh God!"

Together we rushed out into the court. The voice was Sir Thomas', and came from his study in the left wing. As we raced across the court, the sounds of a terrible struggle came clearly to us, and again Sir Thomas cried out like a man in his death agony: "He's got me! Oh God, he's got me!"

"Who is it, Cameron?" shouted Gordon desperately.

"Ganra Singh--" suddenly the straining voice broke short, and a wild gibbering came dimly to us as we rushed into the first door of the lower left wing and charged up the stairs. It seemed an Eternity before we stood at the door of the study, beyond which still came a bestial yammering. We flung open the door and halted, aghast.

Sir Thomas Cameron lay writhing in a growing pool of gore, but it was not the dagger sunk deep into his breast which held us in our tracks like men struck dead, but the hideous and evident insanity stamped on his face. His eyes flared redly, fixed on nothing, and they were the eyes of a man who is staring into Purgatory. A ceaseless gibbering burst from his lips, and then into his yammering was woven human words: "--Noseless--the noseless one--" Then a rush of blood burst from his lips, and he dropped on his face.

We bent over him and eyed each other in horror.

"Stone dead," muttered Gordon. "But what killed him?"

"Ganra Singh--" I began; then both of us whirled. Ganra Singh stood silently in the doorway, his expressionless features giving no hint of his thoughts. Gordon rose, his hand sliding easily to his hip pocket.

"Ganra Singh, where have you been?"

"I was in the lower corridor, locking the house for the night. I heard my master call me, and I came."

"Sir Thomas is dead. Do you have any idea as to who did the murder?"

"No, sahib. I am new to this English land; I do not know if my master had any enemies."

"Help me lift him on this couch." This was done. "Ganra Singh, you realize that we must hold you responsible for the time being."

"While you hold me, the real killer may escape."

Gordon did not reply to this. "Let me have the keys to the house."

The Sikh obeyed without a word.

Gordon then led him across the outer corridor to a small room in which he locked him, first assuring himself that the window, as all the other windows in the house, was heavily barred. Ganra Singh made no resistance; his face showed nothing of his emotions. As we shut the door we saw him standing impassively in the center of the room, arms folded, eyes following us inscrutably.

We returned to the study with its shattered chairs and tables, its red stain on the floor, and the silent form on the couch.

"There's nothing we can do until morning," said Gordon. "We can't communicate with anyone, and if we started out to walk to the village we should probably lose our way in the darkness and fog. It seems a pretty fair case against the Sikh."

"Sir Thomas practically accused him in his last words."

"As to that, I don't know. Cameron shouted his name when I yelled, but he might have been calling the fellow--I doubt if Sir Thomas heard me. Of course, that remark about the 'noseless one' could seem to mean no one else, but it isn't conclusive. Sir Thomas was insane when he died."

I shuddered. "That, Gordon, is the most terrible phase of the matter. What was it that blasted Cameron's reason and made of him a screaming maniac in the last few minutes he had to live?"

Gordon shook his head. "I can't understand it. The mere fact of looking death in the eyes never shook Sir Thomas' nerve before. I tell you, Slade, I believe there's something deeper here than meets the eye.

This smacks of the supernatural, in spite of the fact that I was never a superstitious man. But let's look at it in a logical light.

"This study comprises the whole of the upper left wing, being separated from the back rooms by a corridor which runs the whole length of the house. The only door of the study opens into that corridor.

We crossed the court, entered a lower room of the left wing, went into the hall into which we were first admitted, and came up the stairs into the upper corridor. The study door was shut, but not locked. And through that door came whatever it was that shattered Sir Thomas Cameron's brain before it murdered him. And the man--or thing--left the same way, for it is evident that nothing is concealed in the study, and the bars on the windows prohibit escape in that manner. Had we been a few moments quicker we might have seen the slayer leaving. The victim was still grappling with the fiend when I shouted, but between that instant and the moment we came into the upper corridor, there was time for the slayer, moving swiftly, to accomplish his design and leave the room. Doubtless he concealed himself in one of the rooms across the hall and either slipped out while we were bending over Sir Thomas and made his escape--or, if it were Ganra Singh, came boldly into the study."

"Ganra Singh came after us, according to his story. He should have seen anyone trying to escape from the rooms."

"The killer might have heard him coming and waited until he was in the study before emerging. Oh, understand, I believe the Sikh is the murderer, but we wish to be fair and look at the matter from every angle. Let's see that dagger."

It was a thin-bladed, wicked-looking Egyptian weapon, which I remembered having seen lying on Sir Thomas' table.

"It seems as if Ganra Singh's clothes would have been in disarray and his hands bloody," I suggested.

"He scarcely had time to cleanse himself and arrange his garments."

"At any rate," Gordon answered, "the fingerprints of the killer should be upon this dagger hilt. I have been careful not to obliterate any such traces, and I will lay the weapon on the couch here for the examination of a Bertillon expert. I am not adept in such matters myself. And in the meanwhile I think I'll go over the room, after the accepted manner of detectives, to look for any possible clues."

"And I'll take a turn through the house. Ganra Singh may really be innocent, and the murderer lurking somewhere in the building."

"Better be careful. If there is such a being, remember that it is a desperate man, quite ready and willing to do murder."

I took up a heavy blackthorn and went out into the corridor. I forgot to say that all these corridors were dimly lighted, and the curtains drawn so closely that the whole house appeared to be dark from the outside. As I shut the door behind me, I felt more strongly than ever the oppressive silence of the house.

Heavy velvet hangings masked unseen doorways and, as a stray whisper of wind whipped them about, I started, and the lines from Poe flitted through my brain:

"And the silken, sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled me, filled with fantastic terrors never felt before."

I strode to the landing of the stair, and, after another glance at the silent corridors and the blank doors, I descended. I had decided that if any man had hidden in the upper story, he would have descended to the lower floor by this time, if indeed he had not already left the house. I struck a light in the lower reception hall, and went into the next room. The whole of the main building between the wings, I found, was composed of Sir Thomas' private museum, a really gigantic room, filled with idols, mummy cases, stone and clay pillars, papyrus scrolls, and like objects. I wasted little time here, however, for as I entered my eyes fell upon something I knew to be out of place in some manner. It was a mummy case, very different from the other cases, and it was open! I knew instinctively that it had contained the mummy of which Sir Thomas had boasted that evening, but now it was empty. The mummy was gone.

Thinking of his words regarding the jealousy of his rivals, I turned hastily and made for the hall and the stair. As I did so, I thought I heard somewhere in the house a faint crashing. I had no desire, however, to further explore the building alone and armed only with a club. I wished to return and tell Gordon that we were probably opposed to a gang of international thieves. I had started back toward the hall when I perceived a staircase leading directly from the museum room, and it I mounted, coming into the upper corridor near the right wing.

Again the long dim corridor ran away in front of me, with its blank mysterious doors and dark hangings. I must traverse the greater part of it in order to reach the study at the other end, and a foolish shiver shook me as I visualized hideous creatures lurking behind those closed doors. Then I shook myself. Whatever had driven Sir Thomas Cameron insane, it was human, and I gripped my blackthorn more firmly and strode down the corridor.

Then after a few strides I halted suddenly, the short hairs prickling at the back of my neck, and my flesh crawling unaccountably. I sensed an unseen presence, and my eyes turned as drawn by a magnet to some heavy tapestries which masked a doorway. There was no wind in the rooms, but the hangings moved slightly! I started, straining my eyes on the heavy dark fabric until it seemed the intensity of my gaze would burn through it, and I was aware, instinctively, that other eyes glared back. Then my eyes strayed to the wall beside the hidden doorway. Some freak of the vague light threw a dark formless shadow there, and, as I looked, it slowly assumed shape--a hideous distorted goblin image, grotesquely man-like, and noseless!

My nerve broke suddenly. That distorted figure might be merely the twisted shadow of a man who stood behind the hangings, but it was burned into my brain that, man, beast, or demon, those dark tapestries hid a shape of terrible and soul-shattering threat. A brooding horror lurked in the shadows and there in that silent darkened corridor with its vague flickering lights and that stark shadow hovering within my gaze, I came as near to insanity as I have ever come--it was not so much what met my eyes and senses, but the phantoms conjured up in my brain, the terrible dim images that rose at the back of my skull and gibbered at me. For I knew that for the moment the commonplace human world was far away, and that I was face to face with some horror from another sphere.

I turned and hurried down the corridor, my futile black thorn shaking in my grasp, and the cold sweat forming in great beads upon my brow. I reached the study and entered, closing the door behind me. My eyes turned instinctively to the couch with its grim burden. Gordon leaned over some papers on a table, and he turned as I entered, his eyes alight with some suppressed excitement.

"Slade, I've found a map here drawn by Cameron, and, according to it, he found that mummy on the borders of the land where Von Honmann was murdered--"

"The mummy's gone," I said.

"Gone? By Jupiter! Maybe that explains it! A gang of scientific thieves! Likely Ganra Singh is in with them--let's go talk to him."

Gordon strode across the corridor, I following. My nerve was still shaken, and I had no use to discuss my recent experience. I must get back some of my courage before I could bring myself to put the fear I had felt into words. Gordon knocked at the door. Silence reigned. He turned the key in the lock, swung the door open, and swore. The room was empty! A door opening into another room parallel to the corridor showed how he had escaped. The lock had been fairly torn off.

"That was that noise I heard!" Gordon exclaimed. "Fool that I was, I was so engrossed in Sir Thomas'

notes that I paid no attention, thinking it was but the noise of your opening or closing a door! I'm a failure as a detective. If I had been on my guard I might have arrived on the scene before the prisoner made his getaway."

"Lucky for you, you didn't," I answered shakily. "Gordon, let's get out of here! Ganra Singh was lurking behind the hangings as I came up the corridor--I saw the shadow of his noseless face--and I tell you, the man's not human. He's an evil spirit! An inhuman goblin! Do you think a man could unhinge Sir Thomas'

reason--a human being? No, no, no! He's a demon in human form--and I'm not so sure that the form's human!"

Gordon's face was shadowed. "Nonsense! A hideous and unexplained crime has been perpetrated here tonight, but I will not believe that it cannot be explained in natural terms--listen!"

Somewhere down the corridor a door had opened and closed. Gordon leaped to the door, sprang through the passageway. Down the corridor I followed, cursing his recklessness, but fired by his example to a kind of foolhardy bravery. I had no doubt but that the end of that wild chase would be a death grapple with the inhuman Indian, and the shattered door lock was ample proof of his prowess, even without the gory form which lay in the silent study. But when a man like Gordon leads, what can one do but follow?

Down the corridor we sped, through the door where we had seen the thing vanish, through the dark room beyond, and into the next. The sounds of flight in front of us told us that we were pressing close upon our prey. The memory of that chase through darkened rooms is a vague and hazy dream--a wild and chaotic nightmare. I do not remember the rooms and passages which we traversed. I only know that I followed Gordon blindly and halted only when he stopped in front of a tapestry-hung doorway beyond which a red glow was apparent. I was mazed, breathless. My sense of direction was completely gone. I had no idea as to what part of the house we were in, or why that crimson glow pulsed beyond the hangings.

"This is Ganra Singh's room," said Gordon. "Sir Thomas mentioned it in his conversation. It is the extreme upper room of the right wing. Further he cannot go, for this is the only door to the room and the windows are barred. Within that room stands at bay the man--or whatever--killed Sir Thomas Cameron!"

"Then in God's name let us rush in upon him before we have time to reconsider and our nerve breaks!" I urged, and, shouldering past Gordon, I hurled the curtains aside...

The red glow at least was explained. A great fire leaped and flickered in the huge fireplace, lending a red radiance to the room. And there at bay stood a nightmarish and hellish form--the missing mummy!

My dazed eyes took in at one glance the wrinkled leathery skin, the sunken cheeks, the flaring and withered nostrils from which the nose had decayed away; the hideous eyes were open now, and they burned with a ghastly and demoniac life. A single glimpse was all I had, for in an instant the long lean thing came lurching headlong at me, a heavy ornament of some sort clutched in its lank and taloned hand. I struck once with the blackthorn and felt the skull give way, but it never halted--for who can slay the dead?--and the next instant I was down, writhing and dazed, with a shattered shoulder bone, lying where the sweep of that dried arm had dropped me.

I saw Gordon at short range fire four shots pointblank into the frightful form, and then it had grappled with him, and as I struggled futilely to regain my feet and re-enter the battle, my athletic friend, held helpless in those inhuman arms, was bent back across a table until it seemed his spine would give way.

It was Ganra Singh who saved us. The great Sikh came suddenly through the hangings like an Arctic blast and plunged into the fray like a wounded bull elephant. With a strength I have never seen equalled and which even the living-dead man could not resist, he tore the animated mummy from its prey and hurled it across the room. Borne on the crest of that irresistible onslaught, the mummy was flung backward until the great fireplace was at its back. Then with one last volcanic effort, the avenger crashed it headlong into the fire, beat it down, stamped it into the flames until they caught at the writhing limbs, and the frightful form crumbled and disintegrated among them with an intolerable scent of decayed and burning flesh.

Then Gordon, who had stood watching like a man in a dream, Gordon, the iron-nerved lion hunter who had braved a thousand perils, now crumpled forward on his face in a dead faint!

Later we talked the affair over, while Ganra Singh bandaged my hurts with hands as gentle and light of touch as those of a woman.

"I think," I said weakly, "and I will admit that my view is untenable in the light of reason, but then any explanation must be incredible and improbable, that the people who made this mummy centuries and possibly thousands of years ago knew the art of preserving life; that by some means this man was simply put to sleep and slept in a death-like manner all these years, just as Hindu fakirs appear to lie in death for days and weeks at a time. When the proper time came, then the creature awoke and started on its--or his--hideous course."

"What do you think, Ganra Singh?"

"Sahib," said the great Sikh courteously, "who am I to speak of hidden things? Many things are unknown to man. After the sahib had locked me into the room, I bethought me that whoever slew my master might escape while I stood helpless, and, desiring to go elsewhere, I plucked away the lock with as much silence as I could and went forth searching among the darkened rooms. At last I heard sounds in my own bedroom and, going there, found the sahibs fighting with the living-dead man. It was fortunate that before all this occurred I had built a great fire in my room so as to last all night, for I am unused to this cold country. I know that fire is the enemy of all evil things, the Great Cleanser, and so thrust the Evil One into the flame. I am glad to have avenged my master and aided the sahibs."

"Aided!" Gordon grinned. "If you hadn't showed up just when you did, our bally ships would have been sunk. Ganra Singh, I've already apologized for my suspicions; you're a real man."

"No, Slade," his face grew serious, "I think you are wrong. In the first place, the mummy isn't thousands of years old. It's scarcely ten years old! As I find by reading his secret notes, Sir Thomas didn't find it in a lost temple in Upper Egypt, he found it in a fetish hut in Central Africa. He couldn't explain its presence there, and so said he found it in the hinterlands of Egypt. He being an Egyptologist, it sounded better, too.

But he really thought it was very ancient, and, as we know, he was right about the unusual process of mummification. The tribesmen who sealed that mummy into its case knew more about such things than the ancient Egyptians, evidently. But it wouldn't have lasted over twenty years anyway, I'm sure. Then Sir Thomas came along and stole it from the tribesmen--the same tribe, by the way, who murdered Von Honmann.

"No, your theory is wrong, I feel. You have heard of the occult theory which states that a spirit, earthbound through hate or love, can only do material good or evil when animating a material body? The occultists say, reasonably enough, that to bridge the gulf which lies between the two worlds of life and death, the spirit or ghost must inhabit and animate a fleshly form--preferably its own former habitation.

This mummy had died as men die, but I believe that the hate it felt in life was sufficient to span the void of death, to cause the dead and withered body to move and act and do murder.

"Now, if this be true, there is no limit to the horror to which mankind may be heir. If this be true, men may be hovering forever on the brink of unthought oceans of supernatural terror, parted from the next world by a thin veil which may be rent, as we have just seen it rent. I would like to believe otherwise--but Slade--

"As Ganra Singh hurled the struggling mummy into the fire, I watched--the sunken features expanded in the heat for a fleeting instant, just as a toy balloon when inflated, and for one brief second took on a human and familiar likeness. Slade, that face was the face of Gustave Von Honmann! "

The Dwellers Under the Tomb

I awoke suddenly and sat up in bed, sleepily wondering who it was that was battering on the door so violently; it threatened to shatter the panels. A voice squealed, sharpened intolerably as with mad terror.

"Conrad! Conrad!" someone outside the door was screaming. "For God's sake, let me in! I've seen him!--I've seen him!"

"It sounds like Job Kiles," said Conrad, lifting his long frame off the divan where he had been sleeping, after giving up his bed to me. "Don't knock down the door!" he called, reaching for his slippers. "I'm coming."

"Well, hurry!" squalled the unseen visitor. "I've just looked into the eyes of Hell!"

Conrad turned on a light and flung open the door, and in half fell, half staggered a wild-eyed shape which I recognized as the man Conrad had named--Job Kiles, a sour, miserly old man who lived on the small estate which adjoined that of Conrad. Now a grisly change had come over the man, usually so reticent and self-possessed. His sparse hair fairly bristled; drops of perspiration beaded his grey skin, and from time to time he shook as with a violent ague.

"What in God's name is the matter, Kiles?" exclaimed Conrad, staring at him. "You look as if you'd seen a ghost!"

"A ghost!" Kiles' high pitched voice cracked and dribbled off into a shriek of hysterical laughter. "I've seen a demon from Hell! I tell you, I saw him--tonight! Just a few minutes ago! He looked in at my window and laughed at me! Oh God, that laugh!"

"Who?" snapped Conrad impatiently.

"My brother Jonas!" screamed old Kiles.

Even Conrad started. Job's twin brother Jonas had been dead for a week. Both Conrad and I had seen his corpse placed in the tomb high upon the steep slopes of Dagoth Hills. I remembered the hatred which had existed between the brothers--Job the miser, Jonas the spendthrift, dragging out his last days in poverty and loneliness, in the ruined old family mansion on the lower slopes of the Dagoth Hills, all the brooding venom in his embittered soul centering on the penurious brother who dwelt in a house of his own in the valley. This feeling had been reciprocated. Even when Jonas lay dying, Job had only grudgingly allowed himself to be persuaded to come to his brother. As it chanced, he had been alone with Jonas when the latter died, and the death scene must have been hideous, for Job had run out of the room, grey-faced and trembling, pursued by a horrible cackle of laughter, broken short by the sudden death-rattle.

Now old Job stood shaking before us, sweat pouring off his grey skin, and babbling his dead brother's name.

"I saw him! I sat up later tonight than usual. Just as I turned out the light to go to bed--his face leered at me through the window, framed in the moonlight. He's come back from Hell to drag me down, as he swore to do as he lay dying. He's not human! He hadn't been for years! I suspected it when he returned from his long wandering in the Orient. He's a fiend in human shape! A vampire! He plans my destruction, body and soul!"

I sat speechless, utterly bewildered, and even Conrad found no words. Confronted by the apparent evidence of complete lunacy what is a man to say or do? My only thought was the obvious one that Job Kiles was insane. Now he seized Conrad by the breast of his dressing gown and shook him violently in the agony of his terror.

"There's but one thing to do!" he cried, the light of desperation in his eyes. "I must go to his tomb! I must see with my own eyes if he still lies there where we laid him! And you must go with me! I dare not go through the darkness alone! He might be waiting for me--lying in wait behind any hedge or tree!"

"This is madness, Kiles," expostulated Conrad. "Jonas is dead--you had a nightmare--"

"Nightmare!" his voice rose in a cracked scream. "I've had plenty since I stood beside his evil death-bed and heard the blasphemous threats pour like a black river from his foaming lips; but this was no dream! I was wide awake, and I tell you--I tell you I saw my demon-brother Jonas leering hideously through the window at me!"

He wrung his hands, moaning in terror, all pride, self-possession and poise swept away by stark, primitive, animal terror. Conrad glanced at me, but I had no suggestion to offer. The matter seemed so utterly insane that the only thing obvious seemed to summon the police and have old Job sent to the nearest madhouse. Yet there was in his manner a fundamental terror which seemed to strike even deeper than madness, and which, I will admit, caused a creepy sensation along my spine.

As if sensing our doubt, he broke out again, "I know! You think I'm crazy! I'm sane as you! But I'm going to that tomb, if I have to go alone! And if you let me go alone, my blood will be on your heads!

Are you going?"

"Wait!" Conrad began to dress hurriedly. "We'll go with you. I suppose the only thing that will destroy this hallucination is the sight of your brother in his coffin."

"Aye!" old Job laughed terribly. "In his tomb, in the lidless coffin! Why did he prepare that open coffin before his death and leave orders that no lid of any sort be placed upon it?"

"He was always eccentric," answered Conrad.

"He was always a devil," snarled old Job. "We hated each other from our youth. When he squandered his inheritance and came crawling back, penniless, he resented it because I would not share my hard-gotten wealth with him. The black dog! The fiend from Purgatory's pits!"

"Well, we'll soon see if he's safe in his tomb," said Conrad. "Ready, O'Donnel?"

"Ready," I answered, strapping on my holstered .45. Conrad laughed.

"Can't forget your Texas raising, can you?" he bantered. "Think you might be called on to shoot a ghost?"

"Well, you can't tell," I answered. "I don't like to go out at night without it."

"Guns are useless against a vampire," said Job, fidgeting with impatience. "There is only one thing which will prevail against them--a stake driven through the fiend's black heart."

"Great heavens, Job!" Conrad laughed shortly. "You can't be serious about this thing?"

"Why not?" A flame of madness rose in his eyes. "There were vampires in days past--there still are in Eastern Europe and the Orient. I've heard him boast about his knowledge of secret cults and black magic. I suspected it--then when he lay dying, he divulged his ghastly secret to me--swore he'd come back from the grave and drag me down to Hell with him!"

We emerged from the house and crossed the lawn. That part of the valley was sparsely settled, though a few miles to the southeast shone the lights of the city. Adjoining Conrad's grounds on the west lay Job's estate, the dark house looming gaunt and silent among the trees. That house was the one luxury the miserly old man allowed himself. A mile to the north flowed the river, and to the south rose the sullen black outlines of those low, rolling hills--barren-crowned, with long bush-clad slopes--which men call the Dagoth Hills--a curious name, not allied to any known Indian language, yet used first by the red man to designate this stunted range. They were practically uninhabited. There were farms on the outer slopes, toward the river, but the inner valleys were too shallow of soil, the hills themselves too rocky, for cultivation. Somewhat less than half a mile from Conrad's estate stood the rambling structure that had housed the Kiles family for some three centuries--at least, the stone foundations dated that far back, though the rest of the house was more modern. I thought old Job shuddered as he looked at it, perched there like a vulture on a roost, against the black undulating background of the Dagoth Hills.

It was a wild windy night through which we went on our mad quest. Clouds drove endlessly across the moon and the wind howled through the trees, bringing strange night noises and playing curious tricks with our voices. Our goal was the tomb which squatted on an upper slope of a hill which projected from the rest of the range, running behind and above the high tableland on which the old Kiles house stood. It was as if the occupant of the sepulcher looked out over the ancestral home and the valley his people had once owned from ridge to river. Now all the ground remaining to the old estate was the strip running up the slopes into the hills, the house at one end and the tomb at the other.

The hill upon which the tomb was built diverged from the others, as I have said, and in going to the tomb, we passed close by its steep, thicket-clad extremity, which fell off sharply in a rocky, bush-covered cliff.

We were nearing the point of this ridge when Conrad remarked, "What possessed Jonas to build his tomb so far from the family vaults?"

"He did not build it," snarled Job. "It was built long ago by our ancestor, old Captain Jacob Kiles, for whom this particular projection is still called Pirate Hill--for he was a buccaneer and a smuggler. Some strange whim caused him to build his tomb up there, and in his lifetime he spent much time there alone, especially at night. But he never occupied it for he was lost at sea in a fight with a man-of-war. He used to watch for enemies or soldiers from that very bluff there ahead of us, and that's why people call it Smuggler's Point to this day.

"The tomb was in ruins when Jonas began living at the old house, and he had it repaired to receive his bones. Well he knew he dared not sleep in consecrated ground! Before he died he had made full arrangements--the tomb had been rebuilt, the lidless coffin placed in it to receive him--"

I shuddered in spite of myself. The darkness, the wild clouds scudding across the leprous moon, the shrieking wind-noises, the grim dark hills looming above us, the wild words of our companion, all worked upon my imagination to people the night with shapes of horror and nightmare. I glanced nervously at the thicket-masked slopes, black and repellent in the shifting light, and found myself wishing we were not passing so close to the bush-grown, legend-haunted cliffs of Smuggler's Point, jutting out like the prow of a ship from the sinister range.

"I am no silly girl to be frightened by shadows," old Job was chattering. "I saw his evil face at my moon-lit window. I have always secretly believed that the dead walk the night. Now--what's that?"

He stopped short, frozen in an attitude of utter horror.

Instinctively we strained our ears. We heard the branches of the trees whipping in the gale. We heard the loud rustling of the tall grass.

"Only the wind," muttered Conrad. "It distorts every sound--"

"No! No, I tell you! It was--"

A ghostly cry came driving down the wind--a voice sharpened with mortal fear and agony. "Help! Help!

Oh, God have mercy! Oh, God! Oh, God--"

"My brother's voice!" screamed Job. "He is calling to me from Hell!"

"Which way did it come from?" whispered Conrad, with lips suddenly dry.

"I don't know." The goose-flesh stood out clammily on my limbs. "I couldn't tell. It might have come from above--or below. It sounds strangely muffled."

"The clutch of the grave muffles his voice!" shrieked Job. "The clinging shroud stifles his screams! I tell you he howls on the white-hot grids of Hell, and would drag me down to share his doom! On! On to the tomb!"

"The ultimate path of all mankind," muttered Conrad, which grisly play on Job's words did not add to my comfort. We followed old Kiles, scarcely able to keep pace with him as he loped, a gaunt, grotesque figure, across the slopes mounting towards the squat bulk the illusive moonlight disclosed like a dully glistening skull.

"Did you recognize that voice?" I muttered to Conrad.

"I don't know. It was muffled, as you mentioned. It might have been a trick of the wind. If I said I thought it was Jonas, you'd think me mad."

"Not now," I muttered. "I thought it was insanity at the beginning. But the spirit of the night's gotten into my blood. I'm ready to believe anything."

We had mounted the slopes and stood before the massive iron door of the tomb. Above and behind it the hill rose steeply, masked by dense thickets. The grim mausoleum seemed invested with sinister portent, induced by the fantastic happenings of the night. Conrad turned the beam of an electric torch on the ponderous lock, with its antique appearance.

"This door has not been opened," said Conrad. "The lock has not been tampered with. Look--spiders have already built their webs thickly across the sill, and the strands are unbroken. The grass before the door has not been mashed down, as would have been the case had anyone recently gone into the tomb--or come out."

"What are doors and locks to a vampire?" whined Job. "They pass through solid walls like ghosts. I tell you, I will not rest until I have gone into that tomb and done what I have to do. I have the key--the only key there is in the world which will fit that lock."

He drew it forth--a huge old-fashioned implement--and thrust it into the lock. There was a groan and creak of rusty tumblers, and old Job winced back, as if expecting some hyena-fanged ghost to fly at him through the opening door.

Conrad and I peered in--and I will admit I involuntarily braced myself, shaken with chaotic conjectures.

But the blackness within was Stygian. Conrad made to snap on his light, but Job stopped him. The old man seemed to have recovered a good deal of his normal composure.

"Give me the light," he said, and there was grim determination in his voice. "I'll go in alone. If he has returned to the tomb--if he is again in his coffin, I know how to deal with him. Wait here, and if I cry out, or if you hear the sounds of a struggle, rush in."

"But--" Conrad began an objection.

"Don't argue!" shrieked old Kiles, his composure beginning to crumble again. "This is my task and I'll do it alone!"

He swore as Conrad inadvertently turned the light beam full in his face, then snatched the torch and drawing something from his coat, stalked into the tomb, shoving the ponderous door to behind him.

"More insanity," I muttered uneasily. "Why was he so insistent that we come with him, if he meant to go inside alone? And did you notice the gleam in his eyes? Sheer madness!"

"I'm not so sure," answered Conrad. "It looked more like an evil triumph to me. As for being alone, you'd hardly call it that, since we're only a few feet away from him. He has some reason for not wanting us to enter that tomb with him. What was it he drew from his coat as he went in?"

"It looked like a sharpened stick, and a small hammer. Why should he take a hammer, since there is no lid to be unfastened on the coffin?"

"Of course!" snapped Conrad. "What a fool I've been not to understand already! No wonder he wanted to go in to the tomb alone! O'Donnel, he's serious about this vampire nonsense! Don't you remember the hints he's dropped about being prepared, and all that? He intends to drive that stake through his brother's heart! Come on! I don't intend that he shall mutilate--"

From the tomb rang a scream that will haunt me when I lie dying. The fearful timbre of it paralyzed us in our tracks, and before we could gather our wits, there was a mad rush of feet, the impact of a flying body against the door, and out of the tomb, like a bat blown out of the gates of Hell, flew the shape of Job Kiles. He fell head-long at our feet, the flashlight in his hand striking the ground and going out. Behind him the iron door stood ajar and I thought to hear a strange scrambling, sliding noise in the darkness. But all my attention was rivetted on the wretch who writhed at our feet in horrible convulsions.

We bent above him. The moon sliding from behind a dusky cloud lighted his ghastly face, and we both cried out involuntarily at the horror stamped there. From his distended eyes all light of sanity was gone--blown out as a candle is blown out in the dark. His loose lips worked, spattering forth. Conrad shook him. "Kiles! In God's name, what happened to you?"

A horrible slavering mewling was the only answer; then among the drooling and meaningless sounds we caught human words, slobbering, and half inarticulate.

"The thing!--The thing in the coffin!" Then as Conrad cried a fierce question, the eyes rolled up and set, the hard-drawn lips froze in a ghastly mirthless grin, and the man's whole lank frame seemed to sink and collapse upon itself.

"Dead!" muttered Conrad, appalled.

"I see no wound," I whispered, shaken to my very soul.

"There is no wound--no drop of blood."

"Then--then--" I scarcely dared put the grisly thought into words.

We looked fearsomely at the oblong strip of blackness framed in the partly open door of the silent tomb.

The wind shrieked suddenly across the grass, as if in a paean of demoniac triumph, and a sudden trembling took hold of me.

Conrad rose and squared his shoulders.

"Come on!" said he. "God knows what lurks in the hellish grave--but we've got to find out. The old man was overwrought--a prey to his own fears. His heart was none too strong. Anything might have caused his death. Are you with me?"

What terror of a tangible and understood menace can equal that of menace unseen and nameless? But I nodded consent, and Conrad picked up the flashlight, snapped it on, and grunted pleasure that it was not broken. Then we approached the tomb as men might approach the lair of a serpent. My gun was cocked in my hand as Conrad thrust open the door. His light played swiftly over the dank walls, dusty floor and vaulted roof, to come to rest on the lidless coffin which stood on its stone pedestal in the center. This we approached with drawn breath, not daring to conjecture what eldritch horror might meet our eyes. With a quick intake of breath, Conrad flashed his light into it. A cry escaped each of us; the coffin was empty.

"My God!" I whispered. "Job was right! But where is the--the vampire?"

"No empty coffin frightened the life out of Job Kiles' body," answered Conrad. "His last words were

'the thing in the coffin.' Something was in it--something the sight of which extinguished Job Kiles' life like a blown-out candle."

"But where is it?" I asked uneasily, a most ghastly thrill playing up and down my spine. "It could not have emerged from the tomb without our having seen it. Was it something that can make itself invisible at will?

Is it squatting unseen in the tomb with us here at this instant?"

"Such talk is madness," snapped Conrad, but with a quick instinctive glance over his shoulder to right and left. Then he added, "Do you notice a faint repulsive odor about this coffin?"

"Yes, but I can't define it."

"Nor I. It isn't exactly a charnel-house reek. It's an earthy, reptilian sort of smell. It reminds me faintly of scents I've caught in mines far below the surface of the earth. It clings to the coffin--as if some unholy being out of the deep earth had lain there."

He ran the light over the walls again, and halted it suddenly, focusing it on the back wall, which was cut out of the sheet rock of the hill on which the tomb was built.

"Look!"

In the supposedly solid wall showed a long thin aperture! With one stride Conrad reached it, and together we examined it. He pushed cautiously on the section of the wall nearest it, and it gave inward silently, opening on such blackness as I had not dreamed existed this side of the grave. We both involuntarily recoiled, and stood tensely, as if expecting some horror of the night to spring out at us. Then Conrad's short laugh was like a dash of icy water on taut nerves.

"At least the occupant of the tomb uses an un-supernatural means of entrance and exit," he said. "This secret door was constructed with extreme care, evidently. See, it is merely a large upright block of stone that turns on a pivot. And the silence with which it works shows that the pivot and sockets have been oiled recently."

He directed his beam into the pit behind the door, and it disclosed a narrow tunnel running parallel to the door-sill, plainly cut into the solid rock of the hill. The sides and floor were smooth and even, the roof arched.

Conrad drew back, turning to me.

"O'Donnel, I seem to sense something dark and sinister indeed, here, and I feel sure it possesses a human agency. I feel as if we had stumbled upon a black, hidden river, running under our very feet.

Whither it leads, I can not say, but I believe the power behind it all is Jonas Kiles. I believe that old Job did see his brother at the window tonight."

"But empty tomb or not, Conrad, Jonas Kiles is dead."

"I think not. I believe he was in a self-induced state of catalepsy, such as is practiced by Hindu Fakirs. I have seen a few cases, and would have sworn they were really dead. They have discovered the secret of suspended animation at will, despite scientists and skeptics. Jonas Kiles lived several years in India, and he must have learned that secret, somehow.

"The open coffin, the tunnel leading from the tomb--all point to the belief that he was alive when he was placed here. For some reason he wished people to believe him to be dead. It may be the whim of a disordered mind. It may have a deeper and darker significance. In the light of his appearance to his brother and Job's death, I lean to the latter view, but just now my suspicions are too horrible and fantastic to put into words. But I intend to explore this tunnel. Jonas may be hiding in it somewhere. Are you with me? Remember, the man may be a homicidal maniac, or if not, he may be more dangerous even than a madman."

"I'm with you," I grunted, though my flesh crawled at the prospect of plunging into that nighted pit. "But what about that scream we heard as we passed the Point? That was no feigning of agony! And what was the thing Job saw in the coffin?"

"I don't know. It might have been Jonas, garbed in some hellish disguise. I'll admit there is much mystery attached to this matter, even if we accept the theory that Jonas is alive and behind it all. But we'll look into that tunnel. Help me lift Job. We can't leave him lying here like this. We'll put him in the coffin."

And so we lifted Job Kiles and laid him in the coffin of the brother he had hated, where he lay with his glassy eyes staring from his frozen grey features. As I looked at him, the dirge of the wind seemed to echo his words in my ears: "On! On to the tomb!" And his path had indeed led him to the tomb.

Conrad led the way through the secret door, which we left open. As we moved into that black tunnel I had a moment of sheer panic, and I was glad that the heavy outer door of the tomb was not furnished with a spring-lock, and that Conrad had in his pocket the only key with which the ponderous lock could be fastened. I had an uneasy feeling that the demoniac Jonas might make fast the door, leaving us sealed in the tomb until Judgment Day.

The tunnel seemed to run, roughly, east and west, following the outer line of the hill. We took the left-hand turn--toward the east--and moved along cautiously, shining the light ahead of us.

"This tunnel was never cut by Jonas Kiles," whispered Conrad. "It has a very air of antiquity about it--look!"

Another dark doorway appeared on our right. Conrad directed his beam through it, disclosing another, narrower passage. Other doorways opened into it on both sides.

"It's a regular network," I muttered. "Parallel corridors connected by smaller tunnels. Who'd have guessed such a thing lay under the Dagoth Hills?"

"How did Jonas Kiles discover it?" wondered Conrad. "Look, there's another doorway on our right--and another--and another! You're right--it's a veritable network of tunnels. Who in heaven's name dug them? They must be the work of some unknown prehistoric race. But this particular corridor has been used recently. See how the dust is disturbed on the floor? All the doorways are on the right, none on the left. This corridor follows the outer line of the hill, and there must be an outlet somewhere along it.

Look!"

We were passing the opening of one of the dark intersecting tunnels, and Conrad had flashed his light on the wall beside it. There we saw a crude arrow marked in red chalk, pointed down the smaller corridor.

"That can't lead to the outside," I muttered. "It plunges deeper into the guts of the hill."

"Let's follow it, anyway," answered Conrad. "We can find our way back to this outer tunnel easily."

So down with it we went, crossing several other larger corridors, and at each finding the arrow, still pointing the way we were going. Conrad's thin beam seemed almost lost in that dense blackness, and nameless forebodings and instinctive fears haunted me as we plunged deeper and deeper into the heart of that accursed hill. Suddenly the tunnel ended abruptly in a narrow stair that led down and vanished in the darkness. An involuntary shudder shook me as I looked down those carven steps. What unholy feet had padded them in forgotten ages? Then we saw something else--a small chamber opening onto the tunnel, just at the head of the stair. And as Conrad flashed his light into it, an involuntary exclamation burst from my lips. There was no occupant, but plenty of evidence of recent occupation. We entered and stood following the play of the thin finger of light.

That the chamber had been furnished for human occupancy was not so astonishing, in the light of our previous discoveries, but we stood aghast at the condition of the contents. A camp cot lay on its side, broken, the blankets strewn over the rocky floor in ragged strips. Books and magazines were torn to bits and scattered aimlessly about, cans of food lay carelessly about, battered and bent, some burst and the contents spilled. A lamp lay smashed on the floor.

"A hideout for somebody," said Conrad. "And I'll stake my head it's Jonas Kiles. But what a chaos!

Look at those cans, apparently burst open by having been struck against the rock floor--and those blankets, torn in strips, as a man might rip a piece of paper. Good God, O'Donnel, no human being could work such havoc!"

"A madman might," I muttered. "What's that?"

Conrad had stopped and picked up a notebook. He held it up to his light.

"Badly torn," he grunted. "But here's luck, anyway. It's Jonas Kiles' diary! I know his handwriting.

Look, this last page is intact, and it's dated today! Positive proof that he's alive, were other proof lacking."

"But where is he?" I whispered, looking fearfully about. "And why all this devastation?"

"The only thing I can think of," said Conrad, "is that the man was at least partly sane when he entered these caverns, but has since become insane. We'd best be alert--if he is mad, it's altogether possible that he might attack us in the dark."

"I've thought of that," I growled with an involuntary shudder. "It's a pretty thought--a madman lurking in these hellish black tunnels to spring on our backs. Go ahead--read the diary while I keep an eye on the door."

"I'll read the last entry," said Conrad. "Perhaps it will throw some light on the subject."

And focussing the light on the cramped scrawl, he read: "All is now in readiness for my grand coup.

Tonight I leave this retreat forever, nor will I be sorry, for the eternal darkness and silence are beginning to shake even my iron nerves. I am becoming imaginative. Even as I write, I seem to hear stealthy sounds, as of things creeping up from below, although I have not seen so much as a bat or a snake in these tunnels. But tomorrow I will have taken up my abode in the fine house of my accursed brother.

While he--and it is a jest so rare I regret that I can not share it with someone--he will take my place in the cold darkness--darker and colder than even these dark tunnels.

"I must write, if I can not speak of it, for I am thrilled by my own cleverness. What diabolical cunning is mine! With what devilish craft have I plotted and prepared! Not the least was the way in which, before my 'death'--ha! ha! ha! if the fools only knew--I worked on my brother's superstitions--dropping hints and letting fall cryptic remarks. He always looked on me as a tool of the Evil One. Before my final 'illness' he trembled on the verge of belief that I had become supernatural or infernal. Then on my 'death-bed' when I poured my full fury upon him, his fright was genuine. I know that he is fully convinced that I am a vampire. Well do I know my brother. I am as certain as if I saw him, that he fled his home and prepared a stake to drive through my heart. But he will not make a move until he is sure that what he suspects is true.

"This assurance I will lend him. Tonight I will appear at his window. I will appear and vanish. I do not want to kill him with fright, because then my plans would be set at naught. I know that when he recovers from his first fright, he will come to my tomb to destroy me with his stake. And when he is safely in the tomb, I will kill him. I will change garments with him--lay him safely in the tomb, in the open coffin--and steal back to his fine house. We resemble each other enough, so that, with my knowledge of his ways and mannerisms, I can mimic him to perfection. Besides, who would ever suspect? It is too bizarre--too utterly fantastic. I will take up his life where he left off. People may wonder at the change in Job Kiles, but it will go no further than wondering. I will live and die in my brother's shoes, and when the real death comes to me--may it be long deferred!--I will lie in state in the old Kiles vaults, with the name of Job Kiles on my headstone, while the real Job sleeps unguessed in the old tomb on Pirate Hill! Oh, it is a rare, rare jest!

"I wonder how old Jacob Kiles discovered these subterranean ways. He did not construct them. They were carved out of dim caverns and solid rock by the hands of forgotten men--how long ago I dare not venture a conjecture. While hiding here, waiting for the time to be ripe, I have amused myself by exploring them. I have found that they are far more extensive than I had suspected. The hills must be honeycombed with them, and they sink into the earth to an incredible depth, tier below tier, like the stories of a building, each tier connected with the one below by a single stairway. Old Jacob Kiles must have used these tunnels, at least those of the upper tier, for the storing of plunder and contraband. He built the tomb to mask his real activities, and of course, cut the secret entrance and hung the door-stone on the pivot. He must have discovered the burrows by means of the hidden entrance at Smuggler's Point.

The old door he constructed there was a mere mass of rotting splinters and rusty metal when I found it.

As no one ever discovered it, after him, it is not likely anyone will find the new door I built with my own hands, to replace the old one. Still, I will take the proper precautions in due time.

"I have wondered much as to the identity of the race which must once have inhabited these labyrinths. I have found no bones or skulls, though I have discovered, in the upper tier, curiously hardened copper implements. On the next few stories I found stone implements, down to the tenth tier, where they disappeared. Also, on the topmost tier I found portions of walls decorated with paintings, greatly faded, but evidencing undoubted skill. These picture-paintings I found on all the tiers down to, and including, the fifth, though each tier's decorations were cruder than those of the one above, until the last paintings were mere meaningless daubs, such as an ape might make with a paintbrush. Also, the stone implements were much cruder on the lower levels, as was the workmanship of the roofs, stairs, doorways, etc. One gets a fantastic impression of an emprisoned race burrowing deeper and deeper into the black earth, century by century, and losing more and more of their human attributes as they sank to each new level.

"The fifteenth tier is without rhyme or reason, the tunnels running aimlessly, without apparent plan--so striking a contrast to the top-most tier, which is a triumph of primitive architecture, that it is difficult to believe them to have been constructed by the same race. Many centuries must have elapsed between the building of the two tiers, and the builders must have become greatly degraded. But the fifteenth tier is not the end of these mysterious burrows.

"The doorway opening on the single stairway at the bottom of the lowest tier was blocked by stones which had fallen from the roof--probably hundreds of years ago, before old Captain Jacob discovered the tunnels. Prompted by curiosity, I cleared away the debris, in spite of the tax it was on my strength, and opened a hole in the heap this very day, although I did not have time to explore what lay beneath.

Indeed, I doubt if I could do so, for my light showed me, not the usual series of stone stairs, but a steep smooth shaft, leading down into the blackness. An ape or a serpent might pass up and down it, but not a human being. Into what unthinkable pits it leads, I do not care to even try to guess. For some reason, the realization that the fifteenth tier was not the ultimate boundary of the labyrinths was a shock. The sight of the unstepped shaft gave me a strangely creepy feeling, and led me to fantastic conjectures regarding the ultimate fate of the race which once lived in these hills. I had supposed the diggers, sinking lower and lower in the scale of life, had become extinct in the lower tiers, although I had not found any remains to justify my theories. The lower tiers do not lie in almost solid rock as do those nearer the surface. They are cut into black earth and a very soft sort of stone, and were apparently scooped out with the most primitive utensils; they even appear in places to have been dug out with fingers and nails. It might be the burrowings of animals, except for the evident attempt to imitate the more orderly systems above. But below the fifteenth tier, as I could see, even by my superficial investigations from above, all mimicry ceases; the diggings below the fifteenth tier are mad and brutish pits, and to what blasphemous depths they descend, I have no wish to know.

"I am haunted by fantastic speculations as to the identity of the race which literally sunk into the earth and disappeared in its black depths, so long ago. A legend persisted among Indians of this vicinity that many centuries before the coming of the white men, their ancestors drove a strange alien race into the caverns of Dagoth Hills, and sealed them up to perish. That they did not perish, but survived somehow for at least several centuries, is evident. Who they were, whence they came, what was their ultimate fate, will never be known. Anthropologists might glean some evidence from the paintings on the upper tier, but I do not intend that anyone shall ever know about these burrows. Some of these dim pictures depict unmistakable Indians, at war with men evidently of the same race as the artists. These models, I should venture to say, resembled the Caucasian type rather than the Indian.

"But the time approaches for my call on my beloved brother. I will go forth by the door in Smuggler's Point, and return the same way. I will reach the tomb before my brother, however quickly he comes--as come I know he will. Then when the deed is done, I will go forth from the tomb, and no man shall ever set foot in these corridors again. For I shall see that the tomb is never opened, and a convenient dynamite-blast shall shake down enough rocks from the cliffs above to effectually seal the door in Smuggler's Point forever."

Conrad slipped the notebook into his pocket.

"Mad or sane," he said grimly, "Jonas Kiles is a proper devil. I am not greatly surprised, but I am slightly shocked. What a hellish plot! But he erred in one thing: he apparently took it for granted that Job would come to the tomb alone. The fact that he did not was sufficient to upset his calculations."

"Ultimately," I answered. "Yet inasfar as Job is concerned, Jonas has succeeded in his fiendish plan--he managed to kill his brother somehow. Evidently he was in the tomb when Job entered. He frightened him to death somehow, then, evidently realizing our presence, slipped away through the secret door."

Conrad shook his head. A growing nervousness had made itself evident in his manner as he had progressed with the reading of the diary. From time to time he had paused and lifted his head in a listening attitude.

"O'Donnel, I do not believe that it was Jonas that Job saw in the coffin. I have changed my opinion somewhat. An evil human mind was first at the back of all this, but some of the aspects of this business I can not attribute to humanity.

"That cry we heard at the Point--the condition of this room--the absence of Jonas--all indicate something even darker and more sinister than Jonas Kiles' murder plot."

"What do you mean?" I asked uneasily.

"Suppose that the race which dug these tunnels did not perish! " he whispered. "Suppose their descendants still dwell in some state of abnormal existence in the black pits below the tiers of corridors!

Jonas mentions in his notes that he thought to hear stealthy sounds, as of things creeping up from below! "

"But he lived in these tunnels for a week," I expostulated.

"You forget that the shaft leading to the pits was blocked up until today, when he cleared away the rocks. O'Donnel, I believe that the lower pits are inhabited, that the creatures have found their way up into these tunnels, and that it was the sight of one of them, sleeping in the coffin, which killed Job Kiles!"

"But this is utter madness!" I exclaimed.

"Yet these tunnels were inhabited in times past, and according to what we have read, the inhabitants must have sunk to an incredibly low level of life. What proof have we that their descendants have not lived on in the horrible black pits which Jonas saw below the lower tier? Listen!"

He had snapped off his light, and we had been standing in the darkness for some minutes. Somewhere I heard a faint sliding, scrambling noise. Stealthily we stole into the tunnel.

"It is Jonas Kiles!" I whispered, but an icy sensation stole up and down my spine.

"Then he has been hiding below," muttered Conrad. "The sounds come from the stairs--as of something creeping up from below. I dare not flash the light--if he is armed it might draw his fire."

I wondered why Conrad, iron-nerved in the presence of human enemies, should be trembling like a leaf. I wondered why cold trickles of nameless horror should trace their way along my spine. And then I was electrified. Somewhat back up the tunnel, in the direction from which we had come, I heard another soft repellent sound. And at that instant Conrad's fingers sunk like steel into my arm. In the murky darkness below us, two yellow oblique sparks suddenly glittered.

"My God!" came Conrad's shocked whisper. "That's not Jonas Kiles!"

As he spoke another pair joined the first--then suddenly the dark well below us was alive with floating yellow gleams, like evil stars reflected in a nighted gulf. They flowed up the stairs toward us, silently except for that detestable sliding sound. A vile earthy smell welled up to our nostrils.

"Back, in God's name!" gasped Conrad, and we began to move back away from the stairs, up the tunnel down which we had come. Then suddenly there came the rush of some heavy body through the air, and wheeling, I fired blindly and pointblank in the darkness. And my scream, as the flash momentarily lighted the shadow, was echoed by Conrad. The next instant we were racing up the tunnel as men might run from hell, while behind us something flopped and floundered and wallowed on the floor in its death-throes.

"Turn on your light," I gasped. "We mustn't get lost in these hellish labyrinths."

The beam stabbed the dark ahead of us, and showed us the outer corridor where we had first seen the arrow. There we halted an instant, and Conrad directed his beam back down the tunnel. We saw only the empty darkness, but beyond that short ray of light, God only knows what horrors crawled through the blackness.

"My God, my God!" Conrad panted. "Did you see? Did you see?"

"I don't know!" I gasped. "I glimpsed something--like a flying shadow--in the flash of the shot. It wasn't a man--it had a head something like a dog--"

"I wasn't looking in that direction," he whispered. "I was looking down the stairs when the flash of your gun cut the darkness."

"What did you see?" My flesh was clammy with cold sweat.

"Human words can not describe it!" he cried. "The black earth quickened as with giant maggots. The darkness heaving and writhing with blasphemous life. In God's name, let's get out of here--down this corridor to the tomb!"

But even as we took a forward step, we were paralyzed by stealthy sounds ahead of us.

"The corridors are alive with them!" whispered Conrad. "Quick--the other way! This corridor follows the line of the hill and must run to the door in Smuggler's Point."

Until I die I will remember that flight down that black silent corridor, with the horror that slunk at our heels. I momentarily expected some demon-fanged spectre to leap upon our backs, or rise up out of the blackness ahead of us. Then Conrad, shining his dimming light ahead, gave a gasping sob of relief.

"The door at last! My God, what's this?"

Even as his light had shown a heavy iron-bound door, with a heavy key in the massive lock, he had stumbled over something that lay crumpled on the floor. His light showed a twisted human shape, its blasted head lying in a pool of blood. The features were unrecognizable, but we knew the gaunt, lank shape, still clad in the grave-clothes. The real Death had overtaken Jonas Kiles at last.

"That cry as we passed the Point tonight!" whispered Conrad. "It was his death-scream! He had returned to the tunnels after showing himself to his brother--and horror came upon him in the dark!"

Suddenly, as we stood above the corpse, we heard again that damnable sliding scrambling noise in the darkness. In a frenzy we leaped at the door--tore at the key--hurled open the door. With a sob of relief we staggered into the moon-lit night. For an instant the door swung open behind us, then as we turned to look, a savage gust of wind crashed it shut.

But before it closed, a ghastly picture leaped out at us, half lighted by the straggling moon-beams: the sprawling, mutilated corpse, and above it a grey, shambling monstrosity--a flaming-eyed dog-headed horror such as madmen see in black nightmares. Then the slamming door blotted out the sight, and as we fled across the slope in the shifting moon-light, I heard Conrad babbling, "Spawn of the black pits of madness and eternal night! Crawling obscenities seething in the slime of the earth's unguessed deeps--the ultimate horror of retrogression--the nadir of human degeneration--good God, their ancestors were men!

The pits below the fifteenth tier, into what hells of blasphemous black horror do they sink, and by what demoniac hordes are they peopled? God protect the sons of men from the Dwellers--the Dwellers under the tomb!"