A. Merritt: Collected Works
Author: Abraham Merritt
Date: 1916-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Pulp fiction; Science Fiction; Fantasy; Adventure; Horror; Weird Fiction
Description: This book collects all the classic speculative fiction of Abraham Merritt (1884–1943): 18 novels and short stories, plus three of the novels as they originally appeared in magazine publication.
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less.

A. MERRITT

COLLECTED
WORKS

THE CLASSIC SPECULATIVE FICTION
OF ABRAHAM MERRITT (1884–1943):
18 NOVELS AND SHORT STORIES.

MobileRead Edition
2021

Abraham Grace Merritt (January 20, 1884 – August 21, 1943) – known by his byline, A. Merritt – was an American Sunday magazine editor and a writer of fantastic fiction.

His writings were heavily influenced by H. Rider Haggard, Robert W. Chambers, Helena Blavatsky, and Gertrude Barrows Bennett (writing as Francis Stevens). In turn, Merritt was a major influence on H. P. Lovecraft and Richard Shaver, and was highly esteemed by Michael Moorcock and Robert Bloch.

His stories generally revolve around conventional pulp magazine themes, but his writing is set apart from typical pulp tales by his lush, florid prose style.

This ebook was created by ECM for MobileRead.com, August 2021, and may be freely distributed for non-commercial purposes.

Contents were first published 1917 ~ 1946. This ebook is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less.

THE NOVELS

CONTENTS:

- The Moon Pool
- The Metal Monster
- The Ship of Ishtar
- Seven Footprints to Satan
- The Face in the Abyss
- Dwellers in the Mirage
- Burn, Witch, Burn!
- Creep, Shadow!

THE  MOON  POOL

FOREWORD

The publication of the following narrative of Dr. Walter T. Goodwin has been authorized by the Executive Council of the International Association of Science.

First:

To end officially what is beginning to be called the Throckmartin Mystery, and to kill the innuendo and scandalous suspicions which have threatened to stain the reputations of Dr. David Throckmartin, his youthful wife, and equally youthful associate Dr. Charles Stanton ever since a tardy despatch from Melbourne, Australia, reported the disappearance of the first from a ship sailing to that port, and the subsequent reports of the disappearance of his wife and associate from the camp of their expedition in the Caroline Islands.

Second:

Because the Executive Council have concluded that Dr. Goodwin’s experiences in his wholly heroic effort to save the three, and the lessons and warnings within those experiences, are too important to humanity as a whole to be hidden away in scientific papers understandable only to the technically educated; or to be presented through the newspaper press in the abridged and fragmentary form which the space limitations of that vehicle make necessary.

For these reasons the Executive Council commissioned Mr. A. Merritt to transcribe into form to be readily understood by the layman the stenographic notes of Dr. Goodwin’s own report to the Council, supplemented by further oral reminiscences and comments by Dr. Goodwin; this transcription, edited and censored by the Executive Council of the Association, forms the contents of this book.

Himself a member of the Council, Dr. Walter T. Goodwin, Ph.D., F.R.G.S. etc., is without cavil the foremost of American botanists, an observer of international reputation and the author of several epochal treaties upon his chosen branch of science. His story, amazing in the best sense of that word as it may be, is fully supported by proofs brought forward by him and accepted by the organization of which I have the honor to be president. What matter has been elided from this popular presentation – because of the excessively menacing potentialities it contains, which unrestricted dissemination might develop – will be dealt with in purely scientific pamphlets of carefully guarded circulation.

THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION
OF SCIENCE

Per J. B. K., President

— I —

THE THING
ON THE MOON PATH

For two months I had been on the d’Entrecasteaux Islands gathering data for the concluding chapters of my book upon the flora of the volcanic islands of the South Pacific. The day before I had reached Port Moresby and had seen my specimens safely stored on board the Southern Queen. As I sat on the upper deck I thought, with homesick mind, of the long leagues between me and Melbourne, and the longer ones between Melbourne and New York.

It was one of Papua’s yellow mornings when she shows herself in her somberest, most baleful mood. The sky was smoldering ochre. Over the island brooded a spirit sullen, alien, implacable, filled with the threat of latent, malefic forces waiting to be unleashed. It seemed an emanation out of the untamed, sinister heart of Papua herself – sinister even when she smiles. And now and then, on the wind, came a breath from virgin jungles, laden with unfamiliar odors, mysterious and menacing.

It is on such mornings that Papua whispers to you of her immemorial ancientness and of her power. And, as every white man must, I fought against her spell. While I struggled I saw a tall figure striding down the pier; a Kapa-Kapa boy followed swinging a new valise. There was something familiar about the tall man. As he reached the gangplank he looked up straight into my eyes, stared for a moment, then waved his hand.

And now I knew him. It was Dr. David Throckmartin – “Throck” he was to me always, one of my oldest friends and, as well, a mind of the first water whose power and achievements were for me a constant inspiration as they were, I know, for scores other.

Coincidentally with my recognition came a shock of surprise, definitely – unpleasant. It was Throckmartin – but about him was something disturbingly unlike the man I had known long so well and to whom and to whose little party I had bidden farewell less than a month before I myself had sailed for these seas. He had married only a few weeks before, Edith, the daughter of Professor William Frazier, younger by at least a decade than he but at one with him in his ideals and as much in love, if it were possible, as Throckmartin. By virtue of her father’s training a wonderful assistant, by virtue of her own sweet, sound heart a – I use the word in its olden sense – lover. With his equally youthful associate Dr. Charles Stanton and a Swedish woman, Thora Halversen, who had been Edith Throckmartin’s nurse from babyhood, they had set forth for the Nan-Matal, that extraordinary group of island ruins clustered along the eastern shore of Ponape in the Carolines.

I knew that he had planned to spend at least a year among these ruins, not only of Ponape but of Lele – twin centers of a colossal riddle of humanity, a weird flower of civilization that blossomed ages before the seeds of Egypt were sown; of whose arts we know little enough and of whose science nothing. He had carried with him unusually complete equipment for the work he had expected to do and which, he hoped, would be his monument.

What then had brought Throckmartin to Port Moresby, and what was that change I had sensed in him?

Hurrying down to the lower deck I found him with the purser. As I spoke he turned, thrust out to me an eager hand – and then I saw what was that difference that had so moved me. He knew, of course by my silence and involuntary shrinking the shock my closer look had given me. His eyes filled; he turned brusquely from the purser, hesitated – then hurried off to his stateroom.

“’E looks rather queer – eh?” said the purser. “Know ’im well, sir? Seems to ’ave given you quite a start.”

I made some reply and went slowly up to my chair. There I sat, composed my mind and tried to define what it was that had shaken me so. Now it came to me. The old Throckmartin was on the eve of his venture just turned forty, lithe, erect, muscular; his controlling expression one of enthusiasm, of intellectual keenness, of – what shall I say – expectant search. His always questioning brain had stamped its vigor upon his face.

But the Throckmartin I had seen below was one who had borne some scaring shock of mingled rapture and horror; some soul cataclysm that in its climax had remoulded, deep from within, his face, setting on it seal of wedded ecstasy and despair; as though indeed these two had come to him hand in hand, taken possession of him and departing left behind, ineradicably, their linked shadows!

Yes – it was that which appalled. For how could rapture and horror, Heaven and Hell mix, clasp hands – kiss?

Yet these were what in closest embrace lay on Throckmartin’s face!

Deep in thought, subconsciously with relief, I watched the shore line sink behind; welcomed the touch of the wind of the free seas. I had hoped, and within the hope was an inexplicable shrinking that I would meet Throckmartin at lunch. He did not come down, and I was sensible of deliverance within my disappointment. All that afternoon I lounged about uneasily but still he kept to his cabin – and within me was no strength to summon him. Nor did he appear at dinner.

Dusk and night fell swiftly. I was warm and went back to my deck-chair. The Southern Queen was rolling to a disquieting swell and I had the place to myself.

Over the heavens was a canopy of cloud, glowing faintly and testifying to the moon riding behind it. There was much phosphorescence. Fitfully before the ship and at her sides arose those stranger little swirls of mist that swirl up from the Southern Ocean like breath of sea monsters, whirl for an instant and disappear.

Suddenly the deck door opened and through it came Throckmartin. He paused uncertainly, looked up at the sky with a curiously eager, intent gaze, hesitated, then closed the door behind him.

“Throck,” I called. “Come! It’s Goodwin.”

He made his way to me.

“Throck,” I said, wasting no time in preliminaries. “What’s wrong? Can I help you?”

I felt his body grow tense.

“I’m going to Melbourne, Goodwin,” he answered. “I need a few things – need them urgently. And more men – white men—”

He stopped abruptly; rose from his chair, gazed intently toward the north. I followed his gaze. Far, far away the moon had broken through the clouds. Almost on the horizon, you could see the faint luminescence of it upon the smooth sea. The distant patch of light quivered and shook. The clouds thickened again and it was gone. The ship raced on southward, swiftly.

Throckmartin dropped into his chair. He lighted a cigarette with a hand that trembled; then turned to me with abrupt resolution.

“Goodwin,” he said. “I do need help. If ever man needed it, I do. Goodwin – can you imagine yourself in another world, alien, unfamiliar, a world of terror, whose unknown joy is its greatest terror of all; you all alone there, a stranger! As such a man would need help, so I need—”

He paused abruptly and arose; the cigarette dropped from his fingers. The moon had again broken through the clouds, and this time much nearer. Not a mile away was the patch of light that it threw upon the waves. Back of it, to the rim of the sea was a lane of moonlight; a gigantic gleaming serpent racing over the edge of the world straight and surely toward the ship.

Throckmartin stiffened to it as a pointer does to a hidden covey. To me from him pulsed a thrill of horror – but horror tinged with an unfamiliar, an infernal joy. It came to me and passed away – leaving me trembling with its shock of bitter sweet.

He bent forward, all his soul in his eyes. The moon path swept closer, closer still. It was now less than half a mile away. From it the ship fled – almost as though pursued. Down upon it, swift and straight, a radiant torrent cleaving the waves, raced the moon stream.

“Good God!” breathed Throckmartin, and if ever the words were a prayer and an invocation they were.

And then, for the first time – I saw – it!

The moon path stretched to the horizon and was bordered by darkness. It was as though the clouds above had been parted to form a lane – drawn aside like curtains or as the waters of the Red Sea were held back to let the hosts of Israel through. On each side of the stream was the black shadow cast by the folds of the high canopies And straight as a road between the opaque walls gleamed, shimmered, and danced the shining, racing, rapids of the moonlight.

Far, it seemed immeasurably far, along this stream of silver fire I sensed, rather than saw, something coming. It drew first into sight as a deeper glow within the light. On and on it swept toward us – an opalescent mistiness that sped with the suggestion of some winged creature in arrowed flight. Dimly there crept into my mind memory of the Dyak legend of the winged messenger of Buddha – the Akla bird whose feathers are woven of the moon rays, whose heart is a living opal, whose wings in flight echo the crystal clear music of the white stars – but whose beak is of frozen flame and shreds the souls of unbelievers.

Closer it drew and now there came to me sweet, insistent tinklings – like pizzicati on violins of glass; crystal clear; diamonds melting into sounds!

Now the Thing was close to the end of the white path; close up to the barrier of darkness still between the ship and the sparkling head of the moon stream. Now it beat up against that barrier as a bird against the bars of its cage. It whirled with shimmering plumes, with swirls of lacy light, with spirals of living vapor. It held within it odd, unfamiliar gleams as of shifting mother-of-pearl. Coruscations and glittering atoms drifted through it as though it drew them from the rays that bathed it.

Nearer and nearer it came, borne on the sparkling waves, and ever thinner shrank the protecting wall of shadow between it and us. Within the mistiness was a core, a nucleus of intenser light – veined, opaline, effulgent, intensely alive. And above it, tangled in the plumes and spirals that throbbed and whirled were seven glowing lights.

Through all the incessant but strangely ordered movement of the – thing – these lights held firm and steady. They were seven – like seven little moons. One was of a pearly pink, one of a delicate nacreous blue, one of lambent saffron, one of the emerald you see in the shallow waters of tropic isles; a deathly white; a ghostly amethyst; and one of the silver that is seen only when the flying fish leap beneath the moon.

The tinkling music was louder still. It pierced the ears with a shower of tiny lances; it made the heart beat jubilantly – and checked it dolorously. It closed the throat with a throb of rapture and gripped it tight with the hand of infinite sorrow!

Came to me now a murmuring cry, stilling the crystal notes. It was articulate – but as though from something utterly foreign to this world. The ear took the cry and translated with conscious labor into the sounds of earth. And even as it compassed, the brain shrank from it irresistibly, and simultaneously it seemed reached toward it with irresistible eagerness.

Throckmartin strode toward the front of the deck, straight toward the vision, now but a few yards away from the stern. His face had lost all human semblance. Utter agony and utter ecstasy – there they were side by side, not resisting each other; unholy inhuman companions blending into a look that none of God’s creatures should wear – and deep, deep as his soul! A devil and a God dwelling harmoniously side by side! So must Satan, newly fallen, still divine, seeing heaven and contemplating hell, have appeared.

And then – swiftly the moon path faded! The clouds swept over the sky as though a hand had drawn them together. Up from the south came a roaring squall. As the moon vanished what I had seen vanished with it – blotted out as an image on a magic lantern; the tinkling ceased abruptly – leaving a silence like that which follows an abrupt thunder clap. There was nothing about us but silence and blackness!

Through me passed a trembling as one who has stood on the very verge of the gulf wherein the men of the Louisades says lurks the fisher of the souls of men, and has been plucked back by sheerest chance.

Throckmartin passed an arm around me.

“It is as I thought,” he said. In his voice was a new note; the calm certainty that has swept aside a waiting terror of the unknown. “Now I know! Come with me to my cabin, old friend. For now that you too have seen I can tell you” – he hesitated – “what it was you saw,” he ended.

As we passed through the door we met the ship’s first officer. Throckmartin composed his face into at least a semblance of normality.

“Going to have much of a storm?” he asked.

“Yes,” said the mate. “Probably all the way to Melbourne.”

Throckmartin straightened as though with a new thought. He gripped the officer’s sleeve eagerly.

“You mean at least cloudy weather – for” – he hesitated – “for the next three nights, say?”

“And for three more,” replied the mate.

“Thank God!” cried Throckmartin, and I think I never heard such relief and hope as was in his voice.

The sailor stood amazed. “Thank God?” he repeated. “Thank – what d’ye mean?”

But Throckmartin was moving onward to his cabin. I started to follow. The first officer stopped me.

“Your friend,” he said, “is he ill?”

“The sea!” I answered hurriedly. “He’s not used to it. I am going to look after him.”

Doubt and disbelief were plain in the seaman’s eyes but I hurried on. For I knew now that Throckmartin was ill indeed – but with a sickness the ship’s doctor nor any other could heal.

— II —

“DEAD! ALL DEAD!”

He was sitting, face in hands, on the side of his berth as I entered. He had taken off his coat.

“Throck,” I cried. “What was it? What are you flying from, man? Where is your wife – and Stanton?”

“Dead!” he replied monotonously. “Dead! All dead!” Then as I recoiled from him – “All dead. Edith, Stanton, Thora – dead – or worse. And Edith in the Moon Pool – with them – drawn by what you saw on the moon path – that has put its brand upon me – and follows me!”

He ripped open his shirt.

“Look at this,” he said. Around his chest, above his heart, the skin was white as pearl. This whiteness was sharply defined against the healthy tint of the body. It circled him with an even cincture about two inches wide.

“Burn it!” he said, and offered me his cigarette. I drew back. He gestured – peremptorily. I pressed the glowing end of the cigarette into the ribbon of white flesh. He did not flinch nor was there odor of burning nor, as I drew the little cylinder away, any mark upon the whiteness.

“Feel it!” he commanded again. I placed my fingers upon the band. It was cold – like frozen marble.

He drew his shirt around him.

“Two things you have seen,” he said. “It – and its mark. Seeing, you must believe my story. Goodwin, I tell you again that my wife is dead – or worse – I do not know; the prey of – what you saw; so, too, is Stanton; so Thora. How—”

Tears rolled down the seared face.

“Why did God let it conquer us? Why did He let it take my Edith?” he cried in utter bitterness. “Are there things stronger than God, do you think, Walter?”

I hesitated.

“Are there? Are there?” His wild eyes searched me.

“I do not know just how you define God,” I managed at last through my astonishment to make answer. “If you mean the will to know, working through science—”

He waved me aside impatiently.

“Science,” he said. “What is our science against – that? Or against the science of whatever devils that made it – or made the way for it to enter this world of ours?”

With an effort he regained control.

“Goodwin,” he said, “do you know at all of the ruins on the Carolines; the cyclopean, megalithic cities and harbors of Ponape and Lele, of Kusaie, of Ruk and Hogolu, and a score of other islets there? Particularly, do you know of the Nan-Matal and the Metalanim?”

“Of the Metalanim I have heard and seen photographs,” I said. “They call it, don’t they, the Lost Venice of the Pacific?”

“Look at this map,” said Throckmartin. “That,” he went on, “is Christian’s chart of Metalanim Harbor and the Nan-Matal. Do you see the rectangles marked Nan-Tauach?”

“Yes,” I said.

“There,” he said, “under those walls is the Moon Pool and the seven gleaming lights that raise the Dweller in the Pool, and the altar and shrine of the Dweller. And there in the Moon Pool with it lie Edith and Stanton and Thora.”

“The Dweller in the Moon Pool?” I repeated half-incredulously.

“The Thing you saw,” said Throckmartin solemnly.

A solid sheet of rain swept the ports, and the Southern Queen began to roll on the rising swells. Throckmartin drew another deep breath of relief, and drawing aside a curtain peered out into the night. Its blackness seemed to reassure him. At any rate, when he sat again he was entirely calm.

“There are no more wonderful ruins in the world,” he began almost casually. “They take in some fifty islets and cover with their intersecting canals and lagoons about twelve square miles. Who built them? None knows. When were they built? Ages before the memory of present man, that is sure. Ten thousand, twenty thousand, a hundred thousand years ago – the last more likely.

“All these islets, Walter, are squared, and their shores are frowning seawalls of gigantic basalt blocks hewn and put in place by the hands of ancient man. Each inner water-front is faced with a terrace of those basalt blocks which stand out six feet above the shallow canals that meander between them. On the islets behind these walls are time-shattered fortresses, palaces, terraces, pyramids; immense courtyards strewn with ruins – and all so old that they seem to wither the eyes of those who look on them.

“There has been a great subsidence. You can stand out of Metalanim Harbor for three miles and look down upon the tops of similar monolithic structures and walls twenty feet below you in the water.

“And all about, strung on their canals, are the bulwarked islets with their enigmatic walls peering through the dense growths of mangroves – dead, deserted for incalculable ages; shunned by those who live near.

“You as a botanist are familiar with the evidence that a vast shadowy continent existed in the Pacific – a continent that was not rent asunder by volcanic forces as was that legendary one of Atlantis in the Eastern Ocean. [01] My work in Java, in Papua, and in the Ladrones had set my mind upon this Pacific lost land. Just as the Azores are believed to be the last high peaks of Atlantis, so hints came to me steadily that Ponape and Lele and their basalt bulwarked islets were the last points of the slowly sunken western land clinging still to the sunlight, and had been the last refuge and sacred places of the rulers of that race which had lost their immemorial home under the rising waters of the Pacific.

“I believed that under these ruins I might find the evidence that I sought.

“My – my wife and I had talked before we were married of making this our great work. After the honeymoon we prepared for the expedition. Stanton was as enthusiastic as ourselves. We sailed, as you know, last May for fulfillment of my dreams.

“At Ponape we selected, not without difficulty, workmen to help us – diggers. I had to make extraordinary inducements before I could get together my force. Their beliefs are gloomy, these Ponapeans. They people their swamps, their forests, their mountains, and shores, with malignant spirits – ani, they call them. And they are afraid – bitterly afraid of the isles of ruins and what they think the ruins hide. I do not wonder – now!

“When they were told where they were to go, and how long we expected to stay, they murmured. Those who, at last, were tempted made what I thought then merely a superstitious proviso that they were to be allowed to go away on the three nights of the full moon. Would to God we had heeded them and gone too!”

“We passed into Metalanim Harbor. Off to our left – a mile away arose a massive quadrangle. Its walls were all of forty feet high and hundreds of feet on each side. As we drew by, our natives grew very silent; watched it furtively, fearfully. I knew it for the ruins that are called Nan-Tauach, the ‘place of frowning walls.’ And at the silence of my men I recalled what Christian had written of this place; of how he had come upon its ‘ancient platforms and tetragonal enclosures of stonework; its wonder of tortuous alleyways and labyrinth of shallow canals; grim masses of stonework peering out from behind verdant screens; cyclopean barricades,’ and of how, when he had turned ‘into its ghostly shadows, straight-way the merriment of guides was hushed and conversation died down to whispers.’”

He was silent for a little time.

“Of course I wanted to pitch our camp there,” he went on again quietly, “but I soon gave up that idea. The natives were panic-stricken – threatened to turn back. ‘No,’ they said, ‘too great ani there. We go to any other place – but not there.’

“We finally picked for our base the islet called Uschen-Tau. It was close to the isle of desire, but far enough away from it to satisfy our men. There was an excellent camping-place and a spring of fresh water. We pitched our tents, and in a couple of days the work was in full swing.”

— III —

THE MOON ROCK

“I do not intend to tell you now,” Throckmartin continued, “the results of the next two weeks, nor of what we found. Later – if I am allowed, I will lay all that before you. It is sufficient to say that at the end of those two weeks I had found confirmation for many of my theories.

“The place, for all its decay and desolation, had not infected us with any touch of morbidity – that is not Edith, Stanton, or myself. But Thora was very unhappy. She was a Swede, as you know, and in her blood ran the beliefs and superstitions of the Northland – some of them so strangely akin to those of this far southern land; beliefs of spirits of mountain and forest and water werewolves and beings malign. From the first she showed a curious sensitivity to what, I suppose, may be called the ‘influences’ of the place. She said it ‘smelled’ of ghosts and warlocks.

“I laughed at her then—

“Two weeks slipped by, and at their end the spokesman for our natives came to us. The next night was the full of the moon, he said. He reminded me of my promise. They would go back to their village in the morning; they would return after the third night, when the moon had begun to wane. They left us sundry charms for our ‘protection,’ and solemnly cautioned us to keep as far away as possible from Nan-Tauach during their absence. Half-exasperated, half-amused I watched them go.

“No work could be done without them, of course, so we decided to spend the days of their absence junketing about the southern islets of the group. We marked down several spots for subsequent exploration, and on the morning of the third day set forth along the east face of the breakwater for our camp on Uschen-Tau, planning to have everything in readiness for the return of our men the next day.

“We landed just before dusk, tired and ready for our cots. It was only a little after ten o’clock that Edith awakened me.

“‘Listen!’ she said. ‘Lean over with your ear close to the ground!’

“I did so, and seemed to hear, far, far below, as though coming up from great distances, a faint chanting. It gathered strength, died down, ended; began, gathered volume, faded away into silence.

“‘It’s the waves rolling on rocks somewhere,’ I said. ‘We’re probably over some ledge of rock that carries the sound.’

“‘It’s the first time I’ve heard it,’ replied my wife doubtfully. We listened again. Then through the dim rhythms, deep beneath us, another sound came. It drifted across the lagoon that lay between us and Nan-Tauach in little tinkling waves. It was music – of a sort; I won’t describe the strange effect it had upon me. You’ve felt it—”

“You mean on the deck?” I asked. Throckmartin nodded.

“I went to the flap of the tent,” he continued, “and peered out. As I did so Stanton lifted his flap and walked out into the moonlight, looking over to the other islet and listening. I called to him.

“‘That’s the queerest sound!’ he said. He listened again. ‘Crystalline! Like little notes of translucent glass. Like the bells of crystal on the sistrums of Isis at Dendarah Temple,’ he added half-dreamily. We gazed intently at the island. Suddenly, on the sea-wall, moving slowly, rhythmically, we saw a little group of lights. Stanton laughed.

“‘The beggars!’ he exclaimed. ‘That’s why they wanted to get away, is it? Don’t you see, Dave, it’s some sort of a festival – rites of some kind that they hold during the full moon! That’s why they were so eager to have us keep away, too.’

“The explanation seemed good. I felt a curious sense of relief, although I had not been sensible of any oppression.

“‘Let’s slip over,’ suggested Stanton – but I would not.

“‘They’re a difficult lot as it is,’ I said. ‘If we break into one of their religious ceremonies they’ll probably never forgive us. Let’s keep out of any family party where we haven’t been invited.’

“‘That’s so,’ agreed Stanton.

“The strange tinkling rose and fell, rose and fell—

“‘There’s something – something very unsettling about it,’ said Edith at last soberly. ‘I wonder what they make those sounds with. They frighten me half to death, and, at the same time, they make me feel as though some enormous rapture were just around the corner.’

“‘It’s devilish uncanny!’ broke in Stanton.

“And as he spoke the flap of Thora’s tent was raised and out into the moonlight strode the old Swede. She was the great Norse type – tall, deep-breasted, molded on the old Viking lines. Her sixty years had slipped from her. She looked like some ancient priestess of Odin.

“She stood there, her eyes wide, brilliant, staring. She thrust her head forward toward Nan-Tauach, regarding the moving lights; she listened. Suddenly she raised her arms and made a curious gesture to the moon. It was – an archaic – movement; she seemed to drag it from remote antiquity – yet in it was a strange suggestion of power, Twice she repeated this gesture and – the tinklings died away! She turned to us.

“‘Go!’ she said, and her voice seemed to come from far distances. ‘Go from here – and quickly! Go while you may. It has called—’ She pointed to the islet. ‘It knows you are here. It waits!’ she wailed. ‘It beckons – the – the—”

“She fell at Edith’s feet, and over the lagoon came again the tinklings, now with a quicker note of jubilance – almost of triumph.

“We watched beside her throughout the night. The sounds from Nan-Tauach continued until about an hour before moon-set. In the morning Thora awoke, none the worse, apparently. She had had bad dreams, she said. She could not remember what they were – except that they had warned her of danger. She was oddly sullen, and throughout the morning her gaze returned again and again half-fascinatedly, half-wonderingly to the neighboring isle.

“That afternoon the natives returned. And that night on Nan-Tauach the silence was unbroken nor were there lights nor sign of life.

“You will understand, Goodwin, how the occurrences I have related would excite the scientific curiosity. We rejected immediately, of course, any explanation admitting the supernatural.

“Our – symptoms let me call them – could all very easily be accounted for. It is unquestionable that the vibrations created by certain musical instruments have definite and sometimes extraordinary effect upon the nervous system. We accepted this as the explanation of the reactions we had experienced, hearing the unfamiliar sounds. Thora’s nervousness, her superstitious apprehensions, had wrought her up to a condition of semi-somnambulistic hysteria. Science could readily explain her part in the night’s scene.

“We came to the conclusion that there must be a passageway between Ponape and Nan-Tauach known to the natives – and used by them during their rites. We decided that on the next departure of our laborers we would set forth immediately to Nan-Tauach. We would investigate during the day, and at evening my wife and Thora would go back to camp, leaving Stanton and me to spend the night on the island, observing from some safe hiding-place what might occur.

“The moon waned; appeared crescent in the west; waxed slowly toward the full. Before the men left us they literally prayed us to accompany them. Their importunities only made us more eager to see what it was that, we were now convinced, they wanted to conceal from us. At least that was true of Stanton and myself. It was not true of Edith. She was thoughtful, abstracted – reluctant.

“When the men were out of sight around the turn of the harbor, we took our boat and made straight for Nan-Tauach. Soon its mighty sea-wall towered above us. We passed through the water-gate with its gigantic hewn prisms of basalt and landed beside a half-submerged pier. In front of us stretched a series of giant steps leading into a vast court strewn with fragments of fallen pillars. In the center of the court, beyond the shattered pillars, rose another terrace of basalt blocks, concealing, I knew, still another enclosure.

“And now, Walter, for the better understanding of what follows – and – and—” he hesitated. “Should you decide later to return with me or, if I am taken, to – to – follow us – listen carefully to my description of this place: Nan-Tauach is literally three rectangles. The first rectangle is the sea-wall, built up of monoliths – hewn and squared, twenty feet wide at the top. To get to the gateway in the sea-wall you pass along the canal marked on the map between Nan-Tauach and the islet named Tau. The entrance to the canal is bidden by dense thickets of mangroves; once through these the way is clear. The steps lead up from the landing of the sea-gate through the entrance to the courtyard.

“This courtyard is surrounded by another basalt wall, rectangular, following with mathematical exactness the march of the outer barricades. The sea-wall is from thirty to forty feet high – originally it must have been much higher, but there has been subsidence in parts. The wall of the first enclosure is fifteen feet across the top and its height varies from twenty to fifty feet – here, too, the gradual sinking of the land has caused portions of it to fall.

“Within this courtyard is the second enclosure. Its terrace, of the same basalt as the outer walls, is about twenty feet high. Entrance is gained to it by many breaches which time has made in its stonework. This is the inner court, the heart of Nan-Tauach! There lies the great central vault with which is associated the one name of living being that has come to us out of the mists of the past. The natives say it was the treasure-house of Chau-ta-leur, a mighty king who reigned long ‘before their fathers.’ As Chan is the ancient Ponapean word both for sun and king, the name means, without doubt, ‘place of the sun king.’ It is a memory of a dynastic name of the race that ruled the Pacific continent, now vanished – just as the rulers of ancient Crete took the name of Minos and the rulers of Egypt the name of Pharaoh.

“And opposite this place of the sun king is the moon rock that hides the Moon Pool.

“It was Stanton who discovered the moon rock. We had been inspecting the inner courtyard; Edith and Thora were getting together our lunch. I came out of the vault of Chau-ta-leur to find Stanton before a part of the terrace studying it wonderingly.

“‘What do you make of this?’ he asked me as I came up. He pointed to the wall. I followed his finger and saw a slab of stone about fifteen feet high and ten wide. At first all I noticed was the exquisite nicety with which its edges joined the blocks about it. Then I realized that its color was subtly different – tinged with gray and of a smooth, peculiar – deadness.

“‘Looks more like calcite than basalt,’ I said. I touched it and withdrew my hand quickly for at the contact every nerve in my arm tingled as though a shock of frozen electricity had passed through it. It was not cold as we know cold. It was a chill force – the phrase I have used – frozen electricity – describes it better than anything else. Stanton looked at me oddly.

“‘So you felt it too,’ he said. ‘I was wondering whether I was developing hallucinations like Thora. Notice, by the way, that the blocks beside it are quite warm beneath the sun.’

“We examined the slab eagerly. Its edges were cut as though by an engraver of jewels. They fitted against the neighboring blocks in almost a hair-line. Its base was slightly curved, and fitted as closely as top and sides upon the huge stones on which it rested. And then we noted that these stones had been hollowed to follow the line of the gray stone’s foot. There was a semicircular depression running from one side of the slab to the other. It was as though the gray rock stood in the center of a shallow cup – revealing half, covering half. Something about this hollow attracted me. I reached down and felt it. Goodwin, although the balance of the stones that formed it, like all the stones of the courtyard, were rough and age-worn – this was as smooth, as even surfaced as though it had just left the hands of the polisher.

“‘It’s a door!’ exclaimed Stanton. ‘It swings around in that little cup. That’s what makes the hollow so smooth.’

“‘Maybe you’re right,’ I replied. ‘But how the devil can we open it?’

“We went over the slab again – pressing upon its edges, thrusting against its sides. During one of those efforts I happened to look up – and cried out. A foot above and on each side of the corner of the gray rock’s lintel was a slight convexity, visible only from the angle at which my gaze struck it.

“We carried with us a small scaling-ladder and up this I went. The bosses were apparently nothing more than chiseled curvatures in the stone. I laid my hand on the one I was examining, and drew it back sharply. In my palm, at the base of my thumb, I had felt the same shock that I had in touching the slab below. I put my hand back. The impression came from a spot not more than an inch wide. I went carefully over the entire convexity, and six times more the chill ran through my arm. There were seven circles an inch wide in the curved place, each of which communicated the precise sensation I have described. The convexity on the opposite side of the slab gave exactly the same results. But no amount of touching or of pressing these spots singly or in any combination gave the slightest promise of motion to the slab itself.

“‘And yet – they’re what open it,’ said Stanton positively.

“‘Why do you say that?’ I asked.

“‘I – don’t know,’ he answered hesitatingly. ‘But something tells me so. Throck,’ he went on half earnestly, half laughingly, ‘the purely scientific part of me is fighting the purely human part of me. The scientific part is urging me to find some way to get that slab either down or open. The human part is just as strongly urging me to do nothing of the sort and get away while I can!’

“He laughed again – shamefacedly.

“‘Which shall it be?’ he asked – and I thought that in his tone the human side of him was ascendant.

“‘It will probably stay as it is – unless we blow it to bits,’ I said.

“‘I thought of that,’ he answered, ‘and I wouldn’t dare,’ he added soberly enough. And even as I had spoken there came to me the same feeling that he had expressed. It was as though something passed out of the gray rock that struck my heart as a hand strikes an impious lip. We turned away – uneasily, and faced Thora coming through a breach on the terrace.

“‘Miss Edith wants you quick,’ she began – and stopped. Her eyes went past me to the gray rock. Her body grew rigid; she took a few stiff steps forward and then ran straight to it. She cast herself upon its breast, hands and face pressed against it; we heard her scream as though her very soul were being drawn from her – and watched her fall at its foot. As we picked her up I saw steal from her face the look I had observed when first we heard the crystal music of Nan-Tauach – that unhuman mingling of opposites!”

— IV —

THE FIRST VANISHINGS

“We carried Thora back, down to where Edith was waiting. We told her what had happened and what we had found. She listened gravely, and as we finished Thora sighed and opened her eyes.

“‘I would like to see the stone,’ she said. ‘Charles, you stay here with Thora.’ We passed through the outer court silently – and stood before the rock. She touched it, drew back her hand as I had; thrust it forward again resolutely and held it there. She seemed to be listening. Then she turned to me.

“‘David,’ said my wife, and the wistfulness in her voice hurt me – ‘David, would you be very, very disappointed if we went from here – without trying to find out any more about it – would you?’

“Walter, I never wanted anything so much in my life as I wanted to learn what that rock concealed. Nevertheless, I tried to master my desire, and I answered – ‘Edith, not a bit if you want us to do it.’

“She read my struggle in my eyes. She turned back toward the gray rock. I saw a shiver pass through her. I felt a tinge of remorse and pity!

“‘Edith,’ I exclaimed, ‘we’ll go!’

“She looked at me again. ‘Science is a jealous mistress,’ she quoted. ‘No, after all it may be just fancy. At any rate, you can’t run away. No! But, Dave, I’m going to stay too!’

“And there was no changing her decision. As we neared the others she laid a hand on my arm.

“‘Dave,’ she said, ‘if there should be something – well – inexplicable tonight – something that seems – too dangerous – will you promise to go back to our own islet tomorrow, if we can – and wait until the natives return?’

“I promised eagerly – the desire to stay and see what came with the night was like a fire within me.

“We picked a place about five hundred feet away from the steps leading into the outer court.

“The spot we had selected was well hidden. We could not be seen, and yet we had a clear view of the stairs and the gateway. We settled down just before dusk to wait for whatever might come. I was nearest the giant steps; next me Edith; then Thora, and last Stanton.

“Night fell. After a time the eastern sky began to lighten, and we knew that the moon was rising; grew lighter still, and the orb peeped over the sea; swam into full sight. I glanced at Edith and then at Thora. My wife was intently listening. Thora sat, as she had since we had placed ourselves, elbows on knees, her hands covering her face.

“And then from the moonlight flooding us there dripped down on me a great drowsiness. Sleep seemed to seep from the rays and fall upon my eyes, closing them – closing them inexorably. Edith’s hand in mine relaxed. Stanton’s head fell upon his breast and his body swayed drunkenly. I tried to rise – to fight against the profound desire for slumber that pressed on me.

“And as I fought, Thora raised her head as though listening; and turned toward the gateway. There was infinite despair in her face – and expectancy. I tried again to rise – and a surge of sleep rushed over me. Dimly, as I sank within it, I heard a crystalline chiming; raised my lids once more with a supreme effort.

“Thora, bathed in light, was standing at the top of the stairs.

“Sleep took me for its very own – swept me into the heart of oblivion!

“Dawn was breaking when I wakened. Recollection rushed back; I thrust a panic-stricken hand out toward Edith; touched her and my heart gave a great leap of thankfulness. She stirred, sat up, rubbing dazed eyes. Stanton lay on his side, back toward us, head in arms.

“Edith looked at me laughingly. ‘Heavens! What sleep!’ she said. Memory came to her.

“‘What happened?’ she whispered. ‘What made us sleep like that?’

“Stanton awoke.

“‘What’s the matter!’ he exclaimed. ‘You look as though you’ve been seeing ghosts.’

“Edith caught my hands.

“‘Where’s Thora?’ she cried. Before I could answer she had run out into the open, calling.

“‘Thora was taken,’ was all I could say to Stanton, ‘together we went to my wife, now standing beside the great stone steps, looking up fearfully at the gateway into the terraces. There I told them what I had seen before sleep had drowned me. And together then we ran up the stairs, through the court and to the gray rock.

“The slab was closed as it had been the day before, nor was there trace of its having opened. No trace? Even as I thought this Edith dropped to her knees before it and reached toward something lying at its foot. It was a little piece of gay silk. I knew it for part of the kerchief Thora wore about her hair. She lifted the fragment. It had been cut from the kerchief as though by a razor-edge; a few threads ran from it – down toward the base of the slab; ran on to the base of the gray rock and – under it!

“The gray rock was a door! And it had opened and Thora had passed through it!

“I think that for the next few minutes we all were a little insane. We beat upon that portal with our hands, with stones and sticks. At last reason came back to us.

“Goodwin, during the next two hours we tried every way in our power to force entrance through the slab. The rock resisted our drills. We tried explosions at the base with charges covered by rock. They made not the slightest impression on the surface, expending their force, of course, upon the slighter resistance of their coverings.

“Afternoon found us hopeless. Night was coming on and we would have to decide our course of action. I wanted to go to Ponape for help. But Edith objected that this would take hours and after we had reached there it would be impossible to persuade our men to return with us that night, if at all. What then was left? Clearly only one of two choices: to go back to our camp, wait for our men, and on their return try to persuade them to go with us to Nan-Tauach. But this would mean the abandonment of Thora for at least two days. We could not do it; it would have been too cowardly.

“The other choice was to wait where we were for night to come; to wait for the rock to open as it had the night before, and to make a sortie through it for Thora before it could close again.

“Our path lay clear before us. We had to spend that night on Nan-Tauach!

“We had, of course, discussed the sleep phenomena very fully. If our theory that lights, sounds, and Thora’s disappearance were linked with secret religious rites of the natives, the logical inference was that the slumber had been produced by them, perhaps by vapors – you know as well as I, what extraordinary knowledge these Pacific peoples have of such things. Or the sleep might have been simply a coincidence and produced by emanations either gaseous or from plants, natural causes which had happened to coincide in their effects with the other manifestations. We made some rough and ready but effective respirators.

“As dusk fell we looked over our weapons. Edith was an excellent shot with both rifle and pistol. We had decided that my wife was to remain in the hiding-place. Stanton would take up a station on the far side of the stairway and I would place myself opposite him on the side near Edith. The place I picked out was less than two hundred feet from her, and I could reassure myself now and then as to her safety as it looked down upon the hollow wherein she crouched. From our respective stations Stanton and I could command the gateway entrance. His position gave him also a glimpse of the outer courtyard.

“A faint glow in the sky heralded the moon. Stanton and I took our places. The moon dawn increased rapidly; the disk swam up, and in a moment it was shining in full radiance upon ruins and sea.

“As it rose there came a curious little sighing sound from the inner terrace. Stanton straightened up and stared intently through the gateway, rifle ready.

“‘Stanton, what do you see?’ I called cautiously. He waved a silencing hand. I turned my head to look at Edith. A shock ran through me. She lay upon her side. Her face, grotesque with its nose and mouth covered by the respirator, was turned full toward the moon. She was again in deepest sleep!

“As I turned again to call to Stanton, my eyes swept the head of the steps and stopped, fascinated. For the moonlight had thickened. It seemed to be – curdled – there; and through it ran little gleams and veins of shimmering white fire. A languor passed through me. It was not the ineffable drowsiness of the preceding night. It was a sapping of all will to move. I tried to cry out to Stanton. I had not even the will to move my lips. Goodwin – I could not even move my eyes!

“Stanton was in the range of my fixed vision. I watched him leap up the steps and move toward the gateway. The curdled radiance seemed to await him. He stepped into it – and was lost to my sight.

“For a dozen heart beats there was silence. Then a rain of tinklings that set the pulses racing with joy and at once checked them with tiny fingers of ice – and ringing through them Stanton’s voice from the courtyard – a great cry – a scream – filled with ecstasy insupportable and horror unimaginable! And once more there was silence. I strove to burst the bonds that held me. I could not. Even my eyelids were fixed. Within them my eyes, dry and aching, burned.

“Then Goodwin – I first saw the – inexplicable! The crystalline music swelled. Where I sat I could take in the gateway and its basalt portals, rough and broken, rising to the top of the wall forty feet above, shattered, ruined portals – unclimbable. From this gateway an intenser light began to flow. It grew, it gushed, and out of it walked Stanton.

“Stanton! But – God! What a vision!”

A deep tremor shook him. I waited – waited.

— V —

INTO THE MOON POOL

“Goodwin,” Throckmartin went on at last, “I can describe him only as a thing of living light. He radiated light; was filled with light; overflowed with it. A shining cloud whirled through and around him in radiant swirls, shimmering tentacles, luminescent, coruscating spirals.

“His face shone with a rapture too great to be borne by living man, and was shadowed with insuperable misery. It was as though it had been remoulded by the hand of God and the hand of Satan, working together and in harmony. You have seen that seal upon my own. But you have never seen it in the degree that Stanton bore it. The eyes were wide open and fixed, as though upon some inward vision of hell and heaven!

“The light that filled and surrounded him had a nucleus, a core – something shiftingly human shaped – that dissolved and changed, gathered itself, whirled through and beyond him and back again. And as its shining nucleus passed through him Stanton’s whole body pulsed radiance. As the luminescence moved, there moved above it, still and serene always, seven tiny globes of seven colors, like seven little moons.

“Then swiftly Stanton was lifted – levitated – up the unscalable wall and to its top. The glow faded from the moonlight, the tinkling music grew fainter. I tried again to move. The tears were running down now from my rigid lids and they brought relief to my tortured eyes.

“I have said my gaze was fixed. It was. But from the side, peripherally, it took in a part of the far wall of the outer enclosure. Ages seemed to pass and a radiance stole along it. Soon drifted into sight the figure that was Stanton. Far away he was – on the gigantic wall. But still I could see the shining spirals whirling jubilantly around and through him; felt rather than saw his tranced face beneath the seven moons. A swirl of crystal notes, and he had passed. And all the time, as though from some opened well of light, the courtyard gleamed and sent out silver fires that dimmed the moonrays, yet seemed strangely to be a part of them.

“At last the moon neared the horizon. There came a louder burst of sound; the second, and last, cry of Stanton, like an echo of his first! Again the soft sighing from the inner terrace. Then – utter silence!

“The light faded; the moon was setting and with a rush life and power to move returned to me. I made a leap for the steps, rushed up them, through the gateway and straight to the gray rock. It was closed – as I knew it would be. But did I dream it or did I hear, echoing through it as though from vast distances a triumphant shouting?

“I ran back to Edith. At my touch she wakened; looked at me wanderingly; raised herself on a hand.

“‘Dave!’ she said, ‘I slept – after all.’ She saw the despair on my face and leaped to her feet. ‘Dave!’ she cried. ‘What is it? Where’s Charles?’

“I lighted a fire before I spoke. Then I told her. And for the balance of that night we sat before the flames, arms around each other – like two frightened children.”

Abruptly Throckmartin held his hands out to me appealingly.

“Walter, old friend!” he cried. “Don’t look at me as though I were mad. It’s truth, absolute truth. Wait—” I comforted him as well as I could. After a little time he took up his story.

“Never,” he said, “did man welcome the sun as we did that morning. A soon as it had risen we went back to the courtyard. The walls whereon I had seen Stanton were black and silent. The terraces were as they had been. The gray slab was in its place. In the shallow hollow at its base was – nothing. Nothing – nothing was there anywhere on the islet of Stanton – not a trace.

“What were we to do? Precisely the same arguments that had kept us there the night before held good now – and doubly good. We could not abandon these two; could not go as long as there was the faintest hope of finding them – and yet for love of each other how could we remain? I loved my wife – how much I never knew until that day; and she loved me as deeply.

“‘It takes only one each night,’ she pleaded. ‘Beloved, let it take me.’

“I wept, Walter. We both wept.

“‘We will meet it together,’ she said. And it was thus at last that we arranged it.”

“That took great courage indeed, Throckmartin,” I interrupted. He looked at me eagerly.

“You do believe then?” he exclaimed.

“I believe,” I said. He pressed my hand with a grip that nearly crushed it.

“Now,” he told me. “I do not fear. If I – fail, you will follow with help?”

I promised.

“We talked it over carefully,” he went on, “bringing to bear all our power of analysis and habit of calm, scientific thought. We considered minutely the time element in the phenomena. Although the deep chanting began at the very moment of moonrise, fully five minutes had passed between its full lifting and the strange sighing sound from the inner terrace. I went back in memory over the happenings of the night before. At least ten minutes had intervened between the first heralding sigh and the intensification of the moonlight in the courtyard. And this glow grew for at least ten minutes more before the first burst of the crystal notes. Indeed, more than half an hour must have elapsed, I calculated, between the moment the moon showed above the horizon and the first delicate onslaught of the tinklings.

“‘Edith!’ I cried. ‘I think I have it! The gray rock opens five minutes after upon the moonrise. But whoever or whatever it is that comes through it must wait until the moon has risen higher, or else it must come from a distance. The thing to do is not to wait for it, but to surprise it before it passes out the door. We will go into the inner court early. You will take your rifle and pistol and hide yourself where you can command the opening – if the slab does open. The instant it opens I will enter. It’s our best chance, Edith. I think it’s our only one.’

“My wife demurred strongly. She wanted to go with me. But I convinced her that it was better for her to stand guard without, prepared to help me if I were forced again into the open by what lay behind the rock.

“At the half-hour before moonrise we went into the inner court. I took my place at the side of the gray rock. Edith crouched behind a broken pillar twenty feet away; slipped her rifle-barrel over it so that it would cover the opening.

“The minutes crept by. The darkness lessened and through the breaches of the terrace I watched the far sky softly lighten. With the first pale flush the silence of the place intensified. It deepened; became unbearably – expectant. The moon rose, showed the quarter, the half, then swam up into full sight like a great bubble.

“Its rays fell upon the wall before me and suddenly upon the convexities I have described seven little circles of light sprang out. They gleamed, glimmered, grew brighter – shone. The gigantic slab before me glowed with them, silver wavelets of phosphorescence pulsed over its surface and then – it turned as though on a pivot, sighing softly as it moved!

“With a word to Edith I flung myself through the opening. A tunnel stretched before me. It glowed with the same faint silvery radiance. Down it I raced. The passage turned abruptly, passed parallel to the walls of the outer courtyard and then once more led downward.

“The passage ended. Before me was a high vaulted arch. It seemed to open into space; a space filled with lambent, coruscating, many-colored mist whose brightness grew even as I watched. I passed through the arch and stopped in sheer awe!

“In front of me was a pool. It was circular, perhaps twenty feet wide. Around it ran a low, softly curved lip of glimmering silvery stone. Its water was palest blue. The pool with its silvery rim was like a great blue eye staring upward.

“Upon it streamed seven shafts of radiance. They poured down upon the blue eye like cylindrical torrents; they were like shining pillars of light rising from a sapphire floor.

“One was the tender pink of the pearl; one of the aurora’s green; a third a deathly white; the fourth the blue in mother-of-pearl; a shimmering column of pale amber; a beam of amethyst; a shaft of molten silver. Such are the colors of the seven lights that stream upon the Moon Pool. I drew closer, awestricken. The shafts did not illumine the depths. They played upon the surface and seemed there to diffuse, to melt into it. The Pool drank them?

“Through the water tiny gleams of phosphorescence began to dart, sparkles and coruscations of pale incandescence. And far, far below I sensed a movement, a shifting glow as of a radiant body slowly rising.

“I looked upward, following the radiant pillars to their source. Far above were seven shining globes, and it was from these that the rays poured. Even as I watched their brightness grew. They were like seven moons set high in some caverned heaven. Slowly their splendor increased, and with it the splendor of the seven beams streaming from them.

“I tore my gaze away and stared at the Pool. It had grown milky, opalescent. The rays gushing into it seemed to be filling it; it was alive with sparklings, scintillations, glimmerings. And the luminescence I had seen rising from its depths was larger, nearer!

“A swirl of mist floated up from its surface. It drifted within the embrace of the rosy beam and hung there for a moment. The beam seemed to embrace it, sending through it little shining corpuscles, tiny rosy spiralings. The mist absorbed the rays, was strengthened by them, gained substance. Another swirl sprang into the amber shaft, clung and fed there, moved swiftly toward the first and mingled with it. And now other swirls arose, here and there, too fast to be counted; hung poised in the embrace of the light streams; flashed and pulsed into each other.

“Thicker and thicker still they arose until over the surface of the Pool was a pulsating pillar of opalescent mist steadily growing stronger; drawing within it life from the seven beams falling upon it; drawing to it from below the darting, incandescent atoms of the Pool. Into its center was passing the luminescence rising from the far depths. And the pillar glowed, throbbed – began to send out questing swirls and tendrils—

“There forming before me was That which had walked with Stanton, which had taken Thora – the thing I had come to find!

“My brain sprang into action. My hand threw up the pistol and I fired shot after shot into the shining core.

“As I fired, it swayed and shook; gathered again. I slipped a second clip into the automatic and another idea coming to me took careful aim at one of the globes in the roof. From thence I knew came the force that shaped this Dweller in the Pool – from the pouring rays came its strength. If I could destroy them I could check its forming. I fired again and again. If I hit the globes I did no damage. The little motes in their beams danced with the motes in the mist, troubled. That was all.

“But up from the Pool like little bells, like tiny bursting bubbles of glass, swarmed the tinkling sounds – their pitch higher, all their sweetness lost, angry.

“And out from the Inexplicable swept a shining spiral.

“It caught me above the heart; wrapped itself around me. There rushed through me a mingled ecstasy and horror. Every atom of me quivered with delight and shrank with despair. There was nothing loathsome in it. But it was as though the icy soul of evil and the fiery soul of good had stepped together within me. The pistol dropped from my hand.

“So I stood while the Pool gleamed and sparkled; the streams of light grew more intense and the radiant Thing that held me gleamed and strengthened. Its shining core had shape – but a shape that my eyes and brain could not define. It was as though a being of another sphere should assume what it might of human semblance, but was not able to conceal that what human eyes saw was but a part of it. It was neither man nor woman; it was unearthly and androgynous. Even as I found its human semblance it changed. And still the mingled rapture and terror held me. Only in a little corner of my brain dwelt something untouched; something that held itself apart and watched. Was it the soul? I have never believed – and yet—

“Over the head of the misty body there sprang suddenly out seven little lights. Each was the color of the beam beneath which it rested. I knew now that the Dweller was – complete!

“I heard a scream. It was Edith’s voice. It came to me that she had heard the shots and followed me. I felt every faculty concentrate into a mighty effort. I wrenched myself free from the gripping tentacle and it swept back. I turned to catch Edith, and as I did so slipped – fell.

“The radiant shape above the Pool leaped swiftly – and straight into it raced Edith, arms outstretched to shield me from it! God!

“She threw herself squarely within its splendor,” he whispered. “It wrapped its shining self around her. The crystal tinklings burst forth jubilantly. The light filled her, ran through and around her as it had with Stanton; and dropped down upon her face – the look!

“But her rush had taken her to the very verge of the Moon Pool. She tottered; she fell – with the radiance still holding her, still swirling and winding around and through her – into the Moon Pool! She sank, and with her went – the Dweller!

“I dragged myself to the brink. Far down was a shining, many-colored nebulous cloud descending; out of it peered Edith’s face, disappearing; her eyes stared up at me – and she vanished!

“‘Edith!’ I cried again. ‘Edith, come back to me!’

“And then a darkness fell upon me. I remember running back through the shimmering corridors and out into the courtyard. Reason had left me. When it returned I was far out at sea in our boat wholly estranged from civilization. A day later I was picked up by the schooner in which I came to Port Moresby.

“I have formed a plan; you must hear it, Goodwin—” He fell upon his berth. I bent over him. Exhaustion and the relief of telling his story had been too much for him. He slept like the dead.

All that night I watched over him. When dawn broke I went to my room to get a little sleep myself. But my slumber was haunted.

The next day the storm was unabated. Throckmartin came to me at lunch. He had regained much of his old alertness.

“Come to my cabin,” he said. There, he stripped his shirt from him. “Something is happening,” he said. “The mark is smaller.” It was as he said.

“I’m escaping,” he whispered jubilantly, “Just let me get to Melbourne safely, and then we’ll see who’ll win! For, Walter, I’m not at all sure that Edith is dead – as we know death – nor that the others are. There is something outside experience there – some great mystery.”

And all that day he talked to me of his plans.

“There’s a natural explanation, of course,” he said. “My theory is that the moon rock is of some composition sensitive to the action of moon rays; somewhat as the metal selenium is to sun rays. The little circles over the top are, without doubt, its operating agency. When the light strikes them they release the mechanism that opens the slab, just as you can open doors with sun or electric light by an ingenious arrangement of selenium-cells. Apparently it takes the strength of the full moon both to do this and to summon the Dweller in the Pool. We will first try a concentration of the rays of the waning moon upon these circles to see whether that will open the rock. If it does we will be able to investigate the Pool without interruption from – from – what emanates.

“Look, here on the chart are their locations. I have made this in duplicate for you in the event – of something happening – to me. And if I lose – you’ll come after us, Goodwin, with help – won’t you?”

And again I promised.

A little later he complained of increasing sleepiness.

“But it’s just weariness,” he said. “Not at all like that other drowsiness. It’s an hour till moonrise still,” he yawned at last. “Wake me up a good fifteen minutes before.”

He lay upon the berth. I sat thinking. I came to myself with a guilty start. I had completely lost myself in my deep preoccupation. What time was it? I looked at my watch and jumped to the porthole. It was full moonlight; the orb had been up for fully half an hour. I strode over to Throckmartin and shook him by the shoulder.

“Up, quick, man!” I cried. He rose sleepily. His shirt fell open at the neck and I looked, in amazement, at the white band around his chest. Even under the electric light it shone softly, as though little flecks of light were in it.

Throckmartin seemed only half-awake. He looked down at his breast, saw the glowing cincture, and smiled.

“Yes,” he said drowsily, “it’s coming – to take me back to Edith! Well, I’m glad.”

“Throckmartin!” I cried. “Wake up! Fight!”

“Fight!” he said. “No use; come after us!”

He went to the port and sleepily drew aside the curtain. The moon traced a broad path of light straight to the ship. Under its rays the band around his chest gleamed brighter and brighter; shot forth little rays; seemed to writhe.

The lights went out in the cabin; evidently also throughout the ship, for I heard shoutings above.

Throckmartin still stood at the open port. Over his shoulder I saw a gleaming pillar racing along the moon path toward us. Through the window cascaded a blinding radiance. It gathered Throckmartin to it, clothed him in a robe of living opalescence. Light pulsed through and from him. The cabin filled with murmurings—

A wave of weakness swept over me, buried me in blackness. When consciousness came back, the lights were again burning brightly.

But of Throckmartin there was no trace!

— VI —

“THE SHINING DEVIL
TOOK THEM!”

My colleagues of the Association, and you others who may read this my narrative, for what I did and did not when full realization returned I must offer here, briefly as I can, an explanation; a defense – if you will.

My first act was to spring to the open port. The coma had lasted hours, for the moon was now low in the west! I ran to the door to sound the alarm. It resisted under my frantic hands; would not open. Something fell tinkling to the floor. It was the key and I remembered then that Throckmartin had turned it before we began our vigil. With memory a hope died that I had not known was in me, the hope that he had escaped from the cabin, found refuge elsewhere on the ship.

And as I stooped, fumbling with shaking fingers for the key, a thought came to me that drove again the blood from my heart, held me rigid. I could sound no alarm on the Southern Queen for Throckmartin!

Conviction of my appalling helplessness was complete. The ensemble of the vessel from captain to cabin boy was, to put it conservatively, average. None, I knew, save Throckmartin and myself had seen the first apparition of the Dweller. Had they witnessed the second? I did not know, nor could I risk speaking, not knowing. And not seeing, how could they believe? They would have thought me insane – or worse; even, it might be, his murderer.

I snapped off the electrics; waited and listened; opened the door with infinite caution and slipped, unseen, into my own stateroom. The hours until the dawn were eternities of waking nightmare. Reason, resuming sway at last, steadied me. Even had I spoken and been believed where in these wastes after all the hours could we search for Throckmartin? Certainly the captain would not turn back to Port Moresby. And even if he did, of what use for me to set forth for the Nan-Matal without the equipment which Throckmartin himself had decided was necessary if one hoped to cope with the mystery that lurked there?

There was but one thing to do – follow his instructions; get the paraphernalia in Melbourne or Sydney if it were possible; if not sail to America as swiftly as might be, secure it there and as swiftly return to Ponape. And this I determined to do.

Calmness came back to me after I had made this decision. And when I went up on deck I knew that I had been right. They had not seen the Dweller. They were still discussing the darkening of the ship, talking of dynamos burned out, wires short circuited, a half dozen explanations of the extinguishment. Not until noon was Throckmartin’s absence discovered. I told the captain that I had left him early in the evening; that, indeed, I knew him but slightly, after all. It occurred to none to doubt me, or to question me minutely. Why should it have? His strangeness had been noted, commented upon; all who had met him had thought him half mad. I did little to discourage the impression. And so it came naturally that on the log it was entered that he had fallen or leaped from the vessel sometime during the night.

A report to this effect was made when we entered Melbourne. I slipped quietly ashore and in the press of the war news Throckmartin’s supposed fate won only a few lines in the newspapers; my own presence on the ship and in the city passed unnoticed.

I was fortunate in securing at Melbourne everything I needed except a set of Becquerel ray condensers – but these were the very keystone of my equipment. Pursuing my search to Sydney I was doubly fortunate in finding a firm who were expecting these very articles in a consignment due them from the States within a fortnight. I settled down in strictest seclusion to await their arrival.

And now it will occur to you to ask why I did not cable, during this period of waiting, to the Association; demand aid from it. Or why I did not call upon members of the University staffs of either Melbourne or Sydney for assistance. At the least, why I did not gather, as Throckmartin had hoped to do, a little force of strong men to go with me to the Nan-Matal.

To the first two questions I answer frankly – I did not dare. And this reluctance, this inhibition, every man jealous of his scientific reputation will understand. The story of Throckmartin, the happenings I had myself witnessed, were incredible, abnormal, outside the facts of all known science. I shrank from the inevitable disbelief, perhaps ridicule – nay, perhaps even the graver suspicion that had caused me to seal my lips while on the ship. Why I myself could only half believe! How then could I hope to convince others?

And as for the third question – I could not take men into the range of such a peril without first warning them of what they might encounter; and if I did warn them—

It was checkmate! If it also was cowardice – well, I have atoned for it. But I do not hold it so; my conscience is clear.

That fortnight and the greater part of another passed before the ship I awaited steamed into port. By that time, between my straining anxiety to be after Throckmartin, the despairing thought that every moment of delay might be vital to him and his, and my intensely eager desire to know whether that shining, glorious horror on the moon path did exist or had been hallucination, I was worn almost to the edge of madness.

At last the condensers were in my hands. It was more than a week later, however, before I could secure passage back to Port Moresby and it was another week still before I started north on the Suwarna, a swift little sloop with a fifty-horsepower auxiliary, heading straight for Ponape and the Nan-Matal.

We sighted the Brunhilda some five hundred miles south of the Carolines. The wind had fallen soon after Papua had dropped astern. The Suwarna’s ability to make her twelve knots an hour without it had made me very fully forgive her for not being as fragrant as the Javan flower for which she was named. Da Costa, her captain, was a garrulous Portuguese; his mate was a Canton man with all the marks of long and able service on some pirate junk; his engineer was a half-breed China-Malay who had picked up his knowledge of power plants, Heaven alone knew where, and, I had reason to believe, had transferred all his religious impulses to the American built deity of mechanism he so faithfully served. The crew was made up of six huge, chattering Tonga boys.

The Suwarna had cut through Finschafen Huon Gulf to the protection of the Bismarcks. She had threaded the maze of the archipelago tranquilly, and we were then rolling over the thousand-mile stretch of open ocean with New Hanover far behind us and our boat’s bow pointed straight toward Nukuor of the Monte Verdes. After we had rounded Nukuor we should, barring accident, reach Ponape in not more than sixty hours.

It was late afternoon, and on the demure little breeze that marched behind us came far-flung sighs of spice-trees and nutmeg flowers. The slow prodigious swells of the Pacific lifted us in gentle, giant hands and sent us as gently down the long, blue wave slopes to the next broad, upward slope. There was a spell of peace over the ocean, stilling even the Portuguese captain who stood dreamily at the wheel, slowly swaying to the rhythmic lift and fall of the sloop.

There came a whining hail from the Tonga boy lookout draped lazily over the bow.

“Sail he b’long port side!”

Da Costa straightened and gazed while I raised my glass. The vessel was a scant mile away, and must have been visible long before the sleepy watcher had seen her. She was a sloop about the size of the Suwarna, without power. All sails set, even to a spinnaker she carried, she was making the best of the little breeze. I tried to read her name, but the vessel jibed sharply as though the hands of the man at the wheel had suddenly dropped the helm – and then with equal abruptness swung back to her course. The stern came in sight, and on it I read Brunhilda.

I shifted my glasses to the man at wheel. He was crouching down over the spokes in a helpless, huddled sort of way, and even as I looked the vessel veered again, abruptly as before. I saw the helmsman straighten up and bring the wheel about with a vicious jerk.

He stood so for a moment, looking straight ahead, entirely oblivious of us, and then seemed again to sink down within himself. It came to me that his was the action of a man striving vainly against a weariness unutterable. I swept the deck with my glasses. There was no other sign of life. I turned to find the Portuguese staring intently and with puzzled air at the sloop, now separated from us by a scant half mile.

“Something veree wrong I think there, sair,” he said in his curious English. “The man on deck I know. He is captain and owner of the Br-rwun’ild. His name Olaf Huldricksson, what you say – Norwegian. He is eithair veree sick or veree tired – but I do not undweerstand where is the crew and the starb’d boat is gone—”

He shouted an order to the engineer and as he did so the faint breeze failed and the sails of the Brunhilda flapped down inert. We were now nearly abreast and a scant hundred yards away. The engine of the Suwarna died and the Tonga boys leaped to one of the boats.

“You Olaf Huldricksson!” shouted Da Costa. “What’s a matter wit’ you?”

The man at the wheel turned toward us. He was a giant; his shoulders enormous, thick chested, strength in every line of him, he towered like a viking of old at the rudder bar of his shark ship.

I raised the glass again; his face sprang into the lens and never have I seen a visage lined and marked as though by ages of unsleeping misery as was that of Olaf Huldricksson!

The Tonga boys had the boat alongside and were waiting at the oars. The little captain was dropping into it.

“Wait!” I cried. I ran into my cabin, grasped my emergency medical kit and climbed down the rope ladder. The Tonga boys bent to the oars. We reached the side and Da Costa and I each seized a lanyard dangling from the stays and swung ourselves on board. Da Costa approached Huldricksson softly.

“What’s the matter, Olaf?” he began – and then was silent, looking down at the wheel. The hands of Huldricksson were lashed fast to the spokes by thongs of thin, strong cord; they were swollen and black and the thongs had bitten into the sinewy wrists till they were hidden in the outraged flesh, cutting so deeply that blood fell, slow drop by drop, at his feet! We sprang toward him, reaching out hands to his fetters to loose them. Even as we touched them, Huldricksson aimed a vicious kick at me and then another at Da Costa which sent the Portuguese tumbling into the scuppers.

“Let be!” croaked Huldricksson; his voice was thick and lifeless as though forced from a dead throat; his lips were cracked and dry and his parched tongue was black. “Let be! Go! Let be!”

The Portuguese had picked himself up, whimpering with rage and knife in hand, but as Huldricksson’s voice reached him he stopped. Amazement crept into his eyes and as he thrust the blade back into his belt they softened with pity.

“Something veree wrong wit’ Olaf,” he murmured to me. “I think he crazee!” And then Olaf Huldricksson began to curse us. He did not speak – he howled from that hideously dry mouth his imprecations. And all the time his red eyes roamed the seas and his hands, clenched and rigid on the wheel, dropped blood.

“I go below,” said Da Costa nervously. “His wife, his daughter—” he darted down the companionway and was gone.

Huldricksson, silent once more, had slumped down over the wheel.

Da Costa’s head appeared at the top of the companion steps.

“There is nobody, nobody,” he paused – then – “nobody – nowhere!” His hands flew out in a gesture of hopeless incomprehension. “I do not understan’.”

Then Olaf Huldricksson opened his dry lips and as he spoke a chill ran through me, checking my heart.

“The sparkling devil took them!” croaked Olaf Huldricksson, “the sparkling devil took them! Took my Helma and my little Freda! The sparkling devil came down from the moon and took them!”

He swayed; tears dripped down his cheeks. Da Costa moved toward him again and again Huldricksson watched him, alertly, wickedly, from his bloodshot eyes.

I took a hypodermic from my case and filled it with morphine. I drew Da Costa to me.

“Get to the side of him,” I whispered, “talk to him.” He moved over toward the wheel.

“Where is your Helma and Freda, Olaf?” he said.

Huldricksson turned his head toward him. “The shining devil took them,” he croaked. “The moon devil that spark—”

A yell broke from him. I had thrust the needle into his arm just above one swollen wrist and had quickly shot the drug through. He struggled to release himself and then began to rock drunkenly. The morphine, taking him in his weakness, worked quickly. Soon over his face a peace dropped. The pupils of the staring eyes contracted. Once, twice, he swayed and then, his bleeding, prisoned hands held high and still gripping the wheel, he crumpled to the deck.

With utmost difficulty we loosed the thongs, but at last it was done. We rigged a little swing and the Tonga boys slung the great inert body over the side into the dory. Soon we had Huldricksson in my bunk. Da Costa sent half his crew over to the sloop in charge of the Cantonese. They took in all sail, stripping Huldricksson’s boat to the masts and then with the Brunhilda nosing quietly along after us at the end of a long hawser, one of the Tonga boys at her wheel, we resumed the way so enigmatically interrupted.

I cleansed and bandaged the Norseman’s lacerated wrists and sponged the blackened, parched mouth with warm water and a mild antiseptic.

Suddenly I was aware of Da Costa’s presence and turned. His unease was manifest and held, it seemed to me, a queer, furtive anxiety.

“What you think of Olaf, sair?” he asked. I shrugged my shoulders. “You think he killed his woman and his babee?” He went on. “You think he crazee and killed all?”

“Nonsense, Da Costa,” I answered. “You saw the boat was gone. Most probably his crew mutinied and to torture him tied him up the way you saw. They did the same thing with Hilton of the Coral Lady; you’ll remember.”

“No,” he said. “No. The crew did not. Nobody there on board when Olaf was tied.”

“What!” I cried, startled. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” he said slowly, “that Olaf tie himself!”

“Wait!” he went on at my incredulous gesture of dissent. “Wait, I show you.” He had been standing with hands behind his back and now I saw that he held in them the cut thongs that had bound Huldricksson. They were blood-stained and each ended in a broad leather tip skilfully spliced into the cord. “Look,” he said, pointing to these leather ends. I looked and saw in them deep indentations of teeth. I snatched one of the thongs and opened the mouth of the unconscious man on the bunk. Carefully I placed the leather within it and gently forced the jaws shut on it. It was true. Those marks were where Olaf Huldricksson’s jaws had gripped.

“Wait!” Da Costa repeated, “I show you.” He took other cords and rested his hands on the supports of a chair back. Rapidly he twisted one of the thongs around his left hand, drew a loose knot, shifted the cord up toward his elbow. This left wrist and hand still free and with them he twisted the other cord around the right wrist; drew a similar knot. His hands were now in the exact position that Huldricksson’s had been on the Brunhilda but with cords and knots hanging loose. Then Da Costa reached down his head, took a leather end in his teeth and with a jerk drew the thong that noosed his left hand tight; similarly he drew tight the second.

He strained at his fetters. There before my eyes he had pinioned himself so that without aid he could not release himself. And he was exactly as Huldricksson had been!

“You will have to cut me loose, sair,” he said. “I cannot move them. It is an old trick on these seas. Sometimes it is necessary that a man stand at the wheel many hours without help, and he does this so that if he sleep the wheel wake him, yes, sair.”

I looked from him to the man on the bed.

“But why, sair,” said Da Costa slowly, “did Olaf have to tie his hands?”

I looked at him, uneasily.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “Do you?”

He fidgeted, avoided my eyes, and then rapidly, almost surreptitiously crossed himself.

“No,” he replied. “I know nothing. Some things I have heard – but they tell many tales on these seas.”

He started for the door. Before he reached it he turned. “But this I do know,” he half whispered, “I am damned glad there is no full moon tonight.” And passed out, leaving me staring after him in amazement. What did the Portuguese know?

I bent over the sleeper. On his face was no trace of that unholy mingling of opposites the Dweller stamped upon its victims.

And yet – what was it the Norseman had said?

“The sparkling devil took them!” Nay, he had been even more explicit – “The sparkling devil that came down from the moon!”

Could it be that the Dweller had swept upon the Brunhilda, drawing down the moon path Olaf Huldricksson’s wife and babe even as it had drawn Throckmartin?

As I sat thinking the cabin grew suddenly dark and from above came a shouting and patter of feet. Down upon us swept one of the abrupt, violent squalls that are met with in those latitudes. I lashed Huldricksson fast in the berth and ran up on deck.

The long, peaceful swells had changed into angry, choppy waves from the tops of which the spindrift streamed in long stinging lashes.

A half-hour passed; the squall died as quickly as it had arisen. The sea quieted. Over in the west, from beneath the tattered, flying edge of the storm, dropped the red globe of the setting sun; dropped slowly until it touched the sea rim.

I watched it – and rubbed my eyes and stared again. For over its flaming portal something huge and black moved, like a gigantic beckoning finger!

Da Costa had seen it, too, and he turned the Suwarna straight toward the descending orb and its strange shadow. As we approached we saw it was a little mass of wreckage and that the beckoning finger was a wing of canvas, sticking up and swaying with the motion of the waves. On the highest point of the wreckage sat a tall figure calmly smoking a cigarette.

We brought the Suwarna to, dropped a boat, and with myself as coxswain pulled toward a wrecked hydroairplane. Its occupant took a long puff at his cigarette, waved a cheerful hand, shouted a greeting. And just as he did so a great wave raised itself up behind him, took the wreckage, tossed it high in a swelter of foam, and passed on. When we had steadied our boat, where wreck and man had been was – nothing.

There came a tug at the side – , two muscular brown hands gripped it close to my left, and a sleek, black, wet head showed its top between them. Two bright, blue eyes that held deep within them a laughing deviltry looked into mine, and a long, lithe body drew itself gently over the thwart and seated its dripping self at my feet.

“Much obliged,” said this man from the sea. “I knew somebody was sure to come along when the O’Keefe banshee didn’t show up.”

“The what?” I asked in amazement.

“The O’Keefe banshee – I’m Larry O’Keefe. It’s a far way from Ireland, but not too far for the O’Keefe banshee to travel if the O’Keefe was going to click in.”

I looked again at my astonishing rescue. He seemed perfectly serious.

“Have you a cigarette? Mine went out,” he said with a grin, as he reached a moist hand out for the little cylinder, took it, lighted it.

I saw a lean, intelligent face whose fighting jaw was softened by the wistfulness of the clean-cut lips and the honesty that lay side by side with the deviltry in the laughing blue eyes; nose of a thoroughbred with the suspicion of a tilt; long, well-knit, slender figure that I knew must have all the strength of fine steel; the uniform of a lieutenant in the Royal Flying Corps of Britain’s navy.

He laughed, stretched out a firm hand, and gripped mine.

“Thank you really ever so much, old man,” he said.

I liked Larry O’Keefe from the beginning – but I did not dream as the Tonga boys pulled us back to the Suwarna bow that liking was to be forged into man’s strong love for man by fires which souls such as his and mine – and yours who read this – could never dream.

Larry! Larry O’Keefe, where are you now with your leprechauns and banshee, your heart of a child, your laughing blue eyes, and your fearless soul? Shall I ever see you again, Larry O’Keefe, dear to me as some best beloved younger brother? Larry!

— VII —

LARRY O’KEEFE

Pressing back the questions I longed to ask, I introduced myself. Oddly enough, I found that he knew me, or rather my work. He had bought, it appeared, my volume upon the peculiar vegetation whose habitat is disintegrating lava rock and volcanic ash, that I had entitled, somewhat loosely, I could now perceive, Flora of the Craters. For he explained naively that he had picked it up, thinking it an entirely different sort of a book, a novel in fact – something like Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways, which he liked greatly.

He had hardly finished this explanation when we touched the side of the Suwarna, and I was forced to curb my curiosity until we reached the deck.

“That thing you saw me sitting on,” he said, after he had thanked the bowing little skipper for his rescue, “was all that was left of one of his Majesty’s best little hydro-airplanes after that cyclone threw it off as excess baggage. And by the way, about where are we?”

Da Costa gave him our approximate position from the noon reckoning.

O’Keefe whistled. “A good three hundred miles from where I left the H.M.S. Dolphin about four hours ago,” he said. “That squall I rode in on was some whizzer!

“The Dolphin,” he went on, calmly divesting himself of his soaked uniform, “was on her way to Melbourne. I’d been yearning for a joy ride and went up for an alleged scouting trip. Then that blow shot out of nowhere, picked me up, and insisted that I go with it.

“About an hour ago I thought I saw a chance to zoom up and out of it, I turned, and blick went my right wing, and down I dropped.”

“I don’t know how we can notify your ship, Lieutenant O’Keefe,” I said. “We have no wireless.”

“Doctair Goodwin,” said Da Costa, “we could change our course, sair – perhaps—”

“Thanks – but not a bit of it,” broke in O’Keefe. “Lord alone knows where the Dolphin is now. Fancy she’ll be nosing around looking for me. Anyway, she’s just as apt to run into you as you into her. Maybe we’ll strike something with a wireless, and I’ll trouble you to put me aboard.” He hesitated. “Where are you bound, by the way?” he asked.

“For Ponape,” I answered.

“No wireless there,” mused O’Keefe. “Beastly hole. Stopped a week ago for fruit. Natives seemed scared to death at us – or something. What are you going there for?”

Da Costa darted a furtive glance at me. It troubled me.

O’Keefe noted my hesitation.

“Oh, I beg your pardon,” he said. “Maybe I oughn’t to have asked that?”

“It’s no secret, Lieutenant,” I replied. “I’m about to undertake some exploration work – a little digging among the ruins on the Nan-Matal.”

I looked at the Portuguese sharply as I named the place. A pallor crept beneath his skin and again he made swiftly the sign of the cross, glancing as he did so fearfully to the north. I made up my mind then to question him when opportunity came. He turned from his quick scrutiny of the sea and addressed O’Keefe.

“There’s nothing on board to fit you, Lieutenant.”

“Oh, just give me a sheet to throw around me, Captain,” said O’Keefe and followed him. Darkness had fallen, and as the two disappeared into Da Costa’s cabin I softly opened the door of my own and listened. Huldricksson was breathing deeply and regularly.

I drew my electric-flash, and shielding its rays from my face, looked at him. His sleep was changing from the heavy stupor of the drug into one that was at least on the borderland of the normal. The tongue had lost its arid blackness and the mouth secretions had resumed action. Satisfied as to his condition I returned to deck.

O’Keefe was there, looking like a specter in the cotton sheet he had wrapped about him. A deck table had been cleated down and one of the Tonga boys was setting it for our dinner. Soon the very creditable larder of the Suwarna dressed the board, and O’Keefe, Da Costa, and I attacked it. The night had grown close and oppressive. Behind us the forward light of the Brunhilda glided and the binnacle lamp threw up a faint glow in which her black helmsman’s face stood out mistily. O’Keefe had looked curiously a number of times at our tow, but had asked no questions.

“You’re not the only passenger we picked up today,” I told him. “We found the captain of that sloop, lashed to his wheel, nearly dead with exhaustion, and his boat deserted by everyone except himself.”

“What was the matter?” asked O’Keefe in astonishment.

“We don’t know,” I answered. “He fought us, and I had to drug him before we could get him loose from his lashings. He’s sleeping down in my berth now. His wife and little girl ought to have been on board, the captain here says, but – they weren’t.”

“Wife and child gone!” exclaimed O’Keefe.

“From the condition of his mouth he must have been alone at the wheel and without water at least two days and nights before we found him,” I replied. “And as for looking for anyone on these waters after such a time – it’s hopeless.”

“That’s true,” said O’Keefe. “But his wife and baby! Poor, poor devil!”

He was silent for a time, and then, at my solicitation, began to tell us more of himself. He had been little more than twenty when he had won his wings and entered the war. He had been seriously wounded at Ypres during the third year of the struggle, and when he recovered the war was over. Shortly after that his mother had died. Lonely and restless, he had re-entered the Air Service, and had remained in it ever since.

“And though the war’s long over, I get homesick for the lark’s land with the German planes playing tunes on their machine guns and their Archies tickling the soles of my feet,” he sighed. “If you’re in love, love to the limit; and if you hate, why hate like the devil and if it’s a fight you’re in, get where it’s hottest and fight like hell – if you don’t life’s not worth the living,” sighed he.

I watched him as he talked, feeling my liking for him steadily increasing. If I could but have a man like this beside me on the path of unknown peril upon which I had set my feet I thought, wistfully. We sat and smoked a bit, sipping the strong coffee the Portuguese made so well.

Da Costa at last relieved the Cantonese at the wheel. O’Keefe and I drew chairs up to the rail. The brighter stars shone out dimly through a hazy sky; gleams of phosphorescence tipped the crests of the waves and sparkled with an almost angry brilliance as the bow of the Suwarna tossed them aside. O’Keefe pulled contentedly at a cigarette. The glowing spark lighted the keen, boyish face and the blue eyes, now black and brooding under the spell of the tropic night.

“Are you American or Irish, O’Keefe?” I asked suddenly.

“Why?” he laughed.

“Because,” I answered, “from your name and your service I would suppose you Irish – but your command of pure Americanese makes me doubtful.”

He grinned amiably.

“I’ll tell you how that is,” he said. “My mother was an American – a Grace, of Virginia. My father was the O’Keefe, of Coleraine. And these two loved each other so well that the heart they gave me is half Irish and half American. My father died when I was sixteen. I used to go to the States with my mother every other year for a month or two. But after my father died we used to go to Ireland every other year. And there you are – I’m as much American as I am Irish.

“When I’m in love, or excited, or dreaming, or mad I have the brogue. But for the everyday purpose of life I like the United States talk, and I know Broadway as well as I do Binevenagh Lane, and the Sound as well as St. Patrick’s Channel; educated a bit at Eton, a bit at Harvard; always too much money to have to make any; in love lots of times, and never a heartache after that wasn’t a pleasant one, and never a real purpose in life until I took the king’s shilling and earned my wings; something over thirty – and that’s me – Larry O’Keefe.”

“But it was the Irish O’Keefe who sat out there waiting for the banshee,” I laughed.

“It was that,” he said somberly, and I heard the brogue creep over his voice like velvet and his eyes grew brooding again. “There’s never an O’Keefe for these thousand years that has passed without his warning. An’ twice have I heard the banshee calling – once it was when my younger brother died an’ once when my father lay waiting to be carried out on the ebb tide.”

He mused a moment, then went on: “An’ once I saw an Annir Choille, a girl of the green people, flit like a shade of green fire through Carntogher woods, an’ once at Dunchraig I slept where the ashes of the Dun of Cormac MacConcobar are mixed with those of Cormac an’ Eilidh the Fair, all burned in the nine flames that sprang from the harping of Cravetheen, an’ I heard the echo of his dead harpings—”

He paused again and then, softly, with that curiously sweet, high voice that only the Irish seem to have, he sang:

Woman of the white breasts, Eilidh;

Woman of the gold-brown hair, and lips of the red, red rowan,

Where is the swan that is whiter, with breast more soft,

Or the wave on the sea that moves as thou movest, Eilidh.

— VIII —

OLAF’S STORY

There was a little silence. I looked upon him with wonder. Clearly he was in deepest earnest. I know the psychology of the Gael is a curious one and that deep in all their hearts their ancient traditions and beliefs have strong and living roots. And I was both amused and touched.

Here was this soldier, who had faced war and its ugly realities open-eyed and fearless, picking, indeed, the most dangerous branch of service for his own, a modern if ever there was one, appreciative of most unmystical Broadway, and yet soberly and earnestly attesting to his belief in banshee, in shadowy people of the woods, and phantom harpers! I wondered what he would think if he could see the Dweller and then, with a pang, that perhaps his superstitions might make him an easy prey.

He shook his head half impatiently and ran a hand over his eyes; turned to me and grinned:

“Don’t think I’m cracked, Professor,” he said. “I’m not. But it takes me that way now and then. It’s the Irish in me. And, believe it or not, I’m telling you the truth.”

I looked eastward where the moon, now nearly a week past the full, was mounting.

“You can’t make me see what you’ve seen, Lieutenant,” I laughed. “But you can make me hear. I’ve always wondered what kind of a noise a disembodied spirit could make without any vocal cords or breath or any other earthly sound-producing mechanism. How does the banshee sound?”

O’Keefe looked at me seriously.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll show you.” From deep down in his throat came first a low, weird sobbing that mounted steadily into a keening whose mournfulness made my skin creep. And then his hand shot out and gripped my shoulder, and I stiffened like stone in my chair – for from behind us, like an echo, and then taking up the cry, swelled a wail that seemed to hold within it a sublimation of the sorrows of centuries! It gathered itself into one heartbroken, sobbing note and died away! O’Keefe’s grip loosened, and he rose swiftly to his feet.

“It’s all right, Professor,” he said. “It’s for me. It found me – all this way from Ireland.”

Again the silence was rent by the cry. But now I had located it. It came from my room, and it could mean only one thing – Huldricksson had wakened.

“Forget your banshee!” I gasped, and made a jump for the cabin.

Out of the corner of my eye I noted a look of half-sheepish relief flit over O’Keefe’s face, and then he was beside me. Da Costa shouted an order from the wheel, the Cantonese ran up and took it from his hands and the little Portuguese pattered down toward us. My hand on the door, ready to throw it open, I stopped. What if the Dweller were within – what if we had been wrong and it was not dependent for its power upon that full flood of moon ray which Throckmartin had thought essential to draw it from the blue pool!

From within, the sobbing wail began once more to rise. O’Keefe pushed me aside, threw open the door and crouched low within it. I saw an automatic flash dully in his hand; saw it cover the cabin from side to side, following the swift sweep of his eyes around it. Then he straightened and his face, turned toward the berth, was filled with wondering pity.

Through the window streamed a shaft of the moonlight. It fell upon Huldricksson’s staring eyes; in them great tears slowly gathered and rolled down his cheeks; from his opened mouth came the woe-laden wailing. I ran to the port and drew the curtains. Da Costa snapped the lights.

The Norseman’s dolorous crying stopped as abruptly as though cut. His gaze rolled toward us. And at one bound he broke through the leashes I had buckled round him and faced us, his eyes glaring, his yellow hair almost erect with the force of the rage visibly surging through him. Da Costa shrunk behind me. O’Keefe, coolly watchful, took a quick step that brought him in front of me.

“Where do you take me?” said Huldricksson, and his voice was like the growl of a beast. “Where is my boat?”

I touched O’Keefe gently and stood before the giant.

“Listen, Olaf Huldricksson,” I said. “We take you to where the sparkling devil took your Helma and your Freda. We follow the sparkling devil that came down from the moon. Do you hear me?” I spoke slowly, distinctly, striving to pierce the mists that I knew swirled around the strained brain. And the words did pierce.

He thrust out a shaking hand.

“You say you follow?” he asked falteringly. “You know where to follow? Where it took my Helma and my little Freda?”

“Just that, Olaf Huldricksson,” I answered. “Just that! I pledge you my life that I know.”

Da Costa stepped forward. “He speaks true, Olaf. You go faster on the Suwarna than on the Br-rw-un’ilda, Olaf, yes.”

The giant Norseman, still gripping my hand, looked at him. “I know you, Da Costa,” he muttered. “You are all right. Ja! You are a fair man. Where is the Brunhilda?”

“She follow be’ind on a big rope, Olaf,” soothed the Portuguese. “Soon you see her. But now lie down an’ tell us, if you can, why you tie yourself to your wheel an’ what it is that happen, Olaf.”

“If you’ll tell us how the sparkling devil came it will help us all when we get to where it is, Huldricksson,” I said.

On O’Keefe’s face there was an expression of well-nigh ludicrous doubt and amazement. He glanced from one to the other. The giant shifted his own tense look from me to the Irishman. A gleam of approval lighted in his eyes. He loosed me, and gripped O’Keefe’s arm. “Staerk!” he said. “Ja – strong, and with a strong heart. A man – ja! He comes too – we shall need him – ja!”

“I tell,” he muttered, and seated himself on the side of the bunk. “It was four nights ago. My Freda” – his voice shook – “Mine yndling! She loved the moonlight. I was at the wheel and my Freda and my Helma they were behind me. The moon was behind us and the Brunhilda was like a swanboat sailing down with the moonlight sending her, ja.

“I heard my Freda say: ‘I see a nisse coming down the track of the moon.’ And I hear her mother laugh, low, like a mother does when her yndling dreams. I was happy – that night – with my Helma and my Freda, and the Brunhilda sailing like a swan-boat, ja. I heard the child say, ‘The nisse comes fast!’ And then I heard a scream from my Helma, a great scream – like a mare when her foal is torn from her. I spun around fast, ja! I dropped the wheel and spun fast! I saw—” He covered his eyes with his hands.

The Portuguese had crept close to me, and I heard him panting like a frightened dog.

“I saw a white fire spring over the rail,” whispered Olaf Huldricksson. “It whirled round and round, and it shone like – like stars in a whirlwind mist. There was a noise in my ears. It sounded like bells – little bells, ja! Like the music you make when you run your finger round goblets. It made me sick and dizzy – the hell noise.

“My Helma was – indeholde – what you say – in the middle of the white fire. She turned her face to me and she turned it on the child, and my Helma’s face burned into my heart. Because it was full of fear, and it was full of happiness – of glaede. I tell you that the fear in my Helma’s face made me ice here” – he beat his breast with clenched hand – “but the happiness in it burned on me like fire. And I could not move – I could not move.

“I said in here” – he touched his head – “I said, ‘It is Loki come out of Helvede. But he cannot take my Helma, for Christ lives and Loki has no power to hurt my Helma or my Freda! Christ lives! Christ lives!’ I said. But the sparkling devil did not let my Helma go. It drew her to the rail; half over it. I saw her eyes upon the child and a little she broke away and reached to it. And my Freda jumped into her arms. And the fire wrapped them both and they were gone! A little I saw them whirling on the moon track behind the Brunhilda – and they were gone!

“The sparkling devil took them! Loki was loosed, and he had power. I turned the Brunhilda, and I followed where my Helma and mine yndling had gone. My boys crept up and asked me to turn again. But I would not. They dropped a boat and left me. I steered straight on the path. I lashed my hands to the wheel that sleep might not loose them. I steered on and on and on—

“Where was the God I prayed when my wife and child were taken?” cried Olaf Huldricksson – and it was as though I heard Throckmartin asking that same bitter question. “I have left Him as He left me, ja! I pray now to Thor and to Odin, who can fetter Loki.” He sank back, covering again his eyes.

“Olaf,” I said, “what you have called the sparkling devil has taken ones dear to me. I, too, was following it when we found you. You shall go with me to its home, and there we will try to take from it your wife and your child and my friends as well. But now that you may be strong for what is before us, you must sleep again.”

Olaf Huldricksson looked upon me and in his eyes was that something which souls must see in the eyes of Him the old Egyptians called the Searcher of Hearts in the Judgment Hall of Osiris.

“You speak truth!” he said at last slowly. “I will do what you say!”

He stretched out an arm at my bidding. I gave him a second injection. He lay back and soon he was sleeping. I turned toward Da Costa. His face was livid and sweating, and he was trembling pitiably. O’Keefe stirred.

“You did that mighty well, Dr. Goodwin,” he said. “So well that I almost believed you myself.”

“What did you think of his story, Mr. O’Keefe?” I asked.

His answer was almost painfully brief and colloquial.

“Nuts!” he said. I was a little shocked, I admit. “I think he’s crazy, Dr. Goodwin,” he corrected himself, quickly. “What else could I think?”

I turned to the little Portuguese without answering.

“There’s no need for any anxiety tonight, Captain,” I said. “Take my word for it. You need some rest yourself. Shall I give you a sleeping draft?”

“I do wish you would, Dr. Goodwin, sair,” he answered gratefully. “Tomorrow, when I feel bettair – I would have a talk with you.”

I nodded. He did know something then! I mixed him an opiate of considerable strength. He took it and went to his own cabin.

I locked the door behind him and then, sitting beside the sleeping Norseman, I told O’Keefe my story from end to end. He asked few questions as I spoke. But after I had finished he cross-examined me rather minutely upon my recollections of the radiant phases upon each appearance, checking these with Throckmartin’s observations of the same phenomena in the Chamber of the Moon Pool.

“And now what do you think of it all?” I asked.

He sat silent for a while, looking at Huldricksson.

“Not what you seem to think, Dr. Goodwin,” he answered at last, gravely. “Let me sleep over it. One thing of course is certain – you and your friend Throckmartin and this man here saw – something. But—” he was silent again and then continued with a kindness that I found vaguely irritating – “but I’ve noticed that when a scientist gets superstitious it – er – takes very hard!

“Here’s a few things I can tell you now though,” he went on while I struggled to speak – “I pray in my heart that we’ll meet neither the Dolphin nor anything with wireless on board going up. Because, Dr. Goodwin, I’d dearly love to take a crack at your Dweller.

“And another thing,” said O’Keefe. “After this – cut out the trimmings, Doc, and call me plain Larry, for whether I think you’re crazy or whether I don’t, you’re there with the nerve, Professor, and I’m for you.”

“Good night!” said Larry and took himself out to the deck hammock he had insisted upon having slung for him, refusing the captain’s importunities to use his own cabin.

And it was with extremely mixed emotions as to his compliment that I watched him go. Superstitious. I, whose pride was my scientific devotion to fact and fact alone! Superstitious – and this from a man who believed in banshees and ghostly harpers and Irish wood nymphs and no doubt in leprechauns and all their tribe!

Half laughing, half irritated, and wholly happy in even the part promise of Larry O’Keefe’s comradeship on my venture, I arranged a couple of pillows, stretched myself out on two chairs and took up my vigil beside Olaf Huldricksson.

— IX —

A LOST PAGE OF EARTH

When I awakened the sun was streaming through the cabin porthole. Outside a fresh voice lilted. I lay on my two chairs and listened. The song was one with the wholesome sunshine and the breeze blowing stiffly and whipping the curtains. It was Larry O’Keefe at his matins:

The little red lark is shaking his wings,

Straight from the breast of his love he springs

Larry’s voice soared.

His wings and his feathers are sunrise red,

He hails the sun and his golden head,

Good morning, Doc, you are long abed.

This last was a most irreverent interpolation, I well knew. I opened my door. O’Keefe stood outside laughing. The Suwarna, her engines silent, was making fine headway under all sail, the Brunhilda skipping in her wake cheerfully with half her canvas up.

The sea was crisping and dimpling under the wind. Blue and white was the world as far as the eye could reach. Schools of little silvery green flying fish broke through the water rushing on each side of us; flashed for an instant and were gone. Behind us gulls hovered and dipped. The shadow of mystery had retreated far over the rim of this wide awake and beautiful world and if, subconsciously, I knew that somewhere it was brooding and waiting, for a little while at least I was consciously free of its oppression.

“How’s the patient?” asked O’Keefe.

He was answered by Huldricksson himself, who must have risen just as I left the cabin. The Norseman had slipped on a pair of pajamas and, giant torso naked under the sun, he strode out upon us. We all of us looked at him a trifle anxiously. But Olaf’s madness had left him. In his eyes was much sorrow, but the berserk rage was gone.

He spoke straight to me: “You said last night we follow?”

I nodded.

“It is where?” he asked again.

“We go first to Ponape and from there to Metalanim Harbor – to the Nan-Matal. You know the place?”

Huldricksson bowed – a white gleam as of ice showing in his blue eyes.

“It is there?” he asked.

“It is there that we must first search,” I answered.

“Good!” said Olaf Huldricksson. “It is good!”

He looked at Da Costa inquiringly and the little Portuguese, following his thought, answered his unspoken question.

“We should be at Ponape tomorrow morning early, Olaf.”

“Good!” repeated the Norseman. He looked away, his eyes tear-filled.

A restraint fell upon us; the embarrassment all men experience when they feel a great sympathy and a great pity, to neither of which they quite know how to give expression. By silent consent we discussed at breakfast only the most casual topics.

When the meal was over Huldricksson expressed a desire to go aboard the Brunhilda.

The Suwarna hove to and Da Costa and he dropped into the small boat. When they reached the Brunhilda’s deck I saw Olaf take the wheel and the two fall into earnest talk. I beckoned to O’Keefe and we stretched ourselves out on the bow hatch under cover of the foresail. He lighted a cigarette, took a couple of leisurely puffs, and looked at me expectantly.

“Well?” I asked.

“Well,” said O’Keefe, “suppose you tell me what you think – and then I’ll proceed to point out your scientific errors.” His eyes twinkled mischievously.

“Larry,” I replied, somewhat severely, “you may not know that I have a scientific reputation which, putting aside all modesty, I may say is an enviable one. You used a word last night to which I must interpose serious objection. You more than hinted that I hid – superstitions. Let me inform you, Larry O’Keefe, that I am solely a seeker, observer, analyst, and synthesist of facts. I am not” – and I tried to make my tone as pointed as my words – “I am not a believer in phantoms or spooks, leprechauns, banshees, or ghostly harpers.”

O’Keefe leaned back and shouted with laughter.

“Forgive me, Goodwin,” he gasped. “But if you could have seen yourself solemnly disclaiming the banshee” – another twinkle showed in his eyes – “and then with all this sunshine and this wide-open world” – he shrugged his shoulders – “it’s hard to visualize anything such as you and Huldricksson have described.”

“I know how hard it is, Larry,” I answered. “And don’t think I have any idea that the phenomenon is supernatural in the sense spiritualists and table turners have given that word. I do think it is supernormal; energized by a force unknown to modern science – but that doesn’t mean I think it outside the radius of science.”

“Tell me your theory, Goodwin,” he said. I hesitated – for not yet had I been able to put into form to satisfy myself any explanation of the Dweller.

“I think,” I hazarded finally, “it is possible that some members of that race peopling the ancient continent which we know existed here in the Pacific, have survived. We know that many of these islands are honeycombed with caverns and vast subterranean spaces, literally underground lands running in some cases far out beneath the ocean floor. It is possible that for some reason survivors of this race sought refuge in the abysmal spaces, one of whose entrances is on the islet where Throckmartin’s party met its end.

“As for their persistence in these caverns – we know they possessed a high science. They may have gone far in the mastery of certain universal forms of energy – especially that we call light. They may have developed a civilization and a science far more advanced than ours. What I call the Dweller may be one of the results of this science. Larry – it may well be that this lost race is planning to emerge again upon earth’s surface!”

“And is sending out your Dweller as a messenger, a scientific dove from their Ark?” I chose to overlook the banter in his question.

“Did you ever hear of the Chamats?” I asked him. He shook his head.

“In Papua,” I explained, “there is a wide-spread and immeasurably old tradition that ‘imprisoned under the hills’ is a race of giants who once ruled this region ‘when it stretched from sun to sun before the moon god drew the waters over it’ – I quote from the legend. Not only in Papua but throughout Malaysia you find this story. And, so the tradition runs, these people – the Chamats – will one day break through the hills and rule the world; ‘make over the world’ is the literal translation of the constant phrase in the tale. It was Herbert Spencer who pointed out that there is a basis of fact in every myth and legend of man. It is possible that these survivors I am discussing form Spencer’s fact basis for the Malaysian legend. [02]

“This much is sure – the moon door, which is clearly operated by the action of moon rays upon some unknown element or combination and the crystals through which the moon rays pour down upon the pool their prismatic columns, are humanly made mechanisms. So long as they are humanly made, and so long as it is this flood of moonlight from which the Dweller draws its power of materialization, the Dweller itself, if not the product of the human mind, is at least dependent upon the product of the human mind for its appearance.”

“Wait a minute, Goodwin,” interrupted O’Keefe. “Do you mean to say you think that this thing is made of – well – of moonshine?”

“Moonlight,” I replied, “is, of course, reflected sunlight. But the rays which pass back to earth after their impact on the moon’s surface are profoundly changed. The spectroscope shows that they lose practically all the slower vibrations we call red and infra-red, while the extremely rapid vibrations we call the violet and ultra-violet are accelerated and altered. Many scientists hold that there is an unknown element in the moon – perhaps that which makes the gigantic luminous trails that radiate in all directions from the lunar crater Tycho – whose energies are absorbed by and carried on the moon rays.

“At any rate, whether by the loss of the vibrations of the red or by the addition of this mysterious force, the light of the moon becomes something entirely different from mere modified sunlight – just as the addition or subtraction of one other chemical in a compound of several makes the product a substance with entirely different energies and potentialities.

“Now these rays, Larry, are given perhaps still another mysterious activity by the globes through which Throckmartin said they passed in the Chamber of the Moon Pool. The result is the necessary factor in the formation of the Dweller. There would be nothing scientifically improbable in such a process. Kubalski, the great Russian physicist, produced crystalline forms exhibiting every faculty that we call vital by subjecting certain combinations of chemicals to the action of highly concentrated rays of various colors. Something in light and nothing else produced their pseudo-vitality. We do not begin to know how to harness the potentialities of that magnetic vibration of the ether we call light.”

“Listen, Doc,” said Larry earnestly, “I’ll take everything you say about this lost continent, the people who used to live on it, and their caverns, for granted. But by the sword of Brian Boru, you’ll never get me to fall for the idea that a bunch of moonshine can handle a big woman such as you say Throckmartin’s Thora was, nor a two-fisted man such as you say Throckmartin was, nor Huldricksson’s wife – and I’ll bet she was one of those strapping big northern women too – you’ll never get me to believe that any bunch of concentrated moonshine could handle them and take them waltzing off along a moonbeam back to wherever it goes. No, Doc, not on your life, even Tennessee moonshine couldn’t do that – nix!”

“All right, O’Keefe,” I answered, now very much irritated indeed. “What’s your theory?” And I could not resist adding: “Fairies?”

“Professor,” he grinned, “if that Thing’s a fairy it’s Irish and when it sees me it’ll be so glad there’ll be nothing to it. ‘I was lost, strayed, or stolen, Larry avick,’ it’ll say, ‘an’ I was so homesick for the old sod I was desp’rit,’ it’ll say, an’ ‘take me back quick before I do any more har-rm!’ it’ll tell me – an’ that’s the truth.

“Now don’t get me wrong. I believe you all saw something all right. But what I think you saw was some kind of gas. All this region is volcanic and islands and things are constantly poking up from the sea. It’s probably gas; a volcanic emanation; something new to us and that drives you crazy – lots of kinds of gas do that. It hit the Throckmartin party on that island and they probably were all more or less delirious all the time; thought they saw things; talked it over and – collective hallucination – just like the Angels of Mons and other miracles of the war. Somebody sees something that looks like something else. He points it out to the man next him. ‘Do you see it?’ asks he. ‘Sure I see it,’ says the other. And there you are – collective hallucination.

“When your friends got it bad they most likely jumped overboard one by one. Huldricksson sails into a place where it is and it hits his wife. She grabs the child and jumps over. Maybe the moon rays make it luminous! I’ve seen gas on the front under the moon that looked like a thousand whirling dervish devils. Yes, and you could see the devil’s faces in it. And if it got into your lungs nothing could ever make you think you hadn’t seen real devils.”

For a time I was silent.

“Larry,” I said at last, “whether you are right or I am right, I must go to the Nan-Matal. Will you go with me, Larry?”

“Goodwin,” he replied, “I surely will. I’m as interested as you are. If we don’t run across the Dolphin I’ll stick. I’ll leave word at Ponape, to tell them where I am should they come along. If they report me dead for a while there’s nobody to care. So that’s all right. Only old man, be reasonable. You’ve thought over this so long, you’re going bug, honestly you are.”

And again, the gladness that I might have Larry O’Keefe with me, was so great that I forgot to be angry.

— X —

THE MOON POOL

Da Costa, who had come aboard unnoticed by either of us, now tapped me on the arm.

“Doctair Goodwin,” he said, “can I see you in my cabin, sair?”

At last, then, he was going to speak. I followed him.

“Doctair,” he said, when we had entered, “this is a veree strange thing that has happened to Olaf. Veree strange. An’ the natives of Ponape, they have been very much excite’ lately.

“Of what they fear I know nothing, nothing!” Again that quick, furtive crossing of himself. “But this I have to tell you. There came to me from Ranaloa last month a man, a Russian, a doctair, like you. His name it was Marakinoff. I take him to Ponape an’ the natives there they will not take him to the Nan-Matal where he wish to go – no! So I take him. We leave in a boat, wit’ much instrument carefully tied up. I leave him there wit’ the boat an’ the food. He tell me to tell no one an’ pay me not to. But you are a friend an’ Olaf he depend much upon you an’ so I tell you, sair.”

“You know nothing more than this, Da Costa?” I asked. “Nothing of another expedition?”

“No,” he shook his head vehemently. “Nothing more.”

“Hear the name Throckmartin while you were there?” I persisted.

“No,” his eyes were steady as he answered but the pallor had crept again into his face.

I was not so sure. But if he knew more than he had told me why was he afraid to speak? My anxiety deepened and later I sought relief from it by repeating the conversation to O’Keefe.

“A Russian, eh,” he said. “Well, they can be damned nice, or damned – otherwise. Considering what you did for me, I hope I can look him over before the Dolphin shows up.”

Next morning we raised Ponape, without further incident, and before noon the Suwarna and the Brunhilda had dropped anchor in the harbor. Upon the excitement and manifest dread of the natives, when we sought among them for carriers and workmen to accompany us, I will not dwell. It is enough to say that no payment we offered could induce a single one of them to go to the Nan-Matal. Nor would they say why.

Finally it was agreed that the Brunhilda should be left in charge of a half-breed Chinaman, whom both Da Costa and Huldricksson knew and trusted. We piled her long-boat up with my instruments and food and camping equipment. The Suwarna took us around to Metalanim Harbor, and there, with the tops of ancient sea walls deep in the blue water beneath us, and the ruins looming up out of the mangroves, a scant mile from us, left us.

Then with Huldricksson manipulating our small sail, and Larry at the rudder, we rounded the titanic wall that swept down into the depths, and turned at last into the canal that Throckmartin, on his map, had marked as that which, running between frowning Nan-Tauach and its satellite islet, Tau, led straight to the gate of the place of ancient mysteries.

And as we entered that channel we were enveloped by a silence; a silence so intense, so – weighted that it seemed to have substance; an alien silence that clung and stifled and still stood aloof from us – the living. It was a stillness, such as might follow the long tramping of millions into the grave; it was – paradoxical as it may be – filled with the withdrawal of life.

Standing down in the chambered depths of the Great Pyramid I had known something of such silence – but never such intensity as this. Larry felt it and I saw him look at me askance. If Olaf, sitting in the bow, felt it, too, he gave no sign; his blue eyes, with again the glint of ice within them, watched the channel before us.

As we passed, there arose upon our left sheer walls of black basalt blocks, cyclopean, towering fifty feet or more, broken here and there by the sinking of their deep foundations.

In front of us the mangroves widened out and filled the canal. On our right the lesser walls of Tau, sombre blocks smoothed and squared and set with a cold, mathematical nicety that filled me with vague awe, slipped by. Through breaks I caught glimpses of dark ruins and of great fallen stones that seemed to crouch and menace us, as we passed. Somewhere there, hidden, were the seven globes that poured the moon fire down upon the Moon Pool.

Now we were among the mangroves and, sail down, the three of us pushed and pulled the boat through their tangled roots and branches. The noise of our passing split the silence like a profanation, and from the ancient bastions came murmurs – forbidding, strangely sinister. And now we were through, floating on a little open space of shadow-filled water. Before us lifted the gateway of Nan-Tauach, gigantic, broken, incredibly old; shattered portals through which had passed men and women of earth’s dawn; old with a weight of years that pressed leadenly upon the eyes that looked upon it, and yet was in some curious indefinable way – menacingly defiant.

Beyond the gate, back from the portals, stretched a flight of enormous basalt slabs, a giant’s stairway indeed; and from each side of it marched the high walls that were the Dweller’s pathway. None of us spoke as we grounded the boat and dragged it upon a half-submerged pier. And when we did speak it was in whispers.

“What next?” asked Larry.

“I think we ought to take a look around,” I replied in the same low tones. “We’ll climb the wall here and take a flash about. The whole place ought to be plain as day from that height.”

Huldricksson, his blue eyes alert, nodded. With the greatest difficulty we clambered up the broken blocks.

To the east and south of us, set like children’s blocks in the midst of the sapphire sea, lay dozens of islets, none of them covering more than two square miles of surface; each of them a perfect square or oblong within its protecting walls.

On none was there sign of life, save for a few great birds that hovered here and there, and gulls dipping in the blue waves beyond.

We turned our gaze down upon the island on which we stood. It was, I estimated, about three-quarters of a mile square. The sea wall enclosed it. It was really an enormous basalt-sided open cube, and within it two other open cubes. The enclosure between the first and second wall was stone paved, with here and there a broken pillar and long stone benches. The hibiscus, the aloe tree, and a number of small shrubs had found place, but seemed only to intensify its stark loneliness.

“Wonder where the Russian can be?” asked Larry.

I shook my head. There was no sign of life here. Had Marakinoff gone – or had the Dweller taken him, too? Whatever had happened, there was no trace of him below us or on any of the islets within our range of vision. We scrambled down the side of the gateway. Olaf looked at me wistfully.

“We start the search now, Olaf,” I said. “And first, O’Keefe, let us see whether the gray stone is really here. After that we will set up camp, and while I unpack, you and Olaf search the island. It won’t take long.”

Larry gave a look at his service automatic and grinned. “Lead on, Macduff,” he said. We made our way up the steps, through the outer enclosures and into the central square, I confess to a fire of scientific curiosity and eagerness tinged with a dread that O’Keefe’s analysis might be true. Would we find the moving slab and, if so, would it be as Throckmartin had described? If so, then even Larry would have to admit that here was something that theories of gases and luminous emanations would not explain; and the first test of the whole amazing story would be passed. But if not – And there before us, the faintest tinge of gray setting it apart from its neighboring blocks of basalt, was the moon door!

There was no mistaking it. This was, in very deed, the portal through which Throckmartin had seen pass that gloriously dreadful apparition he called the Dweller. At its base was the curious, seemingly polished cup-like depression within which, my lost friend had told me, the opening door swung.

What was that portal – more enigmatic than was ever sphinx? And what lay beyond it? What did that smooth stone, whose wan deadness whispered of ages-old corridors of time opening out into alien, unimaginable vistas, hide? It had cost the world of science Throckmartin’s great brain – as it had cost Throckmartin those he loved. It had drawn me to it in search of Throckmartin – and its shadow had fallen upon the soul of Olaf the Norseman; and upon what thousands upon thousands more I wondered, since the brains that had conceived it had vanished with their secret knowledge?

What lay beyond it?

I stretched out a shaking hand and touched the surface of the slab. A faint thrill passed through my hand and arm, oddly unfamiliar and as oddly unpleasant; as of electric contact holding the very essence of cold. O’Keefe, watching, imitated my action. As his fingers rested on the stone his face filled with astonishment.

“It’s the door?” he asked. I nodded. There was a low whistle from him and he pointed up toward the top of the gray stone. I followed the gesture and saw, above the moon door and on each side of it, two gently curving bosses of rock, perhaps a foot in diameter.

“The moon door’s keys,” I said.

“It begins to look so,” answered Larry. “If we can find them,” he added.

“There’s nothing we can do till moonrise,” I replied. “And we’ve none too much time to prepare as it is. Come!”

A little later we were beside our boat. We lightered it, set up the tent, and as it was now but a short hour to sundown I bade them leave me and make their search. They went off together, and I busied myself with opening some of the paraphernalia I had brought with me.

First of all I took out the two Becquerel ray-condensers that I had bought in Sydney. Their lenses would collect and intensify to the fullest extent any light directed upon them. I had found them most useful in making spectroscopic analysis of luminous vapors, and I knew that at Yerkes Observatory splendid results had been obtained from them in collecting the diffused radiance of the nebulae for the same purpose.

If my theory of the gray slab’s mechanism were correct, it was practically certain that with the satellite only a few nights past the full we could concentrate enough light on the bosses to open the rock. And as the ray streams through the seven globes described by Throckmartin would be too weak to energize the Pool, we could enter the chamber free from any fear of encountering its tenant, make our preliminary observations and go forth before the moon had dropped so far that the concentration in the condensers would fall below that necessary to keep the portal from closing.

I took out also a small spectroscope, and a few other instruments for the analysis of certain light manifestations and the testing of metal and liquid. Finally, I put aside my emergency medical kit.

I had hardly finished examining and adjusting these before O’Keefe and Huldricksson returned. They reported signs of a camp at least ten days old beside the northern wall of the outer court, but beyond that no evidence of others beyond ourselves on Nan-Tauach.

We prepared supper, ate and talked a little, but for the most part were silent. Even Larry’s high spirits were not in evidence; half a dozen times I saw him take out his automatic and look it over. He was more thoughtful than I had ever seen him. Once he went into the tent, rummaged about a bit and brought out another revolver which, he said, he had got from Da Costa, and a half-dozen clips of cartridges. He passed the gun over to Olaf.

At last a glow in the southeast heralded the rising moon. I picked up my instruments and the medical kit; Larry and Olaf shouldered each a short ladder that was part of my equipment, and, with our electric flashes pointing the way, walked up the great stairs, through the enclosures, and straight to the gray stone.

By this time the moon had risen and its clipped light shone full upon the slab. I saw faint gleams pass over it as of fleeting phosphorescence – but so faint were they that I could not be sure of the truth of my observation.

We set the ladders in place. Olaf I assigned to stand before the door and watch for the first signs of its opening – if open it should. The Becquerels were set within three-inch tripods, whose feet I had equipped with vacuum rings to enable them to hold fast to the rock.

I scaled one ladder and fastened a condenser over the boss; descended; sent Larry up to watch it, and, ascending the second ladder, rapidly fixed the other in its place. Then, with O’Keefe watchful on his perch, I on mine, and Olaf’s eyes fixed upon the moon door, we began our vigil. Suddenly there was an exclamation from Larry.

“Seven little lights are beginning to glow on this stone!” he cried.

But I had already seen those beneath my lens begin to gleam out with a silvery luster. Swiftly the rays within the condenser began to thicken and increase, and as they did so the seven small circles waxed like stars growing out of the dusk, and with a queer – curdled is the best word I can find to define it – radiance entirely strange to me.

Beneath me I heard a faint, sighing murmur and then the voice of Huldricksson:

“It opens – the stone turns—”

I began to climb down the ladder. Again came Olaf’s voice:

“The stone – it is open—” And then a shriek, a wail of blended anguish and pity, of rage and despair – and the sound of swift footsteps racing through the wall beneath me!

I dropped to the ground. The moon door was wide open, and through it I caught a glimpse of a corridor filled with a faint, pearly vaporous light like earliest misty dawn. But of Olaf I could see – nothing! And even as I stood, gaping, from behind me came the sharp crack of a rifle; the glass of the condenser at Larry’s side flew into fragments; he dropped swiftly to the ground, the automatic in his hand flashed once, twice, into the darkness.

And the moon door began to pivot slowly, slowly back into its place!

I rushed toward the turning stone with the wild idea of holding it open. As I thrust my hands against it there came at my back a snarl and an oath and Larry staggered under the impact of a body that had flung itself straight at his throat. He reeled at the lip of the shallow cup at the base of the slab, slipped upon its polished curve, fell and rolled with that which had attacked him, kicking and writhing, straight through the narrowing portal into the passage!

Forgetting all else, I sprang to his aid. As I leaped I felt the closing edge of the moon door graze my side. Then, as Larry raised a fist, brought it down upon the temple of the man who had grappled with him and rose from the twitching body unsteadily to his feet, I heard shuddering past me a mournful whisper; spun about as though some giant’s hand had whirled me—

The end of the corridor no longer opened out into the moonlit square of ruined Nan-Tauach. It was barred by a solid mass of glimmering stone. The moon door had closed!

O’Keefe took a stumbling step toward the barrier behind us. There was no mark of juncture with the shining walls; the slab fitted into the sides as closely as a mosaic.

“It’s shut all right,” said Larry. “But if there’s a way in, there’s a way out. Anyway, Doc, we’re right in the pew we’ve been heading for – so why worry?” He grinned at me cheerfully. The man on the floor groaned, and he dropped to his knees beside him.

“Marakinoff!” he cried.

At my exclamation he moved aside, turning the face so I could see it. It was clearly Russian, and just as clearly its possessor was one of unusual force and intellect.

The strong, massive brow with orbital ridge unusually developed, the dominant, high-bridged nose, the straight lips with their more than suggestion of latent cruelty, and the strong lines of the jaw beneath a black, pointed beard all gave evidence that here was a personality beyond the ordinary.

“Couldn’t be anybody else,” said Larry, breaking in on my thoughts. “He must have been watching us over there from Chau-ta-leur’s vault all the time.”

Swiftly he ran practiced hands over his body; then stood erect, holding out to me two wicked-looking magazine pistols and a knife. “He got one of my bullets through his right forearm, too,” he said. “Just a flesh wound, but it made him drop his rifle. Some arsenal, our little Russian scientist, what?”

I opened my medical kit. The wound was a slight one, and Larry stood looking on as I bandaged it.

“Got another one of those condensers?” he asked, suddenly. “And do you suppose Olaf will know enough to use it?”

“Larry,” I answered, “Olaf’s not outside! He’s in here somewhere!”

His jaw dropped.

“The hell you say!” he whispered.

“Didn’t you hear him shriek when the stone opened?” I asked.

“I heard him yell, yes,” he said. “But I didn’t know what was the matter. And then this wildcat jumped me—” He paused and his eyes widened. “Which way did he go?” he asked swiftly. I pointed down the faintly glowing passage.

“There’s only one way,” I said.

“Watch that bird close,” hissed O’Keefe, pointing to Marakinoff – and pistol in hand stretched his long legs and raced away. I looked down at the Russian. His eyes were open, and he reached out a hand to me. I lifted him to his feet.

“I have heard,” he said. “We follow, quick. If you will take my arm, please, I am shaken yet, yes—” I gripped his shoulder without a word, and the two of us set off down the corridor after O’Keefe. Marakinoff was gasping, and his weight pressed upon me heavily, but he moved with all the will and strength that were in him.

As we ran I took hasty note of the tunnel. Its sides were smooth and polished, and the light seemed to come not from their surfaces, but from far within them – giving to the walls an illusive aspect of distance and depth; rendering them in a peculiarly weird way – spacious. The passage turned, twisted, ran down, turned again. It came to me that the light that illumined the tunnel was given out by tiny points deep within the stone, sprang from the points ripplingly and spread upon their polished faces.

There was a cry from Larry far ahead.

“Olaf!”

I gripped Marakinoff’s arm closer and we sped on. Now we were coming fast to the end of the passage. Before us was a high arch, and through it I glimpsed a dim, shifting luminosity as of mist filled with rainbows. We reached the portal and I looked into a chamber that might have been transported from that enchanted palace of the Jinn King that rises beyond the magic mountains of Kaf.

Before me stood O’Keefe and a dozen feet in front of him, Huldricksson, with something clasped tightly in his arms. The Norseman’s feet were at the verge of a shining, silvery lip of stone within whose oval lay a blue pool. And down upon this pool staring upward like a gigantic eye, fell seven pillars of phantom light – one of them amethyst, one of rose, another of white, a fourth of blue, and three of emerald, of silver, and of amber. They fell each upon the azure surface, and I knew that these were the seven streams of radiance, within which the Dweller took shape – now but pale ghosts of their brilliancy when the full energy of the moon stream raced through them.

Huldricksson bent and placed on the shining silver lip of the Pool that which he held – and I saw that it was the body of a child! He set it there so gently, bent over the side and thrust a hand down into the water. And as he did so he moaned and lurched against the little body that lay before him. Instantly the form moved – and slipped over the verge into the blue. Huldricksson threw his body over the stone, hands clutching, arms thrust deep down – and from his lips issued a long-drawn, heart-shrivelling wail of pain and of anguish that held in it nothing human!

Close on its wake came a cry from Marakinoff.

“Catch him!” shouted the Russian. “Drag him back! Quick!”

He leaped forward, but before he could half clear the distance, O’Keefe had leaped too, had caught the Norseman by the shoulders and toppled him backward, where he lay whimpering and sobbing. And as I rushed behind Marakinoff I saw Larry lean over the lip of the Pool and cover his eyes with a shaking hand; saw the Russian peer into it with real pity in his cold eyes.

Then I stared down myself into the Moon Pool, and there, sinking, was a little maid whose dead face and fixed, terror-filled eyes looked straight into mine; and ever sinking slowly, slowly – vanished! And I knew that this was Olaf’s Freda, his beloved yndling!

But where was the mother, and where had Olaf found his babe?

The Russian was first to speak.

“You have nitroglycerin there, yes?” he asked, pointing toward my medical kit that I had gripped unconsciously and carried with me during the mad rush down the passage. I nodded and drew it out.

“Hypodermic,” he ordered next, curtly; took the syringe, filled it accurately with its one one-hundredth of a grain dosage, and leaned over Huldricksson. He rolled up the sailor’s sleeves half-way to the shoulder. The arms were white with somewhat of that weird semi-translucence that I had seen on Throckmartin’s breast where a tendril of the Dweller had touched him; and his hands were of the same whiteness – like a baroque pearl. Above the line of white, Marakinoff thrust the needle.

“He will need all his heart can do,” he said to me.

Then he reached down into a belt about his waist and drew from it a small, flat flask of what seemed to be lead. He opened it and let a few drops of its contents fall on each arm of the Norwegian. The liquid sparkled and instantly began to spread over the skin much as oil or gasoline dropped on water does – only far more rapidly. And as it spread it drew a sparkling film over the marbled flesh and little wisps of vapor rose from it. The Norseman’s mighty chest heaved with agony. His hands clenched. The Russian gave a grunt of satisfaction at this, dropped a little more of the liquid, and then, watching closely, grunted again and leaned back. Huldricksson’s labored breathing ceased, his head dropped upon Larry’s knee, and from his arms and hands the whiteness swiftly withdrew.

Marakinoff arose and contemplated us – almost benevolently.

“He will all right be in five minutes,” he said. “I know. I do it to pay for that shot of mine, and also because we will need him. Yes.” He turned to Larry. “You have a poonch like a mule kick, my young friend,” he said. “Sometime you pay me for that, too, eh?” He smiled; and the quality of the grimace was not exactly reassuring. Larry looked him over quizzically.

“You’re Marakinoff, of course,” he said. The Russian nodded, betraying no surprise at the recognition.

“And you?” he asked.

“Lieutenant O’Keefe of the Royal Flying Corps,” replied Larry, saluting. “And this gentleman is Dr. Walter T. Goodwin.”

Marakinoff’s face brightened.

“The American botanist?” he queried. I nodded.

“Ah,” cried Marakinoff eagerly, “but this is fortunate. Long I have desired to meet you. Your work, for an American, is most excellent; surprising. But you are wrong in your theory of the development of the Angiospermae from Cycadeoidea dacotensis. Da – all wrong—”

I was interrupting him with considerable heat, for my conclusions from the fossil Cycadeoidea I knew to be my greatest triumph, when Larry broke in upon me rudely.

“Say,” he spluttered, “am I crazy or are you? What in damnation kind of a place and time is this to start an argument like that?

“Angiospermae, is it?” exclaimed Larry. “Hell!”

Marakinoff again regarded him with that irritating air of benevolence.

“You have not the scientific mind, young friend,” he said. “The poonch, yes! But so has the mule. You must learn that only the fact is important – not you, not me, not this” – he pointed to Huldricksson – “or its sorrows. Only the fact, whatever it is, is real, yes. But” – he turned to me – “another time—”

Huldricksson interrupted him. The big seaman had risen stiffly to his feet and stood with Larry’s arm supporting him. He stretched out his hands to me.

“I saw her,” he whispered. “I saw meine Freda when the stone swung. She lay there – just at my feet. I picked her up and I saw that meine Freda was dead. But I hoped – and I thought maybe meine Helma was somewhere here, too, So I ran with meine yndling – here—” His voice broke. “I thought maybe she was not dead,” he went on. “And I saw that” – he pointed to the Moon Pool – “and I thought I would bathe her face and she might live again. And when I dipped my hands within – the life left them, and cold, deadly cold, ran up through them into my heart. And meine Freda – she fell—” he covered his eyes, and dropping his head on O’Keefe’s shoulder, stood, racked by sobs that seemed to tear at his very soul.

— XI —

THE FLAME-TIPPED SHADOWS

Marakinoff nodded his head solemnly as Olaf finished.

“Da!” he said. “That which comes from here took them both – the woman and the child. Da! They came clasped within it and the stone shut upon them. But why it left the child behind I do not understand.”

“How do you know that?” I cried in amazement.

“Because I saw it,” answered Marakinoff simply. “Not only did I see it, but hardly had I time to make escape through the entrance before it passed whirling and murmuring and its bell sounds all joyous. Da! It was what you call the squeak close, that.”

“Wait a moment,” I said – stilling Larry with a gesture. “Do I understand you to say that you were within this place?”

Marakinoff actually beamed upon me.

“Da, Dr. Goodwin,” he said, “I went in when that which comes from it went out!”

I gaped at him, stricken dumb; into Larry’s bellicose attitude crept a suggestion of grudging respect; Olaf, trembling, watched silently.

“Dr. Goodwin and my impetuous young friend, you,” went on Marakinoff after a moment’s silence and I wondered vaguely why he did not include Huldricksson in his address – “it is time that we have an understanding. I have a proposal to make to you also. It is this; we are what you call a bad boat, and all of us are in it. Da! We need all hands, is it not so? Let us put together our knowledge and our brains and resources – and even a poonch of a mule is a resource,” he looked wickedly at O’Keefe, “and pull our boat into quiet waters again. After that—”

“All very well, Marakinoff,” interjected Larry, “but I don’t feel very safe in any boat with somebody capable of shooting me through the back.”

Marakinoff waved a deprecatory hand.

“It was natural that,” he said, “logical, da! Here is a very great secret, perhaps many secrets to my country invaluable—” He paused, shaken by some overpowering emotion; the veins in his forehead grew congested, the cold eyes blazed and the guttural voice harshened.

“I do not apologize and I do not explain,” rasped Marakinoff. “But I will tell you, da! Here is my country sweating blood in an experiment to liberate the world. And here are the other nations ringing us like wolves and waiting to spring at our throats at the least sign of weakness. And here are you, Lieutenant O’Keefe of the English wolves, and you Dr. Goodwin of the Yankee pack – and here in this place may be that will enable my country to win its war for the worker. What are the lives of you two and this sailor to that? Less than the flies I crush with my hand, less than midges in the sunbeam!”

He suddenly gripped himself.

“But that is not now the important thing,” he resumed, almost coldly. “Not that nor my shooting. Let us squarely the situation face. My proposal is so: that we join interests, and what you call see it through together; find our way through this place and those secrets learn of which I have spoken, if we can. And when that is done we will go our ways, to his own land each, to make use of them for our lands as each of us may. On my part, I offer my knowledge – and it is very valuable, Dr. Goodwin – and my training. You and Lieutenant O’Keefe do the same, and this man Olaf, what he can of his strength, for I do not think his usefulness lies in his brains, no.”

“In effect, Goodwin,” broke in Larry as I hesitated, “the professor’s proposition is this: he wants to know what’s going on here but he begins to realize it’s no one man’s job and besides we have the drop on him. We’re three to his one, and we have all his hardware and cutlery. But also we can do better with him than without him – just as he can do better with us than without us. It’s an even break – for a while. But once he gets that information he’s looking for, then look out. You and Olaf and I are the wolves and the flies and the midges again – and the strafing will be about due. Nevertheless, with three to one against him, if he can get away with it he deserves to. I’m for taking him up, if you are.”

There was almost a twinkle in Marakinoff’s eyes.

“It is not just as I would have put it, perhaps,” he said, “but in its skeleton he has right. Nor will I turn my hand against you while we are still in danger here. I pledge you my honor on this.”

Larry laughed.

“All right, Professor,” he grinned. “I believe you mean every word you say. Nevertheless, I’ll just keep the guns.”

Marakinoff bowed, imperturbably.

“And now,” he said, “I will tell you what I know. I found the secret of the door mechanism even as you did, Dr. Goodwin. But by carelessness, my condensers were broken. I was forced to wait while I sent for others – and the waiting might be for months. I took certain precautions, and on the first night of this full moon I hid myself within the vault of Chau-ta-leur.”

An involuntary thrill of admiration for the man went through me at the manifest heroism of this leap in the dark. I could see it reflected in Larry’s face.

“I hid in the vault,” continued Marakinoff, “and I saw that which comes from here come out. I waited – long hours. At last, when the moon was low, it returned – ecstatically – with a man, a native, in embrace enfolded. It passed through the door, and soon then the moon became low and the door closed.

“The next night more confidence was mine, yes. And after that which comes had gone, I looked through its open door. I said, ‘It will not return for three hours. While it is away, why shall I not into its home go through the door it has left open?’ So I went – even to here. I looked at the pillars of light and I tested the liquid of the Pool on which they fell. That liquid, Dr. Goodwin, is not water, and it is not any fluid known on earth.” He handed me a small vial, its neck held in a long thong.

“Take this,” he said, “and see.”

Wonderingly, I took the bottle; dipped it down into the Pool. The liquid was extraordinarily light; seemed, in fact, to give the vial buoyancy. I held it to the light. It was striated, streaked, as though little living, pulsing veins ran through it. And its blueness, even in the vial, held an intensity of luminousness.

“Radioactive,” said Marakinoff. “Some liquid that is intensely radioactive; but what it is I know not at all. Upon the living skin it acts like radium raised to the nth power and with an element most mysterious added. The solution with which I treated him,” he pointed to Huldricksson, “I had prepared before I came here, from certain information I had. It is largely salts of radium and its base is Loeb’s formula for the neutralization of radium and X-ray burns. Taking this man at once, before the degeneration had become really active, I could negative it. But after two hours I could have done nothing.”

He paused a moment.

“Next I studied the nature of these luminous walls. I concluded that whoever had made them, knew the secret of the Almighty’s manufacture of light from the ether itself! Colossal! Da! But the substance of these blocks confines an atomic – how would you say – atomic manipulation, a conscious arrangement of electrons, light-emitting and perhaps indefinitely so. These blocks are lamps in which oil and wick are electrons drawing light waves from ether itself! A Prometheus, indeed, this discoverer! I looked at my watch and that little guardian warned me that it was time to go. I went. That which comes forth returned – this time empty-handed.

“And the next night I did the same thing. Engrossed in research, I let the moments go by to the danger point, and scarcely was I replaced within the vault when the shining thing raced over the walls, and in its grip the woman and child.

“Then you came – and that is all. And now – what is it you know?”

Very briefly I went over my story. His eyes gleamed now and then, but he did not interrupt me.

“A great secret! A colossal secret!” he muttered, when I had ended. “We cannot leave it hidden.”

“The first thing to do is to try the door,” said Larry, matter of fact.

“There is no use, my young friend,” assured Marakinoff mildly.

“Nevertheless we’ll try,” said Larry. We retraced our way through the winding tunnel to the end, but soon even O’Keefe saw that any idea of moving the slab from within was hopeless. We returned to the Chamber of the Pool. The pillars of light were fainter, and we knew that the moon was sinking. On the world outside before long dawn would be breaking. I began to feel thirst – and the blue semblance of water within the silvery rim seemed to glint mockingly as my eyes rested on it.

“Da!” it was Marakinoff, reading my thoughts uncannily. “Da! We will be thirsty. And it will be very bad for him of us who loses control and drinks of that, my friend. Da!”

Larry threw back his shoulders as though shaking a burden from them.

“This place would give an angel of joy the willies,” he said. “I suggest that we look around and find something that will take us somewhere. You can bet the people that built it had more ways of getting in than that once-a-month family entrance. Doc, you and Olaf take the left wall; the professor and I will take the right.”

He loosened one of his automatics with a suggestive movement.

“After you, Professor,” he bowed, politely, to the Russian. We parted and set forth.

The chamber widened out from the portal in what seemed to be the arc of an immense circle. The shining walls held a perceptible curve, and from this curvature I estimated that the roof was fully three hundred feet above us.

The floor was of smooth, mosaic-fitted blocks of a faintly yellow tinge. They were not light-emitting like the blocks that formed the walls. The radiance from these latter, I noted, had the peculiar quality of thickening a few yards from its source, and it was this that produced the effect of misty, veiled distances. As we walked, the seven columns of rays streaming down from the crystalline globes high above us waned steadily; the glow within the chamber lost its prismatic shimmer and became an even gray tone somewhat like moonlight in a thin cloud.

Now before us, out from the wall, jutted a low terrace. It was all of a pearly rose-colored stone, slender, graceful pillars of the same hue. The face of the terrace was about ten feet high, and all over it ran a bas-relief of what looked like short-trailing vines, surmounted by five stalks, on the tip of each of which was a flower.

We passed along the terrace. It turned in an abrupt curve. I heard a hail, and there, fifty feet away, at the curving end of a wall identical with that where we stood, were Larry and Marakinoff. Obviously the left side of the chamber was a duplicate of that we had explored. We joined. In front of us the columned barriers ran back a hundred feet, forming an alcove. The end of this alcove was another wall of the same rose stone, but upon it the design of vines was much heavier.

We took a step forward – there was a gasp of awe from the Norseman, a guttural exclamation from Marakinoff. For on, or rather within, the wall before us, a great oval began to glow, waxed almost to a flame and then shone steadily out as though from behind it a light was streaming through the stone itself!

And within the roseate oval two flame-tipped shadows appeared, stood for a moment, and then seemed to float out upon its surface. The shadows wavered; the tips of flame that nimbused them with flickering points of vermilion pulsed outward, drew back, darted forth again, and once more withdrew themselves – and as they did so the shadows thickened – and suddenly there before us stood two figures!

One was a girl – a girl whose great eyes were golden as the fabled lilies of Kwan-Yung that were born of the kiss of the sun upon the amber goddess the demons of Lao-Tz’e carved for him; whose softly curved lips were red as the royal coral, and whose golden-brown hair reached to her knees!

And the second was a gigantic frog – a woman frog, head helmeted with carapace of shell around which a fillet of brilliant yellow jewels shone; enormous round eyes of blue circled with a broad iris of green; monstrous body of banded orange and white girdled with strand upon strand of the flashing yellow gems; six feet high if an inch, and with one webbed paw of its short, powerfully muscled forelegs resting upon the white shoulder of the golden-eyed girl!

Moments must have passed as we stood in stark amazement, gazing at that incredible apparition. The two figures, although as real as any of those who stood beside me, unphantomlike as it is possible to be, had a distinct suggestion of – projection.

They were there before us – golden-eyed girl and grotesque frog-woman – complete in every line and curve; and still it was as though their bodies passed back through distances; as though, to try to express the well-nigh inexpressible, the two shapes we were looking upon were the end of an infinite number stretching in fine linked chain far away, of which the eyes saw only the nearest, while in the brain some faculty higher than sight recognized and registered the unseen others.

The gigantic eyes of the frog-woman took us all in – unwinkingly. Little glints of phosphorescence shone out within the metallic green of the outer iris ring. She stood upright, her great legs bowed; the monstrous slit of a mouth slightly open, revealing a row of white teeth sharp and pointed as lancets; the paw resting on the girl’s shoulder, half covering its silken surface, and from its five webbed digits long yellow claws of polished horn glistened against the delicate texture of the flesh.

But if the frog-woman regarded us all, not so did the maiden of the rosy wall. Her eyes were fastened upon Larry, drinking him in with extraordinary intentness. She was tall, far over the average of women, almost as tall, indeed, as O’Keefe himself; not more than twenty years old, if that, I thought. Abruptly she leaned forward, the golden eyes softened and grew tender; the red lips moved as though she were speaking.

Larry took a quick step, and his face was that of one who after countless births comes at last upon the twin soul lost to him for ages. The frog-woman turned her eyes upon the girl; her huge lips moved, and I knew that she was talking! The girl held out a warning hand to O’Keefe, and then raised it, resting each finger upon one of the five flowers of the carved vine close beside her. Once, twice, three times, she pressed upon the flower centers, and I noted that her hand was curiously long and slender, the digits like those wonderful tapering ones the painters we call the primitive gave to their Virgins.

Three times she pressed the flowers, and then looked intently at Larry once more. A slow, sweet smile curved the crimson lips. She stretched both hands out toward him again eagerly; a burning blush rose swiftly over white breasts and flower-like face.

Like the clicking out of a cinematograph, the pulsing oval faded and golden-eyed girl and frog-woman were gone!

And thus it was that Lakla, the handmaiden of the Silent Ones, and Larry O’Keefe first looked into each other’s hearts!

Larry stood rapt, gazing at the stone.

“Eilidh,” I heard him whisper; “Eilidh of the lips like the red, red rowan and the golden-brown hair!”

“Clearly of the Ranadae,” said Marakinoff, “a development of the fossil Labyrinthodonts: you saw her teeth, da?”

“Ranadae, yes,” I answered. “But from the Stegocephalia; of the order Ecaudata—”

Never such a complete indignation as was in O’Keefe’s voice as he interrupted.

“What do you mean – fossils and Stego whatever it is?” he asked. “She was a girl, a wonder girl – a real girl, and Irish, or I’m not an O’Keefe!”

“We were talking about the frog-woman, Larry,” I said, conciliatingly.

His eyes were wild as he regarded us.

“Say,” he said, “if you two had been in the Garden of Eden when Eve took the apple, you wouldn’t have had time to give her a look for counting the scales on the snake!”

He strode swiftly over to the wall. We followed. Larry paused, stretched his hand up to the flowers on which the tapering fingers of the golden-eyed girl had rested.

“It was here she put up her hand,” he murmured. He pressed caressingly the carved calyxes, once, twice, a third time even as she had – and silently and softly the wall began to split; on each side a great stone pivoted slowly, and before us a portal stood, opening into a narrow corridor glowing with the same rosy luster that had gleamed around the flame-tipped shadows!

“Have your gun ready, Olaf!” said Larry. “We follow Golden Eyes,” he said to me.

“Follow?” I echoed stupidly.

“Follow!” he said. “She came to show us the way! Follow? I’d follow her through a thousand hells!”

And with Olaf at one end, O’Keefe at the other, both of them with automatics in hand, and Marakinoff and I between them, we stepped over the threshold.

At our right, a few feet away, the passage ended abruptly in a square of polished stone, from which came faint rose radiance. The roof of the place was less than two feet over O’Keefe’s head.

A yard at left of us lifted a four-foot high, gently curved barricade, stretching from wall to wall – and beyond it was blackness; an utter and appalling blackness that seemed to gather itself from infinite depths. The rose-glow in which we stood was cut off by the blackness as though it had substance; it shimmered out to meet it, and was checked as though by a blow; indeed, so strong was the suggestion of sinister, straining force within the rayless opacity that I shrank back, and Marakinoff with me. Not so O’Keefe. Olaf beside him, he strode to the wall and peered over. He beckoned us.

“Flash your pocket-light down there,” he said to me, pointing into the thick darkness below us. The little electric circle quivered down as though afraid, and came to rest upon a surface that resembled nothing so much as clear, black ice. I ran the light across – here and there. The floor of the corridor was of a substance so smooth, so polished, that no man could have walked upon it; it sloped downward at a slowly increasing angle.

“We’d have to have nonskid chains and brakes on our feet to tackle that,” mused Larry. Abstractedly be ran his hands over the edge on which he was leaning. Suddenly they hesitated and then gripped tightly.

“That’s a queer one!” he exclaimed. His right palm was resting upon a rounded protuberance, on the side of which were three small circular indentations.

“A queer one—” he repeated – and pressed his fingers upon the circles.

There was a sharp click; the slabs that had opened to let us through swung swiftly together; a curiously rapid vibration thrilled through us, a wind arose and passed over our heads – a wind that grew and grew until it became a whistling shriek, then a roar and then a mighty humming, to which every atom in our bodies pulsed in rhythm painful almost to disintegration!

The rosy wall dwindled in a flash to a point of light and disappeared!

Wrapped in the clinging, impenetrable blackness we were racing, dropping, hurling at a frightful speed – where?

And ever that awful humming of the rushing wind and the lightning cleaving of the tangible dark – so, it came to me oddly, must the newly released soul race through the sheer blackness of outer space up to that Throne of Justice, where God sits high above all suns!

I felt Marakinoff creep close to me; gripped my nerve and flashed my pocket-light; saw Larry standing, peering, peering ahead, and Huldricksson, one strong arm around his shoulders, bracing him. And then the speed began to slacken.

Millions of miles, it seemed, below the sound of the unearthly hurricane I heard Larry’s voice, thin and ghostlike, beneath its clamor.

“Got it!” shrilled the voice. “Got it! Don’t worry!”

The wind died down to the roar, passed back into the whistling shriek and diminished to a steady whisper. In the comparative quiet O’Keefe’s tones now came in normal volume.

“Some little shoot-the-chutes, what?” he shouted. “Say – if they had this at Coney Island or the Crystal Palace! Press all the way in these holes and she goes top-high. Diminish pressure – diminish speed. The curve of this – dashboard – here sends the wind shooting up over our heads – like a windshield. What’s behind you?”

I flashed the light back. The mechanism on which we were ended in another wall exactly similar to that over which O’Keefe crouched.

“Well, we can’t fall out, anyway,” he laughed. “Wish to hell I knew where the brakes were! Look out!”

We dropped dizzily down an abrupt, seemingly endless slope; fell – fell as into an abyss – then shot abruptly out of the blackness into a throbbing green radiance. O’Keefe’s fingers must have pressed down upon the controls, for we leaped forward almost with the speed of light. I caught a glimpse of luminous immensities on the verge of which we flew; of depths inconceivable, and flitting through the incredible spaces – gigantic shadows as of the wings of Israfel, which are so wide, say the Arabs, the world can cower under them like a nestling – and then – again the living blackness!

“What was that?” This from Larry, with the nearest approach to awe that he had yet shown.

“Trolldom!” croaked the voice of Olaf.

“Chert!” This from Marakinoff. “What a space!”

“Have you considered, Dr. Goodwin,” he went on after a pause, “a curious thing? We know, or, at least, is it not that nine out of ten astronomers believe, that the moon was hurled out of this same region we now call the Pacific when the earth was yet like molasses; almost molten, I should say. And is it not curious that that which comes from the Moon Chamber needs the moon-rays to bring it forth; is it not? And is it not significant again that the stone depends upon the moon for operating? Da! And last – such a space in mother earth as we just glimpsed, how else could it have been torn but by some gigantic birth – like that of the moon? Da? I do not put forward these as statements of fact – no! But as suggestions—”

I started; there was so much that this might explain – an unknown element that responded to the moon-rays in opening the moon door; the blue Pool with its weird radioactivity, and the force within it that reacted to the same light stream—

It was not inconceivable that a film had drawn over the world wound, a film of earth-flesh which drew itself over that colossal abyss after our planet had borne its satellite – that world womb did not close when her shining child sprang forth – it was possible; and all that we know of earth depth is four miles of her eight thousand.

What is there at the heart of earth? What of that radiant unknown element upon the moon mount Tycho? What of that element unknown to us as part of earth which is seen only in the corona of the sun at eclipse that we call coronium? Yet the earth is child of the sun as the moon is earth’s daughter. And what of that other unknown element we find glowing green in the far-flung nebulae – green as that we had just passed through – and that we call nebulium? Yet the sun is child of the nebulae as the earth is child of the sun and the moon is child of the earth.

And what miracles are there in coronium and nebulium which, as the child of nebula and sun, we inherit? Yes – and in Tycho’s enigma which came from earth heart?

We were flashing down to earth heart! And what miracles were hidden there?

— XII —

THE END OF THE JOURNEY

“Say Doc!” It was Larry’s voice flung back at me. “I was thinking about that frog. I think it was her pet. Damn me if I see any difference between a frog and a snake, and one of the nicest women I ever knew had two pet pythons that followed her around like kittens. Not such a devilish lot of choice between a frog and a snake – except on the side of the frog? What? Anyway, any pet that girl wants is hers, I don’t care if it’s a leaping twelve-toed lobster or a whale-bodied scorpion. Get me?”

By which I knew that our remarks upon the frog woman were still bothering O’Keefe.

“He thinks of foolish nothings like the foolish sailor!” grunted Marakinoff, acid contempt in his words. “What are their women to – this?” He swept out a hand and as though at a signal the car poised itself for an instant, then dipped, literally dipped down into sheer space; skimmed forward in what was clearly curved flight, rose as upon a sweeping upgrade and then began swiftly to slacken its fearful speed.

Far ahead a point of light showed; grew steadily; we were within it – and softly all movement ceased. How acute had been the strain of our journey I did not realize until I tried to stand – and sank back, leg-muscles too shaky to bear my weight. The car rested in a slit in the center of a smooth walled chamber perhaps twenty feet square. The wall facing us was pierced by a low doorway through which we could see a flight of steps leading downward.

The light streamed through a small opening, the base of which was twice a tall man’s height from the floor. A curving flight of broad, low steps led up to it. And now it came to my steadying brain that there was something puzzling, peculiar, strangely unfamiliar about this light. It was silvery, shaded faintly with a delicate blue and flushed lightly with a nacreous rose; but a rose that differed from that of the terraces of the Pool Chamber as the rose within the opal differs from that within the pearl. In it were tiny, gleaming points like the motes in a sunbeam, but sparkling white like the dust of diamonds, and with a quality of vibrant vitality; they were as though they were alive. The light cast no shadows!

A little breeze came through the oval and played about us. It was laden with what seemed the mingled breath of spice flowers and pines. It was curiously vivifying, and in it the diamonded atoms of light shook and danced.

I stepped out of the car, the Russian following, and began to ascend the curved steps toward the opening, at the top of which O’Keefe and Olaf already stood. As they looked out I saw both their faces change – Olaf’s with awe, O’Keefe’s with incredulous amaze. I hurried to their side.

At first all that I could see was space – a space filled with the same coruscating effulgence that pulsed about me. I glanced upward, obeying that instinctive impulse of earth folk that bids them seek within the sky for sources of light. There was no sky – at least no sky such as we know – all was a sparkling nebulosity rising into infinite distances as the azure above the day-world seems to fill all the heavens – through it ran pulsing waves and flashing javelin rays that were like shining shadows of the aurora; echoes, octaves lower, of those brilliant arpeggios and chords that play about the poles. My eyes fell beneath its splendor; I stared outward.

Miles away, gigantic luminous cliffs sprang sheer from the limits of a lake whose waters were of milky opalescence. It was from these cliffs that the spangled radiance came, shimmering out from all their lustrous surfaces. To left and to right, as far as the eye could see, they stretched – and they vanished in the auroral nebulosity on high!

“Look at that!” exclaimed Larry. I followed his pointing finger. On the face of the shining wall, stretched between two colossal columns, hung an incredible veil; prismatic, gleaming with all the colors of the spectrum. It was like a web of rainbows woven by the fingers of the daughters of the Jinn. In front of it and a little at each side was a semicircular pier, or, better, a plaza of what appeared to be glistening, pale-yellow ivory. At each end of its half-circle clustered a few low-walled, rose-stone structures, each of them surmounted by a number of high, slender pinnacles.

We looked at each other, I think, a bit helplessly – and back again through the opening. We were standing, as I have said, at its base. The wall in which it was set was at least ten feet thick, and so, of course, all that we could see of that which was without were the distances that revealed themselves above the outer ledge of the oval.

“Let’s take a look at what’s under us,” said Larry.

He crept out upon the ledge and peered down, the rest of us following. A hundred yards beneath us stretched gardens that must have been like those of many-columned Iram, which the ancient Addite King had built for his pleasure ages before the deluge, and which Allah, so the Arab legend tells, took and hid from man, within the Sahara, beyond all hope of finding – jealous because they were more beautiful than his in paradise. Within them flowers and groves of laced, fernlike trees, pillared pavilions nestled.

The trunks of the trees were of emerald, of vermilion, and of azure-blue, and the blossoms, whose fragrance was borne to us, shone like jewels. The graceful pillars were tinted delicately. I noted that the pavilions were double – in a way, two-storied – and that they were oddly splotched with circles, with squares, and with oblongs of – opacity; noted too that over many this opacity stretched like a roof; yet it did not seem material; rather was it – impenetrable shadow!

Down through this city of gardens ran a broad shining green thoroughfare, glistening like glass and spanned at regular intervals with graceful, arched bridges. The road flashed to a wide square, where rose, from a base of that same silvery stone that formed the lip of the Moon Pool, a titanic structure of seven terraces; and along it flitted objects that bore a curious resemblance to the shell of the Nautilus. Within them were – human figures! And upon tree-bordered promenades on each side walked others!

Far to the right we caught the glint of another emerald-paved road.

And between the two the gardens grew sweetly down to the hither side of that opalescent water across which were the radiant cliffs and the curtain of mystery.

Thus it was that we first saw the city of the Dweller; blessed and accursed as no place on earth, or under or above earth has ever been – or, that force willing which some call God, ever again shall be!

“Chert!” whispered Marakinoff. “Incredible!”

“Trolldom!” gasped Olaf Huldricksson. “It is Trolldom!”

“Listen, Olaf!” said Larry. “Cut out that Trolldom stuff! There’s no Trolldom, or fairies, outside Ireland. Get that! And this isn’t Ireland. And, buck up, Professor!” This to Marakinoff. “What you see down there are people – just plain people. And wherever there’s people is where I live. Get me?

“There’s no way in but in – and no way out but out,” said O’Keefe. “And there’s the stairway. Eggs are eggs no matter how they’re cooked – and people are just people, fellow travelers, no matter what dish they are in,” he concluded. “Come on!”

With the three of us close behind him, he marched toward the entrance.

— XIII —

YOLARA, PRIESTESS
OF THE SHINING ONE

“You’d better have this handy, Doc.” O’Keefe paused at the head of the stairway and handed me one of the automatics he had taken from Marakinoff.

“Shall I not have one also?” rather anxiously asked the latter.

“When you need it you’ll get it,” answered O’Keefe. “I’ll tell you frankly, though, Professor, that you’ll have to show me before I trust you with a gun. You shoot too straight – from cover.”

The flash of anger in the Russian’s eyes turned to a cold consideration.

“You say always just what is in your mind, Lieutenant O’Keefe,” he mused. “Da – that I shall remember!” Later I was to recall this odd observation – and Marakinoff was to remember indeed.

In single file, O’Keefe at the head and Olaf bringing up the rear, we passed through the portal. Before us dropped a circular shaft, into which the light from the chamber of the oval streamed liquidly; set in its sides the steps spiraled, and down them we went, cautiously. The stairway ended in a circular well; silent – with no trace of exit! The rounded stones joined each other evenly – hermetically. Carved on one of the slabs was one of the five flowered vines. I pressed my fingers upon the calyxes, even as Larry had within the Moon Chamber.

A crack – horizontal, four feet wide – appeared on the wall; widened, and as the sinking slab that made it dropped to the level of our eyes, we looked through a hundred-feet-long rift in the living rock! The stone fell steadily – and we saw that it was a Cyclopean wedge set within the slit of the passageway. It reached the level of our feet and stopped. At the far end of this tunnel, whose floor was the polished rock that had, a moment before, fitted hermetically into its roof, was a low, narrow triangular opening through which light streamed.

“Nowhere to go but out!” grinned Larry. “And I’ll bet Golden Eyes is waiting for us with a taxi!” He stepped forward. We followed, slipping, sliding along the glassy surface; and I, for one, had a lively apprehension of what our fate would be should that enormous mass rise before we had emerged! We reached the end; crept out of the narrow triangle that was its exit.

We stood upon a wide ledge carpeted with a thick yellow moss. I looked behind – and clutched O’Keefe’s arm. The door through which we had come had vanished! There was only a precipice of pale rock, on whose surfaces great patches of the amber moss hung; around whose base our ledge ran, and whose summits, if summits it had, were hidden, like the luminous cliffs, in the radiance above us.

“Nowhere to go but ahead – and Golden Eyes hasn’t kept her date!” laughed O’Keefe – but somewhat grimly.

We walked a few yards along the ledge and, rounding a corner, faced the end of one of the slender bridges. From this vantage point the oddly shaped vehicles were plain, and we could see they were, indeed, like the shell of the Nautilus and elfinly beautiful. Their drivers sat high upon the forward whorl. Their bodies were piled high with cushions, upon which lay women half-swathed in gay silken webs. From the pavilioned gardens smaller channels of glistening green ran into the broad way, much as automobile runways do on earth; and in and out of them flashed the fairy shells.

There came a shout from one. Its occupants had glimpsed us. They pointed; others stopped and stared; one shell turned and sped up a runway – and quickly over the other side of the bridge came a score of men. They were dwarfed – none of them more than five feet high, prodigiously broad of shoulder, clearly enormously powerful.

“Trolde!” muttered Olaf, stepping beside O’Keefe, pistol swinging free in his hand.

But at the middle of the bridge the leader stopped, waved back his men, and came toward us alone, palms outstretched in the immemorial, universal gesture of truce. He paused, scanning us with manifest wonder; we returned the scrutiny with interest. The dwarf’s face was as white as Olaf’s – far whiter than those of the other three of us; the features clean-cut and noble, almost classical; the wide set eyes of a curious greenish gray and the black hair curling over his head like that on some old Greek statue.

Dwarfed though he was, there was no suggestion of deformity about him. The gigantic shoulders were covered with a loose green tunic that looked like fine linen. It was caught in at the waist by a broad girdle studded with what seemed to be amazonites. In it was thrust a long curved poniard resembling the Malaysian kris. His legs were swathed in the same green cloth as the upper garment. His feet were sandalled.

My gaze returned to his face, and in it I found something subtly disturbing; an expression of half-malicious gaiety that underlay the wholly prepossessing features like a vague threat; a mocking deviltry that hinted at entire callousness to suffering or sorrow; something of the spirit that was vaguely alien and disquieting.

He spoke – and, to my surprise, enough of the words were familiar to enable me clearly to catch the meaning of the whole. They were Polynesian, the Polynesian of the Samoans which is its most ancient form, but in some indefinable way – archaic. Later I was to know that the tongue bore the same relation to the Polynesian of today as does not that of Chaucer, but of the Venerable Bede, to modern English. Nor was this to be so astonishing, when with the knowledge came the certainty that it was from it the language we call Polynesian sprang.

“From whence do you come, strangers – and how found you your way here?” said the green dwarf.

I waved my hand toward the cliff behind us. His eyes narrowed incredulously; he glanced at its drop, upon which even a mountain goat could not have made its way, and laughed.

“We came through the rock,” I answered his thought. “And we come in peace,” I added.

“And may peace walk with you,” he said half-derisively – “if the Shining One wills it!”

He considered us again.

“Show me, strangers, where you came through the rock,” he commanded. We led the way to where we had emerged from the well of the stairway.

“It was here,” I said, tapping the cliff.

“But I see no opening,” he said suavely.

“It closed behind us,” I answered; and then, for the first time, realized how incredible the explanation sounded. The derisive gleam passed through his eyes again. But he drew his poniard and gravely sounded the rock.

“You give a strange turn to our speech,” he said. “It sounds strangely, indeed – as strange as your answers.” He looked at us quizzically. “I wonder where you learned it! Well, all that you can explain to the Afyo Maie.” His head bowed and his arms swept out in a wide salaam. “Be pleased to come with me!” he ended abruptly.

“In peace?” I asked.

“In peace,” he replied – then slowly – “with me at least.”

“Oh, come on, Doc!” cried Larry. “As long as we’re here let’s see the sights. Allons mon vieux!” he called gaily to the green dwarf. The latter, understanding the spirit, if not the words, looked at O’Keefe with a twinkle of approval; turned then to the great Norseman and scanned him with admiration; reached out and squeezed one of the immense biceps.

“Lugur will welcome you, at least,” he murmured as though to himself. He stood aside and waved a hand courteously, inviting us to pass. We crossed. At the base of the span one of the elfin shells was waiting.

Beyond, scores had gathered, their occupants evidently discussing us in much excitement. The green dwarf waved us to the piles of cushions and then threw himself beside us. The vehicle started off smoothly, the now silent throng making way, and swept down the green roadway at a terrific pace and wholly without vibration, toward the seven-terraced tower.

As we flew along I tried to discover the source of the power, but I could not – then. There was no sign of mechanism, but that the shell responded to some form of energy was certain – the driver grasping a small lever which seemed to control not only our speed, but our direction.

We turned abruptly and swept up a runway through one of the gardens, and stopped softly before a pillared pavilion. I saw now that these were much larger than I had thought. The structure to which we had been carried covered, I estimated, fully an acre. Oblong, with its slender, varicolored columns spaced regularly, its walls were like the sliding screens of the Japanese shoji.

The green dwarf hurried us up a flight of broad steps flanked by great carved serpents, winged and scaled. He stamped twice upon mosaicked stones between two of the pillars, and a screen rolled aside, revealing an immense hall scattered about with low divans on which lolled a dozen or more of the dwarfish men, dressed identically as he.

They sauntered up to us leisurely; the surprised interest in their faces tempered by the same inhumanly gay malice that seemed to be characteristic of all these people we had as yet seen.

“The Afyo Maie awaits them, Rador,” said one.

The green dwarf nodded, beckoned us, and led the way through the great hall and into a smaller chamber whose far side was covered with the opacity I had noted from the aerie of the cliff. I examined the – blackness – with lively interest.

It had neither substance nor texture; it was not matter – and yet it suggested solidity; an entire cessation, a complete absorption of light; an ebon veil at once immaterial and palpable. I stretched, involuntarily, my hand out toward it, and felt it quickly drawn back.

“Do you seek your end so soon?” whispered Rador. “But I forget – you do not know,” he added. “On your life touch not the blackness, ever. It—”

He stopped, for abruptly in the density a portal appeared; swinging out of the shadow like a picture thrown by a lantern upon a screen. Through it was revealed a chamber filled with a soft rosy glow. Rising from cushioned couches, a woman and a man regarded us, half leaning over a long, low table of what seemed polished jet, laden with flowers and unfamiliar fruits.

About the room – that part of it, at least, that I could see – were a few oddly shaped chairs of the same substance. On high, silvery tripods three immense globes stood, and it was from them that the rose glow emanated. At the side of the woman was a smaller globe whose roseate gleam was tempered by quivering waves of blue.

“Enter Rador with the strangers!” a clear, sweet voice called.

Rador bowed deeply and stood aside, motioning us to pass. We entered, the green dwarf behind us, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the doorway fade as abruptly as it had appeared and again the dense shadow fill its place.

“Come closer, strangers. Be not afraid!” commanded the bell-toned voice.

We approached.

The woman, sober scientist that I am, made the breath catch in my throat. Never had I seen a woman so beautiful as was Yolara of the Dweller’s city – and none of so perilous a beauty. Her hair was of the color of the young tassels of the corn and coiled in a regal crown above her broad, white brows; her wide eyes were of gray that could change to a cornflower blue and in anger deepen to purple; gray or blue, they had little laughing devils within them, but when the storm of anger darkened them – they were not laughing, no! The silken webs that half covered, half revealed her did not hide the ivory whiteness of her flesh nor the sweet curve of shoulders and breasts. But for all her amazing beauty, she was – sinister! There was cruelty about the curving mouth, and in the music of her voice – not conscious cruelty, but the more terrifying, careless cruelty of nature itself.

The girl of the rose wall had been beautiful, yes! But her beauty was human, understandable. You could imagine her with a babe in her arms – but you could not so imagine this woman. About her loveliness hovered something unearthly. A sweet feminine echo of the Dweller was Yolara, the Dweller’s priestess – and as gloriously, terrifyingly evil!

— XIV —

THE JUSTICE OF LORA

As I looked at her the man arose and made his way round the table toward us. For the first time my eyes took in Lugur. A few inches taller than the green dwarf, he was far broader, more filled with the suggestion of appalling strength.

The tremendous shoulders were four feet wide if an inch, tapering down to mighty thewed thighs. The muscles of his chest stood out beneath his tunic of red. Around his forehead shone a chaplet of bright-blue stones, sparkling among the thick curls of his silver-ash hair.

Upon his face pride and ambition were written large – and power still larger. All the mockery, the malice, the hint of callous indifference that I had noted in the other dwarfish men were there, too – but intensified, touched with the satanic.

The woman spoke again.

“Who are you strangers, and how came you here?” She turned to Rador. “Or is it that they do not understand our tongue?”

“One understands and speaks it – but very badly, O Yolara,” answered the green dwarf.

“Speak, then, that one of you,” she commanded.

But it was Marakinoff who found his voice first, and I marveled at the fluency, so much greater than mine, with which he spoke.

“We came for different purposes. I to seek knowledge of a kind; he” – pointing to me “of another. This man” – he looked at Olaf – “to find a wife and child.”

The gray-blue eyes had been regarding O’Keefe steadily and with plainly increasing interest.

“And why did you come?” she asked him. “Nay – I would have him speak for himself, if he can,” she stilled Marakinoff peremptorily.

When Larry spoke it was haltingly, in the tongue that was strange to him, searching for the proper words.

“I came to help these men – and because something I could not then understand called me, O lady, whose eyes are like forest pools at dawn,” he answered; and even in the unfamiliar words there was a touch of the Irish brogue, and little merry lights danced in the eyes Larry had so apostrophized.

“I could find fault with your speech, but none with its burden,” she said. “What forest pools are I know not, and the dawn has not shone upon the people of Lora these many sais of laya. [03] But I sense what you mean!”

The eyes deepened to blue as she regarded him. She smiled.

“Are there many like you in the world from which you come?” she asked softly. “Well, we soon shall—”

Lugur interrupted her almost rudely and glowering.

“Best we should know how they came hence,” he growled.

She darted a quick look at him, and again the little devils danced in her wondrous eyes.

“Yes, that is true,” she said. “How came you here?”

Again it was Marakinoff who answered – slowly, considering every word.

“In the world above,” he said, “there are ruins of cities not built by any of those who now dwell there. To us these places called, and we sought for knowledge of the wise ones who made them. We found a passageway. The way led us downward to a door in yonder cliff, and through it we came here.”

“Then have you found what you sought?” spoke she. “For we are of those who built the cities. But this gateway in the rock – where is it?”

“After we passed, it closed upon us; nor could we after find trace of it,” answered Marakinoff.

The incredulity that had shown upon the face of the green dwarf fell upon theirs; on Lugur’s it was clouded with furious anger.

He turned to Rador.

“I could find no opening, lord,” said the green dwarf quickly.

And there was so fierce a fire in the eyes of Lugur as he swung back upon us that O’Keefe’s hand slipped stealthily down toward his pistol.

“Best it is to speak truth to Yolara, priestess of the Shining One, and to Lugur, the Voice,” he cried menacingly.

“It is the truth,” I interposed. “We came down the passage. At its end was a carved vine, a vine of five flowers” – the fire died from the red dwarf’s eyes, and I could have sworn to a swift pallor. “I rested a hand upon these flowers, and a door opened. But when we had gone through it and turned, behind us was nothing but unbroken cliff. The door had vanished.”

I had taken my cue from Marakinoff. If he had eliminated the episode of car and Moon Pool, he had good reason, I had no doubt; and I would be as cautious. And deep within me something cautioned me to say nothing of my quest; to stifle all thought of Throckmartin – something that warned, peremptorily, finally, as though it were a message from Throckmartin himself!

“A vine with five flowers!” exclaimed the red dwarf. “Was it like this, say?”

He thrust forward a long arm. Upon the thumb of the hand was an immense ring, set with a dull-blue stone. Graven on the face of the jewel was the symbol of the rosy walls of the Moon Chamber that had opened to us their two portals. But cut over the vine were seven circles, one about each of the flowers and two larger ones covering, intersecting them.

“This is the same,” I said; “but these were not there” – I indicated the circles.

The woman drew a deep breath and looked deep into Lugur’s eyes.

“The sign of the Silent Ones!” he half whispered.

It was the woman who first recovered herself.

“The strangers are weary, Lugur,” she said. “When they are rested they shall show where the rocks opened.”

I sensed a subtle change in their attitude toward us; a new intentness; a doubt plainly tinged with apprehension. What was it they feared? Why had the symbol of the vine wrought the change? And who or what were the Silent Ones?

Yolara’s eyes turned to Olaf, hardened, and grew cold gray. Subconsciously I had noticed that from the first the Norseman had been absorbed in his regard of the pair; had, indeed, never taken his gaze from them; had noticed, too, the priestess dart swift glances toward him.

He returned her scrutiny fearlessly, a touch of contempt in the clear eyes – like a child watching a snake which he did not dread, but whose danger be well knew.

Under that look Yolara stirred impatiently, sensing, I know, its meaning.

“Why do you look at me so?” she cried.

An expression of bewilderment passed over Olaf’s face.

“I do not understand,” he said in English.

I caught a quickly repressed gleam in O’Keefe’s eyes. He knew, as I knew, that Olaf must have understood. But did Marakinoff?

Apparently he did not. But why was Olaf feigning ignorance?

“This man is a sailor from what we call the North,” thus Larry haltingly. “He is crazed, I think. He tells a strange tale of a something of cold fire that took his wife and babe. We found him wandering where we were. And because he is strong we brought him with us. That is all, O lady, whose voice is sweeter than the honey of the wild bees!”

“A shape of cold fire?” she repeated.

“A shape of cold fire that whirled beneath the moon, with the sound of little bells,” answered Larry, watching her intently.

She looked at Lugur and laughed.

“Then he, too, is fortunate,” she said. “For he has come to the place of his something of cold fire – and tell him that he shall join his wife and child, in time; that I promise him.”

Upon the Norseman’s face there was no hint of comprehension, and at that moment I formed an entirely new opinion of Olaf’s intelligence; for certainly it must have been a prodigious effort of the will, indeed, that enabled him, understanding, to control himself.

“What does she say?” he asked.

Larry repeated.

“Good!” said Olaf. “Good!”

He looked at Yolara with well-assumed gratitude. Lugur, who had been scanning his bulk, drew close. He felt the giant muscles which Huldricksson accommodatingly flexed for him.

“But he shall meet Valdor and Tahola before he sees those kin of his,” he laughed mockingly. “And if he bests them – for reward – his wife and babe!”

A shudder, quickly repressed, shook the seaman’s frame. The woman bent her supremely beautiful head.

“These two,” she said, pointing to the Russian and to me, “seem to be men of learning. They may be useful. As for this man,” – she smiled at Larry – “I would have him explain to me some things.” She hesitated. “What ‘hon-ey of ’e wild bees-s’ is.” Larry had spoken the words in English, and she was trying to repeat them. “As for this man, the sailor, do as you please with him, Lugur; always remembering that I have given my word that he shall join that wife and babe of his!” She laughed sweetly, sinisterly. “And now – take them, Rador – give them food and drink and let them rest till we shall call them again.”

She stretched out a hand toward O’Keefe. The Irishman bowed low over it, raised it softly to his lips. There was a vicious hiss from Lugur; but Yolara regarded Larry with eyes now all tender blue.

“You please me,” she whispered.

And the face of Lugur grew darker.

We turned to go. The rosy, azure-shot globe at her side suddenly dulled. From it came a faint bell sound as of chimes far away. She bent over it. It vibrated, and then its surface ran with little waves of dull color; from it came a whispering so low that I could not distinguish the words – if words they were.

She spoke to the red dwarf.

“They have brought the three who blasphemed the Shining One,” she said slowly. “Now it is in my mind to show these strangers the justice of Lora. What say you, Lugur?”

The red dwarf nodded, his eyes sparkling with a malicious anticipation.

The woman spoke again to the globe. “Bring them here!”

And again it ran swiftly with its film of colors, darkened, and shone rosy once more. From without there came a rustle of many feet upon the rugs. Yolara pressed a slender hand upon the base of the pedestal of the globe beside her. Abruptly the light faded from all, and on the same instant the four walls of blackness vanished, revealing on two sides the lovely, unfamiliar garden through the guarding rows of pillars; at our backs soft draperies hid what lay beyond; before us, flanked by flowered screens, was the corridor through which we had entered, crowded now by the green dwarfs of the great hall.

The dwarfs advanced. Each, I now noted, had the same clustering black hair of Rador. They separated, and from them stepped three figures – a youth of not more than twenty, short, but with the great shoulders of all the males we had seen of this race; a girl of seventeen, I judged, white-faced, a head taller than the boy, her long, black hair disheveled; and behind these two a stunted, gnarled shape whose head was sunk deep between the enormous shoulders, whose white beard fell like that of some ancient gnome down to his waist, and whose eyes were a white flame of hate. The girl cast herself weeping at the feet of the priestess; the youth regarded her curiously.

“You are Songar of the Lower Waters?” murmured Yolara almost caressingly. “And this is your daughter and her lover?”

The gnome nodded, the flame in his eyes leaping higher.

“It has come to me that you three have dared blaspheme the Shining One, its priestess, and its Voice,” went on Yolara smoothly. “Also that you have called out to the three Silent Ones. Is it true?”

“Your spies have spoken – and have you not already judged us?” The voice of the old dwarf was bitter.

A flicker shot through the eyes of Yolara, again cold gray. The girl reached a trembling hand out to the hem of the priestess’s veils.

“Tell us why you did these things, Songar,” she said. “Why you did them, knowing full well what your – reward – would be.”

The dwarf stiffened; he raised his withered arms, and his eyes blazed.

“Because evil are your thoughts and evil are your deeds,” he cried. “Yours and your lover’s, there” – he leveled a finger at Lugur. “Because of the Shining One you have made evil, too, and the greater wickedness you contemplate – you and he with the Shining One. But I tell you that your measure of iniquity is full; the tale of your sin near ended! Yea – the Silent Ones have been patient, but soon they will speak.” He pointed at us. “A sign are they – a warning – harlot!” He spat the word.

In Yolara’s eyes, grown black, the devils leaped unrestrained.

“Is it even so, Songar?” her voice caressed. “Now ask the Silent Ones to help you! They sit afar – but surely they will hear you.” The sweet voice was mocking. “As for these two, they shall pray to the Shining One for forgiveness – and surely the Shining One will take them to its bosom! As for you – you have lived long enough, Songar! Pray to the Silent Ones, Songar, and pass out into the nothingness – you!”

She dipped down into her bosom and drew forth something that resembled a small cone of tarnished silver. She leveled it, a covering clicked from its base, and out of it darted a slender ray of intense green light.

It struck the old dwarf squarely over the heart, and spread swift as light itself, covering him with a gleaming, pale film. She clenched her hand upon the cone, and the ray disappeared. She thrust the cone back into her breast and leaned forward expectantly; so Lugur and so the other dwarfs. From the girl came a low wail of anguish; the boy dropped upon his knees, covering his face.

For the moment the white beard stood rigid; then the robe that had covered him seemed to melt away, revealing all the knotted, monstrous body. And in that body a vibration began, increasing to incredible rapidity. It wavered before us like a reflection in a still pond stirred by a sudden wind. It grew and grew – to a rhythm whose rapidity was intolerable to watch and that still chained the eyes.

The figure grew indistinct, misty. Tiny sparks in infinite numbers leaped from it – like, I thought, the radiant shower of particles hurled out by radium when seen under the microscope. Mistier still it grew – there trembled before us for a moment a faintly luminous shadow which held, here and there, tiny sparkling atoms like those that pulsed in the light about us! The glowing shadow vanished, the sparkling atoms were still for a moment – and shot away, joining those dancing others.

Where the gnome-like form had been but a few seconds before – there was nothing!

O’Keefe drew a long breath, and I was sensible of a prickling along my scalp.

Yolara leaned toward us.

“You have seen,” she said. Her eyes lingered tigerishly upon Olaf’s pallid face. “Heed!” she whispered. She turned to the men in green, who were laughing softly among themselves.

“Take these two, and go!” she commanded.

“The justice of Lora,” said the red dwarf. “The justice of Lora and the Shining One under Thanaroa!”

Upon the utterance of the last word I saw Marakinoff start violently. The hand at his side made a swift, surreptitious gesture, so fleeting that I hardly caught it. The red dwarf stared at the Russian, and there was amazement upon his face.

Swiftly as Marakinoff, he returned it.

“Yolara,” the red dwarf spoke, “it would please me to take this man of wisdom to my own place for a time. The giant I would have, too.”

The woman awoke from her brooding; nodded.

“As you will, Lugur,” she said.

And as, shaken to the core, we passed out into the garden into the full throbbing of the light, I wondered if all the tiny sparkling diamond points that shook about us had once been men like Songar of the Lower Waters – and felt my very soul grow sick!

— XV —

THE ANGRY,
WHISPERING GLOBE

Our way led along a winding path between banked masses of softly radiant blooms, groups of feathery ferns whose plumes were starred with fragrant white and blue flowerets, slender creepers swinging from the branches of the strangely trunked trees, bearing along their threads orchid-like blossoms both delicately frail and gorgeously flamboyant.

The path we trod was an exquisite mosaic – pastel greens and pinks upon a soft gray base, garlands of nimbused forms like the flaming rose of the Rosicrucians held in the mouths of the flying serpents. A smaller pavilion arose before us, single-storied, front wide open.

Upon its threshold Rador paused, bowed deeply, and motioned us within. The chamber we entered was large, closed on two sides by screens of gray; at the back gay, concealing curtains. The low table of blue stone, dressed with fine white cloths, stretched at one side flanked by the cushioned divans.

At the left was a high tripod bearing one of the rosy globes we had seen in the house of Yolara; at the head of the table a smaller globe similar to the whispering one. Rador pressed upon its base, and two other screens slid into place across the entrance, shutting in the room.

He clapped his hands; the curtains parted, and two girls came through them. Tall and willow lithe, their bluish-black hair falling in ringlets just below their white shoulders, their clear eyes of forget-me-not blue, and skins of extraordinary fineness and purity – they were singularly attractive. Each was clad in an extremely scanty bodice of silken blue, girdled above a kirtle that came barely to their very pretty knees.

“Food and drink,” ordered Rador.

They dropped back through the curtains.

“Do you like them?” he asked us.

“Some chickens!” said Larry. “They delight the heart,” he translated for Rador.

The green dwarf’s next remark made me gasp.

“They are yours,” he said.

Before I could question him further upon this extraordinary statement the pair re-entered, bearing a great platter on which were small loaves, strange fruits, and three immense flagons of rock crystal – two filled with a slightly sparkling yellow liquid and the third with a purplish drink. I became acutely sensible that it had been hours since I had either eaten or drunk. The yellow flagons were set before Larry and me, the purple at Rador’s hand.

The girls, at his signal, again withdrew. I raised my glass to my lips and took a deep draft. The taste was unfamiliar but delightful.

Almost at once my fatigue disappeared. I realized a clarity of mind, an interesting exhilaration and sense of irresponsibility, of freedom from care, that were oddly enjoyable. Larry became immediately his old gay self.

The green dwarf regarded us whimsically, sipping from his great flagon of rock crystal.

“Much do I desire to know of that world you came from,” he said at last – “through the rocks,” he added, slyly.

“And much do we desire to know of this world of yours, O Rador,” I answered.

Should I ask him of the Dweller; seek from him a clue to Throckmartin? Again, clearly as a spoken command, came the warning to forbear, to wait. And once more I obeyed.

“Let us learn, then, from each other.” The dwarf was laughing. “And first – are all above like you – drawn out” – he made an expressive gesture – “and are there many of you?”

“There are—” I hesitated, and at last spoke the Polynesian that means tens upon tens multiplied indefinitely – “there are as many as the drops of water in the lake we saw from the ledge where you found us,” I continued; “many as the leaves on the trees without. And they are all like us – varyingly.”

He considered skeptically, I could see, my remark upon our numbers.

“In Muria,” he said at last, “the men are like me or like Lugur. Our women are as you see them – like Yolara or those two who served you.” He hesitated. “And there is a third; but only one.”

Larry leaned forward eagerly.

“Brown-haired with glints of ruddy bronze, golden-eyed, and lovely as a dream, with long, slender, beautiful hands?” he cried.

“Where saw you her?” interrupted the dwarf, starting to his feet.

“Saw her?” Larry recovered himself. “Nay, Rador, perhaps, I only dreamed that there was such a woman.”

“See to it, then, that you tell not your dream to Yolara,” said the dwarf grimly. “For her I meant and her you have pictured is Lakla, the hand-maiden to the Silent Ones, and neither Yolara nor Lugur, nay, nor the Shining One, love her over-much, stranger.”

“Does she dwell here?” Larry’s face was alight.

The dwarf hesitated, glanced about him anxiously.

“Nay,” he answered, “ask me no more of her.” He was silent for a space. “And what do you who are as leaves or drops of water do in that world of yours?” he said, plainly bent on turning the subject.

“Keep off the golden-eyed girl, Larry,” I interjected. “Wait till we find out why she’s tabu.”

“Love and battle, strive and accomplish and die; or fail and die,” answered Larry – to Rador – giving me a quick nod of acquiescence to my warning in English.

“In that at least your world and mine differ little,” said the dwarf.

“How great is this world of yours, Rador?” I spoke.

He considered me gravely.

“How great indeed I do not know,” he said frankly at last. “The land where we dwell with the Shining One stretches along the white waters for—” He used a phrase of which I could make nothing. “Beyond this city of the Shining One and on the hither shores of the white waters dwell the mayia ladala – the common ones.” He took a deep draft from his flagon. “There are, first, the fair-haired ones, the children of the ancient rulers,” he continued. “There are, second, we the soldiers; and last, the mayia ladala, who dig and till and weave and toil and give our rulers and us their daughters, and dance with the Shining One!” he added.

“Who rules?” I asked.

“The fair-haired, under the Council of Nine, who are under Yolara, the Priestess and Lugur, the Voice,” he answered, “who are in turn beneath the Shining One!” There was a ring of bitter satire in the last.

“And those three who were judged?” – this from Larry.

“They were of the mayia ladala,” he replied, “like those two I gave you. But they grow restless. They do not like to dance with the Shining One – the blasphemers!” He raised his voice in a sudden great shout of mocking laughter.

In his words I caught a fleeting picture of the race – an ancient, luxurious, close-bred oligarchy clustered about some mysterious deity; a soldier class that supported them; and underneath all the toiling, oppressed hordes.

“And is that all?” asked Larry.

“No,” he answered. “There is the Sea of Crimson where—”

Without warning the globe beside us sent out a vicious note, Rador turned toward it, his face paling. Its surface crawled with whisperings – angry, peremptory!

“I hear!” he croaked, gripping the table. “I obey!”

He turned to us a face devoid for once of its malice.

“Ask me no more questions, strangers,” he said. “And now, if you are done, I will show you where you may sleep and bathe.”

He arose abruptly. We followed him through the hangings, passed through a corridor and into another smaller chamber, roofless, the sides walled with screens of dark gray. Two cushioned couches were there and a curtained door leading into an open, outer enclosure in which a fountain played within a wide pool.

“Your bath,” said Rador. He dropped the curtain and came back into the room. He touched a carved flower at one side. There was a tiny sighing from overhead and instantly across the top spread a veil of blackness, impenetrable to light but certainly not to air, for through it pulsed little breaths of the garden fragrances. The room filled with a cool twilight, refreshing, sleep-inducing. The green dwarf pointed to the couches.

“Sleep!” he said. “Sleep and fear nothing. My men are on guard outside.” He came closer to us, the old mocking gaiety sparkling in his eyes.

“But I spoke too quickly,” he whispered. “Whether it is because the Afyo Maie fears their tongues – or—” he laughed at Larry. “The maids are not yours!” Still laughing he vanished through the curtains of the room of the fountain before I could ask him the meaning of his curious gift, its withdrawal, and his most enigmatic closing remarks.

“Back in the great old days of Ireland,” thus Larry breaking into my thoughts raptly, the brogue thick, “there was Cairill mac Cairill – Cairill Swiftspear. An’ Cairill wronged Keevan of Emhain Abhlach, of the blood of Angus of the great people when he was sleeping in the likeness of a pale reed. Then Keevan put this penance on Cairill – that for a year Cairill should wear his body in Emhain Abhlach, which is the Land of Faery and for that year Keevan should wear the body of Cairill. And it was done.

“In that year Cairill met Emar of the Birds that are one white, one red, and one black – and they loved, and from that love sprang Ailill their son. And when Ailill was born he took a reed flute and first he played slumber on Cairill, and then he played old age so that Cairill grew white and withered; then Ailill played again and Cairill became a shadow – then a shadow of a shadow – then a breath; and the breath went out upon the wind!” He shivered. “Like the old gnome,” he whispered, “that they called Songar of the Lower Waters!”

He shook his head as though he cast a dream from him. Then, all alert—

“But that was in Iceland ages agone. And there’s nothing like that here, Doc!” He laughed. “It doesn’t scare me one little bit, old boy. The pretty devil lady’s got the wrong slant. When you’ve had a pal standing beside you one moment – full of life, and joy, and power, and potentialities, telling what he’s going to do to make the world hum when he gets through the slaughter, just running over with zip and pep of life, Doc – and the next instant, right in the middle of a laugh – a piece of damned shell takes off half his head and with it joy and power and all the rest of it” – his face twitched – “well, old man, in the face of that mystery a disappearing act such as the devil lady treated us to doesn’t make much of a dent. Not on me. But by the brogans of Brian Boru – if we could have had some of that stuff to turn on during the war – oh, boy!”

He was silent, evidently contemplating the idea with vast pleasure. And as for me, at that moment my last doubt of Larry O’Keefe vanished, I saw that he did believe, really believed, in his banshees, his leprechauns and all the old dreams of the Gael – but only within the limits of Ireland.

In one drawer of his mind was packed all his superstition, his mysticism, and what of weakness it might carry. But face him with any peril or problem and the drawer closed instantaneously leaving a mind that was utterly fearless, incredulous, and ingenious; swept clean of all cobwebs by as fine a skeptic broom as ever brushed a brain.

“Some stuff!” Deepest admiration was in his voice. “If we’d only had it when the war was on – imagine half a dozen of us scooting over the enemy batteries and the gunners underneath all at once beginning to shake themselves to pieces! Wow!” His tone was rapturous.

“It’s easy enough to explain, Larry,” I said. “The effect, that is – for what the green ray is made of I don’t know, of course. But what it does, clearly, is stimulate atomic vibration to such a pitch that the cohesion between the particles of matter is broken and the body flies to bits – just as a flywheel does when its speed gets so great that the particles of which it is made can’t hold together.”

“Shake themselves to pieces is right, then!” he exclaimed.

“Absolutely right,” I nodded. “Everything in Nature vibrates. And all matter – whether man or beast or stone or metal or vegetable – is made up of vibrating molecules, which are made up of vibrating atoms which are made up of truly infinitely small particles of electricity called electrons, and electrons, the base of all matter, are themselves perhaps only a vibration of the mysterious ether.

“If a magnifying glass of sufficient size and strength could be placed over us we could see ourselves as sieves – our space lattice, as it is called. And all that is necessary to break down the lattice, to shake us into nothingness, is some agent that will set our atoms vibrating at such a rate that at last they escape the unseen cords and fly off.

“The green ray of Yolara is such an agent. It set up in the dwarf that incredibly rapid rhythm that you saw and – shook him not to atoms – but to electrons!”

“They had a gun on the West Front – a seventy-five,” said O’Keefe, “that broke the eardrums of everybody who fired it, no matter what protection they used. It looked like all the other seventy-fives – but there was something about its sound that did it. They had to recast it.”

“It’s practically the same thing,” I replied. “By some freak its vibratory qualities had that effect. The deep whistle of the sunken Lusitania would, for instance, make the Singer Building shake to its foundations; while the Olympic did not affect the Singer at all but made the Woolworth shiver all through. In each case they stimulated the atomic vibration of the particular building—”

I paused, aware all at once of an intense drowsiness. O’Keefe, yawning, reached down to unfasten his puttees.

“Lord, I’m sleepy!” he exclaimed. “Can’t understand it – what you say – most – interesting – Lord!” he yawned again; straightened. “What made Reddy take such a shine to the Russian?” he asked.

“Thanaroa,” I answered, fighting to keep my eyes open.

“What?”

“When Lugur spoke that name I saw Marakinoff signal him. Thanaroa is, I suspect, the original form of the name of Tangaroa, the greatest god of the Polynesians. There’s a secret cult to him in the islands. Marakinoff may belong to it – he knows it anyway. Lugur recognized the signal and despite his surprise answered it.”

“So he gave him the high sign, eh?” mused Larry. “How could they both know it?”

“The cult is a very ancient one. Undoubtedly it had its origin in the dim beginnings before these people migrated here,” I replied. “It’s a link – one – of the few links between up there and the lost past—”

“Trouble then,” mumbled Larry. “Hell brewing! I smell it – Say, Doc, is this sleepiness natural? Wonder where my – gas mask – is—” he added, half incoherently.

But I myself was struggling desperately against the drugged slumber pressing down upon me.

“Lakla!” I heard O’Keefe murmur. “Lakla of the golden eyes – no Eilidh – the Fair!” He made an immense effort, half raised himself, grinned faintly.

“Thought this was paradise when I first saw it, Doc,” he sighed. “But I know now, if it is, No-Man’s Land was the greatest place on earth for a honeymoon. They – they’ve got us, Doc—” He sank back. “Good luck, old boy, wherever you’re going.” His hand waved feebly. “Glad – knew – you. Hope – see – you – ’gain—”

His voice trailed into silence. Fighting, fighting with every fiber of brain and nerve against the sleep, I felt myself being steadily overcome. Yet before oblivion rushed down upon me I seemed to see upon the gray-screened wall nearest the Irishman an oval of rosy light begin to glow; watched, as my falling lids inexorably fell, a flame-tipped shadow waver on it; thicken; condense – and there looking down upon Larry, her eyes great golden stars in which intensest curiosity and shy tenderness struggled, sweet mouth half smiling, was the girl of the Moon Pool’s Chamber, the girl whom the green dwarf had named – Lakla: the vision Larry had invoked before that sleep which I could no longer deny had claimed him—

Closer she came – closer – the eyes were over us.

Then oblivion indeed!

— XVI —

YOLARA OF MURIA
VS. THE O’KEEFE

I awakened with all the familiar, homely sensation of a shade having been pulled up in a darkened room. I thrilled with a wonderful sense of deep rest and restored resiliency. The ebon shadow had vanished from above and down into the room was pouring the silvery light. From the fountain pool came a mighty splashing and shouts of laughter. I jumped and drew the curtain. O’Keefe and Rador were swimming a wild race; the dwarf like an otter, out-distancing and playing around the Irishman at will.

Had that overpowering sleep – and now I confess that my struggle against it had been largely inspired by fear that it was the abnormal slumber which Throckmartin had described as having heralded the approach of the Dweller before it had carried away Thora and Stanton – had that sleep been after all nothing but natural reaction of tired nerves and brains?

And that last vision of the golden-eyed girl bending over Larry? Had that also been a delusion of an overstressed mind? Well, it might have been, I could not tell. At any rate, I decided, I would speak about it to O’Keefe once we were alone again – and then giving myself up to the urge of buoyant well-being I shouted like a boy, stripped and joined the two in the pool. The water was warm and I felt the unwonted tingling of life in every vein increase; something from it seemed to pulse through the skin, carrying a clean vigorous vitality that toned every fiber. Tiring at last, we swam to the edge and drew ourselves out. The green dwarf quickly clothed himself and Larry rather carefully donned his uniform.

“The Afyo Maie has summoned us, Doc,” he said. “We’re to – well – I suppose you’d call it breakfast with her. After that, Rador tells me, we’re to have a session with the Council of Nine. I suppose Yolara is as curious as any lady of – the upper world, as you might put it – and just naturally can’t wait,” he added.

He gave himself a last shake, patted the automatic hidden under his left arm, whistled cheerfully.

“After you, my dear Alphonse,” he said to Rador, with a low bow. The dwarf laughed, bent in an absurd imitation of Larry’s mocking courtesy and started ahead of us to the house of the priestess. When he had gone a little way on the orchid-walled path I whispered to O’Keefe:

“Larry, when you were falling off to sleep – did you think you saw anything?”

“See anything!” he grinned. “Doc, sleep hit me like a Hun shell. I thought they were pulling the gas on us. I – I had some intention of bidding you tender farewells,” he continued, half sheepishly. “I think I did start ’em, didn’t I?”

I nodded.

“But wait a minute—” he hesitated. “I had a queer sort of dream—”

“What was it?” I asked eagerly,

“Well,” he answered slowly, “I suppose it was because I’d been thinking of – Golden Eyes. Anyway, I thought she came through the wall and leaned over me – yes, and put one of those long white hands of hers on my head – I couldn’t raise my lids – but in some queer way I could see her. Then it got real dreamish. Why do you ask?”

Rador turned back toward us,

“Later,” I answered, “Not now. When we’re alone.”

But through me went a little glow of reassurance. Whatever the maze through which we were moving; whatever of menacing evil lurking there – the Golden Girl was clearly watching over us; watching with whatever unknown powers she could muster.

We passed the pillared entrance; went through a long bowered corridor and stopped before a door that seemed to be sliced from a monolith of pale jade – high, narrow, set in a wall of opal.

Rador stamped twice and the same supernally sweet, silver bell tones of – yesterday, I must call it, although in that place of eternal day the term is meaningless – bade us enter. The door slipped aside. The chamber was small, the opal walls screening it on three sides, the black opacity covering it, the fourth side opening out into a delicious little walled garden – a mass of the fragrant, luminous blooms and delicately colored fruit. Facing it was a small table of reddish wood and from the omnipresent cushions heaped around it arose to greet us – Yolara.

Larry drew in his breath with an involuntary gasp of admiration and bowed low. My own admiration was as frank – and the priestess was well pleased with our homage.

She was swathed in the filmy, half-revelant webs, now of palest blue. The corn-silk hair was caught within a wide-meshed golden net in which sparkled tiny brilliants, like blended sapphires and diamonds. Her own azure eyes sparkled as brightly as they, and I noted again in their clear depths the half-eager approval as they rested upon O’Keefe’s lithe, well-knit figure and his keen, clean-cut face. The high-arched, slender feet rested upon soft sandals whose gauzy withes laced the exquisitely formed leg to just below the dimpled knee.

“Some giddy wonder!” exclaimed Larry, looking at me and placing a hand over his heart. “Put her on a New York roof and she’d empty Broadway. Take the cue from me, Doc.”

He turned to Yolara, whose face was somewhat puzzled.

“I said, O lady whose shining hair is a web for hearts, that in our world your beauty would dazzle the sight of men as would a little woman sun!” he said, in the florid imagery to which the tongue lends itself so well.

A flush stole up through the translucent skin. The blue eyes softened and she waved us toward the cushions. Black-haired maids stole in, placing before us the fruits, the little loaves and a steaming drink somewhat the color and odor of chocolate. I was conscious of outrageous hunger.

“What are you named, strangers?” she asked.

“This man is named Goodwin,” said O’Keefe. “As for me, call me Larry.”

“Nothing like getting acquainted quick,” he said to me – but kept his eyes upon Yolara as though he were voicing another honeyed phrase. And so she took it, for: “You must teach me your tongue,” she murmured.

“Then shall I have two words where now I have one to tell you of your loveliness,” he answered.

“And also that’ll take time,” he spoke to me. “Essential occupation out of which we can’t be drafted to make these fun-loving folk any Roman holiday. Get me!”

“Larree,” mused Yolara. “I like the sound. It is sweet—” and indeed it was as she spoke it.

“And what is your land named, Larree?” she continued. “And Goodwin’s?” She caught the sound perfectly.

“My land, O lady of loveliness, is two – Ireland and America; his but one – America.”

She repeated the two names – slowly, over and over. We seized the opportunity to attack the food; halting half guiltily as she spoke again.

“Oh, but you are hungry!” she cried. “Eat then.” She leaned her chin upon her hands and regarded us, whole fountains of questions brimming up in her eyes.

“How is it, Larree, that you have two countries and Goodwin but one?” she asked, at last unable to keep silent longer.

“I was born in Ireland; he in America. But I have dwelt long in his land and my heart loves each,” he said.

She nodded, understandingly.

“Are all the men of Ireland like you, Larree? As all the men here are like Lugur or Rador? I like to look at you,” she went on, with naive frankness. “I am tired of men like Lugur and Rador. But they are strong,” she added, swiftly. “Lugur can hold up ten in his two arms and raise six with but one hand.”

We could not understand her numerals and she raised white fingers to illustrate.

“That is little, O lady, to the men of Ireland,” replied O’Keefe. “Lo, I have seen one of my race hold up ten times ten of our – what call you that swift thing in which Rador brought us here?”

“Corial,” said she.

“Hold up ten times twenty of our corials with but two fingers – and these corials of ours—”

“Coria,” said she.

“And these coria of ours are each greater in weight than ten of yours. Yes, and I have seen another with but one blow of his hand raise hell!

“And so I have,” he murmured to me. “And both at Forty-second and Fifth Avenue, N. Y. – U.S.A.”

Yolara considered all this with manifest doubt.

“Hell?” she inquired at last. “I know not the word.”

“Well,” answered O’Keefe. “Say Muria then. In many ways they are, I gather, O heart’s delight, one and the same.”

Now the doubt in the blue eyes was strong indeed. She shook her head.

“None of our men can do that!” she answered, at length. “Nor do I think you could, Larree.”

“Oh, no,” said Larry easily. “I never tried to be that strong. I fly,” he added, casually.

The priestess rose to her feet, gazing at him with startled eyes.

“Fly!” she repeated incredulously. “Like a Zitia? A bird?”

Larry nodded – and then seeing the dawning command in her eyes, went on hastily.

“Not with my own wings, Yolara. In a – a corial that moves through – what’s the word for air, Doc – well, through this—” He made a wide gesture up toward the nebulous haze above us. He took a pencil and on a white cloth made a hasty sketch of an airplane. “In a – a corial like this—” She regarded the sketch gravely, thrust a hand down into her girdle and brought forth a keen-bladed poniard; cut Larry’s markings out and placed the fragment carefully aside.

“That I can understand,” she said.

“Remarkably intelligent young woman,” muttered O’Keefe. “Hope I’m not giving anything away – but she had me.”

“But what are your women like, Larree? Are they like me? And how many have loved you?” she whispered.

“In all Ireland and America there is none like you, Yolara,” he answered. “And take that any way you please,” he muttered in English. She took it, it was evident, as it most pleased her.

“Do you have goddesses?” she asked.

“Every woman in Ireland and America, is a goddess”; thus Larry.

“Now that I do not believe.” There was both anger and mockery in her eyes. “I know women, Larree – and if that were so there would be no peace for men.”

“There isn’t!” replied he. The anger died out and she laughed, sweetly, understandingly.

“And which goddess do you worship, Larree?”

“You!” said Larry O’Keefe boldly.

“Larry! Larry!” I whispered. “Be careful. It’s high explosive.”

But the priestess was laughing – little trills of sweet bell notes; and pleasure was in each note.

“You are indeed bold, Larree,” she said, “to offer me your worship. Yet am I pleased by your boldness. Still – Lugur is strong; and you are not of those who – what did you say – have tried. And your wings are not here – Larree!”

Again her laughter rang out. The Irishman flushed; it was touché for Yolara!

“Fear not for me with Lugur,” he said, grimly. “Rather fear for him!”

The laughter died; she looked at him searchingly; a little enigmatic smile about her mouth – so sweet and so cruel.

“Well – we shall see,” she murmured. “You say you battle in your world. With what?”

“Oh, with this and with that,” answered Larry, airily. “We manage—”

“Have you the Keth – I mean that with which I sent Songar into the nothingness?” she asked swiftly.

“See what she’s driving at?” O’Keefe spoke to me, swiftly. “Well I do! But here’s where the O’Keefe lands.

“I said,” he turned to her, “O voice of silver fire, that your spirit is high even as your beauty – and searches out men’s souls as does your loveliness their hearts. And now listen, Yolara, for what I speak is truth” – into his eyes came the far-away gaze; into his voice the Irish softness – “Lo, in my land of Ireland, this many of your life’s length agone – see” – he raised his ten fingers, clenched and unclenched them times twenty – “the mighty men of my race, the Taitha-da-Dainn, could send men out into the nothingness even as do you with the Keth. And this they did by their harpings, and by words spoken – words of power, O Yolara, that have their power still – and by pipings and by slaying sounds.

“There was Cravetheen who played swift flames from his harp, flying flames that ate those they were sent against. And there was Dalua, of Hy Brasil, whose pipes played away from man and beast and all living things their shadows – and at last played them to shadows too, so that wherever Dalua went his shadows that had been men and beast followed like a storm of little rustling leaves; yea, and Bel the Harper, who could make women’s hearts run like wax and men’s hearts flame to ashes and whose harpings could shatter strong cliffs and bow great trees to the sod—”

His eyes were bright, dream-filled; she shrank a little from him, faint pallor under the perfect skin.

“I say to you, Yolara, that these things were and are – in Ireland.” His voice rang strong. “And I have seen men as many as those that are in your great chamber this many times over” – he clenched his hands once more, perhaps a dozen times – “blasted into nothingness before your Keth could even have touched them. Yea – and rocks as mighty as those through which we came lifted up and shattered before the lids could fall over your blue eyes. And this is truth, Yolara – all truth! Stay – have you that little cone of the Keth with which you destroyed Songar?”

She nodded, gazing at him, fascinated, fear and puzzlement contending.

“Then use it.” He took a vase of crystal from the table, placed it on the threshold that led into the garden. “Use it on this – and I will show you.”

“I will use it upon one of the ladala—” she began eagerly.

The exaltation dropped from him; there was a touch of horror in the eyes he turned to her; her own dropped before it.

“It shall be as you say,” she said hurriedly. She drew the shining cone from her breast; leveled it at the vase. The green ray leaped forth, spread over the crystal, but before its action could even be begun, a flash of light shot from O’Keefe’s hand, his automatic spat and the trembling vase flew into fragments. As quickly as he had drawn it, he thrust the pistol back into place and stood there empty handed, looking at her sternly. From the anteroom came shouting, a rush of feet.

Yolara’s face was white, her eyes strained – but her voice was unshaken as she called to the clamoring guards:

“It is nothing – go to your places!”

But when the sound of their return had ceased she stared tensely at the Irishman – then looked again at the shattered vase.

“It is true!” she cried, “but see, the Keth is – alive!”

I followed her pointing finger. Each broken bit of the crystal was vibrating, shaking its particles out into space. Broken it the bullet of Larry’s had – but not released it from the grip of the disintegrating force. The priestess’s face was triumphant.

“But what matters it, O shining urn of beauty – what matters it to the vase that is broken what happens to its fragments?” asked Larry, gravely – and pointedly.

The triumph died from her face and for a space she was silent; brooding.

“Next,” whispered O’Keefe to me. “Lots of surprises in the little box; keep your eye on the opening and see what comes out.”

We had not long to wait. There was a sparkle of anger about Yolara, something too of injured pride. She clapped her hands; whispered to the maid who answered her summons, and then sat back regarding us, maliciously.

“You have answered me as to your strength – but you have not proved it; but the Keth you have answered. Now answer this!” she said.

She pointed out into the garden. I saw a flowering branch bend and snap as though a hand had broken it – but no hand was there! Saw then another and another bend and break, a little tree sway and fall – and closer and closer to us came the trail of snapping boughs while down into the garden poured the silvery light revealing – nothing! Now a great ewer beside a pillar rose swiftly in air and hurled itself crashing at my feet. Cushions close to us swirled about as though in the vortex of a whirlwind.

And unseen hands held my arms in a mighty clutch fast to my sides, another gripped my throat and I felt a needle-sharp poniard point pierce my shirt, touch the skin just over my heart!

“Larry!” I cried, despairingly. I twisted my head; saw that he too was caught in this grip of the invisible. But his face was calm, even amused.

“Keep cool, Doc!” he said. “Remember – she wants to learn the language!”

Now from Yolara burst chime upon chime of mocking laughter. She gave a command – the hands loosened, the poniard withdrew from my heart; suddenly as I had been caught I was free – and unpleasantly weak and shaky.

“Have you that in Ireland, Larree!” cried the priestess – and once more trembled with laughter.

“A good play, Yolara.” His voice was as calm as his face. “But they did that in Ireland even before Dalua piped away his first man’s shadow. And in Goodwin’s land they make ships – coria that go on water – so you can pass by them and see only sea and sky; and those water coria are each of them many times greater than this whole palace of yours.”

But the priestess laughed on.

“It did get me a little,” whispered Larry. “That wasn’t quite up to my mark. But God! If we could find that trick out and take it back with us!”

“Not so, Larree!” Yolara gasped, through her laughter. “Not so! Goodwin’s cry betrayed you!”

Her good humor had entirely returned; she was like a mischievous child pleased over some successful trick; and like a child she cried – “I’ll show you!” – signaled again; whispered to the maid who, quickly returning, laid before her a long metal case. Yolara took from her girdle something that looked like a small pencil, pressed it and shot a thin stream of light for all the world like an electric flash, upon its hasp. The lid flew open. Out of it she drew three flat, oval crystals, faint rose in hue. She handed one to O’Keefe and one to me.

“Look!” she commanded, placing the third before her own eyes. I peered through the stone and instantly there leaped into sight, out of thin air – six grinning dwarfs! Each was covered from top of head to soles of feet in a web so tenuous that through it their bodies were plain. The gauzy stuff seemed to vibrate – its strands to run together like quicksilver. I snatched the crystal from my eyes and – the chamber was empty! Put it back – and there were the grinning six!

Yolara gave another sign and they disappeared, even from the crystals.

“It is what they wear, Larree,” explained Yolara, graciously. “It is something that came to us from – the Ancient Ones. But we have so few” – she sighed.

“Such treasures must be two-edged swords, Yolara,” commented O’Keefe. “For how know you that one within them creeps not to you with hand eager to strike?”

“There is no danger,” she said indifferently. “I am the keeper of them.”

She mused for a space, then abruptly:

“And now no more. You two are to appear before the Council at a certain time – but fear nothing. You, Goodwin, go with Rador about our city and increase your wisdom. But you, Larree, await me here in my garden—” she smiled at him, provocatively – maliciously, too. “For shall not one who has resisted a world of goddesses be given all chance to worship when at last he finds his own?”

She laughed – whole-heartedly and was gone. And at that moment I liked Yolara better than ever I had before and – alas – better than ever I was to in the future.

I noted Rador standing outside the open jade door and started to go, but O’Keefe caught me by the arm.

“Wait a minute,” he urged. “About Golden Eyes – you were going to tell me something – it’s been on my mind all through that little sparring match.”

I told him of the vision that had passed through my closing lids. He listened gravely and then laughed.

“Hell of a lot of privacy in this place!” he grinned. “Ladies who can walk through walls and others with regular invisible cloaks to let ’em flit wherever they please. Oh, well, don’t let it get on your nerves, Doc. Remember – everything’s natural! That robe stuff is just camouflage of course. But Lord, if we could only get a piece of it!”

“The material simply admits all light-vibrations, or perhaps curves them, just as the opacities cut them off,” I answered. “A man under the X-ray is partly invisible; this makes him wholly so. He doesn’t register, as the people of the motion-picture profession say.”

“Camouflage,” repeated Larry. “And as for the Shining One – Say!” he snorted. “I’d like to set the O’Keefe banshee up against it. I’ll bet that old resourceful Irish body would give it the first three bites and a strangle hold and wallop it before it knew it had ’em. Oh! Wow! Boy Howdy!”

I heard him still chuckling gleefully over this vision as I passed along the opal wall with the green dwarf.

A shell was awaiting us. I paused before entering it to examine the polished surface of runway and great road. It was obsidian – volcanic glass of pale emerald, unflawed, translucent, with no sign of block or juncture. I examined the shell.

“What makes it go?” I asked Rador. At a word from him the driver touched a concealed spring and an aperture appeared beneath the control-lever, of which I have spoken in a preceding chapter. Within was a small cube of black crystal, through whose sides I saw, dimly, a rapidly revolving, glowing ball, not more than two inches in diameter. Beneath the cube was a curiously shaped, slender cylinder winding down into the lower body of the Nautilus whorl.

“Watch!” said Rador. He motioned me into the vehicle and took a place beside me. The driver touched the lever; a stream of coruscations flew from the ball down into the cylinder. The shell started smoothly, and as the tiny torrent of shining particles increased it gathered speed.

“The corial does not touch the road,” explained Rador. “It is lifted so far” – he held his forefinger and thumb less than a sixteenth of an inch apart – “above it.”

And perhaps here is the best place to explain the activation of the shells or coria. The force utilized was atomic energy. Passing from the whirling ball the ions darted through the cylinder to two bands of a peculiar metal affixed to the base of the vehicles somewhat like skids of a sled. Impinging upon these they produced a partial negation of gravity, lifting the shell slightly, and at the same time creating a powerful repulsive force or thrust that could be directed backward, forward, or sidewise at the will of the driver. The creation of this energy and the mechanism of its utilization were, briefly, as follows:

[Dr. Goodwin’s lucid and exceedingly comprehensive description of this extraordinary mechanism has been deleted by the Executive Council of the International Association of Science as too dangerously suggestive to scientists of the Central European Powers with which we were so recently at war. It is allowable, however, to state that his observations are in the possession of experts in this country, who are, unfortunately, hampered in their research not only by the scarcity of the radioactive elements that we know, but also by the lack of the element or elements unknown to us that entered into the formation of the fiery ball within the cube of black crystal. Nevertheless, as the principle is so clear, it is believed that these difficulties will ultimately be overcome. – J. B. K., President, I. A. of S.]

The wide, glistening road was gay with the coria. They darted in and out of the gardens; within them the fair-haired, extraordinarily beautiful women on their cushions were like princesses of Elfland, caught in gorgeous fairy webs, resting within the hearts of flowers. In some shells were flaxen-haired dwarfish men of Lugur’s type; sometimes black-polled brother officers of Rador; often raven-tressed girls, plainly hand-maidens of the women; and now and then beauties of the lower folk went by with one of the blond dwarfs.

We swept around the turn that made of the jewel-like roadway an enormous horseshoe and, speedily, upon our right the cliffs through which we had come in our journey from the Moon Pool began to march forward beneath their mantles of moss. They formed a gigantic abutment, a titanic salient. It had been from the very front of this salient’s invading angle that we had emerged; on each side of it the precipices, faintly glowing, drew back and vanished into distance.

The slender, graceful bridges under which we skimmed ended at openings in the upflung, far walls of verdure. Each had its little garrison of soldiers. Through some of the openings a rivulet of the green obsidian river passed. These were roadways to the farther country, to the land of the ladala, Rador told me; adding that none of the lesser folk could cross into the pavilioned city unless summoned or with pass.

We turned the bend of the road and flew down that farther emerald ribbon we had seen from the great oval. Before us rose the shining cliffs and the lake. A half-mile, perhaps, from these the last of the bridges flung itself. It was more massive and about it hovered a spirit of ancientness lacking in the other spans; also its garrison was larger and at its base the tangent way was guarded by two massive structures, somewhat like blockhouses, between which it ran. Something about it aroused in me an intense curiosity.

“Where does that road lead, Rador?” I asked.

“To the one place above all of which I may not tell you, Goodwin,” he answered. And again I wondered.

We skimmed slowly out upon the great pier. Far to the left was the prismatic, rainbow curtain between the Cyclopean pillars. On the white waters graceful shells – lacustrian replicas of the Elf chariots – swam, but none was near that distant web of wonder.

“Rador – what is that?” I asked.

“It is the Veil of the Shining One!” he answered slowly.

Was the Shining One that which we named the Dweller?

“What is the Shining One?” I cried, eagerly. Again he was silent. Nor did he speak until we had turned on our homeward way.

And lively as my interest, my scientific curiosity, were – I was conscious suddenly of acute depression. Beautiful, wondrously beautiful this place was – and yet in its wonder dwelt a keen edge of menace, of unease – of inexplicable, inhuman woe; as though in a secret garden of God a soul should sense upon it the gaze of some lurking spirit of evil which some way, some how, had crept into the sanctuary and only bided its time to spring.

— XVII —

THE LEPRECHAUN

The shell carried us straight back to the house of Yolara. Larry was awaiting me. We stood again before the tenebrous wall where first we had faced the priestess and the Voice. And as we stood, again the portal appeared with all its disconcerting, magical abruptness.

But now the scene was changed. Around the jet table were grouped a number of figures – Lugur, Yolara beside him; seven others – all of them fair-haired and all men save one who sat at the left of the priestess – an old, old woman, how old I could not tell, her face bearing traces of beauty that must once have been as great as Yolara’s own, but now ravaged, in some way awesome; through its ruins the fearful, malicious gaiety shining out like a spirit of joy held within a corpse!

Began then our examination, for such it was. And as it progressed I was more and more struck by the change in the O’Keefe. All flippancy was gone, rarely did his sense of humor reveal itself in any of his answers. He was like a cautious swordsman, fencing, guarding, studying his opponent; or rather, like a chess-player who keeps sensing some far-reaching purpose in the game: alert, contained, watchful. Always he stressed the power of our surface races, their multitudes, their solidarity.

Their questions were myriad. What were our occupations? Our system of government? How great were the waters? The land? Intensely interested were they in the World War, querying minutely into its causes, its effects. In our weapons their interest was avid. And they were exceedingly minute in their examination of us as to the ruins which had excited our curiosity; their position and surroundings – and if others than ourselves might be expected to find and pass through their entrance!

At this I shot a glance at Lugur. He did not seem unduly interested. I wondered if the Russian had told him as yet of the girl of the rosy wall of the Moon Pool Chamber and the real reasons for our search. Then I answered as briefly as possible – omitting all reference to these things. The red dwarf watched me with unmistakable amusement – and I knew Marakinoff had told him. But clearly Lugur had kept his information even from Yolara; and as clearly she had spoken to none of that episode when O’Keefe’s automatic had shattered the Keth-smitten vase. Again I felt that sense of deep bewilderment – of helpless search for clue to all the tangle.

For two hours we were questioned and then the priestess called Rador and let us go.

Larry was sombre as we returned. He walked about the room uneasily.

“Hell’s brewing here all right,” he said at last, stopping before me. “I can’t make out just the particular brand – that’s all that bothers me. We’re going to have a stiff fight, that’s sure. What I want to do quick is to find the Golden Girl, Doc. Haven’t seen her on the wall lately, have you?” he queried, hopefully fantastic.

“Laugh if you want to,” he went on. “But she’s our best bet. It’s going to be a race between her and the O’Keefe banshee – but I put my money on her. I had a queer experience while I was in that garden, after you’d left.” His voice grew solemn. “Did you ever see a leprechaun, Doc?” I shook my head again, as solemnly. “He’s a little man in green,” said Larry. “Oh, about as high as your knee. I saw one once – in Carntogher Woods. And as I sat there, half asleep, in Yolara’s garden, the living spit of him stepped out from one of those bushes, twirling a little shillalah.

“‘It’s a tight box ye’re gettin’ in, Larry avick,’ said he, ‘but don’t ye be downhearted, lad.’

“‘I’m carrying on,’ said I, ‘but you’re a long way from Ireland,’ I said, or thought I did.

“‘Ye’ve a lot o’ friends there,’ he answered. ‘An’ where the heart rests the feet are swift to follow. Not that I’m sayin’ I’d like to live here, Larry,’ said he.

“‘I know where my heart is now,’ I told him. ‘It rests on a girl with golden eyes and the hair and swan-white breast of Eilidh the Fair – but me feet don’t seem to get me to her,’ I said.”

The brogue thickened.

“An’ the little man in green nodded his head an’ whirled his shillalah.

“‘It’s what I came to tell ye,’ says he. ‘Don’t ye fall for the Bhean-Nimhera, the serpent woman wit’ the blue eyes; she’s a daughter of Ivor, lad – an’ don’t ye do nothin’ to make the brown-haired colleen ashamed o’ ye, Larry O’Keefe. I knew yer great, great grandfather an’ his before him, aroon,’ says he, ‘an’ wan o’ the O’Keefe failin’s is to think their hearts big enough to hold all the wimmen o’ the world. A heart’s built to hold only wan permanently, Larry,’ he says, ‘an’ I’m warnin’ ye a nice girl don’t like to move into a place all cluttered up wid another’s washin’ an’ mendin’ an’ cookin’ an’ other things pertainin’ to general wife work. Not that I think the blue-eyed wan is keen for mendin’ an’ cookin’!’ says he.

“‘You don’t have to be comin’ all this way to tell me that,’ I answer.

“‘Well, I’m just a tellin’ you,’ he says. ‘Ye’ve got some rough knocks comin’, Larry. In fact, ye’re in for a devil of a time. But, remember that ye’re the O’Keefe,’ says he. ‘An’ while the bhoys are all wid ye, avick, ye’ve got to be on the job yourself.’

“‘I hope,’ I tell him, ‘that the O’Keefe banshee can find her way here in time – that is, if it’s necessary, which I hope it won’t be.’

“‘Don’t ye worry about that,’ says he. ‘Not that she’s keen on leavin’ the ould sod, Larry. The good ould soul’s in quite a state o’ mind about ye, aroon. I don’t mind tellin’ ye, lad, that she’s mobilizing all the clan an’ if she has to come for ye, avick, they’ll be wid her an’ they’ll sweep this joint clean before ye go. What they’ll do to it’ll make the Big Wind look like a summer breeze on Lough Lene! An’ that’s about all, Larry. We thought a voice from the Green Isle would cheer ye. Don’t fergit that ye’re the O’Keefe an’ I say it again – all the bhoys are wid ye. But we want t’ kape bein’ proud o’ ye, lad!’

“An’ I looked again and there was only a bush waving.”

There wasn’t a smile in my heart – or if there was it was a very tender one.

“I’m going to bed,” he said abruptly. “Keep an eye on the wall, Doc!”

Between the seven sleeps that followed, Larry and I saw but little of each other. Yolara sought him more and more. Thrice we were called before the Council; once we were at a great feast, whose splendors and surprises I can never forget. Largely I was in the company of Rador. Together we two passed the green barriers into the dwelling-place of the ladala.

They seemed provided with everything needful for life. But everywhere was an oppressiveness, a gathering together of hate, that was spiritual rather than material – as tangible as the latter and far, far more menacing!

“They do not like to dance with the Shining One,” was Rador’s constant and only reply to my efforts to find the cause.

Once I had concrete evidence of the mood. Glancing behind me, I saw a white, vengeful face peer from behind a tree-trunk, a hand lift, a shining dart speed from it straight toward Rador’s back. Instinctively I thrust him aside. He turned upon me angrily. I pointed to where the little missile lay, still quivering, on the ground. He gripped my hand.

“That, someday I will repay!” he said. I looked again at the thing. At its end was a tiny cone covered with a glistening, gelatinous substance.

Rador pulled from a tree beside us a fruit somewhat like an apple.

“Look!” he said. He dropped it upon the dart – and at once, before my eyes, in less than ten seconds, the fruit had rotted away!

“That’s what would have happened to Rador but for you, friend!” he said.

Come now between this and the prelude to the latter half of the drama whose history this narrative is – only scattering and necessarily fragmentary observations.

First – the nature of the ebon opacities, blocking out the spaces between the pavilion-pillars or covering their tops like roofs, These were magnetic fields, light absorbers, negativing the vibrations of radiance; literally screens of electric force which formed as impervious a barrier to light as would have screens of steel.

They instantaneously made night appear in a place where no night was. But they interposed no obstacle to air or to sound. They were extremely simple in their inception – no more miraculous than is glass, which, inversely, admits the vibrations of light, but shuts out those coarser ones we call air – and, partly, those others which produce upon our auditory nerves the effects we call sound.

Briefly their mechanism was this:

[For the same reason that Dr. Goodwin’s exposition of the mechanism of the atomic engines was deleted, his description of the light-destroying screens has been deleted by the Executive Council. – J. B. F., President, I. A. of S.]

There were two favored classes of the ladala – the soldiers and the dream-makers. The dream-makers were the most astonishing social phenomena, I think, of all. Denied by their circumscribed environment the wider experiences of us of the outer world, the Murians had perfected an amazing system of escape through the imagination.

They were, too, intensely musical. Their favorite instruments were double flutes; immensely complex pipe-organs; harps, great and small. They had another remarkable instrument made up of a double octave of small drums which gave forth percussions remarkably disturbing to the emotional centers.

It was this love of music that gave rise to one of the few truly humorous incidents of our caverned life. Larry came to me – it was just after our fourth sleep, I remember.

“Come on to a concert,” he said.

We skimmed off to one of the bridge garrisons. Rador called the two-score guards to attention; and then, to my utter stupefaction, the whole company, O’Keefe leading them, roared out the anthem, “God Save the King.” They sang – in a closer approach to the English than might have been expected scores of miles below England’s level. “Send him victorious! Happy and glorious!” they bellowed.

He quivered with suppressed mirth at my paralysis of surprise.

“Taught ’em that for Marakinoff’s benefit!” he gasped. “Wait till that Red hears it. He’ll blow up.

“Just wait until you hear Yolara lisp a pretty little thing I taught her,” said Larry as we set back for what we now called home. There was an impish twinkle in his eyes.

And I did hear. For it was not many minutes later that the priestess condescended to command me to come to her with O’Keefe.

“Show Goodwin how much you have learned of our speech, O lady of the lips of honeyed flame!” murmured Larry.

She hesitated; smiled at him, and then from that perfect mouth, out of the exquisite throat, in the voice that was like the chiming of little silver bells, she trilled a melody familiar to me indeed:

“She’s only a bird in a gilded cage,

A bee-yu-tiful sight to see—”

And so on to the bitter end.

•   •   •

“She thinks it’s a love-song,” said Larry when we had left. “It’s only part of a repertoire I’m teaching her. Honestly, Doc, it’s the only way I can keep my mind clear when I’m with her,” he went on earnestly. “She’s a devil-ess from hell – but a wonder. Whenever I find myself going I get her to sing that, or Take Back Your Gold! or some other ancient lay, and I’m back again – pronto – with the right perspective! Pop goes all the mystery! ‘Hell!’ I say, ‘she’s only a woman!’”

— XVIII —

THE AMPHITHEATER OF JET

For hours the black-haired folk had been streaming across the bridges, flowing along the promenade by scores and by hundreds, drifting down toward the gigantic seven-terraced temple whose interior I had never as yet seen, and from whose towering exterior, indeed, I had always been kept far enough away – unobtrusively, but none the less decisively – to prevent any real observation. The structure, I had estimated, nevertheless, could not reach less than a thousand feet above its silvery base, and the diameter of its circular foundation was about the same.

I wondered what was bringing the ladala into Lora, and where they were vanishing. All of them were flower-crowned with the luminous, lovely blooms – old and young, slender, mocking-eyed girls, dwarfed youths, mothers with their babes, gnomed oldsters – on they poured, silent for the most part and sullen – a sullenness that held acid bitterness even as their subtle, half-sinister, half-gay malice seemed tempered into little keen-edged flames, oddly, menacingly defiant.

There were many of the green-clad soldiers along the way, and the garrison of the only bridge span I could see had certainly been doubled.

Wondering still, I turned from my point of observation and made my way back to our pavilion, hoping that Larry, who had been with Yolara for the past two hours, had returned. Hardly had I reached it before Rador came hurrying up, in his manner a curious exultance mingled with what in anyone else I would have called a decided nervousness.

“Come!” he commanded before I could speak. “The Council has made decision – and Larree is awaiting you.”

“What has been decided?” I panted as we sped along the mosaic path that led to the house of Yolara. “And why is Larry awaiting me?”

And at his answer I felt my heart pause in its beat and through me race a wave of mingled panic and eagerness.

“The Shining One dances!” had answered the green dwarf. “And you are to worship!”

What was this dancing of the Shining One, of which so often he had spoken?

Whatever my forebodings, Larry evidently had none.

“Great stuff!” he cried, when we had met in the great antechamber now empty of the dwarfs. “Hope it will be worth seeing – have to be something damned good, though, to catch me, after what I’ve seen of shows at the front,” he added.

And remembering, with a little shock of apprehension, that he had no knowledge of the Dweller beyond my poor description of it – for there are no words actually to describe what that miracle of interwoven glory and horror was – I wondered what Larry O’Keefe would say and do when he did behold it!

Rador began to show impatience.

“Come!” he urged. “There is much to be done – and the time grows short!”

He led us to a tiny fountain room in whose miniature pool the white waters were concentrated, pearl-like and opalescent in their circling rim.

“Bathe!” he commanded; and set the example by stripping himself and plunging within. Only a minute or two did the green dwarf allow us, and he checked us as we were about to don our clothing.

Then, to my intense embarrassment, without warning, two of the black-haired girls entered, bearing robes of a peculiar dull-blue hue. At our manifest discomfort Rador’s laughter roared out. He took the garments from the pair, motioned them to leave us, and, still laughing, threw one around me. Its texture was soft, but decidedly metallic – like some blue metal spun to the fineness of a spider’s thread. The garment buckled tightly at the throat, was girdled at the waist, and, below this cincture, fell to the floor, its folds being held together by a half-dozen looped cords; from the shoulders a hood resembling a monk’s cowl.

Rador cast this over my head; it completely covered my face, but was of so transparent a texture that I could see, though somewhat mistily, through it. Finally he handed us both a pair of long gloves of the same material and high stockings, the feet of which were gloved – five-toed.

And again his laughter rang out at our manifest surprise.

“The priestess of the Shining One does not altogether trust the Shining One’s Voice,” he said at last. “And these are to guard against any sudden – errors. And fear not, Goodwin,” he went on kindly. “Not for the Shining One itself would Yolara see harm come to Larree here – nor, because of him, to you. But I would not stake much on the great white one. And for him I am sorry, for him I do like well.”

“Is he to be with us?” asked Larry eagerly.

“He is to be where we go,” replied the dwarf soberly.

Grimly Larry reached down and drew from his uniform his automatic. He popped a fresh clip into the pocket fold of his girdle. The pistol he slung high up beneath his armpit.

The green dwarf looked at the weapon curiously. O’Keefe tapped it.

“This,” said Larry, “slays quicker than the Keth – I take it so no harm shall come to the blue-eyed one whose name is Olaf. If I should raise it – be you not in its way, Rador!” he added significantly.

The dwarf nodded again, his eyes sparkling. He thrust a hand out to both of us.

“A change comes,” he said. “What it is I know not, nor how it will fall. But this remember – Rador is more friend to you than you yet can know. And now let us go!” he ended abruptly.

He led us, not through the entrance, but into a sloping passage ending in a blind wall; touched a symbol graven there, and it opened, precisely as had the rosy barrier of the Moon Pool Chamber. And, just as there, but far smaller, was a passage end, a low curved wall facing a shaft not black as had been that abode of living darkness, but faintly luminescent. Rador leaned over the wall. The mechanism clicked and started; the door swung shut; the sides of the car slipped into place, and we swept swiftly down the passage; overhead the wind whistled. In a few moments the moving platform began to slow down. It stopped in a closed chamber no larger than itself.

Rador drew his poniard and struck twice upon the wall with its hilt. Immediately a panel moved away, revealing a space filled with faint, misty blue radiance. And at each side of the open portal stood four of the dwarfish men, gray-headed, old, clad in flowing garments of white, each pointing toward us a short silver rod.

Rador drew from his girdle a ring and held it out to the first dwarf. He examined it, handed it to the one beside him, and not until each had inspected the ring did they lower their curious weapons; containers of that terrific energy they called the Keth, I thought; and later was to know that I had been right.

We stepped out; the doors closed behind us. The place was weird enough. Its pave was a greenish-blue stone resembling lapis lazuli. On each side were high pedestals holding carved figures of the same material. There were perhaps a score of these, but in the mistiness I could not make out their outlines. A droning, rushing roar beat upon our ears; filled the whole cavern.

“I smell the sea,” said Larry suddenly.

The roaring became deep-toned, clamorous, and close in front of us a rift opened. Twenty feet in width, it cut the cavern floor and vanished into the blue mist on each side. The cleft was spanned by one solid slab of rock not more than two yards wide. It had neither railing nor other protection.

The four leading priests marched out upon it one by one, and we followed. In the middle of the span they knelt. Ten feet beneath us was a torrent of blue seawater racing with prodigious speed between polished walls. It gave the impression of vast depth. It roared as it sped by, and far to the right was a low arch through which it disappeared. It was so swift that its surface shone like polished blue steel, and from it came the blessed, our worldly, familiar ocean breath that strengthened my soul amazingly and made me realize how earth-sick I was.

Whence came the stream, I marveled, forgetting for the moment, as we passed on again, all else. Were we closer to the surface of earth than I had thought, or was this some mighty flood falling through an opening in sea floor, Heaven alone knew how many miles above us, losing itself in deeper abysses beyond these? How near and how far this was from the truth I was to learn – and never did truth come to man in more dreadful guise!

The roaring fell away, the blue haze lessened. In front of us stretched a wide flight of steps, huge as those which had led us into the courtyard of Nan-Tauach through the ruined sea-gate. We scaled it; it narrowed; from above light poured through a still narrower opening. Side by side Larry and I passed out of it.

We had emerged upon an enormous platform of what seemed to be glistening ivory. It stretched before us for a hundred yards or more and then shelved gently into the white waters. Opposite – not a mile away – was that prodigious web of woven rainbows Rador had called the Veil of the Shining One. There it shone in all its unearthly grandeur, on each side of the Cyclopean pillars, as though a mountain should stretch up arms raising between them a fairy banner of auroral glories. Beneath it was the curved, scimitar sweep of the pier with its clustered, gleaming temples.

Before that brief, fascinated glance was done, there dropped upon my soul a sensation as of brooding weight intolerable; a spiritual oppression as though some vastness was falling, pressing, stifling me, I turned – and Larry caught me as I reeled.

“Steady! Steady, old man!” he whispered.

At first all that my staggering consciousness could realize was an immensity, an immeasurable uprearing that brought with it the same throat-gripping vertigo as comes from gazing downward from some great height – then a blur of white faces – intolerable shinings of hundreds upon thousands of eyes. Huge, incredibly huge, a colossal amphitheater of jet, a stupendous semicircle, held within its mighty arc the ivory platform on which I stood.

It reared itself almost perpendicularly hundreds of feet up into the sparkling heavens, and thrust down on each side its ebon bulwarks – like monstrous paws. Now, the giddiness from its sheer greatness passing, I saw that it was indeed an amphitheater sloping slightly backward tier after tier, and that the white blur of faces against its blackness, the gleaming of countless eyes were those of myriads of the people who sat silent, flower-garlanded, their gaze focused upon the rainbow curtain and sweeping over me like a torrent – tangible, appalling!

Five hundred feet beyond, the smooth, high retaining wall of the amphitheater raised itself – above it the first terrace of the seats, and above this, dividing the tiers for another half a thousand feet upward, set within them like a panel, was a dead-black surface in which shone faintly with a bluish radiance a gigantic disk; above it and around it a cluster of innumerable smaller ones.

On each side of me, bordering the platform, were scores of small pillared alcoves, a low wall stretching across their fronts; delicate, fretted grills shielding them, save where in each lattice an opening stared – it came to me that they were like those stalls in ancient Gothic cathedrals wherein for centuries had kneeled paladins and people of my own race on earth’s fair face. And within these alcoves were gathered, score upon score, the elfin beauties, the dwarfish men of the fair-haired folk. At my right, a few feet from the opening through which we had come, a passageway led back between the fretted stalls. Half-way between us and the massive base of the amphitheater a dais rose. Up the platform to it a wide ramp ascended; and on ramp and dais and along the center of the gleaming platform down to where it kissed the white waters, a broad ribbon of the radiant flowers lay like a fairy carpet.

On one side of this dais, meshed in a silken web that hid no line or curve of her sweet body, white flesh gleaming through its folds, stood Yolara; and opposite her, crowned with a circlet of flashing blue stones, his mighty body stark bare, was Lugur!

O’Keefe drew a long breath; Rador touched my arm and, still dazed, I let myself be drawn into the aisle and through a corridor that ran behind the alcoves. At the back of one of these the green dwarf paused, opened a door, and motioned us within.

Entering, I found that we were exactly opposite where the ramp ran up to the dais – and that Yolara was not more than fifty feet away. She glanced at O’Keefe and smiled. Her eyes were ablaze with little dancing points of light; her body seemed to palpitate, the rounded delicate muscles beneath the translucent skin to run with joyful little eager waves!

Larry whistled softly.

“There’s Marakinoff!” he said.

I looked where he pointed. Opposite us sat the Russian, clothed as we were, leaning forward, his eyes eager behind his glasses; but if he saw us he gave no sign.

“And there’s Olaf!” said O’Keefe.

Beneath the carved stall in which sat the Russian was an aperture and within it was Huldricksson. Unprotected by pillars or by grills, opening clear upon the platform, near him stretched the trail of flowers up to the great dais which Lugur and Yolara the priestess guarded. He sat alone, and my heart went out to him.

O’Keefe’s face softened.

“Bring him here,” he said to Rador.

The green dwarf was looking at the Norseman, too, a shade of pity upon his mocking face. He shook his head.

“Wait!” he said. “You can do nothing now – and it may be there will be no need to do anything,” he added; but I could feel that there was little of conviction in his words.

— XIX —

THE MADNESS OF OLAF

Yolara threw her white arms high. From the mountainous tiers came a mighty sigh; a rippling ran through them. And upon the moment, before Yolara’s arms fell, there issued, apparently from the air around us, a peal of sound that might have been the shouting of some playful god hurling great suns through the net of stars. It was like the deepest notes of all the organs in the world combined in one; summoning, majestic, cosmic!

It held within it the thunder of the spheres rolling through the infinite, the birth-song of suns made manifest in the womb of space; echoes of creation’s supernal chord! It shook the body like a pulse from the heart of the universe – pulsed – and died away.

On its death came a blaring as of all the trumpets of conquering hosts since the first Pharaoh led his swarms – triumphal, compelling! Alexander’s clamoring hosts, brazen-throated wolf-horns of Caesar’s legions, blare of trumpets of Genghis Khan and his golden horde, clangor of the locust levies of Tamerlane, bugles of Napoleon’s armies – war-shout of all earth’s conquerors! And it died!

Fast upon it, a throbbing, muffled tumult of harp sounds, mellownesses of myriads of wood horns, the subdued sweet shrilling of multitudes of flutes, Pandean pipings – inviting, carrying with them the calling of waterfalls in the hidden places, rushing brooks and murmuring forest winds – calling, calling, languorous, lulling, dripping into the brain like the very honeyed essence of sound.

And after them a silence in which the memory of the music seemed to beat, to beat ever more faintly, through every quivering nerve.

From me all fear, all apprehension, had fled. In their place was nothing but joyous anticipation, a supernal freedom from even the shadow of the shadow of care or sorrow; not now did anything matter – Olaf or his haunted, hate-filled eyes; Throckmartin or his fate – nothing of pain, nothing of agony, nothing of striving nor endeavor nor despair in that wide outer world that had turned suddenly to a troubled dream.

Once more the first great note pealed out! Once more it died and from the clustered spheres a kaleidoscopic blaze shot as though drawn from the majestic sound itself. The many-colored rays darted across the white waters and sought the face of the irised Veil. As they touched, it sparkled, flamed, wavered, and shook with fountains of prismatic color.

The light increased – and in its intensity the silver air darkened. Faded into shadow that white mosaic of flower-crowned faces set in the amphitheater of jet, and vast shadows dropped upon the high-flung tiers and shrouded them. But on the skirts of the rays the fretted stalls in which we sat with the fair-haired ones blazed out, iridescent, like jewels.

I was sensible of an acceleration of every pulse; a wild stimulation of every nerve. I felt myself being lifted above the world – close to the threshold of the high gods – soon their essence and their power would stream out into me! I glanced at Larry. His eyes were – wild – with life!

I looked at Olaf – and in his face was none of this – only hate, and hate, and hate.

The peacock waves streamed out over the waters, cleaving the seeming darkness, a rainbow path of glory. And the Veil flashed as though all the rainbows that had ever shone were burning within it. Again the mighty sound pealed.

Into the center of the Veil the light drew itself, grew into an intolerable brightness – and with a storm of tinklings, a tempest of crystalline notes, a tumult of tiny chimings, through it sped – the Shining One!

Straight down that radiant path, its high-flung plumes of feathery flame shimmering, its coruscating spirals whirling, its seven globes of seven colors shining above its glowing core, it raced toward us. The hurricane of bells of diamond glass were jubilant, joyous. I felt O’Keefe grip my arm; Yolara threw her white arms out in a welcoming gesture; I heard from the tier a sigh of rapture – and in it a poignant, wailing under-tone of agony!

Over the waters, down the light stream, to the end of the ivory pier, flew the Shining One. Through its crystal pizzicati drifted inarticulate murmurings – deadly sweet, stilling the heart and setting it leaping madly.

For a moment it paused, poised itself, and then came whirling down the flower path to its priestess, slowly, ever more slowly. It hovered for a moment between the woman and the dwarf, as though contemplating them; turned to her with its storm of tinklings softened, its murmurings infinitely caressing. Bent toward it, Yolara seemed to gather within herself pulsing waves of power; she was terrifying; gloriously, maddeningly evil; and as gloriously, maddeningly heavenly! Aphrodite and the Virgin! Tanith of the Carthaginians and St. Bride of the Isles! A queen of hell and a princess of heaven – in one!

Only for a moment did that which we had called the Dweller and which these named the Shining One, pause. It swept up the ramp to the dais, rested there, slowly turning, plumes and spirals lacing and unlacing, throbbing, pulsing. Now its nucleus grew plainer, stronger – human in a fashion, and all inhuman; neither man nor woman; neither god nor devil; subtly partaking of all. Nor could I doubt that whatever it was, within that shining nucleus was something sentient; something that had will and energy, and in some awful, supernormal fashion – intelligence!

Another trumpeting – a sound of stones opening – a long, low wail of utter anguish – something moved shadowy in the river of light, and slowly at first, then ever more rapidly, shapes swam through it. There were half a score of them – girls and youths, women and men. The Shining One poised itself, regarded them. They drew closer, and in the eyes of each and in their faces was the bud of that awful intermingling of emotions, of joy and sorrow, ecstasy and terror, that I had seen in full blossom on Throckmartin’s.

The Thing began again its murmurings – now infinitely caressing, coaxing – like the song of a siren from some witched star! And the bell-sounds rang out – compellingly, calling – calling – calling—

I saw Olaf lean far out of his place; saw, half-consciously, at Lugur’s signal, three of the dwarfs creep in and take places, unnoticed, behind him.

Now the first of the figures rushed upon the dais – and paused. It was the girl who had been brought before Yolara when the gnome named Songar was driven into the nothingness! With all the quickness of light a spiral of the Shining One stretched out and encircled her.

At its touch there was an infinitely dreadful shrinking and, it seemed, a simultaneous hurling of herself into its radiance. As it wrapped its swirls around her, permeated her – the crystal chorus burst forth – tumultuously; through and through her the radiance pulsed. Began then that infinitely dreadful, but infinitely glorious, rhythm they called the dance of the Shining One. And as the girl swirled within its sparkling mists another and another flew into its embrace, until, at last, the dais was an incredible vision; a mad star’s Witches’ Sabbath; an altar of white faces and bodies gleaming through living flame; transfused with rapture insupportable and horror that was hellish – and ever, radiant plumes and spirals expanding, the core of the Shining One waxed – growing greater – as it consumed, as it drew into and through itself the life-force of these lost ones!

So they spun, interlaced – and there began to pulse from them life, vitality, as though the very essence of nature was filling us. Dimly I recognized that what I was beholding was vampirism inconceivable! The banked tiers chanted. The mighty sounds pealed forth!

It was a Saturnalia of demigods!

Then, whirling, bell-notes storming, the Shining One withdrew slowly from the dais down the ramp, still embracing, still interwoven with those who had thrown themselves into its spirals. They drifted with it as though half-carried in dreadful dance; white faces sealed – forever – into that semblance of those who held within linked God and devil – I covered my eyes!

I heard a gasp from O’Keefe; opened my eyes and sought his; saw the wildness vanish from them as he strained forward. Olaf had leaned far out, and as he did so the dwarfs beside him caught him, and whether by design or through his own swift, involuntary movement, thrust him half into the Dweller’s path. The Dweller paused in its gyrations – seemed to watch him. The Norseman’s face was crimson, his eyes blazing. He threw himself back and, with one defiant shout, gripped one of the dwarfs about the middle and sent him hurtling through the air, straight at the radiant Thing! A whirling mass of legs and arms, the dwarf flew – then in mid-flight stopped as though some gigantic invisible hand had caught him, and – was dashed down upon the platform not a yard from the Shining One!

Like a broken spider he moved – feebly – once, twice. From the Dweller shot a shimmering tentacle – touched him – recoiled. Its crystal tinklings changed into an angry chiming. From all about – jeweled stalls and jet peak – came a sigh of incredulous horror.

Lugur leaped forward. On the instant Larry was over the low barrier between the pillars, rushing to the Norseman’s side. And even as they ran there was another wild shout from Olaf, and he hurled himself out, straight at the throat of the Dweller!

But before he could touch the Shining One, now motionless – and never was the thing more horrible than then, with the purely human suggestion of surprise plain in its poise – Larry had struck him aside.

I tried to follow – and was held by Rador. He was trembling – but not with fear. In his face was incredulous hope, inexplicable eagerness.

“Wait!” he said. “Wait!”

The Shining One stretched out a slow spiral, and as it did so I saw the bravest thing man has ever witnessed. Instantly O’Keefe thrust himself between it and Olaf, pistol out. The tentacle touched him, and the dull blue of his robe flashed out into blinding, intense azure light. From the automatic in his gloved hand came three quick bursts of flame straight into the Thing. The Dweller drew back; the bell-sounds swelled.

Lugur paused, his hand darted up, and in it was one of the silver Keth cones. But before he could flash it upon the Norseman, Larry had unlooped his robe, thrown its fold over Olaf, and, holding him with one hand away from the Shining One, thrust with the other his pistol into the dwarf’s stomach. His lips moved, but I could not hear what he said. But Lugur understood, for his hand dropped.

Now Yolara was there – all this had taken barely more than five seconds. She thrust herself between the three men and the Dweller. She spoke to it – and the wild buzzing died down; the gay crystal tinklings burst forth again. The Thing murmured to her – began to whirl – faster, faster – passed down the ivory pier, out upon the waters, bearing with it, meshed in its light, the sacrifices – swept on ever more swiftly, triumphantly and turning, turning, with its ghastly crew, vanished through the Veil!

Abruptly the polychromatic path snapped out. The silver light poured in upon us. From all the amphitheater arose a clamor, a shouting. Marakinoff, his eyes staring, was leaning out, listening. Unrestrained now by Rador, I vaulted the wall and rushed forward. But not before I had heard the green dwarf murmur:

“There is something stronger than the Shining One! Two things – yea – a strong heart – and hate!”

Olaf, panting, eyes glazed, trembling, shrank beneath my hand.

“The devil that took my Helma!” I heard him whisper. “The Shining Devil!”

“Both these men,” Lugur was raging, “they shall dance with the Shining one. And this one, too.” He pointed at me malignantly.

“This man is mine,” said the priestess, and her voice was menacing. She rested her hand on Larry’s shoulder. “He shall not dance. No – nor his friend. I have told you I dare not for this one!” She pointed to Olaf.

“Neither this man, nor this,” said Larry, “shall be harmed. This is my word, Yolara!”

“Even so,” she answered quietly, “my lord!”

I saw Marakinoff stare at O’Keefe with a new and curiously speculative interest. Lugur’s eyes grew hellish; he raised his arms as though to strike her. Larry’s pistol prodded him rudely enough.

“No rough stuff now, kid!” said O’Keefe in English. The red dwarf quivered, turned – caught a robe from a priest standing by, and threw it over himself. The ladala, shouting, gesticulating, fighting with the soldiers, were jostling down from the tiers of jet.

“Come!” commanded Yolara – her eyes rested upon Larry. “Your heart is great, indeed – my lord!” she murmured; and her voice was very sweet. “Come!”

“This man comes with us, Yolara,” said O’Keefe pointing to Olaf.

“Bring him,” she said. “Bring him – only tell him to look no more upon me as before!” she added fiercely.

Beside her the three of us passed along the stalls, where sat the fair-haired, now silent, at gaze, as though in the grip of some great doubt. Silently Olaf strode beside me. Rador had disappeared. Down the stairway, through the hall of turquoise mist, over the rushing sea-stream we went and stood beside the wall through which we had entered. The white-robed ones had gone.

Yolara pressed; the portal opened. We stepped upon the car; she took the lever; we raced through the faintly luminous corridor to the house of the priestess.

And one thing now I knew sick at heart and soul the truth had come to me – no more need to search for Throckmartin. Behind that Veil, in the lair of the Dweller, dead-alive like those we had just seen swim in its shining train was he, and Edith, Stanton and Thora and Olaf Huldricksson’s wife!

The car came to rest; the portal opened; Yolara leaped out lightly, beckoned and flitted up the corridor. She paused before an ebon screen. At a touch it vanished, revealing an entrance to a small blue chamber, glowing as though cut from the heart of some gigantic sapphire; bare, save that in its center, upon a low pedestal, stood a great globe fashioned from milky rock-crystal; upon its surface were faint tracings as of seas and continents, but, if so, either of some other world or of this world in immemorial past, for in no way did they resemble the mapped coastlines of our earth.

Poised upon the globe, rising from it out into space, locked in each other’s arms, lips to lips, were two figures, a woman and a man, so exquisite, so lifelike, that for the moment I failed to realize that they, too, were carved of the crystal. And before this shrine – for nothing else could it be, I knew – three slender cones raised themselves: one of purest white flame, one of opalescent water, and the third of – moonlight! There was no mistaking them, the height of a tall man each stood – but how water, flame and light were held so evenly, so steadily in their spire-shapes, I could not tell.

Yolara bowed lowly – once, twice, thrice. She turned to O’Keefe, nor by slightest look or gesture betrayed she knew others were there than he. The blue eyes wide, searching, unfathomable, she drew close; put white hands on his shoulders, looked down into his very soul.

“My lord,” she murmured. “Now listen well for I, Yolara, give you three things – myself, and the Shining One, and the power that is the Shining One’s – yea, and still a fourth thing that is all three – power over all upon that world from whence you came! These, my lord, ye shall have. I swear it” – she turned toward the altar – uplifted her arms – “by Siya and by Siyana, and by the flame, by the water, and by the light!” [04]

Her eyes grew purple dark.

“Let none dare to take you from me! Nor ye go from me unbidden!” she whispered fiercely.

Then swiftly, still ignoring us, she threw her arms about O’Keefe, pressed her white body to his breast, lips raised, eyes closed, seeking his. O’Keefe’s arms tightened around her, his head dropped lips seeking, finding hers – passionately! From Olaf came a deep indrawn breath that was almost a groan. But not in my heart could I find blame for the Irishman!

The priestess opened eyes now all misty blue, thrust him back, stood regarding him. O’Keefe, dead-white, raised a trembling hand to his face.

“And thus have I sealed my oath, O my lord!” she whispered. For the first time she seemed to recognize our presence, stared at us a moment, then through us, and turned to O’Keefe.

“Go, now!” she said. “Soon Rador shall come for you. Then – well, after that let happen what will!”

She smiled once more at him – so sweetly; turned toward the figures upon the great globe; sank upon her knees before them. Quietly we crept away; still silent, made our way to the little pavilion. But as we passed we heard a tumult from the green roadway; shouts of men, now and then a woman’s scream. Through a rift in the garden I glimpsed a jostling crowd on one of the bridges: green dwarfs struggling with the ladala – and all about droned a humming as of a giant hive disturbed!

Larry threw himself down upon one of the divans, covered his face with his hands, dropped them to catch in Olaf’s eyes troubled reproach, looked at me.

“I couldn’t help it,” he said, half defiantly – half-miserably. “God, what a woman! I couldn’t help it!”

“Larry,” I asked. “Why didn’t you tell her you didn’t love her – then?”

He gazed at me – the old twinkle back in his eye.

“Spoken like a scientist, Doc!” he exclaimed. “I suppose if a burning angel struck you out of nowhere and threw itself about you, you would most dignifiedly tell it you didn’t want to be burned. For God’s sake, don’t talk nonsense, Goodwin!” he ended, almost peevishly.

“Evil! Evil!” The Norseman’s voice was deep, nearly a chant. “All here is of evil: Trolldom and Helvede it is, Ja! And that she djaevelsk of beauty – what is she but harlot of that shining devil they worship. I, Olaf Huldricksson, know what she meant when she held out to you power over all the world, Ja! – as if the world had not devils enough in it now!”

“What?” The cry came from both O’Keefe and myself at once.

Olaf made a gesture of caution, relapsed into sullen silence. There were footsteps on the path, and into sight came Rador – but a Rador changed. Gone was every vestige of his mockery; curiously solemn, he saluted O’Keefe and Olaf with that salute which, before this, I had seen given only to Yolara and to Lugur. There came a swift quickening of the tumult – died away. He shrugged mighty shoulders.

“The ladala are awake!” he said. “So much for what two brave men can do!” He paused thoughtfully. “Bones and dust jostle not each other for place against the grave wall!” he added oddly. “But if bones and dust have revealed to them that they still – live—”

He stopped abruptly, eyes seeking the globe that bore and sent forth speech. [05]

“The Afyo Maie has sent me to watch over you till she summons you,” he announced clearly. “There is to be a – feast. You, Larree, you Goodwin, are to come. I remain here with – Olaf.”

“No harm to him!” broke in O’Keefe sharply. Rador touched his heart, his eyes.

“By the Ancient Ones, and by my love for you, and by what you twain did before the Shining One – I swear it!” he whispered.

Rador clapped palms; a soldier came round the path, in his grip a long flat box of polished wood. The green dwarf took it, dismissed him, threw open the lid.

“Here is your apparel for the feast, Larree,” he said, pointing to the contents.

O’Keefe stared, reached down and drew out a white, shimmering, softly metallic, long-sleeved tunic, a broad, silvery girdle, leg swathings of the same argent material, and sandals that seemed to be cut out from silver. He made a quick gesture of angry dissent.

“Nay, Larree!” muttered the dwarf. “Wear them – I counsel it – I pray it – ask me not why,” he went on swiftly, looking again at the globe.

O’Keefe, as I, was impressed by his earnestness. The dwarf made a curiously expressive pleading gesture. O’Keefe abruptly took the garments; passed into the room of the fountain.

“The Shining One dances not again?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “No” – he hesitate – “it is the usual feast that follows the sacrament! Lugur – and Double Tongue, who came with you, will be there,” he added slowly.

“Lugur—” I gasped in astonishment. “After what happened – he will be there?”

“Perhaps because of what happened, Goodwin, my friend,” he answered – his eyes again full of malice; “and there will be others – friends of Yolara – friends of Lugur – and perhaps another” – his voice was almost inaudible – “one whom they have not called—” He halted, half-fearfully, glancing at the globe; put finger to lips and spread himself out upon one of the couches.

“Strike up the band” – came O’Keefe’s voice – “here comes the hero!”

He strode into the room. I am bound to say that the admiration in Rador’s eyes was reflected in my own, and even, if involuntarily, in Olaf’s.

“A son of Siyana!” whispered Rador.

He knelt, took from his girdle-pouch a silk-wrapped something, unwound it – and, still kneeling, drew out a slender poniard of gleaming white metal, hilted with the blue stones; he thrust it into O’Keefe’s girdle; then gave him again the rare salute.

“Come,” he ordered and took us to the head of the pathway.

“Now,” he said grimly, “let the Silent Ones show their power – if they still have it!”

And with this strange benediction, he turned back.

“For God’s sake, Larry,” I urged as we approached the house of the priestess, “you’ll be careful!”

He nodded – but I saw with a little deadly pang of apprehension in my heart a puzzled, lurking doubt within his eyes.

As we ascended the serpent steps Marakinoff appeared. He gave a signal to our guards – and I wondered what influence the Russian had attained, for promptly, without question, they drew aside. At me he smiled amiably.

“Have you found your friends yet?” he went on – and now I sensed something deeply sinister in him. “No! It is too bad! Well, don’t give up hope.” He turned to O’Keefe.

“Lieutenant, I would like to speak to you – alone!”

“I’ve no secrets from Goodwin,” answered O’Keefe.

“So?” queried Marakinoff, suavely. He bent, whispered to Larry.

The Irishman started, eyed him with a certain shocked incredulity, then turned to me.

“Just a minute, Doc!” he said, and I caught the suspicion of a wink. They drew aside, out of earshot. The Russian talked rapidly. Larry was all attention. Marakinoff’s earnestness became intense; O’Keefe interrupted – appeared to question. Marakinoff glanced at me and as his gaze shifted from O’Keefe, I saw a flame of rage and horror blaze up in the latter’s eyes. At last the Irishman appeared to consider gravely; nodded as though he had arrived at some decision, and Marakinoff thrust his hand to him.

And only I could have noticed Larry’s shrinking, his microscopic hesitation before he took it, and his involuntary movement, as though to shake off something unclean, when the clasp had ended.

Marakinoff, without another look at me, turned and went quickly within. The guards took their places. I looked at Larry inquiringly.

“Don’t ask a thing now, Doc!” he said tensely. “Wait till we get home. But we’ve got to get damned busy and quick – I’ll tell you that now—”

— XX —

THE TEMPTING OF LARRY

We paused before thick curtains, through which came the faint murmur of many voices. They parted; out came two – ushers, I suppose, they were – in cuirasses and kilts that reminded me somewhat of chain-mail – the first armor of any kind here that I had seen. They held open the folds.

The chamber, on whose threshold we stood, was far larger than either anteroom or hall of audience. Not less than three hundred feet long and half that in depth, from end to end of it ran two huge semicircular tables, paralleling each other, divided by a wide aisle, and heaped with flowers, with fruits, with viands unknown to me, and glittering with crystal flagons, beakers, goblets of as many hues as the blooms. On the gay-cushioned couches that flanked the tables, lounging luxuriously, were scores of the fair-haired ruling class and there rose a little buzz of admiration, oddly mixed with a half-startled amaze, as their gaze fell upon O’Keefe in all his silvery magnificence. Everywhere the light-giving globes sent their roseate radiance.

The cuirassed dwarfs led us through the aisle. Within the arc of the inner half – circle was another glittering board, an oval. But of those seated there, facing us – I had eyes for only one – Yolara! She swayed up to greet O’Keefe – and she was like one of those white lily maids, whose beauty Hoang-Ku, the sage, says made the Gobi first a paradise, and whose lusts later the burned-out desert that it is. She held out hands to Larry, and on her face was passion – unashamed, unhiding.

She was Circe – but Circe conquered. Webs of filmiest white clung to the rose-leaf body. Twisted through the corn-silk hair a threaded circlet of pale sapphires shone; but they were pale beside Yolara’s eyes. O’Keefe bent, kissed her hands, something more than mere admiration flaming from him. She saw – and, smiling, drew him down beside her.

It came to me that of all, only these two, Yolara and O’Keefe, were in white – and I wondered; then with a tightening of nerves ceased to wonder as there entered – Lugur! He was all in scarlet, and as he strode forward a silence fell a tense, strained silence.

His gaze turned upon Yolara, rested upon O’Keefe, and instantly his face grew – dreadful – there is no other word than that for it. Marakinoff leaned forward from the center of the table, near whose end I sat, touched and whispered to him swiftly. With appalling effort the red dwarf controlled himself; he saluted the priestess ironically, I thought; took his place at the further end of the oval. And now I noted that the figures between were the seven of that Council of which the Shining One’s priestess and Voice were the heads. The tension relaxed, but did not pass – as though a storm-cloud should turn away, but still lurk, threatening.

My gaze ran back. This end of the room was draped with the exquisitely colored, graceful curtains looped with gorgeous garlands. Between curtains and table, where sat Larry and the nine, a circular platform, perhaps ten yards in diameter, raised itself a few feet above the floor, its gleaming surface half-covered with the luminous petals, fragrant, delicate.

On each side below it, were low carven stools. The curtains parted and softly entered girls bearing their flutes, their harps, the curiously emotion-exciting, octaved drums. They sank into their places. They touched their instruments; a faint, languorous measure throbbed through the rosy air.

The stage was set! What was to be the play?

Now about the tables passed other dusky-haired maids, fair bosoms bare, their scanty kirtles looped high, pouring out the wines for the feasters.

My eyes sought O’Keefe. Whatever it had been that Marakinoff had said, clearly it now filled his mind – even to the exclusion of the wondrous woman beside him. His eyes were stern, cold – and now and then, as he turned them toward the Russian, filled with a curious speculation. Yolara watched him, frowned, gave a low order to the Hebe behind her.

The girl disappeared, entered again with a ewer that seemed cut of amber. The priestess poured from it into Larry’s glass a clear liquid that shook with tiny sparkles of light. She raised the glass to her lips, handed it to him. Half-smiling, half-abstractedly, he took it, touched his own lips where hers had kissed; drained it. A nod from Yolara and the maid refilled his goblet.

At once there was a swift transformation in the Irishman. His abstraction vanished; the sternness fled; his eyes sparkled. He leaned caressingly toward Yolara; whispered. Her blue eyes flashed triumphantly; her chiming laughter rang. She raised her own glass – but within it was not that clear drink that filled Larry’s! And again he drained his own; and, lifting it, full once more, caught the baleful eyes of Lugur, and held it toward him mockingly. Yolara swayed close – alluring, tempting. He arose, face all reckless gaiety; rollicking deviltry.

“A toast!” he cried in English, “to the Shining One – and may the hell where it belongs soon claim it!”

He had used their own word for their god – all else had been in his own tongue, and so, fortunately, they did not understand. But the contempt in his action they did recognize – and a dead, a fearful silence fell upon them all. Lugur’s eyes blazed, little sparks of crimson in their green. The priestess reached up, caught at O’Keefe. He seized the soft hand; caressed it; his gaze grew far away, sombre.

“The Shining One.” He spoke low. “An’ now again I see the faces of those who dance with it. It is the Fires of Mora – come, God alone knows how – from Erin – to this place. The Fires of Mora!” He contemplated the hushed folk before him; and then from his lips came that weirdest, most haunting of the lyric legends of Erin – the Curse of Mora:

“The fretted fires of Mora blew o’er him in the night;

He thrills no more to loving, nor weeps for past delight.

For when those flames have bitten, both grief and joy take flight—”

Again Yolara tried to draw him down beside her; and once more he gripped her hand. His eyes grew fixed – he crooned:

“And through the sleeping silence his feet must track the tune,

When the world is barred and speckled with silver of the moon—”

He stood, swaying, for a moment, and then, laughing, let the priestess have her way; drained again the glass.

And now my heart was cold, indeed – for what hope was there left with Larry mad, wild drunk!

The silence was unbroken – elfin women and dwarfs glancing furtively at each other. But now Yolara arose, face set, eyes flashing gray.

“Hear you, the Council, and you, Lugur – and all who are here!” she cried. “Now I, the priestess of the Shining One, take, as is my right, my mate. And this is he!” She pointed down upon Larry. He glanced up at her.

“Can’t quite make out what you say, Yolara,” he muttered thickly. “But say anything – you like – I love your voice!”

I turned sick with dread. Yolara’s hand stole softly upon the Irishman’s curls caressingly.

“You know the law, Yolara.” Lugur’s voice was flat, deadly, “You may not mate with other than your own kind. And this man is a stranger – a barbarian – food for the Shining One!” Literally, he spat the phrase.

“No, not of our kind – Lugur – higher!” Yolara answered serenely. “Lo, a son of Siya and of Siyana!”

“A lie!” roared the red dwarf. “A lie!”

“The Shining One revealed it to me!” said Yolara sweetly. “And if ye believe not, Lugur – go ask of the Shining One if it be not truth!”

There was bitter, nameless menace in those last words – and whatever their hidden message to Lugur, it was potent. He stood, choking, face hell-shadowed – Marakinoff leaned out again, whispered. The red dwarf bowed, now wholly ironically; resumed his place and his silence. And again I wondered, icy-hearted, what was the power the Russian had so to sway Lugur.

“What says the Council?” Yolara demanded, turning to them.

Only for a moment they consulted among themselves. Then the woman, whose face was a ravaged shrine of beauty, spoke.

“The will of the priestess is the will of the Council!” she answered.

Defiance died from Yolara’s face; she looked down at Larry tenderly. He sat swaying, crooning.

“Bid the priests come,” she commanded, then turned to the silent room. “By the rites of Siya and Siyana, Yolara takes their son for her mate!” And again her hand stole down possessingly, serpent soft, to the drunken head of the O’Keefe.

The curtains parted widely. Through them filed, two by two, twelve hooded figures clad in flowing robes of the green one sees in forest vistas of opening buds of dawning spring. Of each pair one bore clasped to breast a globe of that milky crystal in the sapphire shrine-room; the other a harp, small, shaped somewhat like the ancient clarsach of the Druids.

Two by two they stepped upon the raised platform, placed gently upon it each their globe; and two by two crouched behind them. They formed now a star of six points about the petaled dais, and, simultaneously, they drew from their faces the covering cowls.

I half-rose – youths and maidens these of the fair-haired; and youths and maids more beautiful than any of those I had yet seen – for upon their faces was little of that disturbing mockery to which I have been forced so often, because of the deep impression it made upon me, to refer. The ashen-gold of the maiden priestesses’ hair was wound about their brows in shining coronals. The pale locks of the youths were clustered within circlets of translucent, glimmering gems like moonstones. And then, crystal globe alternately before and harp alternately held by youth and maid, they began to sing.

What was that song, I do not know – nor ever shall. Archaic, ancient beyond thought, it seemed – not with the ancientness of things that for uncounted ages have been but wind-driven dust. Rather was it the ancientness of the golden youth of the world, love lilts of earth younglings, with light of newborn suns drenching them, chorals of young stars mating in space; murmurings of April gods and goddesses. A languor stole through me. The rosy lights upon the tripods began to die away, and as they faded the milky globes gleamed forth brighter, ever brighter. Yolara rose, stretched a hand to Larry, led him through the sextuple groups, and stood face to face with him in the center of their circle.

The rose-light died; all that immense chamber was black, save for the circle of the glowing spheres. Within this their milky radiance grew brighter – brighter. The song whispered away. A throbbing arpeggio dripped from the harps, and as the notes pulsed out, up from the globes, as though striving to follow, pulsed with them tips of moon-fire cones, such as I had seen before Yolara’s altar. Weirdly, caressingly, compellingly the harp notes throbbed in repeated, re-repeated theme, holding within itself the same archaic golden quality I had noted in the singing. And over the moon flame pinnacles rose higher!

Yolara lifted her arms; within her hands were clasped O’Keefe’s. She raised them above their two heads and slowly, slowly drew him with her into a circling, graceful step, tendrilings delicate as the slow spiralings of twilight mist upon some still stream.

As they swayed the rippling arpeggios grew louder, and suddenly the slender pinnacles of moon fire bent, dipped, flowed to the floor, crept in a shining ring around those two – and began to rise, a gleaming, glimmering, enchanted barrier – rising, ever rising – hiding them!

With one swift movement Yolara unbound her circlet of pale sapphires, shook loose the waves of her silken hair. It fell, a rippling, wondrous cascade, veiling both her and O’Keefe to their girdles – and now the shining coils of moon fire had crept to their knees – was circling higher – higher.

And ever despair grew deeper in my soul!

What was that! I started to my feet, and all around me in the darkness I heard startled motion. From without came a blaring of trumpets, the sound of running men, loud murmurings. The tumult drew closer. I heard cries of “Lakla! Lakla!” Now it was at the very threshold and within it, oddly, as though – punctuating – the clamor, a deep-toned, almost abysmal, booming sound – thunderously bass and reverberant.

Abruptly the harpings ceased; the moon fires shuddered, fell, and began to sweep back into the crystal globes; Yolara’s swaying form grew rigid, every atom of it listening. She threw aside the veiling cloud of hair, and in the gleam of the last retreating spirals her face glared out like some old Greek mask of tragedy.

The sweet lips that even at their sweetest could never lose their delicate cruelty, had no sweetness now. They were drawn into a square – inhuman as that of the Medusa; in her eyes were the fires of the pit, and her hair seemed to writhe like the serpent locks of that Gorgon whose mouth she had borrowed; all her beauty was transformed into a nameless thing – hideous, inhuman, blasting! If this was the true soul of Yolara springing to her face, then, I thought, God help us in very deed!

I wrested my gaze away to O’Keefe. All drunkenness gone, himself again, he was staring down at her, and in his eyes were loathing and horror unutterable. So they stood – and the light fled.

Only for a moment did the darkness hold. With lightning swiftness the blackness that was the chamber’s other wall vanished. Through a portal open between gray screens, the silver sparkling radiance poured.

And through the portal marched, two by two, incredible, nightmare figures – frog-men, giants, taller by nearly a yard than even tall O’Keefe! Their enormous saucer eyes were irised by wide bands of green-flecked red, in which the phosphorescence flickered. Their long muzzles, lips half-open in monstrous grin, held rows of glistening, slender, lancet sharp fangs. Over the glaring eyes arose a horny helmet, a carapace of black and orange scales, studded with foot-long lance-headed horns.

They lined themselves like soldiers on each side of the wide table aisle, and now I could see that their horny armor covered shoulders and backs, ran across the chest in a knobbed cuirass, and at wrists and heels jutted out into curved, murderous spurs. The webbed hands and feet ended in yellow, spade-shaped claws.

They carried spears, ten feet, at least, in length, the heads of which were pointed cones, glistening with that same covering, from whose touch of swift decay I had so narrowly saved Rador.

They were grotesque, yes – more grotesque than anything I had ever seen or dreamed, and they were – terrible!

And then, quietly, through their ranks came – a girl! Behind her, enormous pouch at his throat swelling in and out menacingly, in one paw a treelike, spike-studded mace, a frog-man, huger than any of the others, guarding. But of him I caught but a fleeting, involuntary impression – all my gaze was for her.

For it was she who had pointed out to us the way from the peril of the Dweller’s lair on Nan-Tauach. And as I looked at her, I marveled that ever could I have thought the priestess more beautiful. Into the eyes of O’Keefe rushed joy and an utter abasement of shame.

And from all about came murmurs – edged with anger, half-incredulous, tinged with fear:

“Lakla!”

“Lakla!”

“The handmaiden!”

She halted close beside me. From firm little chin to dainty buskined feet she was swathed in the soft robes of dull, almost coppery hue. The left arm was hidden, the right free and gloved. Wound tight about it was one of the vines of the sculptured wall and of Lugur’s circled signet-ring. Thick, a vivid green, its five tendrils ran between her fingers, stretching out five flowered heads that gleamed like blossoms cut from gigantic, glowing rubies.

So she stood contemplating Yolara. Then drawn perhaps by my gaze, she dropped her eyes upon me; golden, translucent, with tiny flecks of amber in their aureate irises, the soul that looked through them was as far removed from that flaming out of the priestess as zenith is above nadir.

I noted the low, broad brow, the proud little nose, the tender mouth, and the soft – sunlight – glow that seemed to transfuse the delicate skin. And suddenly in the eyes dawned a smile – sweet, friendly, a touch of roguishness, profoundly reassuring in its all humanness. I felt my heart expand as though freed from fetters, a recrudescence of confidence in the essential reality of things – as though in nightmare the struggling consciousness should glimpse some familiar face and know the terrors with which it strove were but dreams. And involuntarily I smiled back at her.

She raised her head and looked again at Yolara, contempt and a certain curiosity in her gaze; at O’Keefe – and through the softened eyes drifted swiftly a shadow of sorrow, and on its fleeting wings deepest interest, and hovering over that a naive approval as reassuringly human as had been her smile.

She spoke, and her voice, deep-timbred, liquid gold as was Yolara’s all silver, was subtly the synthesis of all the golden glowing beauty of her.

“The Silent Ones have sent me, O Yolara,” she said. “And this is their command to you – that you deliver to me to bring before them three of the four strangers who have found their way here. For him there who plots with Lugur” – she pointed at Marakinoff, and I saw Yolara start – “they have no need. Into his heart the Silent Ones have looked; and Lugur and you may keep him, Yolara!”

There was honeyed venom in the last words.

Yolara was herself now; only the edge of shrillness on her voice revealed her wrath as she answered.

“And whence have the Silent Ones gained power to command, choya?”

This last, I knew, was a very vulgar word; I had heard Rador use it in a moment of anger to one of the serving maids, and it meant, approximately, “kitchen girl,” “scullion.” Beneath the insult and the acid disdain, the blood rushed up under Lakla’s ambered ivory skin.

“Yolara” – her voice was low – “of no use is it to question me. I am but the messenger of the Silent Ones. And one thing only am I bidden to ask you – do you deliver to me the three strangers?”

Lugur was on his feet; eagerness, sardonic delight, sinister anticipation thrilling from him – and my same glance showed Marakinoff, crouched, biting his fingernails, glaring at the Golden Girl.

“No!” Yolara spat the word. “No! Now by Thanaroa and by the Shining One, no!” Her eyes blazed, her nostrils were wide, in her fair throat a little pulse beat angrily. “You, Lakla – take you my message to the Silent Ones. Say to them that I keep this man” – she pointed to Larry – “because he is mine. Say to them that I keep the yellow-haired one and him” – she pointed to me – “because it pleases me.

“Tell them that upon their mouths I place my foot, so!” – she stamped upon the dais viciously – “and that in their faces I spit!” – and her action was hideously snakelike. “And say last to them, you handmaiden, that if you they dare send to Yolara again, she will feed you to the Shining One! Now – go!”

The handmaiden’s face was white.

“Not unforeseen by the three was this, Yolara,” she replied. “And did you speak as you have spoken then was I bidden to say this to you.” Her voice deepened. “Three tal have you to take counsel, Yolara. And at the end of that time these things must you have determined – either to do or not to do: first, send the strangers to the Silent Ones; second, give up, you and Lugur and all of you, that dream you have of conquest of the world without; and, third, forswear the Shining One! And if you do not one and all these things, then are you done, your cup of life broken, your wine of life spilled. Yea, Yolara, for you and the Shining One, Lugur and the Nine and all those here and their kind shall pass! This say the Silent Ones, ‘Surely shall all of ye pass and be as though never had ye been!’”

Now a gasp of rage and fear arose from all those around me – but the priestess threw back her head and laughed loud and long. Into the silver sweet chiming of her laughter clashed that of Lugur – and after a little the nobles took it up, till the whole chamber echoed with their mirth. O’Keefe, lips tightening, moved toward the Handmaiden, and almost imperceptibly, but peremptorily, she waved him back.

“Those are great words – great words indeed, choya,” shrilled Yolara at last; and again Lakla winced beneath the word. “Lo, for laya upon laya, the Shining One has been freed from the Three; and for laya upon laya they have sat helpless, rotting. Now I ask you again – whence comes their power to lay their will upon me, and whence comes their strength to wrestle with the Shining One and the beloved of the Shining One?”

And again she laughed – and again Lugur and all the fair-haired joined in her laughter.

Into the eyes of Lakla I saw creep a doubt, a wavering; as though deep within her the foundations of her own belief were none too firm.

She hesitated, turning upon O’Keefe gaze in which rested more than suggestion of appeal! And Yolara saw, too, for she flushed with triumph, stretched a finger toward the handmaiden.

“Look!” she cried. “Look! Why, even she does not believe!” Her voice grew silk of silver – merciless, cruel. “Now am I minded to send another answer to the Silent Ones. Yea! But not by you, Lakla; by these” – she pointed to the frog-men, and, swift as light, her hand darted into her bosom, bringing forth the little shining cone of death.

But before she could level it the Golden Girl had released that hidden left arm and thrown over her face a fold of the metallic swathings. Swifter than Yolara, she raised the arm that held the vine – and now I knew this was no inert blossoming thing.

It was alive!

It writhed down her arm, and its five rubescent flower heads thrust out toward the priestess – vibrating, quivering, held in leash only by the light touch of the handmaiden at its very end.

From the swelling throat pouch of the monster behind her came a succession of the reverberant boomings. The frogmen wheeled, raised their lances, leveled them at the throng. Around the reaching ruby flowers a faint red mist swiftly grew.

The silver cone dropped from Yolara’s rigid fingers; her eyes grew stark with horror; all her unearthly loveliness fled from her; she stood pale-lipped. The Handmaiden dropped the protecting veil – and now it was she who laughed.

“It would seem, then, Yolara, that there is a thing of the Silent Ones ye fear!” she said. “Well – the kiss of the Yekta I promise you in return for the embrace of your Shining One.”

She looked at Larry, long, searchingly, and suddenly again with all that effect of sunlight bursting into dark places, her smile shone upon him. She nodded, half gaily; looked down upon me, the little merry light dancing in her eyes; waved her hand to me.

She spoke to the giant frog-man. He wheeled behind her as she turned, facing the priestess, club upraised, fangs glistening. His troop moved not a jot, spears held high. Lakla began to pass slowly – almost, I thought, tauntingly – and as she reached the portal Larry leaped from the dais.

“Alanna!” he cried. “You’ll not be leavin’ me just when I’ve found you!”

In his excitement he spoke in his own tongue, the velvet brogue appealing. Lakla turned, contemplated O’Keefe, hesitant, unquestionably longingly, irresistibly like a child making up her mind whether she dared or dared not take a delectable something offered her.

“I go with you,” said O’Keefe, this time in her own speech. “Come on, Doc!” He reached out a hand to me.

But now Yolara spoke. Life and beauty had flowed back into her face, and in the purple eyes all her hosts of devils were gathered.

“Do you forget what I promised you before Siya and Siyana? And do you think that you can leave me – me – as though I were a choya – like her.” She pointed to Lakla. “Do you—”

“Now, listen, Yolara,” Larry interrupted almost plaintively. “No promise has passed from me to you – and why would you hold me?” He passed unconsciously into English. “Be a good sport, Yolara,” he urged, “You have got a very devil of a temper, you know, and so have I; and we’d be really awfully uncomfortable together. And why don’t you get rid of that devilish pet of yours, and be good!”

She looked at him, puzzled, Marakinoff leaned over, translated to Lugur. The red dwarf smiled maliciously, drew near the priestess; whispered to her what was without doubt as near as he could come in the Murian to Larry’s own very colloquial phrases.

Yolara’s lips writhed.

“Hear me, Lakla!” she cried. “Now would I not let you take this man from me were I to dwell ten thousand laya in the agony of the Yekta’s kiss. This I swear to you – by Thanaroa, by my heart, and by my strength – and may my strength wither, my heart rot in my breast, and Thanaroa forget me if I do!”

“Listen, Yolara” – began O’Keefe again.

“Be silent, you!” It was almost a shriek. And her hand again sought in her breast for the cone of rhythmic death.

Lugur touched her arm, whispered again, The glint of guile shone in her eyes; she laughed softly, relaxed.

“The Silent Ones, Lakla, bade you say that they – allowed – me three tal to decide,” she said suavely. “Go now in peace, Lakla, and say that Yolara has heard, and that for the three tal they – allow – her she will take council.” The handmaiden hesitated.

“The Silent Ones have said it,” she answered at last. “Stay you here, strangers” – the long lashes drooped as her eyes met O’Keefe’s and a hint of blush was in her cheeks – “stay you here, strangers, till then. But, Yolara, see you on that heart and strength you have sworn by that they come to no harm – else that which you have invoked shall come upon you swiftly indeed – and that I promise you,” she added.

Their eyes met, clashed, burned into each other – black flame from Abaddon and golden flame from Paradise.

“Remember!” said Lakla, and passed through the portal. The gigantic frog-man boomed a thunderous note of command, his grotesque guards turned and slowly followed their mistress; and last of all passed out the monster with the mace.

— XXI —

LARRY’S DEFIANCE

A clamor arose from all the chambers; stilled in an instant by a motion of Yolara’s hand. She stood silent, regarding O’Keefe with something other now than blind wrath; something half regretful, half beseeching. But the Irishman’s control was gone.

“Yolara,” – his voice shook with rage, and he threw caution to the wind – “now hear me. I go where I will and when I will. Here shall we stay until the time she named is come. And then we follow her, whether you will or not. And if any should have thought to stop us – tell them of that flame that shattered the vase,” he added grimly.

The wistfulness died out of her eyes, leaving them cold. But no answer made she to him.

“What Lakla has said, the Council must consider, and at once.” The priestess was facing the nobles. “Now, friends of mine, and friends of Lugur, must all feud, all rancor, between us end.” She glanced swiftly at Lugur. “The ladala are stirring, and the Silent Ones threaten. Yet fear not – for are we not strong under the Shining One? And now – leave us.”

Her hand dropped to the table, and she gave, evidently, a signal, for in marched a dozen or more of the green dwarfs.

“Take these two to their place,” she commanded, pointing to us.

The green dwarfs clustered about us. Without another look at the priestess O’Keefe marched beside me, between them, from the chamber. And it was not until we had reached the pillared entrance that Larry spoke.

“I hate to talk like that to a woman, Doc,” he said, “and a pretty woman, at that. But first she played me with a marked deck, and then not only pinched all the chips, but drew a gun on me. What the hell! she nearly had me – married – to her. I don’t know what the stuff was she gave me; but, take it from me, if I had the recipe for that brew I could sell it for a thousand dollars a jolt at Forty-second and Broadway.

“One jigger of it, and you forget there is a trouble in the world; three of them, and you forget there is a world. No excuse for it, Doc; and I don’t care what you say or what Lakla may say – it wasn’t my fault, and I don’t hold it up against myself for a damn.”

“I must admit that I’m a bit uneasy about her threats,” I said, ignoring all this. He stopped abruptly.

“What’re you afraid of?”

“Mostly,” I answered dryly, “I have no desire to dance with the Shining One!”

“Listen to me, Goodwin,” He took up his walk impatiently. “I’ve all the love and admiration for you in the world; but this place has got your nerve. Hereafter one Larry O’Keefe, of Ireland and the little old U. S. A., leads this party. Nix on the tremolo stop, nix on the superstition! I’m the works. Get me?”

“Yes, I get you!” I exclaimed testily enough. “But to use your own phrase, kindly can the repeated references to superstition.”

“Why should I?” He was almost wrathful. “You scientific people build up whole philosophies on the basis of things you never saw, and you scoff at people who believe in other things that you think they never saw and that don’t come under what you label scientific. You talk about paradoxes – why, your scientist, who thinks he is the most skeptical, the most materialistic aggregation of atoms ever gathered at the exact mathematical center of Missouri, has more blind faith than a dervish, and more credulity, more superstition, than a cross-eyed smoke beating it past a country graveyard in the dark of the moon!”

“Larry!” I cried, dazed.

“Olaf’s no better,” he said. “But I can make allowances for him. He’s a sailor. No, sir. What this expedition needs is a man without superstition. And remember this. The leprechaun promised that I’d have full warning before anything happened. And if we do have to go out, we’ll see that banshee bunch clean up before we do, and pass in a blaze of glory. And don’t forget it. Hereafter – I’m – in – charge!”

By this time we were before our pavilion; and neither of us in a very amiable mood I’m afraid. Rador was awaiting us with a score of his men.

“Let none pass in here without authority – and let none pass out unless I accompany them,” he ordered brusquely. “Summon one of the swiftest of the coria and have it wait in readiness,” he added, as though by afterthought.

But when we had entered and the screens were drawn together his manner changed; all eagerness he questioned us. Briefly we told him of the happenings at the feast, of Lakla’s dramatic interruption, and of what had followed.

“Three tal,” he said musingly; “three tal the Silent Ones have allowed – and Yolara agreed.” He sank back, silent and thoughtful. [06]

“Ja!” It was Olaf. “Ja! I told you the Shining Devil’s mistress was all evil. Ja! Now I begin again that tale I started when he came” – he glanced toward the preoccupied Rador. “And tell him not what I say should he ask. For I trust none here in Trolldom, save the Jomfrau – the White Virgin!

“After the oldster was adsprede” – Olaf once more used that expressive Norwegian word for the dissolving of Songar – “I knew that it was a time for cunning. I said to myself, ‘If they think I have no ears to hear, they will speak; and it may be I will find a way to save my Helma and Dr. Goodwin’s friends, too.’ Ja, and they did speak.

“The red Trolde asked the Russian how came it he was a worshipper of Thanaroa.” I could not resist a swift glance of triumph toward O’Keefe. “And the Russian,” rumbled Olaf, “said that all his people worshipped Thanaroa and had fought against the other nations that denied him.

“And then we had come to Lugur’s palace. They put me in rooms, and there came to me men who rubbed and oiled me and loosened my muscles. The next day I wrestled with a great dwarf they called Valdor. He was a mighty man, and long we struggled, and at last I broke his back. And Lugur was pleased, so that I sat with him at feast and with the Russian, too. And again, not knowing that I understood them, they talked.

“The Russian had gone fast and far. They talked of Lugur as emperor of all Europe, and Marakinoff under him. They spoke of the green light that shook life from the oldster; and Lugur said that the secret of it had been the Ancient Ones’ and that the Council had not too much of it. But the Russian said that among his race were many wise men who could make more once they had studied it.

“And the next day I wrestled with a great dwarf named Tahola, mightier far than Valdor. Him I threw after a long, long time, and his back also I broke. Again Lugur was pleased. And again we sat at table, he and the Russian and I. This time they spoke of something these Trolde have which opens up a Svaelc – abysses into which all in its range drops up into the sky!”

“What!” I exclaimed.

“I know about them,” said Larry. “Wait!”

“Lugur had drunk much,” went on Olaf. “He was boastful. The Russian pressed him to show this thing. After a while the red one went out and came back with a little golden box. He and the Russian went into the garden. I followed them. There was a lille Hoj – a mound – of stones in that garden on which grew flowers and trees.

“Lugur pressed upon the box, and a spark no bigger than a sand grain leaped out and fell beside the stones. Lugur pressed again, and a blue light shot from the box and lighted on the spark. The spark that had been no bigger than a grain of sand grew and grew as the blue struck it. And then there was a sighing, a wind blew – and the stones and the flowers and the trees were not. They were forsvinde – vanished!

“Then Lugur, who had been laughing, grew quickly sober; for he thrust the Russian back – far back. And soon down into the garden came tumbling the stones and the trees, but broken and shattered, and falling as though from a great height. And Lugur said that of this something they had much, for its making was a secret handed down by their own forefathers and not by the Ancient Ones.

“They feared to use it, he said, for a spark thrice as large as that he had used would have sent all that garden falling upward and might have opened a way to the outside before – he said just this – ‘before we are ready to go out into it!’

“The Russian questioned much, but Lugur sent for more drink and grew merrier and threatened him, and the Russian was silent through fear. Thereafter I listened when I could, and little more I learned, but that little enough. Ja! Lugur is hot for conquest; so Yolara and so the Council. They tire of it here and the Silent Ones make their minds not too easy, no, even though they jeer at them! And this they plan – to rule our world with their Shining Devil.”

The Norseman was silent for a moment; then voice deep, trembling—

“Trolldom is awake; Helvede crouches at Earth Gate whining to be loosed into a world already devil ridden! And we are but three!”

I felt the blood drive out of my heart. But Larry’s was the fighting face of the O’Keefes of a thousand years. Rador glanced at him, arose, stepped through the curtains; returned swiftly with the Irishman’s uniform.

“Put it on,” he said, brusquely; again fell back into his silence and whatever O’Keefe had been about to say was submerged in his wild and joyful whoop. He ripped from him glittering tunic and leg swathings.

“Richard is himself again!” he shouted; and each garment as he donned it, fanned his old devil-may-care confidence to a higher flame. The last scrap of it on, he drew himself up before us.

“Bow down, ye divils!” he cried. “Bang your heads on the floor and do homage to Larry the First, Emperor of Great Britain, Autocrat of all Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales, and adjacent waters and islands! Kneel, ye scuts, kneel.”

“Larry,” I cried, “are you going crazy?”

“Not a bit of it,” he said. “I’m that and more if Comrade Marakinoff is on the level. Whoop! Bring forth the royal jewels an’ put a whole new bunch of golden strings in Tara’s harp an’ down with the Sassenach forever! Whoop!”

He did a wild jig.

“Lord how good the old togs feel,” he grinned. “The touch of ’em has gone to my head. But it’s straight stuff I’m telling you about my empire.”

He sobered.

“Not that it’s not serious enough at that. A lot that Olaf’s told us I’ve surmised from hints dropped by Yolara. But I got the full key to it from the Red himself when he stopped me just before – before” – he reddened – “well, just before I acquired that brand-new brand of souse.

“Maybe he had a hint – maybe he just surmised that I knew a lot more than I did. And he thought Yolara and I were going to be loving little turtle doves. Also he figured that Yolara had a lot more influence with the Unholy Fireworks than Lugur. Also that being a woman she could be more easily handled. All this being so, what was the logical thing for himself to do? Sure, you get me, Steve! Throw down Lugur and make an alliance with me! So he calmly offered to ditch the red dwarf if I would deliver Yolara. My reward from Russia was to be said emperorship! Can you beat it? Good Lord!”

He went off into a perfect storm of laughter. But not to me in the light of what Russia has done and has proved herself capable, did this thing seem at all absurd; rather in it I sensed the dawn of catastrophe colossal.

“And yet,” he was quiet enough now, “I’m a bit scared. They’ve got the Keth ray and those gravity-destroying bombs—”

“Gravity-destroying bombs!” I gasped.

“Sure,” he said. “The little fairy that sent the trees and stones kiting up from Lugur’s garden. Marakinoff licked his lips over them. They cut off gravity, just about as the shadow screens cut off light – and consequently whatever’s in their range goes shooting just naturally up to the moon—

“They get my goat, why deny it?” went on Larry. “With them and the Keth and gentle invisible soldiers walking around assassinating at will – well, the worst Bolsheviki are only puling babes, eh, Doc?”

“I don’t mind the Shining One,” said O’Keefe, “one splash of a downtown New York high-pressure fire hose would do for it! But the others – are the goods! Believe me!”

But for once O’Keefe’s confidence found no echo within me. Not lightly, as he, did I hold that dread mystery, the Dweller – and a vision passed before me, a vision of an Apocalypse undreamed by the Evangelist.

A vision of the Shining One swirling into our world, a monstrous, glorious flaming pillar of incarnate, eternal Evil – of peoples passing through its radiant embrace into that hideous, unearthly life-in-death which I had seen enfold the sacrifices – of armies trembling into dancing atoms of diamond dust beneath the green ray’s rhythmic death – of cities rushing out into space upon the wings of that other demoniac force which Olaf had watched at work – of a haunted world through which the assassins of the Dweller’s court stole invisible, carrying with them every passion of hell – of the rallying to the Thing of every sinister soul and of the weak and the unbalanced, mystics and carnivores of humanity alike; for well I knew that, once loosed, not any nation could hold this devil-god for long and that swiftly its blight would spread!

And then a world that was all colossal reek of cruelty and terror; a welter of lusts, of hatreds and of torment; a chaos of horror in which the Dweller waxing ever stronger, the ghastly hordes of those it had consumed growing ever greater, wreaked its inhuman will!

At the last a ruined planet, a cosmic plague, spinning through the shuddering heavens; its verdant plains, its murmuring forests, its meadows and its mountains manned only by a countless crew of soulless, mindless dead-alive, their shells illumined with the Dweller’s infernal glory – and flaming over this vampirized earth like a flare from some hell far, infinitely far, beyond the reach of man’s farthest flung imagining – the Dweller!

Rador jumped to his feet; walked to the whispering globe. He bent over its base; did something with its mechanism; beckoned to us. The globe swam rapidly, faster than ever I had seen it before. A low humming arose, changed into a murmur, and then from it I heard Lugur’s voice clearly.

“It is to be war then?”

There was a chorus of assent – from the Council, I thought.

“I will take the tall one named – Larree.” It was the priestess’s voice. “After the three tal, you may have him, Lugur, to do with as you will.”

“No!” it was Lugur’s voice again, but with a rasp of anger. “All must die.”

“He shall die,” again Yolara. “But I would that first he see Lakla pass – and that she know what is to happen to him.”

“No!” I started – for this was Marakinoff. “Now is no time, Yolara, for one’s own desires. This is my counsel. At the end of the three tal Lakla will come for our answer. Your men will be in ambush and they will slay her and her escort quickly with the Keth. But not till that is done must the three be slain – and then quickly. With Lakla dead we shall go forth to the Silent Ones – and I promise you that I will find the way to destroy them!”

“It is well!” It was Lugur.

“It is well, Yolara.” It was a woman’s voice, and I knew it for that old one of ravaged beauty. “Cast from your mind whatever is in it for this stranger – either of love or hatred. In this the Council is with Lugur and the man of wisdom.”

There was a silence. Then came the priestess’s voice, sullen but – beaten.

“It is well!”

“Let the three be taken now by Rador to the temple and given to the High Priest Sator” – thus Lugur – “until what we have planned comes to pass.”

Rador gripped the base of the globe; abruptly it ceased its spinning. He turned to us as though to speak and even as he did so its bell note sounded peremptorily and on it the color films began to creep at their accustomed pace.

“I hear,” the green dwarf whispered. “They shall be taken there at once.” The globe grew silent. He stepped toward us.

“You have heard,” he turned to us.

“Not on your life, Rador,” said Larry. “Nothing doing!” And then in the Murian’s own tongue. “We follow Lakla, Rador. And you lead the way.” He thrust the pistol close to the green dwarf’s side.

Rador did not move.

“Of what use, Larree?” he said, quietly. “Me you can slay – but in the end you will be taken. Life is not held so dear in Muria that my men out there or those others who can come quickly will let you by – even though you slay many. And in the end they will overpower you.”

There was a trace of irresolution in O’Keefe’s face.

“And,” added Rador, “if I let you go I dance with the Shining One – or worse!”

O’Keefe’s pistol hand dropped.

“You’re a good sport, Rador, and far be it from me to get you in bad,” he said. “Take us to the temple – when we get there – well, your responsibility ends, doesn’t it?”

The green dwarf nodded; on his face a curious expression – was it relief? Or was it emotion higher than this?

He turned curtly.

“Follow,” he said. We passed out of that gay little pavilion that had come to be home to us even in this alien place. The guards stood at attention.

“You, Sattoya, stand by the globe,” he ordered one of them. “Should the Afyo Maie ask, say that I am on my way with the strangers even as she has commanded.”

We passed through the lines to the corial standing like a great shell at the end of the runway leading into the green road.

“Wait you here,” he said curtly to the driver. The green dwarf ascended to his seat, sought the lever and we swept on – on and out upon the glistening obsidian.

Then Rador faced us and laughed.

“Larree,” he cried, “I love you for that spirit of yours! And did you think that Rador would carry to the temple prison a man who would take the chances of torment upon his own shoulders to save him? Or you, Goodwin, who saved him from the rotting death? For what did I take the corial or lift the veil of silence that I might hear what threatened you—”

He swept the corial to the left, away from the temple approach.

“I am done with Lugur and with Yolara and the Shining One!” cried Rador. “My hand is for you three and for Lakla and those to whom she is handmaiden!”

The shell leaped forward; seemed to fly.

— XXII —

THE CASTING OF THE SHADOW

Now we were racing down toward that last span whose ancientness had set it apart from all the other soaring arches. The shell’s speed slackened; we approached warily.

“We pass there?” asked O’Keefe.

The green dwarf nodded, pointing to the right where the bridge ended in a broad platform held high upon two gigantic piers, between which ran a spur from the glistening road. Platform and bridge were swarming with men-at-arms; they crowded the parapets, looking down upon us curiously but with no evidence of hostility. Rador drew a deep breath of relief.

“We don’t have to break our way through, then?” There was disappointment in the Irishman’s voice.

“No use, Larree!” Smiling, Rador stopped the corial just beneath the arch and beside one of the piers. “Now, listen well. They have had no warning, hence does Yolara still think us on the way to the temple. This is the gateway of the Portal – and the gateway is closed by the Shadow. Once I commanded here and I know its laws. This must I do – by craft persuade Serku, the keeper of the gateway, to lift the Shadow; or raise it myself. And that will be hard and it may well be that in the struggle life will be stripped of us all. Yet is it better to die fighting than to dance with the Shining One!”

He swept the shell around the pier. Opened a wide plaza paved with the volcanic glass, but black as that down which we had sped from the chamber of the Moon Pool. It shone like a mirrored lakelet of jet; on each side of it arose what at first glance seemed towering bulwarks of the same ebon obsidian; at second, revealed themselves as structures hewn and set in place by men; polished faces pierced by dozens of high, narrow windows.

Down each facade a stairway fell, broken by small landings on which a door opened; they dropped to a broad ledge of grayish stone edging the lip of this midnight pool and upon it also fell two wide flights from either side of the bridge platform. Along all four stairways the guards were ranged; and here and there against the ledge stood the shells – in a curiously comforting resemblance to parked motors in our own world.

The sombre walls bulked high; curved and ended in two obelisked pillars from which, like a tremendous curtain, stretched a barrier of that tenebrous gloom which, though weightless as shadow itself, I now knew to be as impenetrable as the veil between life and death. In this murk, unlike all others I had seen, I sensed movement, a quivering, a tremor constant and rhythmic; not to be seen, yet caught by some subtle sense; as though through it beat a swift pulse of – black light.

The green dwarf turned the corial slowly to the edge at the right; crept cautiously on toward where, not more than a hundred feet from the barrier, a low, wide entrance opened in the fort. Guarding its threshold stood two guards, armed with broadswords, double-handed, terminating in a wide lunette mouthed with murderous fangs. These they raised in salute and through the portal strode a dwarf huge as Rador, dressed as he and carrying only the poniard that was the badge of office of Muria’s captainry.

The green dwarf swept the shell expertly against the ledge; leaped out.

“Greeting, Serku!” he answered. “I was but looking for the coria of Lakla.”

“Lakla!” exclaimed Serku. “Why, the handmaiden passed with her Akka nigh a va ago!”

“Passed!” The astonishment of the green dwarf was so real that half was I myself deceived. “You let her pass?”

“Certainly I let her pass—” But under the green dwarf’s stern gaze the truculence of the guardian faded. “Why should I not?” he asked, apprehensively.

“Because Yolara commanded otherwise,” answered Rador, coldly.

“There came no command to me.” Little beads of sweat stood out on Serku’s forehead.

“Serku,” interrupted the green dwarf swiftly, “truly is my heart wrung for you. This is a matter of Yolara and of Lugur and the Council; yes, even of the Shining One! And the message was sent – and the fate, mayhap, of all Muria rested upon your obedience and the return of Lakla with these strangers to the Council. Now truly is my heart wrung, for there are few I would less like to see dance with the Shining One than you, Serku,” he ended, softly.

Livid now was the gateway’s guardian, his great frame shaking.

“Come with me and speak to Yolara,” he pleaded. “There came no message – tell her—”

“Wait, Serku!” There was a thrill as of inspiration in Rador’s voice. “This corial is of the swiftest – Lakla’s are of the slowest. With Lakla scarce a va ahead we can reach her before she enters the Portal. Lift you the Shadow – we will bring her back, and this will I do for you, Serku.”

Doubt tempered Serku’s panic.

“Why not go alone, Rador, leaving the strangers here with me?” he asked – and I thought not unreasonably.

“Nay, then.” The green dwarf was brusque. “Lakla will not return unless I carry to her these men as evidence of our good faith. Come – we will speak to Yolara and she shall judge you—” He started away – but Serku caught his arm.

“No, Rador, no!” he whispered, again panic-stricken. “Go you – as you will. But bring her back! Speed, Rador!” He sprang toward the entrance. “I lift the Shadow—”

Into the green dwarf’s poise crept a curious, almost a listening, alertness. He leaped to Serku’s side.

“I go with you,” I heard. “Some little I can tell you—” They were gone.

“Fine work!” muttered Larry. “Nominated for a citizen of Ireland when we get out of this, one Rador of—”

The Shadow trembled – shuddered into nothingness; the obelisked outposts that had held it framed a ribbon of roadway, high banked with verdure, vanishing in green distances.

And then from the portal sped a shriek, a death cry! It cut through the silence of the ebon pit like a whimpering arrow. Before it had died, down the stairways came pouring the guards. Those at the threshold raised their swords and peered within. Abruptly Rador was between them. One dropped his hilt and gripped him – the green dwarf’s poniard flashed and was buried in his throat. Down upon Rador’s head swept the second blade. A flame leaped from O’Keefe’s hand and the sword seemed to fling itself from its wielder’s grasp – another flash and the soldier crumpled. Rador threw himself into the shell, darted to the high seat – and straight between the pillars of the Shadow we flew!

There came a crackling, a darkness of vast wings flinging down upon us. The corial’s flight was checked as by a giant’s hand. The shell swerved sickeningly; there was an oddly metallic splintering; it quivered; shot ahead. Dizzily I picked myself up and looked behind.

The Shadow had fallen – but too late, a bare instant too late. And shrinking as we fled from it, still it seemed to strain like some fettered Afrit from Eblis, throbbing with wrath, seeking with every malign power it possessed to break its bonds and pursue. Not until long after were we to know that it had been the dying hand of Serku, groping out of oblivion, that had cast it after us as a fowler upon an escaping bird.

“Snappy work, Rador!” It was Larry speaking. “But they cut the end off your bus all right!”

A full quarter of the hindward whorl was gone, sliced off cleanly. Rador noted it with anxious eyes.

“That is bad,” he said, “but not too bad perhaps. All depends upon how closely Lugur and his men can follow us.”

He raised a hand to O’Keefe in salute.

“But to you, Larree, I owe my life – not even the Keth could have been as swift to save me as that death flame of yours – friend!”

The Irishman waved an airy hand.

“Serku” – the green dwarf drew from his girdle the bloodstained poniard – “Serku I was forced to slay. Even as he raised the Shadow the globe gave the alarm. Lugur follows with twice ten times ten of his best—” He hesitated. “Though we have escaped the Shadow it has taken toll of our swiftness. May we reach the Portal before it closes upon Lakla – but if we do not—” He paused again. “Well – I know a way – but it is not one I am gay to follow – no!”

He snapped open the aperture that held the ball flaming within the dark crystal; peered at it anxiously. I crept to the torn end of the corial. The edges were crumbling, disintegrated. They powdered in my fingers like dust. Mystified still, I crept back where Larry, sheer happiness pouring from him, was whistling softly and polishing up his automatic. His gaze fell upon Olaf’s grim, sad face and softened.

“Buck up, Olaf!” he said. “We’ve got a good fighting chance. Once we link up with Lakla and her crowd I’m betting that we get your wife – never doubt it! The baby—” he hesitated awkwardly. The Norseman’s eyes filled; he stretched a hand to the O’Keefe.

“The Yndling – she is of the de Dode,” he half whispered, “of the blessed dead. For her I have no fear and for her vengeance will be given me. Ja! But my Helma – she is of the dead-alive – like those we saw whirling like leaves in the light of the Shining Devil – and I would that she too were of de Dode – and at rest. I do not know how to fight the Shining Devil – no!”

His bitter despair welled up in his voice.

“Olaf,” Larry’s voice was gentle. “We’ll come out on top – I know it. Remember one thing. All this stuff that seems so strange and – and, well, sort of supernatural, is just a lot of tricks we’re not hep to as yet. Why, Olaf, suppose you took a Fijian when the war was on and set him suddenly down in London with autos rushing past, sirens blowing, Archies popping, a dozen enemy planes dropping bombs, and the searchlights shooting all over the sky – wouldn’t he think he was among thirty-third degree devils in some exclusive circle of hell? Sure he would! And yet everything he saw would be natural – just as natural as all this is, once we get the answer to it. Not that we’re Fijians, of course, but the principle is the same.”

The Norseman considered this; nodded gravely.

“Ja!” he answered at last. “And at least we can fight. That is why I have turned to Thor of the battles, Ja! And one have I hope in for mine Helma – the white maiden. Since I have turned to the old gods it has been made clear to me that I shall slay Lugur and that the Heks, the evil witch Yolara, shall also die. But I would talk with the white maiden.”

“All right,” said Larry, “but just don’t be afraid of what you don’t understand. There’s another thing” – he hesitated, nervously – “there’s another thing that may startle you a bit when we meet up with Lakla – her – er – frogs!”

“Like the frog-woman we saw on the wall?” asked Olaf.

“Yes,” went on Larry, rapidly. “It’s this way – I figure that the frogs grow rather large where she lives, and they’re a bit different too. Well, Lakla’s got a lot of ’em trained. Carry spears and clubs and all that junk – just like trained seals or monkeys or so on in the circus. Probably a custom of the place. Nothing queer about that, Olaf. Why people have all kinds of pets – armadillos and snakes and rabbits, kangaroos and elephants and tigers.”

Remembering how the frog-woman had stuck in Larry’s mind from the outset, I wondered whether all this was not more to convince himself than Olaf.

“Why, I remember a nice girl in Paris who had four pet pythons—” he went on.

But I listened no more, for now I was sure of my surmise. The road had begun to thrust itself through high-flung, sharply pinnacled masses and rounded outcroppings of rock on which clung patches of the amber moss.

The trees had utterly vanished, and studding the moss-carpeted plains were only clumps of a willowy shrub from which hung, like grapes, clusters of white waxen blooms. The light too had changed; gone were the dancing, sparkling atoms and the silver had faded to a soft, almost ashen grayness. Ahead of us marched a rampart of coppery cliffs rising, like all these mountainous walls we had seen, into the immensities of haze. Something long drifting in my subconsciousness turned to startled realization. The speed of the shell was slackening! The aperture containing the ionizing mechanism was still open; I glanced within, The whirling ball of fire was not dimmed, but its coruscations, instead of pouring down through the cylinder, swirled and eddied and shot back as though trying to re-enter their source. Rador nodded grimly.

“The Shadow takes its toll,” he said.

We topped a rise – Larry gripped my arm.

“Look!” he cried, and pointed. Far, far behind us, so far that the road was but a glistening thread, a score of shining points came speeding.

“Lugur and his men,” said Rador.

“Can’t you step on her?” asked Larry.

“Step on her?” repeated the green dwarf, puzzled.

“Give her more speed; push her,” explained O’Keefe.

Rador looked about him. The coppery ramparts were close, not more than three or four miles distant; in front of us the plain lifted in a long rolling swell, and up this the corial essayed to go – with a terrifying lessening of speed. Faintly behind us came shootings, and we knew that Lugur drew close. Nor anywhere was there sign of Lakla nor her frogmen.

Now we were half-way to the crest; the shell barely crawled and from beneath it came a faint hissing; it quivered, and I knew that its base was no longer held above the glassy surface but rested on it.

“One last chance!” exclaimed Rador. He pressed upon the control lever and wrenched it from its socket. Instantly the sparkling ball expanded, whirling with prodigious rapidity and sending a cascade of coruscations into the cylinder. The shell rose; leaped through the air; the dark crystal split into fragments; the fiery ball dulled; died – but upon the impetus of that last thrust we reached the crest. Poised there for a moment, I caught a glimpse of the road dropping down the side of an enormous moss-covered, bowl-shaped valley whose sharply curved sides ended abruptly at the base of the towering barrier.

Then down the steep, powerless to guide or to check the shell, we plunged in a meteor rush straight for the annihilating adamantine breasts of the cliffs!

Now the quick thinking of Larry’s air training came to our aid. As the rampart reared close he threw himself upon Rador; hurled him and himself against the side of the flying whorl. Under the shock the finely balanced machine swerved from its course. It struck the soft, low bank of the road, shot high in air, bounded on through the thick carpeting, whirled like a dervish and fell upon its side. Shot from it, we rolled for yards, but the moss saved broken bones or serious bruise.

“Quick!” cried the green dwarf. He seized an arm, dragged me to my feet, began running to the cliff base not a hundred feet away. Beside us raced O’Keefe and Olaf. At our left was the black road. It stopped abruptly – was cut off by a slab of polished crimson stone a hundred feet high, and as wide, set within the coppery face of the barrier. On each side of it stood pillars, cut from the living rock and immense, almost, as those which held the rainbow veil of the Dweller. Across its face weaved unnameable carvings – but I had no time for more than a glance. The green dwarf gripped my arm again.

“Quick!” he cried again. “The handmaiden has passed!”

At the right of the Portal ran a low wall of shattered rock. Over this we raced like rabbits. Hidden behind it was a narrow path. Crouching, Rador in the lead, we sped along it; three hundred, four hundred yards we raced – and the path ended in a cul-de-sac! To our ears was borne a louder shouting.

The first of the pursuing shells had swept over the lip of the great bowl, poised for a moment as we had and then began a cautious descent. Within it, scanning the slopes, I saw Lugur.

“A little closer and I’ll get him!” whispered Larry viciously. He raised his pistol.

His hand was caught in a mighty grip; Rador, eyes blazing, stood beside him.

“No!” rasped the green dwarf. He heaved a shoulder against one of the boulders that formed the pocket. It rocked aside, revealing a slit.

“In!” ordered he, straining against the weight of the stone. O’Keefe slipped through. Olaf at his back, I following. With a lightning leap the dwarf was beside me, the huge rock missing him by a hair breadth as it swung into place!

We were in Cimmerian darkness. I felt for my pocket-flash and recalled with distress that I had left it behind with my medicine kit when we fled from the gardens. But Rador seemed to need no light.

“Grip hands!” he ordered. We crept, single file, holding to each other like children, through the black. At last the green dwarf paused.

“Await me here,” he whispered. “Do not move. And for your lives – be silent!”

And he was gone.

— XXIII —

DRAGON WORM
AND MOSS DEATH

For a small eternity – to me at least – we waited. Then as silent as ever the green dwarf returned. “It is well,” he said, some of the strain gone from his voice. “Grip hands again, and follow.”

“Wait a bit, Rador,” this was Larry. “Does Lugur know this side entrance? If he does, why not let Olaf and me go back to the opening and pick them off as they come in? We could hold the lot – and in the meantime you and Goodwin could go after Lakla for help.”

“Lugur knows the secret of the Portal – if he dare use it,” answered the captain, with a curious indirection. “And now that they have challenged the Silent Ones I think he will dare. Also, he will find our tracks – and it may be that he knows this hidden way.”

“Well, for God’s sake!” O’Keefe’s appalled bewilderment was almost ludicrous. “If he knows all that, and you knew all that, why didn’t you let me click him when I had the chance?”

“Larree,” the green dwarf was oddly humble. “It seemed good to me, too – at first. And then I heard a command, heard it clearly, to stop you – that Lugur die not now, lest a greater vengeance fail!”

“Command? From whom?” The Irishman’s voice distilled out of the blackness the very essence of bewilderment.

“I thought,” Rador was whispering – “I thought it came from the Silent Ones!”

“Superstition!” groaned O’Keefe in utter exasperation. “Always superstition! What can you do against it!

“Never mind, Rador.” His sense of humor came to his aid. “It’s too late now, anyway. Where do we go from here, old dear?” he laughed.

“We tread the path of one I am not fain to meet,” answered Rador. “But if meet we must, point the death tubes at the pale shield he bears upon his throat and send the flame into the flower of cold fire that is its center – nor look into his eyes!”

Again Larry gasped, and I with him.

“It’s getting too deep for me, Doc,” he muttered dejectedly. “Can you make head or tail of it?”

“No,” I answered, shortly enough, “but Rador fears something and that’s his description of it.”

“Sure,” he replied, “only it’s a code I don’t understand.” I could feel his grin. “All right for the flower of cold fire, Rador, and I won’t look into his eyes,” he went on cheerfully. “But hadn’t we better be moving?”

“Come!” said the soldier; again hand in hand we went blindly on.

O’Keefe was muttering to himself.

“Flower of cold fire! Don’t look into his eyes! Some joint! Damned superstition.” Then he chuckled and caroled, softly:

“Oh, mama, pin a cold rose on me;

Two young frog-men are in love with me;

Shut my eyes so I can’t see.”

“Sh!” Rador was warning; he began whispering. “For half a va we go along a way of death. From its peril we pass into another against whose dangers I can guard you. But in part this is in view of the roadway and it may be that Lugur will see us. If so, we must fight as best we can. If we pass these two roads safely, then is the way to the Crimson Sea clear, nor need we fear Lugur nor any. And there is another thing – that Lugur does not know – when he opens the Portal the Silent Ones will hear and Lakla and the Akka will be swift to greet its opener.”

“Rador,” I asked, “how know you all this?”

“The handmaiden is my own sister’s child,” he answered quietly.

O’Keefe drew a long breath.

“Uncle,” he remarked casually in English, “meet the man who’s going to be your nephew!”

And thereafter he never addressed the green dwarf except by the avuncular title, which Rador, humorously enough, apparently conceived to be one of respectful endearment.

For me a light broke. Plain now was the reason for his foreknowledge of Lakla’s appearance at the feast where Larry had so narrowly escaped Yolara’s spells; plain the determining factor that had cast his lot with ours, and my confidence, despite his discourse of mysterious perils, experienced a remarkable quickening.

Speculation as to the marked differences in pigmentation and appearance of niece and uncle was dissipated by my consciousness that we were now moving in a dim half-light. We were in a fairly wide tunnel. Not far ahead the gleam filtered, pale yellow like sunlight sifting through the leaves of autumn poplars. And as we drove closer to its source I saw that it did indeed pass through a leafy screen hanging over the passage end. This Rador drew aside cautiously, beckoned us and we stepped through.

It appeared to be a tunnel cut through soft green mold. Its base was a flat strip of pathway a yard wide from which the walls curved out in perfect cylindrical form, smoothed and evened with utmost nicety. Thirty feet wide they were at their widest, then drew toward each other with no break in their symmetry; they did not close. Above was, roughly, a ten-foot rift, ragged edged, through which poured light like that in the heart of pale amber, a buttercup light shot through with curiously evanescent bronze shadows.

“Quick!” commanded Rador, uneasily, and set off at a sharp pace.

Now, my eyes accustomed to the strange light, I saw that the tunnel’s walls were of moss. In them I could trace fringe leaf and curly leaf, pressings of enormous bladder caps (Physcomitrium), immense splashes of what seemed to be the scarlet-crested Cladonia, traceries of huge moss veils, crushings of teeth (peristome) gigantic; spore cases brown and white, saffron and ivory, hot vermilions and cerulean blues, pressed into an astounding mosaic by some titanic force.

“Hurry!” It was Rador calling. I had lagged behind.

He quickened the pace to a half-run; we were climbing; panting. The amber light grew stronger; the rift above us wider. The tunnel curved; on the left a narrow cleft appeared. The green dwarf leaped toward it, thrust us within, pushed us ahead of him up a steep rocky fissure – well-nigh, indeed, a chimney. Up and up this we scrambled until my lungs were bursting and I thought I could climb no more. The crevice ended; we crawled out and sank, even Rador, upon a little leaf-carpeted clearing circled by lacy tree ferns.

Gasping, legs aching, we lay prone, relaxed, drawing back strength and breath. Rador was first to rise. Thrice he bent low as in homage, then—

“Give thanks to the Silent Ones – for their power has been over us!” he exclaimed.

Dimly I wondered what he meant. Something about the fern leaf at which I had been staring aroused me. I leaped to my feet and ran to its base. This was no fern, no! It was fern moss! The largest of its species I had ever found in tropic jungles had not been more than two inches high, and this was – twenty feet! The scientific fire I had experienced in the tunnel returned uncontrollable. I parted the fronds, gazed out—

My outlook commanded a vista of miles – and that vista! A Fata Morgana of plantdom! A land of flowered sorcery!

Forests of tree-high mosses spangled over with blooms of every conceivable shape and color; cataracts and clusters, avalanches and nets of blossoms in pastels, in dulled metallics, in gorgeous flamboyant hues; some of them phosphorescent and shining like living jewels; some sparkling as though with dust of opals, of sapphires, of rubies and topazes and emeralds; thickets of convolvuli like the trumpets of the seven archangels of Mara, king of illusion, which are shaped from the bows of splendors arching his highest heaven!

And moss veils like banners of a marching host of Titans; pennons and bannerets of the sunset; gonfalons of the Jinn; webs of faery; oriflammes of elfland!

Springing up through that polychromatic flood myriads of pedicles – slender and straight as spears, or soaring in spirals, or curving with undulations gracile as the white serpents of Tanit in ancient Carthaginian groves – and all surmounted by a fantasy of spore cases in shapes of minaret and turret, domes and spires and cones, caps of Phrygia and bishops’ mitres, shapes grotesque and unnameable – shapes delicate and lovely!

They hung high poised, nodding and swaying – like goblins hovering over Titania’s court; cacophony of Cathay accenting the Flower Maiden music of “Parsifal”; bizarrerie of the angled, fantastic beings that people the Javan pantheon watching a bacchanal of houris in Mohammed’s paradise!

Down upon it all poured the amber light; dimmed in the distances by huge, drifting darkenings lurid as the flying mantles of the hurricane.

And through the light, like showers of jewels, myriads of birds, darting, dipping, soaring, and still other myriads of gigantic, shimmering butterflies.

A sound came to us, reaching out like the first faint susurrus of the incoming tide; sighing, sighing, growing stronger – now its mournful whispering quivered all about us, shook us – then passing like a Presence, died away in far distances.

“The Portal!” said Rador. “Lugur has entered!”

He, too, parted the fronds and peered back along our path. Peering with him we saw the barrier through which we had come stretching verdure-covered walls for miles three or more away. Like a mole burrow in a garden stretched the trail of the tunnel; here and there we could look down within the rift at its top; far off in it I thought I saw the glint of spears.

“They come!” whispered Rador. “Quick! We must not meet them here!”

And then—

“Holy St. Brigid!” gasped Larry.

From the rift in the tunnel’s continuation, nigh a mile beyond the cleft through which we had fled, lifted a crown of horns – of tentacles – erect, alert, of mottled gold and crimson; lifted higher – and from a monstrous scarlet head beneath them blazed two enormous, obloid eyes, their depths wells of purplish phosphorescence; higher still – noseless, earless, chinless; a livid, worm mouth from which a slender scarlet tongue leaped like playing flames! Slowly it rose – its mighty neck cuirassed with gold and scarlet scales from whose polished surfaces the amber light glinted like flakes of fire; and under this neck shimmered something like a palely luminous silvery shield, guarding it. The head of horror mounted – and in the shield’s center, full ten feet across, glowing, flickering, shining out – coldly, was a rose of white flame, a “flower of cold fire” even as Rador had said.

Now swiftly the Thing upreared, standing like a scaled tower a hundred feet above the rift, its eyes scanning that movement I had seen along the course of its lair. There was a hissing; the crown of horns fell, whipped and writhed like the tentacles of an octopus; the towering length dropped back.

“Quick!” gasped Rador and through the fern moss, along the path and down the other side of the steep we raced.

Behind us for an instant there was a rushing as of a torrent; a far-away, faint, agonized screaming – silence!

“No fear now from those who followed,” whispered the green dwarf, pausing.

“Sainted St. Patrick!” O’Keefe gazed ruminatively at his automatic. “An’ he expected me to kill that with this. Well, as Fergus O’Connor said when they sent him out to slaughter a wild bull with a potato knife: ‘Ye’ll niver rayilize how I appreciate the confidence ye show in me!’

“What was it, Doc?” he asked.

“The dragon worm!” Rador said.

“It was Helvede Orm – the hell worm!” groaned Olaf.

“There you go again—” blazed Larry; but the green dwarf was hurrying down the path and swiftly we followed, Larry muttering, Olaf mumbling, behind me.

The green dwarf was signaling us for caution. He pointed through a break in a grove of fifty-foot cedar mosses – we were skirting the glassy road! Scanning it we found no trace of Lugur and wondered whether he too had seen the worm and had fled. Quickly we passed on; drew away from the coria path. The mosses began to thin; less and less they grew, giving way to low clumps that barely offered us shelter. Unexpectedly another screen of fern moss stretched before us. Slowly Rador made his way through it and stood hesitating.

The scene in front of us was oddly weird and depressing; in some indefinable way – dreadful. Why, I could not tell, but the impression was plain; I shrank from it. Then, self-analyzing, I wondered whether it could be the uncanny resemblance the heaps of curious mossy fungi scattered about had to beast and bird – yes, and to man – that was the cause of it. Our path ran between a few of them. To the left they were thick. They were viridescent, almost metallic hued – verd-antique. Curiously indeed were they like distorted images of dog and deer-like forms, of birds – of dwarfs and here and there the simulacra of the giant frogs! Spore cases, yellowish green, as large as mitres and much resembling them in shape protruded from the heaps. My repulsion grew into a distinct nausea.

Rador turned to us a face whiter far than that with which he had looked upon the dragon worm.

“Now for your lives,” he whispered, “tread softly here as I do – and speak not at all!”

He stepped forward on tiptoe, slowly with utmost caution. We crept after him; passed the heaps beside the path – and as I passed my skin crept and I shrank and saw the others shrink too with that unnameable loathing; nor did the green dwarf pause until he had reached the brow of a small hillock a hundred yards beyond. And he was trembling.

“Now what are we up against?” grumbled O’Keefe.

The green dwarf stretched a hand; stiffened; gazed over to the left of us beyond a lower hillock upon whose broad crest lay a file of the moss shapes. They fringed it, their mitres having a grotesque appearance of watching what lay below. The glistening road lay there – and from it came a shout. A dozen of the coria clustered, filled with Lugur’s men and in one of them Lugur himself, laughing wickedly!

There was a rush of soldiers and up the low hillock raced a score of them toward us.

“Run!” shouted Rador.

“Not much!” grunted Larry – and took swift aim at Lugur. The automatic spat: Olaf’s echoed. Both bullets went wild, for Lugur, still laughing, threw himself into the protection of the body of his shell. But following the shots, from the file of moss heaps on the crest, came a series of muffled explosions. Under the pistol’s concussions the mitred caps had burst and instantly all about the running soldiers grew a cloud of tiny, glistening white spores – like a little cloud of puff-ball dust many times magnified. Through this cloud I glimpsed their faces, stricken with agony.

Some turned to fly, but before they could take a second step stood rigid.

The spore cloud drifted and eddied about them; rained down on their heads and half bare breasts, covered their garments – and swiftly they began to change! Their features grew indistinct – merged! The glistening white spores that covered them turned to a pale yellow, grew greenish, spread and swelled, darkened. The eyes of one of the soldiers glinted for a moment – and then were covered by the swift growth!

Where but a few moments before had been men were only grotesque heaps, swiftly melting, swiftly rounding into the semblance of the mounds that lay behind us – and already beginning to take on their gleam of ancient viridescence!

The Irishman was gripping my arm fiercely; the pain brought me back to my senses.

“Olaf’s right,” he gasped. “This is hell! I’m sick.” And he was, frankly and without restraint. Lugur and his others awakened from their nightmare; piled into the coria, wheeled, raced away.

“On!” said Rador thickly. “Two perils have we passed – the Silent Ones watch over us!”

Soon we were again among the familiar and so unfamiliar moss giants. I knew what I had seen and this time Larry could not call me – superstitious. In the jungles of Borneo I had examined that other swiftly developing fungus which wreaks the vengeance of some of the hill tribes upon those who steal their women; gripping with its microscopic hooks into the flesh; sending quick, tiny rootlets through the skin down into the capillaries, sucking life and thriving and never to be torn away until the living thing it clings to has been sapped dry. Here was but another of the species in which the development’s rate was incredibly accelerated. Some of this I tried to explain to O’Keefe as we sped along, reassuring him.

“But they turned to moss before our eyes!” he said.

Again I explained, patiently. But he seemed to derive no comfort at all from my assurances that the phenomena were entirely natural and, aside from their more terrifying aspect, of peculiar interest to the botanist.

“I know,” was all he would say. “But suppose one of those things had burst while we were going through – God!”

I was wondering how I could with comparative safety study the fungus when Rador stopped; in front of us was again the road ribbon.

“Now is all danger passed,” he said. “The way lies open and Lugur has fled—”

There was a flash from the road. It passed me like a little lariat of light. It struck Larry squarely between the eyes, spread over his face and drew itself within!

“Down!” cried Rador, and hurled me to the ground. My head struck sharply; I felt myself grow faint; Olaf fell beside me; I saw the green dwarf draw down the O’Keefe; he collapsed limply, face still, eyes staring. A shout – and from the roadway poured a host of Lugur’s men; I could hear Lugur bellowing.

There came a rush of little feet; soft, fragrant draperies brushed my face; dimly I watched Lakla bend over the Irishman.

She straightened – her arms swept out and the writhing vine, with its tendriled heads of ruby bloom, five flames of misty incandescence, leaped into the faces of the soldiers now close upon us. It darted at their throats, striking, coiling, and striking again; coiling and uncoiling with incredible rapidity and flying from leverage points of throats, of faces, of breasts like a spring endowed with consciousness, volition and hatred – and those it struck stood rigid as stone with faces masks of inhuman fear and anguish; and those still unstricken fled.

Another rush of feet – and down upon Lugur’s forces poured the frog-men, their booming giant leading, thrusting with their lances, tearing and rending with talons and fangs and spurs.

Against that onslaught the dwarfs could not stand. They raced for the shells; I heard Lugur shouting, menacingly – and then Lakla’s voice, pealing like a golden bugle of wrath.

“Go, Lugur!” she cried. “Go – that you and Yolara and your Shining One may die together! Death for you, Lugur – death for you all! Remember Lugur – death!”

There was a great noise within my head – no matter, Lakla was here – Lakla here – but too late – Lugur had outplayed us; moss death nor dragon worm had frightened him away – he had crept back to trap us – Lakla had come too late – Larry was dead – Larry! But I had heard no banshee wailing – and Larry had said he could not die without that warning – no, Larry was not dead. So ran the turbulent current of my mind.

A horny arm lifted me; two enormous, oddly gentle saucer eyes were staring into mine; my head rolled; I caught a glimpse of the Golden Girl kneeling beside the O’Keefe.

The noise in my head grew thunderous – was carrying me away on its thunder – swept me into soft, blind darkness.

— XXIV —

THE CRIMSON SEA

I was in the heart of a rose pearl, swinging, swinging; no, I was in a rosy dawn cloud, pendulous in space. Consciousness flooded me, in reality I was in the arms of one of the man frogs, carrying me as though I were a babe, and we were passing through some place suffused with glow enough like heart of pearl or dawn cloud to justify my awakening vagaries.

Just ahead walked Lakla in earnest talk with Rador, and content enough was I for a time to watch her. She had thrown off the metallic robes; her thick braids of golden brown hair with their flame glints of bronze were twined in a high coronal meshed in silken net of green; little clustering curls escaped from it, clinging to the nape of the proud white neck, shyly kissing it. From her shoulders fell a loose, sleeveless garment of shimmering green belted with a high golden girdle; skirt folds dropping barely below the knees.

She had cast aside her buskins, too, and the slender, high-arched feet were sandalled. Between the buckled edges of her kirtle I caught gleams of translucent ivory as exquisitely molded, as delectably rounded, as those revealed so naively beneath the hem.

Something was knocking at the doors of my consciousness – some tragic thing. What was it? Larry! Where was Larry? I remembered; raised my head abruptly; saw at my side another frog-man carrying O’Keefe, and behind him, Olaf, step instinct with grief, following like some faithful, wistful dog who has lost a loved master. Upon my movement the monster bearing me halted, looked down inquiringly, uttered a deep, booming note that held the quality of interrogation.

Lakla turned; the clear, golden eyes were sorrowful, the sweet mouth drooping; but her loveliness, her gentleness, that undefinable synthesis of all her tender self that seemed always to circle her with an atmosphere of lucid normality, lulled my panic.

“Drink this,” she commanded, holding a small vial to my lips.

Its contents were aromatic, unfamiliar but astonishingly effective, for as soon as they passed my lips I felt a surge of strength; consciousness was restored.

“Larry!” I cried. “Is he dead?”

Lakla shook her head; her eyes were troubled.

“No,” she said; “but he is like one dead – and yet unlike—”

“Put me down,” I demanded of my bearer.

He tightened his hold; round eyes upon the Golden Girl. She spoke – in sonorous, reverberating monosyllables – and I was set upon my feet; I leaped to the side of the Irishman. He lay limp, with a disquieting, abnormal sequacity, as though every muscle were utterly flaccid; the antithesis of the rigor mortis, thank God, but terrifyingly toward the other end of its arc; a syncope I had never known. The flesh was stone cold; the pulse barely perceptible, long intervalled; the respiration undiscoverable; the pupils of the eyes were enormously dilated; it was as though life had been drawn from every nerve.

“A light flashed from the road. It struck his face and seemed to sink in,” I said.

“I saw,” answered Rador; “but what it was I know not; and I thought I knew all the weapons of our rulers.” He glanced at me curiously. “Some talk there has been that the stranger who came with you, Double Tongue, was making new death tools for Lugur,” he ended.

Marakinoff! The Russian at work already in this storehouse of devastating energies, fashioning the weapons for his plots! The Apocalyptic vision swept back upon me—

“He is not dead.” Lakla’s voice was poignant. “He is not dead; and the Three have wondrous healing. They can restore him if they will – and they will, they will!” For a moment she was silent. “Now their gods help Lugur and Yolara,” she whispered; “for come what may, whether the Silent Ones be strong or weak, if he dies, surely shall I fall upon them and I will slay those two – yea, though I, too perish!”

“Yolara and Lugur shall both die.” Olaf’s eyes were burning. “But Lugur is mine to slay.”

That pity I had seen before in Lakla’s eyes when she looked upon the Norseman banished the white wrath from them. She turned, half hurriedly, as though to escape his gaze.

“Walk with us,” she said to me, “unless you are still weak.”

I shook my head, gave a last look at O’Keefe; there was nothing I could do; I stepped beside her. She thrust a white arm into mine protectingly, the wonderfully molded hand with its long, tapering fingers catching about my wrist; my heart glowed toward her.

“Your medicine is potent, handmaiden,” I answered. “And the touch of your hand would give me strength enough, even had I not drunk it,” I added in Larry’s best manner.

Her eyes danced, trouble flying.

“Now, that was well spoken for such a man of wisdom as Rador tells me you are,” she laughed; and a little pang shot through me. Could not a lover of science present a compliment without it always seeming to be as unusual as plucking a damask rose from a cabinet of fossils?

Mustering my philosophy, I smiled back at her. Again I noted that broad, classic brow, with the little tendrils of shining bronze caressing it, the tilted, delicate, nut-brown brows that gave a curious touch of innocent diablerie to the lovely face – flower-like, pure, high-bred, a touch of roguishness, subtly alluring, sparkling over the maiden Madonnaness that lay ever like a delicate, luminous suggestion beneath it; the long, black, curling lashes – the tender, rounded, bare left breast—

“I have always liked you,” she murmured naively, “since first I saw you in that place where the Shining One goes forth into your world. And I am glad you like my medicine as well as that you carry in the black box that you left behind,” she added swiftly.

“How know you of that, Lakla?” I gasped.

“Oft and oft I came to him there, and to you, while you lay sleeping. How call you him?” She paused.

“Larry!” I said.

“Larry!” she repeated it excellently. “And you?”

“Goodwin,” said Rador.

I bowed quite as though I were being introduced to some charming young lady met in that old life now seemingly aeons removed.

“Yes – Goodwin.” she said. “Oft and oft I came. Sometimes I thought you saw me. And he – did he not dream of me sometime—?” she asked wistfully.

“He did.” I said, “and watched for you.” Then amazement grew vocal. “But how came you?” I asked.

“By a strange road,” she whispered, “to see that all was well with him – and to look into his heart; for I feared Yolara and her beauty. But I saw that she was not in his heart.” A blush burned over her, turning even the little bare breast rosy. “It is a strange road,” she went on hurriedly. “Many times have I followed it and watched the Shining One bear back its prey to the blue pool; seen the woman he seeks” – she made a quick gesture toward Olaf – “and a babe cast from her arms in the last pang of her mother love; seen another woman throw herself into the Shining One’s embrace to save a man she loved; and I could not help!” Her voice grew deep, thrilled. “The friend, it comes to me, who drew you here, Goodwin!”

She was silent, walking as one who sees visions and listens to voices unheard by others, Rador made a warning gesture; I crowded back my questions, glanced about me. We were passing over a smooth strand, hard packed as some beach of long-thrust-back ocean. It was like crushed garnets, each grain stained deep red, faintly sparkling. On each side were distances, the floor stretching away into them bare of vegetation – stretching on and on into infinitudes of rosy mist, even as did the space above.

Flanking and behind us marched the giant batrachians, five-score of them at least, black scale and crimson scale lustrous and gleaming in the rosaceous radiance; saucer eyes shining circles of phosphorescence green, purple, red; spurs clicking as they crouched along with a gait at once grotesque and formidable.

Ahead the mist deepened into a ruddier glow; through it a long, dark line began to appear – the mouth I thought of the caverned space through which we were going; it was just before us; over us – we stood bathed in a flood of rubescence!

A sea stretched before us – a crimson sea, gleaming like that lost lacquer of royal coral and the Flame Dragon’s blood which Fu S’cze set upon the bower he built for his stolen sun maiden – that going toward it she might think it the sun itself rising over the summer seas. Unmoved by wave or ripple, it was placid as some deep woodland pool when night rushes up over the world.

It seemed molten – or as though some hand great enough to rock earth had distilled here from conflagrations of autumn sunsets their flaming essences.

A fish broke through, large as a shark, blunt-headed, flashing bronze, ridged and mailed as though with serrate plates of armor. It leaped high, shaking from it a sparkling spray of rubies; dropped and shot up a geyser of fiery gems.

Across my line of vision, moving stately over the sea, floated a half globe, luminous, diaphanous, its iridescence melting into turquoise, thence to amethyst, to orange, to scarlet shot with rose, to vermilion, a translucent green, thence back into the iridescence; behind it four others, and the least of them ten feet in diameter, and the largest no less than thirty. They drifted past like bubbles blown from froth of rainbows by pipes in mouths of Titans’ young. Then from the base of one arose a tangle of shimmering strands, long, slender whiplashes that played about and sank slowly again beneath the crimson surface.

I gasped – for the fish had been a ganoid – that ancient, armored form that was perhaps the most intelligent of all life on our planet during the Devonian era, but which for age upon age had vanished, save for its fossils held in the embrace of the stone that once was their soft bottom beds; and the half-globes were Medusae, jelly-fish – but of a size, luminosity, and color unheard of.

Now Lakla cupped her mouth with pink palms and sent a clarion note ringing out. The ledge on which we stood continued a few hundred feet before us, falling abruptly, though from no great height to the Crimson Sea; at right and left it extended in a long semicircle. Turning to the right whence she had sent her call, I saw rising a mile or more away, veiled lightly by the haze, a rainbow, a gigantic prismatic arch, flattened, I thought, by some quality of the strange atmosphere. It sprang from the ruddy strand, leaped the crimson tide, and dropped three miles away upon a precipitous, jagged upthrust of rock frowning black from the lacquered depths.

And surmounting a higher ledge beyond this upthrust a huge dome of dull gold, Cyclopean, striking eyes and mind with something unhumanly alien, baffling; sending the mind groping, as though across the deserts of space, from some far-flung star, should fall upon us linked sounds, coherent certainly, meaningful surely, vaguely familiar – yet never to be translated into any symbol or thought of our own particular planet.

The sea of crimson lacquer, with its floating moons of luminous color – this bow of prismed stone leaping to the weird isle crowned by the anomalous, aureate excrescence – the half human batrachians – the elfland through which we had passed, with all its hidden wonders and terrors – I felt the foundations of my cherished knowledge shaking. Was this all a dream? Was this body of mine lying somewhere, fighting a fevered death, and all these but images floating through the breaking chambers of my brain? My knees shook; involuntarily I groaned.

Lakla turned, looked at me anxiously, slipped a soft arm behind me, held me till the vertigo passed.

“Patience,” she said. “The bearers come. Soon you shall rest.”

I looked; down toward us from the bow’s end were leaping swiftly another score of the frog-men. Some bore litters, high, handled, not unlike palanquins—

“Asgard!” Olaf stood beside me, eyes burning, pointing to the arch. “Bifrost Bridge, sharp as sword edge, over which souls go to Valhalla. And she – she is a Valkyr – a sword maiden, Ja!”

I gripped the Norseman’s hand. It was hot, and a pang of remorse shot through me. If this place had so shaken me, how must it have shaken Olaf? It was with relief that I watched him, at Lakla’s gentle command, drop into one of the litters and lie back, eyes closed, as two of the monsters raised its yoke to their scaled shoulders. Nor was it without further relief that I myself lay back on the soft velvety cushions of another.

The cavalcade began to move. Lakla had ordered O’Keefe placed beside her, and she sat, knees crossed Orient fashion, leaning over the pale head on her lap, the white, tapering fingers straying fondly through his hair.

Presently I saw her reach up, slowly unwind the coronal of her tresses, shake them loose, and let them fall like a veil over her and him.

Her head bent low; I heard a soft sobbing – I turned away my gaze, lorn enough in my own heart, God knew!

— XXV —

THE THREE SILENT ONES

The arch was closer – and in my awe I forgot for the moment Larry and aught else. For this was no rainbow, no thing born of light and mist, no Bifrost Bridge of myth – no! It was a flying arch of stone, stained with flares of Tyrian purples, of royal scarlets, of blues dark as the Gulf Stream’s ribbon, sapphires soft as midday May skies, splashes of chromes and greens – a palette of giantry, a bridge of wizardry; a hundred, nay, a thousand, times greater than that of Utah which the Navaho call Nonnegozche and worship, as well they may, as a god, and which is itself a rainbow in eternal rock.

It sprang from the ledge and winged its prodigious length in one low arc over the sea’s crimson breast, as though in some ancient paroxysm of earth it had been hurled molten, crystallizing into that stupendous span and still flaming with the fires that had molded it.

Closer we came and closer, while I watched spellbound; now we were at its head, and the litter-bearers swept upon it. All of five hundred feet wide it was, surface smooth as a city road, sides low walled, curving inward as though in the jetting-out of its making the edges of the plastic rock had curled.

On and on we sped; the high thrusting precipices upon which the bridge’s far end rested, frowned close; the enigmatic, dully shining dome loomed ever greater. Now we had reached that end; were passing over a smooth plaza whose level floor was enclosed, save for a rift in front of us, by the fanged tops of the black cliffs.

From this rift stretched another span, half a mile long, perhaps, widening at its center into a broad platform, continuing straight to two massive gates set within the face of the second cliff wall like panels, and of the same dull gold as the dome rising high beyond. And this smaller arch leaped a pit, an abyss, of which the outer precipices were the rim holding back from the pit the red flood.

We were rapidly approaching; now upon the platform; my bearers were striding closely along the side; I leaned far out – a giddiness seized me! I gazed down into depth upon vertiginous depth; an abyss indeed – an abyss dropping to world’s base like that in which the Babylonians believed writhed Talaat, the serpent mother of Chaos; a pit that struck down into earth’s heart itself.

Now, what was that – distance upon unfathomable distance below? A stupendous glowing like the green fire of life itself. What was it like? I had it! It was like the corona of the sun in eclipse – that burgeoning that makes of our luminary when moon veils it an incredible blossoming of splendors in the black heavens.

And strangely, strangely, it was like the Dweller’s beauty when with its dazzling spiralings and writhings it raced amid its storm of crystal bell sounds!

The abyss was behind us; we had paused at the golden portals; they swung inward. A wide corridor filled with soft light was before us, and on its threshold stood – bizarre, yellow gems gleaming, huge muzzle wide in what was evidently meant for a smile of welcome – the woman frog of the Moon Pool wall.

Lakla raised her head; swept back the silken tent of her hair and gazed at me with eyes misty from weeping. The frog-woman crept to her side; gazed down upon Larry; spoke – spoke – to the Golden Girl in a swift stream of the sonorous, reverberant monosyllables; and Lakla answered her in kind. The webbed digits swept over O’Keefe’s face, felt at his heart; she shook her head and moved ahead of us up the passage.

Still borne in the litters we went on, winding, ascending until at last they were set down in a great hall carpeted with soft fragrant rushes and into which from high narrow slits streamed the crimson light from without.

I jumped over to Larry, there had been no change in his condition; still the terrifying limpness, the slow, infrequent pulsation. Rador and Olaf – and the fever now seemed to be gone from him – came and stood beside me, silent.

“I go to the Three,” said Lakla. “Wait you here.” She passed through a curtaining; then as swiftly as she had gone she returned through the hangings, tresses braided, a swathing of golden gauze about her.

“Rador,” she said, “bear you Larry – for into your heart the Silent Ones would look. And fear nothing,” she added at the green dwarf’s disconcerted, almost fearful start.

Rador bowed, was thrust aside by Olaf.

“No,” said the Norseman; “I will carry him.”

He lifted Larry like a child against his broad breast. The dwarf glanced quickly at Lakla; she nodded.

“Come!” she commanded, and held aside the folds.

Of that journey I have few memories. I only know that we went through corridor upon corridor; successions of vast halls and chambers, some carpeted with the rushes, others with rugs into which the feet sank as into deep, soft meadows; spaces illumined by the rubrous light, and spaces in which softer lights held sway.

We paused before a slab of the same crimson stone as that the green dwarf had called the portal, and upon its polished surface weaved the same unnameable symbols. The Golden Girl pressed upon its side; it slipped softly back; a torrent of opalescence gushed out of the opening – and as one in a dream I entered.

We were, I knew, just under the dome; but for the moment, caught in the flood of radiance, I could see nothing. It was like being held within a fire opal – so brilliant, so flashing, was it. I closed my eyes, opened them; the lambency cascaded from the vast curves of the globular walls; in front of me was a long, narrow opening in them, through which, far away, I could see the end of the wizards’ bridge and the ledged mouth of the cavern through which we had come; against the light from within beat the crimson light from without – and was checked as though by a barrier.

I felt Lakla’s touch; turned.

A hundred paces away was a dais, its rim raised a yard above the floor. From the edge of this rim streamed upward a steady, coruscating mist of the opalescence, veined even as was that of the Dweller’s shining core and shot with milky shadows like curdled moonlight; up it stretched like a wall.

Over it, from it, down upon me, gazed three faces – two clearly male, one a woman’s. At the first I thought them statues, and then the eyes of them gave the lie to me; for the eyes were alive, terribly, and if I could admit the word – supernaturally – alive.

They were thrice the size of the human eye and triangular, the apex of the angle upward; black as jet, pupilless, filled with tiny, leaping red flames.

Over them were foreheads, not as ours – high and broad and visored; their sides drawn forward into a vertical ridge, a prominence, an upright wedge, somewhat like the visored heads of a few of the great lizards – and the heads, long, narrowing at the back, were fully twice the size of mankind’s!

Upon the brows were caps – and with a fearful certainty I knew that they were not caps – long, thick strands of gleaming yellow, feathered scales thin as sequins! Sharp, curving noses like the beaks of the giant condors; mouths thin, austere; long, powerful, pointed chins; the – flesh – of the faces white as the whitest marble; and wreathing up to them, covering all their bodies, the shimmering, curdled, misty fires of opalescence!

Olaf stood rigid; my own heart leaped wildly. What – what were these beings?

I forced myself to look again – and from their gaze streamed a current of reassurance, of good will – nay, of intense spiritual strength. I saw that they were not fierce, not ruthless, not inhuman, despite their strangeness; no, they were kindly; in some unmistakable way, benign and sorrowful – so sorrowful! I straightened, gazed back at them fearlessly. Olaf drew a deep breath, gazed steadily too, the hardness, the despair wiped from his face.

Now Lakla drew closer to the dais; the three pairs of eyes searched hers, the woman’s with an ineffable tenderness; some message seemed to pass between the Three and the Golden Girl. She bowed low, turned to the Norseman.

“Place Larry there,” she said softly – “there at the feet of the Silent Ones.”

She pointed into the radiant mist; Olaf started, hesitated, stared from Lakla to the Three, searched for a moment their eyes – and something like a smile drifted through them. He stepped forward, lifted O’Keefe, set him squarely within the covering light. It wavered, rolled upward, swirled about the body, steadied again – and within it there was no sign of Larry!

Again the mist wavered, shook, and seemed to climb higher, hiding the chins, the beaked noses, the brows of that incredible Trinity – but before it ceased to climb, I thought the yellow feathered heads bent; sensed a movement as though they lifted something.

The mist fell; the eyes gleamed out again, inscrutable.

And groping out of the radiance, pausing at the verge of the dais, leaping down from it, came Larry, laughing, filled with life, blinking as one who draws from darkness into sunshine. He saw Lakla, sprang to her, gripped her in his arms.

“Lakla!” he cried. “Mavourneen!” She slipped from his embrace, blushing, glancing at the Three shyly, half-fearfully. And again I saw the tenderness creep into the inky, flame-shot orbs of the woman being; and a tenderness in the others too – as though they regarded some well-beloved child.

“You lay in the arms of Death, Larry,” she said. “And the Silent Ones drew you from him. Do homage to the Silent Ones, Larry, for they are good and they are mighty!”

She turned his head with one of the long, white hands – and he looked into the faces of the Three; looked long, was shaken even as had been Olaf and myself; was swept by that same wave of power and of – of – what can I call it? – holiness that streamed from them.

Then for the first time I saw real awe mount into his face. Another moment he stared – and dropped upon one knee and bowed his head before them as would a worshipper before the shrine of his saint. And – I am not ashamed to tell it – I joined him; and with us knelt Lakla and Olaf and Rador.

The mist of fiery opal swirled up about the Three; hid them.

And with a long, deep, joyous sigh Lakla took Larry’s hand, drew him to his feet, and silently we followed them out of that hall of wonder.

But why, in going, did the thought come to me that from where the Three sat throned they ever watched the cavern mouth that was the door into their abode; and looked down ever into the unfathomable depth in which glowed and pulsed that mystic flower, colossal, awesome, of green flame that had seemed to me fire of life itself?

— XXVI —

THE WOOING OF LAKLA

I had slept soundly and dreamlessly; I wakened quietly in the great chamber into which Rador had ushered O’Keefe and myself after that culminating experience of crowded, nerve-racking hours – the facing of the Three.

Now, lying gazing upward at the high-vaulted ceiling, I heard Larry’s voice:

“They look like birds.” Evidently he was thinking of the Three; a silence – then: “Yes, they look like birds – and they look, and it’s meaning no disrespect to them I am at all, they look like lizards” – and another silence – “they look like some sort of gods, and, by the good sword-arm of Brian Boru, they look human, too! And it’s none of them they are either, so what – what the – what the sainted St. Bridget are they?” Another short silence, and then in a tone of awed and absolute conviction: “That’s it, sure! That’s what they are – it all hangs in – they couldn’t be anything else—”

He gave a whoop; a pillow shot over and caught me across the head.

“Wake up!” shouted Larry. “Wake up, ye seething cauldron of fossilized superstitions! Wake up, ye bogy-haunted man of scientific unwisdom!”

Under pillow and insults I bounced to my feet, filled for a moment with quite real wrath; he lay back, roaring with laughter, and my anger was swept away.

“Doc,” he said, very seriously, after this, “I know who the Three are!”

“Yes?” I queried, with studied sarcasm.

“Yes?” he mimicked. “Yes! Ye – ye” He paused under the menace of my look, grinned. “Yes, I know,” he continued. “They’re of the Tuatha De, the old ones, the great people of Ireland, that’s who they are!”

I knew, of course, of the Tuatha De Danann, the tribes of the god Danu, the half-legendary, half-historical clan who found their home in Erin some four thousand years before the Christian era, and who have left so deep an impress upon the Celtic mind and its myths.

“Yes,” said Larry again, “the Tuatha De – the Ancient Ones who had spells that could compel Mananan, who is the spirit of all the seas, an’ Keithor, who is the god of all green living things, an’ even Hesus, the unseen god, whose pulse is the pulse of all the firmament; yes, an’ Orchil too, who sits within the earth an’ weaves with the shuttle of mystery and her three looms of birth an’ life an’ death – even Orchil would weave as they commanded!”

He was silent – then:

“They are of them – the mighty ones – why else would I have bent my knee to them as I would have to the spirit of my dead mother? Why else would Lakla, whose gold-brown hair is the hair of Eilidh the Fair, whose mouth is the sweet mouth of Deirdre, an’ whose soul walked with mine ages agone among the fragrant green myrtle of Erin, serve them?” he whispered, eyes full of dream.

“Have you any idea how they got here?” I asked, not unreasonably.

“I haven’t thought about that,” he replied somewhat testily. “But at once, me excellent man o’ wisdom, a number occur to me. One of them is that this little party of three might have stopped here on their way to Ireland, an’ for good reasons of their own decided to stay a while; an’ another is that they might have come here afterward, havin’ got wind of what those rats out there were contemplatin’, and have stayed on the job till the time was ripe to save Ireland from ’em; the rest of the world, too, of course,” he added magnanimously, “but Ireland in particular. And do any of those reasons appeal to ye?”

I shook my head.

“Well, what do you think?” he asked wearily.

“I think,” I said cautiously, “that we face an evolution of highly intelligent beings from ancestral sources radically removed from those through which mankind ascended. These half-human, highly developed batrachians they call the Akka prove that evolution in these caverned spaces has certainly pursued one different path than on earth. The Englishman, Wells, wrote an imaginative and very entertaining book concerning an invasion of earth by Martians, and he made his Martians enormously specialized cuttlefish. There was nothing inherently improbable in Wells’ choice. Man is the ruling animal of earth today solely by reason of a series of accidents; under another series spiders or ants, or even elephants, could have become the dominant race.

“I think,” I said, even more cautiously, “that the race to which the Three belong never appeared on earth’s surface; that their development took place here, unhindered through aeons. And if this be true, the structure of their brains, and therefore all their reactions, must be different from ours. Hence their knowledge and command of energies unfamiliar to us – and hence also the question whether they may not have an entirely different sense of values, of justice – and that is rather terrifying,” I concluded.

Larry shook his head.

“That last sort of knocks your argument, Doc,” he said. “They had sense of justice enough to help me out – and certainly they know love – for I saw the way they looked at Lakla; and sorrow – for there was no mistaking that in their faces.

“No,” he went on. “I hold to my own idea. They’re of the Old People. The little leprechaun knew his way here, an’ I’ll bet it was they who sent the word. An’ if the O’Keefe banshee comes here – which save the mark! – I’ll bet she’ll drop in on the Silent Ones for a social visit before she an’ her clan get busy. Well, it’ll make her feel more at home, the good old body. No, Doc, no,” he concluded, “I’m right; it all fits in too well to be wrong.”

I made a last despairing attempt.

“Is there anything anywhere in Ireland that would indicate that the Tuatha De ever looked like the Three?” I asked – and again I had spoken most unfortunately.

“Is there?” he shouted. “Is there? By the kilt of Cormack MacCormack, I’m glad ye reminded me. It was worryin’ me a little meself. There was Daghda, who could put on the head of a great boar an’ the body of a giant fish and cleave the waves an’ tear to pieces the birlins of any who came against Erin; an’ there was Rinn—”

How many more of the metamorphoses of the Old People I might have heard, I do not know, for the curtains parted and in walked Rador.

“You have rested well,” he smiled, “I can see. The handmaiden bade me call you. You are to eat with her in her garden.”

Down long corridors we trod and out upon a gardened terrace as beautiful as any of those of Yolara’s city; bowered, blossoming, fragrant, set high upon the cliffs beside the domed castle. A table, as of milky jade, was spread at one corner, but the Golden Girl was not there. A little path ran on and up, hemmed in by the mass of verdure. I looked at it longingly; Rador saw the glance, interpreted it, and led me up the stepped sharp slope into a rock embrasure.

Here I was above the foliage, and everywhere the view was clear. Below me stretched the incredible bridge, with the frog people hurrying back and forth upon it. A pinnacle at my side hid the abyss. My eyes followed the cavern ledge. Above it the rock rose bare, but at the ends of the semicircular strand a luxuriant vegetation began, stretching from the crimson shores back into far distances. Of browns and reds and yellows, like an autumn forest, was the foliage, with here and there patches of dark-green, as of conifers. Five miles or more, on each side, the forests swept, and then were lost to sight in the haze.

I turned and faced an immensity of crimson waters, unbroken, a true sea, if ever there was one. A breeze blew – the first real wind I had encountered in the hidden places; under it the surface, that had been as molten lacquer, rippled and dimpled. Little waves broke with a spray of rose-pearls and rubies. The giant Medusae drifted – stately, luminous kaleidoscopic elfin moons.

Far down, peeping around a jutting tower of the cliff, I saw dipping with the motion of the waves a floating garden. The flowers, too, were luminous – indeed sparkling – gleaming brilliants of scarlet and vermilions lighter than the flood on which they lay, mauves and odd shades of reddish-blue. They gleamed and shone like a little lake of jewels.

Rador broke in upon my musings.

“Lakla comes! Let us go down.”

It was a shy Lakla who came slowly around the end of the path and, blushing furiously, held her hands out to Larry. And the Irishman took them, placed them over his heart, kissed them with a tenderness that had been lacking in the half-mocking, half-fierce caresses he had given the priestess. She blushed deeper, holding out the tapering fingers – then pressed them to her own heart.

“I like the touch of your lips, Larry,” she whispered. “They warm me here” – she pressed her heart again – “and they send little sparkles of light through me.” Her brows tilted perplexedly, accenting the nuance of diablerie, delicate and fascinating, that they cast upon the flower face.

“Do you?” whispered the O’Keefe fervently. “Do you, Lakla?” He bent toward her. She caught the amused glance of Rador; drew herself aside half-haughtily.

“Rador,” she said, “is it not time that you and the strong one, Olaf, were setting forth?”

“Truly it is, handmaiden,” he answered respectfully enough – yet with a current of laughter under his words. “But as you know the strong one, Olaf, wished to see his friends here before we were gone – and he comes even now,” he added, glancing down the pathway, along which came striding the Norseman.

As he faced us I saw that a transformation had been wrought in him. Gone was the pitiful seeking, and gone too the just as pitiful hope. The set face softened as he looked at the Golden Girl and bowed low to her. He thrust a hand to O’Keefe and to me.

“There is to be battle,” he said. “I go with Rador to call the armies of these frog people. As for me – Lakla has spoken. There is no hope for – for mine Helma in life, but there is hope that we destroy the Shining Devil and give meine Helma peace. And with that I am well content, ja! Well content!” He gripped our hands again. “We will fight!” he muttered. “Ja! And I will have vengeance!” The sternness returned; and with a salute Rador and he were gone.

Two great tears rolled from the golden eyes of Lakla.

“Not even the Silent Ones can heal those the Shining One has taken,” she said. “He asked me – and it was better that I tell him. It is part of the Three’s – punishment – but of that you will soon learn,” she went on hurriedly. “Ask me no questions now of the Silent Ones. I thought it better for Olaf to go with Rador, to busy himself, to give his mind other than sorrow upon which to feed.”

Up the path came five of the frog-women, bearing platters and ewers. Their bracelets and anklets of jewels were tinkling; their middles covered with short kirtles of woven cloth studded with the sparkling ornaments.

And here let me say that if I have given the impression that the Akka are simply magnified frogs, I regret it. Frog-like they are, and hence my phrase for them – but as unlike the frog, as we know it, as man is unlike the chimpanzee. Springing, I hazard, from the stegocephalia, the ancestor of the frogs, these batrachians followed a different line of evolution and acquired the upright position just as man did his from the four-footed folk.

The great staring eyes, the shape of the muzzle were frog-like, but the highly developed brain had set upon the head and shape of it vital differences. The forehead, for instance, was not low, flat, and retreating – its frontal arch was well defined. The head was, in a sense, shapely, and with the females the great horny carapace that stood over it like a fantastic helmet was much modified, as were the spurs that were so formidable in the male; coloration was different also. The torso was upright; the legs a little bent, giving them their crouching gait – but I wander from my subject. [07]

They set their burdens down. Larry looked at them with interest.

“You surely have those things well trained, Lakla,” he said.

“Things!” The handmaiden arose, eyes flashing with indignation. “You call my Akka things!”

“Well,” said Larry, a bit taken aback, “what do you call them?”

“My Akka are a people,” she retorted. “As much a people as your race or mine. They are good and loyal, and they have speech and arts, and they slay not, save for food or to protect themselves. And I think them beautiful, Larry, beautiful!” She stamped her foot. “And you call them – things!”

Beautiful! These? Yet, after all, they were, in their grotesque fashion. And to Lakla, surrounded by them, from babyhood, they were not strange, at all. Why shouldn’t she think them beautiful? The same thought must have struck O’Keefe, for he flushed guiltily.

“I think them beautiful, too, Lakla,” he said remorsefully. “It’s my not knowing your tongue too well that traps me. Truly, I think them beautiful – I’d tell them so, if I knew their talk.”

Lakla dimpled, laughed – spoke to the attendants in that strange speech that was unquestionably a language; they bridled, looked at O’Keefe with fantastic coquetry, cracked and boomed softly among themselves.

“They say they like you better than the men of Muria,” laughed Lakla.

“Did I ever think I’d be swapping compliments with lady frogs!” he murmured to me. “Buck up, Larry – keep your eyes on the captive Irish princess!” he muttered to himself.

“Rador goes to meet one of the ladala who is slipping through with news,” said the Golden Girl as we addressed ourselves to the food. “Then, with Nak, he and Olaf go to muster the Akka – for there will be battle, and we must prepare. Nak,” she added, “is he who went before me when you were dancing with Yolara, Larry.” She stole a swift, mischievous glance at him. “He is headman of all the Akka.”

“Just what forces can we muster against them when they come, darlin’?” said Larry.

“Darlin’?” – the Golden Girl had caught the caress of the word – “what’s that?”

“It’s a little word that means Lakla,” he answered. “It does – that is, when I say it; when you say it, then it means Larry.”

“I like that word,” mused Lakla.

“You can even say Larry darlin’!” suggested O’Keefe.

“Larry darlin’!” said Lakla. “When they come we shall have first of all my Akka—”

“Can they fight, mavourneen?” interrupted Larry.

“Can they fight! My Akka!” Again her eyes flashed. “They will fight to the last of them – with the spears that give the swift rotting, covered, as they are, with the jelly of those Saddu there—” She pointed through a rift in the foliage across which, on the surface of the sea, was floating one of the moon globes – and now I know why Rador had warned Larry against a plunge there. “With spears and clubs and with teeth and nails and spurs – they are a strong and brave people, Larry – darlin’, and though they hurl the Keth at them, it is slow to work upon them, and they slay even while they are passing into the nothingness!”

“And have we none of the Keth?” he asked.

“No” – she shook her head – “none of their weapons have we here, although it was – it was the Ancient Ones who shaped them.”

“But the Three are of the Ancient Ones?” I cried. “Surely they can tell—”

“No,” she said slowly. “No – there is something you must know – and soon; and then the Silent Ones say you will understand. You, especially, Goodwin, who worship wisdom.”

“Then,” said Larry, “we have the Akka; and we have the four men of us, and among us three guns and about a hundred cartridges – an’ – an’ the power of the Three – but what about the Shining One, Fireworks—”

“I do not know.” Again the indecision that had been in her eyes when Yolara had launched her defiance crept back. “The Shining One is strong – and he has his – slaves!”

“Well, we’d better get busy good and quick!” the O’Keefe’s voice rang. But Lakla, for some reason of her own, would pursue the matter no further. The trouble fled from her eyes – they danced.

“Larry darlin’?” she murmured. “I like the touch of your lips—”

“You do?” he whispered, all thought flying of anything but the beautiful, provocative face so close to his. “Then, acushla, you’re goin’ to get acquainted with ’em! Turn your head, Doc!” he said.

And I turned it. There was quite a long silence, broken by an interested, soft outburst of gentle boomings from the serving frog-maids. I stole a glance behind me. Lakla’s head lay on the Irishman’s shoulder, the golden eyes misty sunpools of love and adoration; and the O’Keefe, a new look of power and strength upon his clear-cut features, was gazing down into them with that look which rises only from the heart touched for the first time with that true, all-powerful love, which is the pulse of the universe itself, the real music of the spheres of which Plato dreamed, the love that is stronger than death itself, immortal as the high gods and the true soul of all that mystery we call life.

Then Lakla raised her hands, pressed down Larry’s head, kissed him between the eyes, drew herself with a trembling little laugh from his embrace.

“The future Mrs. Larry O’Keefe, Goodwin,” said Larry to me a little unsteadily.

I took their hands – and Lakla kissed me!

She turned to the booming – smiling – frog-maids; gave them some command, for they filed away down the path. Suddenly I felt, well, a little superfluous.

“If you don’t mind,” I said, “I think I’ll go up the path there again and look about.”

But they were so engrossed with each other that they did not even hear me – so I walked away, up to the embrasure where Rador had taken me. The movement of the batrachians over the bridge had ceased. Dimly at the far end I could see the cluster of the garrison. My thoughts flew back to Lakla and to Larry.

What was to be the end?

If we won, if we were able to pass from this place, could she live in our world? A product of these caverns with their atmosphere and light that seemed in some subtle way to be both food and drink – how would she react to the unfamiliar foods and air and light of outer earth? Further, here so far as I was able to discover, there were no malignant bacilli – what immunity could Lakla have then to those microscopic evils without, which only long ages of sickness and death have bought for us a modicum of protection? I began to be oppressed. Surely they had been long enough by themselves. I went down the path.

I heard Larry.

“It’s a green land, mavourneen. And the sea rocks and dimples around it – blue as the heavens, green as the isle itself, and foam horses toss their white manes, and the great clean winds blow over it, and the sun shines down on it like your eyes, acushla—”

“And are you a king of Ireland, Larry darlin’?” Thus Lakla—

But enough!

At last we turned to go – and around the corner of the path I caught another glimpse of what I have called the lake of jewels. I pointed to it.

“Those are lovely flowers, Lakla,” I said. “I have never seen anything like them in the place from whence we come.”

She followed my pointing finger – laughed.

“Come,” she said, “let me show you them.”

She ran down an intersecting way, we following; came out of it upon a little ledge close to the brink, three feet or more I suppose about it. The Golden Girl’s voice rang out in a high-pitched, tremulous, throbbing call.

The lake of jewels stirred as though a breeze had passed over it; stirred, shook, and then began to move swiftly, a shimmering torrent of shining flowers down upon us! She called again, the movement became more rapid; the gem blooms streamed closer – closer, wavering, shifting, winding – at our very feet. Above them hovered a little radiant mist. The Golden Girl leaned over; called softly, and up from the sparkling mass shot a green vine whose heads were five flowers of flaming ruby – shot up, flew into her hand and coiled about the white arm, its quintette of lambent blossoms – regarding us!

It was the thing Lakla had called the Yekta; that with which she had threatened the priestess; the thing that carried the dreadful death – and the Golden Girl was handling it like a rose!

Larry swore – I looked at the thing more closely. It was a hydroid, a development of that strange animal-vegetable that, sometimes almost microscopic, waves in the sea depths like a cluster of flowers paralyzing its prey with the mysterious force that dwells in its blossom heads! [08]

“Put it down, Lakla,” the distress in O’Keefe’s voice was deep. Lakla laughed mischievously, caught the real fear for her in his eyes; opened her hand, gave another faint call – and back it flew to its fellows.

“Why, it wouldn’t hurt me, Larry!” she expostulated. “They know me!”

“Put it down!” he repeated hoarsely.

She sighed, gave another sweet, prolonged call. The lake of gems – rubies and amethysts, mauves and scarlet-tinged blues – wavered and shook even as it had before – and swept swiftly back to that place whence she had drawn them!

Then, with Larry and Lakla walking ahead, white arm about his brown neck; the O’Keefe still expostulating, the handmaiden laughing merrily, we passed through her bower to the domed castle.

Glancing through a cleft I caught sight again of the far end of the bridge; noted among the clustered figures of its garrison of the frog-men a movement, a flashing of green fire like marsh lights on spear tips; wondered idly what it was, and then, other thoughts crowding in, followed along, head bent, behind the pair who had found in what was Olaf’s hell, their true paradise.

— XXVII —

THE COMING OF YOLARA

“Never was there such a girl!” Thus Larry, dreamily, leaning head in hand on one of the wide divans of the chamber where Lakla had left us, pleading service to the Silent Ones.

“An’, by the faith and the honor of the O’Keefes, an’ by my dead mother’s soul may God do with me as I do by her!” he whispered fervently.

He relapsed into open-eyed dreaming.

I walked about the room, examining it – the first opportunity I had gained to inspect carefully any of the rooms in the abode of the Three. It was octagonal, carpeted with the thick rugs that seemed almost as though woven of soft mineral wool, faintly shimmering, palest blue. I paced its diagonal; it was fifty yards; the ceiling was arched, and either of pale rose metal or metallic covering; it collected the light from the high, slitted windows, and shed it, diffused, through the room.

Around the octagon ran a low gallery not two feet from the floor, balustraded with slender pillars, close set; broken at opposite curtained entrances over which hung thick, dull-gold curtainings giving the same suggestion of metallic or mineral substance as the rugs. Set within each of the eight sides, above the balcony, were colossal slabs of lapis lazuli, inset with graceful but unplaceable designs in scarlet and sapphire blue.

There was the great divan on which mused Larry; two smaller ones, half a dozen low seats and chairs carved apparently of ivory and of dull soft gold.

Most curious were tripods, strong, pike-like legs of golden metal four feet high, holding small circles of the lapis with intaglios of one curious symbol somewhat resembling the ideographs of the Chinese.

There was no dust – nowhere in these caverned spaces had I found this constant companion of ours in the world overhead. My eyes caught a sparkle from a corner. Pursuing it I found upon one of the low seats a flat, clear crystal oval, remarkably like a lens. I took it and stepped up on the balcony. Standing on tiptoe I found I commanded from the bottom of a window slit a view of the bridge approach. Scanning it I could see no trace of the garrison there, nor of the green spear flashes. I placed the crystal to my eyes – and with a disconcerting abruptness the cavern mouth leaped before me, apparently not a hundred feet away; decidedly the crystal was a very excellent lens – but where were the guards?

I peered closely. Nothing! But now against the aperture I saw a score or more of tiny, dancing sparks. An optical illusion, I thought, and turned the crystal in another direction. There were no sparklings there. I turned it back again – and there they were. And what were they like? Realization came to me – they were like the little, dancing, radiant atoms that had played for a time about the emptiness where had stood Sorgar of the Lower Waters before he had been shaken into the nothingness! And that green light I had noticed – the Keth!

A cry on my lips, I turned to Larry – and the cry died as the heavy curtainings at the entrance on my right undulated, parted as though a body had slipped through, shook and parted again and again – with the dreadful passing of unseen things!

“Larry!” I cried. “Here! Quick!”

He leaped to his feet, gazed about wildly – and disappeared! Yes – vanished from my sight like the snuffed flame of a candle or as though something moving with the speed of light itself had snatched him away!

Then from the divan came the sounds of struggle, the hissing of straining breaths, the noise of Larry cursing. I leaped over the balustrade, drawing my own pistol – was caught in a pair of mighty arms, my elbows crushed to my sides, drawn down until my face pressed close to a broad, hairy breast – and through that obstacle – formless, shadowless, transparent as air itself – I could still see the battle on the divan!

Now there were two sharp reports; the struggle abruptly ceased. From a point not a foot over the great couch, as though oozing from the air itself, blood began to drop, faster and ever faster, pouring out of nothingness.

And out of that same air, now a dozen feet away, leaped the face of Larry – bodyless, poised six feet above the floor, blazing with rage – floating weirdly, uncannily to a hideous degree, in vacancy.

His hands flashed out – armless; they wavered, appearing, disappearing – swiftly tearing something from him. Then there, feet hidden, stiff on legs that vanished at the ankles, striking out into vision with all the dizzy abruptness with which he had been stricken from sight was the O’Keefe, a smoking pistol in hand.

And ever that red stream trickled out of vacancy and spread over the couch, dripping to the floor.

I made a mighty movement to escape; was held more firmly – and then close to the face of Larry, flashing out with that terrifying instantaneousness even as had his, was the head of Yolara, as devilishly mocking as I had ever seen it, the cruelty shining through it like delicate white flames from hell – and beautiful!

“Stir not! Strike not – until I command!” She flung the words beyond her, addressed to the invisible ones who had accompanied her; whose presences I sensed filling the chamber. The floating, beautiful head, crowned high with corn-silk hair, darted toward the Irishman. He took a swift step backward. The eyes of the priestess deepened toward purple; sparkled with malice.

“So,” she said. “So, Larree – you thought you could go from me so easily!” She laughed softly. “In my hidden hand I hold the Keth cone,” she murmured. “Before you can raise the death tube I can smite you – and will. And consider, Larree, if the handmaiden, the choya comes, I can vanish – so” – the mocking head disappeared, burst forth again – “and slay her with the Keth – or bid my people seize her and bear her to the Shining One!”

Tiny beads of sweat stood out on O’Keefe’s forehead, and I knew he was thinking not of himself, but of Lakla.

“What do you want with me, Yolara?” he asked hoarsely.

“Nay,” came the mocking voice. “Not Yolara to you, Larree – call me by those sweet names you taught me – Honey of the Wild Bee-e-s, Net of Hearts—” Again her laughter tinkled.

“What do you want with me?” his voice was strained, the lips rigid.

“Ah, you are afraid, Larree.” There was diabolic jubilation in the words. “What should I want but that you return with me? Why else did I creep through the lair of the dragon worm and pass the path of perils but to ask you that? And the choya guards you not well.” Again she laughed. “We came to the cavern’s end and, there were her Akka. And the Akka can see us – as shadows. But it was my desire to surprise you with my coming, Larree,” the voice was silken. “And I feared that they would hasten to be first to bring you that message to delight in your joy. And so, Larree, I loosed the Keth upon them – and gave them peace and rest within the nothingness. And the portal below was open – almost in welcome!”

Once more the malignant, silver pealing of her laughter.

“What do you want with me?” There was wrath in his eyes, and plainly he strove for control.

“Want!” the silver voice hissed, grew calm. “Do not Siya and Siyana grieve that the rite I pledged them is but half done – and do they not desire it finished? And am I not beautiful? More beautiful than your choya?”

The fiendishness died from the eyes; they grew blue, wondrous; the veil of invisibility slipped down from the neck, the shoulders, half revealing the gleaming breasts. And weird, weird beyond all telling was that exquisite head and bust floating there in air – and beautiful, sinisterly beautiful beyond all telling, too. So even might Lilith, the serpent woman, have shown herself tempting Adam!

“And perhaps,” she said, “perhaps I want you because I hate you; perhaps because I love you – or perhaps for Lugur or perhaps for the Shining One.”

“And if I go with you?” He said it quietly.

“Then shall I spare the handmaiden – and – who knows? – take back my armies that even now gather at the portal and let the Silent Ones rot in peace in their abode – from which they had no power to keep me,” she added venomously.

“You will swear that, Yolara; swear to go without harming the handmaiden?” he asked eagerly. The little devils danced in her eyes. I wrenched my face from the smothering contact.

“Don’t trust her, Larry!” I cried – and again the grip choked me.

“Is that devil in front of you or behind you, old man?” he asked quietly, eyes never leaving the priestess. “If he’s in front I’ll take a chance and wing him – and then you scoot and warn Lakla.”

But I could not answer; nor, remembering Yolara’s threat, would I, had I been able.

“Decide quickly!” There was cold threat in her voice.

The curtains toward which O’Keefe had slowly, step by step, drawn close, opened. They framed the handmaiden! The face of Yolara changed to that gorgon mask that had transformed it once before at sight of the Golden Girl. In her blind rage she forgot to cast the occulting veil. Her hand darted like a snake out of the folds; poising itself with the little silver cone aimed at Lakla.

But before it was wholly poised, before the priestess could loose its force, the handmaiden was upon her. Swift as the lithe white wolf hound she leaped, and one slender hand gripped Yolara’s throat, the other the wrist that lifted the quivering death; white limbs wrapped about the hidden ones, I saw the golden head bend, the hand that held the Keth swept up with a vicious jerk; saw Lakla’s teeth sink into the wrist – the blood spurt forth and heard the priestess shriek. The cone fell, bounded toward me; with all my strength I wrenched free the hand that held my pistol, thrust it against the pressing breast and fired.

The clasp upon me relaxed; a red rain stained me; at my feet a little pillar of blood jetted; a hand thrust itself from nothingness, clawed – and was still.

Now Yolara was down, Lakla meshed in her writhings and fighting like some wild mother whose babes are serpent menaced. Over the two of them, astride, stood the O’Keefe, a pike from one of the high tripods in his hand – thrusting, parrying, beating on every side as with a broadsword against poniard-clutching hands that thrust themselves out of vacancy striving to strike him; stepping here and there, always covering, protecting Lakla with his own body even as a caveman of old who does battle with his mate for their lives.

The sword-club struck – and on the floor lay the half body of a dwarf, writhing with vanishments and re-appearings of legs and arms. Beside him was the shattered tripod from which Larry had wrenched his weapon. I flung myself upon it, dashed it down to break loose one of the remaining supports, struck in mid-fall one of the unseen even as his dagger darted toward me! The seat splintered, leaving in my clutch a golden bar. I jumped to Larry’s side, guarding his back, whirling it like a staff; felt it crunch once – twice – through unseen bone and muscle.

At the door was a booming. Into the chamber rushed a dozen of the frog-men. While some guarded the entrances, others leaped straight to us, and forming a circle about us began to strike with talons and spurs at unseen things that screamed and sought to escape. Now here and there about the blue rugs great stains of blood appeared; heads of dwarfs, torn arms and gashed bodies, half occulted, half revealed. And at last the priestess lay silent, vanquished, white body gleaming with that uncanny – fragmentariness – from her torn robes. Then O’Keefe reached down, drew Lakla from her. Shakily, Yolara rose to her feet. The handmaiden, face still blazing with wrath, stepped before her; with difficulty she steadied her voice.

“Yolara,” she said, “you have defied the Silent Ones, you have desecrated their abode, you came to slay these men who are the guests of the Silent Ones and me, who am their handmaiden – why did you do these things?”

“I came for him!” gasped the priestess; she pointed to O’Keefe.

“Why?” asked Lakla.

“Because he is pledged to me,” replied Yolara, all the devils that were hers in her face. “Because he wooed me! Because he is mine!”

“That is a lie!” The handmaiden’s voice shook with rage. “It is a lie! But here and now he shall choose, Yolara. And if you he choose, you and he shall go forth from here unmolested – for Yolara, it is his happiness that I most desire, and if you are that happiness – you shall go together. And now, Larry, choose!”

Swiftly she stepped beside the priestess; swiftly wrenched the last shreds of the hiding robes from her.

There they stood – Yolara with but the filmiest net of gauze about her wonderful body; gleaming flesh shining through it; serpent woman – and wonderful, too, beyond the dreams even of Phidias – and hellfire glowing from the purple eyes.

And Lakla, like a girl of the Vikings, like one of those warrior maids who stood and fought for dun and babes at the side of those old heroes of Larry’s own green isle; translucent ivory lambent through the rents of her torn draperies, and in the wide, golden eyes flaming wrath, indeed – not the diabolic flames of the priestess but the righteous wrath of some soul that looking out of paradise sees vile wrong in the doing.

“Lakla,” the O’Keefe’s voice was subdued, hurt, “there is no choice. I love you and only you – and have from the moment I saw you. It’s not easy – this. God, Goodwin, I feel like an utter cad,” he flashed at me. “There is no choice, Lakla,” he ended, eyes steady upon hers.

The priestess’s face grew deadlier still.

“What will you do with me?” she asked.

“Keep you,” I said, “as hostage.”

O’Keefe was silent; the Golden Girl shook her head.

“Well would I like to,” her face grew dreaming; “but the Silent Ones say – no; they bid me let you go, Yolara—”

“The Silent Ones,” the priestess laughed. “You, Lakla! You fear, perhaps, to let me tarry here too close!”

Storm gathered again in the handmaiden’s eyes; she forced it back.

“No,” she answered, “the Silent Ones so command – and for their own purposes. Yet do I think, Yolara, that you will have little time to feed your wickedness – tell that to Lugur – and to your Shining One!” she added slowly.

Mockery and disbelief rode high in the priestess’s pose. “Am I to return alone – like this?” she asked.

“Nay, Yolara, nay; you shall be accompanied,” said Lakla; “and by those who will guard – and watch you well. They are here even now.”

The hangings parted, and into the chamber came Olaf and Rador.

The priestess met the fierce hatred and contempt in the eyes of the Norseman – and for the first time lost her bravado.

“Let not him go with me,” she gasped – her eyes searched the floor frantically.

“He goes with you,” said Lakla, and threw about Yolara a swathing that covered the exquisite, alluring body. “And you shall pass through the Portal, not skulk along the path of the worm!”

She bent to Rador, whispered to him; he nodded; she had told him, I supposed, the secret of its opening.

“Come,” he said, and with the ice-eyed giant behind her, Yolara, head bent, passed out of those hangings through which, but a little before, unseen, triumph in her grasp, she had slipped.

Then Lakla came to the unhappy O’Keefe, rested her hands on his shoulders, looked deep into his eyes.

“Did you woo her, even as she said?” she asked.

The Irishman flushed miserably.

“I did not,” he said. “I was pleasant to her, of course, because I thought it would bring me quicker to you, darlin’.”

She looked at him doubtfully; then—

“I think you must have been very – pleasant!” was all she said – and leaning, kissed him forgivingly straight on the lips. An extremely direct maiden was Lakla, with a truly sovereign contempt for anything she might consider non-essentials; and at this moment I decided she was wiser even than I had thought her.

He stumbled, feet vanishing; reached down and picked up something that in the grasping turned his hand to air.

“One of the invisible cloaks,” he said to me. “There must be quite a lot of them about – I guess Yolara brought her full staff of murderers. They’re a bit shopworn, probably – but we’re considerably better off with ’em in our hands than in hers. And they may come in handy – who knows?”

There was a choking rattle at my feet; half the head of a dwarf raised out of vacancy; beat twice upon the floor in death throes; fell back. Lakla shivered; gave a command. The frog-men moved about; peering here and there; lifting unseen folds revealing in stark rigidity torn form after form of the priestess’s men.

Lakla had been right – her Akka were thorough fighters!

She called, and to her came the frog-woman who was her attendant. To her the handmaiden spoke, pointing to the batrachians who stood, paws and forearms melted beneath the robes they had gathered. She took them and passed out – more grotesque than ever, shattering into streaks of vacancies, reappearing with flickers of shining scale and yellow gems as the tattered pennants of invisibility fluttered about her.

The frog-men reached down, swung each a dead dwarf in his arms, and filed, booming triumphantly away.

And then I remembered the cone of the Keth which had slipped from Yolara’s hand; knew it had been that for which her wild eyes searched. But look as closely as we might, search in every nook and corner as we did, we could not find it. Had the dying hand of one of her men clutched it and had it been borne away with them? With the thought Larry and I raced after the scaled warriors, searched everybody they carried. It was not there. Perhaps the priestess had found it, retrieved it swiftly without our seeing.

Whatever was true – the cone was gone. And what a weapon that one little holder of the shaking death would have been for us!

— XXVIII —

IN THE LAIR
OF THE DWELLER

It is with marked hesitation that I begin this chapter, because in it I must deal with an experience so contrary to every known law of physics as to seem impossible. Until this time, barring, of course, the mystery of the Dweller, I had encountered nothing that was not susceptible of naturalistic explanation; nothing, in a word, outside the domain of science itself; nothing that I would have felt hesitancy in reciting to my colleagues of the International Association of Science. Amazing, unfamiliar – advanced – as many of the phenomena were, still they lay well within the limits of what we have mapped as the possible; in regions, it is true, still virgin to the mind of man, but toward which that mind is steadily advancing.

But this – well, I confess that I have a theory that is naturalistic; but so abstruse, so difficult to make clear within the short confines of the space I have to give it, so dependent upon conceptions that even the highest-trained scientific brains find difficult to grasp, that I despair.

I can only say that the thing occurred; that it took place in precisely the manner I am about to narrate, and that I experienced it.

Yet, in justice to myself, I must open up some paths of preliminary approach toward the heart of the perplexity. And the first path is the realization that our world whatever it is, is certainly not the world as we see it! Regarding this I shall refer to a discourse upon “Gravitation and the Principle of Relativity,” by the distinguished English physicist, Dr. A. S. Eddington, which I had the pleasure of hearing him deliver before the Royal Institution. [09]

I realize, of course, that it is not true logic to argue – “The world is not as we think it is – therefore everything we think impossible is possible in it.” Even if it be different, it is governed by law. The truly impossible is that which is outside law, and as nothing can be outside law, the impossible cannot exist.

The crux of the matter then becomes our determination whether what we think is impossible may or may not be possible under laws still beyond our knowledge.

I hope that you will pardon me for this somewhat academic digression, but I felt it was necessary, and it has, at least, put me more at ease. And now to resume.

We had watched, Larry and I, the frog-men throw the bodies of Yolara’s assassins into the crimson waters. As vultures swoop down upon the dying, there came sailing swiftly to where the dead men floated, dozens of the luminous globes. Their slender, varicolored tentacles whipped out; the giant iridescent bubbles climbed over the cadavers. And as they touched them there was the swift dissolution, the melting away into putrescence of flesh and bone that I had witnessed when the dart touched fruit that time I had saved Rador – and upon this the Medusae gorged; pulsing lambently; their wondrous colors shifting, changing, glowing stronger; elfin moons now indeed, but satellites whose glimmering beauty was fed by death; alembics of enchantment whose glorious hues were sucked from horror.

Sick, I turned away – O’Keefe as pale as I; passed back into the corridor that had opened on the ledge from which we had watched; met Lakla hurrying toward us. Before she could speak there throbbed faintly about us a vast sighing. It grew into a murmur, a whispering, shook us – then passing like a presence, died away in far distance.

“The Portal has opened,” said the handmaiden. A fainter sighing, like an echo of the other, mourned about us. “Yolara is gone,” she said, “the Portal is closed. Now must we hasten – for the Three have commanded that you, Goodwin, and Larry and I tread that strange road of which I have spoken, and which Olaf may not take lest his heart break – and we must return ere he and Rador cross the bridge.”

Her hand sought Larry’s.

“Come!” said Lakla, and we walked on; down and down through hall after hall, flight upon flight of stairways. Deep, deep indeed, we must be beneath the domed castle – Lakla paused before a curved, smooth breast of the crimson stone rounding gently into the passage. She pressed its side; it revolved; we entered; it closed behind us.

The room, the – hollow – in which we stood was faceted like a diamond; and like a cut brilliant its sides glistened – though dully. Its shape was a deep oval, and our path dropped down to a circular polished base, roughly two yards in diameter. Glancing behind me I saw that in the closing of the entrance there had been left no trace of it save the steps that led from where that entrance had been – and as I looked these steps turned, leaving us isolated upon the circle, only the faceted walls about us – and in each of the gleaming faces the three of us reflected – dimly. It was as though we were within a diamond egg whose graven angles had been turned inward.

But the oval was not perfect; at my right a screen cut it – a screen that gleamed with fugitive, fleeting luminescences – stretching from the side of our standing place up to the tip of the chamber; slightly convex and crisscrossed by millions of fine lines like those upon a spectroscopic plate, but with this difference – that within each line I sensed the presence of multitudes of finer lines, dwindling into infinitude, ultramicroscopic, traced by some instrument compared to whose delicacy our finest tool would be as a crowbar to the needle of a micrometer.

A foot or two from it stood something like the standee of a compass, bearing, like it a cradled dial under whose crystal ran concentric rings of prisoned, lambent vapors, faintly blue. From the edge of the dial jutted a little shelf of crystal, a keyboard, in which were cut eight small cups.

Within these cups the handmaiden placed her tapering fingers. She gazed down upon the disk; pressed a digit – and the screen behind us slipped noiselessly into another angle.

“Put your arm around my waist, Larry, darlin’, and stand close,” she murmured. “You, Goodwin, place your arm over my shoulder.”

Wondering, I did as she bade; she pressed other fingers upon the shelf’s indentations – three of the rings of vapor spun into intense light, raced around each other; from the screen behind us grew a radiance that held within itself all spectrums – not only those seen, but those unseen by man’s eyes. It waxed brilliant and ever more brilliant, all suffusing, passing through me as day streams through a window pane!

The enclosing facets burst into a blaze of coruscations, and in each sparkling panel I saw our images, shaken and torn like pennants in a whirlwind. I turned to look – was stopped by the handmaiden’s swift command: “Turn not – on your life!”

The radiance behind me grew; was a rushing tempest of light in which I was but the shadow of a shadow. I heard, but not with my ears – nay with mind itself – a vast roaring; an ordered tumult of sound that came hurling from the outposts of space; approaching – rushing – hurricane out of the heart of the cosmos – closer, closer. It wrapped itself about us with unearthly mighty arms.

And brilliant, ever more brilliant, streamed the radiance through us.

The faceted walls dimmed; in front of me they melted, diaphanously, like a gelatinous wall in a blast of flame; through their vanishing, under the torrent of driving light, the unthinkable, impalpable tornado, I began to move, slowly – then ever more swiftly!

Still the roaring grew; the radiance streamed – ever faster we went. Cutting down through the length, the extension of me, dropped a wall of rock, foreshortened, clenched close; I caught a glimpse of the elfin gardens; they whirled, contracted, into a thin – slice – of color that was a part of me; another wall of rock shrinking into a thin wedge through which I flew, and that at once took its place within me like a card slipped beside those others!

Flashing around me, and from Lakla and O’Keefe, were nimbuses of flickering scarlet flames. And always the steady hurling forward – appallingly mechanical.

Another barrier of rock – a gleam of white waters incorporating themselves into my – drawing out – even as were the flowered moss lands, the slicing, rocky walls – still another rampart of cliff, dwindling instantly into the vertical plane of those others. Our flight checked; we seemed to hover within, then to sway onward – slowly, cautiously.

A mist danced ahead of me – a mist that grew steadily thinner. We stopped, wavered – the mist cleared.

I looked out into translucent, green distances; shot with swift prismatic gleamings; waves and pulsings of luminosity like midday sun glow through green, tropic waters: dancing, scintillating veils of sparkling atoms that flew, hither and yon, through depths of nebulous splendor!

And Lakla and Larry and I were, I saw, like shadow shapes upon a smooth breast of stone twenty feet or more above the surface of this place – a surface spangled with tiny white blossoms gleaming wanly through creeping veils of phosphorescence like smoke of moon fire. We were shadows – and yet we had substance; we were incorporated with, a part of, the rock – and yet we were living flesh and blood; we stretched – nor will I qualify this – we stretched through mile upon mile of space that weirdly enough gave at one and the same time an absolute certainty of immense horizontal lengths and a vertical concentration that contained nothing of length, nothing of space whatever; we stood there upon the face of the stone – and still we were here within the faceted oval before the screen of radiance!

“Steady!” It was Lakla’s voice – and not beside me there, but at my ear close before the screen. “Steady, Goodwin! And – see!”

The sparkling haze cleared. Enormous reaches stretched before me. Shimmering up through them, and as though growing in some medium thicker than air, was mass upon mass of verdure – fruiting trees and trees laden with pale blossoms, arbors and bowers of pallid blooms, like that sea fruit of oblivion – grapes of Lethe – that cling to the tide-swept walls of the caverns of the Hebrides.

Through them, beyond them, around and about them, drifted and eddied a horde – great as that with which Tamerlane swept down upon Rome, vast as the myriads which Genghis Khan rolled upon the caliphs – men and women and children – clothed in tatters, half nude and wholly naked; slant-eyed Chinese, sloe-eyed Malays, islanders black and brown and yellow, fierce-faced warriors of the Solomons with grizzled locks fantastically bedizened; Papuans, feline Javans, Dyaks of hill and shore; hook-nosed Phoenicians, Romans, straight-browed Greeks, and Vikings centuries beyond their lives: scores of the black-haired Murians; white faces of our own Westerners – men and women and children – drifting, eddying – each stamped with that mingled horror and rapture, eyes filled with ecstasy and terror entwined, marked by God and devil in embrace – the seal of the Shining One – the dead-alive; the lost ones!

The loot of the Dweller!

Soul-sick, I gazed. They lifted to us visages of dread; they swept down toward us, glaring upward – a bank against which other and still other waves of faces rolled, were checked, paused; until as far as I could see, like billows piled upon an ever-growing barrier, they stretched beneath us – staring – staring!

Now there was a movement – far, far away; a concentrating of the lambency; the dead-alive swayed, oscillated, separated – forming a long lane against whose outskirts they crowded with avid, hungry insistence.

First only a luminous cloud, then a whirling pillar of splendors through the lane came – the Shining One. As it passed, the dead-alive swirled in its wake like leaves behind a whirlwind, eddying, twisting; and as the Dweller raced by them, brushing them with its spiralings and tentacles, they shone forth with unearthly, awesome gleamings – like vessels of alabaster in which wicks flare suddenly. And when it had passed they closed behind it, staring up at us once more.

The Dweller paused beneath us.

Out of the drifting ruck swam the body of Throckmartin! Throckmartin, my friend, to find whom I had gone to the pallid moon door; my friend whose call I had so laggardly followed. On his face was the Dweller’s dreadful stamp; the lips were bloodless; the eyes were wide, lucent, something like pale, phosphorescence gleaming within them – and soulless.

He stared straight up at me, unwinking, unrecognizing. Pressing against his side was a woman, young and gentle, and lovely – lovely even through the mask that lay upon her face. And her wide eyes, like Throckmartin’s, glowed with the lurking, unholy fires. She pressed against him closely; though the hordes kept up the faint churning, these two kept ever together, as though bound by unseen fetters.

And I knew the girl for Edith, his wife, who in vain effort to save him had cast herself into the Dweller’s embrace!

“Throckmartin!” I cried. “Throckmartin! I’m here!”

Did he hear? I know now, of course, he could not.

But then I waited – hope striving to break through the nightmare hands that gripped my heart.

Their wide eyes never left me. There was another movement about them, others pushed past them; they drifted back, swaying, eddying – and still staring were lost in the awful throng.

Vainly I strained my gaze to find them again, to force some sign of recognition, some awakening of the clean life we know. But they were gone. Try as I would I could not see them – nor Stanton and the northern woman named Thora who had been the first of that tragic party to be taken by the Dweller.

“Throckmartin!” I cried again, despairingly. My tears blinded me.

I felt Lakla’s light touch.

“Steady,” she commanded, pitifully. “Steady, Goodwin. You cannot help them – now! Steady and – watch!”

Below us the Shining One had paused – spiraling, swirling, vibrant with all its transcendent, devilish beauty; had paused and was contemplating us. Now I could see clearly that nucleus, that core shot through with flashing veins of radiance, that ever-shifting shape of glory through the shroudings of shimmering, misty plumes, throbbing lacy opalescences, vaporous spiralings of prismatic phantom fires. Steady over it hung the seven little moons of amethyst, of saffron, of emerald and azure and silver, of rose of life and moon white. They poised themselves like a diadem – calm, serene, immobile – and down from them into the Dweller, piercing plumes and swirls and spirals, ran countless tiny strands, radiations, finer than the finest spun thread of spider’s web, gleaming filaments through which seemed to run – power – from the seven globes; like – yes, that was it – miniatures of the seven torrents of moon flame that poured through the septichromatic, high crystals in the Moon Pool’s chamber roof.

Swam out of the coruscating haze the – face!

Both of man and of woman it was – like some ancient, androgynous deity of Etruscan fanes long dust, and yet neither woman nor man; human and unhuman, seraphic and sinister, benign and malefic – and still no more of these four than is flame, which is beautiful whether it warms or devours, or wind whether it feathers the trees or shatters them, or the wave which is wondrous whether it caresses or kills.

Subtly, undefinably it was of our world and of one not ours. Its lineaments flowed from another sphere, took fleeting familiar form – and as swiftly withdrew whence they had come; something amorphous, unearthly – as of unknown unheeding, unseen gods rushing through the depths of star-hung space; and still of our own earth, with the very soul of earth peering out from it, caught within it – and in some – unholy – way debased.

It had eyes – eyes that were now only shadows darkening within its luminosity like veils falling, and falling, opening windows into the unknowable; deepening into softly glowing blue pools, blue as the Moon Pool itself; then flashing out, and this only when the – face – bore its most human resemblance, into twin stars large almost as the crown of little moons; and with that same baffling suggestion of peep-holes into a world untrodden, alien, perilous to man!

“Steady!” came Lakla’s voice, her body leaned against mine.

I gripped myself, my brain steadied, I looked again. And I saw that of body, at least body as we know it, the Shining One had none – nothing but the throbbing, pulsing core streaked with lightning veins of rainbows; and around this, never still, sheathing it, the swirling, glorious veilings of its hell and heaven born radiance.

So the Dweller stood – and gazed.

Then up toward us swept a reaching, questing spiral!

Under my hand Lakla’s shoulder quivered; dead-alive and their master vanished – I danced, flickered, within the rock; felt a swift sense of shrinking, of withdrawal; slice upon slice the carded walls of stone, of silvery waters, of elfin gardens slipped from me as cards are withdrawn from a pack, one by one – slipped, wheeled, flattened, and lengthened out as I passed through them and they passed from me.

Gasping, shaken, weak, I stood within the faceted oval chamber; arm still about the handmaiden’s white shoulder; Larry’s hand still clutching her girdle.

The roaring, impalpable gale from the cosmos was retreating to the outposts of space – was still; the intense, streaming, flooding radiance lessened – died.

“Now have you beheld,” said Lakla, “and well you trod the road. And now shall you hear, even as the Silent Ones have commanded, what the Shining One is – and how it came to be.”

The steps flashed back; the doorway into the chamber opened.

Larry as silent as I – we followed her through it.

— XXIX —

THE SHAPING
OF THE SHINING ONE

We reached what I knew to be Lakla’s own boudoir, if I may so call it. Smaller than any of the other chambers of the domed castle in which we had been, its intimacy was revealed not only by its faint fragrance but by its high mirrors of polished silver and various oddly wrought articles of the feminine toilet that lay here and there; things I afterward knew to be the work of the artisans of the Akka – and no mean metal workers were they. One of the window slits dropped almost to the floor, and at its base was a wide, comfortably cushioned seat commanding a view of the bridge and of the cavern ledge. To this the handmaiden beckoned us; sank upon it, drew Larry down beside her and motioned me to sit close to him.

“Now this,” she said, “is what the Silent Ones have commanded me to tell you two: To you Larry, that knowing you may weigh all things in your mind and answer as your spirit bids you a question that the Three will ask – and what that is I know not,” she murmured, “and I, they say, must answer, too – and it – frightens me!”

The great golden eyes widened; darkened with dread; she sighed, shook her head impatiently.

“Not like us, and never like us,” she spoke low, wonderingly, “the Silent Ones say were they. Nor were those from which they sprang like those from which we have come. Ancient, ancient beyond thought are the Taithu, the race of the Silent Ones. Far, far below this place where now we sit, close to earth heart itself were they born; and there they dwelt for time upon time, laya upon laya upon laya – with others, not like them, some of which have vanished time upon time agone, others that still dwell – below – in their – cradle.

“It is hard” – she hesitated – “hard to tell this – that slips through my mind – because I know so little that even as the Three told it to me it passed from me for lack of place to stand upon,” she went on, quaintly. “Something there was of time when earth and sun were but cold mists in the – the heavens – something of these mists drawing together, whirling, whirling, faster and faster – drawing as they whirled more and more of the mists – growing larger, growing warm – forming at last into the globes they are, with others spinning around the sun – something of regions within this globe where vast fire was prisoned and bursting forth tore and rent the young orb – of one such bursting forth that sent what you call moon flying out to company us and left behind those spaces whence we now dwell – and of – of life particles that here and there below grew into the race of the Silent Ones, and those others – but not the Akka which, like you, they say came from above – and all this I do not understand – do you, Goodwin?” she appealed to me.

I nodded – for what she had related so fragmentarily was in reality an excellent approach to the Chamberlain-Moulton theory of a coalescing nebula contracting into the sun and its planets.

Astonishing was the recognition of this theory. Even more so was the reference to the life particles, the idea of Arrhenius, the great Swede, of life starting on earth through the dropping of minute, life spores, propelled through space by the driving power of light and, encountering favorable environment here, developing through the vast ages into man and every other living thing we know. [10]

Nor was it incredible that in the ancient nebula that was the matrix of our solar system similar, or rather dissimilar, particles in all but the subtle essence we call life, might have become entangled and, resisting every cataclysm as they had resisted the absolute zero of outer space, found in these caverned spaces their proper environment to develop into the race of the Silent Ones and – only they could tell what else!

“They say,” the handmaiden’s voice was surer, “they say that in their – cradle – near earth’s heart they grew; grew untroubled by the turmoil and disorder which flayed the surface of this globe. And they say it was a place of light and that strength came to them from earth heart – strength greater than you and those from which you sprang ever derived from sun.

“At last, ancient, ancient beyond all thought, they say again, was this time – they began to know, to – to – realize – themselves. And wisdom came ever more swiftly. Up from their cradle, because they did not wish to dwell longer with those – others – they came and found this place.

“When all the face of earth was covered with waters in which lived only tiny, hungry things that knew naught save hunger and its satisfaction, they had attained wisdom that enabled them to make paths such as we have just traveled and to look out upon those waters! And laya upon laya thereafter, time upon time, they went upon the paths and watched the flood recede; saw great bare flats of steaming ooze appear on which crawled and splashed larger things which had grown from the tiny hungry ones; watched the flats rise higher and higher and green life begin to clothe them; saw mountains uplift and vanish.

“Ever the green life waxed and the things which crept and crawled grew greater and took ever different forms; until at last came a time when the steaming mists lightened and the things which had begun as little more than tiny hungry mouths were huge and monstrous, so huge that the tallest of my Akka would not have reached the knee of the smallest of them.

“But in none of these, in none, was there – realization – of themselves, say the Three; naught but hunger driving, always driving them to still its crying.

“So for time upon time the race of the Silent Ones took the paths no more, placing aside the half-thought that they had of making their way to earth face even as they had made their way from beside earth heart. They turned wholly to the seeking of wisdom – and after other time on time they attained that which killed even the faintest shadow of the half-thought. For they crept far within the mysteries of life and death, they mastered the illusion of space, they lifted the veils of creation and of its twin destruction, and they stripped the covering from the flaming jewel of truth – but when they had crept within those mysteries they bid me tell you, Goodwin, they found ever other mysteries veiling the way; and after they had uncovered the jewel of truth they found it to be a gem of infinite facets and therefore not wholly to be read before eternity’s unthinkable end!

“And for this they were glad – because now throughout eternity might they and theirs pursue knowledge over ways illimitable.

“They conquered light – light that sprang at their bidding from the nothingness that gives birth to all things and in which lie all things that are, have been and shall be; light that streamed through their bodies cleansing them of all dross; light that was food and drink; light that carried their vision afar or bore to them images out of space opening many windows through which they gazed down upon life on thousands upon thousands of the rushing worlds; light that was the flame of life itself and in which they bathed, ever renewing their own. They set radiant lamps within the stones, and of black light they wove the sheltering shadows and the shadows that slay.

“Arose from this people those Three – the Silent Ones. They led them all in wisdom so that in the Three grew – pride. And the Three built them this place in which we sit and set the Portal in its place and withdrew from their kind to go alone into the mysteries and to map alone the facets of Truth Jewel.

“Then there came the ancestors of the – Akka; not as they are now, and glowing but faintly within them the spark of – self-realization. And the Taithu seeing this spark did not slay them. But they took the ancient, long untrodden paths and looked forth once more upon earth face. Now on the land were vast forests and a chaos of green life. On the shores things scaled and fanged, fought and devoured each other, and in the green life moved bodies great and small that slew and ran from those that would slay.

“They searched for the passage through which the Akka had come and closed it. Then the Three took them and brought them here; and taught them and blew upon the spark until it burned ever stronger and in time they became much as they are now – my Akka.

“The Three took counsel after this and said – ‘We have strengthened life in these until it has become articulate; shall we not create life?’” Again she hesitated, her eyes rapt, dreaming. “The Three are speaking,” she murmured. “They have my tongue—”

And certainly, with an ease and rapidity as though she were but a voice through which minds far more facile, more powerful poured their thoughts, she spoke.

“Yea,” the golden voice was vibrant. “We said that what we would create should be of the spirit of life itself, speaking to us with the tongues of the far-flung stars, of the winds, of the waters, and of all upon and within these. Upon that universal matrix of matter, that mother of all things that you name the ether, we labored. Think not that her wondrous fertility is limited by what ye see on earth or what has been on earth from its beginning. Infinite, infinite are the forms the mother bears and countless are the energies that are part of her.

“By our wisdom we had fashioned many windows out of our abode and through them we stared into the faces of myriads of worlds, and upon them all were the children of ether even as the worlds themselves were her children.

“Watching we learned, and learning we formed that ye term the Dweller, which those without name – the Shining One. Within the Universal Mother we shaped it, to be a voice to tell us her secrets, a lamp to go before us lighting the mysteries. Out of the ether we fashioned it, giving it the soul of light that still ye know not nor perhaps ever may know, and with the essence of life that ye saw blossoming deep in the abyss and that is the pulse of earth heart we filled it. And we wrought with pain and with love, with yearning and with scorching pride and from our travail came the Shining One – our child!

“There is an energy beyond and above ether, a purposeful, sentient force that laps like an ocean the furthest-flung star, that transfuses all that ether bears, that sees and speaks and feels in us and in you, that is incorporate in beast and bird and reptile, in tree and grass and all living things, that sleeps in rock and stone, that finds sparkling tongue in jewel and star and in all dwellers within the firmament. And this ye call consciousness!

“We crowned the Shining One with the seven orbs of light which are the channels between it and the sentience we sought to make articulate, the portals through which flow its currents and so flowing, become choate, vocal, self-realizant within our child.

“But as we shaped, there passed some of the essence of our pride; in giving will we had given power, perforce, to exercise that will for good or for evil, to speak or to be silent, to tell us what we wished of that which poured into it through the seven orbs or to withhold that knowledge itself; and in forging it from the immortal energies we had endowed it with their indifference; open to all consciousness it held within it the pole of utter joy and the pole of utter woe with all the arc that lies between; all the ecstasies of the countless worlds and suns and all their sorrows; all that ye symbolize as gods and all ye symbolize as devils – not negativing each other, for there is no such thing as negation, but holding them together, balancing them, encompassing them, pole upon pole!”

So this was the explanation of the entwined emotions of joy and terror that had changed so appallingly Throckmartin’s face and the faces of all the Dweller’s slaves!

The handmaiden’s eyes grew bright, alert, again; the brooding passed from her face; the golden voice that had been so deep found its own familiar pitch.

“I listened while the Three spoke to you,” she said. “Now the shaping of the Shining One had been a long, long travail and time had flown over the outer world laya upon laya. For a space the Shining One was content to dwell here; to be fed with the foods of light: to open the eyes of the Three to mystery upon mystery and to read for them facet after facet of the gem of truth. Yet as the tides of consciousness flowed through it they left behind shadowings and echoes of their burdens; and the Shining One grew stronger, always stronger of itself within itself. Its will strengthened and now not always was it the will of the Three; and the pride that was woven in the making of it waxed, while the love for them that its creators had set within it waned.

“Not ignorant were the Taithu of the work of the Three. First there were a few, then more and more who coveted the Shining One and who would have had the Three share with them the knowledge it drew in for them. But the Silent Ones in their pride, would not.

“There came a time when its will was now all its own, and it rebelled, turning its gaze to the wider spaces beyond the Portal, offering itself to the many there who would serve it; tiring of the Three, their control and their abode.

“Now the Shining One has its limitations, even as we. Over water it can pass, through air and through fire; but pass it cannot, through rock or metal. So it sent a message – how I know not – to the Taithu who desired it, whispering to them the secret of the Portal. And when the time was ripe they opened the Portal and the Shining One passed through it to them; nor would it return to the Three though they commanded, and when they would have forced it they found that it had hived and hidden a knowledge that they could not overcome.

“Yet by their arts the Three could have shattered the seven shining orbs; but they would not because – they loved, it!

“Those to whom it had gone built for it that place I have shown you, and they bowed to it and drew wisdom from it. And ever they turned more and more from the ways in which the Taithu had walked – for it seemed that which came to the Shining One through the seven orbs had less and less of good and more and more of the power you call evil. Knowledge it gave and understanding, yes; but not that which, clear and serene, lights the paths of right wisdom; rather were they flares pointing the dark roads that lead to – to the ultimate evil!

“Not all of the race of the Three followed the counsel of the Shining One. There were many, many, who would have none of it nor of its power. So were the Taithu split; and to this place where there had been none, came hatred, fear and suspicion. Those who pursued the ancient ways went to the Three and pleaded with them to destroy their work – and they would not, for still they loved it.

“Stronger grew the Dweller and less and less did it lay before its worshippers – for now so they had become – the fruits of its knowledge; and it grew – restless – turning its gaze upon earth face even as it had turned it from the Three. It whispered to the Taithu to take again the paths and look out upon the world. Lo! above them was a great fertile land on which dwelt an unfamiliar race, skilled in arts, seeking and finding wisdom – mankind! Mighty builders were they; vast were their cities and huge their temples of stone.

“They called their lands Muria and they worshipped a god Thanaroa whom they imagined to be the maker of all things, dwelling far away. They worshipped as closer gods, not indifferent but to be prayed to and to be propitiated, the moon and the sun. Two kings they had, each with his council and his court. One was high priest to the moon and the other high priest to the sun.

“The mass of this people were black-haired, but the sun king and his nobles were ruddy with hair like mine; and the moon king and his followers were like Yolara – or Lugur. And this, the Three say, Goodwin, came about because for time upon time the law had been that whenever a ruddy-haired or ashen-tressed child was born of the black-haired it became dedicated at once to either sun god or moon god, later wedding and bearing children only to their own kind. Until at last from the black-haired came no more of the light-locked ones, but the ruddy ones, being stronger, still arose from them.”

— XXX —

THE BUILDING
OF THE MOON POOL

She paused, running her long fingers through her own bronze-flecked ringlets. Selective breeding this, with a vengeance, I thought; an ancient experiment in heredity which of course would in time result in the stamping out of the tendency to depart from type that lies in all organisms; resulting, obviously, at last, in three fixed forms of black-haired, ruddy-haired, and silver-haired – but this, with a shock of realization it came to me, was also an accurate description of the dark-polled ladala, their fair-haired rulers and of the golden-brown tressed Lakla!

How – questions began to stream through my mind; silenced by the handmaiden’s voice.

“Above, far, far above the abode of the Shining One,” she said, “was their greatest temple, holding the shrines both of sun and moon. All about it were other temples hidden behind mighty walls, each enclosing its own space and squared and ruled and standing within a shallow lake; the sacred city, the city of the gods of this land—”

“It is the Nan-Matal that she is describing,” I thought.

“Out upon all this looked the Taithu who were now but the servants of the Shining One as it had been the messenger of the Three,” she went on. “When they returned the Shining One spoke to them, promising them dominion over all that they had seen, yea, under it dominion of all earth itself and later perhaps of other earths!

“In the Shining One had grown craft, cunning; knowledge to gain that which it desired. Therefore it told its Taithu – and mayhap told them truth – that not yet was it time for them to go forth; that slowly must they pass into that outer world, for they had sprung from heart of earth and even it lacked power to swirl unaided into and through the above. Then it counseled them, instructing them what to do. They hollowed the chamber wherein first I saw you, cutting their way to it that path down which from it you sped.

“It revealed to them that the force that is within moon flame is kin to the force that is within it, for the chamber of its birth was the chamber too of moon birth and into it went the subtle essence and powers that flow in that earth child: and it taught them how to make that which fills what you call the Moon Pool whose opening is close behind its Veil hanging upon the gleaming cliffs.

“When this was done it taught them how to make and how to place the seven lights through which moon flame streams into Moon Pool – the seven lights that are kin to its own seven orbs even as its fires are kin to moon fires – and which would open for it a path that it could tread. And all this the Taithu did, working so secretly that neither those of their race whose faces were set against the Shining One nor the busy men above know aught of it.

“When it was done they moved up the path, clustering within the Moon Pool Chamber. Moon flame streamed through the seven globes, poured down upon the pool; they saw mists arise, embrace, and become one with the moon flame – and then up through Moon Pool, shaping itself within the mists of light, whirling, radiant – the Shining One!

“Almost free, almost loosed upon the world it coveted!

“Again it counseled them, and they pierced the passage whose portal you found first; set the fires within its stones, and revealing themselves to the moon king and his priests spake to them even as the Shining One had instructed.

“Now was the moon king filled with fear when he looked upon the Taithu, shrouded with protecting mists of light in Moon Pool Chamber, and heard their words. Yet, being crafty, he thought of the power that would be his if he heeded and how quickly the strength of the sun king would dwindle. So he and his made a pact with the Shining One’s messengers.

“When next the moon was round and poured its flames down upon Moon Pool, the Taithu gathered there again, watched the child of the Three take shape within the pillars, speed away – and out! They heard a mighty shouting, a tumult of terror, of awe and of worship; a silence; a vast sighing – and they waited, wrapped in their mists of light, for they feared to follow nor were they near the paths that would have enabled them to look without.

“Another tumult – and back came the Shining One, murmuring with joy, pulsing, triumphant, and clasped within its vapors a man and woman, ruddy-haired, golden-eyed, in whose faces rapture and horror lay side by side – gloriously, hideously. And still holding them it danced above the Moon Pool and – sank!

“Now must I be brief. Lat after lat the Shining One went forth, returning with its sacrifices. And stronger after each it grew – and gayer and more cruel. Ever when it passed with its prey toward the pool, the Taithu who watched felt a swift, strong intoxication, a drunkenness of spirit, streaming from it to them. And the Shining One forgot what it had promised them of dominion – and in this new evil delight they too forgot.

“The outer land was torn with hatred and open strife. The moon king and his kind, through the guidance of the evil Taithu and the favor of the Shining One, had become powerful and the sun king and his were darkened. And the moon priests preached that the child of the Three was the moon god itself come to dwell with them.

“Now vast tides arose and when they withdrew they took with them great portions of this country. And the land itself began to sink. Then said the moon king that the moon had called to ocean to destroy because wroth that another than he was worshipped. The people believed and there was slaughter. When it was over there was no more a sun king nor any of the ruddy-haired folk; slain were they, slain down to the babe at breast.

“But still the tides swept higher; still dwindled the land!

“As it shrank multitudes of the fleeing people were led through Moon Pool Chamber and carried here. They were what now are called the ladala, and they were given place and set to work; and they thrived. Came many of the fair-haired; and they were given dwellings. They sat beside the evil Taithu; they became drunk even as they with the dancing of the Shining One; they learned – not all; only a little part but little enough – of their arts. And ever the Shining One danced more gaily out there within the black amphitheater; grew ever stronger – and ever the hordes of its slaves behind the Veil increased.

“Nor did the Taithu who clung to the old ways check this – they could not. By the sinking of the land above, their own spaces were imperiled. All of their strength and all of their wisdom it took to keep this land from perishing; nor had they help from those others mad for the poison of the Shining One; and they had no time to deal with them nor the earth race with whom they had foregathered.

“At last came a slow, vast flood. It rolled even to the bases of the walled islets of the city of the gods – and within these now were all that were left of my people on earth face.

“I am of those people,” she paused, looking at me proudly, “one of the daughters of the sun king whose seed is still alive in the ladala!”

As Larry opened his mouth to speak she waved a silencing hand.

“This tide did not recede,” she went on. “And after a time the remnant, the moon king leading them, joined those who had already fled below. The rocks became still, the quakings ceased, and now those Ancient Ones who had been laboring could take breath. And anger grew within them as they looked upon the work of their evil kin. Again they sought the Three – and the Three now knew what they had done and their pride was humbled. They would not slay the Shining One themselves, for still they loved it; but they instructed these others how to undo their work; how also they might destroy the evil Taithu were it necessary.

“Armed with the wisdom of the Three they went forth – but now the Shining One was strong indeed. They could not slay it!

“Nay, it knew and was prepared; they could not even pass beyond its Veil nor seal its abode. Ah, strong, strong, mighty of will, full of craft and cunning had the Shining One become. So they turned upon their kind who had gone astray and made them perish, to the last. The Shining One came not to the aid of its servants – though they called; for within its will was the thought that they were of no further use to it; that it would rest awhile and dance with them – who had so little of the power and wisdom of its Taithu and therefore no reins upon it. And while this was happening black-haired and fair-haired ran and hid and were but shaking vessels of terror.

“The Ancient Ones took counsel. This was their decision; that they would go from the gardens before the Silver Waters – leaving, since they could not kill it, the Shining One with its worshippers. They sealed the mouth of the passage that leads to the Moon Pool Chamber and they changed the face of the cliff so that none might tell where it had been. But the passage itself they left open – having foreknowledge I think, of a thing that was to come to pass in the far future – perhaps it was your journey here, my Larry and Goodwin – verily I think so. And they destroyed all the ways save that which we three trod to the Dweller’s abode.

“For the last time they went to the Three – to pass sentence upon them. This was the doom – that here they should remain, alone, among the Akka, served by them, until that time dawned when they would have will to destroy the evil they had created – and even now – loved; nor might they seek death, nor follow their judges until this had come to pass. This was the doom they put upon the Three for the wickedness that had sprung from their pride, and they strengthened it with their arts that it might not be broken.

“Then they passed – to a far land they had chosen where the Shining One could not go, beyond the Black Precipices of Doul, a green land—”

“Ireland!” interrupted Larry, with conviction, “I knew it.”

“Since then time upon time had passed,” she went on, unheeding. “The people called this place Muria after their sunken land and soon they forgot where had been the passage the Taithu had sealed. The moon king became the Voice of the Dweller and always with the Voice is a woman of the moon king’s kin who is its priestess.

“And many have been the journeys upward of the Shining One, through the Moon Pool – returning with still others in its coils.

“And now again has it grown restless, longing for the wider spaces. It has spoken to Yolara and to Lugur even as it did to the dead Taithu, promising them dominion. And it has grown stronger, drawing to itself power to go far on the moon stream where it will. Thus was it able to seize your friend, Goodwin, and Olaf’s wife and babe – and many more. Yolara and Lugur plan to open way to earth face; to depart with their court and under the Shining One grasp the world!

“And this is the tale the Silent Ones bade me tell you – and it is done.”

Breathlessly I had listened to the stupendous epic of a long-lost world. Now I found speech to voice the question ever with me, the thing that lay as close to my heart as did the welfare of Larry, indeed the whole object of my quest – the fate of Throckmartin and those who had passed with him into the Dweller’s lair; yes, and of Olaf’s wife, too.

“Lakla,” I said, “the friend who drew me here and those he loved who went before him – can we not save them?”

“The Three say no, Goodwin.” There was again in her eyes the pity with which she had looked upon Olaf. “The Shining One – feeds – upon the flame of life itself, setting in its place its own fires and its own will. Its slaves are only shells through which it gleams. Death, say the Three, is the best that can come to them; yet will that be a boon great indeed.”

“But they have souls, mavourneen,” Larry said to her. “And they’re alive still – in a way. Anyhow, their souls have not gone from them.”

I caught a hope from his words – skeptic though I am – holding that the existence of soul has never been proved by dependable laboratory methods – for they recalled to me that when I had seen Throckmartin, Edith had been close beside him.

“It was days after his wife was taken, that the Dweller seized Throckmartin,” I cried. “How, if their wills, their life, were indeed gone, how did they find each other mid all that horde? How did they come together in the Dweller’s lair?”

“I do not know,” she answered, slowly. “You say they loved – and it is true that love is stronger even than death!”

“One thing I don’t understand” – this was Larry again – “is why a girl like you keeps coming out of the black-haired crowd; so frequently and one might say, so regularly, Lakla. Aren’t there ever any red-headed boys – and if they are what becomes of them?”

“That, Larry, I cannot answer,” she said, very frankly. “There was a pact of some kind; how made or by whom I know not. But for long the Murians feared the return of the Taithu and greatly they feared the Three. Even the Shining One feared those who had created it – for a time; and not even now is it eager to face them – that I know. Nor are Yolara and Lugur so sure. It may be that the Three commanded it: but how or why I know not. I only know that it is true – for here am I and from where else would I have come?”

“From Ireland,” said Larry O’Keefe, promptly. “And that’s where you’re going. For ’tis no place for a girl like you to have been brought up – Lakla; what with people like frogs, and a half-god three quarters devil, and red oceans, an’ the only Irish things yourself and the Silent Ones up there, bless their hearts. It’s no place for ye, and by the soul of St. Patrick, it’s out of it soon ye’ll be gettin’!”

Larry! Larry! If it had but been true – and I could see Lakla and you beside me now!

— XXXI —

LARRY AND THE FROG-MEN

Long had been her tale in the telling, and too long, perhaps, have I been in the repeating – but not every day are the mists rolled away to reveal undreamed secrets of earth-youth. And I have set it down here, adding nothing, taking nothing from it; translating liberally, it is true, but constantly striving, while putting it into idea-forms and phraseology to be readily understood by my readers, to keep accurately to the spirit. And this, I must repeat, I have done throughout my narrative, wherever it has been necessary to record conversation with the Murians.

Rising, I found I was painfully stiff – as muscle-bound as though I had actually trudged many miles. Larry, imitating me, gave an involuntary groan.

“Faith, mavourneen,” he said to Lakla, relapsing unconsciously into English, “your roads would never wear out shoe-leather, but they’ve got their kick, just the same!”

She understood our plight, if not his words; gave a soft little cry of mingled pity and self-reproach; forced us back upon the cushions.

“Oh, but I’m sorry!” mourned Lakla, leaning over us. “I had forgotten – for those new to it the way is a weary one, indeed—”

She ran to the doorway, whistled a clear high note down the passage. Through the hangings came two of the frog-men. She spoke to them rapidly. They crouched toward us, what certainly was meant for an amiable grin wrinkling the grotesque muzzles, baring the glistening rows of needle-teeth. And while I watched them with the fascination that they never lost for me, the monsters calmly swung one arm around our knees, lifted us up like babies – and as calmly started to walk away with us!

“Put me down! Put me down, I say!” The O’Keefe’s voice was both outraged and angry; squinting around I saw him struggling violently to get to his feet. The Akka only held him tighter, booming comfortingly, peering down into his flushed face inquiringly.

“But, Larry – darlin’!” – Lakla’s tones were – well, maternally surprised – “you’re stiff and sore, and Kra can carry you quite easily.”

“I won’t be carried!” sputtered the O’Keefe. “Damn it, Goodwin, there are such things as the unities even here, an’ for a lieutenant of the Royal Air Force to be picked up an’ carted around like a – like a bundle of rags – it’s not discipline! Put me down, ye omadhaun, or I’ll poke ye in the snout!” he shouted to his bearer – who only boomed gently, and stared at the handmaiden, plainly for further instructions.

“But, Larry – dear!” – Lakla was plainly distressed – “it will hurt you to walk; and I don’t want you to hurt, Larry – darlin’!”

“Holy shade of St. Patrick!” moaned Larry; again he made a mighty effort to tear himself from the frog-man’s grip; gave up with a groan. “Listen, alanna!” he said plaintively. “When we get to Ireland, you and I, we won’t have anybody to pick us up and carry us about every time we get a bit tired. And it’s getting me in bad habits you are!”

“Oh, yes, we will, Larry!” cried the handmaiden, “because many, oh, many, of my Akka will go with us!”

“Will you tell this – boob! – to put me down!” gritted the now thoroughly aroused O’Keefe. I couldn’t help laughing; he glared at me.

“Bo-oo-ob?” exclaimed Lakla.

“Yes, boo-oo-ob!” said O’Keefe, “an’ I have no desire to explain the word in my present position, light of my soul!”

The handmaiden sighed, plainly dejected. But she spoke again to the Akka, who gently lowered the O’Keefe to the floor.

“I don’t understand,” she said hopelessly, “if you want to walk, why, of course, you shall, Larry.” She turned to me.

“Do you?” she asked.

“I do not,” I said firmly.

“Well, then,” murmured Lakla, “go you, Larry and Goodwin, with Kra and Gulk, and let them minister to you. After, sleep a little – for not soon will Rador and Olaf return. And let me feel your lips before you go, Larry – darlin’!” She covered his eyes caressingly with her soft little palms; pushed him away.

“Now go,” said Lakla, “and rest!”

Unashamed I lay back against the horny chest of Gulk; and with a smile noticed that Larry, even if he had rebelled at being carried, did not disdain the support of Kra’s shining, black-scaled arm which, slipping around his waist, half-lifted him along.

They parted a hanging and dropped us softly down beside a little pool, sparkling with the clear water that had heretofore been brought us in the wide basins. Then they began to undress us. And at this point the O’Keefe gave up.

“Whatever they’re going to do we can’t stop ’em, Doc!” he moaned. “Anyway, I feel as though I’ve been pulled through a knothole, and I don’t care – I don’t care – as the song says.”

When we were stripped we were lowered gently into the water. But not long did the Akka let us splash about the shallow basin. They lifted us out, and from jars began deftly to anoint and rub us with aromatic unguents.

I think that in all the medley of grotesque, of tragic, of baffling, strange and perilous experiences in that underground world none was more bizarre than this – valeting. I began to laugh, Larry joined me, and then Kra and Gulk joined in our merriment with deep batrachian cachinnations and gruntings. Then, having finished appareling us and still chuckling, the two touched our arms and led us out, into a room whose circular sides were ringed with soft divans. Still smiling, I sank at once into sleep.

How long I slumbered I do not know. A low and thunderous booming coming through the deep window slit, reverberated through the room and awakened me. Larry yawned; arose briskly.

“Sounds as though the bass drums of every jazz band in New York were serenading us!” he observed. Simultaneously we sprang to the window; peered through.

We were a little above the level of the bridge, and its full length was plain before us. Thousands upon thousands of the Akka were crowding upon it, and far away other hordes filled like a glittering thicket both sides of the cavern ledge’s crescent strand. On black scale and orange scale the crimson light fell, picking them off in little flickering points.

Upon the platform from which sprang the smaller span over the abyss were Lakla, Olaf, and Rador; the handmaiden clearly acting as interpreter between them and the giant she had called Nak, the Frog King.

“Come on!” shouted Larry.

Out of the open portal we ran; over the World Heart Bridge – and straight into the group.

“Oh!” cried Lakla, “I didn’t want you to wake up so soon, Larry – darlin’!”

“See here, mavourneen!” Indignation thrilled in the Irishman’s voice. “I’m not going to be done up with baby-ribbons and laid away in a cradle for safe-keeping while a fight is on; don’t think it. Why didn’t you call me?”

“You needed rest!” There was indomitable determination in the handmaiden’s tones, the eternal maternal shining defiant from her eyes. “You were tired and you hurt! You shouldn’t have got up!”

“Needed the rest!” groaned Larry. “Look here, Lakla, what do you think I am?”

“You’re all I have,” said that maiden firmly, “and I’m going to take care of you, Larry – darlin’! Don’t you ever think anything else.”

“Well, pulse of my heart, considering my delicate health and general fragility, would it hurt me, do you think, to be told what’s going on?” he asked.

“Not at all, Larry!” answered the handmaiden serenely. “Yolara went through the Portal. She was very, very angry—”

“She was all the devil’s woman that she is!” rumbled Olaf.

“Rador met the messenger,” went on the Golden Girl calmly. “The ladala are ready to rise when Lugur and Yolara lead their hosts against us. They will strike at those left behind. And in the meantime we shall have disposed my Akka to meet Yolara’s men. And on that disposal we must all take counsel, you, Larry, and Rador, Olaf and Goodwin and Nak, the ruler of the Akka.”

“Did the messenger give any idea when Yolara expects to make her little call?” asked Larry.

“Yes,” she answered. “They prepare, and we may expect them in—” She gave the equivalent of about thirty-six hours of our time.

“But, Lakla,” I said, the doubt that I had long been holding finding voice, “should the Shining One come – with its slaves – are the Three strong enough to cope with it?”

There was troubled doubt in her own eyes.

“I do not know,” she said at last, frankly. “You have heard their story. What they promise is that they will help. I do not know – any more than do you, Goodwin!”

I looked up at the dome beneath which I knew the dread Trinity stared forth; even down upon us. And despite the awe, the assurance, I had felt when I stood before them I, too, doubted.

“Well,” said Larry, “you and I, uncle,” he turned to Rador, “and Olaf here had better decide just what part of the battle we’ll lead—”

“Lead!” the handmaiden was appalled. “You lead, Larry? Why you are to stay with Goodwin and with me – up there, there we can watch.”

“Heart’s beloved,” O’Keefe was stern indeed. “A thousand times I’ve looked Death straight in the face, peered into his eyes. Yes, and with ten thousand feet of space under me an’ bursting shells tickling the ribs of the boat I was in. An’ d’ye think I’ll sit now on the grandstand an’ watch while a game like this is being pulled? Ye don’t know your future husband, soul of my delight!”

And so we started toward the golden opening, squads of the frog-men following us soldierly and disappearing about the huge structure. Nor did we stop until we came to the handmaiden’s boudoir. There we seated ourselves.

“Now,” said Larry, “two things I want to know. First – how many can Yolara muster against us; second, how many of these Akka have we to meet them?”

Rador gave our equivalent for eighty thousand men as the force Yolara could muster without stripping her city. Against this force, it appeared, we could count, roughly, upon two hundred thousand of the Akka.

“And they’re some fighters!” exclaimed Larry. “Hell, with odds like that what’re you worrying about? It’s over before it’s begun.”

“But, Larree,” objected Rador to this, “you forget that the nobles will have the Keth – and other things; also that the soldiers have fought against the Akka before and will be shielded very well from their spears and clubs – and that their blades and javelins can bite through the scales of Nak’s warriors. They have many things—”

“Uncle,” interjected O’Keefe, “one thing they have is your nerve. Why, we’re more than two to one. And take it from me—”

Without warning dropped the tragedy!

— XXXII —

“YOUR LOVE; YOUR LIVES;
YOUR SOULS!”

Lakla had taken no part in the talk since we had reached her bower. She had seated herself close to the O’Keefe. Glancing at her I had seen steal over her face that brooding, listening look that was hers whenever in that mysterious communion with the Three. It vanished; swiftly she arose; interrupted the Irishman without ceremony.

“Larry darlin’,” said the handmaiden. “The Silent Ones summon us!”

“When do we go?” I asked; Larry’s face grew bright with interest.

“The time is now,” she said – and hesitated. “Larry dear, put your arms about me,” she faltered, “for there is something cold that catches at my heart – and I am afraid.”

At his exclamation she gathered herself together; gave a shaky little laugh.

“It’s because I love you so that fear has power to plague me,” she told him.

Without another word he bent and kissed her; in silence we passed on, his arm still about her girdled waist, golden head and black close together. Soon we stood before the crimson slab that was the door to the sanctuary of the Silent Ones. She poised uncertainly before it; then with a defiant arching of the proud little head that sent all the bronze-flecked curls flying, she pressed. It slipped aside and once more the opalescence gushed out, flooding all about us.

Dazzled as before, I followed through the lambent cascades pouring from the high, carved walls; paused, and my eyes clearing, looked up – straight into the faces of the Three. The angled orbs centered upon the handmaiden; softened as I had seen them do when first we had faced them. She smiled up; seemed to listen.

“Come closer,” she commanded, “close to the feet of the Silent Ones.”

We moved, pausing at the very base of the dais. The sparkling mists thinned; the great heads bent slightly over us; through the veils I caught a glimpse of huge columnar necks, enormous shoulders covered with draperies as of pale-blue fire.

I came back to attention with a start, for Lakla was answering a question only heard by her, and, answering it aloud, I perceived for our benefit; for whatever was the mode of communication between those whose handmaiden she was, and her, it was clearly independent of speech.

“He has been told,” she said, “even as you commanded.”

Did I see a shadow of pain flit across the flickering eyes? Wondering, I glanced at Lakla’s face and there was a dawn of foreboding and bewilderment. For a little she held her listening attitude; then the gaze of the Three left her; focused upon the O’Keefe.

“Thus speak the Silent Ones – through Lakla, their handmaiden,” the golden voice was like low trumpet notes. “At the threshold of doom is that world of yours above. Yea, even the doom, Goodwin, that ye dreamed and the shadow of which, looking into your mind they see, say the Three. For not upon earth and never upon earth can man find means to destroy the Shining One.”

She listened again – and the foreboding deepened to an amazed fear.

“They say, the Silent Ones,” she went on, “that they know not whether even they have power to destroy. Energies we know nothing of entered into its shaping and are part of it; and still other energies it has gathered to itself” – she paused; a shadow of puzzlement crept into her voice “and other energies still, forces that ye do know and symbolize by certain names – hatred and pride and lust and many others which are forces real as that hidden in the Keth; and among them – fear, which weakens all those others—” Again she paused.

“But within it is nothing of that greatest of all, that which can make powerless all the evil others, that which we call – love,” she ended softly.

“I’d like to be the one to put a little more fear in the beast,” whispered Larry to me, grimly in our own English. The three weird heads bent, ever so slightly – and I gasped, and Larry grew a little white as Lakla nodded—

“They say, Larry,” she said, “that there you touch one side of the heart of the matter – for it is through the way of fear the Silent Ones hope to strike at the very life of the Shining One!”

The visage Larry turned to me was eloquent of wonder; and mine reflected it – for what really were this Three to whom our minds were but open pages, so easily read? Not long could we conjecture; Lakla broke the little silence.

“This, they say, is what is to happen. First will come upon us Lugur and Yolara with all their host. Because of fear the Shining One will lurk behind within its lair; for despite all, the Dweller does dread the Three, and only them. With this host the Voice and the priestess will strive to conquer. And if they do, then will they be strong enough, too, to destroy us all. For if they take the abode they banish from the Dweller all fear and sound the end of the Three.

“Then will the Shining One be all free indeed; free to go out into the world, free to do there as it wills!

“But if they do not conquer – and the Shining One comes not to their aid, abandoning them even as it abandoned its own Taithu – then will the Three be loosed from a part of their doom, and they will go through the Portal, seek the Shining One beyond the Veil, and, piercing it through fear’s opening, destroy it.”

“That’s quite clear,” murmured the O’Keefe in my ear. “Weaken the morale – then smash. I’ve seen it happen a dozen times in Europe. While they’ve got their nerve there’s not a thing you can do; get their nerve – and not a thing can they do. And yet in both cases they’re the same men.”

Lakla had been listening again. She turned, thrust out hands to Larry, a wild hope in her eyes – and yet a hope half shamed.

“They say,” she cried, “that they give us choice. Remembering that your world doom hangs in the balance, we have choice – choice to stay and help fight Yolara’s armies – and they say they look not lightly on that help. Or choice to go – and if so be you choose the latter, then will they show another way that leads into your world!”

A flush had crept over the O’Keefe’s face as she was speaking. He took her hands and looked long into the golden eyes; glancing up I saw the Trinity were watching them intently – imperturbably.

“What do you say, mavourneen?” asked Larry gently. The handmaiden hung her head; trembled.

“Your words shall be mine, O one I love,” she whispered. “So going or staying, I am beside you.”

“And you, Goodwin?” he turned to me. I shrugged my shoulders – after all I had no one to care.

“It’s up to you, Larry,” I remarked, deliberately choosing his own phraseology.

The O’Keefe straightened, squared his shoulders, gazed straight into the flame-flickering eyes.

“We stick!” he said briefly.

Shamefacedly I recall now that at the time I thought this colloquialism not only irreverent, but in somewhat bad taste. I am glad to say I was alone in that bit of weakness. The face that Lakla turned to Larry was radiant with love, and although the shamed hope had vanished from the sweet eyes, they were shining with adoring pride. And the marble visages of the Three softened, and the little flames died down.

“Wait,” said Lakla, “there is one other thing they say we must answer before they will hold us to that promise – wait—”

She listened, and then her face grew white – white as those of the Three themselves; the glorious eyes widened, stark terror filling them; the whole lithe body of her shook like a reed in the wind.

“Not that!” she cried out to the Three. “Oh, not that! Not Larry – let me go even as you will – but not him!” She threw up frantic hands to the woman-being of the Trinity. “Let me bear it alone,” she wailed. “Alone – mother! Mother!”

The Three bent their heads toward her, their faces pitiful, and from the eyes of the woman One rolled – tears! Larry leaped to Lakla’s side.

“Mavourneen!” he cried. “Sweetheart, what have they said to you?”

He glared up at the Silent Ones, his hand twitching toward the high-hung pistol holster.

The handmaiden swung to him; threw white arms around his neck; held her head upon his heart until her sobbing ceased.

“This they – say – the Silent Ones,” she gasped and then all the courage of her came back. “O heart of mine!” she whispered to Larry, gazing deep into his eyes, his anxious face cupped between her white palms. “This they say – that should the Shining One come to succor Yolara and Lugur, should it conquer its fear – and – do this – then is there but one way left to destroy it – and to save your world.”

She swayed; he gripped her tightly.

“But one way – you and I must go – together – into its embrace! Yea, we must pass within it – loving each other, loving the world, realizing to the full all that we sacrifice and sacrificing all, our love, our lives, perhaps even that you call soul, O loved one; must give ourselves all to the Shining One – gladly, freely, our love for each other flaming high within us – that this curse shall pass away! For if we do this, pledge the Three, then shall that power of love we carry into it weaken for a time all that evil which the Shining One has become – and in that time the Three can strike and slay!”

The blood rushed from my heart; scientist that I am, essentially, my reason rejected any such solution as this of the activities of the Dweller. Was it not, the thought flashed, a propitiation by the Three out of their own weakness – and as it flashed I looked up to see their eyes, full of sorrow, on mine – and knew they read the thought. Then into the whirling vortex of my mind came steadying reflections – of history changed by the power of hate, of passion, of ambition, and most of all, by love. Was there not actual dynamic energy in these things – was there not a Son of Man who hung upon a cross on Calvary?

“Dear love o’ mine,” said the O’Keefe quietly, “is it in your heart to say yes to this?”

“Larry,” she spoke low, “what is in your heart is in mine; but I did so want to go with you, to live with you – to – to bear you children, Larry – and to see the sun.”

My eyes were wet; dimly through them I saw his gaze on me.

“If the world is at stake,” he whispered, “why of course there’s only one thing to do. God knows I never was afraid when I was fighting up there – and many a better man than me has gone West with shell and bullet for the same idea; but these things aren’t shell and bullet – but I hadn’t Lakla then – and it’s the damned doubt I have behind it all.”

He turned to the Three – and did I in their poise sense a rigidity, an anxiety that sat upon them as alienly as would divinity upon men?

“Tell me this, Silent Ones,” he cried. “If we do this, Lakla and I, is it sure you are that you can slay the – Thing, and save my world? Is it sure you are?”

For the first and the last time, I heard the voice of the Silent Ones. It was the man-being at the right who spoke.

“We are sure,” the tones rolled out like deepest organ notes, shaking, vibrating, assailing the ears as strangely as their appearance struck the eyes. Another moment the O’Keefe stared at them. Once more he squared his shoulders; lifted Lakla’s chin and smiled into her eyes.

“We stick!” he said again, nodding to the Three.

Over the visages of the Trinity fell benignity that was – awesome; the tiny flames in the jet orbs vanished, leaving them wells in which brimmed serenity, hope – an extraordinary joyfulness. The woman sat upright, tender gaze fixed upon the man and girl. Her great shoulders raised as though she had lifted her arms and had drawn to her those others. The three faces pressed together for a fleeting moment; raised again. The woman bent forward – and as she did so, Lakla and Larry, as though drawn by some outer force, were swept upon the dais.

Out from the sparkling mist stretched two hands, enormously long, six-fingered, thumbless, a faint tracery of golden scales upon their white backs, utterly unhuman and still in some strange way beautiful, radiating power and – all womanly!

They stretched forth; they touched the bent heads of Lakla and the O’Keefe; caressed them, drew them together, softly stroked them – lovingly, with more than a touch of benediction. And withdrew!

The sparkling mists rolled up once more, hiding the Silent Ones. As silently as once before we had gone we passed out of the place of light, beyond the crimson stone, back to the handmaiden’s chamber.

Only once on our way did Larry speak.

“Cheer up, darlin’,” he said to her, “it’s a long way yet before the finish. An’ are you thinking that Lugur and Yolara are going to pull this thing off? Are you?”

The handmaiden only looked at him, eyes love and sorrow filled.

“They are!” said Larry. “They are! Like HELL they are!”

— XXXIII —

THE MEETING OF TITANS

It is not my intention, nor is it possible no matter how interesting to me, to set down ad seriatim the happenings of the next twelve hours. But a few will not be denied recital.

O’Keefe regained cheerfulness.

“After all, Doc,” he said to me, “it’s a beautiful scrap we’re going to have. At the worst the worst is no more than the leprechaun warned about. I would have told the Taitha De about the banshee raid he promised me; but I was a bit taken off my feet at the time. The old girl an’ all the clan’ll be along, said the little green man, an’ I bet the Three will be damned glad of it, take it from me.”

Lakla, shining-eyed and half fearful too:

“I have other tidings that I am afraid will please you little, Larry – darlin’. The Silent Ones say that you must not go into battle yourself. You must stay here with me, and with Goodwin – for if – if – the Shining One does come, then must we be here to meet it. And you might not be, you know, Larry, if you fight,” she said, looking shyly up at him from under the long lashes.

The O’Keefe’s jaw dropped.

“That’s about the hardest yet,” he answered slowly. “Still – I see their point; the lamb corralled for the altar has no right to stray out among the lions,” he added grimly. “Don’t worry, sweet,” he told her. “As long as I’ve sat in the game I’ll stick to the rules.”

Olaf took fierce joy in the coming fray. “The Norns spin close to the end of this web,” he rumbled. “Ja! And the threads of Lugur and the Heks woman are between their fingers for the breaking! Thor will be with me, and I have fashioned me a hammer in glory of Thor.” In his hand was an enormous mace of black metal, fully five feet long, crowned with a massive head.

I pass to the twelve hours’ closing.

At the end of the coria road where the giant fernland met the edge of the cavern’s ruby floor, hundreds of the Akka were stationed in ambush, armed with their spears tipped with the rotting death and their nail-studded, metal-headed clubs. These were to attack when the Murians debauched from the corials. We had little hope of doing more here than effect some attrition of Yolara’s hosts, for at this place the captains of the Shining One could wield the Keth and their other uncanny weapons freely. We had learned, too, that every forge and artisan had been put to work to make an armor Marakinoff had devised to withstand the natural battle equipment of the frog-people – and both Larry and I had a disquieting faith in the Russian’s ingenuity.

At any rate the numbers against us would be lessened.

Next, under the direction of the frog-king, levies commanded by subsidiary chieftains had completed rows of rough walls along the probable route of the Murians through the cavern. These afforded the Akka a fair protection behind which they could hurl their darts and spears – curiously enough they had never developed the bow as a weapon.

At the opening of the cavern a strong barricade stretched almost to the two ends of the crescent strand; almost, I say, because there had not been time to build it entirely across the mouth.

And from edge to edge of the titanic bridge, from where it sprang outward at the shore of the Crimson Sea to a hundred feet away from the golden door of the abode, barrier after barrier was piled.

Behind the wall defending the mouth of the cavern, waited other thousands of the Akka. At each end of the unfinished barricade they were mustered thickly, and at right and left of the crescent where their forest began, more legions were assembled to make way up to the ledge as opportunity offered.

Rank upon rank they manned the bridge barriers; they swarmed over the pinnacles and in the hollows of the island’s ragged outer lip; the domed castle was a hive of them, if I may mix my metaphors – and the rocks and gardens that surrounded the abode glittered with them.

“Now,” said the handmaiden, “there’s nothing else we can do – save wait.”

She led us out through her bower and up the little path that ran to the embrasure.

Through the quiet came a sound, a sighing, a half-mournful whispering that beat about us and fled away.

“They come!” cried Lakla, the light of battle in her eyes. Larry drew her to him, raised her in his arms, kissed her.

“A woman!” acclaimed the O’Keefe. “A real woman – and mine!”

With the cry of the Portal there was movement among the Akka, the glint of moving spears, flash of metal-tipped clubs, rattle of horny spurs, rumblings of battle-cries.

And we waited – waited it seemed interminably, gaze fastened upon the low wall across the cavern mouth. Suddenly I remembered the crystal through which I had peered when the hidden assassins had crept upon us. Mentioning it to Lakla, she gave a little cry of vexation, a command to her attendant; and not long that faithful if unusual lady had returned with a tray of the glasses. Raising mine, I saw the lines furthest away leap into sudden activity. Spurred warrior after warrior leaped upon the barricade and over it. Flashes of intense, green light, mingled with gleams like lightning strokes of concentrated moon rays, sprang from behind the wall – sprang and struck and burned upon the scales of the batrachians.

“They come!” whispered Lakla.

At the far ends of the crescent a terrific milling had begun. Here it was plain the Akka were holding. Faintly, for the distance was great, I could see fresh force upon force rush up and take the places of those who had fallen.

Over each of these ends, and along the whole line of the barricade a mist of dancing, diamonded atoms began to rise; sparking, coruscating points of diamond dust that darted and danced.

What had once been Lakla’s guardians – dancing now in the nothingness!

“God, but it’s hard to stay here like this!” groaned the O’Keefe; Olaf’s teeth were bared, the lips drawn back in such a fighting grin as his ancestors berserk on their raven ships must have borne; Rador was livid with rage; the handmaiden’s nostrils flaring wide, all her wrathful soul in her eyes.

Suddenly, while we looked, the rocky wall which the Akka had built at the cavern mouth – was not! It vanished, as though an unseen, unbelievably gigantic hand had with the lightning’s speed swept it away. And with it vanished, too, long lines of the great amphibians close behind it.

Then down upon the ledge, dropping into the Crimson Sea, sending up geysers of ruby spray, dashing on the bridge, crushing the frog-men, fell a shower of stone, mingled with distorted shapes and fragments whose scales still flashed meteoric as they hurled from above.

“That which makes things fall upward,” hissed Olaf. “That which I saw in the garden of Lugur!”

The fiendish agency of destruction which Marakinoff had revealed to Larry; the force that cut off gravitation and sent all things within its range racing outward into space!

And now over the debris upon the ledge, striking with long sword and daggers, here and there a captain flashing the green ray, moving on in ordered squares, came the soldiers of the Shining One. Nearer and nearer the verge of the ledge they pushed Nak’s warriors. Leaping upon the dwarfs, smiting them with spear and club, with teeth and spur, the Akka fought like devils. Quivering under the ray, they leaped and dragged down and slew.

Now there was but one long line of the frog-men at the very edge of the cliff.

And ever the clouds of dancing, diamonded atoms grew thicker over them all!

That last thin line of the Akka was going; yet they fought to the last, and none toppled over the lip without at least one of the armored Murians in his arms.

My gaze dropped to the foot of the cliffs. Stretched along their length was a wide ribbon of beauty – a shimmering multitude of gleaming, pulsing, prismatic moons; glowing, glowing ever brighter, ever more wondrous – the gigantic Medusae globes feasting on dwarf and frog-man alike!

Across the waters, faintly, came a triumphant shouting from Lugur’s and Yolara’s men!

Was the ruddy light of the place lessening, growing paler, changing to a faint rose? There was an exclamation from Larry; something like hope relaxed the drawn muscles of his face. He pointed to the aureate dome wherein sat the Three – and then I saw!

Out of it, through the long transverse slit through which the Silent Ones kept their watch on cavern, bridge, and abyss, a torrent of the opalescent light was pouring. It cascaded like a waterfall, and as it flowed it spread whirling out, in columns and eddies, clouds and wisps of misty, curdled coruscations. It hung like a veil over all the islands, filtering everywhere, driving back the crimson light as though possessed of impenetrable substance – and still it cast not the faintest shadowing upon our vision.

“Good God!” breathed Larry. “Look!”

The radiance was marching – marching – down the colossal bridge. It moved swiftly, in some unthinkable way intelligently. It swathed the Akka, and closer, ever closer it swept toward the approach upon which Yolara’s men had now gained foothold.

From their ranks came flash after flash of the green ray – aimed at the abode! But as the light sped and struck the opalescence it was blotted out! The shimmering mists seemed to enfold, to dissipate it.

Lakla drew a deep breath.

“The Silent Ones forgive me for doubting them,” she whispered; and again hope blossomed on her face even as it did on Larry’s.

The frog-men were gaining. Clothed in the armor of that mist, they pressed back from the bridge-head the invaders. There was another prodigious movement at the ends of the crescent, and racing up, pressing against the dwarfs, came other legions of Nak’s warriors. And re-enforcing those out on the prodigious arch, the frog-men stationed in the gardens below us poured back to the castle and out through the open Portal.

“They’re licked!” shouted Larry. “They’re—”

So quickly I could not follow the movement his automatic leaped to his hand – spoke, once and again and again. Rador leaped to the head of the little path, sword in hand; Olaf, shouting and whirling his mace, followed. I strove to get my own gun quickly.

For up that path were running two-score of Lugur’s men, while from below Lugur’s own voice roared.

“Quick! Slay not the handmaiden or her lover! Carry them down. Quick! But slay the others!”

The handmaiden raced toward Larry, stopped, whistled shrilly – again and again. Larry’s pistol was empty, but as the dwarfs rushed upon him I dropped two of them with mine. It jammed – I could not use it; I sprang to his side. Rador was down, struggling in a heap of Lugur’s men. Olaf, a Viking of old, was whirling his great hammer, and striking, striking through armor, flesh, and bone.

Larry was down, Lakla flew to him. But the Norseman, now streaming blood from a dozen wounds, caught a glimpse of her coming, turned, thrust out a mighty hand, sent her reeling back, and then with his hammer cracked the skulls of those trying to drag the O’Keefe down the path.

A cry from Lakla – the dwarfs had seized her, had lifted her despite her struggles, were carrying her away. One I dropped with the butt of my useless pistol, and then went down myself under the rush of another.

Through the clamor I heard a booming of the Akka, closer, closer; then through it the bellow of Lugur. I made a mighty effort, swung a hand up, and sunk my fingers in the throat of the soldier striving to kill me. Writhing over him, my fingers touched a poniard; I thrust it deep, staggered to my feet.

The O’Keefe, shielding Lakla, was battling with a long sword against a half dozen of the soldiers. I started toward him, was struck, and under the impact hurled to the ground. Dizzily I raised myself – and leaning upon my elbow, stared and moved no more. For the dwarfs lay dead, and Larry, holding Lakla tightly, was staring even as I, and ranged at the head of the path were the Akka, whose booming advance in obedience to the handmaiden’s call I had heard.

And at what we all stared was Olaf, crimson with his wounds, and Lugur, in blood-red armor, locked in each other’s grip, struggling, smiting, tearing, kicking, and swaying about the little space before the embrasure. I crawled over toward the O’Keefe. He raised his pistol, dropped it.

“Can’t hit him without hitting Olaf,” he whispered. Lakla signaled the frog-men; they advanced toward the two – but Olaf saw them, broke the red dwarf’s hold, sent Lugur reeling a dozen feet away.

“No!” shouted the Norseman, the ice of his pale-blue eyes glinting like frozen flames, blood streaming down his face and dripping from his hands. “No! Lugur is mine! None but me slays him! Ho, you Lugur—” and cursed him and Yolara and the Dweller hideously – I cannot set those curses down here.

They spurred Lugur. Mad now as the Norseman, the red dwarf sprang. Olaf struck a blow that would have killed an ordinary man, but Lugur only grunted, swept in, and seized him about the waist; one mighty arm began to creep up toward Huldricksson’s throat.

“’Ware, Olaf!” cried O’Keefe; but Olaf did not answer. He waited until the red dwarf’s hand was close to his shoulder; and then, with an incredibly rapid movement – once before had I seen something like it in a wrestling match between Papuans – he had twisted Lugur around; twisted him so that Olaf’s right arm lay across the tremendous breast, the left behind the neck, and Olaf’s left leg held the Voice’s armored thighs vise-like against his right knee while over that knee lay the small of the red dwarf’s back.

For a second or two the Norseman looked down upon his enemy, motionless in that paralyzing grip. And then – slowly – he began to break him!

Lakla gave a little cry; made a motion toward the two. But Larry drew her head down against his breast, hiding her eyes; then fastened his own upon the pair, white-faced, stern.

Slowly, ever so slowly, proceeded Olaf. Twice Lugur moaned. At the end he screamed – horribly. There was a cracking sound, as of a stout stick snapped.

Huldricksson stooped, silently. He picked up the limp body of the Voice, not yet dead, for the eyes rolled, the lips strove to speak; lifted it, walked to the parapet, swung it twice over his head, and cast it down to the red waters!

— XXXIV —

THE COMING
OF THE SHINING ONE

The Norseman turned toward us. There was now no madness in his eyes; only a great weariness. And there was peace on the once tortured face.

“Helma,” he whispered, “I go a little before! Soon you will come to me – to me and the yndling who will await you – Helma, meine liebe!”

Blood gushed from his mouth; he swayed, fell. And thus died Olaf Huldricksson.

We looked down upon him; nor did Lakla, nor Larry, nor I try to hide our tears. And as we stood the Akka brought to us that other mighty fighter, Rador; but in him there was life, and we attended to him there as best we could.

Then Lakla spoke.

“We will bear him into the castle where we may give him greater care,” she said. “For, lo! the hosts of Yolara have been beaten back; and on the bridge comes Nak with tidings.”

We looked over the parapet. It was even as she had said. Neither on ledge nor bridge was there trace of living men of Muria – only heaps of slain that lay everywhere – and thick against the cavern mouth still danced the flashing atoms of those the green ray had destroyed.

“Over!” exclaimed Larry incredulously. “We live then – heart of mine!”

“The Silent Ones recall their veils,” she said, pointing to the dome. Back through the slitted opening the radiance was streaming; withdrawing from sea and island; marching back over the bridge with that same ordered, intelligent motion. Behind it the red light pressed, like skirmishers on the heels of a retreating army.

“And yet—” faltered the handmaiden as we passed into her chamber, and doubtful were the eyes she turned upon the O’Keefe.

“I don’t believe,” he said, “there’s a kick left in them—”

What was that sound beating into the chamber faintly, so faintly? My heart gave a great throb and seemed to stop for an eternity. What was it – coming nearer, ever nearer? Now Lakla and O’Keefe heard it, life ebbing from lips and cheeks.

Nearer, nearer – a music as of myriads of tiny crystal bells, tinkling, tinkling – a storm of pizzicati upon violins of glass! Nearer, nearer – not sweetly now, nor luring; no – raging, wrathful, sinister beyond words; sweeping on; nearer—

The Dweller! The Shining One!

We leaped to the narrow window; peered out, aghast. The bell notes swept through and about us, a hurricane. The crescent strand was once more a ferment. Back, back were the Akka being swept, as though by brooms, tottering on the edge of the ledge, falling into the waters. Swiftly they were finished; and where they had fought was an eddying throng clothed in tatters or naked, swaying, drifting, arms tossing – like marionettes of Satan.

The dead-alive! The slaves of the Dweller!

They swayed and tossed, and then, like water racing through an opened dam, they swept upon the bridge-head. On and on they pushed, like the bore of a mighty tide. The frog-men strove against them, clubbing, spearing, tearing them. But even those worst smitten seemed not to fall. On they pushed, driving forward, irresistible – a battering ram of flesh and bone. They clove the masses of the Akka, pressing them to the sides of the bridge and over. Through the open gates they forced them – for there was no room for the frog-men to stand against that implacable tide.

Then those of the Akka who were left turned their backs and ran. We heard the clang of the golden wings of the portal, and none too soon to keep out the first of the Dweller’s dreadful hordes.

Now upon the cavern ledge and over the whole length of the bridge there were none but the dead-alive, men and women, black-polled ladala, sloe-eyed Malays, slant-eyed Chinese, men of every race that sailed the seas – milling, turning, swaying, like leaves caught in a sluggish current.

The bell notes became sharper, more insistent. At the cavern mouth a radiance began to grow – a gleaming from which the atoms of diamond dust seemed to try to flee. As the radiance grew and the crystal notes rang nearer, every head of that hideous multitude turned stiffly, slowly toward the right, looking toward the far bridge end; their eyes fixed and glaring; every face an inhuman mask of rapture and of horror!

A movement shook them. Those in the center began to stream back, faster and ever faster, leaving motionless deep ranks on each side. Back they flowed until from golden doors to cavern mouth a wide lane stretched, walled on each side by the dead-alive.

The far radiance became brighter; it gathered itself at the end of the dreadful lane; it was shot with sparklings and with pulsings of polychromatic light. The crystal storm was intolerable, piercing the ears with countless tiny lances; brighter still the radiance.

From the cavern swirled the Shining One!

The Dweller paused, seemed to scan the island of the Silent Ones half doubtfully; then slowly, stately, it drifted out upon the bridge. Closer it drew; behind it glided Yolara at the head of a company of her dwarfs, and at her side was the hag of the Council whose face was the withered, shattered echo of her own.

Slower grew the Dweller’s pace as it drew nearer. Did I sense in it a doubt, an uncertainty? The crystal-tongued, unseen choristers that accompanied it subtly seemed to reflect the doubt; their notes were not sure, no longer insistent; rather was there in them an undertone of hesitancy, of warning! Yet on came the Shining One until it stood plain beneath us, searching with those eyes that thrust from and withdrew into unknown spheres, the golden gateway, the cliff face, the castle’s rounded bulk – and more intently than any of these, the dome wherein sat the Three.

Behind it each face of the dead-alive turned toward it, and those beside it throbbed and gleamed with its luminescence.

Yolara crept close, just beyond the reach of its spirals. She murmured – and the Dweller bent toward her, its seven globes steady in their shining mists, as though listening. It drew erect once more, resumed its doubtful scrutiny. Yolara’s face darkened; she turned abruptly, spoke to a captain of her guards. A dwarf raced back between the palisades of dead-alive.

Now the priestess cried out, her voice ringing like a silver clarion.

“Ye are done, ye Three! The Shining One stands at your door, demanding entrance. Your beasts are slain and your power is gone. Who are ye, says the Shining One, to deny it entrance to the place of its birth?”

“Ye do not answer,” she cried again, “yet know we that ye hear! The Shining One offers these terms: Send forth your handmaiden and that lying stranger she stole; send them forth to us – and perhaps ye may live. But if ye send them not forth, then shall ye too die – and soon!”

We waited, silent, even as did Yolara – and again there was no answer from the Three.

The priestess laughed; the blue eyes flashed.

“It is ended!” she cried. “If you will not open, needs must we open for you!”

Over the bridge was marching a long double file of the dwarfs. They bore a smoothed and handled tree-trunk whose head was knobbed with a huge ball of metal. Past the priestess, past the Shining One, they carried it; fifty of them to each side of the ram; and behind them stepped – Marakinoff!

Larry awoke to life.

“Now, thank God,” he rasped, “I can get that devil, anyway!”

He drew his pistol, took careful aim. Even as he pressed the trigger there rang through the abode a tremendous clanging. The ram was battering at the gates. O’Keefe’s bullet went wild. The Russian must have heard the shot; perhaps the missile was closer than we knew. He made a swift leap behind the guards; was lost to sight.

Once more the thunderous clanging rang through the castle.

Lakla drew herself erect; down upon her dropped the listening aloofness. Gravely she bowed her head.

“It is time, O love of mine.” She turned to O’Keefe. “The Silent Ones say that the way of fear is closed, but the way of love is open. They call upon us to redeem our promise!”

For a hundred heartbeats they clung to each other, breast to breast and lip to lip. Below, the clangor was increasing, the great trunk swinging harder and faster upon the metal gates. Now Lakla gently loosed the arms of the O’Keefe, and for another instant those two looked into each other’s souls. The handmaiden smiled tremulously.

“I would it might have been otherwise, Larry darlin’,” she whispered. “But at least – we pass together, dearest of mine!”

She leaped to the window.

“Yolara!” the golden voice rang out sweetly. The clanging ceased. “Draw back your men. We open the Portal and come forth to you and the Shining One – Larry and I.”

The priestess’s silver chimes of laughter rang out, cruel, mocking.

“Come, then, quickly,” she jeered. “For surely both the Shining One and I yearn for you!” Her malice-laden laughter chimed high once more. “Keep us not lonely long!” the priestess mocked.

Larry drew a deep breath, stretched both hands out to me.

“It’s good-by, I guess, Doc.” His voice was strained. “Good-by and good luck, old boy. If you get out, and you will, let the old Dolphin know I’m gone. And carry on, pal – and always remember the O’Keefe loved you like a brother.”

I squeezed his hands desperately. Then out of my balance-shaking woe a strange comfort was born.

“Maybe it’s not good-by, Larry!” I cried. “The banshee has not cried!”

A flash of hope passed over his face; the old reckless grin shone forth.

“It’s so!” he said. “By the Lord, it’s so!”

Then Lakla bent toward me, and for the second time – kissed me.

“Come!” she said to Larry. Hand in hand they moved away, into the corridor that led to the door outside of which waited the Shining One and its priestess.

And unseen by them, wrapped as they were within their love and sacrifice, I crept softly behind. For I had determined that if enter the Dweller’s embrace they must, they should not go alone.

They paused before the Golden Portals; the handmaiden pressed its opening lever; the massive leaves rolled back.

Heads high, proudly, serenely, they passed through and out upon the hither span. I followed.

On each side of us stood the Dweller’s slaves, faces turned rigidly toward their master. A hundred feet away the Shining One pulsed and spiraled in its evilly glorious lambency of sparkling plumes.

Unhesitating, always with that same high serenity, Lakla and the O’Keefe, hands clasped like little children, drew closer to that wondrous shape. I could not see their faces, but I saw awe fall upon those of the watching dwarfs, and into the burning eyes of Yolara crept a doubt. Closer they drew to the Dweller, and closer, I following them step by step. The Shining One’s whirling lessened; its tinklings were faint, almost stilled. It seemed to watch them apprehensively. A silence fell upon us all, a thick silence, brooding, ominous, palpable. Now the pair were face to face with the child of the Three – so near that with one of its misty tentacles it could have enfolded them.

And the Shining One drew back!

Yes, drew back – and back with it stepped Yolara, the doubt in her eyes deepening. Onward paced the handmaiden and the O’Keefe – and step by step, as they advanced, the Dweller withdrew; its bell notes chiming out, puzzled questioning – half fearful!

And back it drew, and back until it had reached the very center of that platform over the abyss in whose depths pulsed the green fires of earth heart. And there Yolara gripped herself; the hell that seethed within her soul leaped out of her eyes, a cry, a shriek of rage, tore from her lips.

As at a signal, the Shining One flamed high; its spirals and eddying mists swirled madly, the pulsing core of it blazed radiance. A score of coruscating tentacles swept straight upon the pair who stood intrepid, unresisting, awaiting its embrace. And upon me, lurking behind them.

Through me swept a mighty exaltation. It was the end then – and I was to meet it with them.

Something drew us back, back with an incredible swiftness, and yet as gently as a summer breeze sweeps a bit of thistle-down! Drew us back from those darting misty arms even as they were a hairs-breadth from us! I heard the Dweller’s bell notes burst out ragingly! I heard Yolara scream.

What was that?

Between the three of us and them was a ring of curdled moon flames, swirling about the Shining One and its priestess, pressing in upon them, enfolding them!

And within it I glimpsed the faces of the Three – implacable, sorrowful, filled with a supernal power!

Sparks and flashes of white flame darted from the ring, penetrating the radiant swathings of the Dweller, striking through its pulsing nucleus, piercing its seven crowning orbs.

Now the Shining One’s radiance began to dim, the seven orbs to dull; the tiny sparkling filaments that ran from them down into the Dweller’s body snapped, vanished! Through the battling nebulosities Yolara’s face swam forth – horror-filled, distorted, inhuman!

The ranks of the dead-alive quivered, moved, writhed, as though each felt the torment of the Thing that had enslaved them. The radiance that the Three wielded grew more intense, thicker, seemed to expand. Within it, suddenly, were scores of flaming triangles – scores of eyes like those of the Silent Ones!

And the Shining One’s seven little moons of amber, of silver, of blue and amethyst and green, of rose and white, split, shattered, were gone! Abruptly the tortured crystal chimings ceased.

Dulled, all its soul-shaking beauty dead, blotched and shadowed squalidly, its gleaming plumes tarnished, its dancing spirals stripped from it, that which had been the Shining One wrapped itself about Yolara – wrapped and drew her into itself; writhed, swayed, and hurled itself over the edge of the bridge – down, down into the green fires of the unfathomable abyss – with its priestess still enfolded in its coils!

From the dwarfs who had watched that terror came screams of panic fear. They turned and ran, racing frantically over the bridge toward the cavern mouth.

The serried ranks of the dead-alive trembled, shook. Then from their faces tied the horror of wedded ecstasy and anguish. Peace, utter peace, followed in its wake.

And as fields of wheat are bent and fall beneath the wind, they fell. No longer dead-alive, now all of the blessed dead, freed from their dreadful slavery!

Abruptly from the sparkling mists the cloud of eyes was gone. Faintly revealed in them were only the heads of the Silent Ones. And they drew before us; were before us! No flames now in their ebon eyes – for the flickering fires were quenched in great tears, streaming down the marble white faces. They bent toward us, over us; their radiance enfolded us. My eyes darkened. I could not see. I felt a tender hand upon my head – and panic and frozen dread and nightmare web that held me fled.

Then they, too, were gone.

Upon Larry’s breast the handmaiden was sobbing – sobbing out her heart – but this time with the joy of one who is swept up from the very threshold of hell into paradise.

— XXXV —

“LARRY – FAREWELL!”

“My heart, Larry—” It was the handmaiden’s murmur. “My heart feels like a bird that is flying from a nest of sorrow.”

We were pacing down the length of the bridge, guards of the Akka beside us, others following with those companies of ladala that had rushed to aid us; in front of us the bandaged Rador swung gently within a litter; beside him, in another, lay Nak, the frog-king – much less of him than there had been before the battle began, but living.

Hours had passed since the terror I have just related. My first task had been to search for Throckmartin and his wife among the fallen multitudes strewn thick as autumn leaves along the flying arch of stone, over the cavern ledge, and back, back as far as the eye could reach.

At last, Lakla and Larry helping, we found them. They lay close to the bridge-end, not parted – locked tight in each other’s arms, pallid face to face, her hair streaming over his breast! As though when that unearthly life the Dweller had set within them passed away, their own had come back for one fleeting instant – and they had known each other, and clasped before kindly death had taken them.

“Love is stronger than all things.” The handmaiden was weeping softly. “Love never left them. Love was stronger than the Shining One. And when its evil fled, love went with them – wherever souls go.”

Of Stanton and Thora there was no trace; nor, after our discovery of those other two, did I care to look more. They were dead – and they were free.

We buried Throckmartin and Edith beside Olaf in Lakla’s bower. But before the body of my old friend was placed within the grave I gave it a careful and sorrowful examination. The skin was firm and smooth, but cold; not the cold of death, but with a chill that set my touching fingers tingling unpleasantly. The body was bloodless; the course of veins and arteries marked by faintly indented white furrows, as though their walls had long collapsed. Lips, mouth, even the tongue, was paper white. There was no sign of dissolution as we know it; no shadow or stain upon the marble surface. Whatever the force that, streaming from the Dweller or impregnating its lair, had energized the dead-alive, it was barrier against putrescence of any kind; that at least was certain.

But it was not barrier against the poison of the Medusae, for, our sad task done, and looking down upon the waters, I saw the pale forms of the Dweller’s hordes dissolving, vanishing into the shifting glories of the gigantic moons sailing down upon them from every quarter of the Sea of Crimson.

While the frog-men, those late levies from the farthest forests, were clearing bridge and ledge of cavern of the litter of the dead, we listened to a leader of the ladala. They had risen, even as the messenger had promised Rador. Fierce had been the struggle in the gardened city by the silver waters with those Lugur and Yolara had left behind to garrison it. Deadly had been the slaughter of the fair-haired, reaping the harvest of hatred they had been sowing so long. Not without a pang of regret did I think of the beautiful, gaily malicious elfin women destroyed – evil though they may have been.

The ancient city of Lara was a charnel. Of all the rulers not two-score had escaped, and these into regions of peril which to describe as sanctuary would be mockery. Nor had the ladala fared so well. Of all the men and women, for women as well as men had taken their part in the swift war, not more than a tenth remained alive.

And the dancing motes of light in the silver air were thick, thick – they whispered.

They told us of the Shining One rushing through the Veil, comet-like, its hosts streaming behind it, raging with it, in ranks that seemed interminable!

Of the massacre of the priests and priestesses in the Cyclopean temple; of the flashing forth of the summoning lights by unseen hands – followed by the tearing of the rainbow curtain, by colossal shatterings of the radiant cliffs; the vanishing behind their debris of all trace of entrance to the haunted place wherein the hordes of the Shining One had slaved – the sealing of the lair!

Then, when the tempest of hate had ended in seething Lara, how, thrilled with victory, armed with the weapons of those they had slain, they had lifted the Shadow, passed through the Portal, met and slaughtered the fleeing remnants of Yolara’s men – only to find the tempest stilled here, too.

But of Marakinoff they had seen nothing! Had the Russian escaped, I wondered, or was he lying out there among the dead?

But now the ladala were calling upon Lakla to come with them, to govern them.

“I don’t want to, Larry darlin’,” she told him. “I want to go out with you to Ireland. But for a time – I think the Three would have us remain and set that place in order.”

The O’Keefe was bothered about something else than the government of Muria.

“If they’ve killed off all the priests, who’s to marry us, heart of mine?” he worried. “None of those Siya and Siyana rites, no matter what,” he added hastily.

“Marry!” cried the handmaiden incredulously. “Marry us? Why, Larry dear, we are married!”

The O’Keefe’s astonishment was complete; his jaw dropped; collapse seemed imminent.

“We are?” he gasped. “When?” he stammered fatuously.

“Why, when the Mother drew us together before her; when she put her hands on our heads after we had made the promise! Didn’t you understand that?” asked the handmaiden wonderingly.

He looked at her, into the purity of the clear golden eyes, into the purity of the soul that gazed out of them; all his own great love transfiguring his keen face.

“An’ is that enough for you, mavourneen?” he whispered humbly.

“Enough?” The handmaiden’s puzzlement was complete, profound. “Enough? Larry darlin’, what more could we ask?”

He drew a deep breath, clasped her close.

“Kiss the bride, Doc!” cried the O’Keefe. And for the third and, soul’s sorrow! the last time, Lakla dimpling and blushing, I thrilled to the touch of her soft, sweet lips.

Quickly were our preparations for departure made. Rador, conscious, his immense vitality conquering fast his wounds, was to be borne ahead of us. And when all was done, Lakla, Larry, and I made our way up to the scarlet stone that was the doorway to the chamber of the Three. We knew, of course, that they had gone, following, no doubt, those whose eyes I had seen in the curdled mists, and who, coming to the aid of the Three at last from whatever mysterious place that was their home, had thrown their strength with them against the Shining One. Nor were we wrong. When the great slab rolled away, no torrents of opalescence came rushing out upon us. The vast dome was dim, tenantless; its curved walls that had cascaded Light shone now but faintly; the dais was empty; its wall of moon-flame radiance gone.

A little time we stood, heads bent, reverent, our hearts filled with gratitude and love – yes, and with pity for that strange trinity so alien to us and yet so near; children even as we, though so unlike us, of our same Mother Earth.

And what I wondered had been the secret of that promise they had wrung from their handmaiden and from Larry. And whence, if what the Three had said had been all true – whence had come their power to avert the sacrifice at the very verge of its consummation?

“Love is stronger than all things!” had said Lakla.

Was it that they had needed, must have, the force which dwells within love, within willing sacrifice, to strengthen their own power and to enable them to destroy the evil, glorious Thing so long shielded by their own love? Did the thought of sacrifice, the will toward abnegation, have to be as strong as the eternals, unshaken by faintest thrill of hope, before the Three could make of it their key to unlock the Dweller’s guard and strike through at its life?

Here was a mystery – a mystery indeed! Lakla softly closed the crimson stone. The mystery of the red dwarf’s appearance was explained when we discovered a half-dozen of the water coria moored in a small cove not far from where the Sekta flashed their heads of living bloom. The dwarfs had borne the shallops with them, and from somewhere beyond the cavern ledge had launched them unperceived; stealing up to the farther side of the island and risking all in one bold stroke. Well, Lugur, no matter what he held of wickedness, held also high courage.

The cavern was paved with the dead-alive, the Akka carrying them out by the hundreds, casting them into the waters. Through the lane down which the Dweller had passed we went as quickly as we could, coming at last to the space where the coria waited. And not long after we swung past where the shadow had hung and hovered over the shining depths of the Midnight Pool.

Upon Lakla’s insistence we passed on to the palace of Lugur, not to Yolara’s – I do not know why, but go there then she would not. And within one of its columned rooms, maidens of the black-haired folks, the wistfulness, the fear, all gone from their sparkling eyes, served us.

There came to me a huge desire to see the destruction they had told us of the Dweller’s lair; to observe for myself whether it was not possible to make a way of entrance and to study its mysteries.

I spoke of this, and to my surprise both the handmaiden and the O’Keefe showed an almost embarrassed haste to acquiesce in my hesitant suggestion.

“Sure,” cried Larry, “there’s lots of time before night!”

He caught himself sheepishly; cast a glance at Lakla.

“I keep forgettin’ there’s no night here,” he mumbled.

“What did you say, Larry?” asked she.

“I said I wish we were sitting in our home in Ireland, watching the sun go down,” he whispered to her. Vaguely I wondered why she blushed.

But now I must hasten. We went to the temple, and here at least the ghastly litter of the dead had been cleaned away. We passed through the blue-caverned space, crossed the narrow arch that spanned the rushing sea stream, and, ascending, stood again upon the ivoried pave at the foot of the frowning, towering amphitheater of jet.

Across the Silver Waters there was sign of neither Web of Rainbows nor colossal pillars nor the templed lips that I had seen curving out beneath the Veil when the Shining One had swirled out to greet its priestess and its voice and to dance with the sacrifices. There was but a broken and rent mass of the radiant cliffs against whose base the lake lapped.

Long I looked – and turned away saddened. Knowing even as I did what the irised curtain had hidden, still it was as though something of supernal beauty and wonder had been swept away, never to be replaced; a glamour gone forever; a work of the high gods destroyed.

“Let’s go back,” said Larry abruptly.

I dropped a little behind them to examine a bit of carving – and, after all, they did not want me. I watched them pacing slowly ahead, his arm around her, black hair close to bronze-gold ringlets. Then I followed. Half were they over the bridge when through the roar of the imprisoned stream I heard my name called softly.

“Goodwin! Dr. Goodwin!”

Amazed, I turned. From behind the pedestal of a carved group slunk – Marakinoff! My premonition had been right. Some way he had escaped, slipped through to here. He held his hands high, came forward cautiously.

“I am finished,” he whispered – “Done! I don’t care what they’ll do to me.” He nodded toward the handmaiden and Larry, now at the end of the bridge and passing on, oblivious of all save each other. He drew closer. His eyes were sunken, burning, mad; his face etched with deep lines, as though a graver’s tool had cut down through it. I took a step backward.

A grin, like the grimace of a fiend, blasted the Russian’s visage. He threw himself upon me, his hands clenching at my throat!

“Larry!” I yelled – and as I spun around under the shock of his onslaught, saw the two turn, stand paralyzed, then race toward me.

“But you’ll carry nothing out of here!” shrieked Marakinoff. “No!”

My foot, darting out behind me, touched vacancy. The roaring of the racing stream deafened me. I felt its mists about me; threw myself forward.

I was falling – falling – with the Russian’s hand strangling me. I struck water, sank; the hands that gripped my throat relaxed for a moment their clutch. I strove to writhe loose; felt that I was being hurled with dreadful speed on – full realization came – on the breast of that racing torrent dropping from some far ocean cleft and rushing – where? A little time, a few breathless instants, I struggled with the devil who clutched me – inflexibly, indomitably.

Then a shrieking as of all the pent winds of the universe in my ears – blackness!

Consciousness returned slowly, agonizedly.

“Larry!” I groaned. “Lakla!”

A brilliant light was glowing through my closed lids. It hurt. I opened my eyes, closed them with swords and needles of dazzling pain shooting through them. Again I opened them cautiously. It was the sun!

I staggered to my feet. Behind me was a shattered wall of basalt monoliths, hewn and squared. Before me was the Pacific, smooth and blue and smiling.

And not far away, cast up on the strand even as I had been, was – Marakinoff!

He lay there, broken and dead indeed. Yet all the waters through which we had passed – not even the waters of death themselves – could wash from his face the grin of triumph. With the last of my strength I dragged the body from the strand and pushed it out into the waves. A little billow ran up, coiled about it, and carried it away, ducking and bending. Another seized it, and another, playing with it. It floated from my sight – that which had been Marakinoff, with all his schemes to turn our fair world into an undreamed-of-hell.

My strength began to come back to me. I found a thicket and slept; slept it must have been for many hours, for when I again awakened the dawn was rosing the east. I will not tell my sufferings. Suffice it to say that I found a spring and some fruit, and just before dusk had recovered enough to writhe up to the top of the wall and discover where I was.

The place was one of the farther islets of the Nan-Matal. To the north I caught the shadows of the ruins of Nan-Tauach, where was the moon door, black against the sky. Where was the moon door – which, some way, somehow, I must reach, and quickly.

At dawn of the next day I got together driftwood and bound it together in shape of a rough raft with fallen creepers. Then, with a makeshift paddle, I set forth for Nan-Tauach. Slowly, painfully, I crept up to it. It was late afternoon before I grounded my shaky craft on the little beach between the ruined sea-gates and, creeping up the giant steps, made my way to the inner enclosure.

And at its opening I stopped, and the tears ran streaming down my cheeks while I wept aloud with sorrow and with disappointment and with weariness.

For the great wall in which had been set the pale slab whose threshold we had crossed to the land of the Shining One lay shattered and broken. The monoliths were heaped about; the wall had fallen, and about them shone a film of water, half covering them.

There was no moon door!

Dazed and weeping, I drew closer, climbed upon their outlying fragments. I looked out only upon the sea. There had been a great subsidence, an earth shock, perhaps, tilting downward all that side – the echo, little doubt, of that cataclysm which had blasted the Dweller’s lair!

The little squared islet called Tau, in which were hidden the seven globes, had entirely disappeared. Upon the waters there was no trace of it.

The moon door was gone; the passage to the Moon Pool was closed to me – its chamber covered by the sea!

There was no road to Larry – nor to Lakla!

And there, for me, the world ended.

— THE END —

FOOTNOTES

[01]  For more detailed observations on these points refer to G. Volkens, Uber die Karolinen Insel Yap, in Verhandlungen Gesellschaft Erdkunde Berlin, xxvii (1901); J. S. Kubary, Ethnographische Beitrage zur Kentniss des Karolinen Archipel (Leiden, 1889-1892); De Abrade Historia del Conflicto de las Carolinas, etc. (Madrid, 1886). – W. T. G.

[02]  William Beebe, the famous American naturalist and ornithologist, recently fighting in France with America’s air force, called attention to this remarkable belief in an article printed not long ago in the Atlantic Monthly. Still more significant was it that he noted a persistent rumor that the breaking out of the buried race was close. – W. T. G., Pres. I. A. of S.

[03]  Later I was to find that the Maurian reckoning rested upon the extraordinary increased luminosity of the cliffs at the time of the full moon on Earth – this action to my mind being linked either with the effect of the light streaming globes upon the Moon Pool, whose source was in the shining cliffs, or else upon some mysterious affinity of their radiant element with the flood of moonlight on Earth – the latter, most probably, because even when the moon must have been clouded above, it made to difference in the phenomenon. Thirteen of these shinings forth constituted a laya, one of them a lat. Ten was a sais. A sais of laya was literally ten thousand years. What we would call an hour was called by them a va. The whole time system was, of course, a mingling of time as it had been known to their remote, surface-dwelling ancestors, and the peculiar determining factors in the vast cavern.

Unquestionably there is a subtle difference between time as we know it and time in this subterranean land – its progress there being slower. This, however, is only in accord with the well-known doctrine of relativity, which predicates both space and time as necessary inventions of the human mind to orient itself to the conditions under which it finds itself. I tried often to measure this difference, but could never do so to my entire satisfaction. The closest I can come to it is to say that an hour of our time is the equivalent of an hour and five-eighths in Muria. For further information upon this matter of relativity the reader may consult any of the numerous books upon the subject. – W. T. G.

[04]  I have no space here even to outline the eschatology of this people, nor to catalogue their pantheon. Siya and Siyana typified worldly love. Their ritual was, however, singularly free from those degrading elements usually found in love-cults. Priests and priestesses of all cults dwelt in the immense seven-terraced structure, of which the jet amphitheater was the water side. The symbol, icon, representation, of Siya and Siyana – the globe and the up-striving figures – typified earthly love, feet bound to earth, but eyes among the stars. Hell or heaven I never heard formulated, nor their equivalents; unless that existence in the Shining One’s domain could serve for either. Over all this was Thanaroa, remote; unheeding, but still maker and ruler of all – an absentee First Cause personified! Thanaroa seemed to be the one article of belief in the creed of the soldiers – Rador, with his reverence for the Ancient Ones, was an exception. Whatever there was, indeed, of high, truly religious impulse among the Murians, this far, High God had. I found this exceedingly interesting, because it had long been my theory – to put the matter in the shape of a geometrical formula – that the real attractiveness of gods to man increases uniformly according to the square of their distance – W. T. G.

[05]  I find that I have neglected to explain the working of these interesting mechanisms that were telephonic, dictaphonic, telegraphic in one. I must assume that my readers are familiar with the receiving apparatus of wireless telegraphy, which must be “tuned” by the operator until its own vibratory quality is in exact harmony with the vibrations – the extremely rapid impacts – of those short electric wavelengths we call Hertzian, and which carry the wireless messages. I must assume also that they are familiar with the elementary fact of physics that the vibrations of light and sound are interchangeable. The hearing-talking globes utilize both these principles, and with consummate simplicity. The light with which they shone was produced by an atomic “motor” within their base, similar to that which activated the merely illuminating globes. The composition of the phonic spheres gave their surfaces an acute sensitivity and resonance. In conjunction with its energizing power, the metal set up what is called a “field of force,” which linked it with every particle of its kind no matter how distant. When vibrations of speech impinged upon the resonant surface its rhythmic light-vibrations were broken, just as a telephone transmitter breaks an electric current. Simultaneously these light-vibrations were changed into sound – on the surfaces of all spheres tuned to that particular instrument. The “crawling” colors which showed themselves at these times were literally the voice of the speaker in its spectrum equivalent. While usually the sounds produced required considerable familiarity with the apparatus to be understood quickly, they could, on occasion, be made startlingly loud and clear – as I was soon to realize – W. T. G.

[06]  A tal in Muria is the equivalent of thirty hours of earth surface time. – W. T. G.

[07]  The Akka are viviparous. The female produces progeny at five-year intervals, never more than two at a time. They are monogamous, like certain of our own Ranidae. Pending my monograph upon what little I had time to learn of their interesting habits and customs, the curious will find instruction and entertainment in Brandes and Schvenichen’s Brutpfleige der Schwanzlosen Bat rachier, p. 395; and Lilian V. Sampson’s Unusual Modes of Breeding among Anura, Amer. Nat. xxxiv., 1900. – W. T. G.

[08]  The Yekta of the Crimson Sea, are as extraordinary developments of hydroid forms as the giant Medusae, of which, of course, they are not too remote cousins. The closest resemblances to them in outer water forms are among the Gymnoblastic Hydroids, notably Clavetella prolifera, a most interesting ambulatory form of six tentacles. Almost every bather in Southern waters, Northern too, knows the pain that contact with certain “jelly fish” produces. The Yekta’s development was prodigious and, to us, monstrous. It secretes in its five heads an almost incredibly swiftly acting poison which I suspect, for I had no chance to verify the theory, destroys the entire nervous system to the accompaniment of truly infernal agony; carrying at the same time the illusion that the torment stretches through infinities of time. Both ether and nitrous oxide gas produce in the majority this sensation of time extension, without of course the pain symptom. What Lakla called the Yekta kiss is I imagine about as close to the orthodox idea of Hell as can be conceived. The secret of her control over them I had no opportunity of learning in the rush of events that followed. Knowledge of the appalling effects of their touch came, she told me, from those few “who had been kissed so lightly” that they recovered. Certainly nothing, not even the Shining One, was dreaded by the Murians as these were – W. T. G.

[09]  Reprinted in full in Nature, in which those sufficiently interested may peruse it. – W. T. G.

[10]  Professor Svante August Arrhenius, in his Worlds in the Making – the conception that life is universally diffused, constantly emitted from all habitable worlds in the form of spores which traverse space for years and ages, the majority being ultimately destroyed by the heat of some blazing star, but some few finding a resting-place on globes which have reached the habitable stage. – W. T. G.

Short story “The Moon Pool”
All-Story Weekly, 22 Jun 1918

Sequel – “The Conquest of the Moon Pool”
All-Story Weekly, 15 Feb-22 Mar 1919

The two stories revised for first book edition:
G.P. Putnam Sons, New York and London, 1919

Reprints:
Liveright Publishing Corp., New York, ca. 1919
Fantastic Novels Magazine, May and Sep 1948

THE  METAL  MONSTER

PROLOGUE

Before the narrative which follows was placed in my hands, I had never seen Dr. Walter T. Goodwin, its author.

When the manuscript revealing his adventures among the prehistoric ruins of the Nan-Matal in the Carolines (The Moon Pool) had been given me by the International Association of Science for editing and revision to meet the requirements of a popular presentation, Dr. Goodwin had left America. He had explained that he was still too shaken, too depressed, to be able to recall experiences that must inevitably carry with them freshened memories of those whom he loved so well and from whom, he felt, he was separated in all probability forever.

I had understood that he had gone to some remote part of Asia to pursue certain botanical studies, and it was therefore with the liveliest surprise and interest that I received a summons from the President of the Association to meet Dr. Goodwin at a designated place and hour.

Through my close study of the Moon Pool papers I had formed a mental image of their writer. I had read, too, those volumes of botanical research which have set him high above all other American scientists in this field, gleaning from their curious mingling of extremely technical observations and minutely accurate but extraordinarily poetic descriptions, hints to amplify my picture of him. It gratified me to find I had drawn a pretty good one.

The man to whom the President of the Association introduced me was sturdy, well-knit, a little under average height. He had a broad but rather low forehead that reminded me somewhat of the late electrical wizard Steinmetz. Under level black brows shone eyes of clear hazel, kindly, shrewd, a little wistful, lightly humorous; the eyes both of a doer and a dreamer.

Not more than forty I judged him to be. A close-trimmed, pointed beard did not hide the firm chin and the clean-cut mouth. His hair was thick and black and oddly sprinkled with white; small streaks and dots of gleaming silver that shone with a curiously metallic luster.

His right arm was closely bound to his breast. His manner as he greeted me was tinged with shyness. He extended his left hand in greeting, and as I clasped the fingers I was struck by their peculiar, pronounced, yet pleasant warmth; a sensation, indeed, curiously electric.

The Association’s President forced him gently back into his chair.

“Dr. Goodwin,” he said, turning to me, “is not entirely recovered as yet from certain consequences of his adventures. He will explain to you later what these are. In the meantime, Mr. Merritt, will you read this?”

I took the sheets he handed me, and as I read them felt the gaze of Dr. Goodwin full upon me, searching, weighing, estimating. When I raised my eyes from the letter I found in his a new expression. The shyness was gone; they were filled with complete friendliness. Evidently I had passed muster.

“You will accept, sir?” It was the president’s gravely courteous tone.

“Accept!” I exclaimed. “Why, of course, I accept. It is not only one of the greatest honors, but to me one of the greatest delights to act as a collaborator with Dr. Goodwin.”

The president smiled.

“In that case, sir, there is no need for me to remain longer,” he said. “Dr. Goodwin has with him his manuscript as far as he has progressed with it. I will leave you two alone for your discussion.”

He bowed to us and, picking up his old-fashioned bell-crowned silk hat and his quaint, heavy cane of ebony, withdrew. Dr. Goodwin turned to me.

“I will start,” he said, after a little pause, “from when I met Richard Drake on the field of blue poppies that are like a great prayer-rug at the gray feet of the nameless mountain.”

The sun sank, the shadows fell, the lights of the city sparkled out, for hours New York roared about me unheeded while I listened to the tale of that utterly weird, stupendous drama of an unknown life, of unknown creatures, unknown forces, and of unconquerable human heroism played among the hidden gorges of unknown Asia.

It was dawn when I left him for my own home. Nor was it for many hours after that I laid his then incomplete manuscript down and sought sleep – and found a troubled sleep.

— I —

VALLEY OF
THE BLUE POPPIES

In this great crucible of life we call the world – in the vaster one we call the universe – the mysteries lie close packed, uncountable as grains of sand on ocean’s shores. They thread gigantic, the star-flung spaces; they creep, atomic, beneath the microscope’s peering eye. They walk beside us, unseen and unheard, calling out to us, asking why we are deaf to their crying, blind to their wonder.

Sometimes the veils drop from a man’s eyes, and he sees – and speaks of his vision. Then those who have not seen pass him by with the lifted brows of disbelief, or they mock him, or if his vision has been great enough they fall upon and destroy him.

For the greater the mystery, the more bitterly is its verity assailed; upon what seem the lesser a man may give testimony and at least gain for himself a hearing.

There is reason for this. Life is a ferment, and upon and about it, shifting and changing, adding to or taking away, beat over legions of forces, seen and unseen, known and unknown. And man, an atom in the ferment, clings desperately to what to him seems stable; nor greets with joy him who hazards that what he grips may be but a broken staff, and, so saying, fails to hold forth a sturdier one.

Earth is a ship, plowing her way through uncharted oceans of space wherein are strange currents, hidden shoals and reefs, and where blow the unknown winds of Cosmos.

If to the voyagers, painfully plotting their course, comes one who cries that their charts must be remade, nor can tell why they must be – that man is not welcome – no!

Therefore it is that men have grown chary of giving testimony upon mysteries. Yet knowing each in his own heart the truth of that vision he has himself beheld, lo, it is that in whose reality he most believes.

The spot where I had encamped was of a singular beauty; so beautiful that it caught the throat and set an ache within the breast – until from it a tranquility distilled that was like healing mist.

Since early March I had been wandering. It was now mid-July. And for the first time since my pilgrimage had begun I drank – not of forgetfulness, for that could never be – but of anodyne for a sorrow which had held fast upon me since my return from the Carolines a year before.

No need to dwell here upon that – it has been written. Nor shall I recite the reasons for my restlessness – for these are known to those who have read that history of mine. Nor is there cause to set forth at length the steps by which I had arrived at this vale of peace.

Sufficient is to tell that in New York one night, reading over what is perhaps the most sensational of my books – “The Poppies and Primulas of Southern Tibet,” the result of my travels of 1910-1911, I determined to return to that quiet, forbidden land. There, if anywhere, might I find something akin to forgetting.

There was a certain flower which I long had wished to study in its mutations from the singular forms appearing on the southern slopes of the Elburz – Persia’s mountainous chain that extends from Azerbaijan in the west to Khorasan in the east; from thence I would follow its modified types in the Hindu-Kush ranges and its migrations along the southern scarps of the Trans-Himalayas – the unexplored upheaval, higher than the Himalayas themselves, more deeply cut with precipice and gorge, which Sven Hedin had touched and named on his journey to Lhasa.

Having accomplished this, I planned to push across the passes to the Manasarowar Lakes, where, legend has it, the strange, luminous purple lotuses grow.

An ambitious project, undeniably fraught with danger; but it is written that desperate diseases require desperate remedies, and until inspiration or message how to rejoin those whom I had loved so dearly came to me, nothing less, I felt, could dull my heartache.

And, frankly, feeling that no such inspiration or message could come, I did not much care as to the end.

In Teheran I had picked up a most unusual servant; yes, more than this, a companion and counselor and interpreter as well.

He was a Chinese; his name Chiu-Ming. His first thirty years had been spent at the great Lamasery of Palkhor-Choinde at Gyantse, west of Lhasa. Why he had gone from there, how he had come to Teheran, I never asked. It was most fortunate that he had gone, and that I had found him. He recommended himself to me as the best cook within ten thousand miles of Pekin.

For almost three months we had journeyed; Chiu-Ming and I and the two ponies that carried my impedimenta.

We had traversed mountain roads which had echoed to the marching feet of the hosts of Darius, to the hordes of the Satraps. The highways of the Achaemenids – yes, and which before them had trembled to the tramplings of the myriads of the godlike Dravidian conquerors.

We had slipped over ancient Iranian trails; over paths which the warriors of conquering Alexander had traversed; dust of bones of Macedons, of Greeks, of Romans, beat about us; ashes of the flaming ambitions of the Sassanidae whimpered beneath our feet – the feet of an American botanist, a Chinaman, two Tibetan ponies. We had crept through clefts whose walls had sent back the howlings of the Ephthalites, the White Huns who had sapped the strength of these same proud Sassanids until at last both fell before the Turks.

Over the highways and byways of Persia’s glory, Persia’s shame and Persia’s death we four – two men, two beasts – had passed. For a fortnight we had met no human soul, seen no sign of human habitation.

Game had been plentiful – green things Chiu-Ming might lack for his cooking, but meat never. About us was a welter of mighty summits. We were, I knew, somewhere within the blending of the Hindu-Kush with the Trans-Himalayas.

That morning we had come out of a ragged defile into this valley of enchantment, and here, though it had been so early, I had pitched my tent, determining to go no farther till the morrow.

It was a Phocean vale; a gigantic cup filled with tranquility. A spirit brooded over it, serene, majestic, immutable – like the untroubled calm which rests, the Burmese believe, over every place which has guarded the Buddha, sleeping.

At its eastern end towered the colossal scarp of the unnamed peak through one of whose gorges we had crept. On his head was a cap of silver set with pale emeralds – the snow fields and glaciers that crowned him. Far to the west another gray and ochreous giant reared its bulk, closing the vale. North and south, the horizon was a chaotic sky land of pinnacles, spired and minareted, steepled and turreted and domed, each diademed with its green and argent of eternal ice and snow.

And all the valley was carpeted with the blue poppies in wide, unbroken fields, luminous as the morning skies of mid-June; they rippled mile after mile over the path we had followed, over the still untrodden path which we must take. They nodded, they leaned toward each other, they seemed to whisper – then to lift their heads and look up like crowding swarms of little azure fays, half impudently, wholly trustfully, into the faces of the jeweled giants standing guard over them. And when the little breeze walked upon them it was as though they bent beneath the soft tread and were brushed by the sweeping skirts of unseen, hastening Presences.

Like a vast prayer-rug, sapphire and silken, the poppies stretched to the gray feet of the mountain. Between their southern edge and the clustering summits a row of faded brown, low hills knelt – like brown-robed, withered and weary old men, backs bent, faces hidden between outstretched arms, palms to the earth and brows touching earth within them – in the East’s immemorial attitude of worship.

I half expected them to rise – and as I watched a man appeared on one of the bowed, rocky shoulders, abruptly, with the ever-startling suddenness which in the strange light of these latitudes objects spring into vision. As he stood scanning my camp there arose beside him a laden pony, and at its head a Tibetan peasant. The first figure waved its hand; came striding down the hill.

As he approached I took stock of him. A young giant, three good inches over six feet, a vigorous head with unruly clustering black hair; a clean-cut, clean-shaven American face.

“I’m Dick Drake,” he said, holding out his hand. “Richard Keen Drake, recently with Uncle’s engineers in France.”

“My name is Goodwin.” I took his hand, shook it warmly. “Dr. Walter T. Goodwin.”

“Goodwin the botanist—? Then I know you!” he exclaimed. “Know all about you, that is. My father admired your work greatly. You knew him – Professor Alvin Drake.”

I nodded. So he was Alvin Drake’s son. Alvin, I knew, had died about a year before I had started on this journey. But what was his son doing in this wilderness?

“Wondering where I came from?” he answered my unspoken question. “Short story. War ended. Felt an irresistible desire for something different. Couldn’t think of anything more different from Tibet – always wanted to go there anyway. Went. Decided to strike over toward Turkestan. And here I am.”

I felt at once a strong liking for this young giant. No doubt, subconsciously, I had been feeling the need of companionship with my own kind. I even wondered, as I led the way into my little camp, whether he would care to join fortunes with me in my journeyings.

His father’s work I knew well, and although this stalwart lad was unlike what one would have expected Alvin Drake – a trifle dried, precise, wholly abstracted with his experiments – to beget, still, I reflected, heredity like the Lord sometimes works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform.

It was almost with awe that he listened to me instruct Chiu-Ming as to just how I wanted supper prepared, and his gaze dwelt fondly upon the Chinese busy among his pots and pans.

We talked a little, desultorily, as the meal was prepared – fragments of traveler’s news and gossip, as is the habit of journeyers who come upon each other in the silent places. Ever the speculation grew in his face as he made away with Chiu-Ming’s artful concoctions.

Drake sighed, drawing out his pipe.

“A cook, a marvel of a cook. Where did you get him?”

Briefly I told him.

Then a silence fell upon us. Suddenly the sun dipped down behind the flank of the stone giant guarding the valley’s western gate; the whole vale swiftly darkened – a flood of crystal-clear shadows poured within it. It was the prelude to that miracle of unearthly beauty seen nowhere else on this earth – the sunset of Tibet.

We turned expectant eyes to the west. A little, cool breeze raced down from the watching steeps like a messenger, whispered to the nodding poppies, sighed and was gone. The poppies were still. High overhead a homing kite whistled, mellowly.

As if it were a signal there sprang out in the pale azure of the western sky row upon row of cirrus cloudlets, rank upon rank of them, thrusting their heads into the path of the setting sun. They changed from mottled silver into faint rose, deepened to crimson.

“The dragons of the sky drink the blood of the sunset,” said Chiu-Ming.

As though a gigantic globe of crystal had dropped upon the heavens, their blue turned swiftly to a clear and glowing amber – then as abruptly shifted to a luminous violet A soft green light pulsed through the valley.

Under it, like hills ensorcelled, the rocky walls about it seemed to flatten. They glowed and all at once pressed forward like gigantic slices of palest emerald jade, translucent, illumined, as though by a circlet of little suns shining behind them.

The light faded, robes of deepest amethyst dropped around the mountain’s mighty shoulders. And then from every snow and glacier-crowned peak, from minaret and pinnacle and towering turret, leaped forth a confusion of soft peacock flames, a host of irised prismatic gleamings, an ordered chaos of rainbows.

Great and small, interlacing and shifting, they ringed the valley with an incredible glory – as if some god of light itself had touched the eternal rocks and bidden radiant souls stand forth.

Through the darkening sky swept a rosy pencil of living light; that utterly strange, pure beam whose coming never fails to clutch the throat of the beholder with the hand of ecstasy, the ray which the Tibetans name the Ting-Pa. For a moment this rosy finger pointed to the east, then arched itself, divided slowly into six shining, rosy bands; began to creep downward toward the eastern horizon where a nebulous, pulsing splendor arose to meet it.

And as we watched I heard a gasp from Drake. And it was echoed by my own.

For the six beams were swaying, moving with ever swifter motion from side to side in ever-widening sweep, as though the hidden orb from which they sprang were swaying like a pendulum.

Faster and faster the six high-flung beams swayed – and then broke – broke as though a gigantic, unseen hand had reached up and snapped them!

An instant the severed ends ribboned aimlessly, then bent, turned down and darted earthward into the welter of clustered summits at the north and swiftly were gone, while down upon the valley fell night.

“Good God!” whispered Drake. “It was as though something reached up, broke those rays and drew them down – like threads.”

“I saw it.” I struggled with bewilderment. “I saw it. But I never saw anything like it before,” I ended, most inadequately.

“It was purposeful,” he whispered. “It was deliberate. As though something reached up, juggled with the rays, broke them, and drew them down like willow withes.”

“The devils that dwell here!” quavered Chiu-Ming.

“Some magnetic phenomenon.” I was half angry at myself for my own touch of panic. “Light can be deflected by passage through a magnetic field. Of course that’s it. Certainly.”

“I don’t know.” Drake’s tone was doubtful indeed. “It would take a whale of a magnetic field to have done that – it’s inconceivable.” He harked back to his first idea. “It was so – so damned deliberate,” he repeated.

“Devils—” muttered the frightened Chinese.

“What’s that?” Drake gripped my arm and pointed to the north. A deeper blackness had grown there while we had been talking, a pool of darkness against which the mountain summits stood out, blade-sharp edges faintly luminous.

A gigantic lance of misty green fire darted from the blackness and thrust its point into the heart of the zenith; following it, leaped into the sky a host of the sparkling spears of light, and now the blackness was like an ebon hand, brandishing a thousand javelins of tinseled flame.

“The aurora,” I said.

“It ought to be a good one,” mused Drake, gaze intent upon it. “Did you notice the big sun spot?”

I shook my head.

“The biggest I ever saw. Noticed it first at dawn this morning. Some little aurora lighter – that spot. I told you – look at that!” he cried.

The green lances had fallen back. The blackness gathered itself together – then from it began to pulse billows of radiance, spangled with infinite darting swarms of flashing corpuscles like uncounted hosts of dancing fireflies.

Higher the waves rolled – phosphorescent green and iridescent violet, weird copperous yellows and metallic saffrons and a shimmer of glittering ash of rose – then wavered, split and formed into gigantic, sparkling, marching curtains of splendor.

A vast circle of light sprang out upon the folds of the flickering, rushing curtains. Misty at first, its edges sharpened until they rested upon the blazing glory of the northern sky like a pale ring of cold flame. And about it the aurora began to churn, to heap itself, to revolve.

Toward the ring from every side raced the majestic folds, drew themselves together, circled, seethed around it like foam of fire about the lip of a cauldron, and poured through the shining circle as though it were the mouth of that fabled cavern where old Aeolus sits blowing forth and breathing back the winds that sweep the earth.

Yes – into the ring’s mouth the aurora flew, cascading in a columned stream to earth. Then swiftly, a mist swept over all the heavens, veiled that incredible cataract.

“Magnetism?” muttered Drake. “I guess not!”

“It struck about where the Ting-Pa was broken and seemed drawn down like the rays,” I said.

“Purposeful,” Drake said. “And devilish. It hit on all my nerves like a – like a metal claw. Purposeful and deliberate. There was intelligence behind that.”

“Intelligence? Drake – what intelligence could break the rays of the setting sun and suck down the aurora?”

“I don’t know,” he answered.

“Devils,” croaked Chiu-Ming. “The devils that defied Buddha – and have grown strong—”

“Like a metal claw!” breathed Drake.

Far to the west a sound came to us; first a whisper, then a wild rushing, a prolonged wailing, a crackling. A great light flashed through the mist, glowed about us and faded. Again the wailing, the vast rushing, the retreating whisper.

Then silence and darkness dropped embraced upon the valley of the blue poppies.

— II —

THE SIGIL ON THE ROCKS

Dawn came. Drake had slept well. But I, who had not his youthful resiliency, lay for long, awake and uneasy. I had hardly sunk into troubled slumber before dawn awakened me.

As we breakfasted, I approached directly that matter which my growing liking for him was turning into strong desire.

“Drake,” I asked. “Where are you going?”

“With you,” he laughed. “I’m foot loose and fancy free. And I think you ought to have somebody with you to help watch that cook. He might get away.”

The idea seemed to appall him.

“Fine!” I exclaimed heartily, and thrust out my hand to him. “I’m thinking of striking over the range soon to the Manasarowar Lakes. There’s a curious flora I’d like to study.”

“Anywhere you say suits me,” he answered.

We clasped hands on our partnership and soon we were on our way to the valley’s western gate; our united caravans stringing along behind us. Mile after mile we trudged through the blue poppies, discussing the enigmas of the twilight and of the night.

In the light of day their breath of vague terror was dissipated. There was no place for mystery nor dread under this floor of brilliant sunshine. The smiling sapphire floor rolled ever on before us.

Whispering little playful breezes flew down the slopes to gossip for a moment with the nodding flowers. Flocks of rose finches raced chattering overhead to quarrel with the tiny willow warblers, the chi-u-teb-tok, holding fief of the drooping, graceful bowers bending down to the little laughing stream that for the past hour had chuckled and gurgled like a friendly water baby beside us.

I had proven, almost to my own satisfaction, that what we had beheld had been a creation of the extraordinary atmospheric attributes of these highlands, an atmosphere so unique as to make almost anything of the kind possible. But Drake was not convinced.

“I know,” he said. “Of course I understand all that – superimposed layers of warmer air that might have bent the ray; vortices in the higher levels that might have produced just that effect of the captured aurora. I admit it’s all possible. I’ll even admit it’s all probable, but damn me, Doc, if I believe it! I had too clearly the feeling of a conscious force, a something that knew exactly what it was doing – and had a reason for it.”

It was mid-afternoon.

The spell of the valley upon us, we had gone leisurely. The western mount was close, the mouth of the gorge through which we must pass, now plain before us. It did not seem as though we could reach it before dusk, and Drake and I were reconciled to spending another night in the peaceful vale. Plodding along, deep in thought, I was startled by his exclamation.

He was staring at a point some hundred yards to his right. I followed his gaze.

The towering cliffs were a scant half mile away. At some distant time there had been an enormous fall of rock. This, disintegrating, had formed a gently-curving breast which sloped down to merge with the valley’s floor. Willow and witch alder, stunted birch and poplar had found roothold, clothed it, until only their crowding outposts, thrusting forward in a wavering semicircle, held back seemingly by the blue hordes, showed where it melted into the meadows.

In the center of this breast, beginning half way up its slopes and stretching down into the flowered fields was a colossal imprint.

Gray and brown, it stood out against the green and blue of slope and level; a rectangle all of thirty feet wide, two hundred long, the heel faintly curved and from its hither end, like claws, four slender triangles radiating from it like twenty-four points of a ten-rayed star.

Irresistibly was it like a footprint – but what thing was there whose tread could leave such a print as this?

I ran up the slope – Drake already well in advance. I paused at the base of the triangles where, were this thing indeed a footprint, the spreading claws sprang from the flat of it.

The track was fresh. At its upper edges were clipped bushes and split trees, the white wood of the latter showing where they had been sliced as though by the stroke of a scimitar.

I stepped out upon the mark. It was as level as though planed; bent down and stared in utter disbelief of what my own eyes beheld. For stone and earth had been crushed, compressed, into a smooth, microscopically grained, adamantine complex, and in this matrix poppies still bearing traces of their coloring were imbedded like fossils. A cyclone can and does grip straws and thrust them unbroken through an inch board – but what force was there which could take the delicate petals of a flower and set them like inlay within the surface of a stone?

Into my mind came recollection of the wailings, the crashings in the night, of the weird glow that had flashed about us when the mist arose to hide the chained aurora.

“It was what we heard,” I said. “The sounds – it was then that this was made.”

“The foot of Shin-je!” Chiu-Ming’s voice was tremulous. “The lord of Hell has trodden here!”

I translated for Drake’s benefit.

“Has the lord of Hell but one foot?” asked Dick, politely.

“He bestrides the mountains,” said Chiu-Ming. “On the far side is his other footprint. Shin-je it was who strode the mountains and set here his foot.”

Again I interpreted.

Drake cast a calculating glance up to the cliff top.

“Two thousand feet, about,” he mused. “Well, if Shin-je is built in our proportions that makes it about right. The length of this thing would give him just about a two thousand foot leg. Yes – he could just about straddle that hill.”

“You’re surely not serious?” I asked in consternation.

“What the hell!” he exclaimed, “am I crazy? This is no foot mark. How could it be? Look at the mathematical nicety with which these edges are stamped out – as though by a die—

“That’s what it reminds me of – a die. It’s as if some impossible power had been used to press it down. Like – like a giant seal of metal in a mountain’s hand. A sigil – a seal—”

“But why?” I asked. “What could be the purpose—”

“Better ask where the devil such a force could be gotten together and how it came here,” he said. “Look – except for this one place there isn’t a mark anywhere. All the bushes and the trees, all the poppies and the grass are just as they ought to be.

“How did whoever or whatever it was that made this, get here and get away without leaving any trace but this? Damned if I don’t think Chiu-Ming’s explanation puts less strain upon the credulity than any I could offer.”

I peered about. It was so. Except for the mark, there was no slightest sign of the unusual, the abnormal.

But the mark was enough!

“I’m for pushing up a notch or two and getting into the gorge before dark,” he was voicing my own thought. “I’m willing to face anything human – but I’m not keen to be pressed into a rock like a flower in a maiden’s book of poems.” Just at twilight we drew out of the valley into the pass. We traveled a full mile along it before darkness forced us to make camp. The gorge was narrow. The far walls but a hundred feet away; but we had no quarrel with them for their neighborliness, no! Their solidity, their immutability, breathed confidence back into us.

And after we had found a deep niche capable of holding the entire caravan we filed within, ponies and all, I for one perfectly willing thus to spend the night, let the air at dawn be what it would. We dined within on bread and tea, and then, tired to the bone, sought each his place upon the rocky floor. I slept well, waking only once or twice by Chiu-Ming’s groanings; his dreams evidently were none of the pleasantest. If there was an aurora I neither knew nor cared. My slumber was dreamless.

— III —

RUTH VENTNOR

The dawn, streaming into the niche, awakened us. A covey of partridges venturing too close yielded three to our guns. We breakfasted well, and a little later were pushing on down the cleft.

Its descent, though gradual, was continuous, and therefore I was not surprised when soon we began to come upon evidences of semi-tropical vegetation. Giant rhododendrons and tree ferns gave way to occasional clumps of stately kopek and clumps of the hardier bamboos. We added a few snow cocks to our larder – although they were out of their habitat, flying down into the gorge from their peaks and table-lands for some choice tidbit.

All that day we marched on, and when at night we made camp, sleep came to us quickly and overmastering. An hour after dawn we were on our way. A brief stop we made for lunch; pressed forward.

It was close to two when we caught the first sight of the ruins.

The soaring, verdure-clad walls of the canyon had long been steadily marching closer. Above, between their rims the wide ribbon of sky was like a fantastically shored river, shimmering, dazzling; every cove and headland edged with an opalescent glimmering as of shining pearly beaches.

And as though we were sinking in that sky stream’s depths its light kept lessening, darkening imperceptibly with luminous shadows of ghostly beryl, drifting veils of pellucid aquamarine, limpid mists of glaucous chrysolite.

Fainter, more crepuscular became the light, yet never losing its crystalline quality. Now the high overhead river was but a brook; became a thread. Abruptly it vanished.

We passed into a tunnel, fern walled, fern roofed, garlanded with tawny orchids, gay with carmine fungus and golden moss. We stepped out into a blaze of sunlight.

Before us lay a wide green bowl held in the hands of the clustered hills; shallow, circular, as though, while plastic still, the thumb of God had run round its rim, shaping it. Around it the peaks crowded, craning their lofty heads to peer within.

It was about a mile in its diameter, this hollow, as my gaze then measured it. It had three openings – one that lay like a crack in the northeast slope; another, the tunnel mouth through which we had come. The third lifted itself out of the bowl, creeping up the precipitous bare scarp of the western barrier straight to the north, clinging to the ochreous rock up and up until it vanished around a far distant shoulder.

It was a wide and bulwarked road, a road that spoke as clearly as though it had tongue of human hands which had cut it there in the mountain’s breast. An ancient road weary beyond belief beneath the tread of uncounted years.

From the hollow the blind soul of loneliness groped out to greet us!

Never had I felt such loneliness as that which lapped the lip of the verdant bowl. It was tangible – as though it had been poured from some reservoir of misery. A pool of despair—

Half the width of the valley away the ruins began. Weirdly were they its visible expression. They huddled in two bent rows to the bottom. They crouched in a wide cluster against the cliffs. From the cluster a curving row of them ran along the southern crest of the hollow.

A flight of shattered, cyclopean steps lifted to a ledge and here a crumbling fortress stood.

Irresistibly did the ruins seem a colossal hag, flung prone, lying listlessly, helplessly, against the barrier’s base. The huddled lower ranks were the legs, the cluster the body, the upper row an out-flung arm and above the neck of the stairway the ancient fortress, rounded and with two huge ragged apertures in its northern front was an aged, bleached and withered head staring, watching.

I looked at Drake – the spell of the bowl was heavy upon him, his face drawn. The Chinaman and Tibetan were murmuring, terror written large upon them.

“A hell of a joint!” Drake turned to me, a shadow of a grin lightening the distress on his face. “But I’d rather chance it than go back. What d’you say?”

I nodded, curiosity mastering my oppression. We stepped over the rim, rifles on the alert. Close behind us crowded the two servants and the ponies.

The vale was shallow, as I have said. We trod the fragments of an olden approach to the green tunnel so the descent was not difficult. Here and there beside the path upreared huge broken blocks. On them I thought I could see faint tracings as of carvings – now a suggestion of gaping, arrow-fanged dragon jaws, now the outline of a scaled body, a hint of enormous, bat-like wings.

Now we had reached the first of the crumbling piles that stretched down into the valley’s center.

Half fainting, I fell against Drake, clutching to him for support.

A stream of utter hopelessness was racing upon us, swirling and eddying around us, reaching to our hearts with ghostly fingers dripping with despair. From every shattered heap it seemed to pour, rushing down the road upon us like a torrent, engulfing us, submerging, drowning.

Unseen it was – yet tangible as water; it sapped the life from every nerve. Weariness filled me, a desire to drop upon the stones, to be rolled away. To die. I felt Drake’s body quivering even as mine; knew that he was drawing upon every reserve of strength.

“Steady,” he muttered. “Steady—”

The Tibetan shrieked and fled, the ponies scrambling after him. Dimly I remembered that mine carried precious specimens; a surge of anger passed, beating back the anguish. I heard a sob from Chiu-Ming, saw him drop.

Drake stopped, drew him to his feet. We placed him between us, thrust each an arm through his own. Then, like swimmers, heads bent, we pushed on, buffeting that inexplicable invisible flood.

As the path rose, its force lessened, my vitality grew, and the terrible desire to yield and be swept away waned. Now we had reached the foot of the cyclopean stairs, now we were half up them – and now as we struggled out upon the ledge on which the watching fortress stood, the clutching stream shoaled swiftly, the shoal became safe, dry land and the cheated, unseen maelstrom swirled harmlessly beneath us.

We stood erect, gasping for breath, again like swimmers who have fought their utmost and barely, so barely, won.

There was an almost imperceptible movement at the side of the ruined portal.

Out darted a girl. A rifle dropped from her hands. Straight she sped toward me.

And as she ran I recognized her.

Ruth Ventnor!

The flying figure reached me, threw soft arms around my neck, was weeping in relieved gladness on my shoulder.

“Ruth!” I cried. “What on earth are you doing here?”

“Walter!” she sobbed. “Walter Goodwin – Oh, thank God! Thank God!”

She drew herself from my arms, catching her breath; laughed shakily.

I took swift stock of her. Save for fear upon her, she was the same Ruth I had known three years before; wide, deep blue eyes that were now all seriousness, now sparkling wells of mischief; petite, rounded and tender; the fairest skin; an impudent little nose; shining clusters of intractable curls; all human, sparkling and sweet.

Drake coughed, insinuatingly. I introduced him.

“I – I watched you struggling through that dreadful pit.” She shuddered. “I could not see who you were, did not know whether friend or enemy – but oh, my heart almost died in pity for you, Walter,” she breathed. “What can it be – there?”

I shook my head.

“Martin could not see you,” she went on. “He was watching the road that leads above. But I ran down – to help.”

“Mart watching?” I asked. “Watching for what?”

“I—” she hesitated oddly. “I think I’d rather tell you before him. It’s so strange – so incredible.”

She led us through the broken portal and into the fortress. It was more gigantic even than I had thought. The floor of the vast chamber we had entered was strewn with fragments fallen from the crackling, stone-vaulted ceiling. Through the breaks light streamed from the level above us.

We picked our way among the debris to a wide crumbling stairway, crept up it, Ruth flitting ahead. We came out opposite one of the eye-like apertures. Black against it, perched high upon a pile of blocks, I recognized the long, lean outline of Ventnor, rifle in hand, gazing intently up the ancient road whose windings were plain through the opening. He had not heard us.

“Martin,” called Ruth softly.

He turned. A shaft of light from a crevice in the gap’s edge struck his face, flashing it out from the semi-darkness of the corner in which he crouched. I looked into the quiet gray eyes, upon the keen face.

“Goodwin!” he shouted, tumbling down from his perch, shaking me by the shoulders. “If I had been in the way of praying – you’re the man I’d have prayed for. How did you get here?”

“Just wandering, Mart,” I answered. “But Lord! I’m sure glad to see you.”

“Which way did you come?” he asked, keenly. I threw my hand toward the south.

“Not through that hollow?” he asked incredulously.

“And some hell of a place to get through,” Drake broke in. “It cost us our ponies and all my ammunition.”

“Richard Drake,” I said. “Son of old Alvin – you knew him, Mart.”

“Knew him well,” cried Ventnor, seizing Dick’s hand. “Wanted me to go to Kamchatka to get some confounded sort of stuff for one of his devilish experiments. Is he well?”

“He’s dead,” replied Dick soberly.

“Oh!” said Ventnor. “Oh – I’m sorry. He was a great man.”

Briefly I acquainted him with my wanderings, my encounter with Drake.

“That place out there—” he considered us thoughtfully. “Damned if I know what it is. Thought maybe it’s gas – of a sort. If it hadn’t been for it we’d have been out of this hole two days ago. I’m pretty sure it must be gas. And it must be much less than it was this morning, for then we made an attempt to get through again – and couldn’t.”

I was hardly listening. Ventnor had certainly advanced a theory of our unusual symptoms that had not occurred to me. That hollow might indeed be a pocket into which a gas flowed; just as in the mines the deadly coal damp collects in pits, flows like a stream along the passages. It might be that – some odorless, colorless gas of unknown qualities; and yet—

“Did you try respirators?” asked Dick.

“Surely,” said Ventnor. “First off the go. But they weren’t of any use. The gas, if it is gas, seems to operate as well through the skin as through the nose and mouth. We just couldn’t make it – and that’s all there is to it. But if you made it – could we try it now, do you think?” he asked eagerly.

I felt myself go white.

“Not – not for a little while,” I stammered.

He nodded, understandingly.

“I see,” he said. “Well, we’ll wait a bit, then.”

“But why are you staying here? Why didn’t you make for the road up the mountain? What are you watching for, anyway?” asked Drake.

“Go to it, Ruth,” Ventnor grinned. “Tell ’em. After all – it was your party, you know.”

“Mart!” she cried, blushing.

“Well – it wasn’t me they admired,” he laughed.

“Martin!” she cried again, and stamped her foot.

“Shoot,” he said. “I’m busy. I’ve got to watch.”

“Well” – Ruth’s voice was uncertain – “we’d been hunting up in Kashmir. Martin wanted to come over somewhere here. So we crossed the passes. That was about a month ago. The fourth day out we ran across what looked like a road running south.

“We thought we’d take it. It looked sort of old and lost – but it was going the way we wanted to go. It took us first into a country of little hills; then to the very base of the great range itself; finally into the mountains – and then it ran blank.”

“Bing!” interjected Ventnor, looking around for a moment. “Bing – just like that. Slap dash against a prodigious fall of rock. We couldn’t get over it.”

“So we cast about to find another road,” went on Ruth. “All we could strike were – just strikes.”

“No fish on the end of ’em,” said Ventnor. “God! But I’m glad to see you, Walter Goodwin. Believe me, I am. However – go on, Ruth.”

“At the end of the second week,” she said, “we knew we were lost. We were deep in the heart of the range. All around us was a forest of enormous, snow-topped peaks. The gorges, the canyons, the valleys that we tried led us east and west, north and south.

“It was a maze, and in it we seemed to be going ever deeper. There was not the slightest sign of human life. It was as though no human beings except ourselves had ever been there. Game was plentiful. We had no trouble in getting food. And sooner or later, of course, we were bound to find our way out. We didn’t worry.

“It was five nights ago that we camped at the head of a lovely little valley. There was a mound that stood up like a tiny watch-tower, looking down it. The trees grew round like tall sentinels.

“We built our fire in that mound; and after we had eaten, Martin slept. I sat watching the beauty of the skies and of the shadowy vale. I heard no one approach – but something made me leap to my feet, look behind me.

“A man was standing just within the glow of firelight, watching me.”

“A Tibetan?” I asked. She shook her head, trouble in her eyes.

“Not at all.” Ventnor turned his head. “Ruth screamed and awakened me. I caught a glimpse of the fellow before he vanished.

“A short purple mantle hung from his shoulders. His chest was covered with fine chain mail. His legs were swathed and bound by the thongs of his high buskins. He carried a small, round, hide-covered shield and a short two-edged sword. His head was helmeted. He belonged, in fact – oh, at least twenty centuries back.”

He laughed in plain enjoyment of our amazement.

“Go on, Ruth,” he said, and took up his watch.

“But Martin did not see his face,” she went on. “And oh, but I wish I could forget it. It was as white as mine, Walter, and cruel, so cruel; the eyes glowed and they looked upon me like a – like a slave dealer. They shamed me – I wanted to hide myself.

“I cried out and Martin awakened. As he moved, the man stepped out of the light and was gone. I think he had not seen Martin; had believed that I was alone.

“We put out the fire, moved farther into the shadow of the trees. But I could not sleep – I sat hour after hour, my pistol in my hand,” she patted the automatic in her belt, “my rifle close beside me.

“The hours went by – dreadfully. At last I dozed. When I awakened again it was dawn – and – and—” she covered her eyes, then: “Two men were looking down on me. One was he who had stood in the firelight.”

“They were talking,” interrupted Ventnor again, “in archaic Persian.”

“Persian,” I repeated blankly; “archaic Persian?”

“Very much so,” he nodded. “I’ve a fair knowledge of the modern tongue, and a rather unusual command of Arabic. The modern Persian, as you know, comes straight through from the speech of Xerxes, of Cyrus, of Darius whom Alexander of Macedon conquered. It has been changed mainly by taking on a load of Arabic words. Well – there wasn’t a trace of the Arabic in the tongue they were speaking.

“It sounded odd, of course – but I could understand quite easily. They were talking about Ruth. To be explicit, they were discussing her with exceeding frankness—”

“Martin!” she cried wrathfully.

“Well, all right,” he went on, half repentantly. “As a matter of fact, I had seen the pair steal up. My rifle was under my hand. So I lay there quietly, listening.

“You can realize, Walter, that when I caught sight of those two, looking as though they had materialized from Darius’s ghostly hordes, my scientific curiosity was aroused – prodigiously. So in my interest I passed over the matter of their speech; not alone because I thought Ruth asleep but also because I took into consideration that the mode of polite expression changes with the centuries – and these gentlemen clearly belonged at least twenty centuries back – the real truth is I was consumed with curiosity.

“They had got to a point where they were detailing with what pleasure a certain mysterious person whom they seemed to regard with much fear and respect would contemplate her. I was wondering how long my desire to observe – for to the anthropologist they were most fascinating – could hold my hand back from my rifle when Ruth awakened.

“She jumped up like a little fury. Fired a pistol point blank at them. Their amazement was – well – ludicrous. I know it seems incredible, but they seemed to know nothing of firearms – they certainly acted as though they didn’t.

“They simply flew into the timber. I took a pistol shot at one but missed. Ruth hadn’t though; she had winged her man; he left a red trail behind him.

“We didn’t follow the trail. We made for the opposite direction – and as fast as possible.

“Nothing happened that day or night. Next morning, creeping up a slope, we caught sight of a suspicious glitter a mile or two away in the direction we were going. We sought shelter in a small ravine. In a little while, over the hill and half a mile away from us, came about two hundred of these fellows, marching along.

“And they were indeed Darius’s men. Men of that Persia which had been dead for millenniums. There was no mistaking them, with their high, covering shields, their great bows, their javelins and armor.

“They passed; we doubled. We built no fires that night – and we ought to have turned the pony loose, but we didn’t. It carried my instruments, and ammunition, and I felt we were going to need the latter.

“The next morning we caught sight of another band – or the same. We turned again. We stole through a tree-covered plain; we struck an ancient road. It led south, into the peaks again. We followed it. It brought us here.

“It isn’t, as you observe, the most comfortable of places. We struck across the hollow to the crevice – we knew nothing of the entrance you came through. The hollow was not pleasant, either. But it was penetrable, then.

“We crossed. As we were about to enter the cleft there issued out of it a most unusual and disconcerting chorus of sounds – wailings, crashings, splinterings.”

I started, shot a look at Dick; absorbed, he was drinking in Ventnor’s every word.

“So unusual, so – well, disconcerting is the best word I can think of, that we were not encouraged to proceed. Also the peculiar unpleasantness of the hollow was increasing rapidly.

“We made the best time we could back to the fortress. And when next we tried to go through the hollow, to search for another outlet – we couldn’t. You know why,” he ended abruptly.

“But men in ancient armor. Men like those of Darius.” Dick broke the silence that had followed this amazing recital. “It’s incredible!”

“Yes,” agreed Ventnor, “isn’t it. But there they were. Of course, I don’t maintain that they were relics of Darius’s armies. They might have been of Xerxes before him – or of Artaxerxes after him. But there they certainly were, Drake, living, breathing replicas of exceedingly ancient Persians.

“Why, they might have been the wall carvings on the tomb of Khosroes come to life. I mention Darius because he fits in with the most plausible hypothesis. When Alexander the Great smashed his empire he did it rather thoroughly. There wasn’t much sympathy for the vanquished in those days. And it’s entirely conceivable that a city or two in Alexander’s way might have gathered up a fleeting regiment or so for protection and have decided not to wait for him, but to hunt for cover.

“Naturally, they would have gone into the almost inaccessible heart of the high ranges. There is nothing impossible in the theory that they found shelter at last up here. As long as history runs this has been a well-nigh unknown land. Penetrating some mountain-guarded, easily defended valley they might have decided to settle down for a time, have rebuilt a city, raised a government; laying low, in a sentence, waiting for the storm to blow over.

“Why did they stay? Well, they might have found the new life more pleasant than the old. And they might have been locked in their valley by some accident – landslides, rockfalls sealing up the entrance. There are a dozen reasonable possibilities.”

“But those who hunted you weren’t locked in,” objected Drake.

“No,” Ventnor grinned ruefully. “No, they certainly weren’t. Maybe we drifted into their preserves by a way they don’t know. Maybe they’ve found another way out. I’m sure I don’t know. But I do know what I saw.”

“The noises, Martin,” I said, for his description of these had been the description of those we had heard in the blue valley. “Have you heard them since?”

“Yes,” he answered, hesitating oddly.

“And you think those – those soldiers you saw are still hunting for you?”

“Haven’t a doubt of it,” he replied more cheerfully. “They didn’t look like chaps who would give up a hunt easily – at least not a hunt for such novel, interesting, and therefore desirable and delectable game as we must have appeared to them.”

“Martin,” I said decisively, “where’s your pony? We’ll try the hollow again, at once. There’s Ruth – and we’d never be able to hold back such numbers as you’ve described.”

“You feel strong enough to try it?”

— IV —

METAL WITH A BRAIN

The eagerness, the relief in his voice betrayed the tension, the anxiety which until now he had hidden so well; and hot shame burned me for my shrinking, my dread of again passing through that haunted vale.

“I certainly do.” I was once more master of myself. “Drake – don’t you agree?”

“Sure,” he replied. “Sure. I’ll look after Ruth – er – I mean Miss Ventnor.”

The glint of amusement in Ventnor’s eyes at this faded abruptly; his face grew somber.

“Wait,” he said. “I carried away some – some exhibits from the crevice of the noises, Goodwin.”

“What kind of exhibits?” I asked, eagerly.

“Put ’em where they’d be safe,” he continued. “I’ve an idea they’re far more curious than our armored men – and of far more importance. At any rate, we must take them with us.

“Go with Ruth, you and Drake, and look at them. And bring them back with the pony. Then we’ll make a start. A few minutes more probably won’t make much difference – but hurry.”

He turned back to his watch. Ordering Chiu-Ming to stay with him I followed Ruth and Drake down the ruined stairway. At the bottom she came to me, laid little hands on my shoulders.

“Walter,” she breathed, “I’m frightened. I’m so frightened I’m afraid to tell even Mart. He doesn’t like them, either, these little things you’re going to see. He likes them so little that he’s afraid to let me know how little he does like them.”

“But what are they? What’s to fear about them?” asked Drake.

“See what you think!” She led us slowly, almost reluctantly toward the rear of the fortress. “They lay in a little heap at the mouth of the cleft where we heard the noises. Martin picked them up and dropped them in a sack before we ran through the hollow.

“They’re grotesque and they’re almost cute, and they make me feel as though they were the tiniest tippy-tip of the claw of some incredibly large cat just stealing around the corner, a terrible cat, a cat as big as a mountain,” she ended breathlessly.

We climbed through the crumbling masonry into a central, open court. Here a clear spring bubbled up in a ruined and choked stone basin; close to the ancient well was their pony, contentedly browsing in the thick grass that grew around it. From one of its hampers Ruth took a large cloth bag.

“To carry them,” she said, and trembled.

We passed through what had once been a great door into another chamber larger than that we had just left; and it was in better preservation, the ceiling unbroken, the light dim after the blazing sun of the court. Near its center she halted us.

Before me ran a two-feet-wide ragged crack, splitting the floor and dropping down into black depths. Beyond was an expanse of smooth flagging, almost clear of debris.

Drake gave a low whistle. I followed his pointing finger. In the wall at the end whirled two enormous dragon shapes, cut in low relief. Their gigantic wings, their monstrous coils, covered the nearly unbroken surface, and these chimerae were the shapes upon the upthrust blocks of the haunted roadway.

In Ruth’s gaze I read a nameless fear, a half shuddering fascination.

But she was not looking at the cavern dragons.

Her gaze was fixed upon what at my first glance seemed to be a raised and patterned circle in the dust-covered floor. Not more than a foot in width, it shone wanly with a pale, metallic bluish luster, as though, I thought, it had been recently polished. Compared with the wall’s tremendous winged figures this floor design was trivial, ludicrously insignificant. What could there be about it to stamp that dread upon Ruth’s face?

I leaped the crevice; Dick joined me. Now I could see that the ring was not continuous. Its broken circle was made of sharply edged cubes about an inch in height, separated from each other with mathematical exactness by another inch of space. I counted them – there were nineteen.

Almost touching them with their bases were an equal number of pyramids, of tetrahedrons, as sharply angled and of similar length. They lay on their sides with tips pointing star-like to six spheres clustered like a conventionalized five petaled primrose in the exact center. Five of these spheres – the petals – were, I roughly calculated, about an inch and a half in diameter, the ball they enclosed larger by almost an inch.

So orderly was their arrangement, so much like a geometrical design nicely done by some clever child that I hesitated to disturb it. I bent, and stiffened, the first touch of dread upon me.

For within the ring, close to the clustering globes, was a miniature replica of the giant track in the poppied valley!

It stood out from the dust with the same hint of crushing force, the same die cut sharpness, the same metallic suggestion – and pointing toward the globes were the claw marks of the four spreading star points.

I reached down and picked up one of the pyramids. It seemed to cling to the rock; it was with effort that I wrenched it away. It gave to the touch a slight sensation of warmth – how can I describe it? – a warmth that was living.

I weighed it in my hand. It was oddly heavy, twice the weight, I should say, of platinum. I drew out a glass and examined it. Decidedly the pyramid was metallic, but of finest, almost silken texture – and I could not place it among any of the known metals. It certainly was none I had ever seen; yet it was as certainly metal. It was striated – slender filaments radiating from tiny, dully lustrous points within the polished surface.

And suddenly I had the weird feeling that each of these points was an eye, peering up at me, scrutinizing me. There came a startled cry from Dick.

“Look at the ring!”

The ring was in motion!

Faster the cubes moved; faster the circle revolved; the pyramids raised themselves, stood bolt upright on their square bases; the six rolling spheres touched them, joined the spinning, and with sleight-of-hand suddenness the ring drew together; its units coalesced, cubes and pyramids and globes threading with a curious suggestion of ferment.

With the same startling abruptness there stood erect, where but a moment before they had seethed, a little figure, grotesque; a weirdly humorous, a vaguely terrifying foot-high shape, squared and angled and pointed and animate – as though a child should build from nursery blocks a fantastic shape which abruptly is filled with throbbing life.

A troll from the kindergarten! A kobold of the toys!

Only for a second it stood, then began swiftly to change, melting with quicksilver quickness from one outline into another as square and triangle and spheres changed places. Their shiftings were like the transformations one sees within a kaleidoscope. And in each vanishing form was the suggestion of unfamiliar harmonies, of a subtle, a transcendental geometric art as though each swift shaping were a symbol, a word—

Euclid’s problems given volition!

Geometry endowed with consciousness!

It ceased. Then the cubes drew one upon the other until they formed a pedestal nine inches high; up this pillar rolled the larger globe, balanced itself upon the top; the five spheres followed it, clustered like a ring just below it. The other cubes raced up, clicked two by two on the outer arc of each of the five balls; at the ends of these twin blocks a pyramid took its place, tipping each with a point.

The Lilliputian fantasy was now a pedestal of cubes surmounted by a ring of globes from which sprang a star of five arms.

The spheres began to revolve. Faster and faster they spun around the base of the crowning globe; the arms became a disc upon which tiny brilliant sparks appeared, clustered, vanished only to reappear in greater number.

The troll swept toward me. It glided. The finger of panic touched me. I sprang aside, and swift as light it followed, seemed to poise itself to leap.

“Drop it!” It was Ruth’s cry.

But, before I could let fall the pyramid I had forgotten was in my hand, the little figure touched me and a paralyzing shock ran through me. My fingers clenched, locked. I stood, muscle and nerve bound, unable to move.

The little figure paused. Its whirling disc shifted from the horizontal plane on which it spun. It was as though it cocked its head to look up at me – and again I had the sense of innumerable eyes peering at me. It did not seem menacing – its attitude was inquisitive, waiting; almost as though it had asked for something and wondered why I did not let it have it. The shock still held me rigid, although a tingle in every nerve told me of returning force.

The disc tilted back to place, bent toward me again. I heard a shout; heard a bullet strike the pigmy that now clearly menaced; heard the bullet ricochet without the slightest effect upon it. Dick leaped beside me, raised a foot and kicked at the thing. There was a flash of light and upon the instant he crashed down as though struck by a giant hand, lay sprawling and inert upon the floor.

There was a scream from Ruth; there was softly sibilant rustling all about her. I saw her leap the crevice, drop on her knees beside Drake.

There was movement on the flagging where she stood. A score or more of faintly shining, bluish shapes were marching there – pyramids and cubes and spheres like those forming the shape that stood before me. There was a curious sharp tang of ozone in the air, a perceptible tightening as of electrical tension.

They swept to the edge of the fissure, swam together, and there, hanging half over the gap was a bridge, half spanning it, a weird and fairy arch made up of alternate cube and angle. The shape at my feet disintegrated; resolved itself into units that raced over to the beckoning span.

At the hither side of the crack they clicked into place, even as had the others. Before me now was a bridge complete except for the one arc near the middle where an angled gap marred it.

I felt the little object I held pulse within my hand, striving to escape. I dropped it. The tiny shape swept to the bridge, ascended it – dropped into the gap.

The arch was complete – hanging in one flying span over the depths!

Upon it, over it, as though they had but awaited this completion, rolled the six globes. And as they dropped to the farther side the end of the bridge nearest me raised itself in air, curved itself like a scorpion’s tail, drew itself into a closer circled arc, and dropped upon the floor beyond.

Again the sibilant rustling – and cubes and pyramids and spheres were gone.

Nerves tingling slowly back to life, mazed in absolute bewilderment, my gaze sought Drake. He was sitting up, feebly, his head supported by Ruth’s hands.

“Goodwin!” he whispered. “What – what were they?”

“Metal,” I said – it was the only word to which my whirling mind could cling – “metal—”

“Metal!” he echoed. “These things metal? Metal – alive and thinking!”

Suddenly he was silent, his face a page on which, visibly, dread gathered slowly and ever deeper.

And as I looked at Ruth, white-faced, and at him, I knew that my own was as pallid, as terror-stricken as theirs.

“They were such little things,” muttered Drake. “Such little things – bits of metal – little globes and pyramids and cubes – just little things.”

“Babes! Only babes!” It was Ruth – “babes!”

“Bits of metal” – Dick’s gaze sought mine, held it – “and they looked for each other, they worked with each other – thinkingly, consciously – they were deliberate, purposeful – little things – and with the force of a score of dynamos – living, thinking—”

“Don’t!” Ruth laid white hands over his eyes. “Don’t – don’t you be frightened!”

“Frightened?” he echoed. “I’M not afraid – yes, I am afraid—”

He arose, stiffly – and stumbled toward me.

Afraid? Drake afraid. Well – so was I. Bitterly, terribly afraid.

For what we had beheld in the dusk of that dragoned, ruined chamber was outside all experience, beyond all knowledge or dream of science. Not their shapes – that was nothing. Not even that, being metal, they had moved.

But that being metal, they had moved consciously, thoughtfully, deliberately.

They were metal things with – minds!

That – that was the incredible, the terrifying thing. That – and their power.

Thor compressed within Hop-o’-my-thumb – and thinking. The lightnings incarnate in metal minacules – and thinking.

The inert, the immobile, given volition, movement, cognisance – thinking.

Metal with a brain!

— V —

THE SMITING THING

Silently we looked at each other, and silently we passed out of the courtyard. The dread was heavy upon me. The twilight was stealing upon the close-clustered peaks. Another hour, and their amethyst-and-purple mantles would drop upon them; snowfields and glaciers sparkle out in irised beauty; nightfall.

As I gazed upon them I wondered to what secret place within their brooding immensities the little metal mysteries had fled. And to what myriads, it might be, of their kind? And these hidden hordes – of what shapes were they? Of what powers? Small like these, or – or—

Quick on the screen of my mind flashed two pictures, side by side – the little four-rayed print in the great dust of the crumbling ruin and its colossal twin on the breast of the poppied valley.

I turned aside, crept through the shattered portal and looked over the haunted hollow.

Unbelieving, I rubbed my eyes; then leaped to the very brim of the bowl.

A lark had risen from the roof of one of the shattered heaps and had flown caroling up into the shadowy sky.

A flock of the little willow warblers flung themselves across the valley, scolding and gossiping; a hare sat upright in the middle of the ancient roadway.

The valley itself lay serenely under the ambering light, smiling, peaceful – emptied of horror!

I dropped over the side, walked cautiously down the road up which but an hour or so before we had struggled so desperately; paced farther and farther with an increasing confidence and a growing wonder.

Gone was that soul of loneliness; vanished the whirlpool of despair that had striven to drag us down to death.

The bowl was nothing but a quiet, smiling lovely little hollow in the hills. I looked back. Even the ruins had lost their sinister shape; were time-worn, crumbling piles – nothing more.

I saw Ruth and Drake run out upon the ledge and beckon me; made my way back to them, running.

“It’s all right,” I shouted. “The place is all right.”

I stumbled up the side; joined them.

“It’s empty,” I cried. “Get Martin and Chiu-Ming quick! While the way’s open—”

A rifle-shot rang out above us; another and another. From the portal scampered Chiu-Ming, his robe tucked up about his knees.

“They come!” he gasped. “They come!”

There was a flashing of spears high up the winding mountain path. Down it was pouring an avalanche of men. I caught the glint of helmets and corselets. Those in the van were mounted, galloping two abreast upon sure-footed mountain ponies. Their short swords, lifted high, flickered.

After the horsemen swarmed foot soldiers, a forest of shining points and dully gleaming pikes above them. Clearly to us came their battle cries.

Again Ventnor’s rifle cracked. One of the foremost riders went down; another stumbled over him, fell. The rush was checked for an instant, milling upon the road.

“Dick,” I cried, “rush Ruth over to the tunnel mouth. We’ll follow. We can hold them there. I’ll get Martin. Chiu-Ming, after the pony, quick.”

I pushed the two over the rim of the hollow. Side by side the Chinaman and I ran back through the gateway. I pointed to the animal and rushed back into the fortress.

“Quick, Mart!” I shouted up the shattered stairway. “We can get through the hollow. Ruth and Drake are on their way to the break we came through. Hurry!”

“All right. Just a minute,” he called.

I heard him empty his magazine with almost machine-gun quickness. There was a short pause, and down the broken steps he leaped, gray eyes blazing.

“The pony?” He ran beside me toward the portal. “All my ammunition is on him.”

“Chiu-Ming’s taking care of that,” I gasped.

We darted out of the gateway. A good five hundred yards away were Ruth and Drake, running straight to the green tunnel’s mouth. Between them and us was Chiu-Ming urging on the pony.

As we sped after him I looked back. The horsemen had recovered, were now a scant half-mile from where the road swept past the fortress. I saw that with their swords the horsemen bore great bows. A little cloud of arrows sparkled from them; fell far short.

“Don’t look back,” grunted Ventnor. “Stretch yourself, Walter. There’s a surprise coming. Hope to God I judged the time right.”

We turned off the ruined way; raced over the sward.

“If it looks as though – we can’t make it,” he panted, “you beat it after the rest. I’ll try to hold ’em until you get into the tunnel. Never do for ’em to get Ruth.”

“Right.” My own breathing was growing labored, “we’ll hold them. Drake can take care of Ruth.”

“Good boy,” he said. “I wouldn’t have asked you. It probably means death.”

“Very well,” I gasped, irritated. “But why borrow trouble?”

He reached out, touched me.

“You’re right, Walter,” he grinned. “It does – seem – like carrying coals – to Newcastle.”

There was a thunderous booming behind us; a shattering crash. A cloud of smoke and dust hung over the northern end of the ruined fortress.

It lifted swiftly, and I saw that the whole side of the structure had fallen, littering the road with its fragments. Scattered prone among these were men and horses; others staggered, screaming. On the farther side of this stony dike our pursuers were held like rushing waters behind a sudden fallen tree.

“Timed to a second!” cried Ventnor. “Hold ’em for a while. Fuses and dynamite. Blew out the whole side, right on ’em, by the Lord!”

On we fled. Chiu-Ming was now well in advance; Ruth and Dick less than half a mile from the opening of the green tunnel. I saw Drake stop, raise his rifle, empty it before him, and, holding Ruth by the hand, race back toward us.

Even as he turned, the vine-screened entrance through which we had come, through which we had thought lay safety, streamed other armored men. We were outflanked.

“To the fissure!” shouted Ventnor. Drake heard, for he changed his course to the crevice at whose mouth Ruth had said the – Little Things – had lain.

After him streaked Chiu-Ming, urging on the pony. Shouting out of the tunnel, down over the lip of the bowl, leaped the soldiers. We dropped upon our knees, sent shot after shot into them. They fell back, hesitated. We sprang up, sped on.

All too short was the check, but once more we held them – and again.

Now Ruth and Dick were a scant fifty yards from the crevice. I saw him stop, push her from him toward it. She shook her head.

Now Chiu-Ming was with them. Ruth sprang to the pony, lifted from its back a rifle. Then into the mass of their pursuers Drake and she poured a fusillade. They huddled, wavered, broke for cover.

“A chance!” gasped Ventnor.

Behind us was a wolf-like yelping. The first pack had re-formed; had crossed the barricade the dynamite had made; was rushing upon us.

I ran as I had never known I could. Over us whined the bullets from the covering guns. Close were we now to the mouth of the fissure. If we could but reach it. Close, close were our pursuers, too – the arrows closer.

“No use!” said Ventnor. “We can’t make it. Meet ’em from the front. Drop – and shoot.”

We threw ourselves down, facing them. There came a triumphant shouting. And in that strange sharpening of the senses that always goes hand in hand with deadly peril, that is indeed nature’s summoning of every reserve to meet that peril, my eyes took them in with photographic nicety – the linked mail, lacquered blue and scarlet, of the horsemen; brown, padded armor of the footmen; their bows and javelins and short bronze swords, their pikes and shields; and under their round helmets their cruel, bearded faces – white as our own where the black beards did not cover them; their fierce and mocking eyes.

The springs of ancient Persia’s long dead power, these. Men of Xerxes’s ruthless, world-conquering hordes; the lustful, ravening wolves of Darius whom Alexander scattered – in this world of ours twenty centuries beyond their time!

Swiftly, accurately, even as I scanned them, we had been drilling into them. They advanced deliberately, heedless of their fallen. Their arrows had ceased to fly. I wondered why, for now we were well within their range. Had they orders to take us alive – at whatever cost to themselves?

“I’ve got only about ten cartridges left, Martin,” I told him.

“We’ve saved Ruth anyway,” he said. “Drake ought to be able to hold that hole in the wall. He’s got lots of ammunition on the pony. But they’ve got us.”

Another wild shouting; down swept the pack.

We leaped to our feet, sent our last bullets into them; stood ready, rifles clubbed to meet the rush. I heard Ruth scream—

What was the matter with the armored men? Why had they halted? What was it at which they were glaring over our heads? And why had the rifle fire of Ruth and Drake ceased so abruptly?

Simultaneously we turned.

Within the black background of the fissure stood a shape, an apparition, a woman – beautiful, awesome, incredible!

She was tall, standing there swathed from chin to feet in clinging veils of pale amber, she seemed taller even than tall Drake. Yet it was not her height that sent through me the thrill of awe, of half incredulous terror which, relaxing my grip, let my smoking rifle drop to earth; nor was it that about her proud head a cloud of shining tresses swirled and pennoned like a misty banner of woven copper flames – no, nor that through her veils her body gleamed faint radiance.

It was her eyes – her great, wide eyes whose clear depths were like pools of living star fires. They shone from her white face – not phosphorescent, not merely lucent and light reflecting, but as though they themselves were sources of the cold white flames of far stars – and as calm as those stars themselves.

And in that face, although as yet I could distinguish nothing but the eyes, I sensed something unearthly.

“God!” whispered Ventnor. “What is she?”

The woman stepped from the crevice. Not fifty feet from her were Ruth and Drake and Chiu-Ming, their rigid attitudes revealing the same shock of awe that had momentarily paralyzed me.

She looked at them, beckoned them. I saw the two walk toward her, Chiu-Ming hang back. The great eyes fell upon Ventnor and myself. She raised a hand, motioned us to approach.

I turned. There stood the host that had poured down the mountain road, horsemen, spearsmen, pikemen – a full thousand of them. At my right were the scattered company that had come from the tunnel entrance, threescore or more.

There seemed a spell upon them. They stood in silence, like automatons, only their fiercely staring eyes showing that they were alive.

“Quick,” breathed Ventnor.

We ran toward her who had checked death even while its jaws were closing upon us.

Before we had gone half-way, as though our flight had broken whatever bonds had bound them, a clamor arose from the host; a wild shouting, a clanging of swords on shields. I shot a glance behind. They were in motion, advancing slowly, hesitatingly as yet – but I knew that soon that hesitation would pass; that they would sweep down upon us, engulf us.

“To the crevice,” I shouted to Drake. He paid no heed to me, nor did Ruth – their gaze fastened upon the swathed woman.

Ventnor’s hand shot out, gripped my shoulder, halted me. She had thrown up her head. The cloudy metallic hair billowed as though wind had blown it.

From the lifted throat came a low, a vibrant cry; harmonious, weirdly disquieting, golden and sweet – and laden with the eery, minor wailings of the blue valley’s night, the dragoned chamber.

Before the cry had ceased there poured with incredible swiftness out of the crevice score upon score of the metal things. The fissures vomited them!

Globes and cubes and pyramids – not small like those of the ruins, but shapes all of four feet high, dully lustrous, and deep within that luster the myriads of tiny points of light like unwinking, staring eyes.

They swirled, eddied and formed a barricade between us and the armored men.

Down upon them poured a shower of arrows from the soldiers. I heard the shouts of their captains; they rushed. They had courage – those men – yes!

Again came the woman’s cry – golden, peremptory.

Sphere and block and pyramid ran together, seemed to seethe. I had again that sense of a quicksilver melting. Up from them thrust a thick rectangular column. Eight feet in width and twenty feet high, it shaped itself. Out from its left side, from right side, sprang arms – fearful arms that grew and grew as globe and cube and angle raced up the column’s side and clicked into place each upon, each after, the other. With magical quickness the arms lengthened.

Before us stood a monstrous shape; a geometric prodigy. A shining angled pillar that, though rigid, immobile, seemed to crouch, be instinct with living force striving to be unleashed.

Two great globes surmounted it – like the heads of some two-faced Janus of an alien world.

At the left and right the knobbed arms, now fully fifty feet in length, writhed, twisted, straightened; flexing themselves in grotesque imitation of a boxer. And at the end of each of the six arms the spheres were clustered thick, studded with the pyramids – again in gigantic, awful, parody of the spiked gloves of those ancient gladiators who fought for imperial Nero.

For an instant it stood here, preening, testing itself like an athlete – a chimera, amorphous yet weirdly symmetric – under the darkening sky, in the green of the hollow, the armored hosts frozen before it—

And then – it struck!

Out flashed two of the arms, with a glancing motion, with appalling force. They sliced into the close-packed forward ranks of the armored men; cut out of them two great gaps.

Sickened, I saw fragments of man and horse fly. Another arm javelined from its place like a flying snake, clicked at the end of another, became a hundred-foot chain which swirled like a flail through the huddling mass. Down upon a knot of the soldiers with a straight-forward blow drove a third arm, driving through them like a giant punch.

All that host which had driven us from the ruins threw down sword, spear, and pike; fled shrieking. The horsemen spurred their mounts, riding heedless over the footmen who fled with them.

The Smiting Thing seemed to watch them go with – amusement!

Before they could cover a hundred yards it had disintegrated. I heard the little wailing sounds – then behind the fleeing men, close behind them, rose the angled pillar; into place sprang the flexing arms, and again it took its toll of them.

They scattered, running singly, by twos, in little groups, for the sides of the valley. They were like rats scampering in panic over the bottom of a great green bowl. And like a monstrous cat the shape played with them – yes, played.

It melted once more – took new form. Where had been pillar and flailing arms was now a tripod thirty feet high, its legs alternate globe and cube and upon its apex a wide and spinning ring of sparkling spheres. Out from the middle of this ring stretched a tentacle – writhing, undulating like a serpent of steel, four score yards at least in length.

At its end cube, globe and pyramid had mingled to form a huge trident. With the three long prongs of this trident the thing struck, swiftly, with fearful precision – joyously – tining those who fled, forking them, tossing them from its points high in air.

It was, I think, that last touch of sheer horror, the playfulness of the Smiting Thing, that sent my dry tongue to the roof of my terror-parched mouth, and held open with monstrous fascination eyes that struggled to close.

Ever the armored men fled from it, and ever was it swifter than they, teetering at their heels on its tripod legs.

From half its length the darting snake streamed red rain.

I heard a sigh from Ruth; wrested my gaze from the hollow; turned. She lay fainting in Drake’s arms.

Beside the two the swathed woman stood, looking out upon that slaughter, calm and still, shrouded with an unearthly tranquility – viewing it, it came to me, with eyes impersonal, cold, indifferent as the untroubled stars which look down upon hurricane and earthquake in this world of ours.

There was a rushing of many feet at our left; a wail from Chiu-Ming. Were they maddened by fear, driven by despair, determined to slay before they themselves were slain? I do not know. But those who still lived of the men from the tunnel mouth were charging us.

They clustered close, their shields held before them. They had no bows, these men. They moved swiftly down upon us in silence – swords and pikes gleaming.

The Smiting Thing rocked toward us, the metal tentacle straining out like a rigid, racing serpent, flying to cut between its weird mistress and those who menaced her.

I heard Chiu-Ming scream; saw him throw up his hands, cover his eyes – run straight upon the pikes!

“Chiu-Ming!” I shouted. “Chiu-Ming! This way!”

I ran toward him. Before I had gone five paces Ventnor flashed by me, revolver spitting. I saw a spear thrown. It struck the Chinaman squarely in the breast. He tottered – fell upon his knees.

Even as he dropped, the giant flail swept down upon the soldiers. It swept through them like a scythe through ripe grain. It threw them, broken and torn, far toward the valley’s sloping sides. It left only fragments that bore no semblance to men.

Ventnor was at Chiu-Ming’s head; I dropped beside him. There was a crimson froth upon his lips.

“I thought that Shin-Je was about to slay us,” he whispered. “Fear blinded me.”

His head dropped; his body quivered, lay still.

We arose, looked about us dazedly. At the side of the crevice stood the woman, her gaze resting upon Drake, his arms about Ruth, her head hidden on his breast.

The valley was empty – save for the huddled heaps that dotted it.

High up on the mountain path a score of figures crept, all that were left of those who but a little before had streamed down to take us captive or to slay. High up in the darkening heavens the lammergeiers, the winged scavengers of the Himalayas, were gathering.

The woman lifted her hand, beckoned us once more. Slowly we walked toward her, stood before her. The great clear eyes searched us – but no more intently than our own wondering eyes did her.

— VI —

NORHALA
OF THE LIGHTNINGS

We looked upon a vision of loveliness such, I think, as none has beheld since Trojan Helen was a maid. At first all I could note were the eyes, clear as rain-washed April skies, crystal clear as some secret spring sacred to crescented Diana. Their wide gray irises were flecked with golden amber and sapphire – flecks that shone like clusters of little aureate and azure stars.

Then with a strange thrill of wonder I saw that these tiny constellations were not in the irises alone; that they clustered even within the pupils – deep within them, like far-flung stars in the depths of velvety, midnight heavens.

Whence had come those cold fires that had flared from them, I wondered – more menacing, far more menacing, in their cold tranquility than the hot flames of wrath? These eyes were not perilous – no. Calm they were and still – yet in them a shadow of interest flickered; a ghost of friendliness smiled.

Above them were level, delicately penciled brows of bronze. The lips were coral crimson and – asleep. Sweet were those lips as ever master painter, dreaming his dream of the very soul of woman’s sweetness, saw in vision and limned upon his canvas – and asleep, nor wistful for awakening.

A proud, straight nose; a broad low brow, and over it the masses of the tendriling tresses – tawny, lustrous topaz, cloudy, metallic. Like spun silk of ruddy copper; and misty as the wisps of cloud that Soul’tze, Goddess of Sleep, sets in the skies of dawn to catch the wandering dreams of lovers.

Down from the wondrous face melted the rounded column of her throat to merge into exquisite curves of shoulders and breasts, half revealed beneath the swathing veils.

But upon that face, within her eyes, kissing her red lips and clothing her breasts, was something unearthly.

Something that came straight out of the still mysteries of the star-filled spaces; out of the ordered, the untroubled, the illimitable void.

A passionless spirit that watched over the human passion in the scarlet mouth, in every slumbering, sculptured line of her – guarding her against its awakening.

Twilight calm dropping down from the sun sleep to still the restless mountain tarn. Ishtar dreamlessly asleep within Nirvana.

Something not of this world we know – and yet of it as the winds of the Cosmos are to the summer breeze, the ocean to the wave, the lightnings to the glowworm.

“She isn’t – human,” I heard Ventnor whispering at my ear. “Look at her eyes; look at the skin of her—”

Her skin was white as milk of pearls; gossamer fine, silken and creamy; translucent as though a soft brilliancy dwelt within it. Beside it Ruth’s fair skin was like some sun-and-wind-roughened country lass’s to Titania’s.

She studied us as though she were seeing for the first time beings of her own kind. She spoke – and her voice was elfin distant, chimingly sweet like hidden little golden bells; filled with that tranquil, far off spirit that was part of her – as though indeed a tiny golden chime should ring out from the silences, speak for them, find tongues for them. The words were hesitating, halting as though the lips that uttered them found speech strange – as strange as the clear eyes found our images.

And the words were Persian – purest, most ancient Persian.

“I am Norhala,” the golden voice chimed forth, whispered down into silence. “I am Norhala.”

She shook her head impatiently. A hand stole forth from beneath her veils, slender, long-fingered with nails like rosy pearls; above the wrist was coiled a golden dragon with wicked little crimson eyes. The slender white hand touched Ruth’s head, turned it until the strange, flecked orbs looked directly into the misty ones of blue.

Long they gazed – and deep. Then she who had named herself Norhala thrust out a finger, touched the tear that hung upon Ruth’s curled lashes, regarded it wonderingly.

Something of recognition, of memory, seemed to awaken within her.

“You are – troubled?” she asked with that halting effort.

Ruth shook her head.

“They – do not trouble you?”

She pointed to the huddled heaps strewing the hollow. And then I saw whence the light which had streamed from her great eyes came. For the little azure and golden stars paled, trembled, then flashed out like galaxies of tiny, clustered silver suns.

From that weird radiance Ruth shrank, affrighted.

“No – no,” she gasped. “I weep for – him.”

She pointed where Chiu-Ming lay, a brown blotch at the edge of the shattered men.

“For – him?” There was puzzlement in the faint voice. “For – that? But why?”

She looked at Chiu-Ming – and I knew that to her the sight of the crumpled form carried no recognition of the human, nothing of kin to her. There was a faint wonder in her eyes, no longer light-filled, when at last she turned back to us. Long she considered us.

“Now,” she broke the silence, “now something stirs within me that it seems has long been sleeping. It bids me take you with me. Come!”

Abruptly she turned from us, glided to the crevice. We looked at each other, seeking council, decision.

“Chiu-Ming,” Drake spoke. “We can’t leave him like that. At least let’s cover him from the vultures.”

“Come.” The woman had reached the mouth of the fissure.

“I’m afraid! Oh, Martin – I’m afraid.” Ruth reached little trembling hands to her tall brother.

“Come!” Norhala called again. There was an echo of harshness, a clanging, peremptory and inexorable, in the chiming.

Ventnor shrugged his shoulders.

“Come, then,” he said.

With one last look at the Chinese, the lammergeiers already circling about him, we walked to the crevice. Norhala waited, silent, brooding until we passed her; then glided behind us.

Before we had gone ten paces I saw that the place was no fissure. It was a tunnel, a passage hewn by human hands, its walls covered with the writhing dragon lines, its roof the mountain.

The swathed woman swept by us. Swiftly we followed her. Far, far ahead was a wan gleaming. It quivered, a faintly shimmering, ghostly curtain, a full mile away.

Now it was close; we passed through it and were out of the tunnel. Before us stretched a narrow gorge, a sword slash in the body of the towering giant under whose feet the tunnel crept. High above was the ribbon of the sky.

The sides were dark, but it came to me that here were no trees, no verdure of any kind. Its floor was strewn with boulders, fantastically shaped, almost indistinguishable in the fast closing dark.

Twin monoliths bulwarked the passage end; the gigantic stones were leaning, crumbling. Fissures radiated from the opening, like deep wrinkles in the rock, showing where earth warping, range pressure, had long been working to close this hewn way.

“Stop,” Norhala’s abrupt, golden note halted us; and again through the clear eyes I saw the white starshine flash.

“It may be well—” She spoke as though to herself. “It may be well to close this way. It is not needed—”

Her voice rang out again, vibrant, strangely disquieting, harmonious. Murmurous chanting it was at first, rhythmic and low; ripples and flutings, tones and progressions utterly unknown to me; unfamiliar, abrupt, and alien themes that kept returning, droppings of crystal-clear jewels of sound, golden tollings – and all ordered, mathematical, geometric, even as had been the gestures of the shapes; Lilliputians of the ruins, Brobdignagian of the haunted hollow.

What was it? I had it – it was those gestures transformed into sound!

•   •   •

There was a movement down by the tunnel mouth. It grew more rapid, seemed to vibrate with her song. Within the darkness there were little flashes; glimmerings of light began to come and go – like little awakenings of eyes of soft, jeweled flames, like giant gorgeous fireflies; flashes of cloudy amber, gleam of rose, sparkles of diamonds and of opals, of emeralds and of rubies – blinking, gleaming.

A shimmering mist drew down around them – a swift and swirling mist. It thickened, was shot with slender shuttled threads like cobweb, coruscating strands of light.

The shining threads grew thicker, pulsed, were spangled with tiny vivid sparklings. They ran together, condensed – and all this in an instant, in a tenth of the time it takes me to write it.

From fiery mist and gemmed flashes came bolt upon bolt of lightning. The cliff face leaped out, a cataract of green flame. The fissures widened, the monoliths trembled, fell.

In the wake of that dazzling brilliancy came utter blackness. I opened my blinded eyes; slowly the flecks of green fire cleared. A faint lambency still clung to the cliff. By it I saw that the tunnel’s mouth had vanished, had been sealed – where it had gaped were only tons of shattered rock.

Came a rushing past us as of great bodies; something grazed my hand, something whose touch was like that of warm metal – but metal throbbing with life. They rushed by – and whispered down into silence.

“Come!” Norhala flitted ahead of us, a faintly luminous shape in the darkness. Swiftly we followed. I found Ruth beside me; felt her hand grip my wrist.

“Walter,” she whispered, “Walter – she isn’t human!”

“Nonsense,” I muttered. “Nonsense, Ruth. What do you think she is – a goddess, a spirit of the Himalayas? She’s as human as you or I.”

“No.” Even in the darkness I could sense the stubborn shake of her curly head. “Not all human. Or how could she have commanded those things? Or have summoned the lightnings that blasted the tunnel’s mouth? And her skin and hair – they’re too wonderful, Walter.

“Why, she makes me look – look coarse. And the light that hovers about her – why, it is by that light we are making our way. And when she touched me – I – I glowed – all through.

“Human, yes – but there is something else in her – something stronger than humanness, something that – makes it sleep!” she added astonishingly.

The ground was level as a dancing floor. We followed the enigmatic glow – emanation, it seemed to me – from Norhala which was as a light for us to follow within the darkness. The high ribbon of sky had vanished – seemed to be overcast, for I could see no stars.

Within the darkness I began again to sense faint movement; soft stirring all about us. I had the feeling that on each side and behind us moved an invisible host.

“There’s something moving all about us – going with us,” Ruth echoed my thought.

“It’s the wind,” I said, and paused – for there was no wind.

From the blackness before us came a succession of curious, muffled clickings, like a smothered mitrailleuse [volley gun, machine gun]. The luminescence that clothed Norhala brightened, deepening the darkness.

“Cross!”

She pointed into the void ahead; then, as we started forward, thrust out a hand to Ruth, held her back. Drake and Ventnor drew close to them, questioningly, anxious. But I stepped forward, out of the dim gleaming.

Before me were two cubes; one I judged in that uncertain light to be six feet high, the other half its bulk. From them a shaft of pale-blue phosphorescence pierced the murk. They stood, the smaller pressed against the side of the larger, for all the world like a pair of immense nursery blocks, placed like steps by some giant child.

As my eyes swept over them, I saw that the shining shaft was an unbroken span of cubes; not multi-arched like the Lilliputian bridge of the dragon chamber, but flat and running out over an abyss that gaped at my very feet. All of a hundred feet they stretched; a slender, lustrous girder crossing unguessed depths of gloom. From far, far below came the faint whisper of rushing waters.

I faltered. For these were the blocks that had formed the body of the monster of the hollow, its flailing arms. The thing that had played so murderously with the armored men.

And now had shaped itself into this anchored, quiescent bridge.

“Do not fear.” It was the woman speaking, softly, as one would reassure a child. “Ascend. Cross. They obey me.”

I stepped firmly upon the first block, climbed to the second. The span stretched, sharp edged, smooth, only a slender, shimmering line revealing where each great cube held fast to the other.

I walked at first slowly, then with ever-increasing confidence, for up from the surface streamed a guiding, a holding force, that was like a host of little invisible hands, steadying me, keeping firm my feet. I looked down; the myriads of enigmatic eyes were staring, staring up at me from deep within. They fascinated me; I felt my pace slowing; a vertigo seized me. Resolutely I dragged my gaze up and ahead; marched on.

From the depths came more clearly the sound of the waters. Now there were but a few feet more of the bridge before me. I reached its end, dropped my feet over, felt them touch a smaller cube, and descended.

Over the span came Ventnor. He was leading his laden pony. He had bandaged its eyes so that it could not look upon the narrow way it was treading. And close behind, a band resting reassuringly upon its flank, strode Drake, swinging along carelessly. The little beast ambled along serenely, sure-footed as all its mountain kind, and docile to darkness and guidance.

Then, an arm about Ruth, floated Norhala. Now she was beside us; dropped her arm from Ruth; glided past us. On for a hundred yards or more we went, and then she drew us a little toward the unseen canyon wall.

She stood before us, shielding us. One golden call she sent.

I looked back into the darkness. Something like an enormous, dimly shimmering rod was raising itself. Higher it rose and higher. Now it stood, upright, a slender towering pillar, a gigantic slim figure whose tip pointed a full hundred feet in the air.

Then slowly it inclined itself toward us; drew closer, closer to the ground; touched and lay there for an instant inert. Abruptly it vanished.

But well I knew what I had seen. The span over which we had passed had raised itself even as had the baby bridge of the fortress; had lifted itself across the chasm and dropping itself upon the hither verge had disintegrated into its units; was following us.

A bridge of metal that could build itself – and break itself. A thinking, conscious metal bridge! A metal bridge with volition – with mind – that was following us.

There sighed from behind a soft, sustained wailing; rapidly it neared us. A wanly glimmering shape drew by; halted. It was like a rigid serpent cut from a gigantic square bar of cold blue steel.

Its head was a pyramid, a tetrahedron; its length vanished in the further darkness. The head raised itself, the blocks that formed its neck separating into open wedges like a Brobdignagian replica of those jointed, fantastic, little painted reptiles the Japanese toy-makers cut from wood.

It seemed to regard us – mockingly. The pointed head dropped – past us streamed the body. Upon it other pyramids clustered – like the spikes that guarded the back of the nightmare Brontosaurus. Its end came swiftly into sight – its tail another pyramid twin to its head.

It flirted by – gaily; vanished.

I had thought the span must disintegrate to follow – and it did not need to! It could move as a composite as well as in units. Move intelligently, consciously – as the Smiting Thing had moved.

“Come!” Norhala’s command checked my thoughts; we fell in behind her. Looking up I caught the friendly sparkle of a star; knew the cleft was widening.

The star points grew thicker. We stepped out into a valley small as that hollow from which we had fled; ringed like it with heaven-touching summits. I could see clearly. The place was suffused with a soft radiance as though into it the far, bright stars were pouring all their rays, filling it as a cup with their pale flames.

It was luminous as the Alaskan valleys when on white arctic nights they are lighted, the Athabascans believe, by the gleaming spears of hunting gods. The walls of the valley seemed to be drawn back into infinite distances.

The shimmering mists that had nimbused Norhala had vanished – or merging into the wan gleaming had become one with it.

I stared straight at her, striving to clarify in my own clouded thought what it was that I had sensed as inhuman – never of our world or its peoples. Yet this conviction came not because of the light that had hovered about her, nor of her summonings of the lightnings; nor even of her control of those – things – which had smitten the armored men and spanned for us the abyss.

All of that I was certain lay in the domain of the explicable, could be resolved into normality once the basic facts were gained.

Suddenly, I knew. Side by side with what we term the human there dwelt within this woman an actual consciousness foreign to earth, passionless, at least as we know passion, ordered, mathematical – an emanation of the eternal law which guides the circling stars.

This it was that had moved in the gestures which had evoked the lightnings. This it was that had spoken in the song which were those gestures transformed into sound. This it was that something greater than my consciousness knew and accepted.

Something which shared, no – that reigned, serene and untroubled, upon the throne of her mind; something utterly uncomprehending, utterly unconscious of, cosmically blind to all human emotion; that spread itself like a veil over her own consciousness; that plated her thought – that was a strange word – why had it come to me – something that had set its mark upon her like – like – the gigantic claw print on the poppied field, the little print of the dragoned hall.

I caught at my mind, whirling I thought then in the grip of fantasy; strove by taking minute note of her to bring myself back to normal.

Her veils had slipped from her, baring her neck, her arms, the right shoulder. Under the smooth throat a buckle of dull gold held the sheer, diaphanous folds of the pale amber silk which swathed the high and rounded breasts, hiding no goddess curve of them.

A wide and golden girdle clasped the waist, covered the rounded hips and thighs. The long, narrow, and high-arched feet were shod with golden sandals, laced just below the rounded knees with flat turquoise studded bands.

And shining through the amber folds, as glowing above them, the miracle of her body.

The dream of master sculptor given life. A goddess of earth’s youth reborn in Himalayan wilds.

She raised her eyes; broke the long silence.

“Now being with you,” she said dreamily, “there waken within me old thoughts, old wisdom, old questioning – all that I had forgotten and thought forgotten forever—”

The golden voice died – she who had spoken was gone from us, like the fading out of a phantom; like the breaking of a film.

A flicker shot over the skies, another and another. A brilliant ray of intense green like that of a distant searchlight swept to the zenith, hung for a moment and withdrew. Up came pouring the lances and the streamers of the aurora; faster and faster, banners and slender shining spears of green and iridescent blues and smoky, glistening reds.

The valley sprang into full view.

I felt Ventnor’s grip upon my wrist. I followed his pointing finger. Into the valley from the right ran a black spur of rock, half a mile from us, fifty feet high.

Upon its crest stood – Norhala!

Her arms were lifted to the sparkling sky; her braids were loosened – and as the fires of the aurora rose and fell, raced and were still, the silken cloud of her tresses swirled and eddied with them. Little clouds of coruscations danced gaily like fireflies about and through it.

And all her bared body was outlined in living light, glowed and throbbed with light – light filled her like a vessel, she bathed in it. She thrust arms through the streaming, flaming locks; held them out from her, prisoned. She swayed slowly, rhythmically; like a faint, golden chiming came the echo of her song.

Abruptly around her, half circling her on the black spur, gleamed myriads of gem fires. Flares and flames of pale emerald, steady glowing of flame rubies, glints and lambencies of deepest sapphire, of wan sapphire, flickering opalescences, irised glitterings. A moment they gleamed. Then from them came bolt upon bolt of lightning – lightning that darted upon the lovely shape swaying there; lightnings that fell upon her, broke and dashed, cascading, from her radiant body.

The lightnings bathed her – she bathed in them.

The skies were covered by a swift mist. The aurora was veiled.

The valley filled with a palely shimmering radiance which dropped like veils upon it, hiding all within it. Hiding within fold upon luminous fold – Norhala!

— VII —

THE SHAPES IN THE MIST

Mutely we faced each other, white and wan in the ghostly light.

The valley was very still; as silent as though sound had been withdrawn from it. The shimmering radiance suffusing it had thickened perceptibly; hovered over the valley floor faintly sparkling mists; hid it.

Like a shroud was that silence. Beneath it my mind struggled, its unease, its forebodings growing ever stronger. Silently we repacked the saddlebags; girthed the pony; silently we waited for Norhala’s return.

Idly I had noted that the place on which we stood must be raised above the level of the vale. Up toward us the gathering mists had been steadily rising; still was their wavering crest a half score feet below us.

Abruptly out of their dim nebulosity a faintly phosphorescent square broke. It lifted, slowly; then swept, a dully lustrous six-foot cube, up the slope and came to rest almost at our feet. It dwelt there; contemplated us from its myriads of deep-set, sparkling striations.

In its wake swam, one by one, six others – their tops raising from the vapors like the first, watchfully; like shimmering backs of sea monsters; like turrets of fantastic angled submarines from phosphorescent seas. One by one they skimmed swiftly over the ledge; and one by one they nestled, edge to edge and alternately, against the cube which had gone before.

In a crescent, they stretched before us. Back from them, a pace, ten paces, twenty, we retreated.

They lay immobile – staring at us.

Cleaving the mists, silk of copper hair streaming wide, unearthly eyes lambent, floated up behind them – Norhala. For an instant she was hidden behind their bulk; suddenly was upon them; drifted over them like some spirit of light; stood before us.

Her veils were again about her; golden girdle, sandals of gold and turquoise in their places. Pearl white her body gleamed; no mark of lightning marred it.

She walked toward us, turned and faced the watching cubes. She uttered no sound, but as at a signal the central cube slid forward, halted before her. She rested a hand upon its edge.

“Ride with me,” she said to Ruth.

“Norhala.” Ventnor took a step forward. “Norhala, we must go with her. And this” – he pointed to the pony – “must go with us.”

“I meant – you – to come,” the faraway voice chimed, “but I had not thought of – that.”

A moment she considered; then turned to the six waiting cubes. Again as at a command four of the things moved, swirled in toward each other with a weird precision, with a monstrous martial mimicry; joined; stood before us, a platform twelve feet square, six high.

“Mount,” sighed Norhala.

Ventnor looked helplessly at the sheer front facing him.

“Mount.” There was half-wondering impatience in her command. “See!”

She caught Ruth by the waist and with the same bewildering swiftness with which she had vanished from us when the aurora beckoned she stood, holding the girl, upon the top of the single cube. It was as though the two had been lifted, had been levitated with an incredible rapidity.

“Mount,” she murmured again, looking down upon us.

Slowly Ventnor began to bandage the pony’s eyes. I placed my hand upon the edge of the quadruple; sprang. A myriad unseen hands caught me, raised me, set me instantaneously on the upward surface.

“Lift the pony to me,” I called to Ventnor.

“Lift it?” he echoed, incredulously.

Drake’s grin cut like a sunray through the nightmare dread that shrouded my mind.

“Catch,” he called; placed one hand beneath the beast’s belly, the other under its throat; his shoulders heaved – and up shot the pony, laden as it was, landed softly upon four wide-stretched legs beside me. The faces of the two gaped up, ludicrous in their amazement.

“Follow,” cried Norhala.

Ventnor leaped wildly for the top, Drake beside him; in the flash of a hummingbird’s wing they were gripping me, swearing feebly. The unseen hold angled; struck upward; clutched from ankle to thigh; held us fast – men and beast.

Away swept the block that bore Ruth and Norhala; I saw Ruth crouching, head bent, her arms around the knees of the woman. They slipped into the mists; vanished.

And after them, like a log in a racing current, we, too, dipped beneath the faintly luminous vapors.

The cubes moved with an entire absence of vibration; so smoothly and skimmingly, indeed, that had it not been for the sudden wind that had risen when first we had stirred, and that now beat steadily upon our faces, and the cloudy walls streaming by, I would have thought ourselves at rest.

I saw the blurred form of Ventnor drift toward the forward edge. He walked as though wading. I essayed to follow him; my feet I could not lift; I could advance only by gliding them as though skating.

Also the force, whatever it was, that held me seemed to pass me on from unseen clutch to clutch; it was as though up to my hips I moved through a closely woven yet fluid mass of cobwebs. I had the fantastic idea that if I so willed I could slip over the edge of the blocks, crawl about their sides without falling – like a fly on the vertical faces of a huge sugar loaf.

I drew beside Ventnor. He was staring ahead, striving, I knew, to pierce the mists for some glimpse of Ruth.

He turned to me, his face drawn with anxiety, his eyes feverish.

“Can you see them, Walter?” His voice shook. “God – why did I ever let her go like that? Why did I let her go alone?”

“They’ll be close ahead, Martin.” I spoke out of a conviction I could not explain. “Whatever it is we’re bound for, wherever it is the woman’s taking us, she means to keep us together – for a time at least. I’m sure of it.”

“She said – follow.” It was Drake beside us. “How the hell can we do anything else? We haven’t any control over this bird we’re on. But she has. What she meant, Ventnor, is that it would follow her.”

“That’s true” – new hope softened the haggard face – “that’s true – but is it? We’re reckoning with creatures that man’s imagination never conceived – nor could conceive. And with this – woman – human in shape, yes, but human in thought – never. How then can we tell—”

He turned once more, all his consciousness concentrated in his searching eyes.

Drake’s rifle slipped from his hand.

He stooped to pick it up; then tugged with both hands. The rifle lay immovable.

I bent and strove to aid him. For all the pair of us could do, the rifle might have been a part of the gleaming surface on which it rested. The tiny, deepset star points winked up—

“They’re – laughing at us!” grunted Drake.

“Nonsense,” I answered, and tried to check the involuntary shuddering that shook me, as I saw it shake him. “Nonsense. These blocks are great magnets – that’s what holds the rifle; what holds us, too.”

“I don’t mean the rifle,” he said; “I mean those points of lights – the eyes—”

There came from Ventnor a cry of almost anguished relief. We straightened. Our head shot above the mists like those of swimmers from water. Unnoticed, we had been climbing out of them.

And a hundred yards ahead of us, cleaving them, veiled in them almost to the shoulders, was Norhala, red-gold tresses steaming; and close beside her were the brown curls of Ruth. At her brother’s cry she turned and her arm flashed out of the veils with reassuring gesture.

A mile away was an opening in the valley’s mountainous wall; toward it we were speeding. It was no ragged crevice, no nature split fissure; it gave the impression of a gigantic doorway.

“Look,” whispered Drake.

Between us and the vast gateway, gleaming triangles began to break through the vapors, like the cutting fins of sharks, glints of round bodies like gigantic porpoises – the vapors seethed with them. Quickly the fins and rolling curves were all about us. They centered upon the portal, streamed through – a horde of the metal things, leading us, guarding us, playing about us.

And weird, unutterably weird was that spectacle – the vast and silent vale with its still, smooth vapors like a coverlet of cloud; the regal head of Norhala sweeping over them; the dull glint and gleam of the metal paradoxes flowing, in ordered motion, all about us; the titanic gateway, glowing before us.

We were at its threshold; over it.

— VIII —

THE DRUMS OF THUNDER

Upon that threshold the mists foamed like breaking billows, then ceased abruptly to be. Keeping exactly the distance I had noted when our gaze had risen above the fog, glided the block that bore Ruth and Norhala. In the strange light of the place into which we had emerged – and whether that place was canyon, corridor, or tunnel I could not then determine – it stood out sharply.

One arm of Norhala held Ruth – and in her attitude I sensed a shielding intent, guardianship – the first really human impulse this shape of mystery and beauty had revealed.

In front of them swept score upon score of her familiars – no longer dully lustrous, but shining as though cut from blue and polished steel. They – marched – in ordered rows, globes and cubes and pyramids; moving sedately now as units.

I looked behind me; out of the spume boiling at the portal, were pouring forth other scores of the Metal Things, darting through like divers through a wave. And as they drew into our wake and swam into the light, their dim luster vanished like a film; their surfaces grew almost radiant.

Whence came the light that set them gleaming? Our pace had slackened – I looked about me. The walls of the cleft or tunnel were perpendicular, smooth and shining with a cold, metallic, greenish glow.

Between the walls, like rhythmic flashing of fireflies, pulsed soft and fugitive glimmerings that carried a sense of the infinitely minute – of electrons, it came to me, rather than atoms. Their irradiance was greenish, like the walls; but I was certain that these corpuscles did not come from them.

They blinked and faded like motes within a shifting sunbeam; or, to use a more scientific comparison, like colloids within the illuminated field of the ultra-microscope; and like these latter it was as though the eyes took in not the minute particles themselves but their movement only.

Save for these gleamings the light of the place, although crepuscular, was crystalline clear. High above us – five hundred, a thousand feet – the walls merged into a haze of clouded beryl.

Rock certainly the cliffs were – but rock cut and planed, smoothed and polished and plated!

Yes, that was it – plated. Plated with some metallic substance that was itself a reservoir of luminosity and from which, it came to me, pulsed the force that lighted the winking ions. But who could have done such a thing? For what purpose? How?

And the meticulousness, the perfection of these smoothed cliffs struck over my nerves as no rasp could, stirring a vague resentment, an irritated desire for human inharmonies, human disorder.

Absorbed in my examination I had forgotten those who must share with me my doubts and dangers. I felt a grip on my arm.

“If we get close enough and I can get my feet loose from this damned thing I’ll jump,” Drake said.

“What?” I gasped, blankly, startled out of my preoccupation. “Jump where?”

I followed his pointing finger. We were rapidly closing upon the other cube; it was now a scant twenty paces ahead; it seemed to be stopping. Ventnor was leaning forward, quivering with eagerness.

“Ruth!” he called. “Ruth – are you all right?”

Slowly she turned to us – my heart gave a great leap, then seemed to stop. For her sweet face was touched with that same unearthly tranquility which was Norhala’s; in her brown eyes was a shadow of that passionless spirit brooding in Norhala’s own; her voice as she answered held within it more than echo of Norhala’s faint, far-off golden chiming.

“Yes,” she sighed; “yes, Martin – have no fear for me—”

And turned from us, gazing forward once more with the woman and as silent as she.

I glanced covertly at Ventnor, at Drake – had I imagined, or had they too seen? Then I knew they had seen, for Ventnor’s face was white to the lips, and Drake’s jaw was set, his teeth clenched, his eyes blazing with anger.

“What’s she doing to Ruth – you saw her face,” he gritted, half inarticulately.

“Ruth!” There was anguish in Ventnor’s cry.

She did not turn again. It was as though she had not heard him.

The cubes were now not five yards apart. Drake gathered himself; strained to loosen his feet from the shining surface, making ready to leap when they should draw close enough. His great chest swelled with his effort, the muscles of his neck knotted, sweat steamed down his face.

“No use,” he gasped, “no use, Goodwin. It’s like trying to lift yourself by your boot-straps – like a fly stuck in molasses.”

“Ruth,” cried Ventnor once more.

As though it had been a signal the block darted forward, resuming the distance it had formerly maintained between us.

The vanguard of the Metal Things began to race. With an incredible speed they fled into, were lost in an instant within, the luminous distances.

The cube that bore the woman and girl accelerated; flew faster and faster onward. And as swiftly our own followed it. The lustrous walls flowed by, dizzily.

We had swept over toward the right wall of the cleft and were gliding over a broad ledge. This ledge was, I judged, all of a hundred feet in width. From it the floor of the place was dropping rapidly.

The opposite precipices were slowly drawing closer. After us flowed the flanking host.

Steadily our ledge arose and the floor of the canyon dropped. Now we were twenty feet above it, now thirty. And the character of the cliffs was changing. Veins of quartz shone under the metallic plating like cut crystal, like cloudy opals; here was a splash of vermilion, there a patch of amber; bands of pallid ochre stained it.

My gaze was caught by a line of inky blackness in the exact center of the falling floor. So black was it that at first glance I took it for a vein of jetty lignite.

It widened. It was a crack, a fissure. Now it was a yard in width, now three, and blackness seemed to well up from within it, blackness that was the very essence of the depths. Steadily the ebon rift expanded; spread suddenly wide open in two sharp-edged, flying wedges—

Earth had dropped away. At our side a gulf had opened, an abyss, striking down depth upon depth; profound; immeasurable.

We were human atoms, riding upon a steed of sorcery and racing along a split rampart of infinite space.

I looked behind – scores of the cubes were darting from the metal host trailing us; in a long column of twos they flashed by, raced ahead. Far in front of us a gloom began to grow; deepened until we were rushing into blackest night.

Through the murk stabbed a long lance of pale blue phosphorescence. It unrolled like a ribbon of wan flame, flicked like a serpent’s tongue – held steady. I felt the Thing beneath us leap forward; its velocity grew prodigious; the wind beat upon us with hurricane force.

I shielded my eyes with my hands and peered through the chinks of my fingers. Ranged directly in our path was a barricade of the cubes and upon them we were racing like a flying battering-ram. Involuntarily I closed my eyes against the annihilating impact that seemed inevitable.

The Thing on which we rode lifted.

We were soaring at a long angle straight to the top of the barrier; were upon it, and still with that awful speed unchecked were hurtling through the blackness over the shaft of phosphorescence, the ribbon of pale light that I had watched pierce it and knew now was but another span of the cubes that but a little before had fled past us. Beneath the span, on each side of it, I sensed illimitable void.

We were over; rushing along in darkness. There began a mighty tumult, a vast crashing and roaring. The clangor waxed, beat about us with tremendous strokes of sound.

Far away was a dim glowing, as of rising sun through heavy mists of dawn. The mists faded – miles away gleamed what at first glimpse seemed indeed to be the rising sun; a gigantic orb, whose lower limb just touched, was sharply, horizontally cut by the blackness, as though at its base that blackness was frozen.

The sun? Reason returned to me; told me this globe could not be that.

What was it then? Ra-Harmachis, of the Egyptians, stripped of his wings, exiled and growing old in the corridors of the Dead? Or that mocking luminary, the cold phantom of the God of light and warmth which the old Norsemen believed was set in their frozen hell to torment the damned?

I thrust aside the fantasies, impatiently. But sun or no sun, light streamed from this orb, light in multi-colored, lanced rays, banishing the blackness through which we had been flying.

Closer we came and closer; lighter it grew about us, and by the growing light I saw that still beside us ran the abyss. And even louder, more thunderous, became the clamor.

At the foot of the radiant disk I glimpsed a luminous pool. Into it, out of the depths, protruded a tremendous rectangular tongue, gleaming like gray steel.

On the tongue an inky shape appeared; it lifted itself from the abyss, rushed upon the disk and took form.

Like a gigantic spider it was, squat and horned. For an instant it was silhouetted against the smiling sphere, poised itself – and vanished through it.

Now, not far ahead, silhouetted as had been the spider shape, blackened into sight a cube and on it Ruth and Norhala. It seemed to hover, to wait.

“It’s a door,” Drake’s shout beat thinly in my ears against the hurricane of sound.

What I thought had been an orb was indeed a gateway, a portal; and it was gigantic.

The light streamed through it, the flaming colors, the lightning glare, the drifting shadows were all beyond it. The suggestion of sphere had been an illusion, born of the darkness in which we were moving and in its own luminescence.

And I saw that the steel tongue was a ramp, a slide, dropping down into the gulf.

Norhala raised her hands high above her head. Up from the darkness flew an incredible shape – like a monstrous, armored flat-backed crab; angled spikes protruded from it; its huge body was spangled with darting, greenish flames.

It swept beneath us and by. On its back were multitudinous breasts from which issued blinding flashes – sapphire blue, emerald green, sun yellow. It hung poised as had that other nightmare shape, standing out jet black and colossal, rearing upon columnar legs, whose outlines were those of alternate enormous angled arrow-points and lunettes. Swiftly its form shifted; an instant it hovered, half disintegrate.

Now I saw spinning spheres and darting cubes and pyramids click into new positions. The front and side legs lengthened, the back legs shortened, fitting themselves plainly to what must be a varying angle of descent beyond.

And it was no chimera, no kraken of the abyss. It was a car made of the Metal Things. I caught again the flashes and thought that they were jewels or heaps of shining ores carried by the conscious machine.

It vanished. In its place hung poised the cube that bore the enigmatic woman and Ruth. Then they were gone and we stood where but an instant before they had been.

We were high above an ocean of living light – a sea of incandescent splendors that stretched mile upon uncounted mile away and whose incredible waves streamed thousands of feet in air, flew in gigantic banners, in tremendous streamers, in coruscating clouds of varicolored flame – as though torn by the talons of a mighty wind.

My dazzled sight cleared, glare and blaze and searing incandescence took form, became ordered. Within the sea of light I glimpsed shapes cyclopean, unnameable.

They moved slowly, with an awesome deliberateness. They shone darkly within the flame-woven depths. From them came the volleys of the lightnings.

Score upon score of them there were – huge and enigmatic. Their flaming levins threaded the shimmering veils, patterned them, as though they were the flying robes of the very spirit of fire.

And the tumult was as ten thousand Thors, smiting with hammers against the enemies of Odin. As a forge upon whose shouting anvils was being shaped a new world.

A new world? A metal world!

The thought spun through my mazed brain, was gone – and not until long after did I remember it. For suddenly all that clamor died; the lightnings ceased; all the flitting radiances paled and the sea of flaming splendors grew thin as moving mists. The storming shapes dulled with them, seemed to darken into the murk.

Through the fast-waning light and far, far away – miles it seemed on high and many, many miles in length – a broad band of fluorescent amethyst shone. From it dropped curtains, shimmering, nebulous as the marching folds of the aurora; they poured, cascaded, from the amethystine band.

Huge and purple-black against their opalescence bulked what at first I thought a mountain, so like was it to one of those fantastic buttes of our desert Southwest when their castellated tops are silhouetted against the setting sun; knew instantly that this was but subconscious striving to translate into terms of reality the incredible.

It was a City!

A city full five thousand feet high and crowned with countless spires and turrets, titanic arches, stupendous domes! It was as though the man-made cliffs of lower New York were raised scores of times their height, stretched a score of times their length. And weirdly enough it did suggest those same towering masses of masonry when one sees them blacken against the twilight skies.

The pit darkened as though night were filtering down into it; the vast, purple-shadowed walls of the city sparkled out with countless lights. From the crowning arches and turrets leaped broad filaments of flame, flashing, electric.

Was it my straining eyes, the play of the light and shadow – or were those high-flung excrescences shifting, changing shape? An icy hand stretched out of the unknown, stilled my heart. For they were shifting – arches and domes, turrets and spires; were melting, reappearing in ferment; like the lightning-threaded, rolling edges of the thundercloud.

I wrenched my gaze away; saw that our platform had come to rest upon a broad and silvery ledge close to the curving frame of the portal and not a yard from where upon her block stood Norhala, her arm clasped about the rigid form of Ruth. I heard a sigh from Ventnor, an exclamation from Drake.

Before one of us could cry out to Ruth, the cube glided to the edge of the shelf, dipped out of sight.

That upon which we rode trembled and sped after it.

There came a sickening sense of falling; we lurched against each other; for the first time the pony whinnied, fearfully. Then with awful speed we were flying down a wide, a glistening, a steeply angled ramp into the Pit, straight toward the half-hidden, soaring escarpments flashing afar.

Far ahead raced the Thing on which stood woman and maid. Their hair streamed behind them, mingled, silken web of brown and shining veil of red-gold; little clouds of sparkling corpuscles threaded them, like flitting swarms of fire-flies; their bodies were nimbused with tiny, flickering tongues of lavender flame.

About us, above us, began again to rumble the countless drums of the thunder.

— IX —

THE PORTAL OF FLAME

It was as though we were on a meteor hurtling through space. The split air shrieked and shrilled, a keening barrier against the avalanche of the thunder. The blast bent us far back on thighs held rigid by the magnetic grip.

The pony spread its legs, dropped its head; through the hurricane roaring its screaming pierced thinly, that agonizing, terrible lamentation which is of the horse and the horse alone when the limit of its endurance is reached.

Ventnor crouched lower and lower, eyes shielded behind arms folded over his brows, straining for a glimpse of Ruth; Drake crouched beside him, bracing him, supporting him against the tempest.

Our line of flight became less abrupt, but the speed increased, the wind-pressure became almost insupportable. I twisted, dropped upon my right arm, thrust my head against my shoulder, stared backward. When first I had looked upon the place I had sensed its immensity; now I began to realize how vast it must really be – for already the gateway through which we had come glimmered far away on high, shrunk to a hoop of incandescent brass and dwindling fast.

Nor was it a cavern; I saw the stars, traced with deep relief the familiar Northern constellations. Pit it might be, but whatever terror, whatever ordeals were before us, we would not have to face them buried deep within earth. There was a curious comfort to me in the thought.

Suddenly stars and sky were blotted out.

We had plunged beneath the surface of the radiant sea.

Lying in the position in which I was, I was sensible of a diminution of the cyclonic force; the blast streamed up and over the front of the cube. To me drifted only the wailings of our flight and the whimpering terror of the pony.

I turned my head cautiously. Upon the very edge of the flying blocks squatted Drake and Ventnor, grotesquely frog-like. I crawled toward them – crawled, literally, like a caterpillar; for wherever my body touched the surface of the cubes the attracting force held it, allowed a creeping movement only, surface sliding upon surface – and weirdly enough like a human measuring-worm I looped myself over to them.

As my bare palms clung to the Things I realized with finality that whatever their activation, their life, they were metal.

There was no mistaking now the testimony of touch. Metal they were, with a hint upon contact of highly polished platinum, or at the least of a metal as finely grained as it.

Also they had temperature, a curiously pleasant warmth – the surfaces were, I judged, around ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit. I looked deep down into the little sparkling points that were, I knew, organs of sight; they were like the points of contact of innumerable intersecting crystal planes. They held strangest paradoxical suggestion of being close to the surface and still infinite distances away.

And they were like – what was it they were like? – it came to me with a distinct shock.

They were like the galaxies of little aureate and sapphire stars in the clear gray heavens of Norhala’s eyes.

I crept beside Drake, struck him with my head.

“Can’t move,” I shouted. “Can’t lift my hands. Stuck fast – like a fly – just as you said.”

“Drag ’em over your knees,” he cried, bending to me. “It slides ’em out of the attraction.”

Acting as he had suggested I found to my astonishment I could slip my hands free; I caught his belt, tried to lift myself by it.

“No use, Doc.” The old grin lightened for a moment his tense young face. “You’ll have to keep praying till the power’s turned off. Nothing here you can slide your knees on.”

I nodded, waddling close to his side; then sank back on my haunches to relieve the strain upon my aching leg-muscles.

“Can you see them ahead, Walter – Ruth and the woman?” Ventnor turned his anxious eyes toward me.

I peered into the glimmering murk; shook my head. I could see nothing. It was indeed, as though the clustered cubes sped within a bubble of the now wanly glistening vapors; or rather as though in our passage – as a projectile does in air – we piled before us a thick wave of the mists which streaming along each side, closing in behind, obscured all that lay around.

Yet I had, persistently, the feeling that beyond these shroudings was vast and ordered movement; marchings and counter-marchings of hosts greater even than those Golden Hordes of Genghis which ages agone had washed about the outer bases of the very peaks that hid this place. Came, too, flitting shadowings of huge shapes, unnameable, moving swiftly beside our way; gleamings that thrust themselves through the veils like wheeling javelins of flame.

And always, always, everywhere that constant movement, rhythmic, terrifying – like myriads of feet of creatures of an unseen, stranger world marking time just outside the threshold of our own. Preparing, drilling there in some wide vestibule of space between the known and the unknown, alert and menacing – poised for the signal which would send them pouring over it.

Once again I seemed to stand upon the brink of an abyss of incredible revelation, striving helplessly, struggling for realization – and so struggling became aware that our speed was swiftly slackening, the roaring blast dying down, the veils before us thinning.

They cleared away. I saw Drake and Ventnor straighten up; raised myself to my own aching knees.

We were at one end of a vortex, a funneling within the radiant vapors; a funnel whose further end a mile ahead broadened out into a huge circle, its mistily outlined edges impinging upon the towering scarp of the – city. It was as though before us lay, upon its side, a cone of crystalline clear air against whose curved sides some radiant medium heavier than air, lighter than water, pressed.

The top arc of its prostrate base reached a thousand feet or more up the precipitous wall; above it all was hidden in sparkling nebulosities that were like still clouds of greenly glimmering fire-flies. Back from the curving sides of this cone, above it and below it, the pressing luminosities stretched into, it seemed, infinite distances.

Through them, suddenly, thousands of bright beams began to dart, to dance, weaving and interweaving, shooting hither and yon – like myriads of great searchlights in a phosphorescent sea fog, like countless lances of the aurora thrusting through its own iridescent veils! And in the play of these beams was something appallingly ordered, appallingly rhythmic.

It was – how can I describe it? – purposeful; purposeful as the geometric shiftings of the Little Things of the ruins, of the summoning song of Norhala, of the Protean changes of the Smiting Shape and the Following Thing; and like all of these it was as laden with that baffling certainty of hidden meanings, of messages that the brain recognized as such yet knew it never could read.

The rays seemed to spring upward from the earth. Now they were like countless lances of light borne by marching armies of Titans; now they crossed and angled and flew as though they were clouds of javelins hurled by battling swarms of the Genii of Light. And now they stood upright while through them, thrusting them aside, bending them, passed vast, vague shapes like mountains forming and dissolving; like darkening monsters of some world of light pushing through thick forests of slender, high-reaching trees of cold flame; shifting shadows of monstrous chimerae slipping through jungles of bamboo with trunks of diamond fire; phantasmal leviathans swimming through brakes of giant reeds of radiance rising from the sparking ooze of a sea of star shine.

Whence came the force, the mechanism that produced this cone of clarity, this not searchlight, but unlight in the midst of light? Not from behind, that was certain – for turning I saw that behind us the mist was as thick. I turned again – it came to me, why I knew not, yet with an absolute certainty, that the energy, the force emanated from the distant wall itself.

The funnel, the cone, did not expand from where we were standing, now motionless.

It began at the wall and focused upon us.

Within the great circle the surface of the wall was smooth, utterly blank; upon it was no trace of those flitting lights we had seen before we had plunged down toward the radiant sea. It shone with a pale blue phosphorescence. It was featureless, smooth, a blind cliff of polished, blue metal – and that was all.

“Ruth!” groaned Ventnor. “Where is she?”

Aghast at my mental withdrawal from him, angry at myself for my callousness, awkwardly I tried to crawl over to him, to touch him, comfort him as well as I might.

And then, as though his cry had been a signal, the great cone began to move. Slowly the circled base slipped down the shimmering facades; down, steadily down; I realized that we had paused at the edge of some steep declivity, for the bottom of the cone was now at a decided angle while the upper edge of the circle had dropped a full two hundred feet below the place where it had rested – and still it fell.

There came a gasp of relief from Ventnor, a sigh from Drake while, from my own heart, a weight rolled. Not ten yards ahead of us and still deep within the luminosity had appeared the regal head of Norhala, the lovely head of Ruth. The two rose out of the glow like swimmers floating from the depths. Now they were clear before us, and now we could see the surface of the cube on which they rode.

But neither turned to us; each stared straightly, motionless along the axis of the sinking cone, the woman’s left arm holding Ruth close to her side.

Drake’s hand caught my shoulder in a grip that hurt – nor did he need to point toward that which had wrung the exclamation from him. The funnel had broken from its slow falling; it had made one swift, startling drop and had come to rest. Its recumbent side was now flattened into a triangular plane, widening from the narrow tip in which we stood to all of five hundred feet where its base rested against the blue wall, and falling at a full thirty-degree pitch.

The misty-edged circle had become an oval, a flattened ellipse another five hundred feet high and three times that in length. And in its exact center, shining forth as though it opened into a place of pale azure incandescence was another rectangular Cyclopean portal.

On each side of it, in the apparently solid face of the gleaming, metallic cliffs, a slit was opening.

They began as thin lines a hundred yards in height through which the intense light seemed to hiss; quickly they opened – widening like monstrous cat pupils until at last, their widening ceasing, they glared forth, the blue incandescence gushing from them like molten steel from an opened sluice.

Deep within them I sensed a movement. Scores of towering shapes swam within and glided out of them, each reflecting the vivid light as though they themselves were incandescent. Around their crests spun wide and flaming coronets.

They rushed forth, wheeling, whirling, driven like leaves in a whirlwind. Out they swirled from the cat’s eyes of the glimmering wall, these dervish obelisks crowded with spinning fires. They vanished in the mists. Instantly with their going, the eyes contracted; were but slits; were gone. And before us within the oval was only the waiting portal.

The leading block leaped forward. As abruptly, those that bore us followed. Again under that strain of projectile flight we clutched each other; the pony screamed in terror. The metal cliff rushed to meet us like a thunder cloud of steel; the portal raced upon us – a square mouth of cold blue flame.

And into it we swept; were devoured by it.

Light in blinding, intolerable flood beat about us, blackening the sight with agony. We pressed, the three of us, against the side of the pony, burying our faces in its shaggy coat, striving to hide our eyes from the radiance which, strain closely as we might, seemed to pierce through the body of the little beast, through our own heads, searing the sight.

— X —

“WITCH!
GIVE BACK MY SISTER”

How long we were within that glare I do not know; it seemed unending hours; it was of course only minutes – seconds, perhaps. Then I was sensible of a permeating shadow, a darkness gentle and healing.

I raised my head and opened my eyes. We were moving tranquilly, with a curious suggestion of homing leisureliness, through a soft, blue shimmering darkness. It was as though we were drifting within some high borderland of light; a region in which that rapid vibration we call the violet was mingled with a still more rapid vibration whose quick pulsing was felt by the brain but ever fled ere that brain could register it in terms of color. And there seemed to be a film over my sight; dazzlement from the unearthly blaze, I thought, shaking my head impatiently.

My eyes focused upon an object a little more than a foot away; my neck grew rigid, my scalp prickled while I stared, unbelieving. And that at which I stared was – a skeleton hand. Every bone a grayish black, sharply silhouetted, clean as some master surgeon’s specimen, it was extended as though clutching at – clutching at – what was that toward which it was reaching?

Again the icy prickling over scalp and skin – for its talons stretched out to grasp a steed that Death himself might have ridden, a rack whose bare skull hung drooping upon bent vertebrae.

I raised my hands to my face to shut out the ghostly sight – and swiftly the clutching bony hand moved toward me – was before my eyes – touched me.

The cry that sheer horror wrested from me was strangled by realization. And so acute was my relief, so reassuring was it to have in the midst of these mysteries some sane, understandable thing occur that I laughed aloud.

For the skeleton hand was my own. The mournful ghastly mount of death was – our pony. And when I looked again I knew what I would see – and see them I did – two tall skeletons, skulls resting on their bony arms, leaning against the frame of the beast.

While ahead of us, floating poised upon the surface of the glistening cube, were two women skeletons – Ruth and Norhala!

Weird enough was the sight. Dürer-esque, grimly awful as materialization of a scene of the Dance Macabre – and yet – vastly comforting.

For here was something which was well within the range of human knowledge. It was the light about us that did it; a vibration that even as I conjectured, was within the only partly explored region of the ultraviolet and the comparatively unexplored region above it.

Yet there were differences, for there was none of that misty halo around the bones, the flesh which the X-rays cannot render wholly invisible. The skeletons stood out clean cut, with no trace of fleshly vestments.

I crept over, spoke to the two.

“Don’t look up yet,” I said. “Don’t open your eyes. We’re going through a queer light. It has an X-ray quality. You’re going to see me as a skeleton—”

“What?” shouted Drake. Disobeying my warning he straightened, glared at me. And disquieting as the spectacle had been before, fully understanding it as I did, I could not restrain my shudder at the utter weirdness of that skull which was his head thrusting itself toward me.

The skeleton that was Ventnor turned to me; was arrested by the sight of the flitting pair ahead. I saw the fleshless jaws clamp, then opened to speak.

Abruptly, upon the skeletons in front the flesh dropped back. Girl and woman stood there once again robed in beauty.

So swift was that transition from the grisly unreal to the normal that even to my unsuperstitious mind it smacked of necromancy. The next instant the three of us stood looking at each other, clothed once more in the flesh, and the pony no longer the steed of death, but our shaggy, patient little companion.

The light had changed; the high violet had gone from it, and it was shot with yellow gleamings like fugitive sunbeams. We were passing through a wide corridor that seemed to be unending. The yellow light grew stronger.

“That light wasn’t exactly the Roentgen variety,” Drake interrupted my absorption in our surroundings. “And I hope to God it’s as different as it seemed. If it’s not we may be up against a lot of trouble.”

“More trouble than we’re in?” I asked, a trifle satirically.

“X-ray burns,” he answered, “and no way to treat them in this place – if we live to want treatment,” he ended grimly.

“I don’t think we were subjected to their action long enough—” I began, and was silent.

The corridor had opened without warning into a place for whose immensity I have no images that are adequate. It was a chamber that was vaster than ten score of the Great Halls of Karnak in one; great as that fabled hall in dread Amenti where Osiris sits throned between the Searcher of Hearts and the Eater of Souls, judging the jostling hosts of the newly dead.

Temple it was in its immensity, and its solemn vastness – but unlike any temple ever raised by human toil. In no ruin of earth’s youth giants’ work now crumbling under the weight of time had I ever sensed a shadow of the strangeness with which this was instinct. No – nor in the shattered fanes that once had held the gods of old Egypt, nor in the pillared shrines of Ancient Greece, nor Imperial Rome, nor mosque, basilica nor cathedral.

All these had been dedicated to gods which, whether created by humanity as science believes, or creators of humanity as their worshippers believed, still held in them that essence we term human.

The spirit, the force, that filled this place had in it nothing, nothing of the human.

No place? Yes, there was one – Stonehenge. Within that monolithic circle I had felt a something akin to this, as inhuman; a brooding spirit stony, stark, unyielding – as though not men but a people of stone had raised the great Menhirs.

This was a sanctuary built by a people of metal!

It was filled with a soft yellow glow like pale sunshine. Up from its floor arose hundreds of tremendous, square pillars down whose polished sides the crocus light seemed to flow.

Far, far as the gaze could reach, the columns marched, oppressively ordered, appallingly mathematical. From their massiveness distilled a sense of power, mysterious, mechanical yet – living; something priestly, hierophantic – as though they were guardians of a shrine.

Now I saw whence came the light suffusing this place. High up among the pillars floated scores of orbs that shone like pale gilt frozen suns. Great and small, through all the upper levels these strange luminaries gleamed, fixed and motionless, hanging unsupported in space. Out from their shining spherical surfaces darted rays of the same pale gold, rigid, unshifting, with the same suggestion of frozen stillness.

“They look like big Christmas-tree stars,” muttered Drake.

“They’re lights,” I answered. “Of course they are. They’re not matter – not metal, I mean—”

“There’s something about them like St. Elmo’s fire, witch lights – condensations of atmospheric electricity,” Ventnor’s voice was calm; now that it was plain we were nearing the heart of this mystery in which we were enmeshed he had clearly taken fresh grip, was again his observant, scientific self.

We watched, once more silent; and indeed we had spoken little since we had begun that ride whose end we sensed close. In the unfolding of enigmatic happening after happening the mind had deserted speech and crouched listening at every door of sight and hearing to gather some clue to causes, some thread of understanding.

Slowly now we were gliding through the forest of pillars; so effortless, so smooth our flight that we seemed to be standing still, the tremendous columns flitting past us, turning and wheeling around us, dizzyingly. My head swam with the mirage motion, I closed my eyes.

“Look,” Drake was shaking me. “Look. What do you make of that?”

Half a mile ahead the pillars stopped at the edge of a shimmering, quivering curtain of green luminescence. High, high up past the pale gilt suns its smooth folds ran, into the golden amber mist that canopied the columns.

In its sparkling was more than a hint of the dancing corpuscles of the aurora; it was, indeed, as though woven of the auroral rays. And all about it played shifting, tremulous shadows formed by the merging of the golden light with the curtain’s emerald gleaming.

Up to its base swept the cube that bore Ruth and Norhala – and stopped. From it leaped the woman, and drew Ruth down beside her, then turned and gestured toward us.

That upon which we rode drew close. I felt it quiver beneath me; felt on the instant, the magnetic grip drop from me, angle downward and leave me free. Shakily I arose from aching knees, and saw Ventnor flash down and run, rifle in hand, toward his sister.

Drake bent for his gun. I moved unsteadily toward the side of the clustered cubes. There came a curious pushing motion driving me to the edge. Sliding over upon me came Drake and the pony—

The cube tilted, gently, playfully – and with the slightest of jars the three of us stood beside it on the floor, we two men gaping at it in renewed wonder, and the little beast stretching its legs, lifting its feet and whinnying with relief.

Then abruptly the four blocks that had been our steed broke from each other; that which had been the woman’s glided to them.

The four clicked into place behind it and darted from sight.

“Ruth!” Ventnor’s voice was vibrant with his fear. “Ruth! What is wrong with you? What has she done to you?”

We ran to his side. He stood clutching her hands, searching her eyes. They were wide, unseeing, dream filled. Upon her face the calm and stillness, which were mirrored reflections of Norhala’s unearthly tranquility, had deepened.

“Brother.” The sweet voice seemed far away, drifting out of untroubled space, an echo of Norhala’s golden chimings – “Brother, there is nothing wrong with me. Indeed – all is – well with me – brother.”

He dropped the listless palms, faced the woman, tall figure tense, drawn with mingled rage and anguish.

“What have you done to her?” he whispered in Norhala’s own tongue.

Her serene gaze took him in, undisturbed by his anger save for the faintest shadow of wonder, of perplexity.

“Done?” she repeated, slowly. “I have stilled all that was troubled within her – have lifted her above sorrow. I have given her the peace – as I will give it to you if—”

“You’ll give me nothing,” he interrupted fiercely; then, his passion breaking through all restraint – “Yes, you damned witch – you’ll give me back my sister!”

In his rage he had spoken English; she could not, of course, have understood the words, but their anger and hatred she did understand. Her serenity quivered, broke. The strange stars within her eyes began to glitter forth as they had when she had summoned the Smiting Thing. Unheeding, Ventnor thrust out a hand, caught her roughly by one bare, lovely shoulder.

“Give her back to me, I say!” he cried. “Give her back to me!”

The woman’s eyes grew – awful. Out of the distended pupils the strange stars blazed; upon her face was something of the goddess outraged. I felt the shadow of Death’s wings.

“No! No – Norhala! No, Martin!” the veils of inhuman calm shrouding Ruth were torn; swiftly the girl we knew looked out from them. She threw herself between the two, arms outstretched.

“Ventnor!” Drake caught his arms, held them tight; “that’s not the way to save her!”

Ventnor stood between us, quivering, half sobbing. Never until then had I realized how great, how absorbing was that love of his for Ruth. And the woman saw it, too, even though dimly; envisioned it humanly. For, under the shock of human passion, that which I thought then as utterly unknown to her as her cold serenity was to us, the sleeping soul – I use the popular word for those emotional complexes that are peculiar to mankind – stirred, awakened.

Wrath fled from her knitted brows; her eyes dropping to the girl, lost their dreadfulness; softened. She turned them upon Ventnor, they brooded upon him; within their depths a half-troubled interest, a questioning.

A smile dawned upon the exquisite face, humanizing it, transfiguring it, touching with tenderness the sweet and sleeping mouth – as a hovering dream the lips of the slumbering maid.

And on the face of Ruth, as upon a mirror, I watched that same slow, understanding tenderness reflected!

“Come,” said Norhala, and led the way through the sparkling curtains. As she passed, an arm around Ruth’s neck, I saw the marks of Ventnor’s fingers upon her white shoulder, staining its purity, marring it like a blasphemy.

For an instant I hung behind, watching their figures grow misty within the shining shadows; then followed hastily. Entering the mists I was conscious of a pleasant tingling, an acceleration of the pulse, an increase of that sense of well-being which, I grew suddenly aware, had since the beginning of our strange journey minimized the nervous attrition of constant contact with the abnormal.

Striving to classify, to reduce to order, my sensations I drew close to the others, overtaking them in a dozen paces. A dozen paces more and we stepped out of the curtainings.

— XI —

THE METAL EMPEROR

We stood at the edge of a well whose walls were of that same green vaporous iridescence through which we had just come, but finer grained, compact; as though here the corpuscles of which they were woven were far closer spun. Thousands of feet above us the mighty cylinder uprose, and in the lessened circle that was its mouth I glimpsed the bright stars; and knew by this it opened into the free air.

All of half a mile in diameter was this shaft, and ringed regularly along its height by wide amethystine bands – like rings of a hollow piston. They were, in color, replicas of that I had glimpsed before our descent into this place and against whose gleaming cataracts the outlines of the incredible city had lowered. And they were in motion, spinning smoothly, and swiftly.

Only one swift glance I gave them, my eyes held by a most extraordinary – edifice – altar – machine – I could not find the word for it – then.

Its base was a scant hundred yards from where we had paused and concentric with the sides of the pit. It stood upon a thick circular pedestal of what appeared to be cloudy rock crystal supported by hundreds of thick rods of the same material.

Up from it lifted the structure, a thing of glistening cones and spinning golden disks; fantastic yet disquietingly symmetrical; bizarre as an angled headdress worn by a mountainous Javanese god – yet coldly, painfully mathematical. In every direction the cones pointed, seemingly interwoven of strands of metal and of light.

What was their color? It came to me – that of the mysterious element which stains the sun’s corona, that diadem seen only when our day star is in eclipse; the unknown element which science has named coronium, which never yet has been found on earth and that may be electricity in its one material form; electricity that is ponderable; force whose vibrations are keyed down to mass; power transmuted into substance.

Thousands upon thousands the cones bristled, pyramiding to the base of one tremendous spire that tapered up almost to the top of the shaft itself.

In their grouping the mind caught infinite calculations carried into infinity; an apotheosis of geometry compassing the rhythms of unknown spatial dimensions; concentration of the equations of the star hordes.

The mathematics of the Cosmos.

From the left of the crystalline base swept an enormous sphere. It was twice the height of a tall man, and it was a paler blue than any of these Things I had seen, almost, indeed, an azure; different, too, in other subtle, indefinable ways.

Behind it glided a pair of the pyramidal shapes, their pointed tips higher by a yard or more than the top of the sphere. They paused – regarding us. Out from the opposite arc of the crystal pedestal moved six other globes, somewhat smaller than the first and of a deep purplish luster.

They separated, lining up on each side of the leader now standing a little in advance of the twin tetrahedrons, rigid and motionless as watching guards.

There they stood – that enigmatic row, intent, studying us beneath their god or altar or machine of cones and disks within their cylinder walled with light.

And at that moment there crystallized within my consciousness the sublimation of all the strangenesses of all that had gone before, a panic loneliness as though I had wandered into an alien world – a world as unfamiliar to humanity, as unfamiliar with it as our own would seem to a thinking, mobile crystal adrift among men.

Norhala raised her white arms in salutation; from her throat came a lilting theme of her weirdly ordered, golden chanting. Was it speech, I wondered; and if so – prayer or entreaty or command?

The great sphere quivered and undulated. Swifter than the eye could follow it dilated; opened!

Where the azure globe had been, flashed out a disk of flaming splendors, the very secret soul of flowered flame! And simultaneously the pyramids leaped up and out behind it – two gigantic, four-rayed stars blazing with cold blue fires.

The green auroral curtainings flared out, ran with streaming radiance – as though some Spirit of Jewels had broken bonds of enchantment and burst forth jubilant, flooding the shaft with its freed glories. Norhala’s song ceased; an arm dropped down upon the shoulders of Ruth.

Then woman and girl began to float toward the radiant disk.

As one, the three of us sprang after them. I felt a shock that was like a quick, abrupt tap upon every nerve and muscle, stiffening them into helpless rigidity.

Paralyzing that sharp, unseen contact had been, but nothing of pain followed it. Instead it created an extraordinary acuteness of sight and hearing, an abnormal keying up of the observational faculties, as though the energy so mysteriously drawn from our motor centers had been thrown back into the sensory.

I could take in every minute detail of the flashing miracle of gemmed fires and its flaming ministers. Halfway between them and us Norhala and Ruth drifted; I could catch no hint of voluntary motion on their part and knew that they were not walking, but were being borne onward by some manifestation of that same force which held us motionless.

I forgot them in my contemplation of the Disk.

It was oval, twenty feet in height, I judged, and twelve in its greatest width. A broad band, translucent as sun golden chrysolite, ran about its periphery.

Set within this zodiac and spaced at mathematically regular intervals were nine ovoids of intensely living light. They shone like nine gigantic cabochon cut sapphires; they ranged from palest, watery blue up through azure and purple and down to a ghostly mauve shot with sullen undertones of crimson.

In each of them was throned a flame that seemed the very fiery essence of vitality.

The – body – was convex, swelling outward like the boss of a shield; shimmering rosy-gray and crystalline. From the vital ovoids ran a pattern of sparkling threads, irised and brilliant as floss of molten jewels; converging with interfacings of spirals, of volutes and of triangles into the nucleus.

And that nucleus, what was it?

Even now I can but guess – brain in part as we understand brain, certainly; but far, far more than that in its energies, its powers.

It was like an immense rose. An incredible rose of a thousand close clustering petals. It blossomed with a myriad shifting hues. And instant by instant the flood of varicolored flame that poured into its petalings down from the sapphire ovoids waxed and waned in crescendos and diminuendos of relucent harmonies – ecstatic, awesome.

The heart of the rose was a star of incandescent ruby.

From the flaming crimson center to aureate, flashing penumbra it was instinct with and poured forth power – power vast and conscious.

Not with that same completeness could I realize the ministering star shapes, half hidden as they were by the Disk. Their radiance was less, nor had they its miracle of pulsing gem fires. Blue they were, blue of a peculiar vibrancy, and blue were the glistening threads that ran down from blue-black circular convexities set within each of the points visible to me.

Unlike in shape, their flame of vitality dimmer than the ovoids of the Disk’s golden zone, still I knew that they were even as those – organs, organs of unknown senses, unknown potentialities. Their nuclei I could not observe.

The floating figures had drawn close to that disk and had paused.

And on the moment of their pausing I felt a surge of strength, a snapping of the spell that had bound us, an instantaneous withdrawal of the inhibiting force. Ventnor broke into a run, holding his rifle at the alert. We raced after him; were close to the shining shapes. And, gasping, we stopped short not a dozen paces away.

For Norhala had soared up toward the flaming rose of the Disk as though lifted by gentle, unseen hands. Close to it for an instant she swung. I saw the exquisite body gleam through her thin robes as though bathed in soft flames of rosy pearl.

Higher she floated, and toward the right of the zodiac. From the edges of three of the ovoids swirled a little cloud of tentacles, gossamer filaments of opal. They whipped out a full yard from the Disk’s surface, touching her, caressing her.

For a moment she hung there, her face hidden from us; then was dropped softly to her feet and stood, arms stretched wide, her copper hair streaming cloudily about her regal head.

And up past her floated Ruth, levitated as had been she – and her face, ecstatic as though she were gazing into Paradise, yet drenched with the tranquility of the infinite. Her wide eyes stared up toward that rose of splendors through which the pulsing colors now raced more swiftly. She hung poised before it while around her head a faint aureole began to form.

Again the gossamer threads thrust forth, searched her. They ran over her rough clothing – perplexedly. They coiled about her neck, stole through her hair, brushed shut her eyes, circled her brow, her breasts, girdled her.

Weirdly was it like some intelligence observing, studying, some creature of another species – puzzled by its similarity and unsimilarity with the one other creature of its kind it knew, and striving to reconcile those differences. And like such a questioning brain calling upon others for counsel, it swung Ruth upward to the watching star at the right.

A rifle shot rang out.

Another – the reports breaking the silence like a profanation. Unseen by either of us, Ventnor had slipped to one side where he could cover the core of ruby flame that must have seemed to him the heart of the Disk’s rose of fire. He knelt a few yards away, white lipped, eyes cold gray ice, sighting carefully for a third shot.

“Don’t! Martin – don’t fire!” I shouted, leaping toward him.

“Stop! Ventnor—” Drake’s panic cry mingled with my own.

But before we could reach him, Norhala flew to him, like a darting swallow. Down the face of the Disk glided the upright body of Ruth, struck softly, stood swaying.

And out of the blue-black convexity within a star point of one of the opened pyramids a lance of intense green flame darted, a lightning bolt as real as any hurled by tempest, upon Ventnor.

The shattered air closed behind the streaming spark with the sound of breaking glass.

It struck – Norhala.

It struck her. It seemed to splash upon her, to run down her like water. One curling tongue writhed over her bare shoulder and leaped to the barrel of the rifle in Ventnor’s hands. It flashed up it and licked him. The gun was torn from his grip, hurled high in air, exploding as it went. He leaped convulsively from his knees and dropped.

I heard a wailing, low, bitter and heartbroken. Past us ran Ruth, all dream, all unearthliness gone from a face now a tragic mask of human woe and terror. She threw herself down beside her brother, felt of his heart; then raised herself upon her knees and thrust out supplicating hands to the shapes.

“Don’t hurt him any more! He didn’t mean it!” she cried out to them piteously – like a child. She reached up, caught one of Norhala’s hands. “Norhala – don’t let them kill him. Don’t let them hurt him any more. Please!” she sobbed.

Beside me I heard Drake cursing.

“If they touch her I’ll kill the woman! I will, by God I will!” He strode to Norhala’s side.

“If you want to live, call off these devils of yours.” His voice was strangled.

She looked at him, wonder deepening on the tranquil brow, in the clear, untroubled gaze. Of course she could not understand his words – but it was not that which made my own sick apprehension grow.

It was that she did not understand what called them forth. Did not even understand what reason lay behind Ruth’s sorrow, Ruth’s prayer.

And more and more wondering grew in her eyes as she looked from the threatening Drake to the supplicating Ruth, and from them to the still body of Ventnor.

“Tell her what I say, Goodwin. I mean it.”

I shook my head. That was not the way, I knew. I looked toward the Disk, still flanked with its sextette of spheres, still guarded by the flaming blue stars. They were motionless, calm, watching. I sensed no hostility, no anger; it was as though they were waiting for us to – to – waiting for us to do what?

It came to me – they were indifferent. That was it – as indifferent as we could be to the struggle of an ephemera; and as mildly curious.

“Norhala,” I turned to the woman, “she would not have him suffer; she would not have him die. She loves him.”

“Love?” she repeated, and all of her wonderment seemed crystallized in the word. “Love?” she asked.

“She loves him,” I said; and then, why I did not know, but I added, pointing to Drake: “and he loves her.”

There was a tiny, astonished sob from Ruth. Again Norhala brooded over her. Then with a little despairing shake of her head, she paced over and faced the great Disk.

Tensely we waited. Communication there was between them, interchange of – thought; how carried out I would not hazard even to myself.

But of a surety these two – the goddess woman, the wholly unhuman shape of metal, of jeweled fires and conscious force – understood each other.

For she turned, stood aside – and the body of Ventnor quivered, arose from the floor, stood upright and with closed eyes, head dropping upon one shoulder, glided toward the Disk like a dead man carried by those messengers never seen by man who, the Arabs believe, bear the death drugged souls before Allah for their awakening.

Ruth moaned and hid her eyes; Drake reached down, gathered her up in his arms, held her close.

Ventnor’s body stood before the Disk, then swam up along its face. The tendrils waved out, felt of it, thrust themselves down through the wide collar of the shirt. The floating form passed higher, over the edge of the Disk; lay high beside the right star point of the rayed shape to which Ruth had been passing when Ventnor’s shot brought the tragedy upon us. I saw other tentacles whip forth, examine, caress.

Then down the body swung, was borne through air, laid gently at our feet.

“He is not – dead,” it was Norhala beside me; she lifted Ruth’s face from Drake’s breast. “He will not die. It may be he will walk again. They can not help,” there was a shadow of apology in her tones. “They did not know. They thought it was the” – she hesitated as though at loss for words – “the – the Fire Play.”

“The Fire Play?” I gasped.

“Yes,” she nodded. “You shall see it. And now I will take him to my house. You are safe – now, nor need you trouble. For he has given you to me.”

“Who has given us to you – Norhala?” I asked, as calmly as I could.

“He” – she nodded to the Disk, then spoke the phrase that was both ancient Assyria’s and ancient Persia’s title for their all-conquering rulers, and that meant – “the King of Kings. The Great King, Master of Life and Death.”

She took Ruth from Drake’s arms, pointing to Ventnor.

“Bear him,” she commanded, and led the way back through the walls of light.

As we lifted the body, I slipped my hand through the shirt, felt at the heart. Faint was the pulsation and slow, but regular.

Close to the encircling vapors I cast one look behind me. The shapes stood immobile, flashing disks, gigantic radiant stars and the six great spheres beneath their geometric super-Euclidean god or shrine or machine of interwoven threads of luminous force and metal – still motionless, still watching.

We emerged into the place of pillars. There stood the hooded pony and its patience, its uncomplaining acceptance of its place as servant to man brought a lump into my throat, salved, I suppose, my human vanity, abased as it had been by the colossal indifference of those things to which we were but playthings.

Again Norhala sent forth her call. Out of the maze glided her quintette of familiars; again the four clicked into one. Upon its top we lifted, Drake ascending first, the pony; then the body of Ventnor.

I saw Norhala lead Ruth to the remaining cube; saw the girl break away from her, leap beside me, and kneeling at her brother’s head, cradle it against her soft breast. Then as I found in the medicine case the hypodermic needle and the strychnine for which I had been searching, I began my examination of Ventnor.

The cubes quivered – swept away through the forest of columns.

We crouched, the three of us, blind to anything that lay about us, heedless of whatever road of wonders we were on, striving to strengthen in Ventnor the spark of life so near extinction.

— XII —

“I WILL GIVE YOU PEACE”

In our concentration upon Ventnor none of us had given thought to the passing of time, nor where we were going. We stripped him to the waist, and while Ruth massaged head and neck, Drake’s strong fingers kneaded chest and abdomen. I had used to the utmost my somewhat limited medical knowledge.

We had found no mark nor burn upon him, not even upon his hands over which had run the licking flame. The slightly purplish, cyanotic tinge of his skin had given way to a clear pallor; the skin was itself disquietingly cold, the blood-pressure only slightly subnormal. The pulse was more rapid, stronger; the breathing faint but regular, and with no laboring. The pupils of his eyes were contracted almost to the point of invisibility.

I could get no nervous reactions whatever. I am familiar with the effects of electric shock and know what to do in such cases, but Ventnor’s symptoms, while similar in part, presented other features unknown to me and most puzzling. There was a passive automatism, a perplexing muscular rigidity which caused arms and legs, hands and head to remain, doll-like, in any position placed.

Several times during my labors I had been aware of Norhala gazing down upon us; but she made no effort to help, nor did she speak.

Now, my strained attention relaxing, I began to receive and note impressions from without. There was a different feeling in the air, a diminution of the magnetic tension; I smelled the blessed breath of trees and water.

The light about us was clear and pearly, about the intensity of the moon at full. Looking back along the way we had been traveling, I saw a half mile away vertical, knife-sharp edges of two facing cliffs, the gap between them a mile or more wide.

Through them we must have passed, for beyond them were the radiant mists of the pit of the city, and through this precipitous gateway filtered the enveloping luminosity. On each side of us uprose gradually converging and perpendicular scarps along whose base huddled a sparse foliage.

There came a low whistle of astonishment from Drake; I turned. We were slowly gliding toward something that looked like nothing so much as a huge and shimmering bubble of mingled sapphire and turquoise, swimming up from and two-thirds above and the balance still hidden within earth. It seemed to draw to itself the light, sending it back with gleamings of the gray-blue of the star sapphire, with pellucid azures and lazulis like clouded jades, with glistening peacock iridescences and tender, milky greens of tropic shallows.

Little turrets globular and topaz, yellow and pierced with tiny hexagonal openings clustered about it like baby bubbles just nestling down to rest.

Great trees shadowed it, unfamiliar trees among whose glossy leaves blossomed in wreaths flowers pink and white as apple-blossoms. From their graceful branches strange fruits, golden and scarlet and pear-shaped, hung pendulous.

It was an elfin palace; a goblin dwelling; such a bower as some mirthful, beauty-loving Jinn King of Jewels might have built from enchanted hoards for some well-beloved daughter of earth.

All of fifty feet in height was the blue globe, and up to a wide and ovaled entrance ran a broad and shining roadway. Along this the cubes swept and stopped.

“My house,” murmured Norhala.

The attraction that had held us to the surface of the blocks relaxed, angled through changed and assisting lines of force; the hosts of minute eyes sparkling quizzically, interestedly, at us, we gently slid Ventnor’s body; lifted down the pony.

“Enter,” sighed Norhala, and waved a welcoming hand.

“Tell her to wait a minute,” ordered Drake.

He slipped the bandage from off the pony’s head, threw off the saddlebags, and led it to the side of the roadway where thick, lush grass was growing, spangled with flowerets. There he hobbled it and rejoined us. Together we picked up Ventnor and passed slowly through the portal.

We stood in a shadowed chamber. The light that filled it was translucent, and oddly enough with little of the bluish quality I had expected. Crystalline it was; the shadows crystalline, too, rigid – like the facets of great crystals. And as my eyes accustomed themselves I saw that what I had thought shadows actually were none.

They were slices of semitransparent stone like pale moonstones, springing from the curving walls and the high dome, and bisecting and intersecting the chamber. They were pierced with oval doorways over which fell glimmering metallic curtains – silk of silver and gold.

I glimpsed a pile of this silken stuff near by, and as we laid our burden upon it Ruth caught my arm with a little frightened cry.

Through a curtained oval sidled a figure.

Black and tall, its long and gnarled arms swung apelike; its shoulders were distorted, one so much longer than the other that the hand upon that side hung far below the knee.

It walked with a curious, crablike motion. Upon its face were stamped countless wrinkles and its blackness seemed less that of pigmentation than the weathering of unbelievable years, the very stain of ancientness. And about neither face nor figure was there anything to show whether it was man or woman.

From the twisted shoulders a short and sleeveless red tunic fell. Incredibly old the creature was – and by its corded muscles, its sinewy tendons, as incredibly powerful. It raised within me a half sick revulsion, loathing. But the eyes were not ancient, no. Irisless, lashless, black and brilliant, they blazed out of the face’s carven web of wrinkles, intent upon Norhala and filled with a flame of worship.

It threw itself at her feet, prostrate, the inordinately long arms outstretched.

“Mistress!” it whined in a high and curiously unpleasant falsetto. “Great lady! Goddess!”

She stretched out a sandaled foot, touched one of the black taloned hands, and at the contact I saw a shiver of ecstasy run through the lank body. “Yuruk—” she began, and paused, regarding us.

“The goddess speaks! Yuruk hears! The goddess speaks!” It was a chant of adoration.

“Yuruk. Rise. Look upon the strangers.”

The creature – and now I knew what it was – writhed, twisted, and hideously apelike crouched upon its haunches, hands knuckling the floor.

By the amazement in the unwinking eyes it was plain that not till now had the eunuch taken cognizance of us. The amazement fled, was replaced with a black fire of malignancy, of hatred – jealousy.

“Augh!” he snarled; leaped to his feet; thrust an arm toward Ruth. She gave a little cry, cowered against Drake.

“None of that!” He struck down the clutching arm.

“Yuruk!” There was a hint of anger in the bell-toned voice. “Yuruk, these belong to me. No harm must come to them. Yuruk – beware!”

“The goddess commands. Yuruk obeys.” If fear quavered in the words, beneath was more than a trace of a sullenness, too, sinister enough.

“That’s a nice little playmate for her new playthings,” muttered Drake. “If that bird gets the least bit gay – I shoot him pronto.” He gave Ruth a reassuring hug. “Cheer up, Ruth. Don’t mind that thing. He’s something we can handle.”

Norhala waved a white hand; Yuruk sidled over to one of the curtained ovals and through it, reappearing almost instantly with a huge platter upon which were fruits, and a curdly white liquid in bowls of thick porcelain.

“Eat,” she said, as the gnarled black arms placed the platter at our feet.

“Hungry?” asked Drake. Ruth shook her head violently.

“I’m going out for the saddlebags,” said Drake. “We’ll use our own stuff – while it lasts. I’m taking no chances on what the Yuruk lad brings – with all due respect to Norhala’s good intentions.”

He started for the doorway; the eunuch blocked his way.

“We have with us food of our own, Norhala,” I explained. “He goes to get it.”

She nodded indifferently; clapped her hands. Yuruk shrank back, and out strode Drake.

“I am weary,” sighed Norhala. “The way was long. I will refresh myself—”

She stretched out a foot toward Yuruk. He knelt, unlaced the turquoise bands, drew off the sandals. Her hands sought her breast, dwelt for an instant there.

Down slipped her silken veils, clingingly, slowly, as though reluctant to unclasp her; whispering they fell from the high and tender breasts, the delicate rounded hips, and clustered about her feet in soft petalings as of some flower of pale amber foam. Out of the calyx of that flower arose the gleaming miracle of her body crowned with glowing glory of her cloudy hair.

Naked she was, yet clothed with an unearthly purity, the purity of the far-flung, serene stars, of the eternal snows upon some calm, high-flung peak, the tranquil, silver dawns of spring; protected by some spell of divinity which chilled and slew the flame of desire. A maiden Ishtar, a virginal Isis; a woman – yet with no more of woman’s lure than if she had been some exquisite and breathing statue of mingled ivory and milk of pearls.

So she stood, indifferent to us who gazed upon her, withdrawn, musing, as though she had forgotten us. And that serene indifference, with its entire absence of what we term sex consciousness, revealed to me once more how great was the abyss between us and her.

Slowly she raised her arms, wound the floating tresses into a coronal. I saw Drake enter with the saddlebags; saw them drop from hands relaxing under the shock of this amazing tableau; saw his eyes widen and fill with wonder and half-awed admiration.

Now Norhala stepped out of her fallen robes and moved toward the further wall, Yuruk following. He stooped, raised an ewer of silver and began gently to pour over her shoulders its contents. Again and again he bent and filled the vessel, dipping it into a shallow basin from which came the bubbling and chuckling of a little spring. And again I marveled at the marble smoothness and fineness of her skin on which the caressing water left tiny silvery globules, gemming it. The eunuch slithered to one side, drew from a quaint chest clothes of white floss; patted her dry with them; threw over her shoulders a silken robe of blue.

Back she floated to us; hovered over Ruth, crouching with her brother’s head upon her knees.

She made a motion as though to draw the girl to her; hesitated as Ruth’s face set in a passion of denial. A shadow of kindness drifted through the wide, mysterious eyes; a shadow of pity joined it as she looked curiously down on Ventnor.

“Bathe,” she murmured, and pointed to the pool. “And rest. No harm shall come to any of you here. And you—” A hand rested for a moment lightly on the girl’s curly head. “When you desire it – I will again give you – peace!”

She parted the curtains, and the eunuch still following, was hidden beyond them.

— XIII —

“VOICE FROM THE VOID”

Helplessly we looked at each other. Then called forth perhaps by what she saw in Drake’s eyes, perhaps by another thought, Ruth’s cheeks crimsoned, her head drooped; the web of her hair hid the warm rose of her face, the frozen pallor of Ventnor’s.

Abruptly, she sprang to her feet. “Walter! Dick! Something’s happening to Martin!”

Before she had ceased we were beside her; bending over Ventnor. His mouth was opening, slowly, slowly – with an effort agonizing to watch. Then his voice came through lips that scarcely moved; faint, faint as though it floated from infinite distances, a ghost of a voice whispering with phantom breath out of a dead throat.

“Hard – hard! So hard!” the whispering complained. “Don’t know how long I can keep connection – with voice.

“Was fool to shoot. Sorry – might have gotten you in worse trouble – but crazy with fear for Ruth – thought, too, might be worth chance. Sorry – not my usual line—”

The thin thread of sound ceased. I felt my eyes fill with tears; it was like Ventnor to flay himself like this for what he thought stupidity, like him to make this effort to admit his supposed fault and crave forgiveness – as like him as that mad attack upon the flaming Disk in its own temple, surrounded by its ministers, had been so bafflingly unlike his usual cool, collected self.

“Martin,” I called, bending closer, “it’s nothing, old friend. No one blames you. Try to rouse yourself.”

“Dear,” it was Ruth, passionately tender, “it’s me. Can you hear me?”

“Only speck of consciousness and motionless in the void,” the whisper began again. “Terribly alive, terribly alone. Seem outside space yet – still in body. Can’t see, hear, feel – short-circuited from every sense – but in some strange way realize you – Ruth, Walter, Drake.

“See without seeing – here floating in darkness that is also light – black light – indescribable. In touch, too, with these—”

Again the voice trailed into silence; returned, word and phrase pouring forth disconnected, with a curious and turbulent rhythm, like rushing wave crests linked by half-seen threads of the spindrift, vocal fragments of thought swiftly assembled by some subtle faculty of the mind as they fell into a coherent, incredible message.

“Group consciousness – gigantic – operating within our sphere – operating also in spheres of vibration, energy, force – above, below one to which humanity reacts – perception, command forces known to us – but in greater degree – cognizant, manipulate unknown energies – senses known to us – unknown – can’t realize them fully – impossible cover, only impinge on contact points akin to our senses, forces – even these profoundly modified by additional ones – metallic, crystalline, magnetic, electric – inorganic with every power of organic – consciousness basically same as ours – profoundly changed by differences in mechanism through which it finds expression – difference our bodies – theirs.

“Conscious, mobile – inexorable, invulnerable. Getting clearer – see more clearly – see—” the voice shrilled out in a shuddering, thin lash of despair – “No! No – oh, God – no!”

Then clearly and solemnly:

“And God said: let us make men in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over all the earth, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

A silence; we bent closer, listening; the still, small voice took up the thread once more – but clearly further on. Something we had missed between that text from Genesis and what we were now hearing; something that even as he had warned us, he had not been able to articulate. The whisper broke through clearly in the middle of a sentence.

“Nor is Jehovah the God of myriads of millions who through those same centuries, and centuries upon centuries before them, found earth a garden and grave – and all these countless gods and goddesses only phantom barriers raised by man to stand between him and the eternal forces man’s instinct has always warned him are ever in readiness to destroy. That do destroy him as soon as his vigilance relaxes, his resistance weakens – the eternal, ruthless law that will annihilate humanity the instant it runs counter to that law and turns its will and strength against itself—”

A little pause; then came these singular sentences:

“Weaklings praying for miracles to make easy the path their own wills should clear. Beggars who whine for alms from dreams. Shirkers each struggling to place upon his god the burden whose carrying and whose carrying alone can give him strength to walk free and unafraid, himself godlike among the stars.”

And now distinctly, unfalteringly, the voice went on:

“Dominion over all the earth? Yes – as long as man is fit to rule; no longer. Science has warned us. Where was the mammal when the giant reptiles reigned? Slinking hidden and afraid in the dark and secret places. Yet man sprang from these skulking beasts.

“For how long a time in the history of earth has man been master of it? For a breath – for a cloud’s passing. And will remain master only until something grown stronger wrests mastery from him – even as he wrested it from his ravening kind – as they took it from the reptiles – as did the reptiles from the giant saurians – which snatched it from the nightmare rulers of the Triassic – and so down to whatever held sway in the murk of earth dawn.

“Life! Life! Life! Life everywhere struggling for completion!

“Life crowding other life aside, battling for its moment of supremacy, gaining it, holding it for one rise and fall of the wings of time beating through eternity – and then – hurled down, trampled under the feet of another straining life whose hour has struck.

“Life crowding outside every barred threshold in a million circling worlds, yes, in a million rushing universes; pressing against the doors, bursting them down, overwhelming, forcing out those dwellers who had thought themselves so secure.

“And these – these—” the voice suddenly dropped, became thickly, vibrantly resonant, “over the Threshold, within the House of Man – nor does he even dream that his doors are down. These – Things of metal whose brains are thinking crystals – Things that suck their strength from the sun and whose blood is the lightning.

“The sun! The sun!” he cried. “There lies their weakness!”

The voice rose in pitch, grew strident.

“Go back to the city! Go back to the city! Walter – Drake. They are not invulnerable. No! The sun – strike them through the sun! Go into the city – not invulnerable – the Keeper of the Cones – strike at the Cones when – the Keeper of the Cones – ah-h-h-ah—”

We shrank back appalled, for from the parted, scarcely moving lips in the unchanging face a gust of laughter, mad, mocking, terrifying, racked its way.

“Vulnerable – under the law – even as we! The Cones!

“Go!” he gasped. A tremor shook him; slowly the mouth closed.

“Martin! Brother,” wept Ruth. I thrust my hand into his breast; felt the heart beating, with a curious suggestion of stubborn, unshakable strength, as though every vital force had concentrated there as in a beleaguered citadel.

But Ventnor himself, the consciousness that was Ventnor was gone; had withdrawn into that subjective void in which he had said he floated – a lonely sentient atom, his one line of communication with us cut; severed from us as completely as though he were, as he had described it, outside space.

And Drake and I looked at each other’s eyes, neither daring to be first to break the silence of which the muffled sobbing of the girl seemed to be the sorrowful soul.

— XIV —

“FREE! BUT A MONSTER!”

The peculiar ability of the human mind to slip so readily into the refuge of the commonplace after, or even during, some well-nigh intolerable crisis, has been to me long one of the most interesting phenomena of our psychology.

It is instinctively a protective habit, of course, acquired through precisely the same causes that had given to animals their protective coloration – the stripes, say, of the zebra and tiger that blend so cunningly with the barred and speckled shadowings of bush and jungle, the twig and leaf-like shapes and hues of certain insects; in fact, all that natural camouflage which was the basis of the art of concealment so astonishingly developed in the late war.

Like the animals of the wild, the mind of man moves through a jungle – the jungle of life, passing along paths beaten out by the thought of his countless forefathers in their progress from birth to death.

And these paths are bordered and screened, figuratively and literally, with bush and trees of his own selection, setting out and cultivation – shelters of the familiar, the habitual, the customary.

On these ancestral paths, within these barriers of usage, man moves hidden and secure as the animals in their haunts – or so he thinks.

Outside them lie the wildernesses and the gardens of the unknown, and man’s little trails are but rabbit-runs in an illimitable forest.

But they are home to him!

Therefore it is that he scurries from some open place of revelation, some storm of emotion, some strength-testing struggle, back into the shelter of the obvious; finding it an intellectual environment that demands no slightest expenditure of mental energy or initiative, strength to sally forth again into the unfamiliar.

I crave pardon for this digression. I set it down because now I remember how, when Drake at last broke the silence that had closed in upon the passing of that still, small voice the essence of these thoughts occurred to me.

He strode over to the weeping girl, and in his voice was a roughness that angered me until I realized his purpose.

“Get up, Ruth,” he ordered. “He came back once and he’ll come back again. Now let him be and help us get a meal together. I’m hungry.”

She looked up at him, incredulously, indignation rising.

“Eat!” she exclaimed. “You can be hungry?”

“You bet I can – and I am,” he answered cheerfully. “Come on; we’ve got to make the best of it.”

“Ruth,” I broke in gently, “we’ll all have to think about ourselves a little if we’re to be of any use to him. You must eat – and then rest.”

“No use crying in the milk even if it’s spilt,” observed Drake, even more cheerfully brutal. “I learned that at the front where we got so we’d yelp for food even when the lads who’d been bringing it were all mixed up in it.”

She lifted Ventnor’s head from her lap, rested it on the silks; arose, eyes wrathful, her little hands closed in fists as though to strike him.

“Oh – you brute!” she whispered. “And I thought – I thought – Oh, I hate you!”

“That’s better,” said Dick. “Go ahead and hit me if you want. The madder you get the better you’ll feel.”

For a moment I thought she was going to take him at his word; then her anger fled.

“Thanks – Dick,” she said quietly.

And while I sat studying Ventnor, they put together a meal from the stores, brewed tea over the spirit-lamp with water from the bubbling spring. In these commonplaces I knew that she at least was finding relief from that strain of the abnormal under which we had labored so long. To my surprise I found that I was hungry, and with deep relief I watched Ruth partake of food and drink even though lightly.

About her seemed to hover something of the ethereal, elusive, and disquieting. Was it the strangely pellucid light that gave the effect, I wondered; and knew it was not, for as I scanned her covertly, there fell upon her face that shadow of inhuman tranquility, of unearthly withdrawal which, I guessed, had more than anything else maddened Ventnor into his attack upon the Disk.

I watched her fight against it, drive it back. White lipped, she raised her head and met my gaze. And in her eyes I read both terror and – shame.

It came to me that painful as it might be for her the time for questioning had come.

“Ruth,” I said, “I know it’s not necessary to remind you that we’re in a tight place. Every fact and every scrap of knowledge that we can lay hold of is of the utmost importance in enabling us to determine our course.

“I’m going to repeat your brother’s question – what did Norhala do to you? And what happened when you were floating before the Disk?”

The blaze of interest in Drake’s eyes at these questions changed to amazement at her stricken recoil from them.

“There was nothing,” she whispered – then defiantly – “nothing. I don’t know what you mean.”

“Ruth!” I spoke sharply now, in my own perplexity. “You do know. You must tell us – for his sake.” I pointed toward Ventnor.

She drew a long breath.

“You’re right – of course,” she said unsteadily. “Only I – I thought maybe I could fight it out myself. But you’ll have to know it – there’s a taint upon me.”

I caught in Drake’s swift glance the echo of my own thrill of apprehension for her sanity.

“Yes,” she said, now quietly. “Some new and alien thing within my heart, my brain, my soul. It came to me from Norhala when we rode the flying block, and – he – sealed upon me when I was in – his” – again she crimsoned, “embrace.”

And as we gazed at her, incredulously:

“A thing that urges me to forget you two – and Martin – and all the world I’ve known. That tries to pull me from you – from all – to drift untroubled in some vast calm filled with an ordered ecstasy of peace. And whose calling I want, God help me, oh, so desperately to heed!

“It whispered to me first,” she said, “from Norhala – when she put her arm around me. It whispered and then seemed to float from her and cover me like – like a veil, and from head to foot. It was a quietness and peace that held within it a happiness at one and the same time utterly tranquil and utterly free.

“I seemed to be at the doorway to unknown ecstasies – and the life I had known only a dream – and you, all of you – even Martin, dreams within a dream. You weren’t – real – and you did not – matter.”

“Hypnotism,” muttered Drake, as she paused.

“No.” She shook her head. “No – more than that. The wonder of it grew – and grew. I thrilled with it. I remember nothing of that ride, saw nothing – except that once through the peace enfolding me pierced warning that Martin was in peril, and I broke through to see him clutching Norhala and to see floating up in her eyes death for him.

“And I saved him – and again forgot. Then, when I saw that beautiful, flaming Shape – I felt no terror, no fear – only a tremendous – joyous – anticipation, as though – as though—” She faltered, hung her head, then leaving that sentence unfinished, whispered: “and when – it – lifted me it was as though I had come at last out of some endless black ocean of despair into the full sun of paradise.”

“Ruth!” cried Drake, and at the pain in his cry she winced.

“Wait,” she said, and held up a little, tremulous hand. “You asked – and now you must listen.”

She was silent; and when once more she spoke her voice was low, curiously rhythmic; her eyes rapt:

“I was free – free from every human fetter of fear or sorrow or love or hate; free even of hope – for what was there to hope for when everything desirable was mine? And I was elemental; one with the eternal things yet fully conscious that I was – I.

“It was as though I were the shining shadow of a star afloat upon the breast of some still and hidden woodland pool; as though I were a little wind dancing among the mountain tops; a mist whirling down a quiet glen; a shimmering lance of the aurora pulsing in the high solitudes.

“And there was music – strange and wondrous music and terrible, but not terrible to me – who was part of it. Vast chords and singing themes that rang like clusters of little swinging stars and harmonies that were like the very voice of infinite law resolving within itself all discords. And all – all – passionless, yet – rapturous.

“Out of the Thing that held me, out from its fires pulsed vitality – a flood of inhuman energy in which I was bathed. And it was as though this energy were – reassembling me, fitting me even closer to the elemental things, changing me fully into them.

“I felt the little tendrils touching, caressing – then came the shots. Awakening was – dreadful, a struggling back from drowning. I saw Martin – blasted. I drove the – the spell away from me, tore it away.

“And, O Walter – Dick – it hurt – it hurt – and for a breath before I ran to him it was like – like coming from a world in which there was no disorder, no sorrow, no doubts, a rhythmic, harmonious world of light and music, into – into a world that was like a black and dirty kitchen.

“And it’s there,” her voice rose, hysterically. “It’s still within me – whispering, whispering; urging me away from you, from Martin, from every human thing; bidding me give myself up, surrender my humanity.

“Its seal,” she sobbed. “No – his seal! An alien consciousness sealed within me, that tries to make the human me a slave – that waits to overcome my will – and if I surrender gives me freedom, an incredible freedom – but makes me, being still human, a – monster.”

She hid her face in her hands, quivering.

“If I could sleep,” she wailed. “But I’m afraid to sleep. I think I shall never sleep again. For sleeping, how do I know what I may be when I wake?”

I caught Drake’s eye; he nodded. I slipped my hand down into the medicine-case, brought forth a certain potent and tasteless combination of drugs which I carry upon explorations.

I dropped a little into her cup, then held it to her lips. Like a child, unthinking, she obeyed and drank.

“But I’ll not surrender.” Her eyes were tragic. “Never think it! I can win – don’t you know I can?”

“Win?” Drake dropped down beside her, drew her toward him. “Bravest girl I’ve known – of course you’ll win. And remember this – nine-tenths of what you’re thinking now is purely over-wrought nerves and weariness. You’ll win – and we’ll win, never doubt it.”

“I don’t,” she said. “I know it – oh, it will be hard – but I will – I will—”

— XV —

THE HOUSE OF NORHALA

Her eyes closed, her body relaxed; the potion had done its work quickly. We laid her beside Ventnor on the pile of silken stuffs, covered them both with a fold, then looked at each other long and silently – and I wondered whether my face was as grim and drawn as his.

“It appears,” he said at last, curtly, “that it’s up to you and me for powwow quick. I hope you’re not sleepy.”

“I am not,” I answered as curtly; the edge of nerves in his manner of questioning doing nothing to soothe my own, “and even if I were I would hardly expect to put all the burden of the present problem upon you by going to sleep.”

“For God’s sake don’t be a prima donna,” he flared up. “I meant no offense.”

“I’m sorry, Dick,” I said. “We’re both a little jumpy, I guess.” He nodded; gripped my hand.

“It wouldn’t be so bad,” he muttered, “if all four of us were all right. But Ventnor’s down and out, and God alone knows for how long. And Ruth – has all the trouble we have and some special ones of her own. I’ve an idea” – he hesitated – “an idea that there was no exaggeration in that story she told – an idea that if anything she underplayed it.”

“I, too,” I replied somberly. “And to me it is the most hideous phase of this whole situation – and for reasons not all connected with Ruth,” I added.

“Hideous!” he repeated. “Unthinkable – yet all this is unthinkable. And still – it is! And Ventnor – coming back – that way. Like a lost soul finding voice.

“Was it raving, Goodwin? Or could he have been – how was it he put it – in touch with these Things and their purpose? Was that message – truth?”

“Ask yourself that question,” I said. “Man – you know it was truth. Had not inklings of it come to you even before he spoke? They had to me. His message was but an interpretation, a synthesis of facts I, for one, lacked the courage to admit.”

“I, too,” he nodded. “But he went further than that. What did he mean by the Keeper of the Cones – and that the Things – were vulnerable under the same law that orders us? And why did he command us to go back to the city? How could he know – how could he?”

“There’s nothing inexplicable in that, at any rate,” I answered. “Abnormal sensitivity of perception due to the cutting off of all sensual impressions. There’s nothing uncommon in that. You have its most familiar form in the sensitivity of the blind. You’ve watched the same thing at work in certain forms of hypnotic experimentation, haven’t you?

“Through the operation of entirely understandable causes the mind gains the power to react to vibrations that normally pass unperceived; is able to project itself through this keying up of perception into a wider area of consciousness than the normal. Just as in certain diseases of the ear the sufferer, though deaf to sounds within the average range of hearing, is fully aware of sound vibrations far above and far below those the healthy ear registers.”

“I know,” he said. “I don’t need to be convinced. But we accept these things in theory – and when we get up against them for ourselves we doubt.

“How many people are there in Christendom, do you think, who believe that the Savior ascended from the dead, but who if they saw it today would insist upon medical inspection, doctor’s certificates, a clinic, and even after that render a Scotch verdict? I’m not speaking irreverently – I’m just stating a fact.”

Suddenly he moved away from me, strode over to the curtained oval through which Norhala had gone.

“Dick,” I cried, following him hastily, “where are you going? What are you going to do?”

“I’m going after Norhala,” he answered. “I’m going to have a showdown with her or know the reason why.”

“Drake,” I cried again, aghast, “don’t make the mistake Ventnor did. That’s not the way to win through. Don’t – I beg you, don’t.”

“You’re wrong,” he answered stubbornly. “I’m going to get her. She’s got to talk.”

He thrust out a hand to the curtains. Before he could touch them, they were parted. Out from between them slithered the black eunuch. He stood motionless, regarding us; in the ink-black eyes a red flame of hatred. I pushed myself between him and Drake.

“Where is your mistress, Yuruk?” I asked.

“The goddess has gone,” he replied sullenly.

“Gone?” I said suspiciously, for certainly Norhala had not passed us. “Where?”

“Who shall question the goddess?” he asked. “She comes and she goes as she pleases.”

I translated this for Drake.

“He’s got to show me,” he said. “Don’t think I’m going to spill any beans, Goodwin. But I want to talk to her. I think I’m right, honestly I do.”

After all, I reflected, there was much in his determination to recommend it. It was the obvious thing to do – unless we admitted that Norhala was superhuman; and that I would not admit. In command of forces we did not yet know, en rapport with these People of Metal, sealed with that alien consciousness Ruth had described – all these, yes. But still a woman – of that I was certain. And surely Drake could be trusted not to repeat Ventnor’s error.

“Yuruk,” I said, “we think you lie. We would speak to your mistress. Take us to her.”

“I have told you that the goddess is not here,” he said. “If you do not believe it is nothing to me. I cannot take you to her for I do not know where she is. Is it your wish that I take you through her house?”

“It is,” I said.

“The goddess has commanded me to serve you in all things.” He bowed, sardonically. “Follow.”

Our search was short. We stepped out into what for want of better words I can describe only as a central hall. It was circular, and strewn with thick piled small rugs whose hues had been softened by the alchemy of time into exquisite, shadowy echoes of color.

The walls of this hall were of the same moonstone substance that had enclosed the chamber upon whose inner threshold we were. They whirled straight up to the dome in a crystalline, cylindrical cone. Four doorways like that in which we stood pierced them. Through each of their curtainings in turn we peered.

All were precisely similar in shape and proportions, radiating in a lunetted, curved base triangle from the middle chamber; the curvature of the enclosing globe forming back wall and roof; the translucent slicings the sides; the circle of floor of the inner hall the truncating lunette.

The first of these chambers was utterly bare. The one opposite held a half-dozen suits of the lacquered armor, as many wicked looking, short and double-edged swords and long javelins. The third I judged to be the lair of Yuruk; within it was a copper brazier, a stand of spears and a gigantic bow, a quiver full of arrows leaning beside it. The fourth room was littered with coffers great and small, of wood and of bronze, and all tightly closed.

The fifth room was beyond question Norhala’s bedchamber. Upon its floor the ancient rugs were thick. A low couch of carven ivory inset with gold rested a few feet from the doorway. A dozen or more of the chests were scattered about and flowing over with silken stuffs.

Upon the back of four golden lions stood a high mirror of polished silver. And close to it, in curiously incongruous domestic array stood a stiffly marshaled row of sandals. Upon one of the chests were heaped combs and fillets of shell and gold and ivory studded with jewels blue and yellow and crimson.

To all of these we gave but a passing glance. We sought for Norhala. And of her we found no shadow. She had gone even as the black eunuch had said; flitting unseen past Ruth, perhaps, absorbed in her watch over her brother; perhaps through some hidden opening in this room of hers.

Yuruk let drop the curtains, sidled back to the first room, we after him. The two there had not moved. We drew the saddlebags close, propped ourselves against them.

The black eunuch squatted a dozen feet away, facing us, chin upon his knees, taking us in with unblinking eyes blank of any emotion. Then he began to move slowly his tremendously long arms in easy, soothing motion, the hands running along the floor upon their talons in arcs and circles. It was curious how these hands seemed to be endowed with a volition of their own, independent of the arms upon which they swung.

And now I could see only the hands, shuttling so smoothly, so rhythmically back and forth – weaving so sleepily, so sleepily back and forth – black hands that dripped sleep – hypnotic.

Hypnotic! I sprang from the lethargy closing upon me. In one quick side glance I saw Drake’s head nodding – nodding in time to the movement of the black hands. I jumped to my feet, shaking with an intensity of rage unfamiliar to me; thrust my pistol into the wrinkled face.

“Damn you!” I cried. “Stop that. Stop it and turn your back.”

The corded muscles of the arms contracted, the claws of the slithering paws drew in as though he were about to clutch me; the ebon pools of eyes were covered with a frozen film of hate.

He could not have known what was this tube with which I menaced him, but its threat he certainly sensed and was afraid to meet. He squattered about, wrapped his arms around his knees, crouched with back toward us.

“What’s the matter?” asked Drake drowsily.

“He tried to hypnotize us,” I answered shortly. “And pretty nearly did.”

“So that’s what it was.” He was now wide awake. “I watched those hands of his and got sleepier and sleepier – I guess we’d better tie Mr. Yuruk up.” He jumped to his feet.

“No,” I said, restraining him. “No. He’s safe enough as long as we’re on the alert. I don’t want to use any force on him yet. Wait until we know we can get something worth while by doing it.”

“All right,” he nodded, grimly. “But when the time comes I’m telling you straight, Doc, I’m going the limit. There’s something about that human spider that makes me itch to squash him – slowly.”

“I’ll have no compunction – when it’s worth while,” I answered as grimly.

We sank down again against the saddlebags; Drake brought out a black pipe, looked at it sorrowfully; at me appealingly.

“All mine was on that pony that bolted,” I answered his wistfulness.

“All mine was on my beast, too,” he sighed. “And I lost my pouch in that spurt from the ruins.”

He sighed again, clamped white teeth down upon the stem.

“Of course,” he said at last, “if Ventnor was right in that – that disembodied analysis of his, it’s rather – well, terrifying, isn’t it?”

“It’s all of that,” I replied, “and considerably more.”

“Metal, he said,” Drake mused. “Things of metal with brains of thinking crystal and their blood the lightnings. You accept that?”

“So far as my own observation has gone – yes,” I said. “Metallic yet mobile. Inorganic but with all the quantities we have hitherto thought only those of the organic and with others added. Crystalline, of course, in structure and highly complex. Activated by magnetic-electric forces consciously exerted and as much a part of their life as brain energy and nerve currents are of our human life. Animate, moving, sentient combinations of metal and electric energy.”

He said:

“The opening of the Disk from the globe and of the two blasting stars from the pyramids show the flexibility of the outer – plate would you call it? I couldn’t help thinking of the armadillo after I had time to think at all.”

“It may be” – I struggled against the conviction now strong upon me – “it may be that within that metallic shell is an organic body, something soft – animal, as there is within the horny carapace of the turtle, the nacreous valves of the oyster, the shells of the crustaceans – it may be that even their inner surface is organic—”

“No,” he interrupted, “if there is a body – as we know a body – it must be between the outer surface and the inner, for the latter is crystal, jewel hard, impenetrable.

“Goodwin – Ventnor’s bullets hit fair. I saw them strike. They did not ricochet – they dropped dead. Like flies dashed up against a rock – and the Thing was no more conscious of their striking than a rock would have been of those flies.”

“Drake,” I said, “my own conviction is that these creatures are absolutely metallic, entirely inorganic – incredible, unknown forms. Let us go on that basis.”

“I think so, too,” he nodded; “but I wanted you to say it first. And yet – is it so incredible, Goodwin? What is the definition of vital intelligence – sentience?

“Haeckel’s is the accepted one. Anything which can receive a stimulus, that can react to a stimulus and retains memory of a stimulus must be called an intelligent, conscious entity. The gap between what we have long called the organic and the inorganic is steadily decreasing. Do you know of the remarkable experiments of Lillie upon various metals?”

“Vaguely,” I said.

“Lillie,” he went on, “proved that under the electric current and other exciting mediums metals exhibited practically every reaction of the human nerve and muscle. It grew weary, rested, and after resting was perceptibly stronger than before; it got what was practically indigestion, and it exhibited a peculiar but unmistakable memory. Also, he found, it could acquire disease and die.

“Lillie concluded that there existed a real metallic consciousness. It was Le Bon who first proved also that metal is more sensitive than man, and that its immobility is only apparent. (Le Bon in Evolution of Matter, Chapter Eleven.)

“Take the block of magnetic iron that stands so gray and apparently lifeless, subject it to a magnetic current lifeless, what happens? The iron block is composed of molecules which under ordinary conditions are disposed in all possible directions indifferently. But when the current passes through there is tremendous movement in that apparently inert mass. All of the tiny particles of which it is composed turn and shift until their north poles all point more or less approximately in the direction of the magnetic force.

“When that happens the block itself becomes a magnet, filled with and surrounded by a field of magnetic energy; instinct with it. Outwardly it has not moved; actually there has been prodigious motion.”

“But it is not conscious motion,” I objected.

“Ah, but how do you know?” he asked. “If Jacques Loeb [01] is right, that action of the iron molecules is every bit as conscious a movement as the least and the greatest of our own. There is absolutely no difference between them.

“Your and my and its every movement is nothing but an involuntary and inevitable reaction to a certain stimulus. If he’s right, then I’m a buttercup – but that’s neither here nor there. Loeb – all he did was to restate destiny, one of humanity’s oldest ideas, in the terms of tropisms, infusoria and light. Omar Khayyam chemically reincarnated in the Rockefeller Institute. Nevertheless those who accept his theories have to admit that there is essentially no difference between their impulses and the rush of filings toward a magnet.

“Equally nevertheless, Goodwin, the iron does meet Haeckel’s three tests – it can receive a stimulus, it does react to that stimulus and it retains memory of it; for even after the current has ceased it remains changed in tensile strength, conductivity and other qualities that were modified by the passage of that current; and as time passes this memory fades. Precisely as some human experience increases wariness, caution, which keying up of qualities remains with us after the experience has passed, and fades away in the ratio of our sensitivity plus retentiveness divided by the time elapsing from the original experience – exactly as it is in the iron.”

— XVI —

CONSCIOUS METAL!

“Granted,” I acquiesced. “We now come to their means of locomotion. In its simplest terms all locomotion is progress through space against the force of gravitation. Man’s walk is a series of rhythmic stumbles against this force that constantly strives to drag him down to earth’s face and keep him pressed there. Gravitation is an etheric – magnetic vibration akin to the force which holds, to use your simile again, Drake, the filing against the magnet. A walk is a constant breaking of the current.

“Take a motion picture of a man walking and run it through the lantern rapidly and he seems to be flying. We have none of the awkward fallings and recoveries that are the tempo of walking as we see it.

“I take it that the movement of these Things is a conscious breaking of the gravitational current just as much as is our own movement, but by a rhythm so swift that it appears to be continuous.

“Doubtless if we could so control our sight as to admit the vibrations of light slowly enough we would see this apparently smooth motion as a series of leaps – just as we do when the motion-picture operator slows down his machine sufficiently to show us walking in a series of stumbles.

“Very well – so far, then, we have nothing in this phenomenon which the human mind cannot conceive as possible; therefore intellectually we still remain masters of the phenomena; for it is only that which human thought cannot encompass which it need fear.”

“Metallic,” he said, “and crystalline. And yet – why not? What are we but bags of skin filled with certain substances in solution and stretched over a supporting and mobile mechanism largely made up of lime? Out of that primeval jelly which Gregory [02] calls Protobion came after untold millions of years us with our skins, our nails, and our hair; came, too, the serpents with their scales, the birds with their feathers; the horny hide of the rhinoceros and the fairy wings of the butterfly; the shell of the crab, the gossamer loveliness of the moth and the shimmering wonder of the mother-of-pearl.

“Is there any greater gap between any of these and the metallic? I think not.”

“Not materially,” I answered. “No. But there remains – consciousness!”

“That,” he said, “I cannot understand. Ventnor spoke of – how did he put it? – a group consciousness, operating in our sphere and in spheres above and below ours, with senses known and unknown. I got – glimpses – Goodwin, but I cannot understand.”

“We have agreed for reasons that seem sufficient to us to call these Things metallic, Dick,” I replied. “But that does not necessarily mean that they are composed of any metal that we know. Nevertheless, being metal, they must be of crystalline structure.

“As Gregory has pointed out, crystals and what we call living matter had an equal start in the first essentials of life. We cannot conceive life without giving it the attribute of some sort of consciousness. Hunger cannot be anything but conscious, and there is no other stimulus to eat but hunger.

“The crystals eat. The extraction of power from food is conscious because it is purposeful, and there can be no purpose without consciousness; similarly the power to work from such derived energy is also purposeful and therefore conscious. The crystals do both. And the crystals can transmit all these abilities to their children, just as we do. For although there would seem to be no reason why they should not continue to grow to gigantic size under favorable conditions – yet they do not. They reach a size beyond which they do not develop.

“Instead, they bud – give birth, in fact – to smaller ones, which increase until they reach the size of the preceding generation. And like the children of man and animals, these younger generations grow on precisely as their progenitors!

“Very well, then – we arrive at the conception of a metallically crystalline being, which by some explosion of the force of evolution has burst from the to us familiar and apparently inert stage into these Things that hold us. And is there any greater difference between the forms with which we are familiar and them than there is between us and the crawling amphibian which is our remote ancestor? Or between that and the amoeba – the little swimming stomach from which it evolved? Or the amoeba and the inert jelly of the Protobion?

“As for what Ventnor calls a group consciousness I would assume that he means a communal intelligence such as that shown by the bees and the ants – that in the case of the former Maeterlinck calls the ‘Spirit of the Hive.’ It is shown in their groupings – just as the geometric arrangement of those groupings shows also clearly their crystalline intelligence.

“I submit that in their rapid coordination either for attack or movement or work without apparent communication having passed between the units, there is nothing more remarkable than the swarming of a hive of bees where also without apparent communication just so many waxmakers, nurses, honey-gatherers, chemists, bread-makers, and all the varied specialists of the hive go with the old queen, leaving behind sufficient number of each class for the needs of the young queen.

“All this apportionment is effected without any means of communication that we recognize. Still it is most obviously intelligent selection. For if it were haphazard all the honey-makers might leave and the hive starve, or all the chemists might go and the food for the young bees not be properly prepared – and so on and so on.”

“But metal,” he muttered, “and conscious. It’s all very well – but where did that consciousness come from? And what is it? And where did they come from? And most of all, why haven’t they overrun the world before this?

“Such development as theirs, such an evolution, presupposes aeons of time – long as it took us to drag up from the lizards. What have they been doing – why haven’t they been ready to strike – if Ventnor’s right – at humanity until now?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, helplessly. “But evolution is not the slow, plodding process that Darwin thought. There seem to be explosions – nature will create a new form almost in a night. Then comes the long ages of development and adjustment, and suddenly another new race appears.

“It might be so of these – some extraordinary conditions that shaped them. Or they might have developed through the ages in spaces within the earth – there’s that incredible abyss we saw that is evidently one of their highways. Or they might have dropped here upon some fragment of a broken world, found in this valley the right conditions and developed in amazing rapidity. [03] They’re all possible theories – take your pick.”

“Something’s held them back – and they’re rushing to a climax,” he whispered. “Ventnor’s right about that – I feel it. And what can we do?”

“Go back to their city,” I said. “Go back as he ordered. I believe he knows what he’s talking about. And I believe he’ll be able to help us. It wasn’t just a request he made, nor even an appeal – it was a command.”

“But what can we do – just two men – against these Things?” he groaned.

“Maybe we’ll find out – when we’re back in the city,” I answered.

“Well,” his old reckless cheerfulness came back to him, “in every crisis of this old globe it’s been up to one man to turn the trick. We’re two. And at the worst we can only go down fighting a little before the rest of us. So, after all, whatever the hell, what the hell.”

For a time we were silent.

“Well,” he said at last, “we have to go to the city in the morning.” He laughed. “Sounds as though we were living in the suburbs, somehow, doesn’t it?”

“It can’t be many hours before dawn,” I said. “Turn in for a while, I’ll wake you when I think you’ve slept enough.”

“It doesn’t seem fair,” he protested, but sleepily.

“I’m not sleepy,” I told him; nor was I.

But whether I was or not, I wanted to question Yuruk, uninterrupted and undisturbed.

Drake stretched himself out. When his breathing showed him fast asleep indeed, I slipped over to the black eunuch and crouched, right hand close to the butt of my automatic, facing him.

— XVII —

YURUK

“Yuruk,” I whispered, “you love us as the wheat field loves the hail; we are as welcome to you as the death cord to the condemned. Lo, a door opened into a land of unpleasant dreams you thought sealed, and we came through. Answer my questions truthfully and it may be that we shall return through that door.”

Interest welled up in the depths of the black eyes.

“There is a way from here,” he muttered. “Nor does it pass through – Them. I can show it to you.”

I had not been blind to the flash of malice, of cunning, that had shot across the wrinkled face.

“Where does that way lead?” I asked. “There were those who sought us; men clad in armor with javelins and arrows. Does your way lead to them, Yuruk?”

For a time he hesitated, the lashless lids half closed.

“Yes,” he said sullenly. “The way leads to them; to their place. But will it not be safer for you there – among your kind?”

“I don’t know that it will,” I answered promptly. “Those who are unlike us smote those who are like us and drove them back when they would have taken and slain us. Why is it not better to remain with them than to go to our kind who would destroy us?”

“They would not,” he said “If you gave them – her.” He thrust a long thumb backward toward sleeping Ruth. “Cherkis would forgive much for her. And why should you not? She is only a woman.”

He spat – in a way that made me want to kill him.

“Besides,” he ended, “have you no arts to amuse him?”

“Cherkis?” I asked.

“Cherkis,” he whined. “Is Yuruk a fool not to know that in the world without, new things have arisen since long ago we fled from Iskander into the secret valley? What have you to beguile Cherkis beyond this woman flesh? Much, I think. Go then to him – unafraid.”

Cherkis? There was a familiar sound to that. Cherkis? Of course – it was the name of Xerxes, the Persian Conqueror, corrupted by time into this – Cherkis. And Iskander? Equally, of course – Alexander. Ventnor had been right.

“Yuruk,” I demanded directly, “is she whom you call goddess – Norhala – of the people of Cherkis?”

“Long ago,” he answered; “long, long ago there was trouble in their city, even in the great dwelling place of Cherkis. I fled with her who was the mother of the goddess. There were twenty of us; and we fled here – by the way which I will show you—”

He leered cunningly; I gave no sign of interest.

“She who was the mother of the goddess found favor in the sight of the ruler here,” he went on. “But after a time she grew old and ugly and withered. So he slew her – like a little mound of dust she danced and blew away after he had slain her; and also he slew others who had grown displeasing to him. He blasted me – as he was blasted—” He pointed to Ventnor.

“Then it was that, recovering, I found my crooked shoulder. The goddess was born here. She is kin to Him Who Rules! How else could she shed the lightnings? Was not the father of Iskander the god Zeus Ammon, who came to Iskander’s mother in the form of a great snake? Well? At any rate the goddess was born – shedder of the lightnings even from her birth. And she is as you see her.

“Cleave to your kind! Cleave to your kind!” Suddenly he shrilled. “Better is it to be whipped by your brother than to be eaten by the tiger. Cleave to your kind. Look – I will show you the way to them.”

He sprang to his feet, clasped my wrist in one of his long hands, led me through the curtained oval into the cylindrical hall, parted the curtainings of Norhala’s bedroom and pushed me within. Over the floor he slid, still holding fast to me, and pressed against the farther wall.

An ovoid slice of the gem-like material slid aside, revealing a doorway. I glimpsed a path, a trail, leading into a forest pallid green beneath the wan light. This way thrust itself like a black tongue into the boskage and vanished in the depths.

“Follow it.” He pointed. “Take those who came with you and follow it.”

The wrinkles upon his face writhed with his eagerness.

“You will go?” panted Yuruk. “You will take them and go by that path?”

“Not yet,” I answered absently. “Not yet.”

And was brought abruptly to full alertness, vigilance, by the flame of rage that filled the eyes thrust so close.

“Lead back,” I directed curtly. He slid the door into place, turned sullenly. I followed, wondering what were the sources of the bitter hatred he so plainly bore for us; the reasons for his eagerness to be rid of us despite the commands of this woman who to him at least was goddess.

And by that curious human habit of seeking for the complex when the simple answer lies close, failed to recognize that it was jealousy of us that was the root of his behavior; that he wished to be, as it would seem he had been for years, the only human thing near Norhala; failed to realize this, and with Ruth and Drake was terribly to pay for this failure.

I looked down upon the pair, sleeping soundly; upon Ventnor lost still in trance.

“Sit,” I ordered the eunuch. “And turn your back to me.”

I dropped down beside Drake, my mind wrestling with the mystery, but every sense alert for movement from the black. Glibly enough I had passed over Dick’s questioning as to the consciousness of the Metal People; now I faced it knowing it to be the very crux of these incredible phenomena; admitting, too, that despite all my special pleading, about that point swirled in my own mind the thickest mists of uncertainty. That their sense of order was immensely beyond a man’s was plain.

As plain was it that their knowledge of magnetic force and its manipulation were far beyond the sphere of humanity. That they had realization of beauty this palace of Norhala’s proved – and no human imagination could have conceived it nor human hands have made its thought of beauty real. What were their senses through which their consciousness fed?

Nine in number had been the sapphire ovals set within the golden zone of the Disk. Clearly it came to me that these were sense organs!

But – nine senses!

And the great stars – how many had they? And the cubes – did they open as did globe and pyramid?

Consciousness itself – after all what is it? A secretion of the brain? The cumulative expression, wholly chemical, of the multitudes of cells that form us? The inexplicable governor of the city of the body of which these myriads of cells are the citizens – and created by them out of themselves to rule?

Is it what many call the soul? Or is it a finer form of matter, a self-realizing force, which uses the body as its vehicle just as other forces use for their vestments other machines? After all, I thought, what is this conscious self of ours, the ego, but a spark of realization running continuously along the path of time within the mechanism we call the brain; making contact along that path as the electric spark at the end of a wire?

Is there a sea of this conscious force which laps the shores of the farthest-flung stars; that finds expression in everything – man and rock, metal and flower, jewel and cloud? Limited in its expression only by the limitations of that which animates, and in essence the same in all. If so, then this problem of the life of the Metal People ceased to be a problem; was answered!

So thinking I became aware of increasing light; strode past Yuruk to the door and peeped out. Dawn was paling the sky. I stooped over Drake, shook him. On the instant he was awake, alert.

“I only need a little sleep, Dick,” I said. “When the sun is well up, call me.”

“Why, it’s dawn,” he whispered. “Goodwin, you ought not to have let me sleep so long. I feel like a damned pig.”

“Never mind,” I said. “But watch the eunuch closely.”

I rolled myself up in his warm blanket; sank almost instantly into dreamless slumber.

— XVIII —

INTO THE PIT

High was the sun when I awakened; or so, I supposed, opening my eyes upon a flood of daylight. As I lay, lazily, recollection rushed upon me.

It was no sky into which I was gazing; it was the dome of Norhala’s elfin home. And Drake had not aroused me. Why? And how long had I slept?

I jumped to my feet, stared about. Ruth nor Drake nor the black eunuch was there!

“Ruth!” I shouted. “Drake!”

There was no answer. I ran to the doorway. Peering up into the white vault of the heavens I set the time of day as close to seven; I had slept then three hours, more or less. Yet short as that time of slumber had been, I felt marvelously refreshed, re-energized; the effect, I was certain, of the extraordinarily tonic qualities of the atmosphere of this place. But where were the others? Where Yuruk?

I heard Ruth’s laughter. Some hundred yards to the left, half hidden by a screen of flowering shrubs, I saw a small meadow. Within it a half-dozen little white goats nuzzled around her and Dick. She was milking one of them.

Reassured, I drew back into the chamber, knelt over Ventnor. His condition was unchanged. My gaze fell upon the pool that had been Norhala’s bath. Longingly I looked at it; then satisfying myself that the milking process was not finished, slipped off my clothes and splashed about.

I had just time to get back in my clothes when through the doorway came the pair, each carrying a porcelain pannikin full of milk.

There was no shadow of fear or horror on her face. It was the old Ruth who stood before me; nor was there effort in the smile she gave me. She had been washed clean in the waters of sleep.

“Don’t worry, Walter,” she said. “I know what you’re thinking. But I’m – me again.”

“Where is Yuruk?” I turned to Drake brusquely to smother the sob of sheer happiness I felt rising in my throat; and at his wink and warning grimace abruptly forbore to press the question.

“You men pick out the things and I’ll get breakfast ready,” said Ruth.

Drake picked up the teakettle and motioned me before him.

“About Yuruk,” he whispered when he had gotten outside. “I gave him a little object lesson. Persuaded him to go down the line a bit, showed him my pistol, and then picked off one of Norhala’s goats with it. Hated to do it, but I knew it would be good for his soul.

“He gave one screech and fell on his face and groveled. Thought it was a lightning bolt, I figure; decided I had been stealing Norhala’s stuff. ‘Yuruk,’ I told him, ‘that’s what you’ll get, and worse, if you lay a finger on that girl inside there.’”

“And then what happened?” I asked.

“He beat it back there.” He grinned, pointing toward the forest through which ran the path the eunuch had shown me. “Probably hiding back of a tree.”

As we filled the container at the outer spring, I told him of the revelations and the offer Yuruk had made to me.

“Whew-w!” he whistled. “In the nutcracker, eh? Trouble behind us and trouble in front of us.”

“When do we start?” he asked, as we turned back.

“Right after we’ve eaten,” I answered. “There’s no use putting it off. How do you feel about it?”

“Frankly, like the chief guest at a lynching party,” he said. “Curious but none too cheerful.”

Nor was I. I was filled with a fever of scientific curiosity. But I was not cheerful – no!

We ministered to Ventnor as well as we could; forcing open his set jaws, thrusting a thin rubber tube down past his windpipe into his gullet and dropping through it a few ounces of the goat milk. Our own breakfasting was silent enough.

We could not take Ruth with us upon our journey; that was certain; she must stay here with her brother. She would be safer in Norhala’s home than where we were going, of course, and yet to leave her was most distressing. After all, I wondered, was there any need of both of us taking the journey; would not one do just as well?

Drake could stay—

“No use of putting all our eggs in one basket,” I broached the subject. “I’ll go down by myself while you stay and help Ruth. You can always follow if I don’t turn up in a reasonable time.”

His indignation at this proposal was matched only by her own.

“You’ll go with him, Dick Drake,” she cried, “or I’ll never look at or speak to you again!”

“Good Lord! Did you think for a minute I wouldn’t?” Pain and wrath struggled on his face. “We go together or neither of us goes. Ruth will be all right here, Goodwin. The only thing she has any cause to fear is Yuruk – and he’s had his lesson.

“Besides, she’ll have the rifles and her pistols, and she knows how to use them. What d’ye mean by making such a proposition as that?” His indignation burst all bounds.

Lamely I tried to justify myself.

“I’ll be all right,” said Ruth. “I’m not afraid of Yuruk. And none of these Things will hurt me – not after – not after—” Her eyes fell, her lips quivered, then she faced us steadily. “Don’t ask me how I know that,” she said quietly. “Believe me, I do know it. I am closer to – them than you two are. And if I choose I can call upon that alien strength their master gave me. It is for you two that I fear.”

“No fear for us,” Drake burst out hastily. “We’re Norhala’s little playthings. We’re tabu. Take it from me, Ruth, I’d bet my head there isn’t one of these Things, great or small, and no matter how many, that doesn’t by this time know all about us.

“We’ll probably be received with demonstrations of interest by the populace as welcome guests. Probably we’ll find a sign – ‘Welcome to our City’ – hung up over the front gate.”

She smiled, a trifle tremulously.

“We’ll come back,” he said. Suddenly he leaned forward, put his hands on her shoulders. “Do you think there is anything that could keep me from coming back?” he whispered.

She trembled, wide eyes searching deep into his.

“Well,” I broke in, a bit uncomfortably, “we’d better be starting. I think as Drake does, that we’re tabu. Barring accident there’s no danger. And if I guess right about these Things, accident is impossible.”

“As inconceivable as the multiplication table going wrong,” he laughed, straightening.

And so we made ready. Our rifles would be worse than useless, we knew; our pistols we decided to carry as Drake put it, “for comfort.” Canteens filled with water; a couple of emergency rations, a few instruments, including a small spectroscope, a selection from the medical kit – all these packed in a little haversack which he threw over his broad shoulders.

I pocketed my compact but exceedingly powerful field-glasses. To my poignant and everlasting regret my camera had been upon the bolting pony, and Ventnor had long been out of films for his.

We were ready for our journey.

Our path led straight away, a smooth and dark-gray road whose surface resembled cement packed under enormous pressure. It was all of fifty feet wide and now, in daylight, glistened faintly as though overlaid with some vitreous coating. It narrowed abruptly into a wedged way that stopped at the threshold of Norhala’s door.

Diminishing through the distance, it stretched straight as an arrow onward and vanished between perpendicular cliffs which formed the frowning gateway through which the night before we had passed upon the coursing cubes from the pit of the city. Here, as then, a mistiness checked the gaze.

Ruth with us, we made a brief inspection of the surroundings of Norhala’s house. It was set as though in the narrowest portion of an hourglass. The precipitous walls marched inward from the gateway forming the lower half of the figure; at the back they swung apart at a wider angle.

This upper part of the hourglass was filled with a park-like forest. It was closed, perhaps twenty miles away, by a barrier of cliffs.

How, I wondered, did the path which Yuruk had pointed out to me pierce them? Was it by pass or tunnel; and why was it the armored men had not found and followed it?

The waist between these two mountain wedges was a valley not more than a mile wide. Norhala’s house stood in its center; and it was like a garden, dotted with flowering and fragrant lilies and here and there a tiny green meadow. The great globe of blue that was Norhala’s dwelling seemed less to rest upon the ground than to emerge from it; as though its basic curvatures were hidden in the earth.

What was its substance I could not tell. It was as though built of the lacquer of the gems whose colors it held. And beautiful, wondrously, incredibly beautiful it was – an immense bubble of froth of molten sapphires and turquoises.

We had not time to study its beauties. A few last instructions to Ruth, and we set forth down the gray road. Hardly had we taken a few steps when there came a faint cry from her.

“Dick! Dick – come here!”

He sprang to her, caught her hands in his. For a moment, half frightened it seemed, she considered him.

“Dick,” I heard her whisper. “Dick – come back safe to me!”

I saw his arms close about her, hers tighten around his neck; black hair touched the silken brown curls, their lips met, clung. I turned away.

In a little time he joined me; head down, silent, he strode along beside me, utterly dejected.

A hundred more yards and we turned. Ruth was still standing on the threshold of the house of mystery, watching us. She waved her hands, flitted in, was hidden from us. And Drake still silent, we pushed on.

The walls of the gateway were close. The sparse vegetation along the base of the cliffs had ceased; the roadway itself had merged into the smooth, bare floor of the canyon. From vertical edge to vertical edge of the rocky portal stretched a curtain of shimmering mist. As we drew nearer we saw that this was motionless, and less like vapor of water than vapor of light; it streamed in oddly fixed lines like atoms of crystals in a still solution. Drake thrust an arm within it, waved it; the mist did not move. It seemed instead to interpenetrate the arm – as though bone and flesh were spectral, without power to dislodge the shining particles from position.

We passed within it – side by side.

Instantly I knew that whatever these veils were, they were not moisture. The air we breathed was dry, electric. I was sensible of a decided stimulation, a pleasant tingling along every nerve, a gaiety almost light-headed. We could see each other quite plainly, the rocky floor on which we trod as well. Within this vapor of light there was no ghost of sound; it was utterly empty of it. I saw Drake turn to me, his mouth open in a laugh, his lips move in speech – and although he bent close to my ear, I heard nothing. He frowned, puzzled, and walked on.

Abruptly we stepped into an opening, a pocket of clear air. Our ears were filled with a high, shrill humming as unpleasantly vibrant as the shriek of a sand blast. Six feet to our right was the edge of the ledge on which we stood; beyond it was a sheer drop into space. A shaft piercing down into the void and walled with the mists.

But it was not that shaft that made us clutch each other. No! It was that through it uprose a colossal column of the cubes. It stood a hundred feet from us. Its top was another hundred feet above the level of our ledge and its length vanished in the depths.

And its head was a gigantic spinning wheel, yards in thickness, tapering at its point of contact with the cliff wall into a diameter half that of the side closest the column, gleaming with flashes of green flame and grinding with tremendous speed at the face of the rock.

Over it, attached to the cliff, was a great vizored hood of some pale yellow metal, and it was this shelter that cutting off the vaporous light like an enormous umbrella made the pocket of clarity in which we stood, the shaft up which sprang the pillar.

All along the length of that column as far as we could see the myriad tiny eyes of the Metal People shone out upon us, not twinkling mischievously, but – grotesque as this may seem, I cannot help it – wide with surprise.

Only an instant longer did the great wheel spin. I saw the screaming rock melting beneath it, dropping like lava. Then, as though it had received some message, abruptly its motion now ceased.

It tilted; looked down upon us!

I noted that its grinding surface was studded thickly with the smaller pyramids and that the tips of these were each capped with what seemed to be faceted gems gleaming with the same pale yellow radiance as the Shrine of the Cones.

The column was bending; the wheel approaching.

Drake seized me by the arm, drew me swiftly back into the mists. We were shrouded in their silences. Step by step we went on, peering for the edge of the shelf, feeling in fancy that prodigious wheeled face stealing upon us; afraid to look behind lest in looking we might step too close to the unseen verge.

Yard after yard we slowly covered. Suddenly the vapors thinned; we passed out of them—

A chaos of sound beat about us. The clanging of a million anvils; the clamor of a million forges; the crashing of a hundred years of thunder; the roarings of a thousand hurricanes. The prodigious bellowings of the Pit beating against us now as they had when we had flown down the long ramp into the depths of the Sea of Light.

Instinct with unthinkable power was that clamor; the very voice of Force. Stunned, nay – blinded, by it, we covered ears and eyes.

As before, the clangor died, leaving in its wake a bewildered silence. Then that silence began to throb with a vast humming, and through that humming rang a murmur as that of a river of diamonds.

We opened our eyes, felt awe grip our throats as though a hand had clutched them.

Difficult, difficult almost beyond thought is it for me now to essay to draw in words the scene before us then. For although I can set down what it was we saw, I nor any man can transmute into phrases its essence, its spirit, the intangible wonder that was its synthesis – the appallingly beautiful, soul-shaking strangeness of it, its grandeur, its fantasy, and its alien terror.

The Domain of the Metal Monster – it was filled like a chalice with Its will; was the visible expression of that will.

We stood at the very rim of a wide ledge. We looked down into an immense pit, shaped into a perfect oval, thirty miles in length I judged, and half that as wide, and rimmed with colossal precipices. We were at the upper end of this deep valley and on the tip of its axis; I mean that it stretched longitudinally before us along the line of greatest length. Five hundred feet below was the pit’s floor. Gone were the clouds of light that had obscured it the night before; the air crystal clear; every detail standing out with stereoscopic sharpness.

First the eyes rested upon a broad band of fluorescent amethyst, ringing the entire rocky wall. It girdled the cliffs at a height of ten thousand feet, and from this flaming zone, as though it clutched them, fell the curtains of sparkling mist, the enigmatic, sound-slaying vapors.

But now I saw that all of these veils were not motionless like those through which we had just passed. To the northwest they were pulsing like the aurora, and like the aurora they were shot through with swift iridescences, spectrums, polychromatic gleamings. And always these were ordered, geometric – like immense and flitting prismatic crystals flying swiftly to the very edges of the veils, then darting as swiftly back.

From zone and veils the gaze leaped to the incredible City towering not two miles away from us.

Blue black, shining, sharply cut as though from polished steel, it reared full five thousand feet on high!

How great it was I could not tell, for the height of its precipitous walls barred the vision. The frowning facade turned toward us was, I estimated, five miles in length. Its colossal scarp struck the eyes like a blow; its shadow, falling upon us, checked the heart. It was overpowering – dreadful as that midnight city of Dis that Dante saw rising up from another pit.

It was a metal city, mountainous.

Featureless, smooth, the immense wall of it heaved heavenward. It should have been blind, that vast oblong face – but it was not blind. From it radiated alertness, vigilance. It seemed to gaze toward us as though every foot were manned with sentinels; guardians invisible to the eyes whose concentration of watchfulness was caught by some subtle hidden sense higher than sight.

It was a metal city, mountainous and – aware.

About its base were huge openings. Through and around these portals swirled hordes of the Metal People; in units and in combinations coming and going, streaming in and out, forming as they came and went patterns about the openings like the fretted spume of great breakers surging into, retreating from, ocean-bitten gaps in some iron-bound coast.

From the immensity of the City the eyes dropped back to the Pit in which it lay. Its floor was plaque-like, a great plane smooth as though turned by potter’s wheel, broken by no mound nor hillock, slope nor terrace; level, horizontal, flawlessly flat. On it was no green living thing – no tree nor bush, meadow nor covert.

It was alive with movement. A ferment that was as purposeful as it was mechanical, a ferment symmetrical, geometrical, supremely ordered—

The surging of the Metal Hordes.

There they moved beneath us, these enigmatic beings, in a countless host. They marched and counter-marched in battalions, in regiments, in armies. Far to the south I glimpsed a company of colossal shapes like mobile, castellated and pyramidal mounts. They were circling, weaving about each other with incredible rapidity – like scores of great pyramids crowned with gigantic turrets and dancing. From these turrets came vivid flashes, lightning bright – on their wake the rolling echoes of faraway thunder.

Out of the north sped a squadron of obelisks from whose tops flamed and flared the immense spinning wheels, appearing at this distance like fiery whirling disks.

Up from their setting the Metal People lifted themselves in a thousand incredible shapes, shapes squared and globed and spiked and shifting swiftly into other thousands as incredible. I saw a mass of them draw themselves up into the likeness of a tent skyscraper high; hang so for an instant, then writhe into a monstrous chimera of a dozen towering legs that strode away like a gigantic headless and bodiless tarantula in steps two hundred feet long. I watched mile-long lines of them shape and reshape into circles, into interlaced lozenges and pentagons – then lift in great columns and shoot through the air in unimaginable barrage.

Through all this incessant movement I sensed plainly purpose, knew that it was definite activity toward a definite end, caught the clear suggestion of drill, of maneuver.

And when the shiftings of the Metal Hordes permitted we saw that all the flat floor of the valley was stripped and checkered, stippled and tessellated with every color, patterned with enormous lozenges and squares, rhomboids and parallelograms, pentagons and hexagons and diamonds, lunettes, circles and spirals; harlequined yet harmonious; instinct with a grotesque suggestion of a super-Futurism.

But always this patterning was ordered, always coherent. As though it were a page on which was spelled some untranslatable other world message.

Fourth Dimensional revelations by some Euclidean deity! Commandments traced by some mathematical God!

Looping across the vale, emerging from the sparkling folds of the southernmost curtainings and vanishing into the gleaming veils of the easternmost, ran a broad ribbon of pale-green jade; not straightly but with manifold convolutions and flourishes. It was like a sentence in Arabic.

It was margined with sapphire blue. All along its twisting course two broad bands of jet margined the cerulean shore. It was spanned by scores of flashing crystal arches. Nor were these bridges – even from that distance I knew they were no bridges. From them came the crystalline murmurings.

Jade? This stream jade? If so then it must be in truth molten, for I caught its swift and polished rushing! It was no jade. It was in truth a river; a river running like a writing across a patterned plane.

I looked upward – up to the circling peaks. They were a stupendous coronet thrusting miles deep into the dazzling sky. I raised my glasses, swept them. In color they were an immense and variegated flower with countless multiform petals of stone; in outline they were a ring of fortresses built by fantastic unknown Gods.

Up they thrust – domed and arched, spired and horned, pyramided, fanged and needled. Here were palisades of burning orange with barbicans of incandescent bronze; there aiguilles of azure rising from bastions of cinnabar red; turrets of royal purple, obelisks of indigo; titanic forts whose walls were splashed with vermilion, with citron yellows and with rust of rubies; watch towers of flaming scarlet.

Scattered among them were the flashing emeralds of the glaciers and the immense pallid baroques of the snow fields.

Like a diadem the summits ringed the Pit. Below them ran the ring of flashing amethyst with its aural mists. Between them lay the vast and patterned flat covered with still symbol and inexplicable movement. Under their summits brooded the blue black, metallic mass of the Seeing City.

Within circling walls, over plain and from the City hovered a cosmic spirit not to be understood by man. Like an emanation of stars and space, it was yet gem fine and gem hard, crystalline and metallic, lapidescent and—

Conscious!

Down from the ledge where we stood fell a steep ramp, similar to that by which, in the darkness, we had descended. It dropped at an angle of at least forty-five degrees; its surface was smooth and polished.

Through the mists at our back stole a shining block. It paused, seemed to perk itself; spun so that in turn each of its six faces took us in.

I felt myself lifted upon it by multitudes of little invisible hands; saw Drake whirling up beside me. I moved toward him – through the force that held us. A block swept away from the ledge, swayed for a moment. Under us, as though we were floating in air, the Pit lay stretched. There was a rapid readjustment, a shifting of our two selves upon another surface. I looked down upon a tremendous, slender pillar of the cubes, dropping below, five hundred feet to the valley’s floor a column of which the block that held us was the top.

Gone was the whirling wheel that had crowned it, but I knew this for the Grinding Thing from which we had fled; the questing block had been its scout. As though curious to know more of us, the Shape had sought us out through the mists, its messenger had caught us, delivered us to it.

The pillar leaned over – bent like that shining pillar that had bridged for us, at Norhala’s commands, the abyss. The floor of the valley arose to meet us. Further and further leaned the pillar. Again there was a rapid shifting of us to another surface of the crowning cube. Fast now swept up toward us the valley floor. A dizziness clouded my sight. There was a little shock, a rolling over the Thing that had held us—

We stood upon the floor of the Pit.

And breaking from the immense and prostrate shaft on whose top we had ridden downward came score upon score of the cubes. They broke from it, disintegrating it; circled about us, curiously, interestedly, twinkling at us from their deep sparkling points of eyes.

Helplessly we gazed at those who circled around us. Then suddenly I felt myself lifted once more, was tossed to the surface of the nearest block. Upon it I spun while the tiny eyes searched me. Then like a human ball it tossed me to another. I caught a glimpse of Drake’s tall figure drifting through the air.

The play became more rapid, breathtaking. It was play; I recognized that. But it was perilous play for us. I felt myself as fragile as a doll of glass in the hands of careless children.

I was tossed to a waiting cube. On the ground, not ten feet from me, was Drake, swaying dizzily. Suddenly the cube that held me tightened its grip; tightened it so that it drew me irresistibly flat down upon its surface. Before I dropped, Drake’s body leaped toward me as though drawn by a lasso. He fell at my side.

Then pursued by scores of the Things and like some mischievous boy bearing off the spoils, the block that held us raced away, straight for an open portal. A blaze of incandescent blue flame blinded me; again as the dazzlement faded I saw Drake beside me – a skeleton form. Swiftly flesh melted back upon him, clothed him.

The cube stopped, abruptly; the hosts of little unseen hands raised us, slid us gently over its edge, set us upright beside it. And it sped away.

All about us stretched another of those vast halls in which on high burned the pale-gilt suns. Between its colossal columns streamed thousands of the Metal Folk; no longer hurriedly, but quietly, deliberately, sedately.

We were within the City – even as Ventnor had commanded.

— XIX —

THE CITY
THAT WAS ALIVE

Close beside us was one of the cyclopean columns. We crept to it; crouched at its base opposite the drift of the Metal People; strove, huddled there, to regain our shaken poise. Like bagatelles we felt in that tremendous place, the weird luminaries gleaming above like garlands of frozen suns, the enigmatic hosts of animate cubes and spheres and pyramids trooping past.

They ranged in size from shapes yard-high to giants of thirty feet or more. They paid no heed to us, did not stop; streaming on, engrossed in whatever mysterious business was summoning them. And after a time their numbers lessened; thinned down to widely separate groups, to stragglers; then ceased. The hall was empty of them.

As far as the eye could reach the columned spaces stretched. I was conscious once more of that unusual flow of energy through every vein and nerve.

“Follow the crowd!” said Drake. “Do you feel just full of pep and ginger, by the way?”

“I am aware of the most extraordinary vigor,” I answered.

“Some weird joint,” he mused, looking about him. “Wonder if they have any windows? This whole place looked solid to me – what I could see of it. Wonder if we’ll get up against it for air? These Things don’t need it, that’s sure. Wonder—”

He broke off staring fascinatedly at the pillar behind us.

“Look here, Goodwin!” There was a tremor in his voice. “What do you make of this?”

I followed his pointing finger; looked at him inquiringly.

“The eyes!” he said impatiently. “Don’t you see them? The eyes in the column!”

And now I saw them. The pillar was a pale metallic blue, in color a trifle darker than the Metal Folk. All within it were the myriads of tiny crystalline points that we had grown to know were the receptors of some strange sense of sight. But they did not sparkle as did those others; they were dull, lifeless. I touched the surface. It was smooth, cool – with none of that subtle, warm vitality that pulsed through all the Things with which I had come in contact. I shook my head, realizing as I did so what a shock the incredible possibility he had suggested had given me.

“No,” I said. “There is a resemblance, yes. But there is no force about this – stuff; no life. Besides, such a thing is utterly incredible.”

“They might be – dormant,” he suggested stubbornly. “Can you see any mark of their joining – if they are the cubes?”

Together we scanned the pillar minutely. The faces seemed unbroken, continuous; there was no trace of those thin and shining lines that marked the juncture of the cubes when they had clicked together to form the bridge of the abyss or that had gleamed, cross-like, upon the back of the combined four upon which we had followed Norhala.

“It’s a sheer impossibility. It’s madness to think such a thing, Drake!” I exclaimed, and wondered at my own vehemence of denial.

“Maybe,” he shook his head doubtfully. “Maybe – but – well – let’s be on our way.”

We strode on, following the direction the Metal Folk had gone. Clearly Drake was still doubtful; at each pillar he hesitated, scanning it closely with troubled eyes.

But I, having determinedly dismissed the idea, was more interested in the fantastic lights that flooded this columned hall with their buttercup radiance. They were still and unwinking; not disks, I could see now, but globes. Great and small, they floated motionless, their rays extending rigidly and as still as the orb that shed them.

Yet rigid as they were there was nothing about either rays or orbs that suggested either hardness or the metallic. They were vaporous, soft as St. Elmo’s fire, the witch lights that cling at times to the spars of ships, weird gleaming visitors from the invisible ocean of atmospheric electricity.

When they disappeared, as they did frequently, it was instantaneously, completely, with a disconcerting sleight-of-hand finality. I noted, though, that when they did vanish, immediately close to where they had been other orbs swam forth with that same astonishing abruptness; sometimes only one, larger it might be than that which had gone; sometimes a cluster of smaller globes, their frozen, crocused rays impinging.

What could they be, I wondered – how fixed, and what the source of their light? Products of electro-magnetic currents and born of the interpenetration of such streams flowing above us? Such a theory might account for their disappearance, and reappearance, shiftings of the flows that changed the light producing points of contact. Wireless lights? If so here was an idea that human science might elaborate if ever we returned to—

“Now which way?” Drake broke in upon my musing. The hall had ended. We stood before a blank wall vanishing into the soft mists hiding the roof of the chamber.

“I thought we had been going along the way They went,” I said in amazement.

“So did I,” he answered. “We must have circled. They never went through that unless – unless—” He hesitated.

“Unless what?” I asked sharply.

“Unless it opened and let them through,” he said. “Have you forgotten those great ovals – like cat’s eyes that opened in the outer walls?” he added quietly.

I had forgotten. I looked again at the wall. Certainly it was smooth, lineless. In one unbroken, shining surface it rose, a facade of polished metal. Within it the deep set points of light were duller even than they had been in the pillars; almost indeed indistinguishable.

“Go on to the left,” I said none too patiently. “And get that absurd notion out of your head.”

“All right.” He flushed. “But you don’t think I’m afraid, do you?”

“If what you’re thinking were true, you’d have a right to be,” I replied tartly. “And I want to tell you I’D be afraid. Damned afraid.”

For perhaps two hundred paces we skirted the base of the wall. We came abruptly to an opening, an oblong passageway fully fifty foot wide by twice as high. At its entrance the mellow, saffron light was cut off as though by an invisible screen. The tunnel itself was filled with a dim grayish blue luster. For an instant we contemplated it.

“I wouldn’t care to be caught in there by any rush,” I hesitated.

“There’s not much good in thinking of that now,” said Drake, grimly. “A few chances more or less in a joint of this kind is nothing between friends, Goodwin; take it from me. Come on.”

We entered. Walls, floor and roof were composed of the same substance as the great pillars, the wall of the outer chamber; filled like them with dimmed replicas of the twinkling eye points.

“Odd that all the places in here are square,” muttered Drake. “They don’t seem to have used any spherical or pyramidal ideas in their building – if it is a building.”

It was true. All was mathematically straight up and down and across. It was strange – still we had seen little as yet.

There was a warmth about this passageway we trod; a difference in the air of it. The warmth grew, a dry and baking heat; but stimulative rather than oppressive. I touched the walls; the warmth did not come from them. And there was no wind. Yet as we went on the heat increased.

The passageway turned at a right angle, continuing in a corridor half its former dimensions. Far away shone a high bar of pale yellow radiance, rising like a pillar of light from floor to roof. Toward it, perforce, we trudged. Its brilliancy grew greater.

A few paces away from it we stopped. The yellow luminescence streamed through a slit not more than a foot wide in the wall. We were in a cul-de-sac for the opening was not wide enough for either Drake or me to push through. Through it with the light gushed the curious heat enveloping us.

Drake walked to the opening, peered through. I joined him.

At first all that I could see was a space filled with the saffron lambency. Then I saw that this was splashed with tiny flashes of the jewel fires; little lances and javelin thrusts of burning emeralds and rubies; darting gem hard flames rose scarlet and pale sapphire; quick flares of violet.

Into my sight through the irised, crocus mist swam the radiant body of Norhala!

She stood naked, clad only in the veils of her hair that glowed now like spun silk of molten copper, her strange eyes wide and smiling, the galaxies of tiny stars sparkling through their gray depths.

And all about her swirled a countless host of the Little Things!

From them came the gem fires piercing the aureate mists. They played and frolicked about her in scores of swiftly forming, swiftly changing, goblin shapes. They circled her feet in shining, elfin rings; then opening into flaming disks and stars, shot up and spun about the white miracle of her body in great girdles of multi-colored living fires. Mingled with disk and star were tiny crosses gleaming with sullen, deep crimsons and smoky orange.

A flash of blue incandescence and a slender pillared shape leaped from the floor; became a coronet, a whirling, flashing halo toward which streamed up the flaming tendrilings of her tresses. Other halos circled her arms and breasts; they spun like bracelets about the outstretched arms.

Then like a swiftly rushing wave a host of the Little Things thrust themselves up, covered her, hid her in a coruscating cloud.

I saw an exquisite arm thrust itself from their clinging, wave gaily; saw her glorious head emerge from the incredible, the seething draperies of living jewels. I heard her laughter, sweet and golden and far away.

Goddess of the Inexplicable! Madonna of the Metal Babes!

The Nursery of the Metal People!

Norhala was gone, blotted out from our sight! Gone too were the bar of light and the chamber into which we had been peering. We stared at a smooth, blank wall. With that same ensorcelled swiftness the wall had closed even as we had stared through it; closed so quickly that we had not seen its motion.

I gripped Drake; shrank with him into the farthest corner – for on the other side of us the wall was opening. First it was only a crack; then rapidly it widened. There stretched another passageway, luminous and long; far down it we glimpsed movement. Closer that movement came, grew plainer. Out of the mistily luminous distances, three abreast and filling the corridor from side to side, raced upon us a company of the great spheres!

Back we cowered from their approach – back and back; arms outstretched, pressing against the barrier, flattening ourselves against the shock of the destroying impact menacing.

“It’s all up,” muttered Drake. “No place to run. They’re bound to smash us. Stick close, Doc. Get back to Ruth. Maybe I can stop them!”

Before I could check him, he had leaped straight in the path of the rushing globes, now a scant two-score yards away.

The globes stopped – halted a few feet from him. They seemed to contemplate us, astonished. They turned upon themselves, as though consulting. Slowly they advanced. We were pushed forward and lifted gently. Then as we hung suspended, held by that force which always I can liken only to myriads of tiny invisible hands, the shining arcs of their backs undulated beneath us.

Their files swung around the corner and marched down the passage by which we had come from the immense hall. And when the last rank had passed from under us we were dropped softly to our feet; stood swaying in their wake.

A curious frenzy of helpless indignation shook me, a rage of humiliation obscuring all gratitude I should have felt for our escape. Drake’s eyes blazed wrath.

“The insolent devils!” He raised clenched fists. “The insolent, domineering devils!”

We stared after them.

Was the passage growing narrower – closing? Even as I gazed I saw it shrink; saw its walls slide silently toward each other. I pushed Drake into the newly opened way and sprang after him.

Behind us was an unbroken wall covering all that space in which but a moment before we had stood!

Is it to be wondered that a panic seized us; that we began to run crazily down the alley that still lay open before us, casting over our shoulders quick, fearful glances to see whether that inexorable, dreadful closing was continuing, threatening to crush us between these walls like flies in a vise of steel?

But they did not close. Unbroken, silent, the way stretched before us and behind us. At last, gasping, avoiding each other’s gaze, we paused.

And at that very moment of pause a deeper tremor shook me, a trembling of the very foundations of life, the shuddering of one who faces the inconceivable knowing at last that the inconceivable – is.

For, abruptly, walls and floor and roof broke forth into countless twinklings!

As though a film had been withdrawn from them, as though they had awakened from slumber, myriads of little points of light shone forth upon us from the pale-blue surfaces – lights that considered us, measured us – mocked us.

The little points of living light that were the eyes of the Metal People!

This was no corridor cut through inert matter by mechanic art; its opening had been caused by no hidden mechanisms! It was a living Thing – walled and floored and roofed by the living bodies – of the Metal People themselves.

Its opening, as had been the closing of that other passage, was the conscious, coordinate and voluntary action of the Things that formed these mighty walls.

An action that obeyed, was directed by, the incredibly gigantic, communistic will which, like the spirit of the hive, the soul of the formicary, animated every unit of them.

A greater realization swept us. If this were true, then those pillars in the vast hall, its towering walls – all this City was one living Thing!

Built of the animate bodies of countless millions! Tons upon countless tons of them shaping a gigantic pile of which every atom was sentient, mobile – intelligent!

A Metal Monster!

Now I knew why it was that its frowning facade had seemed to watch us Argus-eyed as the Things had tossed us toward it. It had watched us!

That flood of watchfulness pulsing about us had been actual concentration of regard of untold billions of tiny eyes of the living block which formed the City’s cliff.

A City that Saw! A City that was Alive!

No secret mechanism then – back darted my mind to that first terror – had closed the wall, shutting from our sight Norhala at play with the Little Things. None had opened the way for, had closed the way behind, the coursing spheres. It had been done by the conscious action of the conscious Things of whose living bodies was built this whole tremendous thinking pile!

I think that for a moment we both went a little mad as that staggering truth came to us. I know we started to run once more, side by side, gripping like frightened children each other’s hands. Then Drake stopped.

“By all the hell of this place,” he said, solemnly, “I’ll run no more. After all – we’re men. If they kill us, they kill us. But by the God who made me I’ll run from them no more. I’ll die standing.”

His courage steadied me. Defiantly we marched on. Up from below us, down from the roof, out from the walls of our way the hosts of eyes gleamed and twinkled upon us.

“Who could have believed it?” he muttered, half to himself. “A living city of them! A living nest of them; a prodigious living nest of metal!”

“A nest?” I caught the word. What did it suggest? That was it – the nest of the army ants, the city of the army ants, that Beebe had studied in the South American jungles and once described to me. After all, was this more wonderful, more unbelievable than that – the city of ants which was formed by their living bodies precisely as this was of the bodies of the Cubes?

How had Beebe [04] phrased it – “the home, the nest, the hearth, the nursery, the bridal suite, the kitchen, the bed and board of the army ants.” Built of and occupied by those blind and dead and savage little insects which by the guidance of smell alone carried on the most intricate operations, the most complex activities. Nothing here was stranger than that, I reflected – if once one could rid the mind of the paralyzing influence of the shapes of the Metal Things. Whence came the stimuli that moved them, the stimuli to which they reacted?

Well then – whence and how came the orders to which the ants responded; that bade them open this corridor in their nest, close that, form this chamber, fill that one? Was one more mysterious than the other?

Breaking into my current of thoughts came consciousness that I was moving with increased speed; that my body was fast growing lighter.

Simultaneously with this recognition I felt myself lifted from the floor of the corridor and levitated with considerable rapidity forward; looking down I saw that floor several feet below me. Drake’s arm wound itself around my shoulder.

“Closing up behind us,” he muttered. “They’re putting us – out.”

It was, indeed, as though the passageway had wearied of our deliberate progress. Had decided to – give us a lift. Rearward it was shutting. I noted with interest how accurately this motion kept pace with our own speed, and how fluidly the walls seemed to run together.

Our movement became accelerated. It was as though we floated buoyantly, weightless, upon some swift stream. The sensation was curiously pleasant, languorous – what was that word Ruth had used? – elemental – and free. The supporting force seemed to flow equally from walls and floor; to reach down to us from the roof. It was slumberously even, and effortless. I saw that in advance of us the living corridor was opening even as behind us it was closing.

All around us the little eye points twinkled and – laughed.

There was no danger here – there could be none. Deeper and deeper dropped my mind into the depths of that alien tranquility. Faster and faster we floated – onward.

Abruptly, ahead of us shone a blaze of daylight. We passed into it. The force holding us withdrew its grip; I felt solidity beneath my feet; stood and leaned back against a smooth wall.

The corridor had ended and – had shut us out from itself.

“Bounced!” exclaimed Drake.

And incongruous, flippant, colloquial as was that word, I know none that would better describe my own feelings.

We were bounced out upon a turret jutting from the barrier. And before us lay spread the most amazing, the most extraordinary fantastic scene upon which, I think, the vision of man has rested since the advent of time.

— XX —

VAMPIRES OF THE SUN

It was a crater; a half mile on high and all of two thousand feet across ran the circular lip of its vast rim. Above it was a circle of white and glaring sky in whose center flamed the sun.

And instantly, before my vision could grasp a tithe of that panorama, I knew that this place was the very heart of the City; its vital ganglion; its soul.

Around the crater lip were poised thousands of concave disks, vernal green, enormous. They were like a border of gigantic, upthrust shields; and within each, emblazoned like a shield’s device, was a blinding flower of flame – the reflected, dilated face of the sun. Below this diadem hung, pendent, clusters of other disks, swarmed like the globular hiving of the constellation Hercules’ captured stars. And each of these prisoned the image of our sun.

A hundred feet below us was the crater floor.

Up from it thrust a mountainous forest of the pallidly radiant cones; bristling; prodigious. Tier upon tier, thicket upon thicket, phalanx upon phalanx they climbed. Up and up, pyramidically, they flung their spiked hosts.

They drew together two thousand feet above us, clustering close about the foot of a single huge spire which thrust itself skyward above them. The crest of this spire was truncated. From its shorn tip radiated scores of long and slender spokes holding in place a thousand feet wide wheel of wan green disks whose concave surfaces, unlike those smooth ones girding the crater, were curiously faceted.

This amazing structure rested upon a myriad-footed base of crystal, even as had that other cornute fantasy beside which we had met the great Disk. But it was in size to that as – as Leviathan to a minnow. From it streamed the same baffling suggestion of invincible force transmuted into matter; energy coalesced into the tangible; power made concentrate in the vestments of substance.

Half-way between crater lip and floor began the hordes of the Metal People.

In colossal animate chevaux-de-frise of hundred-foot girders they thrust themselves out from the curving walls – walls, I knew, as alive as they!

From these Brobdignagian beams they swung in ropes and clusters – spheres and cubes studded as thickly with the pyramids as ever Titan’s mace with spikes. Group after bizarre group they dropped; pendulous. Coppices of slender columns of thistled globes sprang up to meet the festooned joists.

Between the girders they draped themselves in long, stellated garlands; grouped themselves in innumerable, kaleidoscopic patterns.

They clicked into place around the golden turret in which we crouched.

In fantastic arrases they swayed in front of us – now hiding by, now revealing through their quicksilver interweavings the mounts of the Cones.

And steadily those flowing in below added to their multitudes; gliding up cable and pillar; building out still further the living girders, stringing themselves upon living festoon and living garland, weaving in among them, changing their shapes, rewriting their symbols.

They swung and threaded swiftly, in shifting arabesque, in Gothic traceries, in lace-like fantasies; utterly bizarre, unutterably beautiful – crystalline, geometric always.

Abruptly their movement ceased – so abruptly that the stoppage of all the ordered turmoil had the quality of appalling silence.

An unimaginable tapestry bedight with incredible broidery, the Metal People draped the vast cup.

Pillared it as though it were a temple.

Garnished it with their bodies as though it were a shrine.

Across the floor toward the Cones glided a palely lustrous sphere. In shape only a globe like all its kind, yet it was invested with power; it radiated power as a star does light; was clothed in unseen garments of supernal force. In its wake drifted two great pyramids; after them ten spheres but little smaller than the Shape which led.

“The Metal Emperor!” breathed Drake.

On they swept until they reached the base of the Cones. They paused at the edge of the crystal tabling. They turned.

There was a flashing as of a meteor bursting. The globe had opened into that splendor of jewel fires before which had floated Norhala and Ruth.

I saw again the luminous ovals of sapphire, studding its golden zone, the mystic rose of pulsing, petal flame, the still core of incandescent ruby that was the heart of that rose.

Strangely I felt my own heart veer toward this – Thing; bowing before its beauty and its strength; almost worshiping!

A shock of revulsion went through me. I shot a quick, half frightened glance at Drake. He was crouching dangerously close to the lip of the ledge, hands clasped and knuckles white with the intensity of his grip, eyes rapt, staring – upon the verge of worship even as I had been.

“Drake!” I thrust my elbow into his side brutally. “None of that! Remember you’re human! Guard yourself, man – guard yourself!”

“What?” he muttered; then, abruptly: “How did you know?”

“I felt it myself,” I answered: “For God’s sake, Dick – hold fast to yourself! Remember Ruth!”

He shook his head violently – as though to be rid of some clinging, cloying thing.

“I’ll not forget again,” he said.

He huddled down once more close to the edge of the shelf; peering over. No one of the Metal People had moved; the silence, the stillness, was unbroken.

Now the flanking pyramids shot forth into twin stars, blazing with violet luminescences. And one by one after them the ten lesser spheres expanded into flaming orbs; beautiful they were, but far less glorious than that Disk of whom they were the counselors? – ministers? – what?

Still there was no movement among all the arrased, girdered, pillared hosts.

There came a little wailing; far away it was and far. Nearer it drew. Was that a tremor that passed through the crowded crater? A quick pulse of – eagerness?

“Hungry!” whispered Drake. “They’re hungry!”

Closer was the wailing; again that faint tremor quivered over the place. And now I caught it – a quick and avid pulsing.

“Hungry,” whispered Drake again. “Like a lot of lions with the keeper coming along with meat.”

The wailing was below us. I felt, not a quiver this time, but an unmistakable shock pass through the Horde. It throbbed – and passed.

Into the field of our vision, up to the flaming Disk rushed an immense cube.

Thrice the height of a tall man – as I think I have noted before – when it unfolded its radiance was that shape of mingled beauty and power I call the Metal Emperor.

Yet this Thing eclipsed it. Black, uncompromising, in some indefinable way brutal, its square bulk blotted out the Disk’s effulgence; shrouded it. And a shadow seemed to fall upon the crater. The violet fires of the flanking stars pulsed out – watchfully, threateningly.

For only an instant the darkening block loomed against the Disk; blackened it.

There came another meteor burst of light. Where the cube had been was now a tremendous, fiery cross – a cross inverted.

Its upper arm arose to twice the length either of its horizontals or the square that was its foot. In its opening it must have turned, for its – face – was toward us and away from the Cones, its body hid the Disk, and almost all the surfaces of the two watchful Stars.

Eighty feet at least in height, this cruciform shape stood. It flamed and flickered with angry, smoky crimsons and scarlets; with sullen orange glowings and glitterings of sulphurous yellows. Within its fires were none of those leaping, multi-colored glories that were the Metal Emperor’s; no trace of the pulsing, mystic rose; no shadow of jubilant sapphire; no purple royal; no tender, merciful greens nor gracious opalescences. Nothing even of the blasting violet of the Stars.

All angry, smoky reds and ochres the cross blazed forth – and in its lurid glowings was something sinister, something real, something cruel, something – nearer to earth, closer to man.

“The Keeper of the Cones and the Metal Emperor!” muttered Drake. “I begin to get it – yes – I begin to get – Ventnor!”

Once more the pulse, the avid throbbing shook the crater. And as swiftly in its wake rushed back the stillness, the silence.

The Keeper turned – I saw its palely lustrous blue metallic back. I drew out my little field-glasses, focused them.

The Cross slipped sidewise past the Disk, its courtiers, its stellated guardians. As it went by they swung about with it; ever facing it.

And now at last was clear a thing that had puzzled greatly – the mechanism of that opening process by which sphere became oval disk, pyramid a four-pointed star and – as I had glimpsed in the play of the Little Things about Norhala, could see now so plainly in the Keeper – the blocks took this inverted cruciform shape.

The Metal People were hollow!

Hollow metal – boxes!

In their enclosing sides dwelt all their vitality – their powers – themselves!

And those sides were – everything that they were!

Folded, the oval disk became the sphere; the four points of the star, the square from which those points radiated; shutting became the pyramid; the six faces of the cubes were when opened the inverted cross.

Nor were these flexible, mobile walls massive. They were indeed, considering the apparent mass of the Metal Folk, most astonishingly fragile. Those of the Keeper, despite its eighty feet of height, could not have been more than a yard in thickness. At the edges I thought I could see groovings; noted the same appearances at the outlines of the Stars. Seen sidewise, the body of the Metal Emperor showed as a convexity; its surface smooth, with a suggestion of transparency.

The Keeper was bending; its oblong upper plane dropping forward as though upon a hinge. Lower and lower this flange bent – in a grotesque, terrifying obeisance; a horrible mockery of reverence.

Was this mountain of Cones then actually a shrine – an idol of the Metal People – their God?

The oblong that was the upper half of the cruciform Shape extended now at right angles to the horizontal arms. It hovered, a rectangle forty feet long, as many feet over the floor at the base of the crystal pedestal. It bent again, this time from the hinge that held the outstretched arms to the base. And now it was a huge truncated cross, a T-shaped figure, hovering only twenty feet above the pave.

Down from the Keeper writhed and flicked a tangle of tentacles; serpentine, whip-like. Silvery white, they were dyed with the scarlet and orange flaming of the surface now hidden from my eyes; reflected those sullen and angry gleamings. Vermiceous, coiling, they seemed to drop from every inch of the overhanging planes.

Something there was beneath them – something like an immense and luminous tablet. The tentacles were moving over it – pressing here, thrusting there, turning, pushing, manipulating—

A shuddering passed through the crowding cones. I saw the tremor shake their bristling hosts, oscillate the great spire, set the faceted disks quivering.

The trembling grew; a vibration in every separate cone that became even more rapid. There was a faint, curiously oppressive humming – like the distant echo of a tempest in chaos.

Faster, ever faster grew the vibration. Now the sharp outlines of the cones were dissolving.

And now they were – gone.

The mount of the cones had become a mighty pyramid of pale green radiance – one tremendous, pallid flame, of which the spire was the tongue. Out from the disked wheel at its shorn tip gushed a flood of light – light that gathered itself from the leaping radiance below it.

The tentacles of the Keeper moved more swiftly over the enigmatic tablet; writhing cloudily; confusedly rapid. The faceted disks wavered; turned upward; the wheel began to whirl – faster – faster—

Up from that flaming circle, out into the sky leaped a thick, pale green column of intensest light.

With prodigious speed, as compact as water, concentrate, it struck – straight out toward the face of the sun.

It thrust up with the speed of light – the speed of light? A thought came to me; incredible I believed it even as I reacted to it. My pulse is uniformly seventy to the minute. I sought my wrist, found the artery, made allowance for its possible acceleration, began to count.

“What’s the matter?” asked Drake.

“Take my glasses,” I muttered, trying to keep up, while speaking, my tally. “Matches in my pocket. Smoke the lenses. I want to look at sun.”

With a look of stupefied amazement which, at another time I would have found laughable, he obeyed.

“Hold them to my eyes,” I ordered.

Three minutes had gone by.

There it was – that for which I sought. Clear through the darkened lenses I could see the sun spot, high up on the northernmost limb of the sun. An unimaginable cyclone of incandescent gases; an unthinkably huge dynamo pouring its floods of electro-magnetism upon all the circling planets; that solar crater which we now know was, when at its maximum, all of one hundred and fifty thousand miles across; the great sun spot of the summer of 1919 – the most enormous ever recorded by astronomical science.

Five minutes had gone by.

Common sense whispered to me. There was no use keeping my eyes fixed to the glasses. Even if that thought were true – even if that pillar of radiance were a messenger, an earth-hurled bolt flying to the sun through atmosphere and outer space with the speed of light, even if it were this stupendous creation of these Things, still between eight and nine minutes must elapse before it could reach the orb; and as many minutes must go by before the image of whatever its impact might produce upon the sun could pass back over the bridge of light spanning the ninety millions of miles between it and us.

And after all did not that hypothesis belong to the utterly impossible? Even were it so – what was it that the Metal Monster expected to follow? This radiant shaft, colossal as it was to us, was infinitesimal compared to the target at which it was aimed.

What possible effect could that spear have upon the solar forces?

And yet – and yet – a gnat’s bite can drive an elephant mad. And Nature’s balance is delicate; and what great happenings may follow the slightest disturbance of her infinitely sensitive, her complex, equilibrium? It might be – it might be—

Eight minutes had passed.

“Take the glasses,” I bade Drake. “Look up at the sun spot – the big one.”

“I see it.” He had obeyed me. “What of it?”

Nine minutes.

The shaft, if I were right, had by now touched the sun. What was to follow?

“I don’t get you at all,” said Drake, and lowered the glasses.

Ten minutes.

“What’s happening? Look at the Cones! Look at the Emperor!” gasped Drake.

I peered down, then almost forgot to count.

The pyramidal flame that had been the mount of Cones was shrunken. The pillar of radiance had not lessened – but the mechanism that was its source had retreated whole yards within the field of its crystal base.

And the Metal Emperor! Dulled and faint were his fires, dimmed his splendors; and fainter still were the violet luminescences of the watching Stars, the shimmering livery of his court.

The Keeper of the Cones! Were not its outstretched planes hovering lower and lower over the gleaming tablet; its tentacles moving aimlessly, feebly – wearily?

I had a sense of force being withdrawn from all about me. It was as though all the City were being drained of life – as though vitality were being sucked from it to feed this pyramid of radiance; drained from it to forge the thrusting spear piercing sunward.

The Metal People seemed to hang limply, inert; the living girders seemed to sag; the living columns to bend; to droop and to sway.

Twelve minutes.

With a nerve-racking crash one of the laden beams fell; dragging down with it others; bending, shattering in its fall a thicket of the horned columns. Behind us the sparkling eyes of the wall were dimmed, vacant – dying. Something of that hellish loneliness, that demoniac desire for immolation that had assailed us in the haunted hollow of the ruins began to creep over me.

The crowded crater was fainting. The life was going out of the City – its magnetic life, draining into the shaft of green fire.

Duller grew the Metal Emperor’s glories.

Fourteen minutes.

“Goodwin,” cried Drake, “the life’s going out of these Things! Going out with that ray they’re shooting.”

Fifteen minutes.

I watched the tentacles of the Keeper grope over the tablet. Abruptly the flaming pyramid darkened – went out.

The radiant pillar hurtled upward like a thunder-bolt; vanished in space.

Before us stood the mount of cones, shrunken to a sixth of its former size.

Sixteen minutes.

All about the crater-lip the ringed shields tilted; thrust themselves on high, as though behind each was an eager lifting arm. Below them the hived clusters of disks changed from globules into wide coronets.

Seventeen minutes.

I dropped my wrist; seized the glasses from Drake; raised them to the sun. For a moment I saw nothing – then a tiny spot of white incandescence shone forth at the lower edge of the great spot. It grew into a point of radiance, dazzling even through the shadowed lenses.

I rubbed my eyes; looked again. It was still there, larger – blazing with an ever increasing and intolerable intensity.

I handed the glasses to Drake, silently.

“I see it!” he muttered. “I see it! And that did it – that! Goodwin!” There was panic in his cry. “Goodwin! The spot! it’s widening! It’s widening!”

I snatched the glasses from him. I caught again the dazzling flashing. But whether Drake had seen the spot widen, change – to this day I do not know.

To me it seemed unchanged – and yet – perhaps it was not. It may be that under that finger of force, that spear of light, that wound in the side of our sun had opened further—

That the sun had winced!

I do not to this day know. But whether it had or not – still shone the intolerably brilliant light. And miracle enough that was for me.

Twenty minutes – subconsciously I had gone on counting – twenty minutes—

About the cratered girdle of the upthrust shields a glimmering mistiness was gathering; a translucent mist, beryl pale and beryl clear. In a heartbeat it had thickened into a vast and vaporous ring through whose swarms of corpuscles the sun’s reflected image upon each disk shone clear – as though seen through clouds of transparent atoms of aquamarine.

Again the filaments of the Keeper moved – feebly. As one of the hosts of circling shields shifted downward. Brilliant, ever more brilliant, waxed the fast-thickening mists.

Abruptly, and again as one, the disks began to revolve. From every concave surface, from the surfaces of the huge circlets below them, flashed out a stream of green fire – green as the fire of green life itself. Corpuscular, spun of uncounted rushing, dazzling ions the great rays struck across, impinged upon the thousand-foot wheel that crowned the cones; set it whirling.

Over it I saw form a limpid cloud of the brilliant vapors. Whence came these sparkling nebulosities, these mists of light? It was as though the clustered, spinning disks reached into the shadowless air, sucked from it some unseen, rhythmic energy and transformed it into this visible, coruscating flood.

For now it was a flood. Down from the immense wheel came pouring cataracts of green fires. They cascaded over the cones; deluged them; engulfed them.

Beneath that radiant inundation the cones grew. Perceptibly their volume increased – as though they gorged themselves upon the light. No – it was as though the corpuscles flew to them, coalesced and built themselves into the structure.

Out and further out upon the base of crystal they crept. And higher and higher soared their tips, thrusting, ever thrusting upward toward the whirling wheel that fed them.

Now from the Keeper’s planes writhed the Keeper’s tangle of tentacles, uncoiling eagerly, avidly, through the twenty feet of space between their source and the enigmatic mechanism they manipulated. The crater’s disks tilted downward. Into the vast hollow shot their jets of green radiance, drenching the Metal Hordes, splashing from the polished walls wherever the Metal Hordes had left those living walls exposed.

All about us was a trembling, an accelerating pulse of life. Colossal, rhythmic, ever quicker, ever more powerfully that pulse throbbed – a prodigious vibration monstrously alive.

“Feeding!” whispered Drake. “Feeding! Feeding on the sun!”

Faster danced the radiant beams. The crater was a cauldron of green fires through which the conical rays angled and interwove, crossed and mingled. And where they mingled, where they crossed, flamed out suddenly immense rayless orbs; palpitant for an instant, then dissolving in spiraling, feathery spray of pallid emerald incandescences.

Stronger and stronger beat the pulse of returning life.

A jetting stream struck squarely upon the Metal Emperor. Out blazed his splendors – jubilant. His golden zodiac, no longer tarnished and dull, ran with sun flames; the wondrous rose was a racing, lambent miracle.

Up snapped the Keeper; towered behind him, all flickering scarlets and leaping yellows – no longer wrathful or sullen.

The place dripped radiance; was filling like a chrism with radiance.

Us, too, the sparkling mists bathed.

I was conscious of a curiously wild exhilaration; a quickening of the pulse; an abnormally rapid breathing. I stooped to touch Drake; sparks leaped from my outstretched fingers, great green sparks that crackled as they impacted upon him. He gave them no heed; but stared with fascinated eyes upon the crater.

Now from every side broke a tempest of gem fires. From every girder and column, from every arras, pendent and looping, burst diamond glitterings, ruby luminescences, lanced flames of molten emerald and sapphires, flashings of amethyst and opal, meteoric iridescences, dazzling spectrums.

The hollow was a cave of some Aladdin of the Titans ablaze with enchanted hoards. It was a place of gems ensorcelled, gems in which imprisoned hosts of the Jinns of Light beat sparkling against their crystal walls to escape.

I thrust the fantasies from me. Fantastic enough was this reality – globe and pyramid and cube of the Metal People opening wide, bathing in, drinking from the radiant maelstrom that faster and ever faster swirled about them.

“Feeding!” It was Drake’s awed voice. “Feeding on the sun!”

The circling shields were raising themselves, lifting themselves higher above the crater-lip. Into the crowded cylinder came now only the rays from the high circlets, the streams from the huge wheel above the still growing cones.

Up and up the shields rose, but by what mechanism raised I could not see. Their motion ceased; in all their thousands they turned. Over the City’s top and out into the oval valley they poured their torrents of light; flooding it, deluging it even as they had this pit that was the City’s heart. Feeding, I knew, those other Metal Hordes without.

And as though in answer, sweeping down upon us through the circles of open sky, a clamor poured.

“If we’d but known!” Drake’s voice came to me, thin and unreal through the tumult. “It’s what Ventnor meant! If we had got down there when they were so weak – if we could have handled the Keeper – we could have smashed that plate that works the Cones! We could have killed them!”

“There are other Cones,” I cried back to him.

“No,” he shook his head. “This is the master machine. It’s what Ventnor meant when he said to strike through the sun. And we’ve lost the chance—”

Louder grew the hurricane without; and now within began its mate. Through the mists flashed linked tempests of lightnings. Bolt upon javelin bolt, and ever more thickly; lightnings green as the mists themselves; lightning bolts of destroying violets, searing scarlets; tearing chains of withering yellows, globes of exploding multi-colored electric incandescences.

The crater was threaded with the lightnings of the Metal People; was broidered with them; was a Pit woven with vast and changing patterns of electric flame.

What was it that Drake had said? That if but we could have known we could have destroyed these – Things – Destroyed – Them? Things that could thrust their will and power up through ninety million miles of space and suck from the sun the honey of power! Drain it and hive it within these great mountains of the cones!

Destroy Things that could feed their own life into a machine to draw back from the sun a greater life – Things that could forge of their strength a spear which, piercing the side of the sun, sent gushing back upon them a tenfold, nay, a thousandfold strength!

Destroy this City that was one vast and living dynamo feeding upon the magnetic life of earth and sun!

The clamor had grown stupendous, destroying – like armored Gods roaring at sword play in a hundred Valhallas; like the war drums of battling universe; like the smitings of warring suns.

And all the City was throbbing, beating with a gigantic pulse of life – was fed and drunken with life. I felt that pulsing become my own; I echoed to it; throbbed in unison. I saw Drake outlined in flame; that around me a radiant nimbus was growing.

I thought I saw Norhala floating, clothed in shouting, flailing fires. I strove to call out to her. By me slipped the body of Drake; lay flaming at my feet upon the narrow ledge.

There was a roaring within my head – louder, far louder, than that which beat against my ears. Something was drawing me forth; drawing me out of my body into unimaginable depths of blackness. Something was hurling me out into those cold depths of space that alone could darken the fires that encircled me – the fires of which I was becoming a part.

I felt myself leap outward – outward and outward – into – oblivion.

— XXI —

PHANTASMAGORIA
METALLIOUE

Wearily I opened my eyes. Stiffly, painfully, I stirred. High above me was the tremendous circle of sky, ringed with the hosts of feeding shields. But the shields were now wanly gleaming and the sky was the sky of night.

Night? How long had I lain here? And where was Drake? I struggled to rise.

“Steady, old man,” his voice came from beside me. “Steady – and quiet. How are you feeling?”

“Badly battered,” I groaned. “What happened?”

“We weren’t used to the show,” he said. “We got all fed up at the orgy. Too much magnetism – we had a sudden and violent attack of electrical indigestion. Sh-h – look ahead of you.”

Gingerly I turned. I had been lying, I now saw, head toward and prone at the base of one of the crater’s walls. As my gaze swept away I noted with a curious relief that the tiny eye-points were no longer sparkling with their enigmatic life, that they were dulled and dim once more.

Before me, glimmering pallidly, bristled the mount of the Cones. Around its crystal base glittered immense egg-shaped diamond incandescences. They were both rayless and strangely – lightless; they threw no shadows nor did their lambency lessen the dimness. Beside each of these curious luminosities stood one of the sullen-fired, cruciform shapes – the Things that now I knew for the opened cubes.

They were smaller than the Keeper, indeed less than half his height. They were ranged in an almost unbroken crescent around the visible arc of the immense pedestal – and now I saw that the lights were a few feet closer to that pedestal than they. Egg-shaped as I have said, the wider end was undermost, resting in a broad cup upheld by a slender pedicle silvery-gray and metallic.

“They’re building out the base,” whispered Drake. “The Cones got so big they have to give them more room.”

“Magnetism,” I whispered in return. “Electricity – they drew down from the sun spot. And it was more than that – I saw the Cones grow under it. It fed them as it fed the Hordes – but the Cones grew. It was as though the shields and the Cones turned pure energy into substance.”

“And if we hadn’t been pretty thoroughly magnetized to start with it would have done for us,” he said.

We watched the operation going on in front of us. The cross shapes had bent, hinging above the transverse arms. They bowed in absolute unison as at some signal. Down from the horizontal plane of each whipped the long and writhing tentacles.

At the foot of every one I could now perceive a heap of some faintly glistening material. The tendrils coiled among this, then drew up something that looked like a thick rod of crystal. The bent planes straightened; simultaneously they thrust the crystalline bars toward the incandescences.

There came a curious, brittle hissing. The ends of the rods began to dissolve into dazzling, diamond rain, atomically minute, that passing through the egg-shaped lights poured upon the periphery of the pedestal. Rapidly the bars melted. Heat there must be in these lights, terrific heat – yet the Keeper’s workers seemed impervious to it.

As the ends of the bars radiated into the annealing mist I saw the tentacles creep closer and ever closer to the rayless flame through which the mist flew. And at the last, as the ultimate atoms drove through, the holding tendrils were thrust almost within it; touched it, certainly.

A score of times they repeated this process while we watched. Unaware of us they seemed, or – if aware, then indifferent. More rapid became their movements, the glassy ingots streaming through the floating braziers with hardly a pause in their passing. Abruptly, as though switched, the incandescences lessened into candle-points; instantly, as at a signal, the crescent of crosses closed into a crescent of cubes.

Motionless they stood, huge blocks blackened against the dim glowing of the cones – sentient monoliths; a Druid curve; an arc of a metal Stonehenge. And as at dusk and dawn the great menhirs of Stonehenge fill with a mysterious, granitic life, seem to be praying priests of stone, so about these gathered hierophantic illusion.

They quivered; the slender pedicles cupping, the waned lights swayed; the lights lifted and soared, upright, to their backs.

Two by two with measured pace, solemnly the cubes glided off into the encircling darkness. As they swept away there streamed behind them other scores not until then visible to us, joining pair by pair from hidden arcs.

Into the secret shadows they flowed, two by two, each bearing over it the slim shaft holding the serene flame.

Grotesquely were they like a column of monks marching with dimmed flambeaux of their worship. Angled metal monks of some god of metal, carrying tapers of electric fire, withdrawing slowly from a Holy of Holies whose metallically divine Occupant knew nothing of man – nor cared to know.

Grotesque – yes. But would that I had the power to crystallize in words the underlying, alien terror every movement of the Metal Monster when disintegrate, its every manifestation when combined, evoked; the incredulous, amazed lurking always close behind the threshold of the mind; the never lifting, thin-shuddering shadow.

Smaller, dimmer waned the lights – they were gone.

We crouched, motionless. Nothing stirred; there was no sound. Without speaking we arose; crept together over the smooth floor toward the cones.

As we crossed I saw that the pave, like the walls, was built of the bodies of the Metal People; and, like the walls, they were dormant, filmed eyes oblivious to our passing. Closer we crept – were only a scant score of rods from that colossal mechanism. I noted that the crystal foundation was set low; was not more than four feet above the floor. The sturdy, dwarfed pilasters supporting it thrust up in crowded copses, merging through distance into apparent solidity.

Now, too, I realized, as I had not when looking down from above, how stupendous the structure rising from the crystal foundation was.

I began to wonder how so thin a support could bear the mount bristling above it – then remembered what it was that at first had flown from them, shrinking them, and at last had fed and swelled them.

Light! Weightless magnetic ions; swarms of electric ions; the misty breath of the infinite energy breathing upon, condensing upon, them. Could it be that the Cones for all their apparent mass had little, if any, weight? Like ringed Saturn, thousands of times Earth’s bulk, flaunting itself in the Heavens – yet if transported to our world so light that rings and all it would float like a bubble upon our oceans. The Cones towered above me – close, so close.

The Cones were weightless. How I knew I cannot say – but now, almost touching them, I did know. Nebulous, yet solid, were they; compact, yet tenuous, dense and unsubstantial.

Again the thought came to me – they were force made visible; energy made concentrate into matter.

We skirted, seeking for the tablet over which the Keeper had hovered; the mechanism which, under his tentacles, had shifted the circling shields, thrust the spear of green fire into the side of the wounded sun. Hesitantly I touched the crystal base; the edge was warm, but whether this warmth came from the dazzling rain which we had just watched build it outward or whether it was a property inherent with the substance itself I do not know.

Certainly there was no mark upon it to show where the molten mists had fallen. It was diamond hard and smooth. The nearest cones were but a scant nine feet from its rim.

Suddenly we saw the tablet; stood beside it. The shape of a great T, glimmering with a faint and limpid violet phosphorescence, it might have been, in shape and size, the palely shining shadow of the Keeper. It was a foot above the floor, and had apparently no connection with the cones.

It was made of thousands of close-packed tiny octagonal rods the tops of some of which were cupped, of others pointed; none was more than half an inch in width. There was about it a suggestion of wedded crystal and metal – as about its burden was the suggestion of mated energy and matter.

The rods were movable; they formed a keyboard unimaginably complex; a keyboard whose infinite combinations were like a Fourth Dimensional chess game. I saw that only the swarms of tentacles that were the Keeper’s hands and these only could be masters of its incredible intricacies. No Disk – not even the Emperor, no Star shape could play on it, draw out its chords of power.

But why? Why had it been so made that sullen flaming Cross alone could release its hidden meanings, made articulate its interwoven octaves? And how were its messages conveyed? Up to its bases pressed the dormant cubes – that under it they lay as well I did not doubt.

There was no visible copula of the tablet with cones; no antennae between it and the circled shields. Could it be that the impulses released by the Keeper’s coilings passed through the Metal People of the pave on the upthrust Metal People of the crater rim who held the shields?

That was unthinkable – unthinkable because if so this mechanism was superfluous.

The swift response to the communal will that we had observed showed that the Metal Monster needed nothing of this kind for transmission of the thought of any of its units.

There was some gap here – a gap that the grouped consciousness could not bridge without other means. Clearly that was true – else why the tablet, why the Keeper’s travail?

Was each of these tiny rods a mechanism akin, in a fashion, to the sending keys of the wireless; were they transmitters of subtle energy in which was enfolded command? Spellers-out of a super-Morse carrying to each responsive cell of the Metal Monster the bidding of those higher units which were to It as the brain cells are to us? That, advanced as the knowledge it implied might be, was closer to the heart of the possible.

I bent, determined, despite the well-nigh unconquerable shrinking I felt, to touch the tablet’s rods.

A flickering shadow fell upon me; a flock of pulsating ochreous and scarlet shadows—

The Keeper glowed above us!

In a life that has had its share of dangers, its need for quick decisions, I recognize that few indeed of my reactions to peril have been more than purely instinctive; no more consciously courageous nor intellectually dissociate from the activating stimulus than the shrinking of the burned hand from the brand, the will-to-live dictated rush of the cornered animal upon the thing menacing it.

One such higher functioning was when I followed Larry O’Keefe and Lakla, the Handmaiden, out to what we believed soul-destroying death in a place almost as strange as this [05]; another was now. Deliberately, detachedly, I studied the angrily flaming Shape.

Compared to it we were as a pair of Hop-o’-my-Thumbs to the Giant; had it been man-shaped we would have come less than a third way up to its knees. I focused my attention upon the twenty-foot-wide square that was the Keeper’s foot. Its surface was jewel smooth, hyaline – yet beneath it was a suggestion of granulation, of close-packed, innumerable, microscopic crystals.

Within these grains whose existence was more sensed than seen glowed dull red light, smoky and sullen. At each end of the square, close to the bottom, was a diamond-shaped lozenge, cabochon, perhaps a yard in width. These were dim yellow, translucent, with no suggestion of the underlying crystallization. Sense organs I set them down to be – similar to the great ovals within the Emperor’s golden zone.

My gaze traveled up to the transverse arms. They stretched sixty feet from tip to tip. At each tip were two more of the diamond figures, not dull but burning angrily with orange-and-scarlet luster. In the center of the beam was something that might have been a smoldering rubrous reflection of the Emperor’s pulsing multi-colored rose had each of the petals of the latter been clipped and squared.

It deepened toward its heart into a singular pattern of vermilion latticings. Into the entire figure ran numerous tiny rivulets of angry crimson and orange light, angling in interwoven patterns with never a curve nor arching.

Set at intervals between them were what looked like octagonal rosettes filled with slender silvery flutings, wan striations – like – it came to me – immense chrysanthemum buds, half opened, and carved in gray jade.

Above towered the gigantic vertical beam. Toward its top I glimpsed a huge square of flaring crimsons and bright topaz; two other diamonds stared down upon us from just beneath it – like eyes. And over all its height the striated octagons clustered.

I felt myself lifted, floated upward. Drake’s hand shot out, clung to me as together we drifted up the living wall. Opposite the latticed heart of the square-petaled rose our flight was checked. There for an instant we hung. Then the octagonal symbols stirred, unfolded like buds—

They were the nests of the Keeper’s tentacles, and out from them the whip-like tendrils uncoiled, shot out and writhed toward us.

My skin flinched from their touch; my body, held in the unseen grip, was motionless. Yet when they touched their contact was not unpleasant. They were like flexible strands of glass; their smooth tips questioned us, passing through our hair, searching our faces, writhing over our clothing.

There was a pulse in the great clipped rose, a rhythmic throbbing of vermilion fire that ran into it from the angled veins, beat through the latticed nucleus and throbbed back whence it had come. The huge, high square of scarlet and yellow was liquid flame; the diamond organs beneath it seemed to smoke, to send out swirls of orange red vapor.

Holding us so the Keeper studied us.

The rhythm of the square rose, became the rhythm of my own mind. But here was none of the vast, serene and elemental calm that Ruth had described as emanating from the Metal Emperor. Powerful it was, without doubt, but in it were undertones of rage, of impatience, overtones of revolt, something incomplete and struggling. Within the disharmonies I seemed to sense a fettered force striving for freedom; energy battling against itself.

Greater grew the swarms of the tentacles winding about us like slender strands of glass, covering our faces, making breathing more and more difficult. There was a coil of them around my throat and tightening – tightening.

I heard Drake gasping, laboring for breath. I could not turn my head toward him, could not speak. Was this then to be our end?

The strangling clutch relaxed, the mass of the tentacles lessened. I was conscious of a surge of anger through the cruciform Thing that held us.

Its sullen fires blazed. I was aware of another light beating past us – beating down the Keeper’s. The hosts of tendrils drew back from me. I felt myself picked from the unseen grasp, whirled in the air and drawn away.

Drake beside me, I hung now before the Shining Disk – the Metal Emperor!

He it was who had plucked us from the Keeper – and even as I swung I saw the Keeper’s multitudinous, serpentine arms surge out toward us angrily and then sullenly, slowly, draw back into their nests.

And out of the Disk, clothing me, permeating me, came an immense tranquility, a muting of all human thought, all human endeavor, an unthinkable, cosmic calm into which all that was human of me seemed to be sinking, drowning as in a fathomless abyss. I struggled against it, desperately, striving in study of the Disk to erect a barrier of preoccupation against the power pouring from it.

A dozen feet away from us the sapphire ovals centered upon us their regard. They were limpid, pellucid as gems whose giant replicas they seemed to be. The surface of the Disk ringed about by the aureate zodiac in which the nine ovals shone was a maze of geometric symbols traced in the lines of living gem fires; infinitely complex those patterns and infinitely beautiful; an infinite number of symmetric forms in which I seemed to trace all the ordered crystalline wonders of the snowflakes, the groupings of all crystalline patternings, the soul of ordered beauty that are the marvels of the Radiolaria, Nature’s own miraculous book of the soul of mathematical beauty.

The flashing, petaled heart was woven of living rainbows of cold flame.

Silently we floated there while the Disk – looked – at us.

And as though I had been not an actor but an observer, the weird picture of it all came to me – two men swinging like motes in mid air, on one side the flickering scarlet and orange Cruciform shape, on the other side the radiant Disk, behind the two manikins the pallid mount of the bristling cones; and high above the wan circle of the shields.

There was a ringing about us – an elfin chiming, sweet and crystalline. It came from the cones – and strangely was it their vocal synthesis, their voice. Into the vast circle of sky pierced a lance of green fire; swift in its wake uprose others.

We slid gently down, stood swaying at the Disk’s base. The Keeper bent; angled. Again the planes above the supporting square hovered over the tablet. The tendrils swept down, pushed here and there, playing upon the rods some unknown symphony of power.

Thicker pulsed the lances of the aurora; changed to vast billowing curtains. The faceted wheel at the top of the central spire of the cones swung upward; a light began to stream from the cones themselves – no pillar now, but a vast circle that shot whirling into the heavens like a noose.

And like a noose it caught the aurora, snared it!

Into it the coruscating mists of mysterious flame swirled; lost their colors, became a torrent of light flying down through the ring as though through a funnel top.

Down poured the radiant corpuscles, bathing the cones. They did not glow as they had beneath the flood from the shields, and if they grew it was too slowly for me to see; the shields were motionless. Now here, now there, I saw the other rings whirl up – smaller mouths of lesser cones hidden within the body of the Metal Monster, I knew, sucking down this magnetic flux, these countless ions gushing forth from the sun.

Then as when first we had seen the phenomenon in the valley of the blue poppies, the ring vanished, hidden by a fog of coruscations – as though the force streaming through the rings became diffused after it had been caught.

Crouching, forgetful of our juxtaposition to these two unhuman, anomalous Things, we watched the play of the tentacles upon the upthrust rods.

But if we forgot, we were not forgotten!

The Emperor slipped nearer; seemed to contemplate us – quizzically, amused; as a man would look down upon some curious and interesting insect, a puppy, a kitten. I sensed this amusement in the Disk’s regard even as I had sensed its soul of awful tranquility; as we had sensed the playful malice in the eye stars of the living corridor, the curiosity in the column that had dropped us into the valley.

I felt a push – a push that was filled with a colossal, glittering playfulness.

Under it I went spinning away for yards – Drake twirling close behind me. The force, whatever it was, swept out from the Emperor, but in it was no slightest hint of anger or of malice, no slightest shadow of the sinister.

Rather it was as though one would blow away a feather; urge gently some little lesser thing away.

The Disk watched our whirlings – with a sparkling, jeweled laughter in its pulsing radiance.

Again came the push – farther yet we spun. Suddenly before us, across the pave, shone out a twinkling trail – the wakened eyes of the cubes that formed it, marking out a pathway for us to follow.

Immediately upon their gleaming forth I saw the Emperor turn – his immense, oval, metallic back now black against the radiance of the cones.

Up from the narrow gleaming path – a path opened I knew by some command – lifted the hosts of tiny unseen hands; the sentient currents of magnetic force that were the fingers and arms of the Metal Hordes. They held us, thrust us along, passed us forward. Faster and faster we moved, speeding on the wake of the long-vanished metal monks.

I turned my head – the cones were already far away. Over the tablet of limpid violet phosphorescence still hovered the planes of the Keeper; and still was the oval of the Emperor black against the radiance.

But the twinkling, sparkling path between us and them was gone – was fading out close behind us as we swept onward.

Faster and faster grew our pace. The cylindrical wall loomed close. A high oblong portal showed within it. Into this we were carried. Before us stretched a corridor precisely similar to that which, closing upon us, had forced us completely out into the hall.

Unlike that passage, its floor lifted steeply – a smooth and shining slide up which no man could climb. A shaft, indeed, which thrust upward straight as an arrow at an angle of at least thirty degrees and whose end or turning we could not see. Up and up it cleared its way through the City – through the Metal Monster – closed only by the inability of the eye to pierce the faint luminosity that thickened by distance became impenetrable.

For an instant we hovered upon its threshold. But the impulse, the command, that had carried us thus far was not to stop here. Into it and up it we were thrust, our feet barely touching the glimmering surface; lifted by the force that emanated from its floor, carried on by the force that pressed out from the sides.

Up and up we went – scores of feet – hundreds—

— XXII —

THE ENSORCELLED CHAMBER

“Goodwin!” Drake broke the silence; desperately he was striving to keep his fear out of his voice. “Goodwin – this isn’t the way to get out. We’re going up – farther away all the time from the – the gates!”

“What can we do?” My anxiety was no less than his, but my realization of our helplessness was complete.

“If we only knew how to talk to these Things,” he said. “If we could only have let the Disk know we wanted to get out – damn it, Goodwin, it would have helped us.”

Grotesque as the idea sounded, I felt that he spoke the truth. The Emperor meant no harm to us; in fact in speeding us away I was not at all sure that he had not deliberately wished us well – there was that about the Keeper—

Still up we sped along the shaft. I knew we must now be above the level of the valley.

“We’ve got to get back to Ruth! Goodwin – night! And what may have happened to her?”

“Drake, boy” – I dropped into his own colloquialism – “we’re up against it. We can’t help it. And remember – she’s there in Norhala’s home. I don’t believe, I honestly don’t believe, Dick, that there’s any danger as long as she remains there. And Ventnor ties her fast.”

“That’s true,” he said, more hopefully. “That’s true – and probably Norhala is with her by now.”

“I don’t doubt it,” I said cheerfully. An idea came to me – I half believed it myself. “And another thing. There’s not an action here that’s purposeless. We’re being driven on by the command of that Thing we call the Metal Emperor. It means us no harm. Maybe – maybe this is the way out.”

“Maybe so,” he shook his head doubtfully. “But I’m not sure. Maybe that long push was just to get us away from there. And it strikes me that the impulse has begun to weaken. We’re not going anywhere near as fast as we were.”

I had not realized it, but our speed was slackening. I looked back – hundreds of feet behind us fell the slide. An unpleasant chill went through me – should the magnetic grip upon us relax, withdraw, nothing could stop us from falling back along that incline to be broken like eggs at its end; that our breaths would be snuffed out by the terrific descent long before we reached that end was scant comfort.

“There are other passages opening up along this shaft,” Drake said. “I’m not for trusting the Emperor too far – he has other things on his metallic mind, you know. The next one we get to, let’s try to slip into – if we can.”

I had noticed; there had been openings along the ascending shaft; corridors running apparently transversely to its angled way.

Slower and slower became our pace. A hundred yards above I glimpsed one of the apertures. Could we reach it? Slower and slower we arose. Now the gap was but a yard off – but we were motionless – were tottering!

Drake’s arms wrapped round me. With a tremendous effort he hurled me into the portal. I dropped at its edge, writhed swiftly around, saw him slipping, slipping down – thrust my hands out to him.

He caught them. There came a wrench that tortured my arm sockets as though racked. But he held!

Slowly – I writhed back into the passage, dragging up his almost dead weight. His head appeared, his shoulders; there was a convulsion of the long body and he lay before me.

For a minute or two we lay, flat upon our backs resting. I sat up. The passage was broad, silent; apparently as endless as that from which we had just escaped.

Along it, above us, under us, the crystalline eyes were dim. It showed no sign of movement – yet had it done so there was nothing we could do save drop down the annihilating slant. Drake arose.

“I’m hungry,” he said, “and I’m thirsty. I move that we eat and drink and approximately be merry.”

He slung aside the haversack. From it we took food; from the canteens we drank. We did not talk. Each knew what the other was thinking; infrequently, and thank the eternal law that some call God for that, come crises in which speech seems not only petty but when against it the mind rebels as a nauseous thing.

This was such a time. At last I drew myself to my feet.

“Let’s be going,” I said.

The corridor stretched straight before us; along it we paced. How far we walked I do not know; mile upon mile, it seemed. It broadened abruptly into a vast hall.

And this hall was filled with the Metal Hordes – was a gigantic workshop of them. In every shape, in every form, they seethed and toiled about it. Upon its floor were heaps of shining ores, mounds of flashing gems, piles of ingots, metallic and crystalline. High and low throughout flamed the egg-shaped incandescences; floating furnaces both great and small.

Before one of these forges, close to us, stood a Metal Thing. Its body was a twelve-foot column of smaller cubes. Upon the top was a hollow square formed of even lesser blocks – blocks hardly larger than the Little Things themselves. In the center of the open rectangle was another shaft, its top a two-foot square plate formed of a single cube.

From the sides of the hollow square sprang long arms of spheres, each tipped by a tetrahedron. They moved freely, slipping about upon their curved points of contact and like a dozen little thinking hammers, the pyramid points at their ends beat down upon as many thimble shaped objects which they thrust alternately into the unwinking brazier then laid upon the central block to shape.

A goblin workman the Thing seemed, standing there, so intent upon and so busy with its forgings.

There were scores of these animate machines; they paid no slightest heed to us as we slipped by them, clinging as closely to the wall of the immense workshop as we could.

We passed a company of other Shapes which stood two by two and close together, their tops wide spinning wheels through which the tendrils of an opened globe fed translucent, colorless ingots – the substance it seemed to me of which Norhala’s shadowy walls were made, the crystal of which the bars that built out the base of the Cones were formed.

The ingots passed between the whirling faces; emerged from them as slender, long cylinders; were seized as they slipped down by a crouching block, whose place as it glided away was instantly taken by another. In many bewildering forms, intent upon unknown activities directed toward unguessable ends, the composite, animate mechanisms labored. And all the place was filled with a goblin bustle, trollish racketings, ringing of gnomish anvils, clanging of kobold forges – a clamorous cavern filled with metal Nibelungens.

We came to the opening of another passage, a doorway piercing the walls of the workshop. Its incline, though steep, was not dangerous.

Into it we stepped; climbed onward it seemed interminably. Far ahead of us at last appeared the outline of its further entrance, silhouetted against and filled with a brighter luminosity. We drew near; stopped cautiously at its threshold, peering out.

Well it was that we had hesitated. Before us was open space – an abyss in the body of the Metal Monster.

The corridor opened into it like a window. Thrusting out our heads, we saw an unbroken wall both above and below. Half a mile away was its opposite side. Over this pit was a misty sky and not more than a thousand feet above and black against the heavens was the lip of it – the cornices of this chasm within the City.

Far, far beneath us we watched the Hordes throw themselves across the abyss in webs of curving arches and girder-straight bridges; gigantic we knew these spans must be yet dwarfed to slender footways by distance. Over them moved hurrying companies; from them came flashings, glitterings – prismatic, sun golden; plutonic scarlets, molten blues; javelins of colored light piercing upward from unfolded cubes and globes and pyramids crossing them or from busy bearers of the shining fruits of the mysterious workshops.

And as they passed the bridges swung up, coiled and thrust themselves from sight through openings that closed behind them. Ever, as they passed, close on their going whipped out other spans so that always across that abyss a sentient, shifting web was hung.

We drew back, stared into each other’s white face. Panic swept through me, in quick, alternate pulse of ice and fire. For crushingly, no longer to be denied, came certainty that we were lost within the mazes of this incredible City – lost in the body of the Metal Monster which that City was. There was a sick despair in my heart as we turned and slowly made our way back along the sloping corridor.

A hundred yards, perhaps, we had gone in silence before we stopped, gazing stupidly at an opening in the wall beside us. The portal had not been there when we had passed – of that I was certain.

“It’s opened since we went by,” whispered Drake.

We peered through it. The passage was narrow; its pave led downward. For a moment we hesitated, the same foreboding in both our minds. And yet – among the perils that crowded in upon us what choice had we? There could be no more danger there than here.

Both ways were – alive, both obedient to impulses over which we had no more control and no more way of predetermining than mice in some complex, man-made trap. Furthermore, this shaft also ran downward, and although its pitch was less and it did not therefore drop as quickly toward that level we sought and wherein lay the openings of escape into the outer valley, it fell at right angles to the corridor through which we had come.

We knew that to retrace our steps now would but take us back to the forges and thence to the hall of the Cones and the certain peril waiting for us there.

We stepped into this opened way. For a little distance it ran straightly, then turned and sloped gently upward; and a little distance more we climbed. Then suddenly, not a hundred yards from us, gushed out a flood of soft radiance, opalescent, filled with pearly glimmerings and rosy shadows of light.

It was as though a door had opened into some world of luminescence. From it the lambent torrent poured; billowed down upon us. In its wake came music – if music the mighty harmonies, the sonorous chords, the crystalline themes and the linked chaplet of notes that were like spiralings of tiny golden star bells could be named.

Toward source of light and sound we moved, nor could we have halted nor withdrawn had we willed; the radiance drew us to it as the sun the water drop, and irresistibly the sweet, unearthly music called. Closer we came – it was a narrow alcove from which sound and light poured – into it we crept – and went no further.

We peered into a vast and columnless vault, a limitless temple of light. High up in it, strewn manifold, danced and shone soft orbs like tender suns. No pale gilt luminaries of frozen rays were these. Effulgent, jubilant, they flamed – orbs red as wine of rubies that Djinns of Al Shiraz press from his enchanted vineyards of jewels; twin orbs rosy white as breasts of pampered Babylonian maids; orbs of pulsing opalescences and orbs of the murmuring green of bursting buds of spring, crocused orbs and orbs of royal coral; suns that throbbed with singing rays of wedded rose and pearl and of sapphires and topazes amorous; orbs born of cool virginal dawns and of imperial sunsets and orbs that were the tuliped fruit of mating rainbows of fire.

They danced, these countless aureoles; they swung and threaded in radiant choral patterns, in linked harmonies of light. And as they danced their gay rays caressed and bathed myriads of the Metal Folk open beneath them. Under the rays the jewel fires of disk and star and cross leaped and pulsed and danced to the same bright rhythm.

We sought the source of the music – a tremendous thing of shimmering crystal pipes like some colossal organ. Out of the radiance around it great flames gathered, shook into sight with streamings and pennonings, in bannerets and bandrols, leaped upon the crystal pipes, and merged within them.

And as the pipes drank them the flames changed into sound!

Throbbing bass viols of roaring vernal winds, diapasons of waterfall and torrents – these had been flames of emerald; flaming trumpetings of desire that had been great streamers of scarlet – rose flames that had dissolved into echoes of fulfillment; diamond burgeonings that melted into silver symphonies like mist entangled Pleiades transmuted into melodies; chameleon harmonies to which the strange suns danced.

And now I saw – realizing with a clutch of indescribable awe, with a sense of inexplicable profanation the secret of this ensorcelled chamber.

Within every pulsing rose of irised fire that was the heart of a disk, from every rubrous, clipped rose of a cross, and from every rayed purple petaling of a star there nestled a tiny disk, a tiny cross, a tiny star, luminous and symboled even as those that cradled them.

The Metal Babes building like crystals from hearts of radiance beneath the play of jocund orbs!

Incredible blossomings of crystal and of metal whose lullabies and cradle songs were singing symphonies of flame.

It was the birth chamber of the City!

The womb of the Metal Monster!

Abruptly the walls of the niche sparkled out, the glittering eye points regarding us with a most disquieting suggestion of sentinels who, slumbering, had been caught unaware, and now awakening challenged us. Swiftly the niche closed – so swiftly that barely had we time to spring over its threshold into the corridor.

The corridor was awake – alive!

The power darted out; gripped us. Up it swept us and on. Far away a square of light appeared, grew quickly larger. Framed in it was the amethystine burning of the great ring that girdled the encircling cliffs.

I turned my head – behind us the corridor was closing!

Now the opening was so close that through it I could see the vast panorama of the valley. The wall behind us touched us; pushed us on. We thrust ourselves against it, despairingly. As well might flies have tried to press back a moving mountain.

Resistingly, inexorably we were pressed forward. Now we cowered within a yard-deep niche; now we trembled upon a foot-wide ledge.

Shuddering, gasping, we glared down the sheer drop of the City’s wall. The smooth and glimmering scarp fell thousands of feet straight to the valley floor. And there were no merciful mists to hide what awaited us there; no mists anywhere. In that brief, agonized glance every detail of the Pit was disclosed with an abnormal clarity.

We tottered on the brink. The ledge melted.

Down, down we plunged, locked in each other’s arms, hurtling to the shattering death so far below!

— XXIII —

THE TREACHERY OF YURUK

Was it true that Time is within ourselves – that like Space, its twin, it is only a self-created illusion of the human mind? There are hours that flash by on hummingbird wings; there are seconds that shuffle on shod in leaden shoes.

Was it true that when death faces us the consciousness finds power through its will to live to conquer the illusion – to prolong Time? That, recoiling from oblivion, we can recreate in a fractional moment whole years gone past, years yet to come – striving to lengthen our existence, stretching out our apperception beyond the phantom boundaries, overdrawing upon a Barmecide deposit of minutes, staking fresh claims upon a mirage?

How else explain the seeming slowness with which we were falling – the seeming leisureness with which the wall drifted up past us?

And was this punishment – a sentence meted out for profaning with our eyes a forbidden place; a penalty for touching with our gaze the ark of the Metal Tribes – their holy of holies – the budding place of the Metal Babes?

The valley was swinging – swinging in slow broad curves; was oscillating dizzily.

Slowly the colossal wall slipped upward.

Realization swept me; left me amazed; only half believing. This was no illusion. After that first swift plunge our fall had been checked. We were swinging – not the valley.

Deliberately, in wide arcs like pendulums, we were swinging across the City’s scarp; three feet out from it, and as we swung, slowly sinking.

And now I saw the countless eyes of the watching wall again were twinkling, regarding us with impish mockery.

It was the grip of the living wall that held us; that rocked us from side to side as though giving greater breadths of it chance to behold us; that was dropping us gently, carefully, to the valley floor now a scant two thousand feet below.

A storm of rage, of intensest resentment swept me; as once before any gratitude I should have felt for escape was submerged in the utter humiliation with which it was charged.

I shook my fists at the twinkling wall, strove to kick and smite it like an angry child, cursed it – not childishly. Dared it to hurl me down to death.

I felt Drake’s hand touch mine.

“Steady,” he said. “Steady, old boy. It’s no use. Steady. Look down.”

Hot with shame for my outburst, weak from its violence, I obeyed. The valley floor was not more than a thousand feet away. Thronging about where we must at last touch, clustered and seething, was a multitude of the Metal Things. They seemed to be looking up at us, watching, waiting for us.

“Reception committee,” grinned Drake.

I glanced away; over the valley. It was luminously clear; yet the sky was overcast, no stars showing. The light was no stronger than that of the moon at full, but it held a quality unfamiliar to me. It cast no shadows; though soft, it was piercing, revealing all it bathed with the distinctness of bright sunshine. The illumination came, I thought, from the encircling veils falling from the band of amethyst.

And, as I peered, out of the veils and far away sped a violet spark. With meteor speed it flew toward us. Close to the base of the vast facade it landed with a flashing of blue incandescence. I knew it for one of the Flying Things, the Mark Makers – one of the incredible messengers.

Close upon its fall came increase in the turmoil of the crowding throng awaiting us. Came, too, an abrupt change in our own motion. The long arcs lessened. We were dropped more swiftly.

Far away in the direction from which the Flying Thing had flown I sensed another movement; something coming that carried with it subtle suggestion of unlikeness to all the other incessant, linked movement over the pit. Closer it drew.

“Norhala!” gasped Drake.

Robed in her silken amber swathings, red-copper hair streaming, woven with elfin sparklings, she was racing toward the City like some lovely witch, riding upon the back of a steed of huge cubes.

Nearer she raced. More direct became our fall. Now we were dropping as though at the end of an unreeling plummet cord; the floor of the valley was no more than two hundred feet below.

“Norhala!” we shouted; and again and again – again “Norhala!”

Before our cries could have reached her the cubes swerved; came to a halt beneath us. Through the hundred feet of space between I caught the brilliancy of the weird constellations in Norhala’s great eyes – saw with a vague but no less dire foreboding that on her face dwelt a terrifying, a blasting wrath.

As softly as though by the hand of a giant of cloud we were lifted out from the wall, and were set with no perceptible shock beside her on the back of the cubes.

“Norhala—” I stopped. For this was no Norhala whom we had known. Gone was all calm, vanished every trace of unearthly tranquility. It was a Norhala awakened at last – all human.

Yet in the still rage that filled her I sensed a force, an intensity, more than human. Over the blazing eyes the brows were knit in a rigid, golden bar; the delicate nostrils were pinched; the sweet red mouth was white and merciless. It was as though in its long sleep her human self had gathered more than human strength, and that now, awakened and unleashed, the violence of its rage touched the vibrant zenith of that sphere of which her quiet had been the nadir.

She was like an urn filled and flaming with the fires of the Gods of wrath.

What was it that had awakened her – what in awakening had changed the inpouring human consciousness into this flood of fury? Foreboding gripped me.

“Norhala!” My voice was shaking. “Those we left—”

“They are gone!” The golden voice was octaves deeper, vibrant, throbbing with that muffled, menacing note that must have pulsed from the golden tambours that summoned to battle Timur’s fierce hordes. “They were – taken.”

“Taken!” I gasped. “Taken by what – these?” I swept my hands out toward the Metal Things milling around us.

“No! These are mine. These are they who obey me.” The golden voice now shrilled with her passion. “Taken by – men!”

Drake had read my face although he could not understand our words.

“Ruth—”

“Taken,” I said. “Both Ruth and Ventnor. Taken by the armored men – the men of Cherkis!”

“Cherkis!” She had caught the word. “Yes – Cherkis! And now he and all his men – and all his women – and every living thing he rules shall pay. And fear not – you two. For I, Norhala, will bring back my own.

“Woe, woe to you, Cherkis, and to all of yours! For I, Norhala, am awake, and I, Norhala, remember. Woe to you, Cherkis, woe – for now all ends for you!

“Not by the gods of my mother who turned their strength against her do I promise this. I, Norhala, have no need for them – I, Norhala, who have strength greater than they. And would I could crush those gods as I shall crush you, Cherkis – and every living thing of yours! Yea – and every unliving thing as well!”

Not halting now was Norhala’s speech; it poured from the ruthless lips – flamingly.

“We go,” she cried. “And something of vengeance I have saved for you – as is your right.”

She tossed her arms high; stamped upon the back of the Metal Thing that held us.

It quivered and sped away. Swiftly dwindled the City’s bulk; fast faded its glimmering watchful face.

Not toward the veils of light but out over the plain we flew. Above us, crouching against the blast of our going, streamed like a silken banner Norhala’s hair, gemmed with the witch lights.

We were far out now, the City far away. The cube slowed. Norhala threw high her head. From the arched, exquisite throat pealed a trumpet call – golden, summoning, imperious. Thrice it rang forth – and all the surrounding valley seemed to halt and listen.

Followed upon its ending, a chanting as goldenly sonorous. Wild, peremptory, triumphant. It was like a mustering shouting to adventurous stars, buglings to buccaneering winds, cadenced beckonings to restless ranks of viking waves, signaling to all the corsairs and picaroons of the elemental.

A cosmic call to slay!

The gigantic block upon which we rode quivered; I myself felt a thousand needle-pointed roving arrows prick me, urging me on to some jubilant, reckless orgy of destruction.

Obeying that summoning there swirled to us cube and globe and pyramid by the score – by the hundreds. They swept into our wake and followed – lifting up behind us, an ever-rising sea.

Higher and higher arose the metal wave – mounting, ever mounting as other score upon score leaped upon it, rushed up it and swelled its crest. And soon so great it was that it shadowed us, hung over us.

The cubes we rode angled in their course; raced now with ever-increasing speed toward the spangled curtains.

And still Norhala’s golden chant lured; higher and even higher reached the following wave. Now we were rising upon a steep slope; now the amethystine, gleaming ring was almost overheard.

Norhala’s song ceased. One breathless, soundless moment and we had pierced the veils. A globule of sapphire shone afar, the elfin bubble of her home. We neared it.

Heart leaping, I saw three ponies, high and empty saddles turquoise studded, lift their heads from their roadway browsing. For a moment they stood, stiff with terror; then whimpering raced away.

We were at Norhala’s door; were lifted down; stood close to its threshold. Slaves to a single thought, Drake and I sprang to enter.

“Wait!” Norhala’s white hands caught us. “There is peril there – without me! Me you must – follow!”

Upon the exquisite face was no unshadowing of wrath, no diminishing of rage, no weakening of dreadful determination. The star-flecked eyes were not upon us; they looked over and beyond – coldly, calculatingly.

“Not enough,” I heard her whisper. “Not enough – for that which I will do.”

We turned, following her gaze. A hundred feet on high, stretching nearly across the gorge, an incredible curtain was flung. Over its folds was movement – arms of spinning globes that thrust forth like paws and down upon which leaped pyramid upon pyramid stiffening as they clung like bristling spikes of hair; great bars of clicking cubes that threw themselves from the shuttering – shook and withdrew. The curtain was a ferment – shifting, mercurial; it throbbed with desire, palpitated with eagerness.

“Not enough!” murmured Norhala.

Her lips parted; from them came another trumpeting – tyrannic, arrogant and clangorous. Under it the curtaining writhed – out from it spurted thin cascades of cubes. They swarmed up into tall pillars that shook and swayed and gyrated.

With blinding flash upon flash the sapphire incandescences struck forth at their feet. A score of flaming columned shapes leaped up and curved in meteor flight over the tumultuous curtain. Streaming with violet fires they shot back to the valley of the City.

“Hai!” shouted Norhala as they flew. “Hai!”

Up darted her arms; the starry galaxies of her eyes danced madly, shot forth visible rays. The mighty curtain of the Metal Things pulsed and throbbed; its units interweaving – block and globe and pyramid of which it was woven, each seeming to strain at leash.

“Come!” cried Norhala – and led the way through the portal.

Close behind her we pressed. I stumbled, nearly fell, over a brown-faced, leather-cuirassed body that lay half over, legs barring the threshold.

Contemptuously Norhala stepped over it. We were within that chamber of the pool. About it lay a fair dozen of the armored men. Ruth’s defense, I thought with a grim delight, had been most excellent – those who had taken her and Ventnor had not done so without paying full toll.

A violet flashing drew my eyes away. Close to the pool wherein we had first seen the white miracle of Norhala’s body, two immense, purple fired stars blazed. Between them, like a suppliant cast from black iron, was Yuruk.

Poised upon their nether tips the stars guarded him. Head touching his knees, eyes hidden within his folded arms, the black eunuch crouched.

“Yuruk!”

There was an unearthly mercilessness in Norhala’s voice.

The eunuch raised his head; slowly, fearfully.

“Goddess!” he whispered. “Goddess! Mercy!”

“I saved him,” she turned to us, “for you to slay. He it was who brought those who took the maid who was mine and the helpless one she loved. Slay him.”

Drake understood – his hand twitched down to his pistol, drew it. He leveled the gun at the black eunuch. Yuruk saw it – shrieked and cowered. Norhala laughed – sweetly, ruthlessly.

“He dies before the stroke falls,” she said. “He dies doubly therefore – and that is well.”

Drake slowly lowered the automatic; turned to me.

“I can’t,” he said. “I can’t – do it—”

“Masters!” Upon his knees the eunuch writhed toward us. “Masters – I meant no wrong. What I did was for love of the Goddess. Years upon years I have served her. And her mother before her.

“I thought if the maid and the blasted one were gone, that you would follow. Then I would be alone with the Goddess once more. Cherkis will not slay them – and Cherkis will welcome you and give the maid and the blasted one back to you for the arts that you can teach him.

“Mercy, Masters, I meant no harm – bid the Goddess be merciful!”

The ebon pools of eyes were clarified of their ancient shadows by his terror; age was wiped from them by fear, even as it was wiped from his face. The wrinkles were gone. Appallingly youthful, the face of Yuruk prayed to us.

“Why do you wait?” she asked us. “Time presses, and even now we should be on the way. When so many are so soon to die, why tarry over one? Slay him!”

“Norhala,” I answered, “we cannot slay him so. When we kill, we kill in fair fight – hand to hand. The maid we both love has gone, taken with her brother. It will not bring her back if we kill him through whom she was taken. We would punish him – yes, but slay him we cannot. And we would be after the maid and her brother quickly.”

A moment she looked at us, perplexity shading the high and steady anger.

“As you will,” she said at last; then added, half sarcastically, “Perhaps it is because I who am now awake have slept so long that I cannot understand you. But Yuruk has disobeyed me. That of mine which I committed to his care he has given to the enemies of me and those who were mine. It matters nothing to me what you would do. Matters to me only what I will to do.”

She pointed to the dead.

“Yuruk” – the golden voice was cold – “gather up these carrion and pile them together.”

The eunuch arose, stole out fearfully from between the two stars. He slithered to body after body, dragging them one after the other to the center of the chamber, lifting them and forming of them a heap. One there was who was not dead. His eyes opened as the eunuch seized him, the blackened mouth opened.

“Water!” he begged. “Give me drink. I burn!”

I felt a thrill of pity; lifted my canteen and walked toward him.

“You of the beard,” the merciless chime rang out, “he shall have no water. But drink he shall have, and soon – drink of fire!”

The soldier’s fevered eyes rolled toward her, saw and read aright the ruthlessness in the beautiful face.

“Sorceress!” he groaned. “Cursed spawn of Ahriman!” He spat at her.

The black talons of Yuruk stretched around his throat

“Son of unclean dogs!” he whined. “You dare blaspheme the Goddess!”

He snapped the soldier’s neck as though it had been a rotten twig.

At the callous cruelty I stood for an instant petrified; I heard Drake swear wildly, saw his pistol flash up.

Norhala struck down his arm.

“Your chance has passed,” she said, “and not for that shall you slay him.”

And now Yuruk had cast that body upon the others; the pile was complete.

“Mount!” commanded Norhala, and pointed. He cast himself at her feet, writhing, moaning, imploring. She looked at one of the great Shapes; something of command passed from her, something it understood plainly.

The star slipped forward – there was an almost imperceptible movement of its side points. The twitching form of the black seemed to leap up from the floor, to throw itself like a bag upon the mound of the dead.

Norhala threw up her hands. Out of the violet ovals beneath the upper tips of the Things spurted streams of blue flame. They fell upon Yuruk and splashed over him upon the heap of the slain. In the mound was a dreadful movement, a contortion; the bodies stiffened, seemed to try to rise, to push away – dead nerves and muscles responding to the blasting energy passing through them.

Out from the stars rained bolt upon bolt. In the chamber was the sound of thunder, crackling like broken glass. The bodies flamed, crumbled. There was a little smoke – nauseous, feebly protesting, beaten out by the consuming fires almost before it could rise.

Where had been the heap of slain capped by the black eunuch there was but a little whirling cloud of sad gray dust. Caught by a passing draft, it eddied, slipped over the floor, vanished through the doorway. Motionless stood the blasting stars, contemplating us. Motionless stood Norhala, her wrath no whit abated by the ghastly sacrifice. And paralyzed by what we had beheld, motionless stood we.

“Listen,” she said. “You two who love the maid. What you have seen is nothing to that which you shall see – a wisp of mist to the storm cloud.”

“Norhala” – I found speech – “can you tell us when it was that the maid was captured?”

Perhaps there was still time to overtake the abductors before Ruth was thrust into the worse peril waiting where she was being carried. Crossed this thought another – puzzling, baffling. The cliffs Yuruk had pointed out to me as those through which the hidden way passed were, I had estimated then, at least twenty miles away. And how long was the pass, the tunnel, through them? And then how far this place of the armored men? It had been past dawn when Drake had frightened the black eunuch with his pistol. It was not yet dawn now. How could Yuruk have made his way to the Persians so swiftly – how could they so swiftly have returned?

Amazingly she answered the spoken question and the unspoken.

“They came long before dusk,” she said. “By the night before Yuruk had won to Ruszark, the city of Cherkis; and long before dawn they were on their way hither. This the black dog I slew told me.”

“But Yuruk was with us here at dawn yesterday,” I gasped.

“A night has passed since then,” she said, “and another night is almost gone.”

Stunned, I considered this. If this were true – and not for an instant did I doubt her – then not for a few hours had we lain there at the foot of the living wall in the Hall of the Cones – but for the balance of that day and that night, and another day and part of still another night.

“What does she say?” Drake stared anxiously into my whitened face. I told him.

“Yes.” Norhala spoke again. “The dusk before the last dusk that has passed I returned to my house. The maid was there and sorrowing. She told me you had gone into the valley, prayed me to help you and to bring you back. I comforted her, and something of – the peace – I gave her; but not all, for she fought against it. A little we played together, and I left her sleeping. I sought you and found you also sleeping. I knew no harm would come to you, and I went my ways – and forgot you. Then I came here again – and found Yuruk and these the maid had slain.”

The great eyes flashed.

“Now do I honor the maid for the battle that she did,” she said, “though how she slew so many strong men I do not know. My heart goes out to her. And therefore when I bring her back she shall no more be plaything to Norhala, but sister. And with you it shall be as she wills. And woe to those who have taken her!”

She paused, listening. From without came a rising storm of thin wailings, insistent and eager.

“But I have an older vengeance than this to take,” the golden voice tolled somberly. “Long have I forgotten – and shame I feel that I had forgot. So long have I forgotten all hatreds, all lusts, all cruelty – among – these—” She thrust a hand forth toward the hidden valley. “Forgot – dwelling in the great harmonies. Save for you and what has befallen I would never have stirred from them, I think. But now awakened, I take that vengeance. After it is done” – she paused – “after it is over I shall go back again. For this awakening has in it nothing of the ordered joy I love – it is a fierce and slaying fire. I shall go back—”

The shadow of her far dreaming flitted over, softened the angry brilliancy of her eyes.

“Listen, you two!” The shadow of dream fled. “Those that I am about to slay are evil – evil are they all, men and women. Long have they been so – yea, for cycles of suns. And their children grow like them – or if they be gentle and with love for peace they are slain or die of heartbreak. All this my mother told me long ago. So no more children shall be born from them either to suffer or to grow evil.”

Again she paused, nor did we interrupt her musing.

“My father ruled Ruszark,” she said at last. “Rustum he was named, of the seed of Rustum the Hero even as was my mother. They were gentle and good, and it was their ancestors who built Ruszark when, fleeing from the might of Iskander, they were sealed in the hidden valley by the falling mountain.

“Then there sprang from one of the families of the nobles – Cherkis. Evil, evil was he, and as he grew he lusted for rule. On a night of terror he fell upon those who loved my father and slew; and barely had my father time to fly from the city with my mother, still but a bride, and a handful of those loyal to him.

“They found by chance the way to this place, hiding in the cleft which is its portal. They came, and they were taken by – Those who are now my people. Then my mother, who was very beautiful, was lifted before him who rules here and she found favor in his sight and he had built for her this house, which now is mine.

“And in time I was born – but not in this house. Nay – in a secret place of light where, too, are born my people.”

She was silent. I shot a glance at Drake. The secret place of light – was it not that vast vault of mystery, of dancing orbs and flames transmuted into music into which we had peered and for which sacrilege, I had thought, had been thrust from the City? And did in this lie the explanation of her strangeness? Had she there sucked in with her mother’s milk the enigmatic life of the Metal Hordes, been transformed into half human changeling, become true kin to them? What else could explain—

“My mother showed me Ruszark,” her voice, taking up once more her tale, checked my thoughts. “Once when I was little she and my father bore me through the forest and through the hidden way. I looked upon Ruszark – a great city it is and populous, and a cauldron of cruelty and of evil.

“Not like me were my father and mother. They longed for their kind and sought ever for means to regain their place among them. There came a time when my father, driven by his longing, ventured forth to Ruszark, seeking friends to help him regain that place – for these who obey me obeyed not him as they obey me; nor would he have marched them – as I shall – upon Ruszark if they had obeyed him.

“Cherkis caught him. And Cherkis waited, knowing well that my mother would follow. For Cherkis knew not where to seek her, nor where they had lain hid, for between his city and here the mountains are great, unscalable, and the way through them is cunningly hidden; by chance alone did my mother’s mother and those who fled with her discover it: And though they tortured him, my father would not tell. And after a while forthwith those who still remained of hers stole out with my mother to find him. They left me here with Yuruk. And Cherkis caught my mother.”

The proud breasts heaved, the eyes shot forth visible flames.

“My father was flayed alive and crucified,” she said. “His skin they nailed to the City’s gates. And when Cherkis had had his will with my mother he threw her to his soldiers for their sport.

“All of those who went with them he tortured and slew – and he and his laughed at their torment. But one there was who escaped and told me – me who was little more than a budding maid. He called on me to bring vengeance – and he died. A year passed – and I am not like my mother and my father – and I forgot – dwelling here in the great tranquilities, barred from and having no thought for men and their way.

“Aie, aie!” she cried; “woe to me that I could forget! But now I shall take my vengeance – I, Norhala, will stamp them flat – Cherkis and his city of Ruszark and everything it holds! I, Norhala, and my servants shall stamp them into the rock of their valley so that none shall know that they have been! And would that I could meet their gods with all their powers that I might break them, too, and stamp them into the rock under the feet of my servants!”

She threw out white arms.

Why had Yuruk lied to me? I wondered as I watched her. The Disk had not slain her mother. Of course! He had lied to play upon our terrors; had lied to frighten us away.

The wailings were rising in a sustained crescendo. One of the slaying stars slipped over the chamber floor, folded its points and glided out the door.

“Come!” commanded Norhala, and led the way. The second star closed, followed us. We stepped over the threshold.

For one astounded, breathless moment we paused. In front of us reared a monster – a colossal, headless Sphinx. Like forelegs and paws, a ridge of pointed cubes, and globes thrust against each side of the canyon walls. Between them for two hundred feet on high stretched the breast.

And this was a shifting, weaving mass of the Metal Things; they formed into gigantic cuirasses, giant bucklers, corselets of living mail. From them as they moved – nay, from all the monster – came the wailings. Like a headless Sphinx it crouched – and as we stood it surged forward as though it sprang a step to greet us.

“Hai!” shouted Norhala, battle buglings ringing through the golden voice. “Hai! my companies!”

Out from the summit of the breast shot a tremendous trunk of cubes and spinning globes. And like a trunk it nuzzled us, caught us up, swept us to the crest. An instant I tottered dizzily; was held; stood beside Norhala upon a little, level twinkling eyed platform; upon her other side swayed Drake.

Now through the monster I felt a throbbing, an eager and impatient pulse. I turned my head. Still like some huge and grotesque beast the back of the clustered Things ran for half a mile at least behind, tapering to a dragon tail that coiled and twisted another full mile toward the Pit. And from this back uprose and fell immense spiked and fan-shaped ruffs, thickets of spikes, whipping knouts of bristling tentacles, fanged crests. They thrust and waved, whipped and fell constantly; and constantly the great tail lashed and snapped, fantastic, long and living.

“Hai!” shouted Norhala once more. From her lifted throat came again the golden chanting – but now a relentless, ruthless song of slaughter.

Up reared the monstrous bulk. Into it ran the dragon tail. Into it poured the fanged and bristling back.

Up, up we were thrust – three hundred feet, four hundred, five hundred. Over the blue globe of Norhala’s house bent a gigantic leg. Spider-like out from each side of the monster thrust half a score of others.

Overhead the dawn began to break. Through it with ever increasing speed we moved, straight to the line of the cliffs behind which lay the city of the armored men – and Ruth and Ventnor.

— XXIV —

RUSZARK

Smoothly moved the colossal shape; on it we rode as easily as though cradled. It did not glide – it strode.

The columned legs raised themselves, bending from a thousand joints. The pedestals of the feet, huge and massive as foundations for sixteen-inch guns, fell with machine-like precision, stamping gigantically.

Under their tread the trees of the forest snapped, were crushed like reeds beneath the pads of a mastodon. From far below came the sound of their crashing. The thick forest checked the progress of the Shape less than tall grass would that of a man.

Behind us our trail was marked by deep, black pits in the forest’s green, clean cut and great as the Mark upon the poppied valley. They were the footprints of the Thing that carried us.

The wind streamed and whistled. A flock of the willow warblers arose, swirled about us with manifold beating of little frightened wings. Norhala’s face softened, her eyes smiled.

“Go – foolish little ones,” she cried, and waved her arms. They flew away, scolding.

A lammergeier swooped down on wide funereal wings; it peered at us; darted away toward the cliffs.

“There will be no carrion there for you, black eater of the dead, when I am through,” I heard Norhala whisper, eyes again somber.

Steadily grew the dawn light; from Norhala’s lips came again the chanting. And now that paean, the reckless pulse of the monster we rode, began to creep through my own veins. Into Drake’s too, I knew, for his head was held high and his eyes were clear and bright as hers who sang.

The jubilant pulse streamed through the hands that held us, throbbed through us. The pulse of the Thing – sang!

Closer and closer grew the cliffs. Down and crashing down fell the trees, the noise of their fall accompanying the battle chant of the Valkyr beside me like wild harp chords of storm-lashed surf. Up to the precipices the forest rolled, unbroken. Now the cliffs loomed overhead. The dawn had passed. It was full day.

Cutting up through the towering granite scarps was a rift. In it the black shadows clustered thickly. Straight toward that cleft we sped. As we drew near, the crest of the Shape began swiftly to lower. Down we sank and down – a hundred feet, two hundred; now we were two score yards above the tree tops.

Out shot a neck, a tremendous serpent body. Crested it was with pyramids; crested with them, too, was its immense head. Thickly the head bristled with them, poised motionless upon spinning globes as huge as they. For hundreds of feet that incredible neck stretched ahead of us and for twice as far behind a monstrous, lizard-shaped body writhed.

We rode now upon a serpent, a glittering blue metal dragon, spiked and knobbed and scaled. It was the weird steed of Norhala flattening, thrusting out to pierce the rift.

And still as when it had reared on high beat through it the wild, triumphant, questing pulse. Still rang out Norhala’s chanting.

The trees parted and fell upon each side of us as though we were some monster of the sea and they the waves we cleft.

The rift enclosed us. Lower we dropped; were not more than fifty feet above its floor. The Thing upon which we rode was a torrent roaring through it.

A deeper blackness enclosed us – a tunneling.

Through that we flowed. Out of it we darted into a widening filled with wan light drifting down through a pinnacle fanged mouth miles on high. Again the cleft shrunk. A thousand feet ahead was a crack, a narrowing of the cleft so small that hardly could a man pass through it.

Abruptly the metal dragon halted.

Norhala’s chanting changed; became again the arrogant clarioning. And close below us the huge neck split. It came to me then that it was as though Norhala were the overspirit of this chimera – as though it caught and understood and obeyed each quick thought of hers.

As though, indeed, she was a part of it – as it was in reality a part of that infinitely greater Thing, crouching there in its lair of the Pit – the Metal Monster that had lent this living part of itself to her for a steed, a champion. Little time had I to consider such matters.

Up thrust the Shape before us. Into it raced and spun Things angled, Things curved and Things squared. It gathered itself into a Titanic pillar out of which, instantly, thrust scores of arms.

Over them great globes raced; after these flew other scores of huge pyramids, none less than ten feet in height, the mass of them twenty and thirty. The manifold arms grew rigid. Quiet for a moment, a Titanic metal Briareous, it stood.

Then at the tips of the arms the globes began to spin – faster, faster. Upon them I saw the hosts of the pyramids open – as one into a host of stars. The cleft leaped out in a flood of violet light.

Now for another instant the stars which had been motionless, poised upon the whirling spheres, joined in their mad spinning. Cyclopean pin wheels they turned; again as one they ceased. More brilliant now was their light, dazzling; as though in their whirling they had gathered greater force.

Under me I felt the split Thing quiver with eagerness.

From the stars came a hurricane of lightning! A cataract of electric flame poured into the crack, splashed and guttered down the granite walls. We were blinded by it; were deafened with thunders.

The face of the precipice smoked and split; was whirled away in clouds of dust.

The crack widened – widened as a gulley in a sand bank does when a swift stream rushes through it. Lightnings these were – and more than lightnings; lightnings keyed up to an invincible annihilating weapon that could rend and split and crumble to atoms the living granite.

Steadily the cleft expanded. As its walls melted away the Blasting Thing advanced, spurting into it the flaming torrents. Behind it we crept. The dust of the shattered rocks swirled up toward us like angry ghosts – before they reached us they were blown away as though by strong winds streaming from beneath us.

On we went, blinded, deafened. Interminably, it seemed, poured forth the hurricane of blue fire; interminably the thunder bellowed.

There came a louder clamor – volcanic, chaotic, dulling the thunders. The sides of the cleft quivered, bent outward. They split; crashed down. Bright daylight poured in upon us, a flood of light toward which the billows of dust rushed as though seeking escape; out it poured like the smoke of ten thousand cannon.

And the Blasting Thing shook – as though with laughter!

The stars closed. Back into the Shape ran globe and pyramid. It slid toward us – joined the body from which it had broken away. Through all the mass ran a wave of jubilation, a pulse of mirth – a colossal, metallic – silent – roar of laughter.

We glided forward – out of the cleft. I felt a shifting movement.

Up and up we were thrust. Dazed I looked behind me. In the face of a sky climbing wall of rock, smoked a wide chasm. Out of it the billowing clouds of dust still streamed, pursuing, threatening us. The whole granite barrier seemed to quiver with agony. Higher we rose and higher.

“Look,” whispered Drake, and whirled me around.

Less than five miles away was Ruszark, the City of Cherkis. And it was like some ancient city come into life out of long dead centuries. A page restored from once conquering Persia’s crumbled book. A city of the Chosroes transported by Jinns into our own time.

Built around and upon a low mount, it stood within a valley but little larger than the Pit. The plain was level, as though once it had been the floor of some primeval lake; the hill of the City was its only elevation.

Beyond, I caught the glinting of a narrow stream, meandering. The valley was ringed with precipitous cliffs falling sheer to its floor.

Slowly we advanced.

The city was almost square, guarded by double walls of hewn stone. The first raised itself a hundred feet on high, turreted and parapeted and pierced with gates. Perhaps a quarter of a mile behind it the second fortification thrust up.

The city itself I estimated covered about ten square miles. It ran upward in broad terraces. It was very fair, decked with blossoming gardens and green groves. Among the clustering granite houses, red and yellow roofed, thrust skyward tall spires and towers. Upon the mount’s top was a broad, flat plaza on which were great buildings, marble white and golden roofed; temples I thought, or palaces, or both.

Running to the city out of the grain fields and steads that surrounded it, were scores of little figures, rat-like. Here and there among them I glimpsed horsemen, arms and armor glittering. All were racing to the gates and the shelter of the battlements.

Nearer we drew. From the walls came now a faint sound of gongs, of drums, of shrill, flute-like pipings. Upon them I could see hosts gathering; hosts of swarming little figures whose bodies glistened, from above whom came gleamings – the light striking upon their helms, their spear and javelin tips.

“Ruszark!” breathed Norhala, eyes wide, red lips cruelly smiling. “Lo – I am before your gates. Lo – I am here – and was there ever joy like this!”

The constellations in her eyes blazed. Beautiful, beautiful was Norhala – as Isis punishing Typhon for the murder of Osiris; as avenging Diana; shining from her something of the spirit of all wrathful Goddesses.

The flaming hair whirled and snapped. From all her sweet body came white-hot furious force, a withering perfume of destruction. She pressed against me, and I trembled at the contact.

Lawless, wild imaginings ran through me. Life, human life, dwindled. The City seemed but a thing of toys.

On – let us crush it! On – on!

Again the monster shook beneath us. Faster we moved. Louder grew the clangor of the drums, the gongs, the pipes. Nearer came the walls; and ever more crowded with the swarming human ants that manned them.

We were close upon the heels of the last fleeing stragglers. The Thing slackened in its stride; waited patiently until they were close to the gates. Before they could reach them I heard the brazen clanging of their valves. Those shut out beat frenziedly upon them; dragged themselves close to the base of the battlements, cowered there or crept along them seeking some hole in which to hide.

With a slow lowering of its height the Thing advanced. Now its form was that of a spindle a full mile in length on whose bulging center we three stood.

A hundred feet from the outer wall we halted. We looked down upon it not more than fifty feet above its broad top. Hundreds of the soldiers were crouching behind the parapets, companies of archers with great bows poised, arrows at their cheeks, scores of leather jerkined men with stands of javelins at their right hands, spearsmen and men with long, thonged slings.

Set at intervals were squat, powerful engines of wood and metal beside which were heaps of huge, rounded boulders. Catapults I knew them to be and around each swarmed a knot of soldiers, fixing the great stones in place, drawing back the thick ropes that, loosened, would hurl forth the projectiles. From each side came other men, dragging more of these balusters; assembling a battery against the prodigious, gleaming monster that menaced their city.

Between outer wall and inner battlements galloped squadrons of mounted men. Upon this inner wall the soldiers clustered as thickly as on the outer, preparing as actively for its defense.

The city seethed. Up from it arose a humming, a buzzing, as of some immense angry hive.

Involuntarily I visualized the spectacle we must present to those who looked upon us – this huge incredible Shape of metal alive with quicksilver shifting. This – as it must have seemed to them – hellish mechanism of war captained by a sorceress and two familiars in form of men. There came to me dreadful visions of such a monster looking down upon the peace-reared battlements of New York – the panic rush of thousands away from it.

There was a blaring of trumpets. Up on the parapet leaped a man clad all in gleaming red armor. From head to feet the close linked scales covered him. Within a hood shaped somewhat like the tight-fitting head coverings of the Crusaders a pallid, cruel face looked out upon us; in the fierce black eyes was no trace of fear.

Evil as Norhala had said these people of Ruszark were, wicked and cruel – they were no cowards, no!

The red armored man threw up a hand.

“Who are you?” he shouted. “Who are you three, you three who come driving down upon Ruszark through the rocks? We have no quarrel with you?”

“I seek a man and a maid,” cried Norhala. “A maid and a sick man your thieves took from me. Bring him forth!”

“Seek elsewhere for them then,” he answered. “They are not here. Turn now and seek elsewhere. Go quickly, lest I loose our might upon you and you go never.”

Mockingly rang her laughter – and under its lash the black eyes grew fiercer, the cruelty on the white face darkened.

“Little man whose words are so big! Fly who thunders! What are you called, little man?”

Her raillery bit deep – but its menace passed unheeded in the rage it called forth.

“I am Kulun,” shouted the man in scarlet armor. “Kulun, the son of Cherkis the Mighty, and captain of his hosts. Kulun – who will cast your skin under my mares in stall for them to trample and thrust your red flayed body upon a pole in the grain fields to frighten away the crows! Does that answer you?”

Her laughter ceased; her eyes dwelt upon him – filled with an infernal joy.

“The son of Cherkis!” I heard her murmur. “He has a son—”

There was a sneer on the cruel face; clearly he thought her awed. Quick was his disillusionment.

“Listen, Kulun,” she cried. “I am Norhala – daughter of another Norhala and of Rustum, whom Cherkis tortured and slew. Now go, you lying spawn of unclean toads – go and tell your father that I, Norhala, am at his gates. And bring back with you the maid and the man. Go, I say!”

— XXV —

CHERKIS

There was stark amazement on Kulun’s face; and fear now enough. He dropped from the parapet among his men. There came one loud trumpet blast.

Out from the battlements poured a storm of arrows, a cloud of javelins. The squat catapults leaped forward. From them came a hail of boulders. Before that onrushing tempest of death I flinched.

I heard Norhala’s golden laughter and before they could reach us arrow and javelin and boulder were checked as though myriads of hands reached out from the Thing under us and caught them. Down they dropped.

Forth from the great spindle shot a gigantic arm, hammer tipped with cubes. It struck the wall close to where the scarlet armored Kulun had vanished.

Under its blow the stones crumbled. With the fragments fell the soldiers; were buried beneath them.

A hundred feet in width a breach gaped in the battlements. Out shot the arm again; hooked its hammer tip over the parapet, tore away a stretch of the breastwork as though it had been cardboard. Beside the breach an expanse of the broad flat top lay open like a wide platform.

The arm withdrew, and out from the whole length of the spindle thrust other arms, hammer tipped, held high aloft, menacing.

From all the length of the wall arose panic outcry. Abruptly the storm of arrows ended; the catapults were still. Again the trumpets sounded; the crying ceased. Down fell a silence, terrified, stifling.

Kulun stepped forth again, both hands held high. Gone was his arrogance.

“A parley,” he shouted. “A parley, Norhala. If we give you the maid and man, will you go?”

“Go get them,” she answered. “And take with you this my command to Cherkis – that he return with the two!”

For an instant Kulun hesitated. Up thrust the dreadful arms, poised themselves to strike.

“It shall be so,” he shouted. “I carry your command.”

He leaped back, his red mail flashed toward a turret that held, I supposed, a stairway. He was lost to sight. In silence we waited.

On the further side of the city I glimpsed movement. Little troops of mounted men, pony drawn wains, knots of running figures were fleeing from the city through the opposite gates.

Norhala saw them too. With that incomprehensible, instant obedience to her unspoken thought a mass of the Metal Things separated from us; whirled up into a dozen of those obelisked forms I had seen march from the cat eyes of the City of the Pit.

In but a breath, it seemed, their columns were far off, herding back the fugitives.

They did not touch them, did not offer to harm – only, grotesquely, like dogs heading off and corralling frightened sheep, they circled and darted. Rushing back came those they herded.

From the watching terraces and walls arose shrill cries of terror, a wailing. Far away the obelisks met, pirouetted, melted into one thick column. Towering, motionless as we, it stood, guarding the further gates.

There was a stir upon the wall, a flashing of spears, of drawn blades. Two litters closed with curtainings, surrounded by triple rows of swordsmen fully armored, carrying small shields and led by Kulun were being borne to the torn battlement.

Their bearers stopped well within the platform and gently lowered their burdens. The leader of those around the second litter drew aside its covering, spoke.

Out stepped Ruth and after her – Ventnor!

“Martin!” I could not keep back the cry; heard mingled with it Drake’s own cry to Ruth. Ventnor raised his hand in greeting; I thought he smiled.

The cubes on which we stood shot forward; stopped within fifty feet of them. Instantly the guard of swordsmen raised their blades, held them over the pair as though waiting the signal to strike.

And now I saw that Ruth was not clad as she had been when we had left her. She stood in scanty kirtle that came scarcely to her knees, her shoulders were bare, her curly brown hair unbound and tangled. Her face was set with wrath hardly less than that which beat from Norhala. On Ventnor’s forehead was a blood red scar, a line that ran from temple to temple like a brand.

The curtains of the first litter quivered; behind them someone spoke. That in which Ruth and Ventnor had ridden was drawn swiftly away. The knot of swordsmen drew back.

Into their places sprang and knelt a dozen archers. They ringed in the two, bows drawn taut, arrows in place and pointing straight to their hearts.

Out of the litter rolled a giant of a man. Seven feet he must have been in height; over the huge shoulders, the barreled chest and the bloated abdomen hung a purple cloak glittering with gems; through the thick and grizzled hair passed a flashing circlet of jewels.

The scarlet armored Kulun beside him, swordsmen guarding them, he walked to the verge of the torn gap in the wall. He peered down it, glancing imperturbably at the upraised, hammer-handed arms still threatening; examined again the breach. Then still with Kulun he strode over to the very edge of the broken battlement and stood, head thrust a little forward, studying us in silence.

“Cherkis!” whispered Norhala – the whisper was a hymn to Nemesis. I felt her body quiver from head to foot.

A wave of hatred, a hot desire to kill, passed through me as I scanned the face staring at us. It was a great gross mask of evil, of cold cruelty and callous lusts. Unwinking, icily malignant, black slits of eyes glared at us between pouches that held them half closed. Heavy jowls hung pendulous, dragging down the corners of the thick lipped, brutal mouth into a deep graven, unchanging sneer.

As he gazed at Norhala a flicker of lust shot like a licking tongue through his eyes.

Yet from him pulsed power; sinister, instinct with evil, concentrate with cruelty – but power indomitable. Such was Cherkis, descendant perhaps of that Xerxes the Conqueror who three millenniums gone ruled most of the known world.

It was Norhala who broke the silence.

“Tcherak! Greeting – Cherkis!” There was merciless mirth in the buglings of her voice. “Lo, I did but knock so gently at your gates and you hastened to welcome me. Greetings – gross swine, spittle of the toads, fat slug beneath my sandals.”

He passed the insults by, unmoved – although I heard a murmuring go up from those near and Kulun’s hard eyes blazed.

“We will bargain, Norhala,” he answered calmly; the voice was deep, filled with sinister strength.

“Bargain?” she laughed. “What have you with which to bargain, Cherkis? Does the rat bargain with the tigress? And you, toad, have nothing.”

He shook his head.

“I have these,” he waved a hand toward Ruth and her brother. “Me you may slay – and mayhap many of mine. But before you can move my archers will feather their hearts.”

She considered him, no longer mocking.

“Two of mine you slew long since, Cherkis,” she said, slowly. “Therefore it is I am here.”

“I know,” he nodded heavily. “Yet now that is neither here nor there, Norhala. It was long since, and I have learned much during the years. I would have killed you too, Norhala, could I have found you. But now I would not do as then – quite differently would I do, Norhala; for I have learned much. I am sorry that those that you loved died as they did. I am in truth sorry!”

There was a curious lurking sardonicism in the words, an undertone of mockery. Was what he really meant that in those years he had learned to inflict greater agonies, more exquisite tortures? If so, Norhala apparently did not sense that interpretation. Indeed, she seemed to be interested, her wrath abating.

“No,” the hoarse voice rumbled dispassionately. “None of that is important – now. You would have this man and girl. I hold them. They die if you stir a hand’s breadth toward me. If they die, I prevail against you – for I have cheated you of what you desire. I win, Norhala, even though you slay me. That is all that is now important.”

There was doubt upon Norhala’s face and I caught a quick gleam of contemptuous triumph glint through the depths of the evil eyes.

“Empty will be your victory over me, Norhala,” he said; then waited.

“What is your bargain?” she spoke hesitatingly; with a sinking of my heart I heard the doubt tremble in her throat.

“If you will go without further knocking upon my gates” – there was a satiric grimness in the phrase – “go when you have been given them, and pledge yourself never to return – you shall have them. If you will not, then they die.”

“But what security, what hostages, do you ask?” Her eyes were troubled. “I cannot swear by your gods, Cherkis, for they are not my gods – in truth I, Norhala, have no gods. Why should I not say yes and take the two, then fall upon you and destroy – as you would do in my place, old wolf?”

“Norhala,” he answered, “I ask nothing but your word. Do I not know those who bore you and the line from which they sprung? Was not always the word they gave kept till death – unbroken, inviolable? No need for vows to gods between you and me. Your word is holier than they – O glorious daughter of kings, princess royal!”

The great voice was harshly caressing; not obsequious, but as though he gave her as an equal her rightful honor. Her face softened; she considered him from eyes far less hostile.

A wholesome respect for this gross tyrant’s mentality came to me; it did not temper, it heightened, the hatred I felt for him. But now I recognized the subtlety of his attack; realized that unerringly he had taken the only means by which he could have gained a hearing; have temporized. Could he win her with his guile?

“Is it not true?” There was a leonine purring in the question.

“It is true!” she answered proudly. “Though why you should dwell upon this, Cherkis, whose word is steadfast as the running stream and whose promises are as lasting as its bubbles – why you should dwell on this I do not know.”

“I have changed greatly, Princess, in the years since my great wickedness; I have learned much. He who speaks to you now is not he you were taught – and taught justly then – to hate.”

“You may speak truth! Certainly you are not as I have pictured you.” It was as though she were more than half convinced. “In this at least you do speak truth – that if I promise, I will go and molest you no more.”

“Why go at all, Princess?” Quietly he asked the amazing question – then drew himself to his full height, threw wide his arms.

“Princess?” the great voice rumbled forth. “Nay – Queen! Why leave us again – Norhala the Queen? Are we not of your people? Am I not of your kin? Join your power with ours. What that war engine you ride may be, how built, I know not. But this I do know – that with our strengths joined we two can go forth from where I have dwelt so long, go forth into the forgotten world, eat its cities and rule.

“You shall teach our people to make these engines, Norhala, and we will make many of them. Queen Norhala – you shall wed my son Kulun, he who stands beside me. And while I live you shall rule with me, rule equally. And when I die you and Kulun shall rule.

“Thus shall our two royal lines be made one, the old feud wiped out, the long score be settled. Queen – wherever it is you dwell it comes to me that you have few men. Queen – you need men, many men and strong to follow you, men to gather the harvests of your power, men to bring to you the fruit of your smallest wish – young men and vigorous to amuse you.

“Let the past be forgotten – I too have wrongs to forget, O Queen. Come to us, Great One, with your power and your beauty. Teach us. Lead us. Return, and throned above your people rule the world!”

He ceased. Over the battlements, over the city, dropped a vast expectant silence – as though the city knew its fate was hanging upon the balance.

“No! No!” It was Ruth crying. “Do not trust him, Norhala! It’s a trap! He shamed me – he tortured—”

Cherkis half turned; before he swung about I saw a hell shadow darken his face. Ventnor’s hand thrust out, covered Ruth’s mouth, choking her crying.

“Your son” – Norhala spoke swiftly; and back flashed the cruel face of Cherkis, devouring her with his eyes. “Your son – and Queenship here – and Empire of the World.” Her voice was rapt, thrilled. “All this you offer? Me – Norhala?”

“This and more!” The huge bulk of his body quivered with eagerness. “If it be your wish, O Queen, I, Cherkis, will step down from the throne for you and sit beneath your right hand, eager to do your bidding.”

A moment she studied him.

“Norhala,” I whispered, “do not do this thing. He thinks to gain your secrets.”

“Let my bridegroom stand forth that I may look upon him,” called Norhala.

Visibly Cherkis relaxed, as though a strain had been withdrawn. Between him and his crimson-clad son flashed a glance; it was as though a triumphant devil sped from them into each other’s eyes.

I saw Ruth shrink into Ventnor’s arms. Up from the wall rose a jubilant shouting, was caught by the inner battlements, passed on to the crowded terraces.

“Take Kulun,” it was Drake, pistol drawn and whispering across to me. “I’ll handle Cherkis. And shoot straight.”

— XXVI —

THE VENGEANCE
OF NORHALA

Norhala’s hand that had gone from my wrist dropped down again; the other fell upon Drake’s.

Kulun loosed his hood, let it fall about his shoulders.

He stepped forward, held out his arms to Norhala.

“A strong man!” she cried approvingly. “Hail – my bridegroom! But stay – stand back a moment. Stand beside that man for whom I came to Ruszark. I would see you together!”

Kulun’s face darkened. But Cherkis smiled with evil understanding, shrugged his shoulders and whispered to him. Sullenly Kulun stepped back. The ring of the archers lowered their bows; they leaped to their feet and stood aside to let him pass.

Quick as a serpent’s tongue a pyramid tipped tentacle flicked out beneath us. It darted through the broken circle of the bowmen.

It licked up Ruth and Ventnor and – Kulun!

Swiftly as it had swept forth it returned, coiled and dropped those two I loved at Norhala’s feet.

It flashed back on high with the scarlet length of Cherkis’s son sprawled along its angled end.

The great body of Cherkis seemed to wither.

Up from all the wall went a tempestuous sigh of horror.

Out rang the merciless chimes of Norhala’s laughter.

“Tchai!” she cried. “Tchai! Fat fool there. Tchai – you Cherkis! Toad whose wits have sickened with your years!

“Did you think to catch me, Norhala, in your filthy web? Princess! Queen! Empress of Earth! Ho – old fox I have outplayed and beaten, what now have you to trade with Norhala?”

Mouth sagging open, eyes glaring, the tyrant slowly raised his arms – a suppliant.

“You would have back the bridegroom you gave me?” she laughed. “Take him, then.”

Down swept the metal arm that held Kulun. The arm dropped Cherkis’s son at Cherkis’s feet; and as though Kulun had been a grape – it crushed him!

Before those who had seen could stir from their stupor the tentacle hovered over Cherkis, glaring down at the horror that had been his son.

It did not strike him – it drew him up to it as a magnet draws a pin.

And as the pin swings from the magnet when held suspended by the head, so swung the great body of Cherkis from the under side of the pyramid that held him. Hanging so he was carried toward us, came to a stop not ten feet from us—

Weird, weird beyond all telling was that scene – and would I had the power to make you who read see it as we did.

The animate, living Shape of metal on which we stood, with its forest of hammer-handed arms raised menacingly along its mile of spindled length; the great walls glistening with the armored hosts; the terraces of that fair and ancient city, their gardens and green groves and clustering red and yellow-roofed houses and temples and palaces; the swinging gross body of Cherkis in the clutch of the unseen grip of the tentacle, his grizzled hair touching the side of the pyramid that held him, his arms half outstretched, the gemmed cloak flapping like the wings of a jeweled bat, his white, malignant face in which the evil eyes were burning slits flaming hell’s own blackest hatred; and beyond the city, from which pulsed almost visibly a vast and hopeless horror, the watching column – and over all this the palely radiant white sky under whose light the encircling cliffs were tremendous stony palettes splashed with a hundred pigments.

Norhala’s laughter had ceased. Somberly she looked upon Cherkis, into the devil fires of his eyes.

“Cherkis!” she half whispered. “Now comes the end for you – and for all that is yours! But until the end’s end you shall see.”

The hanging body was thrust forward; was thrust up; was brought down upon its feet on the upper plane of the prostrate pyramid tipping the metal arm that held him. For an instant he struggled to escape; I think he meant to hurl himself down upon Norhala, to kill her before he himself was slain.

If so, after one frenzied effort he realized the futility, for with a certain dignity he drew himself upright, turned his eyes toward the city.

Over that city a dreadful silence hung. It was as though it cowered, hid its face, was afraid to breathe.

“The end!” murmured Norhala.

There was a quick trembling through the Metal Thing. Down swung its forest of sledges. Beneath the blow down fell the smitten walls, shattered, crumbling, and with it glittering like shining flies in a dust storm fell the armored men.

Through that mile-wide breach and up to the inner barrier I glimpsed confusion chaotic. And again I say it – they were no cowards, those men of Cherkis. From the inner battlements flew clouds of arrows, of huge stones – as uselessly as before.

Then out from the opened gates poured regiments of horsemen, brandishing javelins and great maces, and shouting fiercely as they drove down upon each end of the Metal Shape. Under cover of their attack I saw cloaked riders spurring their ponies across the plain to shelter of the cliff walls, to the chance of hiding places within them. Women and men of the rich, the powerful, flying for safety; after them ran and scattered through the fields of grain a multitude on foot.

The ends of the spindle drew back before the horsemen’s charge, broadening as they went – like the heads of monstrous cobras withdrawing into their hoods. Abruptly, with a lightning velocity, these broadenings expanded into immense lunettes, two tremendous curving and crablike claws. Their tips flung themselves past the racing troops; then like gigantic pincers began to contract.

Of no avail now was it for the horsemen to halt dragging their mounts on their haunches, or to turn to fly. The ends of the lunettes had met, the pincer tips had closed. The mounted men were trapped within half-mile-wide circles. And in upon man and horse their living walls marched. Within those enclosures of the doomed began a frantic milling – I shut my eyes—

There was a dreadful screaming of horses, a shrieking of men. Then silence.

Shuddering, I looked. Where the mounted men had been was – nothing.

Nothing? There were two great circular spaces whose floors were glistening, wetly red. Fragments of man or horse – there was none. They had been crushed into – what was it Norhala had promised – had been stamped into the rock beneath the feet of her – servants.

Sick, I looked away and stared at a Thing that writhed and undulated over the plain; a prodigious serpentine Shape of cubes and spheres linked and studded thick with the spikes of the pyramid. Through the fields, over the plain its coils flashed.

Playfully it sped and twisted among the fugitives, crushing them, tossing them aside broken, gliding over them. Some there were who hurled themselves upon it in impotent despair, some who knelt before it, praying. On rolled the metal convolutions, inexorable.

Within my vision’s range there were no more fugitives. Around a corner of the broken battlements raced the serpent Shape. Where it had writhed was now no waving grain, no trees, no green thing. There was only smooth rock upon which here and there red smears glistened wetly.

Afar there was a crying, in its wake a rumbling. It was the column, it came to me, at work upon the further battlements. As though the sound had been a signal the spindle trembled; up we were thrust another hundred feet or more. Back dropped the host of brandished arms, threaded themselves into the parent bulk.

Right and left of us the spindle split into scores of fissures. Between these fissures the Metal Things that made up each now dissociate and shapeless mass geysered; block and sphere and tetrahedron spike spun and swirled. There was an instant of formlessness.

Then right and left of us stood scores of giant, grotesque warriors. Their crests were fully fifty feet below our living platform. They stood upon six immense, columnar stilts. These sextuple legs supported a hundred feet above their bases a huge and globular body formed of clusters of the spheres. Out from each of these bodies that were at one and the same time trunks and heads, sprang half a score of colossal arms shaped like flails; like spike-studded girders, Titanic battle maces, Cyclopean sledges.

From legs and trunks and arms the tiny eyes of the Metal Hordes flashed, exulting.

There came from them, from the Thing we rode as well, a chorus of thin and eager wailings and pulsed through all that battle-line, a jubilant throbbing.

Then with a rhythmic, jocund stride they leaped upon the city.

Under the mallets of the smiting arms the inner battlements fell as under the hammers of a thousand metal Thors. Over their fragments and the armored men who fell with them strode the Things, grinding stone and man together as we passed.

All of the terraced city except the side hidden by the mount lay open to my gaze. In that brief moment of pause I saw crazed crowds battling in narrow streets, trampling over mounds of the fallen, surging over barricades of bodies, clawing and tearing at each other in their flight.

There was a wide, stepped street of gleaming white stone that climbed like an immense stairway straight up the slope to that broad plaza at the top where clustered the great temples and palaces – the Acropolis of the city. Into it the streets of the terraces flowed, each pouring out upon it a living torrent, tumultuous with tuliped, sparkling little waves, the gay coverings and the arms and armor of Ruszark’s desperate thousands seeking safety at the shrines of their gods.

Here great carven arches arose; there slender, exquisite towers capped with red gold – there was a street of colossal statues, another over which dozens of graceful, fretted bridges threw their spans from feathery billows of flowering trees; there were gardens gay with blossoms in which fountains sparkled, green groves; thousands upon thousands of bright multi-colored pennants, banners, fluttered.

A fair, a lovely city was Cherkis’s stronghold of Ruszark.

Its beauty filled the eyes; out from it streamed the fragrance of its gardens – the voice of its agony was that of the souls in Dis.

The row of destroying shapes lengthened, each huge warrior of metal drawing far apart from its mates. They flexed their manifold arms, shadow boxed – grotesquely, dreadfully.

Down struck the flails, the sledges. Beneath the blows the buildings burst like eggshells, their fragments burying the throngs fighting for escape in the thoroughfares that threaded them. Over their ruins we moved.

Down and ever down crashed the awful sledges. And ever under them the city crumbled.

There was a spider Shape that crawled up the wide stairway hammering into the stone those who tried to flee before it.

Stride by stride the Destroying Things ate up the city.

I felt neither wrath nor pity. Through me beat a jubilant roaring pulse – as though I were a shouting corpuscle of the rushing hurricane, as though I were one of the hosts of smiting spirits of the bellowing typhoon.

Through this stole another thought – vague, unfamiliar, yet seemingly of truth’s own essence. Why, I wondered, had I never recognized this before? Why had I never known that these green forms called trees were but ugly, unsymmetrical excrescences? That these high projections of towers, these buildings were deformities?

That these four-pronged, moving little shapes that screamed and ran were – hideous?

They must be wiped out! All this misshapen, jumbled, inharmonious ugliness must be wiped out! It must be ground down to smooth unbroken planes, harmonious curvings, shapeliness – harmonies of arc and line and angle!

Something deep within me fought to speak – fought to tell me that this thought was not human thought, not my thought – that it was the reflected thought of the Metal Things!

It told me – and fiercely it struggled to make me realize what it was that it told. Its insistence was borne upon little despairing, rhythmic beatings – throbbings that were like the muffled sobbings of the drums of grief. Louder, closer came the throbbing; clearer with it my perception of the inhumanness of my thought.

The drum beat tapped at my humanity, became a dolorous knocking at my heart.

It was the sobbing of Cherkis!

The gross face was shrunken, the cheeks sagging in folds of woe; cruelty and wickedness were wiped from it; the evil in the eyes had been washed out by tears. Eyes streaming, bull throat and barrel chest racked by his sobbing, he watched the passing of his people and his city.

And relentlessly, coldly, Norhala watched him – as though loath to lose the faintest shadow of his agony.

Now I saw we were close to the top of the mount. Packed between us and the immense white structures that crowned it were thousands of the people. They fell on their knees before us, prayed to us. They tore at each other, striving to hide themselves from us in the mass that was themselves. They beat against the barred doors of the sanctuaries; they climbed the pillars; they swarmed over the golden roofs.

There was a moment of chaos – a chaos of which we were the heart. Then temple and palace cracked, burst; were shattered; fell. I caught glimpses of gleaming sculptures, glitterings of gold and of silver, flashing of gems, shimmering of gorgeous draperies – under them a weltering of men and women.

We closed down upon them – over them!

The dreadful sobbing ceased. I saw the head of Cherkis swing heavily upon a shoulder; the eyes closed.

The Destroying Things touched. Their flailing arms coiled back, withdrew into their bodies. They joined, forming for an instant a tremendous hollow pillar far down in whose center we stood. They parted; shifted in shape? rolled down the mount over the ruins like a widening wave – crushing into the stone all over which they passed.

Afar away I saw the gleaming serpent still at play – still writhing along, still obliterating the few score scattered fugitives that some way, somehow, had slipped by the Destroying Things.

We halted. For one long moment Norhala looked upon the drooping body of him upon whom she had let fall this mighty vengeance.

Then the metal arm that held Cherkis whirled. Thrown from it, the cloaked form flew like a great blue bat. It fell upon the flattened mound that had once been the proud crown of his city. A blue blot upon desolation the broken body of Cherkis lay.

A black speck appeared high in the sky; grew fast – the lammergeier.

“I have left carrion for you – after all!” cried Norhala.

With an ebon swirling of wings the vulture dropped beside the blue heap – thrust in it its beak.

— XXVII —

“THE DRUMS OF DESTINY”

Slowly we descended that mount of desolation; lingeringly, as though the brooding eyes of Norhala were not yet sated with destruction. Of human life, of green life, of life of any kind there was none.

Man and tree, woman and flower, babe and bud, palace, temple and home – Norhala had stamped flat. She had crushed them within the rock – even as she had promised.

The tremendous tragedy had absorbed my every faculty; I had had no time to think of my companions; I had forgotten them. Now in the painful surges of awakening realization, of full human understanding of that inhuman annihilation, I turned to them for strength. Faintly I wondered again at Ruth’s scantiness of garb, her more than half nudity; dwelt curiously upon the red brand across Ventnor’s forehead.

In his eyes and in Drake’s I saw reflected the horror I knew was in my own. But in the eyes of Ruth was none of this – sternly, coldly triumphant, indifferent to its piteousness as Norhala herself, she scanned the waste that less than an hour since had been a place of living beauty.

I felt a shock of repulsion. After all, those who had been destroyed so ruthlessly could not all have been wholly evil. Yet mother and blossoming maid, youth and oldster, all the pageant of humanity within the great walls were now but lines within the stone. According to their different lights, it came to me, there had been in Ruszark no greater number of the wicked than one could find in any great city of our own civilization.

From Norhala, of course, I looked for no perception of any of this. But from Ruth—

My reaction grew; the pity long withheld racing through me linked with a burning anger, a hatred for this woman who had been the directing soul of that catastrophe.

My gaze fell again upon the red brand. I saw that it was a deep indentation as though a thong had been twisted around Ventnor’s head biting the bone. There was dried blood on the edges, a double ring of swollen white flesh rimming the cincture. It was the mark of – torture!

“Martin,” I cried. “That ring? What did they do to you?”

“They waked me with that,” he answered quietly. “I suppose I ought to be grateful – although their intentions were not exactly – therapeutic—”

“They tortured him,” Ruth’s voice was tense, bitter; she spoke in Persian – for Norhala’s benefit I thought then, not guessing a deeper reason. “They tortured him. They gave him agony until he – returned. And they promised him other agonies that would make him pray long for death.

“And me – me” – she raised little clenched hands – “me they stripped like a slave. They led me through the city and the people mocked me. They took me before that swine Norhala has punished – and stripped me before him – like a slave. Before my eyes they tortured my brother. Norhala – they were evil, all evil! Norhala – you did well to slay them!”

She caught the woman’s hands, pressed close to her. Norhala gazed at her from great gray eyes in which the wrath was dying, into which the old tranquility, the old serenity was flowing. And when she spoke the golden voice held more than returning echoes of the far-away, faint chimings.

“It is done,” she said. “And it was well done – sister. Now you and I shall dwell together in peace – sister. Or if there be those in the world from which you came that you would have slain, then you and I shall go forth with our companies and stamp them out – even as I did these.”

My heart stopped beating – for from the depths of Ruth’s eyes shining shadows were rising, wraiths answering Norhala’s calling; and, as they rose, steadily they drew life from the clear radiance summoning – drew closer to the semblance of that tranquil spirit which her vengeance had banished but that had now returned to its twin thrones of Norhala’s eyes.

And at last it was twin sister of Norhala who looked upon her from the face of Ruth!

The white arms of the woman encircled her; the glorious head bent over her; flaming tresses mingled with tender brown curls.

“Sister!” she whispered. “Little sister! These men you shall have as long as it pleases you – to do with as you will. Or if it is your wish they shall go back to their world and I will guard them to its gates.

“But you and I, little sister, will dwell together – in the vastnesses – in the peace. Shall it not be so?”

With no faltering, with no glance toward us three – lover, brother, old friend – Ruth crept closer to her, rested her head upon the virginal, royal breasts.

“It shall be so!” she murmured. “Sister – it shall be so. Norhala – I am tired. Norhala – I have seen enough of men.”

An ecstasy of tenderness, a flame of unearthly rapture, trembled over the woman’s wondrous face. Hungrily, defiantly, she pressed the girl to her; the stars in the lucid heavens of her eyes were soft and gentle and caressing.

“Ruth!” cried Drake – and sprang toward them. She paid no heed; and even as he leaped he was caught, whirled back against us.

“Wait,” said Ventnor, and caught him by the arm as wrathfully, blindedly, he strove against the force that held him. “Wait. No use – now.”

There was a curious understanding in his voice – a curious sympathy, too, in the patient, untroubled gaze that dwelt upon his sister and this weirdly exquisite woman who held her.

“Wait!” exclaimed Drake. “Wait – hell! The damned witch is stealing her away from us!”

Again he threw himself forward; recoiled as though swept back by an invisible arm; fell against us and was clasped and held by Ventnor. And as he struggled the Thing we rode halted. Like metal waves back into it rushed the enigmatic billows that had washed over the fragments of the city.

We were lifted; between us and the woman and girl a cleft appeared; it widened into a rift. It was as though Norhala had decreed it as a symbol of this her second victory – or had set it between us as a barrier.

Wider grew the rift. Save for the bridge of our voices it separated us from Ruth as though she stood upon another world.

Higher we rose; the three of us now upon the flat top of a tower upon whose counterpart fifty feet away and facing the homeward path, Ruth and Norhala stood with white arms interlaced.

The serpent shape flashed toward us; it vanished beneath, merging into the waiting Thing.

Then slowly the Thing began to move; quietly it glided to the chasm it had blasted in the cliff wall. The shadow of those walls fell upon us. As one we looked back; as one we searched out the patch of blue with the black blot at its breast.

We found it; then the precipices hid it. Silently we streamed through the chasm, through the canyon and the tunnel – speaking no word, Drake’s eyes fixed with bitter hatred upon Norhala, Ventnor brooding upon her always with that enigmatic sympathy. We passed between the walls of the further cleft; stood for an instant at the brink of the green forest.

There came to us as though from immeasurable distances, a faint, sustained thrumming – like the beating of countless muffled drums. The Thing that carried us trembled – the sound died away. The Thing quieted; it began its steady, effortless striding through the crowding trees – but now with none of that speed with which it had come, spurred forward by Norhala’s awakened hate.

Ventnor stirred; broke the silence. And now I saw how wasted was his body, how sharpened his face; almost ethereal; purged not only by suffering but by, it came to me, some strange knowledge.

“No use, Drake,” he said dreamily. “All this is now on the knees of the gods. And whether those gods are humanity’s or whether they are – Gods of Metal – I do not know.

“But this I do know – only one way or another can the balance fall; and if it be one way, then you and we shall have Ruth back. And if it falls the other way – then there will be little need for us to care. For man will be done!”

“Martin! What do you mean?”

“It is the crisis,” he answered. “We can do nothing, Goodwin – nothing. Whatever is to be steps forth now from the womb of Destiny.”

Again there came that distant rolling – louder, now. Again the Thing trembled.

“The drums,” whispered Ventnor. “The drums of destiny. What is it they are heralding? A new birth of Earth and the passing of man? A new child to whom shall be given dominion – nay, to whom has been given dominion? Or is it – taps – for Them?”

The drumming died as I listened – fearfully. About us was only the swishing, the sighing of the falling trees beneath the tread of the Thing. Motionless stood Norhala; and as motionless Ruth.

“Martin,” I cried once more, a dreadful doubt upon me. “Martin – what do you mean?”

“Whence did – They – come?” His voice was clear and calm, the eyes beneath the red brand clear and quiet, too. “Whence did They come – these Things that carry us? That strode like destroying angels over Cherkis’s city? Are they spawn of Earth – as we are? Or are they foster children – changelings from another star?

“These creatures that when many still are one – that when one still are many. Whence did They come? What are They?”

He looked down upon the cubes that held us; their hosts of tiny eyes shone up at him, enigmatically – as though they heard and understood.

“I do not forget,” he said. “At least not all do I forget of what I saw during that time when I seemed an atom outside space – as I told you, or think I told you, speaking with unthinkable effort through lips that seemed eternities away from me, the atom, who strove to open them.

“There were three – visions, revelations – I know not what to call them. And though each seemed equally real, of two of them, only one, I think, can be true; and of the third – that may sometime be true but surely is not yet.”

Through the air came a louder drum roll – in it something ominous, something sinister. It swelled to a crescendo; abruptly ceased. And now I saw Norhala raise her head; listen.

“I saw a world, a vast world, Goodwin, marching stately through space. It was no globe – it was a world of many facets, of smooth and polished planes; a huge blue jewel world, dimly luminous; a crystal world cut out from Aether. A geometric thought of the Great Cause, of God, if you will, made material. It was airless, waterless, sunless.

“I seemed to draw closer to it. And then I saw that over every facet patterns were traced; gigantic symmetrical designs; mathematical hieroglyphs. In them I read unthinkable calculations, formulas of interwoven universes, arithmetical progressions of armies of stars, pandects of the motions of the suns. In the patterns was an appalling harmony – as though all the laws from those which guide the atom to those which direct the cosmos were there resolved into completeness – totaled.

“The faceted world was like a cosmic abacist, tallying as it marched the errors of the infinite.

“The patterned symbols constantly changed form. I drew nearer – the symbols were alive. They were, in untold numbers – These!”

He pointed to the Thing that bore us.

“I was swept back; looked again upon it from afar. And a fantastic notion came to me – fantasy it was, of course, yet built I know around a nucleus of strange truth. It was” – his tone was half whimsical, half apologetic – “it was that this jeweled world was ridden by some mathematical god, driving it through space, noting occasionally with amused tolerance the very bad arithmetic of another Deity the reverse of mathematical – a more or less haphazard Deity, the god, in fact, of us and the things we call living.

“It had no mission; it wasn’t at all out to do any reforming; it wasn’t in the least concerned in rectifying any of the inaccuracies of the Other. Only now and then it took note of the deplorable differences between the worlds it saw and its own impeccably ordered and tidy temple with its equally tidy servitors.

“Just an itinerant demiurge of supergeometry riding along through space on its perfectly summed-up world; master of all celestial mechanics; its people independent of all that complex chemistry and labor for equilibrium by which we live; needing neither air nor water, heeding neither heat nor cold; fed with the magnetism of interstellar space and stopping now and then to banquet off the energy of some great sun.”

A thrill of amazement passed through me; fantasy all this might be but – how, if so, had he gotten that last thought? He had not seen, as we had, the orgy in the Hall of the Cones, the prodigious feeding of the Metal Monster upon our sun.

“That passed,” he went on, unnoticing. “I saw vast caverns filled with the Things; working, growing, multiplying. In caverns of our Earth – the fruit of some unguessed womb? I do not know.

“But in those caverns, under countless orbs of many colored lights” – again the thrill of amaze shook me – “they grew. It came to me that they were reaching out toward sunlight and the open. They burst into it – into yellow, glowing sunlight. Ours? I do not know. And that picture passed.”

His voice deepened.

“There came a third vision. I saw our Earth – I knew, Goodwin, indisputably, unmistakably that it was our earth. But its rolling hills were leveled, its mountains were ground and shaped into cold and polished symbols – geometric, fashioned.

“The seas were fettered, gleaming like immense jewels in patterned settings of crystal shores. The very Polar ice was chiseled. On the ordered plains were traced the hieroglyphs of the faceted world. And on all Earth, Goodwin, there was no green life, no city, no trace of man. On this Earth that had been ours were only – These.

“Visioning!” he said. “Don’t think that I accept them in their entirety. Part truth, part illusion – the groping mind dazzled with light of unfamiliar truths and making pictures from half light and half shadow to help it understand.

“But still – some truth in them. How much I do not know. But this I do know – that last vision was of a cataclysm whose beginnings we face now – this very instant.”

The picture flashed behind my own eyes – of the walled city, its thronging people, its groves and gardens, its science and its art; of the Destroying Shapes trampling it flat – and then the dreadful, desolate mount.

And suddenly I saw that mount as Earth – the city as Earth’s cities – its gardens and groves as Earth’s fields and forests – and the vanished people of Cherkis seemed to expand into all humanity.

“But Martin,” I stammered, fighting against choking, intolerable terror, “there was something else. Something of the Keeper of the Cones and of our striking through the sun to destroy the Things – something of them being governed by the same laws that govern us and that if they broke them they must fall. A hope – a promise, that they would not conquer.”

“I remember,” he replied, “but not clearly. There was something – a shadow upon them, a menace. It was a shadow that seemed to be born of our own world – some threatening spirit of earth hovering over them.

“I cannot remember; it eludes me. Yet it is because I remember but a little of it that I say those drums may not be – taps – for us.”

As though his words had been a cue, the sounds again burst forth – no longer muffled nor faint. They roared; they seemed to pelt through air and drop upon us; they beat about our ears with thunderous tattoo like covered caverns drummed upon by Titans with trunks of great trees.

The drumming did not die; it grew louder, more vehement; defiant and deafening. Within the Thing under us a mighty pulse began to throb, accelerating rapidly to the rhythm of that clamorous roll.

I saw Norhala draw herself up, sharply; stand listening and alert. Under me, the throbbing turned to an uneasy churning, a ferment.

“Drums?” muttered Drake. “They’re no drums. It’s drum fire. It’s like a dozen Marnes, a dozen Verduns. But where could batteries like those come from?”

“Drums,” whispered Ventnor. “They are drums. The drums of Destiny!”

Louder the roaring grew. Now it was a tremendous rhythmic cannonading. The Thing halted. The tower that upheld Ruth and Norhala swayed, bent over the gap between us, touched the top on which we rode.

Gently the two were plucked up; swiftly they were set beside us.

Came a shrill, keen wailing – louder than ever I had heard before. There was an earthquake trembling; a maelstrom swirling in which we spun; a swift sinking.

The Thing split in two. Up before us rose a stupendous, stepped pyramid; little smaller it was than that which Cheops built to throw its shadows across holy Nile. Into it streamed, over it clicked, score upon score of cubes, building it higher and higher. It lurched forward – away from us.

From Norhala came a single cry – resonant, blaring like a wrathful, golden trumpet.

The speeding shape halted, hesitated; it seemed about to return. Crashed down upon us an abrupt crescendo of the distant drumming; peremptory, commanding. The shape darted forward; raced away crushing to straw the trees beneath it in a full quarter-mile-wide swath.

Great gray eyes wide, filled with incredulous wonder, stunned disbelief, Norhala for an instant faltered. Then out of her white throat, through her red lips pelted a tempest of staccato buglings.

Under them what was left of the Thing leaped, tore on. Norhala’s flaming hair crackled and streamed; about her body of milk and pearl – about Ruth’s creamy skin – a radiant nimbus began to glow.

In the distance I saw a sapphire spark; knew it for Norhala’s home. Not far from it now was the rushing pyramid – and it came to me that within that shape was strangely neither globe nor pyramid. Nor except for the trembling cubes that made the platform on which we stood, did the shrunken Thing carrying us hold any unit of the Metal Monster except its spheres and tetrahedrons – at least within its visible bulk.

The sapphire spark had grown to a glimmering azure marble. Steadily we gained upon the pyramid. Never for an instant ceased that scourging hail of notes from Norhala – never for an instant lessened the drumming clamor that seemed to try to smother them.

The sapphire marble became a sapphire ball, a great globe. I saw the Thing we sought to join lift itself into a prodigious pillar; the pillar’s base thrust forth stilts; upon them the Thing stepped over the blue dome of Norhala’s house.

The blue bubble was close; now it curved below us. Gently we were lifted down; were set before its portal. I looked up at the bulk that had carried us.

I had been right – built it was only of globe and pyramid; an inconceivably grotesque shape, it hung over us.

Throughout the towering Shape was awful movement; its units writhed within it. Then it was lost to sight in the mists through which the Thing we had pursued had gone.

In Norhala’s face as she watched it go was a dismay, a poignant uncertainty, that held in it something indescribably pitiful.

“I am afraid!” I heard her whisper.

She tightened her grasp upon dreaming Ruth; motioned us to go within. We passed, silently; behind us she came, followed by three of the great globes, by a pair of her tetrahedrons.

Beside a pile of the silken stuffs she halted. The girl’s eyes dwelt upon hers trustingly.

“I am afraid!” whispered Norhala again. “Afraid – for you!”

Tenderly she looked down upon her, the galaxies of stars in her eyes soft and tremulous.

“I am afraid, little sister,” she whispered for the third time. “Not yet can you go as I do – among the fires.” She hesitated. “Rest here until I return. I shall leave these to guard you and obey you.”

She motioned to the five shapes. They ranged themselves about Ruth. Norhala kissed her upon both brown eyes.

“Sleep till I return,” she murmured.

She swept from the chamber – with never a glance for us three. I heard a little wailing chorus without, fast dying into silence.

Spheres and pyramids twinkled at us, guarding the silken pile whereon Ruth lay asleep – like some enchanted princess.

Beat down upon the blue globe like hollow metal worlds, beaten and shrieking.

The drums of Destiny!

The drums of Doom!

Beating taps for the world of men?

— XXVIII —

THE FRENZY OF RUTH

For many minutes we stood silent, in the shadowy chamber, listening, each absorbed in his own thoughts. The thunderous drumming was continuous; sometimes it faded into a background for clattering storms as of thousands of machine guns, thousands of riveters at work at once upon a thousand metal frameworks; sometimes it was nearly submerged beneath splitting crashes as of meeting meteors of hollow steel.

But always the drumming persisted, rhythmic, thunderous. Through it all Ruth slept, undisturbed, cheek pillowed in one rounded arm, the two great pyramids erect behind her, watchful; a globe at her feet, a globe at her head, the third sphere poised between her and us, and, like the pyramids – watchful.

What was happening out there – over the edge of the canyon, beyond the portal of the cliffs, behind the veils, in the Pit of the Metal Monster? What was the message of the roaring drums? What the rede of their clamorous runes?

Ventnor stepped by the sentinel globe, bent over the tranced girl. Sphere nor pointed pair stirred; only they watched him – like a palpable thing one felt their watchfulness. He listened to her heart, caught up a wrist, took note of her pulse of life. He drew a deep breath, stood upright, nodded reassuringly.

Abruptly Drake turned, walked out through the open portal, his strain and a very deep anxiety written plainly in deep lines that ran from nostrils to firm young mouth.

“Just went out to look for the pony,” he muttered when he returned. “It’s safe. I was afraid it had been stepped on. It’s getting dusk. There’s a big light down the canyon – over in the valley.”

Ventnor drew back past the globe; rejoined us.

The blue bower trembled under a gust of sound. Ruth stirred; her brows knitted; her hands clenched. The sphere that stood before her spun on its axis, swept up to the globe at her head, glided from it to the globe at her feet – as though whispering. Ruth moaned – her body bent upright, swayed rigidly. Her eyes opened; they stared through us as though upon some dreadful vision; and strangely was it as though she were seeing with another’s eyes, were reflecting another’s sufferings.

The globes at her feet and at her head swirled out, clustering against the third sphere – three weird shapes in silent consultation. On Ventnor’s face I saw pity – and a vast relief. With shocked amaze I realized that Ruth’s agony – for in agony she clearly was – was calling forth in him elation. He spoke – and I knew why.

“Norhala!” he whispered. “She is seeing with Norhala’s eyes – feeling what Norhala feels. It’s not going well with – That – out there. If we dared leave Ruth – could only, see—”

Ruth leaped to her feet; cried out – a golden bugling that might have been Norhala’s own wrathful trumpet notes. Instantly the two pyramids flamed open, became two gleaming stars that bathed her in violet radiance. Beneath their upper tips I saw the blasting ovals glitter – menacingly.

The girl glared at us – more brilliant grew the glittering ovals as though their lightnings trembled on their lips.

“Ruth!” called Ventnor softly.

A shadow softened the intolerable, hard brilliancy of the brown eyes. In them something struggled to arise, fighting its way to the surface like some drowning human thing.

It sank back – upon her face dropped a cloud of heartbreak, appalling woe; the despair of a soul that, having withdrawn all faith in its own kind to rest all faith, as it thought, on angels – sees that faith betrayed.

There stared upon us a stripped spirit, naked and hopeless and terrible.

Despairing, raging, she screamed once more. The central globe swam to her; it raised her upon its back; glided to the doorway. Upon it she stood poised like some youthful, anguished Victory – a Victory who faced and knew she faced destroying defeat; poised upon that enigmatic orb on bare slender feet, one sweet breast bare, hands upraised, virginally archaic, nothing about her of the Ruth we knew.

“Ruth!” cried Drake; despair as great as that upon her face was in his voice. He sprang before the globe that held her; barred its way.

For an instant the Thing paused – and in that instant the human soul of the girl rushed back.

“No!” she cried. “No!”

A weird call issued from the white lips – stumbling, uncertain, as though she who sent it forth herself wondered whence it sprang. Abruptly the angry stars closed. The three globes spun – doubting, puzzled! Again she called – now a tremulous, halting cadence. She was lifted; dropped gently to her feet.

For an instant the globes and pyramids whirled and danced before her – then sped away through the portal.

Ruth swayed, sobbing. Then as though drawn, she ran to the doorway, fled through it. As one we sprang after her. Rods ahead her white body flashed, speeding toward the Pit. Like fleet-footed Atalanta she fled – and far, far behind us was the blue bower, the misty barrier of the veils close, when Drake with a last desperate burst reached her side, gripped her. Down the two fell, rolling upon the smooth roadway. Silently she fought, biting, tearing at Drake, struggling to escape.

“Quick!” gasped Ventnor, stretching out to me an arm. “Cut off the sleeve. Quick!”

Unquestioningly, I drew my knife, ripped the garment at the shoulder. He snatched the sleeve, knelt at Ruth’s head; rapidly he crumpled an end, thrust it roughly into her mouth; tied it fast, gagging her.

“Hold her!” he ordered Drake; and with a sob of relief sprang up. The girl’s eyes blazed at him, filled with hate.

“Cut that other sleeve,” he said; and when I had done so, he knelt again, pinned Ruth down with a knee at her throat, turned her over and knotted her hands behind her. She ceased struggling; gently now he drew up the curly head; swung her upon her back.

“Hold her feet.” He nodded to Drake, who caught the slender bare ankles in his hands.

She lay there, helpless, being unable to use her hands or feet.

“Too little Ruth, and too much Norhala,” said Ventnor, looking up at me. “If she’d only thought to cry out! She could have brought a regiment of those Things down to blast us. And would – if she had thought. You don’t think that is Ruth, do you?”

He pointed to the pallid face glaring at him, the eyes from which cold fires flamed.

“No, you don’t!” He caught Drake by the shoulder, sent him spinning a dozen feet away. “Damn it, Drake – don’t you understand!”

For suddenly Ruth’s eyes softened; she had turned them on Dick pitifully, appealingly – and he had loosed her ankles, had leaned forward as though to draw away the band that covered her lips.

“Your gun,” whispered Ventnor to me; before I had moved he had snatched the automatic from my holster; had covered Drake with it.

“Drake,” he said, “stand where you are. If you take another step toward this girl I’ll shoot you – by God, I will!”

Drake halted, shocked amazement in his face; I myself felt resentful, wondering at his outburst.

“But it’s hurting her,” he muttered, Ruth’s eyes, soft and pleading, still dwelt upon him.

“Hurting her!” exclaimed Ventnor. “Man – she’s my sister! I know what I’m doing. Can’t you see? Can’t you see how little of Ruth is in that body there – how little of the girl you love? How or why I don’t know – but that it is so I do know. Drake – have you forgotten how Norhala beguiled Cherkis? I want my sister back. I’m helping her to get back. Now let be. I know what I’m doing. Look at her!”

We looked. In the face that glared up at Ventnor was nothing of Ruth – even as he had said. There was the same cold, awesome wrath that had rested upon Norhala’s as she watched Cherkis weep over the eating up of his city. Swiftly came a change – like the sudden smoothing out of the rushing waves of a hill-locked, wind-lashed lake.

The face was again Ruth’s face – and Ruth’s alone; the eyes were Ruth’s eyes – supplicating, adjuring.

“Ruth!” Ventnor cried. “While you can hear – am I not right?”

She nodded vigorously, sternly; she was lost, hidden once more.

“You see.” He turned to us grimly.

A shattering shaft of light flashed upon the veils; almost pierced them. An avalanche of sound passed high above us. Yet now I noted that where we stood the clamor was lessened, muffled. Of course, it came to me, it was the veils.

I wondered why – for whatever the quality of the radiant mists, their purpose certainly had to do with concentration of the magnetic flux. The deadening of the noise must be accidental, could have nothing to do with their actual use; for sound is an air vibration solely. No – it must be a secondary effect. The Metal Monster was as heedless of clamor as it was of heat or cold—

“We’ve got to see,” Ventnor broke the chain of thought. “We’ve got to get through and see what’s happening. Win or lose – we’ve got to know.”

“Cut off your sleeve, as I did,” he motioned to Drake. “Tie her ankles. We’ll carry her.”

Quickly it was done. Ruth’s light body swinging between brother and lover, we moved forward into the mists; we crept cautiously through their dead silences.

Passed out and fell back into them from a searing chaos of light, chaotic tumult.

From the slackened grip of Ventnor and Drake the body of Ruth dropped while we three stood blinded, deafened, fighting for recovery. Ruth twisted, rolled toward the brink; Ventnor threw himself upon her, held her fast.

Dragging her, crawling on our knees, we crept forward; we stopped when the thinning of the mists permitted us to see through them yet still interposed a curtaining which, though tenuous, dimmed the intolerable brilliancy that filled the Pit, muffled its din to a degree we could bear.

I peered through them – and nerve and muscle were locked in the grip of a paralyzing awe. I felt then as one would feel set close to warring regiments of stars, made witness to the death-throes of a universe, or swept through space and held above the whirling coils of Andromeda’s nebula to watch its birth agonies of nascent suns.

These are no figures of speech, no hyperboles – speck as our whole planet would be in Andromeda’s vast loom, pinprick as was the Pit to the cyclone craters of our own sun, within the cliff-cupped walls of the valley was a tangible, struggling living force akin to that which dwells within the nebula and the star; a cosmic spirit transcending all dimensions and thrusting its confines out into the infinite; a sentient emanation of the infinite itself.

Nor was its voice less unearthly. It used the shell of the earth valley for its trumpetings, its clangors – but as one hears in the murmurings of the fluted conch the great voice of ocean, its whispering and its roarings, so here in the clamorous shell of the Pit echoed the tremendous voices of that illimitable sea which laps the shores of the countless suns.

I looked upon a mighty whirlpool miles and miles wide. It whirled with surges whose racing crests were smiting incandescences; it was threaded with a spindrift of lightnings; it was trodden by dervish mists of molten flame thrust through with forests of lances of living light. It cast a candent spray high to the heavens.

Over it the heavens glittered as though they were a shield held by fearful gods. Through the maelstrom staggered a mountainous bulk; a gleaming leviathan of pale blue metal caught in the swirling tide of some incredible volcano; a huge ark of metal breasting a deluge of flame.

And the drumming we heard as of hollow beaten metal worlds, the shouting tempests of cannonading stars, was the breaking of these incandescent crests, the falling of the lightning spindrift, the rhythmic impact of the lanced rays upon the glimmering mountain that reeled and trembled as they struck it.

The reeling mountain, the struggling leviathan, was – the City!

It was the mass of the Metal Monster itself, guarded by, stormed by, its own legions that though separate from it were still as much of it as were the cells that formed the skin of its walls, its carapace.

It was the Metal Monster tearing, rending, fighting for, battling against – itself.

Mile high as when I had first beheld it was the inexplicable body that held the great heart of the cones into which had been drawn the magnetic cataracts from our sun; that held too the smaller hearts of the lesser cones, the workshops, the birth chamber and manifold other mysteries unguessed and unseen. By a full fourth had its base been shrunken.

Ranged in double line along the side turned toward us were hundreds of dread forms – Shapes that in their intensity bore down upon, oppressed with a nightmare weight, the consciousness.

Rectangular, upon their outlines no spike of pyramid, no curve of globe showing, uncompromisingly ponderous, they upthrust. Upon the tops of the first rank were enormous masses, sledge shaped – like those metal fists that had battered down the walls of Cherkis’s city but to them as the human hand is to the paw of the dinosaur.

Conceive this – conceive these Shapes as animate and flexible; beating down with the prodigious mallets, smashing from side to side as though the tremendous pillars that held them were thousand jointed upright pistons; that as closely as I can present it in images of things we know is the picture of the Hammering Things.

Behind them stood a second row, high as they and as angular. From them extended scores of girdered arms. These were thickly studded with the flaming cruciform shapes, the opened cubes gleaming with their angry flares of reds and smoky yellows. From the tentacles of many swung immense shields like those which ringed the hall of the great cones.

And as the sledges beat, ever over their bent heads poured from the crosses a flood of crimson lightnings. Out of the concave depths of the shields whipped lashes of blinding flame. With ropes of fire they knouted the Things the sledges struck, the sullen crimson levins blasted.

Now I could see the Shapes that attacked. Grotesque; spined and tusked, spiked and antlered, wenned and breasted; as chimerically angled, cusped and cornute as though they were the superangled, supercornute gods of the cusped and angled gods of the Javanese, they strove against the sledge-headed and smiting, the multi-armed and blasting square towers.

High as them, as huge as they, incomparably fantastic, in dozens of shifting forms they battled.

More than a mile from the stumbling City stood ranged like sharpshooters a host of solid, bristling-legged towers. Upon their tops spun gigantic wheels. Out of the centers of these wheels shot the radiant lances, hosts of spears of intensest violet light. The radiance they volleyed was not continuous; it was broken, so that the javelin rays shot out in rhythmic flights, each flying fast upon the shafts of the others.

It was their impact that sent forth the thunderous drumming. They struck and splintered against the walls, dropping from them in great gouts of molten flame. It was as though before they broke they pierced the wall, the Monster’s side, bled fire.

With the crashing of broadsides of massed batteries the sledges smashed down upon the bristling attackers. Under the awful impact globes and pyramids were shattered into hundreds of fragments, rocket bursts of blue and azure and violet flame, flames rainbowed and irised.

The hammer ends split, flew apart, were scattered, were falling showers of sulphurous yellow and scarlet meteors. But ever other cubes swarmed out and repaired the broken smiting tips. And always where a tusked and cornute shape had been battered down, disintegrated, another arose as huge and as formidable pouring forth upon the squared tower its lightnings, tearing at it with colossal spiked and hooked claws, beating it with incredible spiked and globular fists that were like the clenched hands of some metal Atlas.

As the striving Shapes swayed and wrestled, gave way or thrust forward, staggered or fell, the bulk of the Monster stumbled and swayed, advanced and retreated – an unearthly motion wedded to an amorphous immensity that flooded the watching consciousness with a deathly nausea.

Unceasingly the hail of radiant lances poured from the spinning wheels, falling upon Towered Shapes and City’s wall alike. There arose a prodigious wailing, an unearthly thin screaming. About the bases of the defenders flashed blinding bursts of incandescence – like those which had heralded the flight of the Flying Thing dropping before Norhala’s house.

Unlike them they held no dazzling sapphire brilliancies; they were ochreous, suffused with raging vermilion. Nevertheless they were factors of that same inexplicable action – for from thousands of gushing lights leaped thousands of gigantic square pillars; unimaginable projectiles hurled from the flaming mouths of earth-hidden, titanic mortars.

They soared high, swerved and swooped upon the lance-throwers. Beneath their onslaught those chimerae tottered, I saw living projectiles and living target fuse where they met – melt and weld in jets of lightnings.

But not all. There were those that tore great gaps in the horned giants – wounds that instantly were healed with globes and pyramids seething out from the Cyclopean trunk. Ever the incredible projectiles flashed and flew as though from some inexhaustible store; ever uprose that prodigious barrage against the smiting rays.

Now to check them soared from the ranks of the besiegers clouds of countless horned dragons, immense cylinders of clustered cubes studded with the clinging tetrahedrons. They struck the cubed projectiles head on; aimed themselves to meet them.

Bristling dragon and hurtling pillar stuck and fused or burst with intolerable blazing. They fell – cube and sphere and pyramid – some half opened, some fully, in a rain of disks, of stars, huge flaming crosses; a storm of unimaginable pyrotechnics.

Now I became conscious that within the City – within the body of the Metal Monster – there raged a strife colossal as this without. From it came a vast volcanic roaring. Up from its top shot tortured flames, cascades and fountains of frenzied Things that looped and struggled, writhed over its edge, hurled themselves back; battling chimerae which against the glittering heavens traced luminous symbols of agony.

Shrilled a stronger wailing. Up from behind the ray hurling Towers shot hosts of globes. Thousands of palely azure, metal moons they soared; warrior moons charging in meteor rush and streaming with fluttering battle pennons of violet flame. High they flew; they curved over the mile high back of the Monster; they dropped upon it.

Arose to meet them immense columns of the cubes; battered against the spheres; swept them over and down into the depths. Hundreds fell, broken – but thousands held their place. I saw them twine about the pillars – writhing columns of interlaced cubes and globes straining like monstrous serpents while all along their coils the open disks and crosses smote with the scimitars of their lightnings.

In the wall of the City appeared a shining crack; from top to bottom it ran; it widened into a rift from which a flood of radiance gushed. Out of this rift poured a thousand-foot-high torrent of horned globes.

Only for an instant they flowed. The rift closed upon them, catching those still emerging in a colossal vise. It crunched them. Plain through the turmoil came a dreadful – bursting roar.

Down from the closing jaws of the vise dripped a stream of fragments that flashed and flickered – and died. And now in the wall was no trace of the breach.

A hurricane of radiant lances swept it. Under them a mile wide section of the living scarp split away; dropped like an avalanche. Its fall revealed great spaces, huge vaults and chambers filled with warring lightnings – out from them came roaring, bellowing thunders. Swiftly from each side of the gap a metal curtaining of the cubes joined. Again the wall was whole.

I turned my stunned gaze from the City – swept over the valley. Everywhere, in towers, in writhing coils, in whipping flails, in waves that smote and crashed, in countless forms and combinations the Metal Hordes battled. Here were pillars against which metal billows rushed and were broken; there were metal comets that crashed high above the mad turmoil.

From streaming silent veil to veil – north and south, east and west the Monster slew itself beneath its racing, flaming banners, the tempests of its lightnings.

The tortured hulk of the City lurched; it swept toward us. Before it blotted out from our eyes the Pit I saw that the crystal spans upon the river of jade were gone; that the wondrous jeweled ribbons of its banks were broken.

Closer came the reeling City.

I fumbled for my lenses, focused them upon it. Now I saw that where the radiant lances struck they – killed the blocks blackened under them, became lusterless; the sparkling of the tiny eyes – went out; the metal carapaces crumbled.

Closer to the City – came the Monster; shuddering I lowered the glasses that it might not seem so near.

Down dropped the bristling Shapes that wrestled with the squared Towers. They rose again in a single monstrous wave that rushed to overwhelm them. Before they could strike the City swept closer; had hidden them from me.

Again I raised the glasses. They brought the metal scarp not fifty feet away – within it the hosts of tiny eyes glittered, no longer mocking nor malicious, but insane.

Nearer drew the Monster – nearer.

A thousand feet away it checked its movement, seemed to draw itself together. Then like the roar of a falling world that whole side facing us slid down to the valley’s floor.

— XXIX —

THE PASSING OF NORHALA

Hundreds of feet through must have been the fallen mass – within it who knows what chambers filled with mysteries? Yes, thousands of feet thick it must have been, for the debris of it splintered and lashed to the very edge of the ledge on which we crouched; heaped it with the dimming fragments of the bodies that had formed it.

We looked into a thousand vaults, a thousand spaces. There came another avalanche roaring – before us opened the crater of the cones.

Through the torn gap I saw them, clustering undisturbed about the base of that one slender, coroneted and star pointing spire, rising serene and unshaken from a hell of lightnings. But the shields that had rimmed the crater were gone.

Ventnor snatched the glasses from my hand, leveled and held them long to his eyes.

He thrust them back to me. “Look!”

Through the lenses the great hall leaped into full view apparently only a few yards away. It was a cauldron of chameleon flame. It seethed with the Hordes battling over the remaining walls and floor. But around the crystal base of the cones was an open zone into which none broke.

In that wide ring, girdling the shimmering fantasy like a circled sanctuary, were but three forms. One was the wondrous Disk of jeweled fires I have called the Metal Emperor; the second was the sullen fired cruciform of the Keeper.

The third was Norhala!

She stood at the side of that weird master of hers – or was it after all the servant? Between them and the Keeper’s planes gleamed the gigantic T-shaped tablet of countless rods which controlled the activities of the cones; that had controlled the shifting of the vanished shields; that manipulated too, perhaps, the energies of whatever similar but smaller cornute ganglia were scattered throughout the City and one of which we had beheld when the Emperor’s guards had blasted Ventnor.

Close was Norhala in the lenses – so close that almost, it seemed, I could reach out and touch her. The flaming hair streamed and billowed above her glorious head like a banner of molten floss of coppery gold; her face was a mask of wrath and despair; her great eyes blazed upon the Keeper; her exquisite body was bare, stripped of every shred of silken covering.

From streaming tresses to white feet an oval of pulsing, golden light nimbused her. Maiden Isis, virgin Astarte she stood there, held in the grip of the Disk – like a goddess betrayed and hopeless yet thirsting for vengeance.

For all their stillness, their immobility, it came to me that Emperor and Keeper were at grapple, locked in death grip; the realization was as definite as though, like Ruth, I thought with Norhala’s mind, saw with her eyes.

Clearly too it came to me that in this contest between the two was epitomized all the vast conflict that raged around them; that in it was fast ripening that fruit of destiny of which Ventnor had spoken, and that here in the Hall of the Cones would be settled – and soon – the fate not only of Disk and Cross, but it might be of humanity.

But with what unknown powers was that duel being fought? They cast no lightnings, they battled with no visible weapons. Only the great planes of the inverted cruciform Shape smoked and smoldered with their sullen flares of ochres and of scarlets; while over all the face of the Disk its cold and irised fires raced and shone, beating with a rhythm incredibly rapid; its core of incandescent ruby blazed, its sapphire ovals were cabochoned pools of living, lucent radiance.

There was a splitting roar that arose above all the clamor, deafening us even in the shelter of the silent veils. On each side of the crater whole masses of the City dropped away. Fleetingly I was aware of scores of smaller pits in which uprose lesser replicas of the Coned Mount, lesser reservoirs of the Monster’s force.

Neither the Emperor nor the Keeper moved, both seemingly indifferent to the catastrophe fast developing around them.

Now I strained forward to the very thinnest edge of the curtainings. For between the Disk and Cross began to form fine black mist. It was transparent. It seemed spun of minute translucent ebon corpuscles. It hung like a black shroud suspended by unseen hands. It shook and wavered now toward the Disk, now toward the Cross.

I sensed a keying up of force within the two; knew that each was striving to cast like a net that hanging mist upon the other.

Abruptly the Emperor flashed forth, blindingly. As though caught upon a blast, the black shroud flew toward the Keeper – enveloped it. And as the mist covered and clung I saw the sulphurous and crimson flares dim. They were snuffed out.

The Keeper fell!

Upon Norhala’s face flamed a wild triumph, banishing despair. The outstretched planes of the Cross swept up as though in torment. For an instant its fires flared and licked through the clinging blackness; it writhed half upright, threw itself forward, crashed down prostrate upon the enigmatic tablet which only its tentacles could manipulate.

From Norhala’s face the triumph fled. On its heels rushed stark, incredulous horror.

The Mount of Cones shuddered. From it came a single mighty throb of force – like a prodigious heartbeat. Under that pulse of power the Emperor staggered, spun – and spinning, swept Norhala from her feet, swung her close to its flashing rose.

A second throb pulsed from the cones, and mightier.

A spasm shook the Disk – a paroxysm.

Its fires faded; they flared out again, bathing the floating, unearthly figure of Norhala with their iridescences.

I saw her body writhe – as though it shared the agony of the Shape that held her. Her head twisted; the great eyes, pools of uncomprehending, unbelieving horror, stared into mine.

With a spasmodic, infinitely dreadful movement the Disk closed—

And closed upon her!

Norhala was gone – was shut within it. Crushed to the pent fires of its crystal heart.

I heard a sobbing, agonized choking – knew it was I who sobbed. Against me I felt Ruth’s body strike, bend in convulsive arc, drop inert.

The slender steeple of the cones drooped sending its faceted coronet shattering to the floor. The Mount melted. Beneath the flooding radiance sprawled Keeper and the great inert Globe that was the Goddess woman’s sepulcher.

The crater filled with the pallid luminescence. Faster and ever faster it poured down into the Pit. And from all the lesser craters of the smaller cones swept silent cataracts of the same pale radiance.

The City began to crumble – the Monster to fall.

Like pent-up waters rushing through a broken dam the gleaming deluge swept over the valley; gushing in steady torrents from the breaking mass. Over the valley fell a vast silence. The lightnings ceased. The Metal Hordes stood rigid, the shining flood lapping at their bases, rising swiftly ever higher.

Now from the sinking City swarmed multitudes of its weird luminaries.

Out they trooped, swirling from every rent and gap – orbs scarlet and sapphire, ruby orbs, orbs tuliped and irised – the jocund suns of the birth chamber and side by side with them hosts of the frozen, pale gilt, stiff rayed suns.

Thousands upon thousands they marched forth and poised themselves solemnly over all the Pit that now was a fast rising lake of yellow froth of sun flame.

They swept forth in squadrons, in companies, in regiments, those mysterious orbs. They floated over all the valley; they separated and swung motionless above it as though they were mysterious multiple souls of fire brooding over the dying shell that had held them.

Beneath, thrusting up from the lambent lake like grotesque towers of some drowned fantastic metropolis, the great Shapes stood, black against its glowing.

What had been the City – that which had been the bulk of the Monster – was now only a vast and shapeless hill from which streamed the silent torrents of that released, unknown force which, concentrate and bound, had been the cones.

As though it was the Monster’s shining lifeblood it poured, raising ever higher in its swift flooding the level radiant lake.

Lower and lower sank the immense bulk; squattered and spread, ever lowering – about its helpless, patient crouching something ineffably piteous, something indescribably, cosmically tragic.

Abruptly the watching orbs shook under a hail of sparkling atoms streaming down from the glittering sky; raining upon the lambent lake. So thick they fell that now the brooding luminaries were dim aureoles within them.

From the Pit came a blinding, insupportable brilliancy. From every rigid tower gleamed out jeweled fires; their clinging units opened into blazing star and disk and cross. The City was a hill of living gems over which flowed torrents of pale molten gold.

The Pit blazed.

There followed an appalling tensity; a prodigious gathering of force; a panic stirring concentration of energy. Thicker fell the clouds of sparkling atoms – higher rose the yellow flood.

Ventnor cried out. I could not hear him, but I read his purpose – and so did Drake. Up on his broad shoulders he swung Ruth as though she had been a child. Back through the throbbing veils we ran; passed out of them.

“Back!” shouted Ventnor. “Back as far as you can!”

On we raced; we reached the gateway of the cliffs; we dashed on and on – up the shining roadway toward the blue globe now a scant mile before us; ran sobbing, panting – ran, we knew, for our lives.

Out of the Pit came a sound – I cannot describe it!

An unutterably desolate, dreadful wail of despair, it shuddered past us like the groaning of a broken-hearted star – anguished and awesome.

It died. There rushed upon us a sea of that incredible loneliness, that longing for extinction that had assailed us in the haunted hollow where first we had seen Norhala. But its billows were resistless, invincible. Beneath them we fell; were torn by desire for swift death.

Dimly, through fainting eyes, I saw a dazzling brilliancy fill the sky; heard with dying ears a chaotic, blasting roar. A wave of air thicker than water caught us up, hurled us hundreds of yards forward. It dropped us; in its wake rushed another wave, withering, scorching.

It raced over us. Scorching though it was, within its heat was energizing, revivifying force; something that slew the deadly despair and fed the fading fires of life.

I staggered to my feet; looked back. The veils were gone. The precipice walled gateway they had curtained was filled with a Plutonic glare as though it opened into the incandescent heart of a volcano.

Ventnor clutched my shoulder, spun me around. He pointed to the sapphire house, started to run to it. Far ahead I saw Drake, the body of the girl clasped to his breast. The heat became blasting, insupportable; my lungs burned.

Over the sky above the canyon streaked a serpentine chain of lightnings. A sudden cyclonic gust swept the cleft, whirling us like leaves toward the Pit.

I threw myself upon my face, clutching at the smooth rock. A volley of thunder burst – but not the thunder of the Metal Monster or its Hordes; no, the bellowing of the levins of our own earth.

And the wind was cold; it bathed the burning skin; laved the fevered lungs.

Again the sky was split by the lightnings. And roaring down from it in solid sheets came the rain.

From the Pit arose a hissing as though within it raged Babylonian Tiamat, Mother of Chaos, serpent dweller in the void; Midgard-snake of the ancient Norse holding in her coils the world.

Buffeted by wind, beaten down by rain, clinging to each other like drowning men, Ventnor and I pushed on to the elfin globe. The light was dying fast. By it we saw Drake pass within the portal with his burden. The light became embers; it went out; blackness clasped us. Guided by the lightnings, we beat our way to the door; passed through it.

In the electric glare we saw Drake bending over Ruth. In it I saw a slide draw over the open portal through which shrieked the wind, streamed the rain.

As though its crystal panel was moved by unseen, gentle hands, the portal closed; the tempest shut out.

We dropped beside Ruth upon a pile of silken stuffs – awed, marveling, trembling with pity and – thanksgiving.

For we knew – each of us knew with an absolute definiteness as we crouched there among the racing, dancing black and silver shadows with which the lightnings filled the blue globe – that the Metal Monster was dead.

Slain by itself!

— XXX —

BURNED OUT

Ruth sighed and stirred. By the glare of the lightnings, now almost continuous, we saw that her rigidity, and in fact all the puzzling cataleptic symptoms, had disappeared. Her limbs relaxed, her skin faintly flushed, she lay in deepest but natural slumber undisturbed by the incessant cannonading of the thunder under which the walls of the blue globe shuddered. Ventnor passed through the curtains of the central hall; he returned with one of Norhala’s cloaks; covered the girl with it.

An overwhelming sleepiness took possession of me, a weariness ineffable. Nerve and brain and muscle suddenly relaxed, went slack and numb. Without a struggle I surrendered to an overpowering stupor and cradled deep in its heart ceased consciously to be.

When my eyes unclosed the chamber of the moonstone walls was filled with a silvery, crepuscular light. I heard the murmuring and laughing of running water, the play, I lazily realized, of the fountained pool.

I lay for whole minutes unthinking, luxuriating in the sense of tension gone and of security; lay steeped in the aftermath of complete rest. Memory flooded me.

Quietly I sat up; Ruth still slept, breathing peacefully beneath the cloak, one white arm stretched over the shoulder of Drake – as though in her sleep she had drawn close to him.

At her feet lay Ventnor, as deep in slumber as they. I arose and tip-toed over to the closed door.

Searching, I found its key; a cupped indentation upon which I pressed.

The crystalline panel slipped back; it was moved, I suppose, by some mechanism of counterbalances responding to the weight of the hand. It must have been some vibration of the thunder which had loosed that mechanism and had closed the panel upon the heels of our entrance – so I thought – then seeing again in memory that uncanny, deliberate shutting was not at all convinced that it had been the thunder.

I looked out. How many hours the sun had been up there was no means of knowing.

The sky was low and slaty gray; a fine rain was falling. I stepped out.

The garden of Norhala was a wreckage of uprooted and splintered trees and torn masses of what had been blossoming verdure.

The gateway of the precipices beyond which lay the Pit was hidden in the webs of the rain. Long I gazed down the canyon – and longingly; striving to picture what the Pit now held; eager to read the riddles of the night.

There came from the valley no sound, no movement, no light.

I reentered the blue globe and paused on the threshold – staring into the wide and wondering eyes of Ruth bolt upright in her silken bed with Norhala’s cloak clutched to her chin like a suddenly awakened and startled child. As she glimpsed me she stretched out her hand. Drake, wide awake on the instant, leaped to his feet, his hand jumping to his pistol.

“Dick!” called Ruth, her voice tremulous, sweet.

He swung about, looked deep into the clear and fearless brown eyes in which – with leaping heart I realized it – was throned only that spirit which was Ruth’s and Ruth’s alone; Ruth’s clear unshadowed eyes glad and shy and soft with love.

“Dick!” she whispered, and held soft arms out to him. The cloak fell from her. He swung her up. Their lips met.

Upon them, embraced, the wakening eyes of Ventnor dwelt; they filled with relief and joy, nor was there lacking in them a certain amusement.

She drew from Drake’s arms, pushed him from her, stood for a moment shakily, with covered eyes.

“Ruth,” called Ventnor softly.

“Oh!” she cried. “Oh, Martin – I forgot—” She ran to him, held him tight, face hidden in his breast. His hand rested on the clustering brown curls, tenderly.

“Martin.” She raised her face to him. “Martin, it’s gone! I’m – me again! All me! What happened? Where’s Norhala?”

I started. Did she not know? Of course, lying bound as she had in the vanished veils, she could have seen nothing of the stupendous tragedy enacted beyond them – but had not Ventnor said that possessed by the inexplicable obsession evoked by the weird woman Ruth had seen with her eyes, thought with her mind?

And had there not been evidence that in her body had been echoed the torments of Norhala’s? Had she forgotten? I started to speak – was checked by Ventnor’s swift, warning glance.

“She’s – over in the Pit,” he answered her quietly. “But do you remember nothing, little sister?”

“There’s something in my mind that’s been rubbed out,” she replied. “I remember the City of Cherkis – and your torture, Martin – and my torture—”

Her face whitened; Ventnor’s brow contracted anxiously. I knew for what he watched – but Ruth’s shamed face was all human; on it was no shadow nor trace of that alien soul which so few hours since had threatened us.

“Yes,” she nodded, “I remember that. And I remember how Norhala repaid them. I remember that I was glad, fiercely glad, and then I was tired – so tired. And then – I come to the rubbed-out place,” she ended perplexedly.

Deliberately, almost banally had I not realized his purpose, he changed the subject. He held her from him at arm’s length.

“Ruth!” he exclaimed, half mockingly, half reprovingly. “Don’t you think your morning negligee is just a little scanty even for this Godforsaken corner of the earth?”

Lips parted in sheer astonishment, she looked at him. Then her eyes dropped to her bare feet, her dimpled knees. She clasped her arms across her breasts; rosy red turned all her fair skin.

“Oh!” she gasped. “Oh!” And hid from Drake and me behind the tall figure of her brother.

I walked over to the pile of silken stuffs, took the cloak and tossed it to her. Ventnor pointed to the saddlebags.

“You’ve another outfit there, Ruth,” he said. “We’ll take a turn through the place. Call us when you’re ready. We’ll get something to eat and go see what’s happening – out there.”

She nodded. We passed through the curtains and out of the hall into the chamber that had been Norhala’s. There we halted, Drake eyeing Martin with a certain embarrassment. The older man thrust out his hand to him.

“I knew it, Drake,” he said. “Ruth told me all about it when Cherkis had us. And I’m very glad. It’s time she was having a home of her own and not running around the lost places with me. I’ll miss her – miss her damnably, of course. But I’m glad, boy – glad!”

There was a little silence while each looked deep into each other’s hearts. Then Ventnor dropped Dick’s hand.

“And that’s all of that,” he said. “The problem before us is – how are we going to get back home?”

“The – thing – is dead.” I spoke from an absolute conviction that surprised me, based as it was upon no really tangible, known evidence.

“I think so,” he said. “No – I know so. Yet even if we can pass over its body, how can we climb out of its lair? That slide down which we rode with Norhala is unclimbable. The walls are unscalable. And there is that chasm – she – spanned for us. How can we cross that? The tunnel to the ruins was sealed. There remains of possible roads the way through the forest to what was the City of Cherkis. Frankly I am loathe to take it.

“I am not at all sure that all the armored men were slain – that some few may not have escaped and be lurking there. It would be short shrift for us if we fell into their hands now.”

“And I’m not sure of that,” objected Drake. “I think their pep and push must be pretty thoroughly knocked out – if any do remain. I think if they saw us coming they’d beat it so fast that they’d smoke with the friction.”

“There’s something to that,” Ventnor smiled. “Still I’m not keen on taking the chance. At any rate, the first thing to do is to see what happened down there in the Pit. Maybe we’ll have some other idea after that.”

“I know what happened there,” announced Drake, surprisingly. “It was a short circuit!”

We gaped at him, mystified.

“Burned out!” said Drake. “Every damned one of them – burned out. What were they, after all? A lot of living dynamos. Dynamotors – rather. And all of a sudden they had too much juice turned on. Bang went their insulations – whatever they were.

“Bang went they. Burned out – short circuited. I don’t pretend to know why or how. Nonsense! I do know. The cones were some kind of immensely concentrated force – electric, magnetic; either or both or more. I myself believe that they were probably solid – in a way of speaking – coronium.

“If about twenty of the greatest scientists the world has ever known are right, coronium is – well, call it curdled energy. The electric potentiality of Niagara in a pin point of dust of yellow fire. All right – they or it lost control. Every pin point swelled out into a Niagara. And as it did so, it expanded from a controlled dust dot to an uncontrolled cataract – in other words, its energy was unleashed and undammed.

“Very well – what followed? What had to follow? Every living battery of block and globe and spike was supercharged and went – blooey. The valley must have been some sweet little volcano while that short circuiting was going on. All right – let’s go down and see what it did to your unclimbable slide and unscalable walls, Ventnor. I’m not sure we won’t be able to get out that way.”

“Come on; everything’s ready,” Ruth was calling; her summoning blocked any objection we might have raised to Drake’s argument.

It was no dryad, no distressed pagan clad maid we saw as we passed back into the room of the pool. In knickerbockers and short skirt, prim and self-possessed, rebellious curls held severely in place by close-fitting cap and slender feet stoutly shod, Ruth hovered over the steaming kettle swung above the spirit lamp.

And she was very silent as we hastily broke fast. Nor when we had finished did she go to Drake. She clung close to her brother and beside him as we set forth down the roadway, through the rain, toward the ledge between the cliffs where the veils had shimmered.

Hotter and hotter it grew as we advanced; the air steamed like a Turkish bath. The mists clustered so thickly that at last we groped forward step by step, holding to each other.

“No use,” gasped Ventnor. “We couldn’t see. We’ll have to turn back.”

“Burned out!” said Dick. “Didn’t I tell you? The whole valley was a volcano. And with that deluge falling in it – why wouldn’t there be a fog? It’s why there is a fog. We’ll have to wait until it clears.”

We trudged back to the blue globe.

All that day the rain fell. Throughout the few remaining hours of daylight we wandered over the house of Norhala, examining its most interesting contents, or sat theorizing, discussing all phases of the phenomena we had witnessed.

We told Ruth what had occurred after she had thrown in her lot with Norhala; and of the enigmatic struggle between the glorious Disk and the sullenly flaming Thing I have called the Keeper.

We told her of the entombment of Norhala.

When she heard that she wept.

“She was sweet,” she sobbed; “she was lovely. And she was beautiful. Dearly she loved me. I know she loved me. Oh, I know that we and ours and that which was hers could not share the world together. But it comes to me that Earth would have been far less poisonous with those that were Norhala’s than it is with us and ours!”

Weeping, she passed through the curtainings, going we knew to Norhala’s chamber.

It was a strange thing indeed that she had said, I thought, watching her go. That the garden of the world would be far less poisonous blossoming with those Things of wedded crystal and metal and magnetic fires than fertile as now with us of flesh and blood and bone. To me came appreciations of their harmonies, and mingled with those perceptions were others of humanity – disharmonious, incoordinate, ever struggling, ever striving to destroy itself—

There was a plaintive whinnying at the open door. A long and hairy face, a pair of patient, inquiring eyes looked in. It was a pony. For a moment it regarded us – and then trotted trustfully through; ambled up to us; poked its head against my side.

It had been ridden by one of the Persians whom Ruth had killed, for under it, slipped from the girths, a saddle dangled. And its owner must have been kind to it – we knew that from its lack of fear for us. Driven by the tempest of the night before, it had been led back by instinct to the protection of man.

“Some luck!” breathed Drake.

He busied himself with the pony, stripping away the hanging saddle, grooming it.

— XXXI —

SLAG!

That night we slept well. Awakening, we found that the storm had grown violent again; the wind roaring and the rain falling in such volume that it was impossible to make our way to the Pit. Twice, as a matter of fact, we tried; but the smooth roadway was a torrent, and, drenched even through our oils to the skin, we at last abandoned the attempt. Ruth and Drake drifted away together among the other chambers of the globe; they were absorbed in themselves, and we did not thrust ourselves upon them. All the day the torrents fell.

We sat down that night to what was well-nigh the last of Ventnor’s stores. Seemingly Ruth had forgotten Norhala; at least, she spoke no more of her.

“Martin,” she said, “can’t we start back tomorrow? I want to get away. I want to get back to our own world.”

“As soon as the storm ceases, Ruth,” he answered, “we start. Little sister – I too want you to get back quickly.”

The next morning the storm had gone. We awakened soon after dawn into clear and brilliant light. We had a silent and hurried breakfast. The saddlebags were packed and strapped upon the pony. Within them were what we could carry of souvenirs from Norhala’s home – a suit of lacquered armor, a pair of cloaks and sandals, the jeweled combs. Ruth and Drake at the side of the pony, Ventnor and I leading, we set forth toward the Pit.

“We’ll probably have to come back, Walter,” he said. “I don’t believe the place is passable.”

I pointed – we were then just over the threshold of the elfin globe. Where the veils had stretched between the perpendicular pillars of the cliffs was now a wide and ragged-edged opening.

The roadway which had run so smoothly through the scarps was blocked by a thousand foot barrier. Over it, beyond it, I could see through the crystalline clarity of the air the opposing walls.

“We can climb it,” Ventnor said. We passed on and reached the base of the barrier. An avalanche had dropped there; the barricade was the debris of the torn cliffs, their dust, their pebbles, their boulders. We toiled up; we reached the crest; we looked down upon the valley.

When first we had seen it we had gazed upon a sea of radiance pierced with lanced forests, swept with gigantic gonfalons of flame; we had seen it emptied of its fiery mists – a vast slate covered with the chirography of a mathematical god; we had seen it filled with the symboling of the Metal Hordes and dominated by the colossal integrate hieroglyph of the living City; we had seen it as a radiant lake over which brooded weird suns; a lake of yellow flame froth upon which a sparkling hail fell, within which reared islanded towers and a drowning mount running with cataracts of sun fires; here we had watched a goddess woman, a being half of earth, half of the unknown immured within a living tomb – a dying tomb – of flaming mysteries; had seen a cross-shaped metal Satan, a sullen flaming crystal Judas betray – itself.

Where we had peered into the unfathomable, had glimpsed the infinite, had heard and had seen the inexplicable, now was—

Slag!

The amethystine ring from which had been streamed the circling veils was cracked and blackened; like a seam of coal it had stretched around the Pit – a crown of mourning. The veils were gone. The floor of the valley was fissured and blackened; its patterns, its writings burned away. As far as we could see stretched a sea of slag – coal black, vitrified and dead.

Here and there black hillocks sprawled; huge pillars arose, bent and twisted as though they had been jettings of lava cooled into rigidity before they could sink back or break. These shapes clustered most thickly around an immense calcified mound. They were what were left of the battling Hordes, and the mound was what had been the Metal Monster.

Somewhere there were the ashes of Norhala, sealed by fire in the urn of the Metal Emperor!

From side to side of the Pit, in broken beaches and waves and hummocks, in blackened, distorted tusks and warped towerings, reaching with hideous pathos in thousands of forms toward the charred mound, was only slag.

From rifts and hollows still filled with water little wreaths of steam drifted. In those futile wraiths of vapor was all that remained of the might of the Metal Monster.

Catastrophe I had expected, tragedy I knew we would find – but I had looked for nothing so filled with the abomination of desolation, so frightful as was this.

“Burned out!” muttered Drake. “Short-circuited and burned out! Like a dynamo – like an electric light!”

“Destiny!” said Ventnor. “Destiny! Not yet was the hour struck for man to relinquish his sovereignty over the world. Destiny!”

We began to pick our way down the heaped debris and out upon the plain. For all that day and part of another we searched for an opening out of the Pit.

Everywhere was the incredible calcification. The surfaces that had been the smooth metallic carapaces with the tiny eyes deep within them, crumbled beneath the lightest blow. Not long would it be until under wind and rain they dissolved into dust and mud.

And it grew increasingly obvious that Drake’s theory of the destruction was correct. The Monster had been one prodigious magnet – or, rather, a prodigious dynamo. By magnetism, by electricity, it had lived and had been activated.

Whatever the force of which the cones were built and that I have likened to energy-made material, it was certainly akin to electromagnetic energies.

When, in the cataclysm, that force was diffused there had been created a magnetic field of incredible intensity; had been concentrated an electric charge of inconceivable magnitude.

Discharging, it had blasted the Monster – short-circuited it, and burned it out.

But what was it that had led up to the cataclysm? What was it that had turned the Metal Monster upon itself? What disharmony had crept into that supernal order to set in motion the machinery of disintegration?

We could only conjecture. The cruciform Shape I have named the Keeper was the agent of destruction – of that there could be no doubt. In the enigmatic organism which while many still was one and which, retaining its integrity as a whole could dissociate manifold parts yet still as a whole maintain an unseen contact and direction over them through miles of space, the Keeper had its place, its work, its duties.

So too had that wondrous Disk whose visible and concentrate power, whose manifest leadership, had made us name it emperor.

And had not Norhala called the Disk – Ruler?

What were the responsibilities of these twain to the mass of the organism of which they were such important units? What were the laws they administered, the laws they must obey?

Something certainly of that mysterious law which Maeterlinck has called the spirit of the Hive – and something infinitely greater, like that which governs the swarming sun bees of Hercules’ clustered orbs.

Had there evolved within the Keeper of the Cones – guardian and engineer as it seemed to have been – ambition?

Had there risen within it a determination to wrest power from the Disk, to take its place as Ruler?

How else explain that conflict I had sensed when the Emperor had plucked Drake and me from the Keeper’s grip that night following the orgy of the feeding?

How else explain that duel in the shattered Hall of the Cones whose end had been the signal for the final cataclysm?

How else explain the alinement of the cubes behind the Keeper against the globes and pyramids remaining loyal to the will of the Disk?

We discussed this, Ventnor and I.

“This world,” he mused, “is a place of struggle. Air and sea and land and all things that dwell within and on them must battle for life. Earth not Mars is the planet of war. I have a theory” – he hesitated – “that the magnetic currents which are the nerve force of this globe of ours were what fed the Metal Things.

“Within those currents is the spirit of earth. And always they have been supercharged with strife, with hatreds, warfare. Were these drawn in by the Things as they fed? Did it happen that the Keeper became – tuned – to them? That it absorbed and responded to them, growing even more sensitive to these forces – until it reflected humanity?”

“Who knows, Goodwin – who can tell?”

Enigma, unless the explanations I have hazarded be accepted, must remain that monstrous suicide. Enigma, save for inconclusive theories, must remain the question of the Monster’s origin.

If answers there were, they were lost forever in the slag we trod.

It was afternoon of the second day that we found a rift in the blasted wall of the valley. We decided to try it. We had not dared to take the road by which Norhala had led us into the City.

The giant slide was broken and climbable. But even if we could have passed safely through the tunnel of the abyss there still was left the chasm over which we could have thrown no bridge. And if we could have bridged it still at that road’s end was the cliff whose shaft Norhala had sealed with her lightnings.

So we entered the rift.

Of our wanderings thereafter I need not write. From the rift we emerged into a maze of the valleys, and after a month in that wilderness, living upon what game we could shoot, we found a road that led us into Gyantse.

In another six weeks we were home in America.

My story is finished.

There in the Trans-Himalayan wilderness is the blue globe that was the weird home of the lightning witch – and looking back I feel now she could not have been all woman.

There is the vast pit with its coronet of fantastic peaks; its symboled, calcined floor and the crumbling body of the inexplicable, the incredible Thing which, alive, was the shadow of extinction, annihilation, hovering to hurl itself upon humanity. That shadow is gone; that pall withdrawn.

But to me – to each of us four who saw those phenomena – their lesson remains, ineradicable; giving a new strength and purpose to us, teaching us a new humility.

For in that vast crucible of life of which we are so small a part, what other Shapes may even now be rising to submerge us?

In that vast reservoir of force that is the mystery-filled infinite through which we roll, what other shadows may be speeding upon us?

Who knows?

— THE END —

FOOTNOTES

[01]  Professor Jacques Loeb, of the Rockefeller Institute, New York, “The Mechanistic Conception of Life.”

[02]  J. W. Gregory, F.R.S.D.Sc., Professor of Geology, University of Glasgow.

[03]  Professor Svante Arrhenius’s theory of propagation of life by means of minute spores carried through space. See his “Worlds in the Making.” – W. T. G.

[04]   William Beebe, Atlantic Monthly, October, 1919.

[05]  See “The Moon Pool” and “The Conquest of the Moon Pool.”

Serialized in
Argosy All-Story Weekly, 7-28 Aug 1920

Reprinted in
Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Aug 1941

First book edition:
Avon Book Company, New York, 1946

THE  SHIP  OF  ISHTAR

PART ONE

— I —

THE COMING OF THE SHIP

A tendril of the strange fragrance spiraled up from the great stone block. Kenton felt it caress his face like a coaxing hand.

He had been aware of that fragrance – an alien perfume, subtly troubling, evocative of fleeting unfamiliar images, of thought-wisps that were gone before the mind could grasp them – ever since he had unsheathed from its coverings the thing Forsyth, the old archaeologist, had sent him from the sand shrouds of ages-dead Babylon.

Once again his eyes measured the block – four feet long, a little more than that in height, a trifle less in width. A faded yellow, its centuries hung about it like a half visible garment. On one face only was there inscription, a dozen parallel lines of archaic cuneiform; carved there, if Forsyth were right in his deductions, in the reign of Sargon of Akkad, sixty centuries ago. The surface of the stone was scarred and pitted and the wedge-shaped symbols mutilated, half obliterated.

Kenton leaned closer over it, and closer around him wound the scented spirals clinging like scores of tendrils, clinging like little fingers, wistful, supplicating, pleading—

Pleading for release! What nonsense was this he was dreaming? Kenton drew himself up. A hammer lay close at hand; he lifted it and struck the block, impatiently.

The block answered the blow!

It murmured; the murmuring grew louder; louder still, with faint bell tones like distant carillons of jade. The murmurings ceased, now they were only high, sweet chimings; clearer, ever more clear they rang, drawing closer, winging up through endless corridors of time.

There was a sharp crackling. The block split. From the break pulsed a radiance as of rosy pearls and with it wave after wave of the fragrance – no longer questing, no longer wistful nor supplicating.

Jubilant now! Triumphant!

Something was inside the block! Something that had lain hidden there since Sargon of Akkad, six thousand years go!

The carillons of jade rang out again. Sharply they pealed, then turned and fled back the endless corridors up which they had come. They died away; and as they died the block collapsed; it disintegrated; it became a swirling, slowly settling cloud of sparkling dust.

The cloud whirled, a vortex of glittering mist. It vanished like a curtain plucked away.

Where the block had been stood – a ship!

It floated high on a base of curving waves cut from lapis lazuli and foam-crested with milky rock crystals. Its hull was of crystal, creamy and faintly luminous. Its prow was shaped like a slender scimitar, bent backward. Under the incurved tip was a cabin whose seaward sides were formed, galleon fashion, by the upward thrust of the bows. Where the hull drew up to form this cabin, a faint flush warmed and cloudy crystal; it deepened as the sides lifted; it gleamed at last with a radiance that turned the cabin into a rosy jewel.

In the center of the ship, taking up a third of its length, was a pit; down from the bow to its railed edge sloped a deck of ivory. The deck that sloped similarly from the stern was jet black. Another cabin rested there, larger than that at the bow, but squat and ebon. Both decks continued in wide platforms on each side of the pit. At the middle of the ship the ivory and black decks met with an odd suggestion of contending forces. They did not fade into each other. They ended there abruptly, edge to edge; hostile.

Out of the pit arose a rail mast: tapering and green as the core of an immense emerald. From its cross-sticks a wide sail stretched, shimmering like silk spun from fire opals: from mast and yards fell stays of twisted dull gold.

Out from each side of the ship swept a single bank of seven great oars, their scarlet blades dipped deep within the pearl-crested lapis of the waves.

And the jeweled craft was manned! Why, Kenton wondered, had he not noticed the tiny figures before?

It was as though they had just arisen from the deck… a woman had slipped out of the rosy cabin’s door, an arm was still outstretched in its closing… and there were other women shapes upon the ivory deck, three of them, crouching… their heads were bent low; two clasped harps and the third held a double flute…

Little figures, not more than two inches high…

Toys!

Odd that he could not distinguish their faces, nor the details of their dress. The boys were indistinct, blurred, as though a veil covered them. Kenton told himself that the blurring was the fault of his eyes; he closed them for a moment.

Opening them he looked down upon the black cabin and stared with deepening perplexity. The black deck had been empty when first the ship had appeared – that he could have sworn.

Now four manikins were clustered there – close to the edge of the pit!

And the baffling haze around the toys was denser. Of course it must be his eyes – what else? He would lie down for a while and rest them. He turned, reluctantly; he walked slowly to the door; he paused there, uncertainly, to look back at the shining mystery—

All the room beyond the ship was hidden by the haze!

Kenton heard a shrilling as of armies of storm; a roaring as of myriads or tempests; a shrieking chaos as though down upon him swept cataracts of mighty winds.

The room split into thousands of fragments; dissolved. Clear through the clamor came the sound of a bell – one – two – thr—

He knew that bell. It was his clock ringing out the hour of six. The third note was cut in twain.

The solid floor on which he stood melted away. He felt himself suspended in space, a space filled with mists of silver.

The mists melted.

Kenton caught a glimpse of a vast blue wave-crested ocean – another of the deck of a ship flashing by a dozen feet below him.

He felt a sudden numbing shock, a blow upon his right temple. Splintered lightnings veined a blackness that wiped out sight of sea and ship.

— II —

THE FIRST ADVENTURE

Kenton lay listening to a soft whispering, persistent and continuous. It was like the breaking crests of sleepy waves. The sound was all about him; a rippling susurration becoming steadily more insistent. A light beat through his closed lids. He felt motion under him, a gentle, cradling lift and fall. He opened his eyes.

He was on a ship; lying on a narrow deck, his head against the bulwarks. In front of him was a mast rising out of a pit. Inside the pit were chained men straining at great oars. The mast seemed to be of wood covered with translucent, emerald lacquer. It stirred reluctant memories.

Where had he seen such a mast before?

His gaze crept up the mast. There was a wide sail; a sail made of opaled silk. Low overhead hung a sky that was all a soft mist of silver.

He heard a woman’s voice, deep toned, liquidly golden. Kenton sat up, dizzily. At his right was a cabin nestling under the curved tip of a scimitared prow; it gleamed rosily. A balcony ran round its top; little trees blossomed on that balcony; doves with feet and bills crimson as though dipped in wine of rubies fluttered snowy wings among the branches.

At the cabin’s door stood a woman, tall, willow-lithe, staring beyond him. At her feet crouched three girls. Two of them clasped harps, the other held to her lips a double flute. Again the reluctant memories stirred and fled and were forgotten as Kenton’s gaze fastened upon the woman.

Her wide eyes were green as depths of forest glens, and like them they were filled with drifting shadows. Her head was small; the features fine; the red mouth delicately amorous. In the hollow of her throat a dimple lay; a chalice for kisses and empty of them and eager to be filled. Above her brows was set a silver crescent, slim as a newborn moon. Over each horn of the crescent poured a flood of red-gold hair, framing the lovely face; the flood streamed over and was parted by her tilted breasts; it fell in ringlets almost to her sandalled feet.

As young as Spring, she seemed – yet wise as Autumn; Primavera of some archaic Botticelli – but Mona Lisa too; if virginal in body, certainly not in soul.

He followed her gaze. It led him across the pit of the oarsmen. Four men stood there. One was taller by a head than Kenton, and built massively. His pale eyes stared unwinkingly at the woman; menacing; malignant. His face was beardless and pallid. His huge and flattened head was shaven; his nose vulture-beaked; from his shoulders black robes fell, shrouding him to feet. Two shaven heads were at his left, wiry, wolfish, black-robed; each of them held a brazen, conch-shaped horn.

On the last of the group Kenton’s eyes lingered, fascinated. This man squatted, his pointed chin resting on a tall drum whose curved sides glittered scarlet and jet with the polished scales of some great snake. His legs were sturdy but dwarfed – his torso that of a giant, knotted and gnarled, prodigiously powerful. His ape-like arms were wound around the barreled tambour; spider-like were the long fingers standing on their tips upon the drum head.

It was his face that held Kenton. Sardonic and malicious – there was in it none of the evil concentrate in the others. The wide slit of his mouth was frog-like and humor was on the thin lips. His deep set, twinkling black eyes dwelt upon the crescented woman with frank admiration. From the lobes of his outstanding ears hung disks of hammered gold.

The woman paced swiftly down toward Kenton. When she halted he could have reached out a hand and touched her. Yet she did not seem to see him.

“Ho – Klaneth!” she cried. “I hear the voice of Ishtar. She is coming to her ship. Are you ready to do her homage, Slime of Nergal?”

A flicker of hate passed over the massive man’s pallid face like a little wave from hell.

“This is Ishtar’s Ship,” he answered, “yet my Dread Lord has claim upon it too, Sharane? The House of the Goddess brims with light – but tell me, does not Nergal’s shadow darken behind me?”

And Kenton saw that the deck on which were these men was black as polished jet and again memory strove to make itself heard.

A sudden wind smote the ship, like an open hand, heeling it. From the doves within the trees of the rosy cabin broke a tumult of cries; they flew up like a white cloud flecked with crimson; they fluttered around the woman.

The ape-like arms of the drummer unwrapped, his spidery fingers poised over the head of the snake drum. Darkness deepened about him and hid him; darkness cloaked all the ship’s stern.

Kenton felt the gathering of unknown forces. He slid down, upon his haunches, pressed himself against the bulwarks.

From the deck of the rosy cabin blared a golden trumpeting; defiant; inhuman. He turned his head, and on it the hair lifted and prickled.

Resting on the rosy cabin was a great orb, an orb like the moon at full; but not, like the moon, white and cold – an orb alive with pulsing roseate candescence. Over the ship it poured its rays and where the woman called Sharane had been was now – no woman!

Bathed in the orb’s rays she loomed gigantic. The lids of her eyes were closed, yet through those closed lids eyes glared! Plainly Kenton saw them – eyes hard as jade, glaring through the closed lids as though those lids had been gossamer! The slender crescent upon her brows was an arc of living fire, and all about it the masses of her red-gold hair beat and tossed.

Round and round, in clamorous rings above the ship, wheeled the cloud of doves, snowy wings beating, red beaks open; screaming.

Within the blackness of the ship’s stern roared the thunder of the serpent drum.

The blackness thinned. A face stared out, half veiled, bodiless, floating in the shadow. It was the face of the man Klaneth – and yet no more his than that which challenged it was the woman Sharane’s. The pale eyes had become twin pools of hell flames; pupilless. For a heart beat the face hovered, framed by the darkness. The shadow dropped over it and hid it.

Now Kenton saw that this shadow hung like a curtain over the exact center of the ship, and that he crouched hardly ten feet distant from where that curtain cut the craft in twain. The deck on which he lay was pale ivory and again memory stirred but did not awaken. The radiance from the roseate orb struck against the curtain of shadow and made upon it a disk, wider than the ship, that was like a web of beams spun from the rays of a rosy moon. Against this shining web the shadow pressed, straining to break through.

From the black deck the thunder of the serpent drum redoubled; the brazen conches shrieked. Drum-thunder and shrieking horn mingled; they became the pulse of Abaddon, lair of the damned.

From Sharane’s three women, shot storm of harpings, arpeggios like gusts of tiny arrows and with them shrill javelin pipings from the double flute. Arrows and javelins of sound cut through the thunder hammering of the drum and the bellow of the horns, sapping them, beating them back.

A movement began within the shadow. It seethed. It spawned.

Over the face of the disk of radiance black shapes swarmed. Their bodies were like monstrous larva, slugs; faceless. They tore at the web; stove to thrust through it; flailed it.

The web gave!

Its edge held firm, but slowly the center was pushed back until the disk was like the half of a huge hollow sphere. Within that hollow crawled and writhed and struck the monstrous shapes. From the black deck serpent drum and brazen horns bellowed triumph.

Again rang the golden trumpet cry from the deck of ivory. Out of the orb streamed an incandescence intolerable. The edges of the web shot forward and curved.

They closed upon the black spawn; within it the black spawn milled and struggled like fish in a net. Like a net lifted by some mighty hand the web swung high up above the ship. Its brightness grew to match that of the orb. From netted shapes of blackness came a faint, high-pitched, obscene wailing. They shrank, dissolved, were gone.

The net opened. Out of it drifted a little cloud of ebon dust.

The web streamed back into the orb that had sent it forth.

Then, swiftly, the orb was gone! Gone too was the shadow that had shrouded the black deck. High above the ship the snowy doves circled, screaming victory.

A hand touched Kenton’s shoulder. He looked up into the shadowy eyes of the woman called Sharane; no goddess now, only woman. In her eyes he read amazement, startled disbelief.

Kenton sprang to his feet. A thrust of blinding pain shot through his head. The deck whirled round him. He tried to master the dizziness; he could not. Dizzily the ship spun beneath his feet; and beyond in wider arcs dizzily spun turquoise sea and silver horizon.

Now all formed a vortex, a maelstrom, down whose pit he was dropping – faster, ever faster. Around him was a formless blur. Again he heard the tumult of the tempests; the shrillings of the winds of space. The winds died away. There were three clear bell notes—

Kenton stood within his own room!

The bell had been his clock, striking the hour of six. Six o’clock? Why the last sound of his own world before the mystic sea had swept it from under him had been the third stroke of that hour clipped off in mid-note.

God – what a dream! And all in half a bell stroke!

He lifted his hand and touched a throbbing bruise over his right temple. He winced – well, that blow at least had been no dream. He stumbled over to the jeweled ship.

He stared at it, incredulous.

The toys upon the ship had moved – new toys had appeared!

No longer were there four manikins on the black deck.

There were only two. One stood pointing toward the starboard platform near the mast, his hand resting on the shoulder of a red-bearded, agate-eyed soldier toy clad all in glittering chain mail.

Nor was there any woman at the rosy cabin’s door as there had been when Kenton had loosed the ship from the block. At its threshold were five slim girls with javelins in hands.

The woman was on the starboard platform, bent low beside the rail!

And the ship’s oars were no longer buried in the waves of lapis lazuli. They were lifted, poised for the downward stroke!

— III —

THE SHIP RETURNS

One by one Kenton pulled at the manikins, each toy. Immovable, gem hard, each was, seemingly part of the deck itself; no force he could exert would move them.

Yet something had shifted them – and where were the vanished ones? From where had the new ones come?

Nor was there any haze around the little figures, nor blurring; each lineament stood out clean cut. The pointing toy on the black deck had dwarfed, bowed legs; his torso was that of a giant; his bald pate glinted and in his ears were wide discs of gold. Kenton recognized him – the beater of the serpent drum.

There was a tiny silver crescent upon the head of the bending woman toy, and over its tips poured flood of red-gold hair—

Sharane!

And that place at which she peered – was it not where he had lain on that other ship of his dream?

That – other ship? He saw again its decks ebon and ivory, its rosy cabin and its emerald mast. It had been this ship before him – no other! Dream? Then what had moved the toys?

Kenton’s wonder grew. Within it moved a sharp unease, a sharper curiosity. He found he could not think clearly with the ship filling his eyes; it seemed to focus all his attention upon it, to draw it taut, to fill him with a tense expectancy. He unhooked a hanging from the wall and threw it over the gleaming mystery. He walked from the room, fighting with each step an imperative desire to turn his head. He dragged himself through the doorway as though hands were gripping his ankles, drawing him back. Head still turned away Kenton lurched shoulders against the door; closed it; locked it.

In his bathroom he examined the bruise on his head. It was painful enough, but nothing serious. Half an hour of cold compresses fairly well removed all outward marks of it. He told himself that he might have fallen upon the floor, overcome by the strange perfumes – he knew that he had not.

Kenton dined alone, scarce heeding what was set before him, his mind groping through perplexities. What was the history of the block from Babylon? Who had set the ship within it – and why? Forsyth’s letter had said that he had found it in the mound called Amran, just south of the Qser or crumbled “palace” of Nabopolasser. There was evidence, Kenton knew, that the Amran mound was the site of E-Sagilla, the ziggurat or terraced temple that had been the Great House of the Gods in ancient Babylon. The block must have been held in peculiar reverence, so Forsyth had conjectured, since only so would it have been saved from the destruction of the city by Sennacherib and afterwards have been put back in the re-built temple.

But why had it been held in such reverence? Why had such a miracle as the ship been imprisoned in the stone?

The inscription might have given some clue had it not been so mutilated. In his letter Forsyth had pointed out that the name of Ishtar, Mother Goddess of the Babylonians – Goddess of Vengeance and Destruction as well – appeared over and over again; that plain too were the arrowed symbols of Nergal, God of the Babylonian Hades and Lord of the Dead; that the symbols of Nabu, the God of Wisdom, appeared many times. These three names had been almost the only legible words on the block. It was as though the acid of time which had etched out the other characters had been held back from them.

Kenton could read the cuneatic well nigh as readily as his native English. He recalled now that in the inscription Ishtar’s name had been coupled with her wrathful aspect rather than her softer ones, and that associated always with the symbols of Nabu had been the signs of warning, of danger.

Forsyth had not noticed that, evidently – or if he had he had not thought it worth mentioning. Nor, apparently had he been aware of the hidden perfumes of the block.

Well – there was no use thinking of the inscription. It was gone forever with the dust into which it had turned.

Kenton impatiently thrust back his chair. He knew that for the past hour he had been out temporizing, divided between the burning desire to get back to the room where the ship lay and the dread that when he did he would find all that adventure had been illusion, a dream; that the little figures had not really moved; that they were as they had been when he had first loosed the ship; that it was only a toy manned by toys – nothing more. He would temporize no longer.

“Don’t bother about me any more tonight, Jevins,” he told his butler. “I’ve some important work to do. If there are any calls say that I am away. I’m going to lock myself in and I don’t want to be disturbed for anything less than Gabriel’s trumpet.”

The old servant, a heritage from Kenton’s father, smiled.

“Very well, Mr. John,” he said. “I’ll let no one bother you.”

To reach the room wherein was the ship, Kenton’s way led through another in which he kept the rarest of his spoils from many a far away corner of the world. Passing, a vivid gleam of blue caught his eye and stayed him, like a hand. The gleam came from the hilt of a sword in one of the cabinets, a curious weapon he had bought from a desert nomad in Arabia. The sword hung above an ancient cloak in which it had been wrapped when the furtive Arab had slipped into his tent. Unknown centuries had softened the azure of that cloak, through whose web and woof great silver serpents writhed, cabalistically entwined.

Kenton unhooked the sword. Silver serpents, counterparts of those on the garments, twined about its hilt. From the hilt sprang a rod of bronze, eight inches long and three thick, round as a staff. This rod flared and flattened out into a leaf-shaped blade two feet long and full six inches wide across its center. Set in the hilt had been one large stone of cloudy blue.

The stone was no longer clouded. It was translucent, shining like an immense sapphire!

Obeying some half-formed thought that linked this new enigma with the ship’s shifting toys, he drew down the cloak and threw it over his shoulders. The sword in hand, he unlocked the further door, closed and fastened it behind him; walked over to the shrouded ship; swept off its covers.

Pulses leaping, Kenton drew back.

On it now were two figures only – the drummer, crouched with head in arms upon the black deck, and on deck of ivory a girl, leaning over the rail and looking down upon the oarsmen!

Kenton snapped out the electrics and stood waiting.

Minute after minute crept by. Fugitive gleams from the lights on the Avenue penetrated the curtains of the windows, glimmered on the ship. Muted but steady came the roar of the traffic, punctuated by horn blasts, explosions through mufflers – New York’s familiar voice.

Was that a halo growing round the ship… And what had become of the traffic’s roar.

The room was filling with silence as a vessel is filled with water…

Now a sound broke that silence; a sound like the lapping of little waves, languorous, caressing. The sounds stroked his lids, slumbrously; pressed them down. By enormous effort he half raised them.

A wide mist was opposite him, a globular silvery mist floating down upon him. Within that mist drifted a ship, its oars motionless, its sail half-filled. Wavelets crisped at its sickled bow, wavelets of pale turquoise with laced edges of foam.

Half the room was lost in the ripples of that approaching sea… the part on which he stood was many feet above the waves… so far below were they that the deck of the ship was level with his feet.

Closer drew the ship. He wondered why he heard no rushing winds, no clamoring tempests; no sound save the faint whispering of the foam-tipped waves.

Retreating, he felt his back press against the farther wall. Before him drifted that misty world, the ship upon its breast.

Kenton leaped, straight for the deck.

The winds roared about him now; vast winds howled and shrieked – again he heard but felt them not at all. And suddenly the clamor died.

Kenton’s feet struck solid surface.

He stood upon an ivory deck, facing a rosy cabin whose little blossoming trees were filled with cooing crimson billed, vermilion footed, doves. Between him and the cabin’s door was a girl, her soft brown eyes filled with wonder and that same startled disbelief he had seen in those of Sharane when first her gaze had fallen upon him at the foot of the emerald mast.

“Are you Lord Nabu’ that you came thus out of the air and in his cloak of wisdom, his serpents twining within it?” she whispered. “Nay that cannot be – for Nabu is very old – and you are young. Are you his messenger?”

She dropped to her knees; crossed her hands, palms outward, over her forehead. She leaped to her feet; ran to the closed door of the cabin.

“Kadishtu!” she struck it with clenched hands. “Holy One – a messenger from Nabu!”

The door of the cabin was flung open. Upon its threshold stood the woman called Sharane. Her glance swept him; then darted to the black deck. He followed it. The beater of the serpent drum squatted there; he seemed to sleep.

“Watch, Satalu!” breathed Sharane to the girl.

She caught Kenton’s hand; she drew him through the door. Two girls were there who stared at him. She thrust them forward.

“Out!” she whispered. “Out and watch with Satalu.”

They slipped from the cabin. She ran to an inner door; dropped a bar across it.

She turned, back against it; then stepped slowly to Kenton. She stretched out slim fingers; with them touched his eyes, his mouth, his heart – as though to assure herself that he was real.

She cupped his hands in hers, and bowed, and set her brows against his wrists; the waves of her hair bathed them. At her touch desire ran through him, swift and flaming. Her hair was a silken net to which his heart flew, eager to be trapped.

He steadied himself; he drew his hands from hers; he braced himself against her lure.

She lifted her head; regarded him.

“What has the Lord Nabu to say to me?” her voice rocked Kenton with perilous sweetnesses, subtle provocations. “What is his word to me, messenger? Surely will I listen – for in his wisdom has not the Lord of Wisdom sent one to whom to listen ought not be – difficult?”

There was a flash of coquetry like the flirt of a roguish fan in the misty eyes turned for an instant to his.

Thrilling to her closeness, groping for some firm ground, Kenton sought for words to answer her. Playing for time, he looked about the cabined space. There was an altar at the far end. It was sown with luminous gems, with pearls and pale moonstones and curdled, milky crystals. From seven crystal basins set before it arose still silvery flames. There was an alcove behind the altar, but the glow of the seven lights hid whatever was within. He had a swift sense of tenancy of that flame veiled alcove – something dwelt there.

At the far side was a low, wide divan of ivory inlaid with the milky crystals and patterned with golden arabesques. Silken tapestries fell from the walls, multi-colored, flower woven. Soft deep silken rugs covered the cabin’s floor, and piles of cushions. At back, at left, two wide low windows opened; through them streamed silver light.

A bird flew upon the sill of one; a snowy bird with scarlet beak and feet; it scanned him, it preened itself, it cooed and flew away—

Soft hands touched him; Sharane’s face was close, eyes now with doubt more deeply shadowed.

“You – do come from Nabu?” she asked, and waited for reply; and still he found no words to answer her. “Messenger you must be,” she faltered, “else – how could you board the Ship of Ishtar?… And you are clad in Nabu’s cloak… and wear his sword… many times have I seen them in his shrine at Uruk… and I am weary of the Ship,” she whispered. “I would see Babylon again! Ah dearly, do I long for Babylon.”

Now words came to Kenton.

“Sharane,” he said boldly. “I do bear a message for you. It is the truth, and our Lord Nabu is Lord of Truth – therefore it must be from him. But before I give it to you, tell me – what is this ship?”

“What is the Ship!” she drew back from him, doubt enough now in her face – “But if you come indeed from Nabu – you must know that!”

“I do not know,” he told her, “I do not even know the meaning of the message I carry – it is for you to interpret. Yet here am I, upon the ship, before you. And in my ears I hear command – whispered it may be by Nabu himself – that I must not speak until you have told me – what is this ship.”

For a long moment she stood, scanning him, studying him.

“The ways of the gods are strange,” she sighed at last. “They are hard to understand. Yet – I obey.”

PART TWO

— IV —

THE SIN OF ZARPANIT

She slipped down upon the divan and beckoned him beside her. She laid a hand lightly upon his heart. His heart leaped beneath the touch; she felt it, too, and moved a little from him, smiling, watching him through downcast, curving lashes. She drew her slender, sandaled feet beneath her; mused with white hands clasped between rounded knees. When she spoke her voice was low, words half intoned.

“The sin of Zarpanit; the tale of her sin against Ishtar; Ishtar the Mighty Goddess; Mother of the Gods and of men; Lady of the Heavens and of Earth – who loved her!”

“High Priestess of Ishtar at her Great House in Uruk was Zarpanit. Kadishtu, Holy One, was she. And I, Sharane, who come from Babylon, was closest to her; her priestess; loved by her even as she was loved by Ishtar. Through Zarpanit the Goddess counseled and warned, rewarded and punished. Kings and men. Into the body of Zarpanit the Goddess came as to a shrine, seeing through her eyes, speaking with her lips.

“Now the temple in which we dwelt was named the House of the Seven Zones. In it was the sanctuary of Sin, God of Gods, who lives in the Moon; of Shamash his son; whose home is the Sun, of Nabu, the Lord of Wisdom; of Ninib, the Lord of War; of Nergal, the Dark Hornless one, Ruler of the Dead; and of Bel-Merodach, the Mighty Lord. Yet most of all was it the House of Ishtar, who dwelt there of his own right – temple themselves within her holy home.

“From Cuthaw in the north, from the temple there which Dark Nergal ruled as Ishtar ruled at Uruk, came a priest to sit over the Zone of Nergal in the House of the Seven Zones. His name was Alusar – and close as was Zarpanit to Ishtar as close was he to the Lord of the Dead. Nergal made himself manifest through Alusar, spoke through him and dwelt at times within him even as did Ishtar within her Priestess Zarpanit. With Alusar came retinue of priests, and among them that spawn of Nergal’s slime – Klaneth. And Klaneth was close to Alusar as I to Zarpanit.”

She raised her head and looked at Kenton through, narrowed lids.

“I know you now,” she cried. “A while ago you lay upon the ship and watched my strife with Klaneth! Now I know you – although then you had no cloak nor sword; and vanished as I looked upon you!”

Kenton smiled at her.

“You lay with frightened face,” she said. “And stared at me with fearful eyes – and fled!”

She half arose; he saw suspicion sweep her anew; the scorn in her voice lashed him into quick, hot rage. He drew her down beside him.

“I was that man,” he said. “Nor was it fault of mine that then I went away – I who have returned as quickly as I could? And your own eyes lied to you. Nor ever think again that mine hold fear of you! Look into them!” he bade her, fiercely.

She looked – long; sighed and bent away, sighed again and swayed toward him, languorously. His arms gripped her.

“Enough,” she thrust him away. “I read no hasty script in new eyes. Yet I retract – you were not fearful. You did not flee! And when you speak I shall no doubt understand. Let be!

“Between Ishtar and Nergal,” she took up the interrupted tale, “is and ever must be unending hatred and strife. For Ishtar is Bestower of Life and Nergal is Taker of Life; she is the Lover of Good and he is the Lover of Evil. And how shall ever Heaven and Hell be linked; or life and death; or good and evil?

“Yet she, Zarpanit, Kadishtu, the Holy One of Ishtar, her best beloved, did link all these. For where she should have turned away – she looked with desire; and where she should have hated – she loved!

“Yea – the Priestess of the Lady of Life loved Alusar the Priest of the Lord of Death! Her love was a strong flame by whose light she could see only him – and him only. Had Zarpanit been Ishtar she would have gone to the Dwelling Place of the Lost for Alusar, even as did the Goddess for her lover Tammuz – to draw him forth or to dwell there with him.

“Yea – even to dwell with him there in the cold darkness where the dead creep feebly, calling with the weak voices of birds. In the cold of Nergal’s domain, in the famine of Nergal’s abode, in the blackness of his city where the deepest shade of earth would be a ray of sunlight, Zarpanit would have been happy – knowing that she was with Alusar.

“So greatly did she love!

“I helped her in her love – for love of her,” she whispered. “But Klaneth crept ever behind Alusar waiting for chance to betray him and to take his place. Yet Alusar trusted him. There came a night—”

She paused, her face drawn with memoried terror.

“There came… a night when Alusar lay with Zarpanit… within her chamber. His arms were about her… hers around his neck… their lips together…

“And that night down came Ishtar from her Heavens and entered and possessed her!…

“While at the same instant from his dark city came Nergal… and passed into Alusar…

“And in each others arms, looking into each other’s eyes, caught in the fire of mortal love… were… Ishtar and Nergal… Heaven and Hell… the Soul of Life mated to the Soul of Death!”

She quivered and wept and long minutes went slowly by before again she spoke.

“Straightway those two who clasped were torn from each other. We were buffeted as by hurricanes, blinded by lightnings; scourged and thrown broken to the walls. And when we knew consciousness the priests and priestesses of all the Seven Zones had us. All the sin was known!

“Yea, even though Ishtar and Nergal had not… met… that night still would the sinning of Zarpanit and Alusar have been known. For Klaneth, whom we had thought on guard, had betrayed them and brought down upon them the pack!

“Let Klaneth be cursed!” Sharane raised arms high, and the pulse of her hate beat upon Kenton like a hammer of flame. “Let Klaneth crawl blind and undying in the cold blackness of Nergal’s abode! But Goddess Ishtar! Wrathful Ishtar! Give him to me first that I may send him there as I would have him go!”

— V —

HOW THE GODS JUDGED

“For a time,” she said, “we lay in darkness, Zarpanit and I together – and Alusar we knew not where. Great had been the sin of those two, and in it I had shared. Not quickly was our punishment to be decided. I comforted her as best I might, loving her, caring naught for myself – for her heart was close to breaking, knowing not what they did with him she loved.

“There fell another night when the priests came to us. They drew us from our cell and bore us in silence to the portal of the Du-azzaga, the Brilliant Chamber, the Council Room of the Gods. There stood other priests with Alusar. They opened the portal, fearfully, and thrust us three within.

“Now in truth my spirit shrank and was afraid, and beside mine I felt the shuddering soul of Zarpanit.

“For the Du-azzaga was filled with light, and in the places of the Gods sat not their images but the Gods themselves! Hidden each behind a sparkling cloud the Gods looked at us. In the place of Nergal was a fiery darkness.

“Out of the shining azure mist before the Shrine of Nabu came the voice of the Lord of Wisdom.

“‘So great is your sin, woman,’ it said, ‘and yours, priest, that it has troubled even us the Gods! Now what have you to say before we punish?’

“The voice of Nabu was cold and passionless as the light of far flung stars – yet in it was understanding.

“And suddenly my love for Zarpanit swelled, and I held fast to it and it gave me strength; while beside me I felt her soul stand erect, defiant, her love flinging itself before her as a shield. She did not answer – only held out her arms to Alusar. His love stood forth unafraid even as hers. He clasped her.

“Their lips met – and the judging Gods were forgotten!

“Then Nabu spoke again:

“‘These two bear a flame that none but Ishtar can quench – and it may be not even she!’

“At this Zarpanit drew from her lover’s arms; came close to the glory in which hid Ishtar; did homage and addressed her:

“‘Yea, O Mother, are you not the mother of that fire we call love? Did you not create it and set it as a torch above Chaos? And having made it, did you not know how mighty was the thing you made? It was that love of which you are the mother, O Holy Ishtar, that came uncalled into this temple of my body which was yours, and still is yours though you have abandoned it. Is it my fault that so strong was love that it broke the doors of your temple, or my fault that its light blinded me to all save him on whom it shone? You are the creator of love, O Ishtar; and if you did not mean it to conquer then why made you it so mighty? Or if love be grown stronger than you who made it can we – a man and woman – be blamed that we could not overcome it? And if love be not stronger than you, still did you make it stronger than man. Therefore punish love, your child, O Ishtar – not us!’

“It was the Lord Nabu who broke the silence of the Gods:

“‘Truth is in what she says. The flame they bear is one whose ways you know, O Ishtar, far better than do we. Therefore it is for you to answer her.’

“‘From the glory veiling the Goddess a voice came, sweet but small with bitter anger:

“‘There is truth in what you say Zarpanit, whom once I called daughter. Now because of that truth I will temper my anger. You have asked me whether love is stronger than I who created it. We shall learn! You and your lover shall dwell in a certain place that shall be opened to you. Ever together shall you be. You may look upon each other, your eyes may meet – but never lips nor hands! You may speak to each other – but never of this flame called love! For when it leaps and draws you together then I, Ishtar, will enter you, Zarpanit, and give it battle! Nor shall it be the Ishtar you have known. Nay, that Sister-Self of mine whom men name the Wrathful, the Destroyer – she shall possess you. And so it shall be until the flame within you conquers her, or that flame perishes!’

“The voice of Ishtar was still. The gods sat, silent. Then out of the fiery blackness of Nergal’s shrine bellowed the voice of the Lord of Death!

“‘So say you, Ishtar! Then I, Nergal, tell you this – I stand with this man who is my priest! Nor am I much displeased with him, since it was by him that I looked so closely into your eyes, O Mother of Life!’ – the Blackness shook with laughter – ‘I shall be with him, and I will meet you, Ishtar the Destroyer! Yea, with craft to match yours and strength to grapple with you – until I, not you, have blown out that flame. For in my abode is no such fire – and I would quench it in them that my darkness be not affrighted when at last these two come to me!’

“And again the laughter shook the ebon cloud, while the glory that covered the Goddess quivered with her wrath.

“But the three of us listened with despair – for ill as it had gone with us, far worse was it to hear this jesting of the Dark Hornless One with the Mother of the Heavens.

“Came Ishtar’s voice, smaller still:

“‘Be it so, O Nergal!’

“There was silence for a little time among the other gods; and I thought that behind their veils they looked at each other askance. Came at last the passionless voice of Nabu:

“‘What of this other woman—?

“The voice of Ishtar, impatient:

“‘Let her fate be bound with Zarpanit’s. Let Zarpanit have her retinue in that place to which she goes.’

“Then Nabu again:

“‘The priest Klaneth – is he to go free?’

“‘What! Shall not my Alusar have his retinue as well?’ mocked Nergal. ‘Nay, set Klaneth and others beside him to minister to him.’

“‘Again I thought that the Gods looked at each other askance; then Nabu asked:

“‘Shall it be so, O Ishtar?’

“And Ishtar answered:

“‘Let it be so!’

“The Du-azzaga faded; I was one with the nothingness.

“When we awoke we were on this haunted ship, on this strange sea, in this strange world and all the gods had decreed in the Du-azzaga had come to pass. With Zarpanit was I and half a score of the temple girls she had loved. And with Alusar was Klaneth and a pack of his black acolytes. They had given us oarsmen, sturdy temple slaves – a twain for each oar. They had made the ship beautiful, and they had seen to it that we lacked nothing.”

A flame of anger pulsed for an instant through her eyes.

“Yea,” she said, “the kindly gods did all for our comfort – and then they launched the ship on this strange sea in this strange world as battleground for Love and Hate, arena for Wrathful Ishtar and Dark Nergal, torture chamber for their priestess and priest.

“It was in this cabin that Zarpanit awakened – with the name of Alusar upon her lips. Then straightway she ran out the door, and from the black cabin came Alusar calling her name. I saw her reach that line where black deck meets this – and, lo, she was hurled back as though by thrust of arms. For there is a barrier there, messenger – a barrier built by the gods over which none of us upon the ship may pass – but then we knew nothing of that. And Alusar, too, was hurled back.

“Then as they arose, calling, stretching hands, striving to touch finger to finger, straightway into Zarpanit poured that Sister-Self of Ishtar, the Angry One, the Destroyer, while around Alusar black shadows deepened and hid him. At last – the shadows parted – and what had been the face of Alusar peered from them and it was the face of Nergal, Lord of the Dead!

“So it was – even as the gods had decreed. And that immortal twain within the bodies of those mortal two who loved each other so – battled and flung their hates like brands against each other, while the slaves chained to their oars in the pit cowered and raved or fell senseless under the terrors loosed above them. And the temple girls cast themselves upon the deck or ran screaming into the cabin that they might not see. Only I did not cry out or flee – who, since I had faced the gods in the Du-azzaga, could never again feel fear.

“And so it fared; how long, how long I do not know, in this place where time seems not to be, since there is neither night nor day as we knew them in Babylon.

“Yet ever Zarpanit and Alusar strove to meet, and ever Wrathful Ishtar and Dark Nergal thrust them apart. Many are the wiles of the Lord of the Shades and countless are his weapons. Many are the arts of Ishtar, and is not her quiver always full? Messenger, how long the pair endured I know not. Yet always they strove to break that barrier through, driven by their love. And always—

“The flames within them burned on,” she whispered. “Nergal nor Ishtar could dim them. Their love did but grow stronger. There came a day—

“It was in mid-battle. Ishtar had taken possession of Zarpanit and stood where this deck touches the pit of the oarsmen. Nergal had poured himself into Alusar and hurled his evil spawn across the pit against the goddess’s lightnings.

“And as I crouched, watching, at this cabin’s door, I saw the radiance that covered Ishtar tremble and dull. I saw the face of Ishtar waver and fade – the face of Zarpanit look out from where the face of Ishtar had been.

“The darkness that shrouded the Lord of the Dead lightened as though a strong flame had shot up within it!

“Then Ishtar took one step – and another and another – toward the barrier between black deck and this. But it came to me that not by her will did she so move. No! She went haltingly, reluctantly, as though something stronger than herself pushed her on. And as she moved, so moved Nergal within his shadows to meet her!

“Closer they came and closer. And ever the radiance of Ishtar would wax and wane. Ever the shadows clothing Nergal would lighten, darken, lighten again. Yet ever-slowly, unwillingly, but inexorably they drew closer and closer to each other. I could see the face of Alusar, the priest, thrusting itself into sight, stripping itself of Nergal’s mask.

“Slowly, slowly the white feet of Zarpanit carried Ishtar to the barrier; and slowly, slowly, ever matching her tread, came Alusar to meet her. And they met!

“They touched hands, touched lips, clasped – ere conquered god and goddess could withdraw from them.

“They kissed and clasped. They fell upon the deck – dead. Dead – in each other’s arms.

“Nor Ishtar nor Nergal had conquered! Nay! Love of man and love of woman – these had conquered. Victors over god and goddess – the flames were free!

“The priest had fallen on the hither side of the barrier. We did not unclasp their arms. We set them adrift, a-lock, face to face – their bodies.

“Then I ran forth to slay Klaneth. But I had forgotten that neither Ishtar nor Nergal had conquered one the other. Lo, into me poured the goddess, and into Klaneth returned Nergal! As of old these two powers battled. And again as of old the unseen barrier was strong, holding back from each other those on ivory deck and black.

“Yet I was happy – for by this I knew that Zarpanit and Alusar had been forgotten by them. It came to me that the strife had gone beyond those two who had escaped. That now it mattered not either to Wrathful Ishtar or to Nergal that priestess and priest had gone – since in my body and in Klaneth’s they could still strive against each other for possession of the ship…

“And so we sail – and fight, and sail – and fight… How long, I do not know. Many, many years must have passed since we faced the gods in Uruk – but see, I am still as young as then and as fair! Or so my mirror tells me,” she sighed.

— VI —

“AM I NOT — WOMAN!”

Kenton sat silent, unanswering Young and fair she was indeed – and Uruk and Babylon mounds of timeworn sands these thousands of years!

“Tell me, Lord” – her voice roused him; “tell me, has the Temple at Uruk great honor among the nations still? And is Babylon proud in her supremacy?”

He did not speak, belief that he had been thrust into some alien, reality wrestling with outraged revolt of reason.

And Sharane, raising her eyes to his troubled face, stared at him with ever growing doubt. She leaped from beside him, stood quivering like a blade of wrath in a sweetly flowered sheath.

“Have you word for me?” she cried. “Speak – and quickly!”

Dream woman or woman meshed in ancient sorceries, there was but one answer for Sharane – the truth.

And tell her truth Kenton did, beginning from the arrival of the block from Babylon into his house; glossing no detail that might make all plain to her. She listened, her gaze steadfast upon him, drinking in his words – amazement alternating with stark disbelief; and these in turn replaced by horror, by despair.

“For even the site of ancient Uruk is well-nigh lost,” he ended. “The House of the Seven Zones is a windswept heap of desert sand. And Babylon, mighty Babylon, has been level with the wastes for thousands of years!”

She leaped to her feet – leaped and rushed upon him, eyes blazing, red-gold hair streaming.

“Liar!” she shrieked. “Liar! Now I know you – you phantom of Nergal!”

A dagger flashed in her hand; he caught the wrist just in time; struggled with her; bore her down upon the couch.

She relaxed, hung half fainting in his arms.

“Uruk dust!” she whimpered. “The House of Ishtar dust! Babylon a desert! And Sargon of Akkad dead six thousand years ago, you said – six thousand years ago!” She shuddered, sprang from his embrace. “But if that is so, then what am I?” she whispered, white lipped. “What – am I? Six thousand years and more gone since I was born – and I alive! Then what am I?”

Panic overpowered her; her eyes dulled; she clutched at the cushions. He bent over her; she threw white arms around him.

“I am alive?” she cried. “I am – human? I am – woman?”

Her soft lips clung to his, supplicating; the perfumed tent of her hair covered him. She held him, her lithe body pressed tight, imperatively desperate. Against his racing heart he felt the frightened pulse of hers. And ever between her kisses she whispered: “Am I not a woman – and alive? Tell me – am I not alive?”

Desire filled him; he gave her kiss for kiss; tempering the flame of his desire was clear recognition that neither swift love for him nor passion had swept her into his arms.

It was terror that lay behind her caresses. She was afraid – appalled by that six-thousand-year-wide abyss between the life she had known and his. Clinging to him she fought for assurance. She had been driven back to woman’s last intrenchment – the primal assertion of the woman-self – the certainty of her womanhood and its unconquerable lure.

No, it was not to convince him that her kisses burned his lips – it was to convince herself.

He did not care. She was in his arms. He gave her kiss for kiss.

She thrust him from her; sprang to her feet.

“I am a woman, then?” she cried triumphantly. “A woman – and alive?”

“A woman!” he answered thickly, his whole body quivering toward her. “Alive! God – yes!”

She closed her eyes; a great sigh shook her.

“And that is truth,” she cried, “and it is the one truth you have spoken. Nay – be silent!” she checked him. “If I am a woman and alive, it follows that all else you have told me are lies – since I could be neither were Babylon dust and it six thousand years since first I saw the ship. You lying dog!” she shrilled, and with one ringed hand struck Kenton across the lips.

The rings cut deep. As he fell back, dazed both by blow and sudden shift of fortune, she threw open the inner door.

“Luarda! Athnal! All!” wrathfully she summoned. “Quick! Bind me this dog! Bind him – but slay him not!”

Streamed from the cabin seven warrior maids, short kirtled, bare to their waists, in their hands light javelins. They flung themselves upon him. And as they wound about him Sharane darted in and tore the sword of Nabu from his hand.

And now young, fragrant bodies crushed him in rings of woman flesh, soft, yet inexorable as steel. The blue cloak was thrown over his head, twisted around his neck. Kenton awoke from his stupor – awoke roaring with rage. He tore himself loose, hurled the cloak from him, leaped toward Sharane. Quicker than he, the lithe bodies of the maids screened her from his rush. They thrust him with their javelins, pricking him as do the matadors to turn a charging bull. Back and back they drove him, ripping his clothing, bringing blood now here, now there.

Through his torment he heard her laughter.

“Liar!” she mocked. “Liar, coward and fool! Tool of Nergal, sent to me with a lying tale to sap my courage! Back to Nergal you go with another tale!”

The warrior maids dropped their javelins, surged forward as one. They clung to him; twined legs and arms around him, dragged him down. Cursing, flailing with his fists, kicking – caring no longer that they were women – Kenton fought them. Berserk, he staggered to his feet. His foot struck the lintel of the rosy cabin’s door. Down he plunged, dragging his wildcat burden with him. Falling they drove against the door. Open it flew, and out through it they rolled, battling down the ivoried deck.

There was a shouting close behind him, a shrill cry of warning from Sharane – some urgent command, for grip of arms and legs relaxed; clutching hands were withdrawn.

Sobbing with rage, Kenton swung to his feet. He saw that he was almost astride the line between ivoried deck and black. It came to him that this was why Sharane had whistled her furies from him; that he had dragged them too close to its mysterious menace.

Again her laughter lashed him. She stood upon the gallery of little blossoming trees, her doves winging about her. The sword of Nabu was in her hand; derisively she lifted it.

“Ho, lying messenger!” mocked Sharane. “Ho, dog beaten by women! Come, get your sword!”

“I’ll come, damn you!” he shouted, and leaped forward.

The ship pitched. Thrown off his balance, Kenton staggered back, reeled to the line where black and ivory decks met.

Reeled over it – unhurt!

Something deeper than his consciousness registered that fact; registered it as of paramount importance. Whatever the power of the barrier, to it Kenton was immune. He poised himself to leap back to the ivory deck.

“Stop him!” came the voice of Klaneth.

In mid-spring long, sinewy fingers gripped his shoulder, swung him round. He looked into the face of the beater of the serpent drum. The drummer’s talons lifted him and cast Kenton like a puppy behind him.

And panting like some outraged puppy, Kenton swayed up on his feet. A ring of black-robed men was closing in upon him, black-robed men whose faces were dead white, impassive; black-robed men closing in upon him with clutching hands. Beyond the ring stood the mailed warrior with the red beard and the pale agate eyes; and beside him the Black Priest.

Naught cared Kenton for any or all of them. He rushed. The black robes curled over him, overwhelming him, pinned him down.

Again the ship lurched, this time more violently. Kenton, swept off his feet, slid sidewise. A wave swished over him. The hands that clutched him were washed away. Another wave lifted him, flung him up and out. Deep he sank; fought his way upward; dashed the water from his eyes and looked for the ship.

A roaring wind had risen. Under it the ship was scudding – a hundred yards away. He shouted; swam toward her. Down went the sail, down dipped the oars, straining to keep her before the wind. Faster, faster flew the ship before the blast.

She was lost in the silvery mists.

Kenton ceased his efforts; floated, abandoned in an unknown world.

A wave smote him; he came up behind it, choking. The spindrift whipped him. He heard the booming surf, the hiss of combers thrown back by ramparts of rock. Another wave caught him. Struggling on its crest he saw just ahead of him a pinnacle of yellow stone rising from a nest of immense boulders upon which the billows broke in fountains of spume.

He was lifted by a gigantic comber; dashed straight against the yellow pillar.

The shock of his impact was no greater than that of breaking through thick cobweb. For infinite distances it seemed to him he rushed on and on through a soft thick darkness. With him went the shrieking clamor of vast tempests. Abruptly his motion ended, the noise of the tempests ceased.

He lay prone; his fingers clenched some coarse fabric that crumpled stubbornly in his grip. He rolled over, hands thrust out; one of them gripped cool, polished wood. He sat up—

He was back in his own room!

Kenton dragged himself to his feet, stood swaying, dazed.

What was that darkening the rug at his feet? It was water – water that was dripping from him, strangely colored water – crimsoned water.

He realized that he was wet to the skin, drenched. He licked his lips – there was salt upon them. His clothing was ripped and torn, the salt water dripped from it.

And from a score of wounds his blood mingled with the water!

He stumbled over to the jeweled ship. On the black deck was a little group of manikins, leaning and looking over the rail.

Upon the gallery of the rosy cabin one tiny figure stood—

Sharane!

He touched her – jewel hard, jewel cold, a toy!

And yet – Sharane!

Like returning wave his berserk rage swept him. Echoes of her laughter in his ears, Kenton, cursing, sought for something to shatter the shining ship. Never again should Sharane mock him!

He caught a heavy chair by the legs, swung it high overhead, poised for an instant to send it crashing down—

And suddenly beneath the salt upon his lips Kenton tasted the honey musk of her kisses – the kisses of Sharane!

The chair fell from his hands.

“Ishtar! Nabu!” he whispered, and dropped upon his knees. “Set me again upon the ship! Ishtar! Do with me as you will – only set me again upon your ship!”

— VII —

SLAVE OF THE SHIP

Swift was his answer. He heard far away a bellowing roar as of countless combers battering against a rock-ribbed coast. Louder it grew.

With a thunder of vast waters the outward wall of his room disappeared. Where wall had been was the crest of an enormous leaping wave. The wave curled down over Kenton, lifted him up, rolled him far under it; shot him at last, gasping for breath up and up through it.

He was afloat again upon the turquoise sea!

The ship was close. Close! Its scimitared bow was striking down by his head; was flying past him. A golden chain hung from it, skittering over the crests. Kenton clutched at it – missed it.

Back he fell. Swift raced the shining side of the ship past him. Again he threw himself high. There was another chain; a black one spattering over the wave tips and hanging from the stem.

He gripped it. The sea tore at his thighs, his legs, his feet. Grimly he held fast. Hand over hand, cautiously, he drew himself up. Now he was just below the rail. Slowly he raised his head to peer over.

Long arms swept down upon him; long hands gripped his shoulders, lifted him, hurled him down upon the deck, pinned him there. A thong was drawn round his ankles, his arms were pinioned to his sides.

He looked into the face of the frog-mouthed beater of the serpent drum. And over one of the drummer’s enormous shoulders stared the white face of Klaneth. He heard his voice:

“Carry him in, Gigi.”

He felt himself lifted by the drummer as easily as though he had been a babe; and cradled in the huge hands he was carried through the black cabin’s door.

The drummer set Kenton on his feet, regarding him with curious, half-amused eyes. Agate eyes of the red-bearded warrior and pale eyes of Klaneth dwelt upon him as curiously.

Kenton took stock of the three. First the black priest – massive, elephant thewed; flesh pallid and dead as though the blood flowed through veins too deeply imbedded to reveal the creep of its slow tide; the face of Nero remodeled from cold clay by numbed hands.

Then Gigi – the drummer. His frog-like face with the pointed ears; his stunted and bowed legs; his giant’s body above the hips; the gigantic shoulders whence swung the long and sinewy and apish arms whose strength Kenton had felt; the slit of a mouth in whose corners a malicious humor dwelt. Something of old earth gods about him; a touch of Pan.

Red beard – a Persian out of that time when Persia’s hordes were to the world what later the Roman legions were to be. Or so Kenton judged him by his tunic of linked light mail, the silken-sheathed legs, the high buskins and the curved daggers and the scimitar in his jeweled belt. And human as Kenton himself. About him was none of the charnel flavor of Klaneth nor the grotesqueness of Gigi. The full red lips beneath the carefully trimmed beard were sensual, life loving; the body was burly and muscular; the face whiter than Kenton’s own. But it was sullen and stamped deep with a half-resigned, half-desperate boredom that even his lively and frank curiosity about Kenton lightened little.

In front of him was a wide slab of bloodstone. Six priests knelt upon it, worshipping something that stood within a niche just above the slab. What it was he could not tell – except that it breathed out evil. A little larger than a man, the thing within the niche was black and formless as though made of curdling shadows. It quivered, pulsated – as though the shadows that were its substance thickened constantly about it, passed within it and were replaced swiftly by others.

Dark was that cabin, the walls somber as dull black marble. Other shadows clung to the dark walls and clustered in the corners; shadows that seemed only to await command to deepen into substance.

Unholy shadows – like those that clothed the thing within the niche.

Beyond, as in the cabin of Sharane, was another chamber, and crowding at the door between were a dozen or more of the black-robed, white-faced priests.

“Go to your places,” Klaneth turned to them, breaking the silence. They slipped away. The black priest closed the door upon them. He touched the nearest of the kneeling priests with his foot.

“Our Lord Nergal has had enough of worship,” he said. “See – he has swallowed your prayers!”

Kenton looked at the thing within the niche. It was no longer misty, shadowed. It stood out, clear cut. Its body was that of a man and its face was that same awesome visage of evil into which he had seen the black priest’s turn on that first adventure of his upon the ship.

The face of Nergal – Lord of the Dead!

What had been the curdled, quivering shades enveloping the statue?

He felt the eyes of Klaneth searching him, covertly. A trick! A trick to frighten him. He met the black priest’s gaze squarely; smiled.

The Persian laughed.

“Hai, Klaneth,” he said. “There was a bolt that fell short. Mayhap this stranger has seen such things before. Mayhap he is a sorcerer himself and can do better things. Change your play, Klaneth.”

He yawned and seated himself upon a low settle. The black priest’s face grew grimmer.

“Best be silent, Zubran,” he said. “Else it may be that Nergal will change his play for you in a way to banish forever your disbelief.”

“Disbelief?” echoed the Persian. “Oh, Nergal is real enough. It is not disbelief that irks me. It is the eternal monotony. Can you do nothing new, Klaneth? Can Nergal do nothing new? Change his play for me, eh? By Ahriman – that is just what I wish he would do, if he can.”

He yawned again, ostentatiously. The black priest growled; turned to the six worshippers.

“Go,” he ordered, “and send Zachel to me.”

They filed through the outer door. The black priest dropped upon another settle, studying Kenton; the drummer squatted, also watching him; the Persian muttered to himself, playing with his dagger hilts. The door opened and into the cabin stepped a priest who held in one hand a long whip whose snaky lash, metal topped, was curled many times around his forearm. He bowed before Klaneth.

Kenton recognized him. When he had lain on the deck close to the mast he had seen this man sitting on a high platform at the foot of that mast. Overseer of the galley slaves, the oarsmen, was Zachel, and that long lash was measured to flick the furtherest of them if they lagged.

“Is this he whom you saw upon the deck some sleeps ago?” asked Klaneth. “He who lay there and, you say, vanished when the drab of Ishtar yonder bent over to touch him?”

“He is the same, master,” answered the overseer, coming close to Kenton and scanning him.

“Where went he then?” asked Klaneth, more to himself than to the other. “To Sharane’s cabin? But if so, why did she drive him out, her cats clawing him? And whence came that sword she waved and bade him come retake? I know that sword—”

“He did not go into her cabin at that time, master,” interrupted Zachel. “I saw her seek for him. She went back to her place alone. He had vanished.”

“And his driving forth,” mused Klaneth, “that was two sleeps ago. And the ship has sailed far since then. We saw him struggling in the waves far behind us. Yet here he is upon the ship again – and with his wounds still fresh, still bleeding as though it had been but a moment gone. And how passed he the barrier? Yea – how passed he the barrier?”

“Ah, at last you have stumbled on a real question,” cried the Persian. “Let him but tell me that – and, by the Nine Hells, not long will you have me for companion, Klaneth.”

Kenton saw the drummer make a covert warning gesture to Zubran; saw the black priest’s eyes narrow.

“Ho! Ho!” laughed Gigi. “Zubran jests. Would he not find life there as tiresome as he pretends to find it with us? Is it not so, Zubran?”

Again he made the fleet, warning sigh. And the Persian heeded it.

“Yes, I suppose that is so,” he answered grudgingly. “At any rate – am I not sworn to Nergal? Nevertheless,” he muttered, “the gods gave women one art that has not grown tiresome since first they made the world.”

“They lose that art in Nergal’s abode,” said the black priest, grimly. “Best remember that and curb that tongue of yours lest you find yourself in a worse place than here – where at least you have your body.”

“May I speak, master?” asked Zachel; and Kenton felt threat in the glance the overseer shot at him.

The black priest nodded.

“I think he passed the barrier because he knows naught of our Lord,” said Zachel. “Indeed – may be an enemy of our Lord. If not – why was he able to shake off the hands of your priests, vanish in the sea – and return?”

“Enemy of Nergal!” Klaneth muttered.

“But it does not follow that he is friend of Ishtar,” put in the drummer, smoothly. “True if he were sworn to the Dark One he could not pass the barrier. But true is it also that were he sworn to Ishtar equally would that have been impossible.”

“True!” Klaneth’s face cleared. “And I know that sword – Nabu’s own blade.”

He was silent for a moment; thoughtful. When he spoke there was courtesy in the thick voice.

“Stranger,” he said, “if we have used you roughly, forgive us. Visitors are rare upon this craft. You – let me say – startled us out of our manners. Zachel, loose his bonds.”

The overseer bent and sullenly set Kenton free of his thongs.

“If, as I think, you come from Nabu,” went on the black priest, “I tell you that I have no quarrel with the Wise One or his people. Nor is my Master, the Lord of Death, ever at odds with the Lord of Wisdom. How could he be when one carries the keys of knowledge of this life, and the other the key that unlocks the door of the ultimate knowledge? Nay, there is no quarrel there. Are you a favored one of Nabu? Did he set you on the ship? And – why?”

Silent was Kenton, searching desperately for some way to answer the black priest. Temporize with him as he had with Sharane, he knew he could not. Nor, he knew, was it of any use to tell him the truth as he had told her – and been driven out like a hunted rat for it. Here was danger; peril, greater than he had faced in the rosy cabin. Klaneth’s voice cut in:

“But favored of Nabu as you may be, it seems that could not save you from losing his sword, nor from the javelins of Ishtar’s women. And if that is so – can it save you from my whip, my chains?”

And as Kenton stood, still silent, wolf light flared in the dead pupils and the black priest leaped to his feet crying:

“Answer me!”

“Answer Klaneth!” roared Gigi. “Has fear of him killed your tongue?”

Under the apparent anger of the drummer’s voice Kenton sensed a warning; friendliness.

“If that favor could have saved me, at least it did not,” he said sullenly.

The black priest dropped back upon the settle, chuckling.

“Nor could it save you if I decreed your death,” he said.

“Death – if he decrees it,” croaked Gigi. “Whoever you are,” went on the black priest, “whence you come, or how – one thing seems true. You have power to break a chain that irks me. Nay, Zachel, stay,” he spoke to the overseer who had made a move to go. “Your counsel is also good. Stay!”

“There is a slave dead at the oars,” said the overseer. “I would loose his chains and cast him over.”

“Dead,” there was new interest in Klaneth’s voice. “Which was he? How did he die?”

“Who knows?” Zachel shrugged his shoulders. “Of weariness, maybe. He was one of those who first set sail with us. He who sat beside the yellow-haired slave from the North whom we bought at Emakhtila.”

“Well – he had served long,” said the black priest. “Nergal has him. Let his body bear his chains a little longer. Stay with me.”

He spoke again to Kenton, deliberately, finally:

“I offer you freedom. I will give you honors and wealth in Emakhtila, where we shall sail as soon as you have done my bidding. There you shall have priesthood and a temple if you want them. Gold and women and rank – if you will do what I desire.”

“What must I do to win me all this?” asked Kenton. The black priest arose and bent his head so that his eyes looked straight into Kenton’s own. “Slay Sharane!” he said.

“Little meat in that, Klaneth,” the Persian spoke, mockingly. “Did you not see her girls beat him? As well send to conquer a lioness a man who has already been whipped by her cubs.”

“Nay,” said Klaneth, “I did not mean for him to pass over the open deck where surely her watchers would see him. He can clamber round the ship’s hull – from chain, ledge to ledge. There is a window behind the cabin wherein she sleeps. He can creep up and through it.”

“Best swear him to Nergal before he takes that road, master,” Zachel interrupted. “Else we may never have him back again.”

“Fool!” Gigi spoke. “If he makes his vows to Nergal perhaps he cannot go at all. How do we know that then the barrier will not be closed to him as it is to us who are sworn to the Dark One, even as it is to those who are sworn to Ishtar?”

“True,” nodded the black priest. “We dare not risk that. Well spoken, Gigi.”

“Why should Sharane be slain?” asked Kenton. “Let me take her for slave that I may repay her for her mockery and her blows. Give her to me – and you may keep all the riches and honors you have offered.”

“No!” The black priest leaned closer, searching more intently his eyes. “She must be slain. While she lives the Goddess has a vial into which to pour herself. Sharane dead – Ishtar has none on this ship through whom she may make herself manifest. This, I, Klaneth, know. Sharane dead, Nergal rules – through me! Nergal wins – through me!”

In Kenton’s mind a plan had formed. He would promise to do this – to slay Sharane. He would creep into her cabin, tell her of the black priest’s plot. Some way, somehow, make her believe him.

Too late he saw by the black priest’s face that Klaneth had caught his thought! Too late remembered that the sharp eyes of the overseer had been watching him, losing no fleeting change of expression; interpreting.

“Look, master!” Zachel snarled. “Look! Can you not read his thought, even as I? He cannot be trusted. You have held me here for counsel and have called my counsel good – then let me speak what is in my mind. I thought that this man had vanished from beside the mast, even as I told you. But did he? The gods come and go upon the ship as they will. But no man does. We thought we saw him struggling in the waves far behind the ship. But did we? By sorcery he may have lain all this while, hid in Sharane’s cabin. Out of her cabin we saw him come—”

“But driven forth by her women, Zachel,” broke in the drummer. “Cast out. Beaten. Remember that. There was no friendship there, Klaneth. They were at his throat like hounds tearing down a deer.”

“A play!” cried Zachel. “A play to trick you, master. They could have killed him. Why did they not? His wounds are but pin pricks. They drove him, yes, but where? Over to us! Sharane knew he could cross the barrier. Would she have made gift to us of new strength unless – she had a purpose? And what could that purpose have been, master? Only one. To place him here to slay you – even as you now plan to send him to slay her!

“He is a strong man – and lets himself be beaten by girls! He had a sword, a sharp blade and a holy one – and he lets a woman take it. Ho! Ho!” laughed Zachel. “Do you believe all this, master? Well – I do not!”

“By Nergal!” Klaneth swore, livid. “Now by Nergal—!”

He gripped Kenton by the shoulders, hurled him through the cabin door and out upon the deck. Swiftly he followed him.

“Sharane!” he howled. “Sharane!”

Kenton raised his head, dizzily; saw her standing beside the cabin door, arms around the slim waists of two of her damsels.

“Nergal and Ishtar are busy elsewhere,” mocked the black priest. “Life on the ship grows dull. There is a slave under my feet. A lying slave. Do you know him, Sharane?”

He bent and lifted Kenton high, as a man a child. Her face, cold, contemptuous, did not change.

“He is nothing to me – Worm,” she answered.

“Nothing to you, eh?” roared Klaneth. “Yet it was by your will that he came to me. Well – he has a lying tongue, Sharane. By the old law of the slaves shall he be punished for it. I will pit four of my men against him. If he master them I shall keep him for awhile – to amuse us further. But if they master him – then shall his lying tongue be torn from him. And I will give it to you as a token of my love – O, Sacred Vessel of Ishtar!”

“Ho! Ho!” laughed the black priest as Sharane shrank, paling. “A test for your sorceries, Sharane. To make that tongue speak! Make it—” the thick voice purred – “make it whisper of love to you. Tell you how beautiful you are, Sharane. How wonderful – ah, sweet Sharane! Reproach you a little, too, perhaps for sending it to me to be torn out!”

“Ho! Ho!” laughed Klaneth; then as though he spat the words, “You temple slut!”

He thrust a light whip in Kenton’s hands. “Now fight, slave!” he snarled, “fight for your lying tongue!”

Four of the priests leaped forward, drawing from beneath their robes thongs tipped with metal. They circled, and before Kenton could gather his strength they were upon him. They darted about him like four lank wolves; slashing at him with their whips. Blows flailed upon his head, his naked shoulders. Awkwardly he tried to parry to return them. The metal tips bit deep. From shoulders, chest, back, a slow rain of blood began to drip.

A thong caught him across the face, half blinding him.

Far away, he heard the golden voice of Sharane, shrill with scorn.

“Slave – can you not even fight?”

Cursing, he dropped his useless whip. Close before him was the grinning face of the priest who had struck him. Ere his lash could be raised again the fist of Kenton had smashed squarely on the leering mouth. He felt beneath his knuckles the bones of the nose crumble, the teeth shatter. The priest crashed back; went rolling to the rail.

Instantly the other three were upon him; tearing at his throat, clawing him, striving to drag him down. He broke loose. The three held back for an instant; then rushed. One there was a little in front of the others. Kenton caught him by an arm, twisted that arm over his shoulder, set hip to prisoned flank, heaved and hurled the priest through air against the pair poised to strike. Out flung the body; fell short. The head crashed against the deck. There was a sharp snap, like a breaking faggot. For a moment the body stood, shoulders touching deck, legs writhing as though in grotesque mid-somersault. Then crumpled and lay still.

“Well thrown!” he heard the Persian shout.

Long fingers clutched his ankles; his feet flew from beneath him. As he fell he caught glimpse of a face staring up at him, a face that was but one red smear; the face of the first priest he had battered down. Falling, Kenton swept out his arms. Claws clutched his throat. There flashed into Kenton’s mind a dreadful thing he had seen done in another unequal combat upon a battlefield in France. Up swept his right hand, the first two fingers extended. They found place in the eye sockets of the throttler; pressed there cruelly; pressed there relentlessly. He heard a howl of agony; tears of blood spurted over his hands; the choking fingers dropped from his throat. Where eyes had been were now two raw red sockets with dreadful pendants.

Kenton leaped to his feet. He stamped upon the crimson smeared face looking up at him stamped once, twice, thrice – and the grip about his ankles was gone.

He caught a glimpse of Sharane, white-faced, wide-eyed; realized that the laughter of the black priest was stilled.

At him rushed the fourth acolyte, a broad-leafed knife gleaming in his grip. Kenton bent his head, rushed to meet him. He caught the hand that held the blade; bent the arm back; heard the bone snap. The fourth priest shrieked and fell.

He saw Klaneth, mouth loose, staring at him.

Straight for the black priest’s throat he leaped, right fist swinging upward to the jaw as he sprang. But the black priest thrust out his arms, caught him in mid-leap; lifted him high, over his head; balanced him to dash him down upon the deck.

Kenton closed his eyes – this, then, was the end.

He heard the voice of the Persian, urgent:

“Hai, Klaneth! Hai! Kill him not! By Ischak of the Hollow Hell – kill him not. Klaneth! Save him to fight again!”

Then the drummer—

“Nay, Klaneth! Nay!” He felt the talons of Gigi catch him; hold him tight in double grasp. “Nay, Klaneth! He fought fairly and well. He would be a rare one to have with us. Mayhap he will change his mind – with discipline. Remember, Klaneth – he can pass the barrier.”

The great bulk of the black priest trembled. Slowly his hands began to lower Kenton.

“Discipline? Ha!” it was the snarling voice of the overseer. “Give him to me, master, in the place of the slave who died at the oar. I will teach him – discipline.”

The black priest dropped Kenton on the deck; stood over him for a moment. Then he nodded, turned and stalked into his cabin. Kenton, reaction seizing him, huddled; hands clasping knees.

“Unchain the dead slave and cast him over, Zachel,” he heard Gigi say. “I will watch this man till you return.”

Kenton heard the overseer patter away. The drummer bent over him.

“Well fought, wolf cub,” he whispered. “Well fought! Now to your chains. Obey. Your chance shall come. Do as I say, wolf cub – and I will do what I may.”

He walked away. Kenton, wondering, raised his head. He saw the drummer stoop, lift the body of the priest with the broken neck and with one sweep of his long arm send it whirling over the ship’s rail. Bending again he sent after it the body of him upon whose face Kenton had stamped.

He paused speculatively before the wailing, empty-socketed horror stumbling and falling about the deck. Then, grinning cheerfully, he lifted it by the knees and tossed it overboard.

“Three less to worry about hereafter,” muttered Gigi,

A tremor shook Kenton; his teeth chattered; he sobbed. The drummer looked down on him with amused wonder.

“You fought well, wolf cub,” he said. “Then why do you quiver like a whipped hound whose half-chewed bone has been cast away?”

He laid both hands on Kenton’s bleeding shoulders. Under their touch he steadied. It was as though through Gigi’s hands flowed some current of strength of which his soul drank. As though he had tapped some ancient spring, some still pool of archaic indifference both to life and death, the current ran through him.

“Good!” said Gigi, and stood up. “Now Zachel comes for you.”

The overseer was beside Kenton; he touched his shoulder; pointed down a short flight of steps that led from the black deck to the galley-pit. Zachel behind him, Kenton groped down those steps into the half darkness of the pit. He stumbled along a narrow passageway; was brought to halt at a great oar over whose shank a head, golden-haired, long-haired as any woman’s, bent from muscle-gnarled shoulders. This golden-haired oarsman slept. Around his waist was a thick bronze ring. From this ring a strong chain swung, its end fastened to a staple sunk deep in the back of the bench on which he sat. His wrists were manacled. The oar on which his head rested was manacled, too. Between manacled wrists and manacled oar two other strong chains stretched.

There was an empty chained circlet at the sleeper’s left side; on the oar at his left two empty manacles hung from chains.

Zachel pushed Kenton down on the bench beside the sleeping oarsman; girdled his waist with the empty bronze circlet; snapped it close; locked it.

He thrust Kenton’s unresisting hands through the manacles dangling from the oar; closed them on him; locked them.

And suddenly Kenton felt warmth of eyes upon him: looked behind him; saw leaning over the rail the face of Sharane. There was pity in her face; and dawning of something that set his heart to beating wildly.

“I’ll discipline you – never fear!” said Zachel.

Kenton looked behind him again.

Sharane was gone.

He bent over his oar beside the sleeping giant.

Bent over his oar—

Chained to it.

Slave of the ship!

— VIII —

THE TALE OF SIGURD

Kenton awakened to the shrilling of a whistle. Something flicked his shoulder like the touch of a hot iron. He jerked his head up from the bed of his arms; looked stupidly at the chained wrists. Again the flick upon the shoulder, biting into the flesh.

“Up, slave!” he heard a snarling voice say – a voice he knew and struggled with deep drugged mind to place. “Up! Stand to your oar!”

Then another voice, close beside him, whispering, hoarse, but with warmth of comradeship in it:

“On your feet before his whip covers your back with the blood runes.”

He struggled upright; hands falling mechanically into two smooth, worn hollows in the wooden shaft to which he was chained. Standing thus upon the bench, his eyes looked out upon a tranquil, turquoise ocean, waveless, within a huge inverted bowl of silver mists. In front of him were four men, two standing, two sitting, at shanks of great oars which, like that he clutched, thrust through the side of a ship. Beyond them sloped a black deck—

Memory rushed upon him, banishing the last of sleep. The first voice had been that of Zachel, and the hot touches on his skin the bite of his whip. He turned his head. A score of other men, black and brown, sat and stood at other great sweeps, bending and rising, sending the Ship of Ishtar cutting through the still blue sea. And there on a platform at the mast step was Zachel, grinning derisively, out at Kenton, flicked the long lash once more.

“Look not back! Row!” snarled Zachel.

“I will row,” whispered the second voice. “Stand and sway with the oar till strength comes to you.”

He looked down on a head fair-haired, long-haired as any woman’s. But there was nothing womanish in the face that was lifted for an instant to his. Ice cold and ice blue were the eyes in it, though thawed now by a rough kindliness. The skin was storm beaten, tempest tanned. Nor was there aught womanish in the muscles that swelled on shoulders, back, and arms as he swung the great sweep, handling it as easily as a woman a broom.

Norseman from tip to toe; a Viking straight out of some ancient Saga – and, like Kenton, a slave to the ship; the giant who had been asleep over the oar when Kenton’s own chains had been locked upon him.

“Sigurd, Trygg’s son, I,” muttered the Norseman. “What Norn of ill-luck set you on this ship of warlocks? Speak low – bend to your oar. The devil with the lash has sharp ears.”

To the motion of the oar Kenton bent and rose, standing there on the bench. The benumbment that had held his mind was passing: passed ever more swiftly as his tightened grip on the oar began to send the blood more swiftly through his veins. The man beside him grunted approval,

“No weakling, you,” he whispered. “The oar wearies – yet up it flows strength from the sea. But sip that strength slowly. Grow strong – slowly. Then it may be that you and I together—”

He paused; shot a wary side glance at Kenton.

“By your looks, you are a man of Eirnn, of the Southern Isles,” he whispered. “No grudge bear I against them. They met us always sword to sword and breast to breast. Many the blows we have struck between us, and the hovering Valkyries went never empty-handed back to Valhalla where we met the men of Eirnn. Brave men, strong men, men who died shouting, kissing sword blade and spear point as gayly as a bride. Are you one of these?”

Kenton thought swiftly. He must shape his answer cunningly to bind this comradeship so plainly offered him neither bewilder by whole truth nor be so vague as to rouse suspicion.

“Kenton, my name,” he answered softly. “My fathers were of the Eirnn. They knew well the Vikings and their ships – nor have they handed down to me any grudge against them. I would be friend of yours, Sigurd, Trygg’s son, since for how long neither of us knows I must labor here beside you. And since you and I – together—”

He paused meaningly, as had the Viking. The Norseman nodded, then again shot that keen side glance at him.

“How fell this bane upon you?” he muttered. “Since they drove me aboard this ship at Isle of Sorcerers we have entered no harbor. You were not here when they chained me to the oar.”

“Sigurd – by Odin All-Father – I do not know!” The Norseman’s hand quivered at the name of his god. “A hand that I could not see plucked me out of my own land and set me here. That son of Hela who rules the black deck offered me freedom – if I would do a thing of shame. I would not. I battled with his men. Three I slew. And then they chained me to this oar.”

“You slew three!” The Viking looked up at Kenton, eyes blazing, teeth bared. “You slew three! Skoal! Comrade! Skoal!” he shouted.

Something like a flying serpent hissed by Kenton; hissed and struck the Norseman’s back. It withdrew, blood spurting from where it had bitten. It struck and struck again.

Zachel’s voice snarled through the hissing of the lash:

“Dog! Sow spittle! Have you gone mad? Shall I flay you then!”

Under the lash the body of Sigurd, Trygg’s son, shuddered. He looked up at Kenton, bloody froth on his lips. Suddenly, Kenton knew that it was not from the pain of the blows – that it was from the shame of them and from rage; that the whiplash was drawing redder drops from his heart, threatening to break it.

And Kenton, leaning over, thrust his own bare back between that lash and the bloody shoulders; took the blows itself.

“Ha!” shouted Zachel. “You want them, do you? Jealous of my whip’s kisses, are you? Well, then – take your fill of them!”

Mercilessly the lash hissed and struck, hissed and struck. Kenton endured its bite stoically, never shifting the shield of his body from the Norseman; meeting each sharp agony by thought of what he would do to repay when his time had come—

When he had mastered the ship!

“Stop!” Through pain-misted eyes he saw the drummer leaning over the pit. “Would you kill the slave, Zachel? By Nergal, if you do I’ll ask Klaneth as gift to me to chain you to his oar for a while!”

Then Zachel, sullenly:

“Row, slave!”

Silently, half fainting, Kenton bent over the oar. The Norseman caught a hand, held it in iron grip.

“Sigurd, Trygg’s son, am I! Jarl’s grandson! Master of Dragons!” His voice was low, yet in it was a clanging echo of smiting swords; and he spoke with eyes closed as though he stood before some altar. “Blood brotherhood is there now between us, Kenton of the Eirnn. Blood brothers – you and I. By the red runes upon your back written there when you thrust it between me and the whip. I shall be your shield as you have been mine. Our swords shall be as one sword. Your friend shall be my friend, and your enemy my enemy. And my life for yours when need be! This by Odin All-Father and by all the Aesir I swear – I, Sigurd, Trygg’s son! And if ever I break faith with you, then may I lie under the poison of Hela’s snakes until Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life, withers, and Ragnarak, the Night of the Gods, has come!”

The heart of Kenton swelled and grew warm.

The grip of the Norseman tightened. He withdrew his hand and bent once more to the oar. Nothing more said he – but Kenton knew the vow was sealed.

The whip of the overseer cracked, a shrill whistle sounded. The four rowers in front lifted high their oars shunted them into a niche. The Viking raised his sweep, set it in a similar rest.

“Sit,” he said. “They wash us now and feed.”

A cascade of water fell over Kenton, and another. The salt of it stung his wounds, brought tears to his eyes,

“Quiet!” warned Sigurd. “Soon the pain passes, and the salt will heal.”

Then down over him swished the water. Two brown men, naked to the waists, backs scarred, went by. In each hand they held buckets, raised them, and poured the water over two of the men at the stroke oars. They turned and went back along the narrow way between the benches.

Powerful were their bodies. Their faces were those of men come to life out of some ancient Assyrian frieze, narrow, hook-nosed, full-lipped. No mind dwelt behind those faces. Their eyes were staring, empty.

The pair came back with other buckets which they dashed over the floor of the rowers’ pit, washing it clean. And when this was done two other slaves set upon the bench between Kenton and the Norseman a rough platter and a bowl. On the platter were a dozen long pods and a heap of round cakes resembling the cassava bread the tropical folk press out and bake in the sun. The bowl was filled with a dark, thick liquid, purplish red.

He munched the pods; they were fleshy, with a curious meaty flavor. The round cakes tasted exactly like what they resembled – cassava bread. The liquid was strong, pungent, a trace of fermentation in it. There was strength in that food and drink. The Norseman smiled at him.

“No lash now, so we speak not too loudly,” he said. “It is the rule. So while we eat and drink ask what you will of me without fear, blood brother.”

“Two things I would first know of many,” said Kenton. “How came you on the ship, Sigurd? And how comes this food here?”

“From here and there comes the food,” answered the Viking. “It is a ship of warlocks and a cursed one. Not long may it stop at any place, nor at any place is it welcome. Nay, not even at Emakhtila, which is full of warlocks. Where it harbors they bring food and gear quickly and with fear. Quickly do they give to speed it quickly away, lest the demons who possess it grow angry and destroy. They have strong magic – that pale son of Helan and the woman on the white deck. Sometimes I think her a daughter of Loki, whom Odin chained for his wickedness. And sometimes I think her a daughter of Freya, the Mother of Gods. But whatever she be, she is very fair and has a great soul. I have no hatred toward her.”

He lifted the bowl to his lips.

“And as for how I came here,” he went on, “that is a short tale enough. Southward I had sailed with the fleet of Kagnor Red Spear. Twelve great dragons had we when we set forth. Southward sailed we through many seas, raiding as we went. Then after long, with six of our twelve dragons left us, we came to a city in the land of the Egyptians. It was a very great city and full of temples to all the gods in the world – except our gods.

“It irked us that among all these temples Odin All-Father had none. It irked us, and we grew wroth. So one night when we had drunk over-deep of the Egyptian wine, six of us set forth to take a temple, cast out its god and give it to Odin for a home.

“We came to a temple and entered. It was a dark temple and full of black robes like these on board the ship. When we told them what we meant to do, they buzzed like bees and rushed us like a wolfpack. Many then we slew, shouting. And we would have won that temple for Odin, the six of us fighting in a ring, but – a horn blew!”

“Summoning too many for you?” asked Kenton.

“Not at all, blood brother,” said Sigurd. “It was a warlock horn. A horn of sleep. It blew sleep through us as the storm wind blows the spray through a sail. It turned our bones to water, and our red swords dropped from hands that could not longer feel their hilts. And down we all dropped, sodden with sleep, among the slain.

“When we awoke we were in a temple. We thought it the same temple, for it was as dark and the same black-robed priests filled it. We were in chains, and they whipped us and made us slaves. Then we found we were no longer in the land of the Egyptians, but in a city named Emakhtila, on an isle of warlocks set in a sea of what I think a warlock world. Long I slaved for the black robes, I and my comrades, till they dragged me to this ship that had dropped anchor in Emakhtila harbor. And here ever since I have bent over my oar, watching their wizardries and fighting to keep my soul from being sucked from me.”

“A horn that poured out sleep!” said Kenton, puzzled. “But that I do not understand, Sigurd.”

“You will, comrade,” Sigurd said grimly. “Soon enough you will. Zachel plays it well – listen – it begins.”

From behind them a deep, droning, mellow horn note sounded. Low pitched, vibrant, continuous, it crept into the ears, and seemed to pour through them along every nerve, touching them, caressing them with the soft fingers of the very soul of poppied sleep.

The note droned on, dripping sleep.

The Viking’s eyes were fierce and strained with struggle against slumber. Slowly, slowly the lids closed over them.

His hands relaxed, the fingers opened, his body swayed, his head dropped upon his chest. He slumped down upon the bench.

The note droned on.

Fight as hard as Kenton might, he could not thrust away the soft, clinging slumber that pressed inexorably in on him from every side. A numbness crept through his body. Sleep, sleep – swarms of infinite particles of sleep were drifting through him, drifting with his blood through every vein, along every nerve, clogging his brain.

Lower and lower dropped his own lids.

And suddenly he could no longer fight. Chains rattling, down against Sigurd he fell…

Something deep within Kenton whispered to him to awaken; something reached down into the abysses of his charmed slumber and drew to its surface his consciousness. Slowly his heavy lids began to rise – then stopped, obeying some subtle warning. He looked out through narrowest slits. The chains that bound his wrists to the riveted manacles of the oar were long. He had moved in his sleep and now lay with head on arm stretched along the back of the low bench. He faced the ivory deck.

There, at its edge, looking down upon him was Sharane. Veils of palest blue, through which the hands of long dead Assyrian maids had woven golden lotuses, draped her breast, coiled round her slender waist, and fell to the delicate, sandaled feet. Her black-haired maiden Satalu beside her, she leaned over, scanning him.

“Mistress,” he heard Satalu say, “he cannot be man of Nergal, since Nergal’s men have chained him there.”

“No” mused Sharane. “No – in that I was wrong. And had he been of Nergal, never could he have crossed the barrier. Nor would Klaneth have taunted me – as he did—”

“He is very handsome and young,” sighed Satalu, “and strong. He fought the priests like a lion lord.”

“Even a cornered rat will fight,” answered Sharane, scornful. “He let himself be led to his chains like a whipped dog. And he lied to me! He came to me in borrowed plumes, bearing a sword he could not use!”

“Oh,” cried Sharane – and half of that cry was a sob – “oh, Satalu, I am ashamed! Liar and coward and slave – still he stirs something in my heart that never yet stirred for man. Oh, I am ashamed – I am ashamed, Satalu!”

“Lady Sharane, do not weep!” Satalu caught the fluttering hands. “He may be none of these. How do you know? Perhaps he did speak the truth. How know we what has happened in that world of ours so long lost to us? And he is very handsome – and young!”

“At least,” said Sharane and bitterly, “he is a slave.”

“Sh-h!” warned Satalu. “Zachel comes.”

They turned; walked toward Sharane’s cabin out of Kenton’s vision.

The wakening whistle shrilled. There was a stir among the slaves, and Kenton groaned, raised himself, rubbed eyes, and gripped the oar.

Exultation was in his heart. There could be no mistaking Sharane’s words. He held her. By a slender thread, it might be; but still – he held her. And if he were not a slave – when slave he ceased to be – what then? By no slender thread then would he hold her. He laughed – but softly, lest Zachel hear. Sigurd looked at him curiously.

“The sleep horn must have brought you gay dream,” he murmured.

“Gay, indeed, Sigurd,” he answered. “The kind of dream that will thin our chains until we can snap them.”

“Odin send more dreams like it,” grunted the Norseman.

— IX —

THE BARGAINING OF SHARANE

When Zachel blew the horn again Kenton had no need of it to send him to sleep. The sharp eyes of the overseer had seen through Sigurd’s self-sacrificing stratagem, and he had watched Kenton continually, lashing him when he faltered or let the whole burden of the oar fall upon the Norseman. His hands were blistered, every bone and muscle ached, and his mind lay dulled in his weary body. And thus it was between the next five sleeps.

Once he roused himself enough to ask Sigurd a question that had been going round and round in his brain. Half the rowers in the pit were behind the line that separated black deck from ivory – that line which neither Klaneth and his crew nor Sharane and her women could cross. Yet Zachel roamed at will from one end of that pit to the other; other priests, too, for he had seen them. And although he had not seen Klaneth or Gigi or the Persian there, he did not doubt that they could come and go if they so wished. Why, then, did not the black robes swarm up the farther side and overwhelm the rosy cabin? Why did not Sharane and her women drop into the pit and lay siege to the ebon cabin? Why did they not launch their javelins, their arrows, over the pit of the rowers into the wolfpack of the black priest?

It was a warlock ship, the Viking had repeated, and the spell upon it no simple one. The slave who had died had told him that he had been on the ship since the gods had launched her, and that the same unseen, mysterious barrier shut off the side of the rowers that rimmed Sharane’s deck. Nor could javelin or arrow or other missile other than those hurled by god and goddess penetrate it.

Humanly, each opposing camp was helpless against the other. There were other laws, too, the slave had told Sigurd. Neither Sharane nor Klaneth could leave the ship when it hove to in harbor. Sharane’s women could. The black priest’s men, yes – but not for long. Soon they must return. The ship drew them back. What would happen to them if they did not return? The slave had not known, had said that such thing was impossible, the ship would draw them back.

Kenton pondered over all this as with aching back he pushed and pulled at the oar. Decidedly these were practical, efficient deities who had doomed the ship overlooking no detail, he thought, half amused.

Well, they had created the game, and certainly they had the right to make that game’s rules. He wondered whether Sharane could roam at will from stem to stern when he had conquered the ship. Wondering still, he heard the drone of Zachel’s horn begin, and pitched, content, into the bottomless oubliette of sleep it opened.

He awoke from that sixth sleep with mind crystal clear, an astonishing sense of well being, and a body once more free from pain and flexible and vigorous. He pulled at his oar strongly and easily.

“Strength flows up to you from the sea even as I foretold,” grunted Sigurd.

Kenton nodded absently, his sharpened mind grappling with the problem of escape from his chains.

What went on in the pit and on the ship while the rowers were asleep? What chance would offer then to free himself and the Viking if he could stay awake?

If he could stay awake!

But how could he close his ears to that horn which poured sleep into them as the sirens of old poured with their songs fatal fascination into the ears of sailors strayed within their ken?

The sirens! The story of crafty Ulysses’ adventure with those sea women flashed into his memory. How desire had come upon that wanderer to hear the siren song – yet no desire to let it draw him to them. How he had sailed into their domain; had filled his oarsmen’s ears with melted wax; had made them bind him to the mast with open ears, and then, cursing, straining at his bonds, mad with desire to leap into their white arms, had heard their enchanted measures – and sailed safe away.

A wind arose – a steady wind that filled the sail and drove the ship through gently cresting waves. Came command to rest oars. Kenton slouched down upon the bench. Sigurd was in one of his silent moods, face brooding, gaze far away, filled with dreams of other days when his dragons cleft the Northern Ocean.

Kenton dropped his hands upon the silken rags upon his legs; his fingers began, seemingly idly, to unravel their threads, twist and knot them into little silken cylinders. He worked on, the Viking unheeding. Now two were finished. He palmed one, rubbed as idly the side of his face, and so rubbing slipped the little silken cylinder into an ear. He waited for a time; slipped in the other ear the second plug. The roaring of the wind sank to a loud whispering.

Carefully, unhurrying, he drew them out; twisted more threads around them. Again he set them in place. Now the wind’s roar was only a murmuring, faint and far away. Satisfied, he slipped the silken cylinders under his torn girdle.

On sped the ship. And after a while the slaves came and dashed their buckets over him and the Viking; brought them food and drink.

On the very edge of the sleep-horn drone Kenton slumped down upon the bench, face on forearms, the silken cylinders hidden under thumbs. Swiftly he slipped them in his ears. Then he let every muscle go limp. The droning diminished to a faint, hardly heard humming. Even so, a languor crept through him. He fought it. He beat the languor back. The humming ceased. He heard the overseer go by him; looked after him through half-raised lids; saw him ascend that pit’s steps and pass over the deck to Klaneth’s cabin.

The black deck was empty. As though shifting in slumber Kenton rolled over, threw an arm across the back of the bench, rested his head upon it, and through lowered lashes took stock of what lay behind him.

He heard laughter, golden, chiming. To the edge of her deck, black-haired Satalu beside her, walked Sharane. She seated herself there, unbound her hair, shook the flaming red gold cloud of it over face and shoulders; sat within it as though within a perfumed, silken red gold tent. Satalu raised a shining tress; began to comb it.

Through that web of loveliness he felt Sharane’s eyes upon him. Involuntarily his own opened wide; clung to her hidden ones. She gasped, half rose, parted the curtains of her hair, stared at him in wonder. “He is awake!” she whispered. “Sharane!” he breathed.

He watched shame creep again into her eyes – her face grow cold. She raised her head, sniffed daintily.

“Satalu,” she said, “is there not a stronger taint from the pit?” Again she silted her nose. “Yes – I am sure there is. Like the old slave market at Uruk when they brought the new slaves in.”

“I – I notice it not, mistress,” faltered Satalu. “Why yes – of course.” Sharane’s voice was merciless. “See there he sits. A new slave; a strange slave who sleeps with open eyes.”

“Yet he – he looks not like a slave,” again faltered her handmaiden.

“No” questioned Sharane sweetly. “What has happened to your memory, girl? What is the badge of a slave?”

The black-haired girl did not answer; bent low over the locks of her mistress.

“A chain and the brand of whips,” mocked Sharane. “These are the slave’s badge. And this new slave has both – in plenty.”

Still Kenton was silent beneath her mockery; made no movement; indeed scarce heard her, his burning eyes drinking in her beauty.

“Ah, but I dreamed one came to me with great words, a bearer of promises, fanning hope in my heart,” sighed Sharane. “I opened my heart to him – in that dream, Satalu. All my heart! And he repaid me with lies – and his promises were empty – and he was a weakling – and my girls beat him. And now it seems to me that there sits that liar and weakling of my dreams with brand of whip upon his back and weak hands chained. A slave!”

“Mistress! Oh, Mistress!” whispered Satalu. But Kenton kept silence, although now her mockery began to sting.

And suddenly she rose, thrust hands through shining locks.

“Satalu,” she murmured, “would you not think that sight of me would awaken even a slave? That any slave, so he were young and strong, would break his chains – for me?”

She swayed, turned; through her thin robes gleamed exquisite, rosy curves of breast and thigh; lithe loveliness. She spread wide the nets of her hair, peered through them at him with wanton eyes; preened herself, thrust out a tiny, rosy foot, a dimpled knee.

He raised his head recklessly, the hot blood rushing through.

“The chains will break, Sharane!” he called. “I will break them – never fear! And then – —”

“And then—” she echoed, “and then my girls shall beat you as before!” she mocked, and sped away.

He watched her go, pulse beating like drums. He saw her halt and whisper to Satalu. The black-haired girl turned, made him a warning gesture. He closed his eyes, dropped head on arm. And soon he heard the feet of Zachel striding down the steps, go by him. The waking whistle shrilled.

Why, if her mockery had been real, had she warned him?

Sharane looked down upon him again from her deck.

Time had gone by since she had stood there mocking him. Time had gone, but how measured in his own lost world Kenton had no means of telling, meshed as he was in the ship’s timeless web.

Sleep after sleep he had lain on his bench, watching for her. She had kept to her cabin – or if she had not, she had kept herself from his sight.

Nor had he told the Viking that he had broken the spell of the sleep horn. Sigurd he trusted, heart and soul. Yet he was not sure of the Norseman’s subtlety; not certain that he could feign the charmed slumber as Kenton did. He could not take the risk.

And now again Sharane stood and looked down upon him from the platform close to the emerald mast. The slaves slept. There was none at watch on the black deck. There was no mockery now in Sharane’s face. And when she spoke she struck straight home to the heart of her purpose.

“Whoever you are, whatever you may be,” she whispered, “two things can you do. Cross the barrier. Remain awake when the other slaves must sleep. You have told me that you can break your chains. Since those two things you can do – I find belief within me that of the third you also speak the truth. Unless – —”

She paused; he read her thought.

“Unless I lied to you about that as I lied to you before,” he said levelly. “Well, those were no lies I told you.”

“If you break your chains,” she said, “will you slay Klaneth?”

He feigned to consider.

“Why should I kill Klaneth?” he asked at last.

“Why? Why?” Scorn tinged her voice. “Has he not set his chains upon you? Had you whipped? Made you slave?”

“Did not Sharane drive me forth with javelins?” he asked. “Did not Sharane pour salt in my wounds with her mockery – her laughter?”

“But – you lied to me!” she cried.

Again he feigned consideration.

“What will this liar, weakling, and slave gain if he kills the black priest for you?” he asked bluntly.

“Gain?” she repeated blankly.

“What will you pay me for it?” he said.

“Pay you? Pay you! Oh!” The scorn in her eyes scorched him. “You shall be paid. You shall have freedom – the pick of my jewels – all of them—”

“Freedom I shall have when I have slain Klaneth,” he answered. “And of what use to me are your jewels on this cursed ship?”

“You do not understand,” she said. “The black priest slain, I can set you on any land you wish in this world. In all of them jewels have value.”

She paused, then: “And have they no worth in that land from whence you come, and to which, unchained, it seems you can return whenever danger threatens?”

Her voice was honeyed poison. But Kenton only laughed.

“What more do you want?” she asked. “If they be not enough – what more?”

“You!” he said.

“Me!” she gasped incredulously. “I give myself to any man – for a price! I – give myself to you! You whipped dog!” She stormed. “Never!”

Up to this Kenton’s play with her had been calculated; but now he spoke with wrath as real and hot as hers.

“No!” cried Kenton. “No! You’ll not give yourself to me! For, by God, Sharane, I’ll take you!”

He thrust a clenched, chained hand out to her.

“Master of this ship I’ll be, and with no help from you – you who have called me a liar and slave and now would throw me butcher’s pay. No! When I master the ship it will be by my own hand. And that same hand shall master – you!”

“You threaten me!” Her face flamed wrath. “You!”

She thrust a hand into her breast, drew out a slender knife – hurled it at him. As though it had struck some adamantine wall, invisible, it clanged, fell to her feet, blade snapped from hilt.

She paled, shrank.

“Hate me!” jeered Kenton. “Hate me, Sharane; For what is hate but the flame that cleans the cup for wine of love!”

With no soft closing of her cabin door did she go within it. And Kenton, laughing grimly, bent his head over his oar; was soon as sound asleep as the Norseman snoring beside him.

— X —

ON THE SHIP A-SAILING

He awakened to a stirring and humming through all the ship. On ivory deck and black the ship’s folk stood, pointing, talking, gesticulating. A flock of birds, the first he had seen in this strange world, hovered above him. Their wings were shaped like those of great butterflies. Their plumage shone as though lacquered in glowing vermilions and pale golds. From their opened beaks came a chiming tumult as of little tinkling bells.

“Land!” the Viking exclaimed. “We run into harbor. Food and water must be low.”

There was a brisk wind blowing and the oars at rest. Careless of Zachel’s lash, Kenton leaped upon the bench, looking over the bow. The overseer gave no heed, his own eyes intent upon what lay before.

It was a sun yellow isle, high and rounded, and splashed with craters of color like nests of rainbows. Save for these pansied dapplings, the island curved all glowing topaz, from its base in the opalescent shallows of the azure sea to its crest, where feathered trees drooped branches like immense panaches of ostrich plumes dyed golden amber. Over and about that golden isle shot flashes of iridescences from what seemed luminous flying flowers.

Closer drew the ship. At the bow the damsels of Sharane clustered, laughing and chattering. And upon her balcony was Sharane, watching the isle with wistful eyes.

Now it was close indeed. Down ran the peacock sail. The ship rowed slowly and more slowly to the shore; not until the curved prow had almost touched that shore did the steersman shift the rudder and bring the ship sharply about. As they drifted, the plumes of the strange trees swept the deck with long leaves, delicately feathered as those the frost etches on the winter pane. Topaz yellow and sun amber were those leaves; the branches from which they hung glistened as though cut from yellow chrysolite. Immense clusters of flowers dropped from them, lily shaped, flame scarlet.

Slowly, ever more slowly, drifted the ship. It crept by a wide cleft that cut into the heart of the isle. The sides of this vale were harlequined with the cratered colors, and Kenton saw that these were fields of flowers, clustered as though they filled deep circled amphitheaters. The flashing iridescences were birds – birds of every size from smallest dragon flies to those whose wing-spread was that of condors in the high Andes. Large and small, on each glittered the lacquered butterfly wings.

The isle breathed fragrance. Of green upon it there was none, save for the emerald glintings of the birds.

The valley slid behind them. Ever more slowly the feathered trees brushed the deck. The ship slipped into the mouth of a glen at whose end a cataract dropped rain of pearl into a golden-ferned pool. There was the rattling of a chain; an anchor splashed. The bow of the ship swung in; nosed through the foliage; touched the bank.

Over the rail climbed the women of Sharane, upon their heads great baskets. From her balcony Sharane looked after them with deeper wistfulness. The women melted within the flower-spangled boskage; fainter and fainter came their voices; died away. Sharane, chin cupped in white hands, drank in the land and with wide and longing eyes. Above her red gold hair streaming through the silver crescent a bird hovered – a bird all gleaming emeralds and flashing blues, chiming peals of fairy bells. Kenton saw tears upon her cheeks. She caught his gaze, dashed them away angrily. She half turned as though to go; then slipped down woefully behind one of her balcony’s tiny blossoming trees where he could no longer see her weeping.

Now her women filed back along the bank, their baskets filled with plunder; fruits, gourds purple and white, and great clusters of those pods he had eaten when first he had broken fast upon the ship. Into the cabin they trooped, and out again with baskets empty. Time upon time they came and went. At last they bore away skins instead of the woven hampers; water bags which they filled from the pool of the cataract. Time upon time they brought them back, swollen full, upon their shoulders.

They trooped out once more, burdenless; darted joyously over the rail; doffed their scanty enough robes and plunged into the pool. Like water nymphs they swam and played, the pearly flow caressing, streaming from delicately delicious curves – pale ivory, warm rose, soft olive. They sprang from the pool, wove flower crowns and with sprays of the fragrant lily blooms in arms clambered, reluctant, over the side and into the rosy cabin.

Now crawled over the rail the men of Klaneth. They slipped on and off the ship with their burdens, poured their last water skins into the casks.

Again there was stir upon the ship. The chains rattled, the anchor lifted. Up and down flashed the oars, drawing the ship from the bank. Up rose the peacock sail. The ship veered, caught the wind, swam slowly through the amethystine shallows. Faster swung the sweeps. The golden isle diminished, was saffron shadow in the mists; vanished.

On sailed the ship. And on and on – by what signs or reckonings or to what port Kenton could not know. Sleep after sleep it sailed. The huge bowl of silver mists whose edge was the horizon, contracted or expanded as those mists thickened or thinned. Storms they met and weathered; roaring storms that changed the silver of the mists to lurid copper, ambered jet, darkness deeper than night. Sudden storms threaded with lightnings weird and beautiful. Lightnings that were like the shatterings of immense prisms, the breakings of rainbows of jewels. Storms that trod on feet of thunder. Thunder that was metallic, tintinnabulary; hurricanes of clashing cymbals following showers of multi-colored, flaming gems.

Steadily strength of the sea poured into Kenton up his oar blade, even as Sigurd had promised; remaking him, hardening him, turning all his body into a machine as finely tempered as a rapier and as flexible.

Between sleeps Sigurd chanted to him Viking tales, Sagas unsung, lost epics of the Norse.

Twice the black priest sent for him; questioned him, threatened him, cajoled him – vainly. And each time with blacker face sent him back to his chains.

Strife of god and goddess there was none. And Sharane during the sleep time of the slaves kept to her cabin. Awake, he could not turn his head to seek her without inviting the bite of Zachel’s lash. So often he let the horn of sleep have its way – what use to keep awake while Sharane hid?

There came a time when, lying awake, he heard steps coming down the pit’s stair. He turned, face against the back of his bench, as though in troubled slumber. The steps paused beside him.

“Zubran,” it was the voice of Gigi, “this man has become a young lion.”

“Strong enough,” grunted the Persian. “It is a pity that his strength is wasted here – driving this ship from one place of weariness to another as bad.”

“I think as you,” said Gigi. “Strength he now has. Also he has courage. You remember how he slew the priests.”

“Remember!” There was no boredom in Zubran’s voice now. “Can I forget! By the heart of Rustam – could I forget! It was the first draft of life given me, it seemed, for centuries. I owe him something for that.”

“Also,” went on Gigi, “he has loyalty where his heart turns. I told you how he shielded with his own back the man who sleeps beside him. I liked him well for that, Zubran.”

“As a gesture,” said the Persian, “it was excellent. A trifle florid, perhaps, for perfect taste. But still – excellent.”

“Courage, loyalty, strength,” mused the drummer; then slowly, a hint of mirth in his voice, “and cunning. Unusual cunning, Zubran, since he has found a way to shut his ears to the sleep horn – and lies here now wide awake.”

Kenton’s heart stopped; began to beat furiously. How did the drummer know? Did he know? Was it only a guess? Desperately he strove against quivering nerves; forced his body to remain inert.

“What!” exclaimed the Persian, incredulously. “Awake! Gigi – you dream!”

“Nay,” said Gigi quietly. “I have watched him when he saw me not. He is awake, Zubran.”

Suddenly Kenton felt his paw upon his breast, pressing upon his pounding heart. The drummer chuckled; withdrew the hand.

“Also,” he said, approvingly, “he has caution. A little he trusts me – but not too much. Nor does he know you well enough as yet, Zubran, to give you any trust at all. Therefore he lies quiet, saying to himself: ‘Gigi cannot really know. He cannot be sure as long as I do not open my eyes.’ Yes, he has caution. But see, Zubran, he cannot keep the blood from stealing up into his face, nor slow his heart to the calm rhythm of sleep.” Again he chuckled, half-maliciously. “And there is other proof of his caution, in that he has not told his comrade that the horn has no power over him. Hear the long-haired one snore? No mistaking that for wakefulness. I like that too – he knows that a secret shared by two runs risk of being none.”

“He seems sound asleep to me.” Kenton felt the Persian bend down over him doubtfully.

His eyelids fought to rise; by sheer will he kept them down, breathing regularly, motionless. How long would they stand there looking at him? At last Gigi broke the silence.

“Zubran,” he said, quietly, “like you, I tire of the black priest and this fruitless strife between Ishtar and Nergal. Yet bound by our vows neither you nor I may come to grips with Klaneth, nor may we harm his men. It matters not that by trickery those vows were gotten from us. We made them – and they bind. As long as Nergal’s priest rules Nergal’s deck we may not give him battle. But suppose Klaneth no longer ruled – that another hand thrust him to his dark master?”

“A mighty hand that! Where on these seas could we find such a hand? And if found, how persuade it to close on Klaneth?” jeered the Persian.

“I think – it is here.” Kenton felt again the drummer’s touch. “Courage and loyalty and strength, quick wit and caution. He has all these. Besides – he can pass the barrier!”

“By Ahriman! That is so!” whispered the Persian. “Now I would make another vow,” said Gigi. “A vow in which you would join. If this man’s chains were – broken, easily then could he pass to Sharane’s cabin; easily now, I think, regain his sword.”

“Well, what then?” asked Zubran. “He would still have Klaneth to meet and all his pack. And we could not help him.”

“No,” answered the drummer. “But neither would we hinder him. Our vows do not bind us to fight for the black priest, Zubran. Were I this man – with my chains broke – and sword regained – I would find way to release this comrade sleeping beside him. He, I think, could keep off the pack while this wolf cub, who is now no longer cub but grown, could match himself against Klaneth.”

“Well—” the Persian began doubtfully; then changed to cheerfulness – “I would see him loosed, Gigi. At the least, it would give break to this cursed monotony. But you spoke of a vow.”

“A vow for a vow,” answered Gigi. “If broken were his chains, if he regained sword, if he met Klaneth and we fought not against him at Klaneth’s side, and if he slew Klaneth, would he vow comradeship with you and me, Zubran? I wonder?”

“Why should he make that vow to us,” asked Zubran, “unless – we loosed his chains?”

“Exactly,” whispered Gigi. “For if he made that vow – I would loose them!”

Hope sprang flaming up in Kenton. Cold doubt followed. Was this all a trap? A trick to torment him? He would take no chance – and yet – freedom!

Gigi again bent over him.

“Trust me, Wolf,” he said, low. “Vow for vow. If you accept – look at me.”

The dice were offered him. Were they straight or weighted, he would cast them. Kenton opened his eyes, stared straight for an instant into the twinkling beads of jet so close. Then he closed them tight; resumed his slow breathing; his semblance of deepest slumber.

And Gigi rose from him, laughing. He heard the two move away, up the pit’s steps.

Freedom again! Could it be true? And when would Gigi – were it true and no trap – when would Gigi loose his chains? Long he lay between fiery hope and chilling doubt. Could it be true?

Freedom! And – —

Sharane!

— XI —

GIGI SNAPS THE CHAINS

Not long did Kenton have to wait. Hardly had the next faint hum of the sleep horn died than he felt a touch on his shoulder. Longer fingers twitched his ears, raised his eyelids. He looked into the face of Gigi. Kenton pulled out the little silken cylinders that shut off the compelling slumber of the horn.

“So that is how you do it.” Gigi examined them with interest. He squatted down beside him.

“Wolf,” he said, “I have come to have a talk with you, so that you may know me a little better. I would continue to sit here beside you, but some of those cursed priests may come prowling around. Therefore, in a moment I shall seat myself on Zachel’s stool. When I have done so, turn you around facing me, taking that highly deceptive attitude I have so often watched you assume.”

He stepped up on the bench. “Zubran is with Klaneth, arguing about the gods. Zubran, although sworn to Nergal, thinks him a rather inferior copy of Ahriman, the Persian god of darkness. He is also convinced that this whole matter of warfare between Nergal and Ishtar for the ship lacks not only originality and ingenuity, but taste – something, indeed, that his own gods and goddesses would not do; or if they did, would do much better. This angers Klaneth, which greatly rejoices Zubran.”

Once more he arose and looked about him.

“However,” he went on, “this time he is arguing to keep Klaneth and especially Zachel away while we talk, since Klaneth leans a great deal upon Zachel in these arguments. I have told them that I cannot bear their talk and that I will watch on Zachel’s seat until it is finished. And it will not be finished until I return, for Zubran is clever, oh, very clever and he expects our talk to lead, ultimately, to permanent relief of his bore—”

He glanced slyly at the ivory deck.

“So do not fear, Wolf.” He swayed upon his dwarfed legs. “Only as I go, slip sideways and keep your eyes on me. I will give you warning if warning is needed.”

He waddled away, climbed into the overseer’s seat. Kenton, obeying him, turned sleepily; rested arm on bench and head on arm.

“Wolf,” said Gigi suddenly, “is there a shrub called the chilquor in the place from whence you came?”

Kenton stared at him, struck dumb by such a question. Yet Gigi must have some reason for asking it. Had he ever heard of such a shrub? He searched his memory.

“Its leaves are about so large.” Gigi parted fingertips for inches three. “It grows only upon the edge of the desert and it is rare – sorrowfully rare. Look you – perhaps you know it by another name. Perhaps this will enlighten you. You bruise the buds just before they open. Then you mix them with sesamum oil and honey and a little burned ivory and spread it like a paste over your head. Then you rub and rub and rub – so and so and so—” he illustrated vigorously upon his bald and shining pate.

“And after a little,” he said, “the hair begins to sprout; like grain under the rains of spring it grows, until soon – lo – naked dome is covered. Instead of the light flying off affrighted from shining dome it plays within new hair. And once more the man who was bald is beautiful in the eyes of woman!

“By Nadak of the Goats; by Tanith, the dispenser of delights!” cried Gigi with enthusiasm. “That paste grows hair! How it does grow hair! Upon a melon would it grow it. Yes, even those planks rightly rubbed by it would sprout hair like grass. You are sure you do not know it?”

Struggling with his amazement Kenton shook his head. “Well,” said Gigi, sorrowfully. “All this the chilquor buds can do. And so I search for them—” here he sighed mightily – “who would once more be beautiful in woman’s eyes.”

He sighed again. Then one by one he flecked the backs of the sleeping slaves with Zachel’s whip – even the back of Sigurd.

“Yes,” he murmured, “yes, they sleep.”

His black eyes twinkled on Kenton, the slit mouth grinned.

“You wonder,” he said, “why I talk of such trivial matters as shrubs and hair and bald pates, while you lie chained. Well, Wolf, these matters are far from trivial. They brought me here. And were I not here – would you have hope of freedom, think you? Ah, no,” said Gigi. “Life is a serious matter. Therefore all parts of it must be serious. And therefore no part of it can be trivial. Let us rest for a moment, Wolf, while you absorb that great truth.”

Again, one by one, he flecked the backs of the sleeping slaves.

“Well, Wolf,” he went on, “now I shall tell you how I came aboard this ship because of the chilquor, its effect on hair and because of my bald pate. And you shall see how your fortune rests upon them. Wolf, when I was but a child in Nineveh, girls found me singularly attractive.

“‘Gigi!’ they would cry as I passed by them. ‘Gigi, little love, little darling! Kiss me, Gigi!’”

Gigi’s voice was ludicrously languishing; Kenton laughed.

“You laugh, Wolf!” observed the drummer. “Well – that makes us understand each other better.”

His eyes twinkled impishly.

“Yes,” he said, “‘Kiss me,’ they cried. And I would kiss them, because I found them all as singularly attractive as each found me. And as I grew, this mutual attraction increased. You have no doubt noticed,” said Gigi complacently, “that I am an unusual figure of a man. But as I passed from adolescence my greatest beauty was, perhaps, my hair. It was long and black and ringleted, and it fell far over my shoulders. I perfumed it and cared for it, and the tender little vessels of joy who loved me would twine their fingers in it when I lifted them upon my head or when my head was on their knees. They joyed in it even as I.

“And then I had a fever. When I recovered, all my beautiful hair was gone!”

He paused to sigh again.

“There was a woman of Nineveh who pitied me. She it was who anointed my head with the chilquor paste; told me how to make it; showed me the growing shrub. After years of – ah, mutual attraction – I had fever again. And again my hair vanished. I was in Tyre then, Wolf, and made what haste I could to return to Nineveh. When I did return, the kindly woman was dead and a sand storm had covered the spot where she had pointed out to me the chilquor shrubs!”

He sighed, prodigiously. Kenton, amused and fascinated by his tale as he was, could not forbear a suspicious glance after that melancholy exhalation. It seemed overdone.

“Then before I could search further,” went on Gigi, hurriedly, “word came to me that one who loved me – a princess – was on her way to Nineveh to see me. Shame was mine and anguish! I could not meet her with a bald pate. For no one loves a bald man!”

“Nobody loves a fat man,” grinned Kenton. He had spoken, it seemed, in his own tongue for the drummer apparently had not understood.

“What did you say?” he asked.

“I said,” answered Kenton, gravely, “that for one whose excellencies are as great as yours, the loss of your hair should have been of no more consequence to a woman than the falling of one feather from a pet bird.”

“That is a fine tongue of yours,” remarked Gigi, stolidly. “That it can say so much in so few sounds.”

“Well,” he continued. “I was distressed indeed. I could have hidden – but I feared my will would not be strong enough to keep me hid. She was a very lovely princess, Wolf. Besides, I knew that if she found that I was in Nineveh, as find out she surely would, she would rout me out. She was a fair woman. And this is the one difference between the fair women and the dark – that the latter wait for you to come for them, but the former search for you. And I could go to no other city to hide – for in each of them were other women who admired me. What was I to do?”

“Why didn’t you get a wig?” asked Kenton, so interested now in Gigi’s tale that his chains were forgotten.

“I told you, Wolf, that they loved to thread their fingers through my locks,” answered Gigi, severely. “Could any wig stay in place under such treatment? Not when the women were such as loved me – No! No! I will tell you what I did. And here is where you will see how my lost hair and you are entangled. The High Priest of Nergal in Nineveh was a friend of mine. I went to him and asked him first to work a magic that would plant my head afresh with hair. He was indignant – said that his art was not to be debased for such a common purpose.

“It was then. Wolf, that I began to have my suspicions of the real power of these sorcerers. I had seen this priest perform great magic. He had raised phantoms that had raised my hair – when I had it. How much easier then ought it to have been for him to have raised my hair without the trouble of raising the phantoms too? I suggested this. He grew more indignant – said that he dealt with gods, not barbers!

“But now I know better. He could not do it! I made the best of the matter, however, and asked him to put me for a while where my princess could not find me and where, weak willed as I am, I could not go to her. He smiled, and said he knew just the place. He inducted me as an acolyte to Nergal and gave me a token that he said would insure me recognition and good will from one he named Klaneth. Also he sealed me with certain vows, not to be broken. I took them cheerfully, thinking them but temporary, and his friend Klaneth the high priest of some hidden temple where I would be safe. I went to sleep that night trustfully, happy as a child. I awakened, Wolf – here!

“It was a sorry jest,” muttered Gigi, angrily. “And a sorry jest would it be for that Ninevite priest if I knew the way back to him!

“But here I have been ever since,” he added, briskly. “Barred by my acolytage to Nergal from crossing to that other deck where there is a little vessel of joy named Satalu whom I would fain take within my hands. Barred by other vows from leaving the ship wherever it may touch for food and gear – since it was sanctuary I asked from which I could not go nor my princess come to me.”

“By Tiamat of the Abyss – I got the sanctuary I asked!” he exclaimed, ruefully enough. “And by Bel who conquered Tiamat – I am as weary of the ship as Zubran himself. Yet were I not here,” he added, as by afterthought, “who would loose you of your chains? A shrub and lack of hair, an amorous princess and my vanity – these brought me on the ship to set you free when you came. Of such threads do the gods weave our destinies.”

He leaned forward, all malice gone from twinkling eyes, a grotesque tenderness on the frog-like mouth.

“I like you. Wolf,” he said, simply.

“I like you, Gigi,” all Kenton’s defenses were down. “Greatly, indeed, do I like you. And trust fully. But – Zubran—”

“Have no doubts about Zubran,” snapped Gigi. “He, too, was tricked upon this ship and is even more eager than I to be free. Someday he shall tell you his story, as I have mine. Ho! Ho!” laughed the drummer. “Ever seeking the new, ever tiring of the known is Zubran. And this is his fate – to be shot into a whole new world and find it worse than his old. Nay, Wolf, fear not Zubran. With shield and sword will he stand beside you – until he tires even of you. But even then will he be loyal.”

He grew solemn, kept unwinking gaze on Kenton, searching, it seemed, his soul.

“Consider well, Wolf,” he whispered. “The odds are all against you. We two may not help you as long as Klaneth is lord of his deck. It may be that you cannot free the long-haired one beside you, You have Klaneth to face and twenty of his men – and, it may be, Nergal! And if you lose – death for you – and after long, long torture. Here, chained to your oar, you are at least alive. Consider well!”

Kenton held out to him his prisoned wrists.

“When will you loose my chains, Gigi?” was all he said.

Gigi’s face lighted, his black eyes blazed, he sprang upright, the golden loops in his pointed ears dancing.

“Now!” he said. “By Sin, the Father of Gods! By Shamash his Son and by Bel the Smiter – now!”

He thrust his hands between Kenton’s waist and the great circlet of bronze that bound it; pulled it apart as though it had been made of putty; he broke the locks of the manacles on Kenton’s wrists.

“Run free. Wolf!” he whispered. “Run free!”

With never a look behind him, he waddled to the pit’s steps and up them. Slowly Kenton stood upon his feet. His chains dropped from him. He looked down at the sleeping Viking. How could he unfasten his links? How, if he could unfasten, awaken him before Zachel came hurrying down among the slaves?

Again be looked about him. At the foot of the overseer’s high stool lay a shining knife, long-bladed, thin-bladed, dropped there by Gigi – for him? He did not know. But he did know that with it he might pick the Viking’s locks. He took a step toward it—

How long he was in taking the second step.

And there was a mist before his eyes.

Through that mist the sleeping forms of the oarsmen wavered – were like phantoms. And now he could no longer see the knife.

He rubbed his eyes, looked down on Sigurd. He was a wraith!

He looked at the sides of the ship. They melted away even as he sought them. He had a glimpse of sparkling turquoise sea. And then – it became vaporous. Was not!

Cease to be!

And now Kenton floated for an instant in thick mist shot through with silvery light. The light snapped out. He hurtled through a black void filled with tumult of vast winds.

The blackness snapped out! Through his closed lids he saw light. And he was no longer falling. He stood, rocking, upon his feet. He opened his eyes – Once more he was within his own room! Outside hummed the traffic of the Avenue, punctuated by blasts of auto horns.

Kenton rushed over to the jeweled ship. Except for the slaves, on it was but one little figure – one toy. A manikin who stood half way down the pit steps, mouth open, whip at feet, stark astonishment in every rigid line.

Zachel, the overseer!

He looked down into the galley pit. The slaves lay asleep, oars at rest – —

And suddenly he caught sight of himself in the long mirror! Stood, wondering, before it!

For what he saw was never the Kenton who had been borne out of that room upon the breast of the inrushing mystic sea. His mouth had hardened, eyes grown fearless, falcon bright. Over all his broadened chest the muscles ran not bulging, bound – but graceful, flexible, and steel hard. He flexed his arms, and the muscles ran rippling along them. He turned, scanned his back in the mirror.

Scars covered it, healed teeth marks of the lash. The lash of Zachel – Zachel – the toy?

No toy had made those scars!

No oars of toy had brought into being those muscles!

And suddenly all Kenton’s mind awoke. Awoke and was filled with shame, with burning longing, despair.

What would Sigurd think of him when he awakened and found him gone – Sigurd with whom he had sworn blood brothership? What would Gigi think – Gigi, who had made vow for vow with him; and trusting him, had broken his chains?

A frenzy shook him. He must get back! Get back before Sigurd or Gigi knew that he was no longer on the ship.

How long had he been away? As though in answer a clock began chiming. He counted. Eight strokes!

Two hours of his own time had passed while he had been on the ship. Two hours only? And in those two hours all these things had happened? His body changed to – this?

But in those two minutes he had been back in his room what had happened on the ship?

He must get back! He must…

He thought of the fight before him. Could he take his automatics with him when he went back – if he could go back? With them he could match any sorceries of the black priest. But they were in another room, in another part of his house. Again he looked at himself in the glass. If his servants saw him – thus! They would not know him. How could he explain? Who would believe him?

And they might tear him away – away from this room where the ship lay. This room that held his only doorway back into Sharane’s world!

He dared not risk going from that room.

Kenton threw himself upon the floor; grasped the golden chains that hung from the ship’s bow – so thin they were, so small on the ship of jeweled toys!

He threw his will upon the ship! Summoning it! Commanding it!

The golden chains stirred within his grasp. They swelled. He felt a tearing wrench. Thicker grew the chains. They were lifting him. Again the dreadful wrenching, tearing at every muscle, nerve and bone.

His feet swung free.

The vast winds howled around him – for a heartbeat only. They were gone. In their place was the rushing of wind driven waves. He felt the kisses of their spray.

Beneath him was a racing azure sea. High above him curved the prow of the Ship of Ishtar. But not the ship of jeweled toys. No! The ensorcelled ship of which the toy ship was the symbol; the real ship on which blows were actual and death lurked – death that even now might be watching him, poised to strike!

The chain he clutched passed up the side of the bow and into the hawser port painted like a great eye between the bow-ward wall of the cabin and the curved prow. Behind him the great oars rose and fell. He could not be seen from them; the oarsmen’s backs were toward him and the oar ports were covered with strong leather, through which the shanks slipped; shields to protect the rowers from waves dashing past those ports. Nor, under the hang of the hull as he was, could he be seen from the black deck.

Slowly, silently, hand over hand, pressing his body as close to the hull as he could, he began to creep up the chain. Up to Sharane’s cabin. Up to that little window that opened into her cabin from the closed bit of deck beneath the great scimitar.

Slowly, more slowly, he crept; pausing every few links to listen; he reached at last the hawser port; he threw a leg over the bulwark, and dropped upon the little deck. He rolled beneath the window; flattened himself against the cabin wall; hidden now from every eye upon the ship; hidden even from Sharane, should she peer through that window.

Crouched there – waiting.

— XII —

MASTER OF THE SHIP

Kenton raised his head, cautiously. The chains passed through a hawser port, wound around a crude windlass and were fastened to a thin, double hook that was more like a grappling iron than anchor. Evidently, although control of steering gear, mast and rowers’ pit was in the hands of the black priest, the women of Sharane looked after anchorage. He noted, with some anxiety, a door leading out of the cabin’s farther side – the portion that housed her warrior maids. But it was not likely, he thought, that any would come out as long as the ship was under sail and oar. At any rate he would have to take that risk.

Through the opened window above him he could hear the hum of voices. Then that of Sharane came to him scornful.

“He broke his chains, even as he had promised – and then fled!”

“But mistress,” it was Satalu. “Where could he go? He did not come here. How do we know that Klaneth did not take him?”

“No mistaking Klaneth’s wrath,” answered Sharane. “No mistaking the scourging he gave Zachel. Both were real, Satalu.”

So the black priest had scourged Zachel had he, well, that, at any rate, was good news.

“Nay, Satalu,” said Sharane, “why argue? He had grown strong. He broke his chains. He fled. And so proved himself the coward I called him – and never believed he was – till now!”

There was silence in the cabin. Then Sharane spoke again.

“I am weary, Luarda – watch outside the door. You others to your cabin to sleep – or what you will. Satalu, brush my hair a little and then leave me.”

Another silence; a longer one. Then Satalu’s voice:

“Mistress, you are half asleep. I go.”

Kenton waited – but not long. The sill of the window was about as high above the anchor deck as his chin. He raised himself gently; peered within. His gaze rested first on the shrine of the luminous gems, the pearls and pale moonstones, the milky curdled crystals. He had the feeling that it was empty, tenantless. There were no flames in the seven little crystal basins.

He looked down. The head of the wide divan of ivory with its golden arabesques was almost beneath him. Upon it lay Sharane, face down upon its cushions, clothed only in one thin silken veil and the floods of her red gold hair, and weeping; weeping like any woman with bruised heart.

Weeping for – him?

A gleam of sapphire, a glint of steel caught his eyes. It was his sword – the sword of Nabu. The sword he had vowed he would not take from her hands – would take, unaided, with his own. It hung upon a low rack on the wall just above her head; so close that she need but reach up a hand to grasp it.

He drew back, waited impatiently for her weeping to cease. Love for her – or lust – he had in full. But search his heart now as he might – no pity.

And soon her sobbing lessened; died away. And after another while of waiting he slowly thrust his head again through the window. She lay asleep, face turned toward the cabin door, tears still on the long lashes – breast rising and falling softly in the measured respiration of slumber.

Kenton gripped the sill, drew himself softly up until shoulders and breast were within. Then he bent over until his waist rested on the ledge. Now his hands touched the softnesses of one of the rugs upon the floor. He slid down, gripping the sill with his insteps. Slowly, like a tumbler, he brought his legs down; lay prone, full length, at the head of Sharane’s bed.

Again he waited. Her measured breathing did not change. He drew himself up on his feet. He slipped to the door that lay between this cabin and that of the warrior maids. There was a low murmuring of voices there. He saw a bar that, lowered, slipped into a metal clutch on the other side, securing it. Noiselessly he dropped it, fastened it. Those cats were caged, he thought, grinning.

He glanced over the cabin. Upon a low stool lay a small piece of silk; over a settle a long one, scarf-like. He picked up the small piece and rolled it deftly into a serviceable gag. He took the long piece and tested it. It was heavy and strong, just what he needed, he reflected – but not enough. He slipped to a wall, unhooked a similar hanging.

He tiptoed over to Sharane’s bed. She stirred, uneasily, as though she felt his eyes on her; as though she were awakening.

Before she could raise her lids Kenton had opened her mouth and thrust the silken gag within. Then throwing himself over her, holding her down by sheer weight, he jerked up her head, wound the scarf tightly around her mouth, tied it. As swiftly he raised her from the hips and wound the balance of the scarf around her arms, pinioning them to her sides.

Eyes blazing with wrathful recognition, she tried to roll from beneath him, struck up at him with her knees. He shifted his weight, lay across her thighs, bound knees and ankles with the second scarf that he had torn from the wall.

Now she lay motionless, glaring at him. He sent her a kiss, mockingly. She tried to throw herself upon the floor. Noiselessly still, he took other hangings, wrapped her round and round with them. And finally he passed a pair of heavy cords under and over the bed; bound her fast with them to the divan.

Heedless of her now, he walked to the outer door. In some way he must get the handmaiden she called Luarda within the cabin, make her as helpless as her mistress – and as silent. He opened the door the merest slit, peered through it. Luarda sat close beside it, back turned to him, gaze upon the black deck.

He stole away, found another small piece of silk; snatched from the wall another hanging. The small piece he fashioned into another gag. Then he opened the door as before, placed his lips to the crack, pitched his voice high and softly; as femininely as he could, called to her:

“Luarda! The mistress wants you! Quick!” She leaped to her feet. He shrank back, pressing himself against the wall close beside the door frame. Unsuspiciously, she opened the door; stepped within it, and paused for an instant, open-mouthed, at the sight of Sharane, bound and helpless.

That instant was all Kenton needed. One arm was around her neck, throttling her. With his free hand he thrust the gag into her mouth; in the same moment closed the door with his foot. The girl in his arms wriggled like a snake. He managed to keep her mouth closed until he had wound the hanging around jaws and throat. Her hands swept up, clawing him; she strove to wind her legs around his. He drew the silk tighter around her neck, strangling her. When her struggles grew feeble, he bound her arms to her side. He laid her on the floor, and pinioned, as he had Sharane’s, her ankles and knees.

Helpless as her mistress now she lay. He picked her up; carried her over to the divan; rolled her under it.

Not till then did he reach up and take down his sword. He stood before Sharane.

There was no fear in the burning eyes that stared up at him. Rage enough and to spare was there – but no fear.

And Kenton laughed low, bent over her, and pressed his lips to her own gagged and bound ones. He kissed each wrathful eye.

“And now, Sharane,” he laughed. “I go to take the ship – without your help! And when I have taken it, I’ll come back and take – you!”

He walked to the door, opened it softly, swept gaze over the ship.

Upon the black deck squatted Gigi, forehead resting on the edge of the serpent drum, long arms trailing disconsolately down its sides. There was a forlornness about the drummer that made Kenton want to cry out to him. It was an impulse to which the sight of Zachel’s head put speedy check. He could see just the top of it over the low rail between Sharane’s deck and the rowers’ pit.

He crouched low, until the head was out of sight – knowing that in that position Zachel could not see him. He knotted the sword in his girdle. On hands and knees he crept out of the cabin door. He saw that there was a window in the place where Sharane’s women slept. But there was no outward door. They must pass through her cabin to gain the deck. If they suspected something amiss with their mistress, found the door barred, undoubtedly they would come through that window. Well – he would have to take his chances on that; only hope that he could get most of the work ahead of him done before they were aroused.

And if he could surprise Klaneth in his den, strike swiftly and silently – then he and the Viking could make short work of the rest, and the women could do what they pleased. They could neither help nor hinder. It would be too late.

He flattened himself to the deck; wriggled beneath the window; listened. There was no sound of voices now. Slowly raising himself he saw that from this point the overseer was hidden from him by the mast. Keeping a cautious eye on the disconsolate Gigi, he stood up and peered within the second cabin. There were eight girls there asleep; some pillowed on each other’s breasts, some curled up on the silken cushions. He reached in, closed the window noiselessly.

Again he lay flat and squirmed along the side of the cabin to the starboard rail. He slipped over it. He hung for a moment, fingers gripping the top, feet feeling for the chain that stretched below. He swung along it. When he came to its end, he raised himself, caught the rail again and swung along that, swiftly hand over hand.

Now the mast was directly in front of him; he had reached the spot from which he planned to strike his first blow. He chinned himself, and streamed over the rail like a snake; lay flat against the bulwarks until breath came once more easily.

He was in plain sight of Gigi – and as he lay there Gigi’s head came up with a jerk from his drum, his eyes stared straight into Kenton’s own. The ugly face broke into a thousand wrinkles of amazement; then instantly became indifferent, immobile. He yawned, got upon his feet; then, hand over eyes, peered intently over the port side as though he had sighted something far away upon the sea.

“By Nergal, but Klaneth must know of this!” he said.

He waddled over to the black cabin.

Kenton wriggled to the edge of the pit. He had glimpse of Zachel standing upon his platform stool, peering, searching for whatever it was that seemingly had so aroused the drummer’s interest.

Kenton dropped into the pit. One leap he took and was beside the mast. The overseer turned sharply. He opened mouth to yell and swept hand down to belt where his poniard was sheltered.

The sword of Kenton hissed through air and through his neck.

The sheared head of Zachel leaped from his shoulders, mouth stretched open, eyes glaring. For three heartbeats the body of Zachel stood upright, blood spouting from the severed arteries, hand still gripping at the dagger.

The body of Zachel squattered.

The sleep horn fell from his girdle. Kenton snatched at it. The knees of Zachel’s body crumpled down on it; crushed it.

From the benches of the oarsmen came no sound, no outcry; they sat, mouths agape, blades idle.

He groped in Zachel’s belt for the overseer’s keys, the keys that would free Sigurd. He found them, snatched them loose, tore the dagger from Zachel’s stiffening fingers and raced down the narrow passage way to the Viking.

“Brother! I thought you gone! Sigurd forgotten…” the Norseman babbled. “By Odin what a blow! The dog’s head leaped from his shoulders as though Thor had smitten him with his hammer…”

“Quiet, Sigurd! Quiet!” Kenton was working with desperate haste among the keys, trying to find that which would fit the Viking’s fetters. “We must fight for the ship… stand together, you and I… Hell, damn these keys… which is the right one! If we can reach Klaneth’s den before alarm is raised stand you between me and his priests. Leave Klaneth to me. Touch not Gigi nor Zubran the red beard. They cannot help us but they have given vow not to fight against us… remember, Sigurd… ah…”

The manacles at Sigurd’s wrists clicked and opened; the lock on the metal belt flew open. Sigurd shook his hands free of the chains, reached down and wrenched the cincture from his waist. He stood upright, flaxen mane streaming in the wind.

“Free!” he howled. “Free!”

“Close your jaws!” Kenton thrust his hands against the shouting mouth. “Do you want the pack down on us before we have chance to move!”

He pressed Zachel’s dagger into the Viking’s hand.

“Use that,” he said, “until you have won a better weapon.”

“That! Ho-ho!” laughed Sigurd. “A woman’s toy! Nay, Kenton – Sigurd can do better than that!”

He dropped the dagger. He gripped the great oar; lifted it out of the thole pins. He bent forward sharply, bringing its shaft against the side of the port there was a sharp crackling, a rending of wood. He drew back, bringing the oar against the opposite side of the port. There was another crackling, and Sigurd drew the oar in, broken squarely in the middle, a gigantic club all of ten feet long. He gripped it by the splintered end, whirled it round his head, the chains and the dangling manacles spinning like battle mace.

“Come!” barked Kenton, and stooped to pick up the dagger.

Now from all the pit came clamor; the slaves straining at their bonds and crying to be freed.

And from Sharane’s deck came the shrilling of women. Out of the window poured her warrior maids.

No chance now to surprise the black priest. No chance but in battle – fang and claw. His sword and the club of Sigurd against Klaneth and his pack.

“Quick, Sigurd!” he shouted. “To the deck!”

“I first,” grunted Sigurd. “Shield to you!”

He pushed Kenton aside, rushed past him. Before he could reach the foot of the stairway its top was filled with priests, white-faced, snarling, swords in their hands, and short stabbing spears.

Kenton’s foot fell on something that rolled away from beneath it, sending him to his knees. He looked down into the grinning face of Zachel. His severed head it was that had tripped him. He lifted it by the hair, swung it round and hurled it straight at the face of the foremost priest at the stairway top. It caught the priest a glancing blow, fell among the others; rolled and bounced away.

They shrank back from it. Before they could muster again the Viking was up the steps and charging them, oar club flinging like a flail. And at his heels came Kenton, making for the black cabin’s door.

There were eight of the black robes facing them. The Norseman’s oar struck, shattering the skull of one like an egg shell. Before he could raise it again two of the priests had darted in upon him, stabbing, thrusting with their spears. Kenton’s sword swept down, bit deep into the bone of an arm whose point was touching Sigurd’s breast. With quick upward thrust he ripped that priest from navel to chin. The Viking dropped one hand from the oar, caught the half of the second spear, twisted it out of the black robe’s grip and ran it through his heart. Down went another under bite of Kenton’s blade.

Other priests came streaming from every passageway and corner of the black deck, armed with swords and spears and bearing shields. Out they streamed, screaming. And out of the black cabin rushed Klaneth, roaring, a great sword in hand. Behind him were Gigi and the Persian. The black priest came straight on, charging like a bull through the half ring of his servitors. But Gigi and the Persian slipped over to the serpent drum, stood there watching.

For an instant the black priest stood towering over Kenton. Then he struck downward, a lightning blow designed to cleave Kenton from shoulder to hip.

But Kenton was not there when the blow fell. Swifter than the sword of Klaneth he had leaped aside, thrust out his own blade – —

Felt it bite deep into the black priest’s side! The black priest howled and fell back. Instantly his acolytes streamed in between him and the besieged pair. They circled them.

“Back to back,” shouted the Viking. Kenton heard the great club hum, saw three of the black robes mowed down by it as by giant flail. With sweep and thrust he cleared away the priests ravening at him.

Now the fighting had carried them close to the drum. He saw the Persian, scimitar unsheathed and held by rigid arm. And he was cursing, sobbing, quivering like a hound held in leash and held back from his quarry. Gigi, froth upon the corners of wide-open mouth, face contorted, stood with long arms outstretched, hands trembling, shaking with that same eagerness.

Desire, Kenton knew, to join with him and Sigurd in that battle; both held back by vows not to be broken.

Gigi pointed downward. Kenton followed the gesture, saw a priest crawling, sword in hand, and almost within reach of the Viking’s feet. One sweep of the sword against Sigurd’s legs and he was done for; hamstrung. Forgetting his own defense, Kenton leaned forward, cut downward. The head of the creeping priest jumped from his shoulders, rolled away.

But as he straightened he saw Klaneth again above him, poised to strike!

“The end!” thought Kenton. He dropped flat, rolled away from the falling edge.

He had not counted on the Viking. Sigurd had seen that swift by-play. He swept his oar, held horizontally, in a gigantic punch. It crashed into Klaneth’s chest.

The sword stroke fell short, the black priest was hurled backward, half falling for all his strength and massive bulk.

“Gigi! Zubran! To me!” he howled. Before Kenton could rise, two priests were on him, clawing him, stabbing at him. He released his grip on his sword; drew the poniard of Zachel. He thrust upward; felt a body upon him stiffen, then collapse like a pricked balloon, felt too, the edge of a sword slice into his shoulder. He struck again, blindly; was drenched with sudden flood of blood. He heard a bubbling whispering and the second weight was gone.

He gripped his sword, staggered upright. Of all Klaneth’s pack not more than half a dozen were on their feet. They had drawn back, out of reach of the Viking’s club. Sigurd stood, drawing in great breaths. And the black priest was gasping too, holding his broad chest where the oar of Sigurd had struck. At his feet was a little pool of blood, dripping from where the sword of Nabu had pierced him. “Gigi! Zubran!” he panted. “Take these dogs!”

The drummer leered at him. “Nay, Klaneth,” he answered. “There was no vow to aid you.”

He bent over the tall drum, with heave of broad shoulders he hurled it over the side.

From the priests arose a groan. Klaneth stood, silent, struck dumb.

There came from the waves touching the ship a sound – sonorous and sinister.

A thunderous drumming, menacing, malignant – summoning! Br-oom-rr-oom-oom!

The serpent drum swinging against the side of the ship! Lifted by the waves and by their arms beaten against the ship!

The Summoner of Nergal!

The ship trembled. A shadow fell upon the sea. Around Klaneth a darkness began to gather.

More angrily thundered the wave-beaten drum. The mists about the black priest thickened, writhed; beginning that hellish transmutation of Nergal’s priest into the dread self of the Lord of the Dead.

“Strike!” howled Gigi. “Quick! Bite deep!”

He ran to the rail; dropped over it.

Kenton rushed straight upon that cloudy horror within which the black priest moved. His sword swept into it; struck. He heard a shriek, agonized, unbelieving. The voice of Klaneth. He struck again.

And striking realized that the drumming had ceased, that the voice of the drum was stilled. He heard Gigi’s shout:

“Bite again. Wolf! Bite deep!”

The dark mist around Klaneth cleared. He stood there, dead eyes closed, hand holding an arm from which dark blood welled through clasping fingers.

And as Kenton raised his sword to strike again the black priest dashed into his eyes the blood from the hand that had held the wounded arm. Blinded, Kenton held his sword at mid-stroke. The black priest rushed upon him. Mechanically, through dimmed sight, he thrust out his blade to meet that rush; saw Sigurd driving down upon the remaining priests; heard the crack of bone as red stained oar met their bodies.

His sword struck against Klaneth’s, and was beaten down.

Kenton’s foot slipped on a gout of blood. He fell. The black priest crashed on him; his arms encircled him. Over and over they rolled. He saw Sigurd, whimpering with eagerness, striving to strike…

Suddenly Klaneth rolled over, Kenton on top of him; his grip relaxed; he grew limp; lay inert.

Kenton knelt upon him; looked up at the Norseman.

“Not yours,” he gasped. “Mine!”

He sought for the dagger at his belt. The body of the black priest stiffened. Then, like a released spring, he leaped upon his feet, throwing Kenton away.

Before the Viking could raise his club Klaneth was at the rail.

He hurled himself over it into the sea!

A hundred feet away, the serpent drum floated, its top slit across by Gigi’s knife. The head of Klaneth arose beside it, his hands gripped it. Under the touch the huge cylinder dipped to him with grotesque genuflection. From it came a dismal sound, like a lament.

Out of the silver haze a shadow moved. It darkened over black priest and drum. It shrouded them and withdrew. Where it had been was neither black priest nor Summoner! Man and drum – both had gone!

— XIII —

MASTER OF – SHARANE!

Battle fury still in his veins, Kenton looked about him. The black deck was strewn with Klaneth’s men; men crushed and broken under Sigurd’s mace; men from whom his own sword had let out the life; men in twisted heaps; men – but not many – who still writhed and groaned. He turned to Sharane’s deck. Her women, white-faced, clustered at the cabin door.

And on the very verge of the barrier between the two decks stood Sharane. Proudly she faced him, but with misty eyes on whose long lashes tears still trembled. Diadem of shining crescent was gone; gone too that aura of the goddess which even when Ishtar was afar lingered like a splendor around this, her living shrine.

She was but a woman. Nay – only a girl! A girl all human, exquisite—

He was lifted high on the shoulders of Gigi and the Persian.

“Hail!” cried Gigi. “Hail! Master of the ship!”

“Master of the ship!” shouted the Persian.

Master of the ship! “Put me down,” he ordered. And when they had set him on his feet he strode from Klaneth’s deck to Sharane’s.

He stood over her.

“Master of the ship!” he laughed. “And master of – you! Sharane!” He gripped her slender wrists, drew her to him.

There was a cry from Gigi, a groan echoed by the Persian. Sharane’s face paled…

Out of the black cabin strode Sigurd, and in his arms was that dark statue of cloudy evil that had stood in Klaneth’s shrine.

“Stop!” cried Gigi, and sprang. Before the Ninevite could reach him Sigurd had lifted the idol and cast it over into the waves.

“The last devil gone!” he shouted. The ship trembled – trembled as though far beneath its keel a hand had risen and was shaking it. It stopped. Around it the waters darkened. Deep, deep down in those darkened waters began to glow a scarlet cloud. Deep, deep beneath them the cloud moved and widened as widens the thunderhead. It vortexed into a crimson storm cloud blotted with blacknesses. It floated up; ever growing, its scarlets deepening ever more angrily, its blacks shading ever more menacingly’

The lifting cloud swirled; from it shot out strangely ordered rays, horizontal, fan-shaped. From those slant planed luminescences now whirling like a tremendous wheel in the abyss, immense bubbles, black and crimson, began to break. They arose, growing swiftly in girth as they neared the surface.

Within them Kenton glimpsed figures, misty figures; bodies of crouching men clad in armor that glimmered jet and scarlet.

Men within the bubbles!

Armored men! Men who crouched with heads on knees, clothed all in glittering scales. Warriors in whose hands were misty swords, misty bows, misty javelins.

Up rushed the bubble hosts, myriad after myriad. Now they were close to sea surface. Now they broke through.

The bubbles burst!

Out of their shattered sides the warriors sprang. All in their checkered mail, pallid-faced, pupilless eyes half closed and dead, they leaped out upon the darkened blue of the sea. From crest to crest of waves they vaulted. They ran over the waters as though over a field of withered violets. Silently they poured down upon the ship!

“Men of Nergal!” wailed Sharane. “Warriors of the Black One! Ishtar! Ishtar – help us!”

“Phantoms!” cried Kenton, and held high his blood-stained sword. “Phantoms!”

And he knew in his soul that whatever they were – phantoms they were not!

The front rank poised themselves upon the tip of a curling wave as though upon a long land barrow. They thrust down bows no longer misty. To their cheeks they drew the tips of long arrows. Came a twang of strings, a pattering as of hail against the sides of the ship. A dozen shafts quivered along the side of the mast; one fell at his feet – serpent scaled, black and crimson, its head buried deep within the deck.

“Ishtar! Mother Ishtar! Deliver us from Nergal!” wailed Sharane.

As though in answer the ship leaped as if another hand had thrown it forward.

From the hosts still breaking through the bubbles arose a shouting. They raced after the flying ship. Another rain of arrows fell upon it.

“Ishtar! Mother Ishtar!” sobbed Sharane. The hovering darkness split. For an instant out of it peered an immense orb circled with garlands of little moons. From it poured silver fire; living, throbbing, jubilant. The pulsing flood struck the sea and melted through it. The shadows closed; the orb was gone.

The moon flames it had poured dropped down and down. Up to meet them sparkled other great bubbles all rosy, pearl and silver, shimmering with glints and glimmerings of tenderest nacre, gleamings of mother-of-pearl, cream of roses.

In each of them Kenton sensed a form, a body – wondrous, delicate and delicious; a woman’s body from whose beauty the shining sides of the bubbles drew their glory!

Women within the bubbles! Up rushed the spheres of glamour; they touched the surface of the wan sea. They opened.

Out of them flowed hosts of women. Naked, save for tresses black as midnight, silvery as the moon, golden as the wheat and poppy red, they stepped from the shimmering pyxes that had borne them upward.

They lifted white arms and brown arms, arms shell pink and arms pale amber, beckoning to the rushing, sea-born men-at-arms. Their eyes gleamed like little lakes of jewels – sapphires blue, black and pale sapphires, velvet jet, sun stone yellow, witched amber; eyes gray as sword blades beneath winter moons.

Round hipped and slender hipped, high-breasted and virginal, they swayed upon their wave crests, beckoning, calling to Nergal’s warriors.

At their calling – dove sweet, gull plaintive, hawk eager, sweet and poignant – the scaled hosts wavered; halted. The bows that had been drawn dropped; swords splashed; javelins twirled through the deeps. Within their dead eyes a flame sprang.

The warriors shouted. They leaped forward… to the women…

Wave crests on which mailed men raced met crests on which the wondrous women poised. Into the mailed arms the women were swept. For a breath, tresses brown and black, silver as the moon and golden as the wheat, swirled round mail ebon and scarlet.

Then warriors and women melted into the form behind the racing ship; became one with the jeweled and sparkling wake of it; a wake that rolled and sighed as though it were the soul of amorous seas.

“Ishtar! Mother Beloved!” prayed the Lady Sharane. “To Ishtar – homage!”

“To Ishtar – homage!” echoed Kenton, and bent his knee. Rising, he caught her to him.

“Sharane!” he breathed. Her soft arms wreathed his neck. “My lord – I pray you forgiveness,” she sighed. “I pray you forgiveness! Yet how could I have known – when first you lay upon the deck and seemed afraid and fled? I loved you! Yet how could I have known how mighty a lord you are?”

Her fragrance shook him; the softness of her against his breath closed his throat.

“Sharane!” he murmured. “Sharane!”

His lips sought hers and clung; mad wine of life raced through his veins; in the sweet fire of her mouth memory of all save this moment was burned away.

“I – give myself – to you!” she sighed.

He remembered…

“You give nothing, Sharane,” he answered her. “I – take!” He lifted her in his arms; he strode through the rosy cabin’s door; shut it with thrust of foot and hurled down its bar.

Sigurd, Trygg’s son, came and sat at the threshold of the rosy cabin. He polished the black priest’s sword, chanting low some ancient bridal lay.

Upon the black deck Gigi and Zubran moved, casting the bodies of the slain into the sea; ending the pain of those not yet dead; casting them then after the others.

One dove and then another fluttered down from the balcony of the little blossoming trees. The Viking watched them, still chanting. Quick after the first dropped others, twain upon twain. They cooed and bent inquisitive heads; they billed and murmured. They formed a half ring before the cabin’s closed door.

The white-breasted doves – red-beaked, vermilion-footed; the murmuring, the wooing, the caressing doves – they set their snowy seal upon the way to Kenton and Sharane.

The doves of Ishtar wedded them!

PART THREE

— XIV —

THE BLACK PRIEST STRIKES

“Dear lord of mine – Kenton,” whispered Sharane. “I think that even you do not know how greatly I love you!” They sat within the rosy cabin, her head upon his breast. It was a new Kenton who looked down upon the lovely face upturned to his. All that had been modern had fallen from him. He had gained in height, and brown as his face was the broad chest bared by open tunic. His blue eyes were clear and fearless, filled with a laughing recklessness; touched, too, with half fierce ruthlessness. Above the elbow of his left arm was a wide bracelet of thin gold, graven with symbols Sharane had cut there. Upon his feet were sandals that Sharane had embellished with woven Babylonian charms – to keep his feet upon a path of love that led to her and her alone.

How long had it been since that battle with the black priest, he wondered, as he drew her closer to him. Eternities it seemed – and but yesterday! How long?

He could not know – in that timeless world where eternities and yesterdays were as one.

And whether yester-moment or eternities ago, he had ceased to care!

On and on they had sailed. And ever as they slipped through the azure seas, memory of that other life of his had dwindled and sunk beneath the horizon of consciousness, as the land sinks behind the watcher on an outward bound ship. He thought of it, when at all, with a numbing fear that he might be thrust back into it again – that old life of his.

Away from the ship! Away from Sharane – never to return!

On and on they had sailed. The black cabin, swept clean of evil, housed now the Viking, Gigi and the Persian. Sigurd or Gigi handled the two great oars that, fastened to each side of the stern, steered the ship. Sometimes, in fair weather, maids of Sharane took their place at the rudder bars. The Viking had found an anvil in the hold under the black cabin; had made a forge and on it hammered out swords. One he had made for Gigi, full nine feet long, that the dwarf-legged giant handled like a wand. Better, though, Gigi liked the mace that Sigurd had also made for him – long as the sword, with huge bronze ball studded with nails at its end. Zubran clung to his scimitar. But the Viking labored at his forge, beating out lighter brands for Sharane’s warrior maids. He made them shields and taught them to use both sword and shield as they had been used on his dragons in the old Viking days.

Part fruit of that instruction, sword play with Sigurd, wrestling with Gigi, fencing with his own blade against the scimitar of Zubran, was Kenton now.

All this Gigi had encouraged.

“No safety while Klaneth lives!” he would croak. “Make the ship strong.”

“We have done with Klaneth!” Kenton had said, a little boastfully.

“Not so,” Gigi had answered. “He will come with many men. Sooner or later the black priest will come.”

There had been recent confirmation of this. Soon after his battle Kenton had taken one of the blacks, a Nubian, and set him in Zachel’s seat. But this had made them short one slave at the oars. They had met a ship, hailed it, and demanded an oarsman. Its captain had given them one – fearfully, quickly, and had sped away.

“He did not know that Klaneth was no longer here,” chuckled Gigi.

But not long after this they had met another ship. Its captain would not halt when hailed and they had been forced to pursue and to fight. It was a small vessel, easily overhauled and easily captured. And that same captain had told them, sullenly, that Klaneth was at Emakhtila, High Priest of a temple of Nergal there, and one of the council of the House of Nergal in the temple of the Seven Zones. And more, the black priest was high in favor with one he called the Lord of the Two Deaths – the ruler, so they gathered, of Emakhtila.

Klaneth, said the captain, had sent forth word that the Ship of Ishtar was no longer to be feared, that it now held neither Nergal nor Ishtar but only men and women. It was to be sunk when met, but its men and women were to be saved. For them he offered a reward.

“And had my boat been but a little bigger and my men more, I would have claimed that reward,” he had ended, bluntly.

They took what they wanted from him and let him go. But as the ship drew away, he shouted to them to take what joy of life they could at once, since Klaneth on a great ship and with many men was searching for them and their shift was apt to be short!

“Ho-ho!” grunted Gigi, and – “Oh-ho! Klaneth searches for us, does he? Well, I warned you he would, Wolf. What now?”

“Make for one of the isles, pick our vantage ground and let him come,” answered Kenton. “We can build a fort, raise defenses. Better chance we would have against him than on the ship – if it be true that he pursues us in a great vessel with many soldiers.”

They had found Kenton’s word good, and they were sailing toward such an isle, Sigurd at the helm, Gigi and the Persian and the women of Sharane on watch, alert.

“Yea – dear lord of me – even you do not know how greatly I love you,” whispered Sharane again, eyes worshipping, arms fettering his neck. His lips clung to hers. Even in the sweet fire of their touch he marveled, blind to his own renaissance, at this changed Sharane – Love’s changeling since that time he had carried her within her bower, disdaining her as gift, taking her by right of his two strong arms.

Swift memories shook him; of Sharane – conquered; of some unearthly wonder that had flamed over the shrine and with fingers of pure fire had woven his soul with hers in threads of flaming ecstasies!

“Tell me, lord of me – how much you love me,” she murmured, languorously.

There came a shout from Sigurd:

“Waken the slaves! Drop oars! Storm comes!” Imperceptibly, the cabin had darkened. He heard the shrilling of the overseer’s whistle, a shouting and patter of feet. He unclasped Sharane’s arms; gave her one kiss that answered her questioning better than words; passed out upon the deck.

Swiftly the sky blackened. There was a splintering flash of the prismatic lightning, a clashing of cymbaled thunder. A wind arose and roared. Down came the sail. Before the blast, held steady by the hands of Sigurd, the ship flew.

Then fell the rain. Through it scudded the ship, hemmed in by blacknesses which when the lightnings fell were threaded by myriads of multi-colored serpents of glass from sky to sea.

A tremendous gust of wind swept down upon the ship, careening her far over. It buffeted at Sharane’s door; tore it open. Kenton staggered over to Gigi, shouted to the women to leave their watch, go inside. He watched them stumble in.

“Zubran and I will watch,” he cried in Gigi’s ear. “Go you and help Sigurd at the helm.”

But Gigi had not gone a yard before the wind died as quickly as it had risen.

“To the right!” he heard Sigurd shout. “Look to the right!”

To the starboard rail the three ran. Within the darkness was a broad faint disk of luminescence, like a far away searchlight in a fog. Rapidly its diameter decreased, growing ever brighter as its size diminished,

The disk burst out of the mists; it became a blazing beam that shot over the rushing waves and glared upon the ship. Kenton glimpsed double banks of oars that drove a huge bulk down upon them with prodigious speed. Beneath the light was a gleaming ram, lance tipped. It jutted out from the prow like the horn on a charging rhinoceros.

“Klaneth!” roared Gigi, and ran shouting to the black cabin, Zubran at his heels.

“Sharane!” shouted Kenton, and raced to her door. The ship veered abruptly, careening until the sea poured over the port rail. Kenton’s feet flew from under him; he rolled head over heels to the bulwarks; struck and lay for an instant stunned.

Sigurd’s maneuver could not save the ship. The bireme had changed course, swept down parallel with it to shear off its starboard bank of oars. The Viking had thought to escape the impact. But the attacking vessel’s oarsmen were too many, its speed too great for the ship of Ishtar’s single banks of seven. Down dipped the bireme’s sweeps, checking its rush. It swung broadside on straight against the ship, crushing the starboard oars, like sticks!

Kenton reeled to his feet; saw Gigi leaping down to him, battle mace in hand; beside him Zubran, scimitar gleaming. And close behind them, the useless tiller abandoned, was Sigurd the Viking, shields under arm, his great sword held high.

They were beside him. His giddiness was gone. The Viking thrust him a shield. He drew his own sword.

“To Sharane!” he gasped. Forward they ran.

Before they could reach her door, defend it, a score of soldiers, chain mailed and armed with short swords, had poured down the side of the bireme and closed the way to the cabin. And behind them poured other scores.

Out whirled Gigi’s giant mace, striking them down. Blue blade of Nabu, scimitar of Zubran, brand of Sigurd rose and fell, struck and thrust. In a breath were dripping red!

Yet not a step could they advance! For every soldier they slew, another took his place. And still the bireme rained men.

An arrow whistled, stood quivering in Sigurd’s shield. Another flew and hung from Zubran’s shoulder.

Came the bellowing of Klaneth: “No arrows! Take the black-haired dog and yellow-hair alive! Slay the others – if you must – with swords!”

Now the fighting men from the bireme were all around them. Back to back in hollow square the four fought, Upon the deck the mail clad men fell. Steadily growing mounds of dead around them, they fought on. There was a sword gash across Gigi’s hairy chest from which blood ran in little trickling streams. Sigurd was bleeding from a dozen cuts. But Zubran, save for the arrow wound, was untouched. He fought silently, but Sigurd chanted and howled as he struck and Gigi laughed as his giant mace crushed bone and sinew.

Yet still the barrier of the black priest’s men held fast between them and Sharane!

What of Sharane! Kenton’s heart sank. He cast a swift glance up at the balcony. She stood there with three of her warrior maids, swords in hands, battling against soldiers who crept two by two down a narrow bridge of planks that had been dropped from the bireme’s deck.

But that glance had been no wise one. A sword bit into his unguarded side, paralyzing him. He would have fallen but for the Viking’s hand.

“Steady, blood-brother!” he heard him say. “My shield is before you. Take breath!”

There came a triumphant shouting from the ship of Klaneth. Out from its deck two long poles had been thrust. There had been a tugging of ropes and from their ends a net had fallen – squarely over Sharane and her three women!

They were struggling to cut the meshes. They bound them, fettered them. The women beat against those meshes as helplessly as butterflies.

And suddenly the net tightened, was drawn together by cords. Slowly the poles began to lift carrying the net’s burden upward to the deck of the attacking ship!

“Ho! Sharane!” mocked Klaneth, “Ho! Vessel of Ishtar! Welcome to my ship!”

“Christ!” groaned Kenton. Strength renewed by his fury and despair, he charged. Before his onslaught the warriors gave way. Again he rushed. Something whirled through, struck him upon the temple. He fell. The men of Klaneth swarmed upon him, clutching at his hands, his feet, smothering him.

They were hurled from him. The dwarf legs of Gigi were astride of him, his mace whistling, men dropping under its stroke. Dizzily he raised his head; saw Sigurd guarding him at right, Zubran at left and rear.

He looked upward. The net that held the struggling women was being dropped upon the bireme’s deck.

Again he heard the bellow of Klaneth:

“Welcome, sweet Sharane! Welcome!”

He staggered up, broke from the Viking’s grip, staggered forward – toward her.

“Seize him!” came the howl of the black priest. “His weight in gold to the men who bring him to me – alive!”

And now there was a ring of Klaneth’s men around him, sweeping him away. Between him and the three who had fought beside him eddied another stream of warriors, falling smitten by mace and sword and scimitar – but their places taken by others; others wedging in, widening steadily the distance between Kenton and his comrades.

He ceased to struggle. After all – this was what he wanted! This was best. They could take him – he would be with Sharane!

“Hold him up!” roared Klaneth. “Let the slut of Ishtar see him!”

He was lifted high in the hands of his captors. He heard a wail from Sharane…

A dizziness seized him! It was as though he had been caught in some vortex and was being sucked away – away!

He had a vision of Sigurd, the Persian and Gigi staring at him, their faces incredulous bloody masks. And they had stopped fighting. There were other faces, scores of them, staring at him with that same incredulity – though now, it seemed, shaded with terror.

Now they were all staring at him as though over the edge of a prodigious funnel through which he had begun to drop!

And now clutching hands had melted away from him! The faces were gone.

“Gigi!” he called. “Sigurd! Zubran! Help me!”

He heard the howling of winds!

They changed into a trumpet note. The trumpeting changed. It became some familiar sound – some sound known in another life of his, ages and ages gone! What was it? Louder it grew, rasping, peremptory—

The shriek of an auto horn!

Shuddering, he opened his eyes.

He looked upon his own room!

There lay the shining jeweled ship – the ship of toys!

And there was a knocking at the door, agitated, frantic; the murmuring of frightened voices.

Then the voice of Jevins, faltering, panic stricken: “Mr. John! Mr. John!”

— XV —

DOWN THE ROPE OF SOUND

Kenton fought back his faintness; reached out a trembling hand, and snapped on the electrics. “Mr. John! Mr. John!”

The old servant’s voice was sharp with terror; he rattled the door knob; beat against the panels.

Kenton steadied himself against the table; forced himself to speak.

“Why – Jevins—” he strove to lighten the dragging words, inject some naturalness into them – “What’s the matter?”

He heard a little gasp of relief, another murmuring from the servants and then Jevins spoke again.

“I was passing and heard you cry out, sir. A dreadful cry! Are you ill?”

Desperately Kenton strove against the racking weakness; managed a laugh.

“Why, no – I fell asleep. Had a nightmare. Don’t worry! Go to bed.”

“Oh – it was that?”

The relief in Jevins’ voice was greater, but the doubt was not altogether gone. He did not withdraw; stood there hesitating.

There was a mist before Kenton’s eyes, a thin veil of crimson. His knees bent suddenly; barely he saved himself from falling. He stumbled to the couch and sank upon it. A panic impulse urged him to cry out to Jevins to bring help – to break down the door. Fast upon it came warning that he must not do this; that he must fight his battle out alone – if he were to tread the ship’s deck again!

“Go, Jevins!” he cried harshly. “Hell, man – didn’t I tell you I wasn’t to be disturbed tonight? Get away!”

Too late he realized that never before had he spoken so to this old servant who loved him, he knew, like a son. Had he betrayed himself – crystallized Jevins’ suspicions into certainty that within that room something was wrong indeed? Fear spurred his tongue.

“I’m all right!” He forced laughter into the words. “Of course, I’m all right!”

Damn that mist in front of his eyes! What was it? He passed a hand over them, brought it away wet with blood. He stared at it, stupidly.

“Oh, very well, Mr. John.” There was no more doubt, nothing but affection in the voice. “But hearing you cry—”

God! Would the man never go! His eyes traveled from his hand up his arm. Crimson it was, red with blood to the shoulder. The fingers dripped.

“Only a nightmare,” he interrupted quietly. “I won’t sleep again until I’m done and go to bed – so run along.”

“Then – good night, Mr. John.”

“Good night,” he answered.

Swaying he sat until the footsteps of Jevins and the others had died away. Then he tried to rise. His weakness was too great. He slid from the couch to his knees, crawled across the floor to a low cabinet, fumbled at its doors and drew down a bottle of brandy. He raised it to his lips and drank deep. The fiery stuff raced through him, gave him strength. He arose.

A sickening pang stabbed his side. He raised his hand to clutch the agony, covered it and felt trickle through his fingers a slow, warm stream!

He remembered – a sword had bitten him there – the sword of one of Klaneth’s men!

Flashed before him pictures – the arrow quivering in the Viking’s shield, the mace of Gigi, the staring warriors, the great net dropping over Sharane and her women, the wondering faces…

Then – this!

Again he lifted the bottle. Half way to his mouth he stopped, every muscle rigid, every nerve taut. Confronting him was a shape – a man splashed red from head to foot! He saw a strong, fierce face from which glared eyes filled with murderous menace; long tangled elf locks of black writhed round it down to the crimson-stained shoulders. From hair edge to ear down across the forehead was a wound, from which blood dripped. Bare to the waist was this man and from the nipple of his left breast to mid-side ran a red wide-mouthed slash, open to the ribs!

Gory, menacing, dreadful in its red lacquer of life, a living phantom from some pirate deck of death it glared at him.

Stop! There was something familiar about the face – the eyes! His gaze was caught by a shimmer of gold on the right arm above the elbow. It was a bracelet. And he knew that bracelet—

The bridal gift of Sharane!

Who was this man? He could not think clearly – how could he – with numbness in his brain, the red mists before his eyes, this weakness that was creeping back upon him?

Sudden rage swept through him. He swung the bottle to hurl it straight at the wild fierce face.

The left hand of the figure swung up, clutching a similar bottle—

It was he, John Kenton, reflected in the long mirror on the wall. That ensanguined, fearfully wounded, raging shape was – himself!

A clock chimed ten.

As though the slow strokes had been an exorcism, a change came over Kenton. His mind cleared, purpose and will clicked back in place. He took another deep drink of the liquor, and without another look in the mirror, without a glance toward the jeweled ship, he walked to the door.

Hand on the key he paused, considering. No, that would not do. He could not risk going out into the hallway. Jevins might still be hovering near; or some of the other servants might see him. And if he had not known himself, what would be the effect of seeing him on them?

He could not go where water was to cleanse his hurts, wash away the blood. He must do with what was here.

He turned back to the cabinet, stripping the table of its cloth as he passed. His foot struck something on the floor. The blade of Nabu lay there, no longer blue but stained as was he from tip of blade to hilt. For the moment he left it lie. He poured spirits upon the cloth, made shift to cleanse himself with them. From another cabinet he drew out his emergency medical kit. There was lint there and bandages and iodine. Stiff-lipped with the torture of its touch, he poured the latter into the great wound in his side, daubed it into the cut across his forehead. He made compresses of the lint and wound the linen tapes around brow and chest. The blood flow stopped. The fiery agony of the iodine diminished. He stepped again to the mirror and scanned himself.

The clock struck the half hour.

Half past ten! What had it been when he had clutched the golden chains of the ship – had summoned the ship and been lifted by those chains out of the room and into the mysterious world in which it sailed?

Just nine o’clock!

Only an hour and a half ago! Yet during that time in that other and timeless world he had been slave and conqueror, had fought great fights, had won both ship and the woman who had mocked him, had become – what now he was!

And all this in less than two short hours!

He walked over to the ship, picking up the sword as he went. He wiped the hilt clean of blood, the blade he did not touch. He drained the bottle before he dared drop his eyes.

He looked first on Sharane’s cabin. There were gaps in the little blossoming trees. The door was down, flung broken on the deck. The casements of the window were shattered. Upon the roof’s edge a row of doves perched, heads a-droop, mourning.

From the oar ports four sweeps instead of seven dipped on each side. And in the pit were no longer the eight and twenty rowers. Only ten were left, two to each of the stroke oars, one each to the other.

On the starboard side of the hull were gashes and deep dents – the marks of the bireme’s combing of that ship of Ishtar now sailing somewhere on that unknown world from which he had been whirled.

And at the tiller bar a manikin stood – a toy steering the toy ship. A toy man, long-haired, fair-haired. At his feet sat two other toys; one with shining, hairless head, and apelike arms; the other red bearded, agate-eyed, a shining scimitar across his knees.

Longing shook him, heartache, such homesickness as some human soul might feel marooned upon alien star on outskirts of space.

“Gigi!” he groaned. “Sigurd! Zubran! Bring me back to you!”

He bent over the three, touching them with tender fingers, breathing on them, as though to give them warmth of life. Long he paused over Gigi – instinctively he felt that in the Ninevite more than the others dwelt the power to help. Sigurd was strong, the Persian subtle – but in the dwarf-legged giant ran tide of earth gods in earth’s shouting youth; archaic, filled with unknown power long lost to man.

“Gigi!” he whispered, face close – and again and again – “Gigi! Hear me! Gigi!”

Did the manikin move?

Breaking his passion of concentration came a cry. Newsboys shouting some foolish happening of importance on this foolish world on which he was cast away! It broke the threads, shattered the fragile links that he had felt forming between himself and the manikin. Cursing, he straightened. His sight dimmed; he fell. Effort had told upon him; the treacherous weakness crept back. He dragged himself to the cabinet, knocked the head off a second bottle, let half of it pour down his throat.

The whipped blood sang in his ears; strength flowed through him. He snapped off the lights. A ray from the street came through the heavy curtains, outlining the three toy figures. Once more Kenton gathered himself for a mighty effort of will.

“Gigi! It is I! Calling you! Gigi! Answer me! Gigi!” The manikin stirred, its body trembled, its head raised! Far, far away, thin and cold as tip of frost lance upon glass, ghostly and unreal, coming from immeasurable distances, he heard Gigi’s voice.

“Wolf, I hear you! Wolf! Where are you?”

His mind clung to that thread of sound as though it were a line flung to him over vast abysses.

“Wolf – come to us!” The voice was stronger. “Gigi! Gigi! Help me to you!”

The two voices – that far flung, thin, cold one and his own met and clung and knit. They stretched over that gulf which lay between where he stood and the unknown dimension in which sailed the ship.

Now the little figure no longer squatted! It was upright! Louder rang Gigi’s voice:

“Wolf! Come to us! We hear you! Come to us!” Then as though it chanted words of power:

“Sharane! Sharane! Sharane!”

Under the lash of the loved name his will now streamed fiercely.

“Gigi! Gigi. Keep calling!”

He was no longer conscious of his room. He saw the ship far, far beneath him. He was but a point of life floating high above it, yearning to it and calling, calling to Gigi to help him. The strand of sound that linked them strained and shook like a cobweb thread. But it held and ever drew him down.

And now the ship was growing. It was misty, nebulous; but steadily it grew and steadily Kenton dropped down that rope of sound to meet it. Strengthening the two voices came other sounds weaving themselves within their threads – the chanting of Sigurd, the calling of Zubran, the thrumming of the fingers of the wind on the harpstring of the ship’s stays, the murmuring litany of the breaking waves telling their beads of foam.

Ever more real grew the ship. Striking through its substance came the wavering image of his room. It seemed to struggle against the ship, to strive to cover it. But the ship beat it back, crying out to him with the voices of his comrades and the voices of wind and sea in one.

“Wolf! We feel you near! Come to us – Sharane! Sharane! Sharane!”

The phantom outlines leaped into being; they enclosed him.

The arms of Gigi reached out to him, gripped him, plucked him out of space!

And as they gripped, he heard a chaotic whirling, a roaring as of another world spinning from under him and lashed by mighty winds.

He stood again upon the ship.

He was clasped tight to Gigi’s hairy chest. Sigurd’s hands were on his shoulders. Zubran was clasping and patting Kenton’s own hands clutching Gigi’s back, singing in his joy strange intricate Persian curses.

“Wolf!” roared Gigi, tears filling the furrows of his wrinkled face. “Where did you go? In the name of all the gods – where have you been?”

“Never mind!” sobbed Kenton. “Never mind where I’ve been, Gigi! I’m back! Oh, thank God, I’m back!”

— XVI —

HOW THE SHIP WAS MANNED

Faintness conquered him. The wounds and the effort of will had sapped his strength to its limit. When he came back to consciousness he was on the divan in Sharane’s raped cabin. His bandages had been replaced, his wounds re-dressed. The three men and four of Sharane’s maids were looking down upon him. There was no reproach on any of their faces – only curiosity, tempered with awe.

“It must be a strange place to which you go, Wolf,” Gigi said at last. “For see! The slash across my chest is healed, Sigurd’s cuts, too – yet your wounds are as fresh as though made but a moment ago.”

Kenton looked and saw that it was so; the slash across Gigi’s breast was now only a red scar.

“Also it was a strange way to leave us, blood-brother,” rumbled the Viking.

“By the fire of Ormuzd!” swore the Persian. “It was a very good way! A good thing for us that you left as you did. Cyrus the King taught us that it was a good general who knew how to retreat to save his troops. And that retreat of yours was a masterly one, comrade, Without it we would not be here now to welcome you.”

“It was no retreat! I could not help but go!” whispered Kenton.

“Well,” the Persian shook a dubious head, “whatever it was, it saved us. One instant there you were lifted on the paws of the black priest’s dogs. Another instant you had faded into a shadow. And then, lo, even the shadow was gone!”

“How those dogs who had held you shrieked and ran,” laughed Zubran. “And the dogs who were biting at us ran too – back to their kennels on the bireme they ran, for all Klaneth’s cursing. They had great fear, comrade – and so in fact for a moment had I. Then down went their oars, and away sped their ship with Klaneth’s cursing still sounding even after they had gotten safely out of sight of us.”

“Sharane!” groaned Kenton. “What did they do to her? Where have they taken her?”

“To Emakhtila, or Sorcerers’ Isle, I think,” answered Gigi. “Fear not for her, Wolf. The black priests want you both. To torture her without your eyes looking on, or to slay you without hers beholding your agonies would be no revenge for Klaneth. No – until he lays hands on you Sharane is safe enough.”

“Not comfortable, perhaps, nor happy, but assuredly safe enough,” confirmed the Persian.

“Three of her maids they took with her in the nets,” said Sigurd. “Three they slew. These four they left when you vanished.”

“They took Satalu, my little vessel of joy,” mourned Gigi. “And for that Klaneth shall also pay when reckoning comes.”

“Half the slaves were killed when the bireme crashed against us,” went on the Viking. “Oars crushed in ribs, broke backs. Others died later. The black-skin we put in Zachel’s place is a man! He fought those who dropped into the pit and slew his share. Only eight oars have we now instead of twice seven. The black-skin sits at one of them – unchained. When we take new slaves he shall be overseer again and honored.”

“And I remember now,” it was Gigi, dropping back to his first thought, “that when I dragged you up the side of Klaneth’s cabin that day you fought his priests, you still bled from the bites of Sharane’s girls. Yet with us there had been time and time again for them to have healed, And here you are once more with old wounds fresh. It must be a strange place indeed, that you go to, Wolf, is there no time there?”

“It is your own world,” he answered. “The world from whence all of you came.”

And as they stared at him, he leaped up from the divan.

“Sail to Emakhtila! At once! Find Sharane! Free her! How soon, Gigi? How soon?”

He felt the wound in his side open, fell back, his spurt of strength exhausted.

“Not till your wounds are healed,” said Gigi, and began to unfasten the reddening bandages. “And we must make the ship strong again before we take that journey. We must have new slaves for the oars. Now lie quiet, until you heal. Klaneth will do Sharane no harm as long as there is hope of taking you. I, Gigi, tell you this. So set your heart at ease.”

And now began for Kenton a most impatient time of waiting. To be chained here by his wounds when, despite Gigi’s assurances, the black priest might be wreaking his ultimate vengeance upon Sharane! It was not to be borne.

Fever set in. His wounds had been more serious than he had known. Gigi nursed him.

The fever passed, and as he grew stronger he told him of that lost world of theirs; what had passed there during the centuries they had sailed on the timeless ship; of its machinery and its wars, its new laws and its customs.

“And none now go viking!” mused Sigurd. “Clearly then I see that there is no place for me there. Best for Sigurd, Trygg’s son, to end his days where he is.”

The Persian nodded.

“And no place for me,” he echoed. “For a man of taste such as I, it seems no world at all to live in, I like not your way of waging wars, nor could I learn to like it – I who seem to be a soldier of an old, old school, indeed.”

Even Gigi was doubtful.

“I do not think I would care for it,” he said. “The customs seem so different. And I notice, Wolf, that you were willing to risk chains and death to get out of that world – and lose no time getting back to this.”

“The new gods seem so stupid,” urged Zubran. “They do nothing. By the Nine Hells, the gods of this place are stupid enough – still they do something. Although perhaps it is better to do nothing than to do the same stupid things over and over,” he ruminated.

“I will make me a steading on one of these islands,” said Sigurd, “after we have carried away Kenton’s woman and slain the black priest. I will take me a strong wife and breed many younglings. I will teach them to build ships. Then we shall go viking as I did of old. Skoal! Skoal to the dragons slipping through Ran’s bath with the red ravens on their sails and the black ones flying overhead!”

“Say, blood-brother,” he turned to Kenton, “when you have your woman back will you make a steading beside mine? With Zubran taking wives and he and Gigi – if he is not too old – breeding young, and with those who will join us – by Odin, but we could all be great Jarls in this world!”

“That is not to my liking,” replied the Persian promptly. “For one thing it takes too long to rear strong sons to fight for us. No – after we have finished our business with Klaneth I will go back to Emakhtila where there are plenty of men already made. It will be strange if I find there no discontented ones, men who can be stirred to revolt. If there be not enough of them – well, discontent is the easiest thing in the world to breed; much easier than sons, Sigurd. Also I am a great soldier. Cyrus the King himself told me so. With my army of discontented men I shall take his nest of priests and rule Emakhtila myself! And after that – beware how you raid my ships, Sigurd!”

Thus they talked among themselves, telling Kenton things of their own lives as strange to him as his own tales must have been to them. Steadily, swiftly his wounds healed until they were at last only red welts, and strength flowed back in his veins.

Now for many sleeps, while he grew well, they had lain hidden within a landlocked cove of one of the golden isles. Its rock-jawed mouth had been barely wide enough for them to enter. Safe enough this place seemed from pursuit or prying eyes. Nevertheless they had drawn the ship close against a high bank whose water side dropped straight down to the deep bottom. The oars had been taken in. The branches of the feathery trees drooped over the craft, covered it.

The time came when Kenton, awakening, felt full tide of health. He walked back to the rudder bar where Sigurd, Gigi and the Persian were stretched out talking. He paused for the hundredth time beside the strange compass that was the helmsman’s guide in this world, where there was neither sun nor moon nor stars, no east or west, north or south. Set within the top of a wooden standee was a silver bowl covered with a sheet of clear crystal. Around the lip of this bowl were inlaid sixteen symbols, cuneiform, scarlet. Attached to a needle rising vertically from the bowl’s bottom were two slender pointers, serpent shaped, blue. The larger, he knew, pointed always toward Emakhtila, that land to which, were Gigi right, Sharane had been carried by the black priest. The smaller pointed toward the nearest land.

As always, he wondered what mysterious currents stirred them in this poleless world; what magnetic flow from the scattered isles pulled the little one; what constant flow from Emakhtila kept the big one steady? Steadier far than compass needles of earth pointed to the north.

And as he looked it seemed to him that the little blue needle spun in its scarlet pool and lay parallel with the greater one – both pointing to the Isle of Sorcerers!

“An omen!” he cried. “Look, Sigurd! Gigi – Zubran – look!”

They bent over the compass, but in the instant between his call and their response the smaller needle had shifted again; again pointed to the isle where they lay moored!

“An omen?” they asked, puzzled. “What omen?”

“Both the needles pointed to Emakhtila!” he told them. “To Sharane! It was an omen – a summons! We must go! Quick, Gigi – Sigurd – cast loose! We sail for Emakhtila!”

They looked at him, doubtfully; down at the compass once more; at each other covertly.

“I saw it, I tell you.” Kenton repeated. “It was no illusion – I am well! Sharane is in peril! We must go!”

“Sh-h-h!” Gigi held up a warning hand, listened intently, parted the curtains of the leaves and peered out.

“A ship,” he whispered, drawing back his head. “Bid the maids get arrows and javelins. Arm – all of you. Quiet now – and speed!”

They could hear the drop of oars; voices; the low tapping of a hammer, beating the stroke for the rowers. The maids of Sharane silently ranged themselves along the port rail near the bow, bows standing, arrows at strings, beside them their stabbing javelins, their swords, too; their shields at feet.

The four men crouched, peeping out through the trees. What was coming? Questing ship of Klaneth that had nosed them out? Hunters searching the sea for them spurred on by the black priest’s promises of reward?

Through the narrow entrance to the hidden harbor drifted a galley. Twice the length of the ship of Ishtar, it was single tiered, fifteen oars to the side and double banked – two men to each sweep. There were a dozen or more men standing on the bow deck; how many others not visible there was no knowing. The galley crept in. It nosed along the shore. When less than two hundred feet away from the hidden watchers grapnels were thrown over the side and the boat made fast.

“Good water here, and all we need,” they heard one say.

Gigi put his arms around the three, drew them close to him.

“Wolf,” he whispered, “now do I believe in your omen. For lo! close upon its heels follows another and better one. A summons indeed. There are the slaves we must have for our vacant oars! And gold too, I’ll warrant, that we shall want when we reach Emakhtila.”

“Slaves and gold, yes,” muttered Kenton; then sardonically as half a dozen more men came up from below and joined the group on the bow – “only remains to find the way to take them, Gigi.”

“Nay, but that will be easy,” whispered Zubran. “They suspect nothing, and men surprised are already half beaten. We four will creep along the bank until we are just opposite their bow. When we have been away for as long as Zala there—” he motioned to one of the warrior maids – “can count two hundred, the maids shall pour their arrows into that group, shooting fast as they can but taking careful aim and bringing down as many as they can. Then we will leap aboard and upon those left. But when the maids hear us shout they must shoot no longer at the bow, lest we be struck. Thereafter let them keep any others from joining those forward. Is it a good plan? I’ll warrant we shall have their ship in less time than it has taken me to tell it.”

A qualm shook Kenton.

“Now by the gods!” came the voice, evidently of the captain of the galley. “Would that cursed Ship of Ishtar had been here. Had it been – well, I think none of us would need go faring out of Emakhtila again. Gods! If we might only have crept upon her here and won Klaneth’s reward!”

Kenton’s compunction fled; here were the hunters, and delivered into the hands of the hunted.

“Right, Zubran,” he whispered fiercely. “Beckon Zala to us and tell her the plan.”

And when that had been done he led them over to the side of the ship into the covert. There was a ledge that helped them in their going and it seemed to Kenton, watching hungrily the craft which, won, might mean Sharane, that the maids’ arrows would never fly.

At last they came, buzzing like bees and swarming among the cluster of men on the strange ship. And the maids were aiming straight. Of the near score fully half were down, spitted, before they broke for shelter, crying crazily. Kenton shouted and leaped upon the deck, cutting with his sword, while the mace of Gigi struck, and the blade of Sigurd, the scimitar of Zubran look toll. Beaten ere they could raise a hand, those left alive knelt and cried for mercy. A little band running to their aid from the stern met an arrow storm from the maids, threw down their arms, raised hands of submission.

They herded their captives together, disarmed them and thrust them into the forward cabin. They locked them in, first making sure there were no weapons there and no way for them to escape. They took the keys to the rowers’ chains. The Viking went down into the pit, picked out nineteen of the sturdiest slaves, loosed and drove them two by two over to the ship. He manacled them to its empty oars.

Much gold they found, too, and other things that might prove useful in Emakhtila – clothes of seamen in the fashion of the place, long robes to cover them and make them less open to detection.

Arose then the question of what was so be done with their prize – and the men aboard her. Gigi was for putting them all to the sword. The Persian thought that it would be best to bring back the slaves, leave their ship where she was, and after killing all those on the captive galley, put forth to Emakhtila on her. There was much in his plan to be commended. The Ship of Ishtar was a marked vessel. There was no mistaking her. This other craft would arouse no suspicion in the minds of those who saw it sailing. And once landed at Emakhtila, and what lay before them done, they could sail back on it and recover their own.

But Kenton would not have it. And the upshot was that the captain was called out for questioning and told that if he answered truthfully his life and those of the others would be spared.

There was little he could tell them – but that little was enough to quicken Kenton’s heart – bring new dread to it also. Yes, there had been a woman brought to Emakhtila by Klaneth, the Priest of Nergal. He had won her in a fight, Klaneth had said, a sea battle in which many men had been slain. He had not said where, or with whom this battle had taken place, and his soldiers had been warned to be silent. But it began to be whispered that the woman was the woman of the Ship of Ishtar. The priestesses of Ishtar had claimed her. But Klaneth who had great power had resisted them, and as a compromise the Council of Priests had made her priestess of the God Bel and placed her in Bel’s Bower on top of the Temple of the Seven Zones.

“I know that Temple and the Bower of Bel,” Sigurd had nodded. “And why its priestess must live there,” he had whispered, looking askance at Kenton.

This woman appeared now and then, heavily veiled, attending certain ceremonies to the God Bel, the captain went on. But she seemed to be a woman in a dream. Her memory had been taken from her – or so it was reported. Beyond that he knew nothing – except that Klaneth had doubled his reward for three of them – he pointed to Gigi, Zubran and the Persian; and had trebled it for him – he pointed to Kenton.

When they were done with him they unloosed the remaining slaves and sent them ashore. They hailed the ship and the Nubian brought her over. They watched the captain and his men pass over the side of the galley and disappear among the trees.

“Plenty of water and food,” grumbled Gigi. “They fare far better at our hands than we would have fared at theirs.”

They hitched the captured galley to the ship; slowly pulled it out of the harbor through the rock-lipped mouth. And after they had gone a mile or so Sigurd dropped into it, did a few things with an axe, and climbing back cut it loose. Rapidly the galley filled and sank.

“Now,” cried Kenton, and took the rudder bar, steering the ship straight to where the long blue arrow pointed.

Pointed to Emakhtila and to Sharane—

Sharane!

— XVII —

THEY SEEK SORCERERS’ ISLE

Luck clung to them. The silver mists hung close about the ship, shrouding her so that she sailed within a circle not more than double her length. Ever the mists hid her. Kenton, sleeping little, drove the slaves at the oar to point of exhaustion.

“There is a great storm brewing,” warned Sigurd.

“Pray Odin that it may hold back till we are well within Emakhtila,” answered Kenton.

“If we but had a horse I would sacrifice it to the All-Father,” said Sigurd. “Then he would hold that storm till our needs called it.”

“Speak low, lest the sea horses trample us!” warned Kenton.

He had questioned the Viking about that interruption of his when the captain of the captured galley had said that the captured woman was Priestess of Bel’s Bower.

“She will be safe there, even from Klaneth – so long as she takes no other lover than the god,” Sigurd had said.

“No other lover than the god!” Kenton had roared, hand dropping to sword and glaring at Sigurd. “She shall have no lover but me – god or man, Sigurd! What do you mean?”

“Take hand from sword, Wolf,” Sigurd had replied. “I meant not to offend you. Only – gods are gods! And there was something in that captain’s talk about your woman walking in dream, memory withdrawn from her – was there not? If that be so – blood-brother – you are in those memories she has lost!”

Kenton winced.

“Nergal once tried to part a man and a woman who loved,” he said, “even as Sharane and I. He could not. I do not think Nergal’s priest can succeed where his master failed.”

“Not well reasoned, Wolf.” It was Zubran who had come quietly upon them. “The gods are strong. Therefore they have no reason for subtlety or cunning. They smite – and all is done. It is not artistic, I admit – but it is unanswerable. And man, who has not the strength of the gods, must resort to cunning and subtlety. That is why man will do worse things than the gods. Out of his weakness he is forced to it. The gods should not be blamed – except for making man weaker than they. And therefore Klaneth is more to be feared by you than Nergal, his master.”

“He cannot drive me out of Sharane’s heart!” Kenton cried.

The Viking bent his head down to the compass.

“You may be right,” he muttered. “Zubran may be right. All I know is that while your woman is faithful to Bel, no man may harm her!”

Vague as he might be on that one point, the Viking was direct and full of meat upon others. The Norseman had been observant while slave to the priests of Nergal. He knew the city and the Temple of the Seven Zones intimately. Best of all he knew a way of entering Emakhtila by another road than that of its harbor.

This was indeed all important, since it was not within the bounds of possibility that they could enter that harbor without instant recognition.

“Look, comrades,” Sigurd scratched with point of sword a rude map on the planks of the deck. “Here lies the city. It is at the end of a fjord. The mountains rise on each side of it and stretch in two long spits far out to sea. But here” – he pointed to a spot in the coast line close to the crotch where the left hand mountain barrier shot out from the coast – “is a bay with a narrow entrance from the sea. It is used by the priests of Nergal for a certain secret sacrifice. Between it and the city a hidden way runs through the hills. That path brings you out to the great temple. I have traveled the hidden way and have stood on the shores of that bay. I went there with other slaves, bearing priests in litters and things for the sacrifice. While it would take two good sleeps for a ship to make the journey from Emakhtila to this place, it is by the hidden way only half so far as a strong man could walk in my own land between the dawn and noon of a winter day. Also there are many places there where the ship can be hidden. Few galleys pass by and no one lives near – which is why the priests of Nergal picked it.

“Also I know well the Temple of the Seven Zones – since long it was my home,” went on Sigurd. “Its height is thirty times the ship’s mast.”

Kenton swiftly estimated. That would make the temple six hundred feet – a respectable height indeed.

“Its core,” said the Viking, “is made up of the sanctuaries of the gods and the goddess Ishtar, one upon each other. Around this core are the quarters of the priests and priestesses and lesser shrines. These secret sanctuaries are seven, the last being the house of Bel. From Bel’s House a stairway leads up into his Bower. At the base of the temple is a vast court with altars and other shrines where the people come to worship. Its entrances are strongly guarded. Even we four could not enter – there!

“But around the temple, which is shaped thus” – he scratched the outline of a truncated cone – “a great stone stairway runs thus” – he drew a spiral from base to top of cone. “At intervals, along that stairway, are sentinels. There is a garrison where it begins. Is this all clear?”

“What is clear,” grunted Gigi, “is that we would need an army to take it!”

“Not so,” the Viking answered. “Remember how we took the galley – although they outnumbered us? We will row the ship into that secret harbor. If priests are there we must do what we can – slay or flee. But if the Norns decree that no priests be there, we will hide the ship and leave the slaves in care of the black-skin. Then the four of us, dressed as seamen in the clothes and the long cloaks we took from the galley, will take the hidden way and go into the city.

“For as to that stairway – I have another plan. It is high walled – up to a man’s chest. If we can pass without arousing the guards at its base, we can creep up under shadow of that wall, slaying the sentinels as we go, until we reach the Bower of Bel and entering, bear Sharane away.

“But not in fair weather could we do this,” he ended. “There must be darkness or storm that they see us not from the streets. And that is why I pray to Odin, that this brewing tempest may not boil until we have reached the city and looked upon that stairway. For in that storm that is surely coming we could do as I have said and swiftly.”

“But in all this I see no chance of slaying Klaneth,” growled Zubran. “We creep in, we creep up, we creep out again with Sharane – if we can. And that is all. By Ormuzd, my knees are too tender for creeping! Also my scimitar itches to scratch itself on the black priest’s hide.”

“No safety while Klaneth lives!” croaked Gigi, playing upon his old tune.

“I have no thought of Klaneth now,” rumbled the Viking. “First comes Kenton’s woman. After that – we take up the black priest.”

“I am ashamed,” said Zubran. “I should have remembered. Yet in truth, I would feel easier if we could kill Klaneth on our way to her. For I agree with Gigi – while he lives, no safety for your blood-brother or any of us, However – Sharane first, of course.”

The Viking had been peering down into the compass. He looked again, intently, and drew back, pointing to it.

Both the blue serpents in the scarlet bath were parallel, their heads turned to one point.

“We head straight to Emakhtila,” said Sigurd. “But are we within the jaws of that fjord or out of them? Wherever we are we must be close.”

He swung the rudder to port. The ship veered. The large needle slipped a quarter of the space to the right between the red symbols on the bowl edge. The smaller held steady.

“That proves nothing,” grunted the Viking, “except that we are no longer driving straight to the city. But we may be close upon the mounts. Check the oarsmen.”

Slower went the ship, and slower, feeling her way through the mists. And suddenly they darkened before them. Something grew out of them slowly, slowly. It lay revealed as a low shore, rising sharply and melting into deeper shadows behind. The waves ran gently to it, caressing its rocks. Sigurd swore a great oath of thankfulness.

“We are on the other side of the mounts,” he said. “Somewhere close is that secret bay of which I told you. Bid the overseer drive the ship along as we are.”

He swung the rudder sharply to starboard. The ship turned; slowly followed the shore. Soon in front of them loomed a high ridge of rock. This they skirted, circled its end and still sculling silently came at last to another narrow strait into which the Viking steered.

“A place for hiding,” he said. “Send the ship into that cluster of trees ahead. Nay – there is water there, the trees rise out of it. Once within them the ship can be seen neither from shore nor sea.”

They drifted into the grove. Long, densely leaved branches covered them.

“Now lash her to the tree trunks,” whispered Sigurd. “Go softly. Priests may be about. We will look for them later, when we are on our way. We leave the ship in charge of the women. The black-skin stays behind. Let them all lie close till we return—”

“There would be better chance for you to return if you cut off that long hair of yours and your beard, Sigurd,” said the Persian, and added: “Better chance for us, also.”

“What!” cried the Viking, outraged. “Cut my hair! Why, even when I was slave they left that untouched!”

“Wise counsel!” said Kenton. “And Zubran – that naming beard of yours and your red hair. Better for you and us, too, if you shaved them both – or changed their color.”

“By Ormuzd, no!” exclaimed the Persian, as outraged as Sigurd.

“The fowler sets the net and is caught with the bird!” laughed the Viking. “Nevertheless, it is good counsel. Better hair off face and head than head off shoulders!”

The maids brought shears. Laughing, they snipped Sigurd’s mane to nape of neck, trimmed the long beard into short spade shape. Amazing was the transformation of Sigurd, Trygg’s son, brought about by that shearing.

“There is one that Klaneth will not know if he sees him,” grunted Gigi.

Now the Persian put himself in the women’s hands.

They dabbled at beard and head with cloths dipped in a bowl of some black liquid. The red faded, then darkened into brown. Not so great was the difference between him and the old Zubran as there was between the new and old Sigurd. But Kenton and Gigi nodded approvingly – at least the red that made him as conspicuous as the Norseman’s long hair was gone.

Remained Kenton and Gigi. Little could be done for either of them. There was no changing Gigi’s frog slit of a mouth, the twinkling beady eyes, the bald pate, the immense shoulders.

“Take out your earrings, Gigi,” bade Kenton.

“Take off that bracelet on your arm,” replied Gigi,

“Sharane’s gift! Never!” exclaimed Kenton, as outraged as had been both the Norseman and the Persian.

“My earrings were put there by one who loved me as much as she does you.” For the first time since Kenton had known Gigi there was anger in his voice.

The Persian laughed softly. It broke the tension. Kenton grinned at the drummer, somewhat guiltily. Gigi grinned back.

“Well,” he said. “It seems that we must all make our sacrifices—” he began to unscrew the earrings.

“No, Gigi!” Kenton could not bring himself to break that golden band upon which Sharane had graven the symbols of her love. “Leave them be. Rings and bracelet – both can be hidden.”

“I do not know—” Gigi paused doubtfully. “It seems to me to be better. That idea of sacrifice – it grows stronger.”

“There is little sense in what you say,” said Kenton stubbornly.

“No?” mused Gigi. “Yet many men must have seen that bracelet of yours that time you fought the black priest’s men and lost Sharane. Klaneth must have seen it. Something whispers to me that token is more perilous than the rings in my ears.”

“Well, nothing whispers to me,” said Kenton, shortly, He led the way into what had been Klaneth’s cabin and began stripping to clothe himself in the sailors’ gear they had taken from the captured galley. He slipped on a loose shirt of finely tanned, thin leather whose loose sleeves fastened around his wrists.

“You see,” he said to Gigi, “the bracelet is hidden.”

Next came loose hose of the same material drawn tight by a girdle around the waist. He drew on high, laced buskins. Over the shirt he fastened a sleeveless tunic of mail. On his head he placed a conical metal covered cap from whose padded sides dropped, shoulder deep, folds of heavy oiled silk.

The others dressed with him in similar garments. Only the Persian would not leave off his own linked mail. He knew its strength, he said, and the others were new to him It was an old friend, often tried and always faithful he said he would not cast it off for new ones whose loyalty was still untried. But over it he drew one of the shirts and a tunic. And Gigi, after he had set the cap upon his head, drew close the folds of silk so that they hid his ears and their pendants. Also he fastened around his neck another long fold of silk, binding the others fast and hiding his mouth.

And when they had covered themselves with the long cloaks they scanned each other with lightened hearts. The Viking and the Persian were true changelings. Little fear of recognition there. Changed enough by his new garb, it seemed to them, was Kenton. The cloak hid Gigi’s stumpy legs and the cloths around his face, the close fitting, conical cap altered it curiously into one not easily recognzable.

“It is good!” murmured the Viking.

“It is very good!” echoed Kenton.

They belted themselves and thrust into the belts both their own swords and short ones of Sigurd’s forging. Only Gigi would take neither that nine-foot blade the Norseman had made for him nor the great mace. The latter was too well known; the other too cumbersome for their journey; impossible, like the mace, to hide. He took two swords of average length. Last he picked up a long, thin piece of rope, swiftly spliced to it a small grappling hook. He coiled the rope around his waist, hanging the grapple to his belt.

“Lead, Sigurd,” said Kenton.

One by one they dropped over the ship’s bow, waded through shallow water and stood upon the shore while Sigurd cast about for his bearings. The mists had grown thicker. The golden leaves, the panicles of crimson and yellow blooms were etched against them as though upon some ancient Chinese screen. In the mists Sigurd moved, shadowy.

“Come,” the Viking joined them. “I have found the way.”

Silently they followed him through the mists, under the silver shadows of the trees.

PART FOUR

— XVIII —

IN THE SORCERERS’ CITY

There was a hidden way, in truth. How Sigurd followed it in the glimmering fog, by what signs led, Kenton could not tell. But the Viking walked along, unhesitant.

Between high rocks covered with the golden ferns the narrow road ran, and through thickets where the still air was languorous with the scent of myriads of strange blossoms; through dense clumps of slender trunks which were like bamboo stems all lacquered scarlet, and through groves where trees grew primly in park-like precision and under which the tarnished silver shadows were thick. Their steps made no sound on the soft moss. They had long lost the murmur of the sea. Sound of any kind around them there was none.

At the skirt of one of the ordered groves the Viking paused.

“The place of sacrifice,” he whispered. “I go to see if any of Nergal’s black dogs are about. Wait for me here.”

He melted into the mists. They waited, silent. Each felt that something evil lay sleeping within those trees and if they spoke or moved it would awaken, draw them to it. And out of it, as though the sleeping evil breathed, pulsed the sickly sweet and charnel odor that had hung in Klaneth’s cabin.

Silently as he had gone, Sigurd returned.

“No black robes there,” he said. “Yet – something of their dark god dwells in that grove always. Eager am I to pass this place. Go softly and quickly.”

They pushed on. At last Sigurd paused, exhaled a vast sigh of relief.

“We have passed,” he told them.

He led them with increased speed. And now the way began to climb steeply. They passed through a long and deep ravine in which the glimmering, misty light was hardly strong enough for them to pick their way over the boulders that strewed it.

They passed out of it between two huge monoliths – and halted. Abruptly the silence that had enveloped them had been broken. Before them was nothing but the wall of the mists, but from them and far, far below came a murmuring, a humming of a great city, the creaking of masts, the rattle of gear, the splashing of oars and now and then a shouting, darting up like a kite from the vague clamor.

“The harbor,” said Sigurd, and pointed downward to the right. “Emakhtila lies beneath us – close. And there,” – he pointed again downward and a little to the left – “there is the temple of the Seven Zones.”

Kenton followed the pointing finger. A mighty mass loomed darkly in the silvery haze, its nebulous outlines cone-shaped, its top flattened. His heart quickened.

Down they went, and down. The murmuring of the city came to them ever louder and louder. Ever the great bulk of the temple grew plainer, climbing higher and higher into the heavens as they descended. And ever the mists hid this city from them.

They came to a high stone wall. Here Sigurd turned and led them into a grove of trees, thick, heavily shadowed. Through the trees they slipped, following the Viking who now went on with greater caution.

At last he peered out from behind an enormous trunk, beckoned them. Beyond the trees was a deep rutted, broad roadway.

“A road into the city,” he said. “A free road on which we can walk without fear.”

They clambered down a high bank and took that road, walking now side by side. Soon the trees cave way to fields, cultivated as far as the mists would let them see; fields filled with high plants whose leaves were shaped like those of the corn, but saffron yellow instead of green and instead of ears long panicles of gleaming white grains; rows of bushes on whose branches shone berries green as emeralds: strange fruits; three-stemmed vines from which fell star-shaped gourds.

They saw houses, two-storied; block-like with smaller cubes for wings like those a child makes. They were painted startlingly – both in colors and patterns; facades striped with alternate vertical, yard-wide bands of blue, and yellow facades of dull blue through which darted scarlet zigzags like the conventionalized lightning bolt; broad horizontal bands of crimson barred with stripes of green.

The road narrowed, became a thoroughfare paved with blocks. The painted houses became thicker. Men and women passed them, brown faced and black, clad alike in one sleeveless white garment cut short just below the knees. On the right wrist of each of these was a bronze ring from which fell a half dozen links of chain. They carried burdens – jugs, baskets of the fruits and gourds, loaves of bread colored ruddy brown, flat cakes a foot across. They glanced at the four curiously as they passed.

“Slaves,” said Sigurd.

Now the painted houses stood solidly, side by side. These were galleried and on the galleries were flowering trees and plants like those upon the rosy cabin of the ship. From some of them women leaned and called out to them as they went by.

They passed out of this street into a roaring avenue thronged with people. And here Kenton halted in sheer amazement.

At its far end loomed the huge bulk of the terraced temple. Its sides were lined with shops. At their doors stood men crying out their wares. Banners fell from them on which in woven silk ran the cuneiform letters that told their goods.

Past him walked Assyrians, men of Nineveh and Babylon with curled heads and ringleted beards; hook-nosed, fierce-eyed Phoenicians; sloe-eyed, muslin-skirted Egyptians; Ethiopians with great golden circles in their ears, almond-lidded, smiling yellow men. Soldiers in cuirasses of linked mail, archers with quivers on back and bows in hand strode by; priests in robes of black and crimson and blue. There stood in front of him for an instant a ruddy-skinned, smooth-muscled warrior who carried upon one shoulder the double-bladed ax of ancient Crete. Over his other shoulder lay the white arm of a sandalled woman in oddly modern pleated and patterned skirt, snake-girdled and with high, white breasts peeping from her opened and as oddly modern blouse. A Minoan and his mate he knew the pair to be, two who had perhaps watched youths and maids who were Athen’s tribute to the Minotaur go through the door of the labyrinth to the lair where the monstrous man-bull awaited them.

And there went a cuirassed Roman, gripping a short sword of bronze that might have helped cut out the paths the first Caesar trod. Behind him strode a giant Gaul with twisted locks and eyes as coldly blue as Sigurd’s own.

Up and down along the center of the thoroughfare rode men and women in litters borne on the shoulders of slaves. His eyes followed a Grecian girl, long limbed and lithe, with hair as yellow as the ripened wheat. They followed, too, a hot-eyed Carthaginian lovely enough to be a bride of Baal who leaned over the side of her litter and smiled at him.

“I am hungry and I thirst,” grunted Sigurd. “Why do we stand here? Let us be going.”

And Kenton realized that this pageant of past ages could be no strange thing to these comrades who were also of that past. He nodded assent. They swung into the crowd and stopped before a place wherein men sat eating and drinking.

“Better for us to enter two by two,” said Gigi. “Klaneth seeks four men and we are four strangers. Wolf, go you in first with Sigurd. Zubran and I will follow – but do not notice us when we enter.”

The shopkeeper set food before them and high beakers of red wine. He was garrulous; he asked them when they had made harbor, if their voyage had been a good one.

“It is a good time to be off the sea,” he gossiped. “Storm comes – and a great one. I pray to the Dispenser of Waters, that he hold it until Bel’s worship is ended. I close my shop soon to see that new priestess they talk so much about.”

Kenton’s face had been bent over, his cap veils hiding it. But at this he raised it and stared full into the man’s face.

The shopkeeper blanched, faltered, stared back at him with wide eyes.

Had he been recognized? Kenton’s hand sought stealthily his sword.

“Pardon!” gasped the shopkeeper, “I knew you not—” Then he peered closer, straightened and laughed. “By Bel! I thought you were – another – Gods!”

He hurried away, Kenton looked after him. Was his departure a ruse? Had he recognized him as the man Klaneth sought? It could not be. His fright had been too real; his relief too sincere. Who was it then that Kenton so resembled to bring forth this fright and relief?

They finished their food quickly, paid from the gold they had taken from the galley; passed out into the street. Almost at once Gigi and the Persian joined them.

Two by two they passed down the street, not hurrying, like men just in from a long voyage. But as they went Kenton, with an ever growing puzzlement and apprehension, saw now one and now another glance at him, pause as though in wonder and then, averting eyes go swiftly by. The others saw it, too.

“Draw the cap cloths about your face,” said Gigi, uneasily. “I like not the way they stare.”

Briefly Kenton told him of the shopkeeper.

“That is bad,” Gigi shook his head. “Now who can it be you so resemble that those who look at you grow frightened? Well – hide your face as best you can.”

And this Kenton did, keeping his head bent as he walked. Nevertheless heads still turned.

The street entered a broad park. People were strolling over its sward, sitting on benches of stone, and gigantic roots of trees whose trunks were thick as the sequoia and whose tops were lost in the slowly thickening mists. And when they had gone a little way Sigurd turned off the highway into this park.

“Wolf,” he said. “Gigi is right. They stare at you too much. It comes to me that it will be better for all if you go no further. Sit upon this bench. Bow your head as though asleep or drunken. There are few here and they will be fewer as the temple court fills. The mists hide you from those who pass along the street. The three of us will go on to the temple and study that stairway. Then we will return to you and we will take counsel.”

Kenton knew the Viking was right. Steadily his own unease had grown. And yet – it was hard to stay behind, not to see for himself that place where Sharane lay captive, leave to others the chance of finding way to her.

“Courage, brother,” said Sigurd as they left him. “Odin has held off the storm for us. Odin will help us get your woman.”

Now for a time, a long, long time, it seemed to him, he sat upon that bench with face covered by hands. Stronger and stronger grew that desire to see for himself Sharane’s prison, study its weaknesses. After all, his comrades were not as interested as he; their eyes not sharpened by love. He might succeed where they would fail; his eyes see what theirs would miss. And at last the desire mastered him. He arose from the bench, made his way back to the thronged street. When it was a few steps away, he turned and went along through the park, paralleling the street but not going out on it.

And in a short while he came to the end of the park and stood, half hidden, looking out.

Directly before him, not fifty yards away, arose the immense bulk of the Temple of the Seven Zones.

It blocked his vision like a Cyclopean cone. The great stairway coiled round it like a serpent. For a hundred feet up from its base the temple shone like burnished silver. There a circular terrace bit into the cone. Above that terrace for another hundred feet the surface was covered with some metal of red gold color, rich orange. Another terrace and above that a facade of jet black, dull and dead. Again a terrace. The mists hid the walls above this last, but he thought that through them he could see a glint of flaming scarlet and over it a blue shadow.

His eyes followed the girdling stairway. He stepped forward that he might see a little better. Broad steps led up from its base to a wide platform on which stood many men on armor. That, he realized, was the garrison which they must either trick or overcome. His heart sank as he counted the soldiers that guarded it.

He looked beyond them. The rise of the stairway from the platform of the guards was gradual. About five thousand feet away the park came close to the side of the temple. There was a clump of high trees whose branches almost touched the stairway at that point.

Gigi’s rope and grapple! Ah, wise had been the Ninevite, anticipating some such chance. Kenton was lightest of the four – he could climb those trees, drop to the stairway, or if that were not possible, cast the grapple over the wall of it, swing in and climb up the rope and over!

Then he could drop that rope for the three to swarm it. It could be done! And if in such a storm as Sigurd prophesied, with certainty of giving no alarm to the garrison below.

Suddenly he had the sense of being watched. He saw that the space between him and the temple was empty of people; saw an officer of the garrison standing at the base of the steps staring.

Kenton turned; swiftly skirted the street until he was back to the bench. He seated himself on it as he had been before – bent over, face in hands.

And as he sat there someone dropped down beside him.

“What is the matter, sailor?” came a voice, roughly kind. “If you are sick why not go home?”

Kenton spoke huskily, keeping his face covered.

“Too much of Emakhtila wine,” he answered. “Leave me be. It will pass.”

“Ho!” laughed the other, and gripped an arm about the elbow. “Look up. Better seek home before the tempest breaks.”

“No, no,” said Kenton, thickly. “Never mind the tempest. Water will help me.”

The hand dropped from his arm. For a time, whoever it was beside him, was silent. Then he arose.

“Right, sailor,” he said heartily. “Stay here. Stretch out on the bench and sleep a little. The gods be with you!”

“And with you,” muttered Kenton. He heard the footsteps of that brief companionship retreating. Cautiously he turned his head, looked in their direction. There were several figures walking there among the trees. One was an old man in a long blue cloak; another an officer dressed like the one who had watched him from the base of the great stairway; a sailor; a hurrying citizen. Which had it been?

The man who had sat beside him had gripped his arm, gripped it where Sharane’s bracelet was bound! And that officer – the watching soldier of the garrison! Had it been he? Had he been followed?

He sat bolt upright, clapped his right hand on the sleeve of the leather shirt. His hand touched – the bracelet! The sleeve had been slit by a knife to reveal it!

Kenton leaped to his feet – to run. Before he could take a step there was a rustling behind him, a trampling. A heavy cloth was thrown over his head like a bag. Hands clutched his throat. Other hands wound strand after strand of rope around his arms, pinioning them to his sides.

“Take that cloth off his face – but keep your hands around his throat,” said a cold dead voice.

His head was freed. He looked straight into the pale eyes of Klaneth!

Then from the double ring of soldiers around him came a gasp of amazement, a movement of terror. An officer stepped forward, stared at him incredulously.

“Mother of the Gods!” he groaned, and knelt at Kenton’s feet. “Lord – I did not know—” He leaped up, set knife to his bonds.

“Stop!” Klaneth spoke. “It is the slave! Look again!”

Trembling, the officer studied Kenton’s face, lifted the cap veils; swore.

“Gods!” he exclaimed, “but I thought he was—”

“And he is not,” interposed Klaneth smoothly. His eyes gloated over Kenton. He reached down into his belt, drew from it the sword of Nabu.

“Hold!” the officer quietly took it from him. “This man is my prisoner until I deliver him to the king. And till then I keep his sword.”

The feral light in the pupils of the black priest glowed.

“He goes to Nergal’s House,” he rumbled. “Best beware, captain, how you cross Klaneth.”

“Cross or no cross,” replied the officer, “I am the king’s man. His orders I obey. And you know as well as I do that he has commanded all prisoners to be brought before him first – no matter what even high priests may say. Besides,” he added slyly, “there is that matter of the reward. Best to get this capture a matter of record. The king is a just man.”

The black priest stood silent, fingering his mouth. The officer laughed.

“March!” he snapped. “To the temple. If this man escapes – all your lives for his!”

In a triple ring of the soldiers walked Kenton. On one side of him strode the officers; on the other the black priest, gloating gaze never leaving him; Klaneth, licking his merciless lips.

Thus they passed through the wooded park, out into the street and at last through a high archway, and were swallowed up within a gateway of the temple.

— XIX —

THE LORD OF THE TWO DEATHS

The King of Emakhtila, Lord of the Two Deaths, sat, legs crooked, on a high divan. He was very like Old King Cole of the nursery rhyme, even to that monarch’s rubicund jollity, his apple-round, pippin-red cheeks. Merriment shone in his somewhat watery blue eyes. He wore one loose robe of scarlet. His long, white beard, stained here and there with drops of red and purple and yellow wine, wagged roguishly.

The judgment chamber of the King of Emakhtila was some hundred feet square. His divan rested on a platform five feet high that stretched from side to side like a stage. The checkered floor raised in a sharp concave curve to build it. The curved front was cut through by a broad flight of low wide steps ascending from the lower floor and ending about five feet from the divan of the king.

Two and ten archers in belted kirtles of silver and scarlet stood on the lowest step, shoulder to shoulder, bows at stand, arrows at strings, ready on the instant to be raised to ears and loosed. Four and twenty archers knelt at their feet. Six and thirty shafts of death were leveled at Kenton, black priest and the captain.

Out from each side of the steps and along the curved wall to where it met the sides of the chamber another file of bowmen stretched, scarlet and silver, shoulder to shoulder, arrows alert. The twinkling eyes of the king could see the backs of the heads ranged over the edge of his stage like footlights.

Along the other three walls, shoulder to shoulder, arrows at strings, eyes fixed on the King of Emakhtila, ran an unbroken silver and scarlet frieze of archers. They stood silent; tense as automatons tightly wound and waiting for touch upon some hidden spring.

The chamber was windowless. Pale blue tapestries covered all its walls. A hundred lamps lighted it with still, yellow flames.

Twice a tall man’s height away from the king’s left hand a veiled shape stood, motionless as the bowmen. Even through its thick veils came subtle hints of beauty.

At the same distance from the king’s right hand another veiled shape stood. Nor could its veils check hint of horror seeping forth from what they covered.

One shape set the pulses leaping.

One shape checked them.

On the floor, at the king’s feet, crouched a giant Chinese with a curved and crimson sword.

Close to each end of the divan stood girls, fair and young and naked to their waists. Six to this side – six to that. They held ewers filled with wine. At their feet were great bowls of wine, red and purple and yellow, in larger bowls of snow.

At the right hand of the Lord of the Two Deaths knelt a girl with golden cup on outstretched palms. At his left hand another knelt, a golden flagon on her palms. And the king to drink used equally well his left hand and his right, raising cup or flagon, setting them to his lips, putting them back. Whereupon at once they were refilled.

Through many passages the captain and the black priest had hurried Kenton to this place. And now the king drank deep, set down his cup and clapped his hands.

“The King of Emakhtila judges!” intoned the Chinese, sonorously.

“He judges!” whispered the bowmen ranged along the walls.

Kenton, black priest and captain stepped forward until their breasts touched the foremost arrow points. The king leaned, merry eyes twinkling on Kenton.

“What jest is this, Klaneth?” he cried in a high, thin treble. “Or have the Houses of Bel and Nergal declared war upon each other?”

“They are not at war, lord,” answered Klaneth. “This is the slave for whom I have offered great reward and whom I now claim since I have taken—”

“Since I have taken, Mighty One,” interrupted the captain, kneeling as he spoke. “And so have earned Klaneth’s reward, O Just One!”

“You lie, Klaneth!” chuckled the king. “If you are not at war why have you trussed up—”

“Look again, lord,” interrupted Klaneth. “I do not lie.”

The watery eyes peered closer at Kenton.

“No!” laughed the king. “You are right. He is what the other man would be were he half as much a man. Well well—”

He raised the flagon; before he had half lifted it to his lips he paused and looked into it.

“Half full!” giggled the king. “Only half full!”

He glanced from the flagon to the girl who stood closest to the kneeling girl at his left. His round face beamed on her.

“Insect!” chuckled the king. “You forgot to fill my flagon!”

He raised a finger.

A bow string sang along the left wall, an arrow shrilled. It struck the trembling girl in the shoulder on the right side. She swayed, eyes closed.

“Bad!” the king cried merrily, and again held up a finger.

From the frieze along the right wall another bow string sang; an arrow whittled across the room. The shaft cleft the heart of the first archer. Before his body touched the floor the same bow sang once more.

A second shaft leaped into sight deep within the left side of the wounded girl.

“Good!” laughed the king.

“Our lord has granted death!” chanted the Chinese. “Praise him!”

“Praise him!” echoed the bowmen and the cup maidens.

But Kenton, mad with swift rage at that heartless killing, leaped forward. Instantly the bow strings of the six and thirty archers before him were drawn taut, arrow shafts touched ears. Black priest and captain caught him, threw him down.

The Chinese drew a small hammer and struck the blade of his sword. It rang like a bell. Two slaves came out on the dais and carried the dead girl away. Another girl took her place. The slaves dragged off the dead archer. Another slipped through the curtains and stood where he had been.

“Let him up,” crowed the king – and drained his filled flagon.

“Lord – he is my slave.” All the black priest’s will could not keep the arrogant impatience out of his voice. “He has been brought before you in obedience to your general command. You have seen him. Now I claim my right to take him to his place of punishment.”

“Oh-ho!” the king set down his cup, beamed at Klaneth. “Oh-ho! Sh-so you won’t let him up? And you will take him away? Oh-ho!

“Toe nail of a rotting flea!” he shrilled. “Am I King of Emakhtila or am I not? Answer me!”

From all around the chamber came the sigh of tight drawn bow strings. Every arrow of the silver and scarlet frieze of bowmen was pointed at the black priest’s great body. The captain threw himself down beside Kenton.

“Gods!” muttered that shoulder. “Hell take you and the reward. Why did I ever see you!”

The black priest spoke, voice strangled between rage and fear—

“King of Emakhtila you are!”

He knelt. The king waved his hand. The bow strings dropped loose.

“Stand up!” cried the king. The three arose. The King of Emakhtila shook a finger at Kenton.

“Why were you so angered,” he chuckled, “by my boon of death to those two? Man – how many times, think you, will you beseech death to come, and pray for my swift archers before Klaneth is done with you?”

“It was slaughter,” said Kenton, eyes steady on the watery ones.

“My cup must be kept filled,” answered the king gently. “The girl knew the penalty. She broke my law. She was slain. I am just.”

“Our lord is just!” chanted the Chinese.

“He is just!” echoed the archers and the cup maidens.

“The bowman made her suffer when I meant painless death for her. Therefore he was slain,” said the king. “I am merciful.”

“Our lord is merciful!” chanted the Chinese. “He is merciful!” echoed the bowmen and the cup maidens.

“Death!” the king’s face wrinkled jovially. “Why, man – death is the first of boons. It is the one thing out of which the gods cannot cheat us. It is the one thing that is stronger than the fickleness of the gods. It is the only thing that is man’s own. Above the gods, heedless of the gods, stronger than the gods – since even gods in their due time must die!

“Ah!” sighed the king – and for a fleeting instant all King Cole jocundity was gone. “Ah! There was a poet in Chaldea when I dwelt there – a man who knew death and how to write of it. Maldronah, his name. None here knows him—”

And then softly:

“’Tis better be dead than alive, he said—

But best is never to be!”

Kenton listened, interest in this strange personality banishing his anger. He too knew Maldronah of ancient Ur; had run across that very poem from which the king had quoted while going through some of the inscribed clay tablets recovered by Heilprecht in the sands of Nineveh – back in that old life, half forgotten. And involuntarily he spoke the beginning of the last macabresque stanza:

“Life is a game, he said;

Its end we know not – nor care,

And we yawn ere we come to its end—”

“What!” the king cried. “You know Maldronah! You—”

Old King Cole again, he shook with laughter. “Go on!” he ordered. Kenton felt the bulk of Klaneth beside him tremble with wrath. And Kenton laughed, too – meeting the twinkling eyes of the king; and while the Lord of the Two Deaths beat time with cup and flagon he finished Maldronah’s verse, with its curious jigging lilt entangled in slow measure of marche funerale:

“Yet it pleases to play with the snare, To skirt the pit, and the peril dare, And lightly the gains to spend; There’s a door that has opened, he said, A space where ye may tread – But the things ye have seen and the things ye have done, What are these things when the race is run—

And ye pause at the farthest door? As though they never had been, he said – Utterly passed as the pulse of the dead! Then tread on lightly with nothing to mourn! Shall he who had nothing fear for the score? Ah – better be dead than alive, he said – But best is ne’er to be born!”

Long sat the king in silence. At last he stirred, raised his flagon and beckoned one of the maidens.

“He drinks with me!” he said, pointing to Kenton.

The archers parted; let the cup maiden pass. She stood before Kenton; held the flagon to his lips. He drank deep; lifted head and bowed thanks.

“Klaneth,” said the king, “no man who knows Maldronah of Ur is a slave.”

“Lord,” answered the black priest, stubbornly. “Yet this man is my slave.”

The king again sat silent, drinking now from cup and now from flagon; eyes now on Kenton, now at Klaneth.

“Come here,” he ordered at last – and pointed with one finger at Kenton, with another at the side of the Chinese.

“Lord!” said Klaneth, more uneasily yet as stubbornly. “My slave stays beside me.”

“Does he?” laughed the king. “Ulcer on a gnat’s belly! Does he?”

All around the chamber the bow strings sighed.

“Lord,” panted Klaneth, with bowed head. “He goes to you.”

As he passed him, Kenton heard the black priest’s teeth grate; heard him sob as does a man after a long race. And Kenton, grinning, stepped through the opened space of archers; stood before the king.

“Man who knows Maldronah,” smiled the king. “You wonder how I, alone, have greater power than these priests and all their gods? Well – it is because in all Emakhtila I am the only one who has neither gods nor superstitions. I am the one man who knows there are only three realities. Wine – which up to a certain point makes man see more clearly than the gods. Power – which being combined with man’s cunning makes him superior to the gods. Death – which no god can abolish and which I deal at will.”

“Wine! Power! Death!” chanted the Chinese.

“These priests have many gods – each of them jealous of all the others. Ho! Ho!” laughed the king. “I have no gods. Therefore I am just to all. The just judge must be without prejudice; without belief.”

“Our lord is without prejudice!” chanted the Chinese. “He has no beliefs!” intoned the bowmen. “I am on one side of the scales,” nodded the king. “On the other side are many gods and priests. There are only three things that I am sure are real. Wine, power, death! Those who try to outweigh me have beliefs many times three. Therefore I outweigh them. If there were but one god, one belief opposite me – lo, I would be outweighed! Yea – three to one! That is paradox – also it is truth.”

“The Lord of Emakhtila speaks truth!” whispered the bowmen.

“Better three straight arrows in your quiver than threescore crooked ones. And if there should arise one man in Emakhtila with but one arrow and that arrow straighter than my three – that man would soon rule in my place,” beamed the king.

“Archers – hear ye the king!” chanted the Chinese. “And so,” the king said, briskly, “since all the gods and all the priests are jealous of each other, they make me – who gives not a curse for any god or priest – king of Emakhtila – to keep peace among them and hold them back from destroying each other! And this, since I now have ten bowmen to every one of theirs, and twenty swordsmen to each swordsman of the priests, I do very well. Ho! Ho!” laughed the king. “That is power.”

“Our lord has power!” cried the Chinese.

“And having power I can get drunk at will,” chuckled the king.

“Our lord is drunken!” whispered the archers, all around the chamber.

“Drunken or sober – I am King of the Two Deaths!” tittered the ruler of Emakhtila.

“The Two Deaths!” whispered the archers, nodding to each other.

“To you – man who knows Maldronah – I unveil them,” said the king.

“Bowmen at sides and back – bend your heads!” shouted the Chinese. The heads of the archers along three sides of the living frieze dropped immediately upon their breasts.

The veils fell from the shape upon the left hand of the king.

There, looking at Kenton with deep eyes in which were tenderness of the mother, shyness of the maid, passion of the beloved mistress, stood a woman. Her naked body was flawless. In it, harmonies of mother, maid and mistress flowed in one compelling chord. From her breathed all springtides that ever caressed earth. She was the doorway to enchanted worlds, the symbol of everything that life could offer both of beauty and of joy. She was all the sweetnesses of life, its promises, its ecstasies, its lure and its reason. Looking on her Kenton knew that life was something to be held fast. That it was dear and filled with wonders. Exquisite – not to be let go!

And that death was very dreadful!

He had no desire toward her. But she fanned to roaring flame desire for life in full continuance.

In her right hand she held a strangely shaped instrument, long, with sharp fangs and rows of tearing claws.

“To her,” chuckled the king, “I give only those whom I greatly dislike. She kills them slowly. Looking upon her, they cling to life; fiercely, terribly they cling to it. Each moment of life that she draws from them with those claws and teeth is an eternity through which they battle against death. Slowly she draws them out of life – wailing, clinging to it, turning stubborn faces from death! And now – look!”

The veils fell from the shape at his right hand.

There crouched a black dwarf, misshapen, warped, hideous. He stared at Kenton out of dull eyes that held every sorrow and sadness and disillusionment of life; held all of life’s uselessness, its weariness, its empty labor. And looking at him, Kenton forgot that other shape – knew that life was dreadful, not to be borne.

And that death was the one good thing!

In his right hand the dwarf held a slender sword, rapier thin, needle pointed. Kenton fought increasing desire to hurl himself upon that point – die upon it!

“To him,” laughed the king, “I give those who have greatly pleased me. Swift is their death and a sweet cup to their lips.”

“You there—” the king pointed to the captain who had trapped Kenton. “Not too pleased am I with you for taking this man who knows Maldronah, even if he be Klaneth’s slave. Go up before my left hand death!”

Face bloodless white, the captain marched to the steps; rigid he marched through the archers, marched without pause until he stood before the woman. The Chinese struck his sword. Two slaves entered, heads bent low, carrying a lattice of metal. They stripped the captain of his armor, strapped him naked to the grate. The woman leaned over him, tenderness, love, all life’s promise in her wondrous face. She thrust the fanged instrument against his breast – so lovingly!

From his lips came a shrieking, anguished, despairing; prayers and curses; the wailing of the newly damned.

Still the woman leaned over him, smiling, tender, her eyes brooding upon his.

“Let be!” giggled the king. She lifted the thing of torment from the soldier’s breast; bent to her veils and threw them over her. The slaves unbound the captain; dressed his shaking body. Sobbing, he staggered back, sank on knees at the black priest’s side.

“I am displeased,” said the king, merrily. “Yet you did your duty. Therefore – live for a while, since that is your desire. I am just.”

“Just is our lord,” echoed the chamber. “You—” he pointed to the archer who had slain cup maiden and a fellow bowman – “I am much pleased with you. You shall have your reward. Come to my right hand death!”

Slowly at first the archer stepped forward. Faster he moved as the dull eyes of the dwarf met his and clung to them. Faster and faster – he raced up the steps, hurling the archers aside and leaped upon the slender sword!

“I am generous,” said the king.

“Our lord is generous,” intoned the Chinese.

“Generous!” whispered the bowmen.

“I am thirsty,” laughed the king. He drank deep from left hand and right. His head nodded; he swayed a bit; quite drunkenly.

“My command!” he opened and closed one twinkling eye after the other. “Hear me, Klaneth! I am sleepy. I will sleep. When I was awaken – bring this man who knows Maldronah to me again. Let no harm come to him before then. It is my command. Also he shall have a guard of bowmen. Take him away. Keep him safe. It is my command!”

He reached for his cup. It dropped from his lax hand.

“By my Deaths!” he whimpered. “What shame that casks can hold so much and man so little!”

He sank upon the divan.

The Lord of the Two Deaths snored.

“Our lord sleeps!” chanted the Chinese, softly.

“He sleeps!” whispered the bowmen and cup maidens.

The Chinese arose, bent over the king. He raised him on his shoulders like a child. The Two Deaths followed him. The two and ten archers upon the lowest step turned, marched up and circled the four. The four and twenty turned, marched and circled them. The bowmen beside the curved wall swung round and six abreast marched up the steps. The living frieze of scarlet and silver swung six by six out from their walls and followed them.

The double ring stepped forward, passed through the curtains at the rear. After them strode the bowmen.

Six fell out of the ranks, ranged themselves beside Kenton.

The cup maidens picked up ewers and bowls. They tripped through the curtains.

One of the six bowmen pointed to the lower floor. Kenton walked down the steps.

Black priest on one side of him, white-faced captain on the other, three archers marching before them, three after them, he passed out of the judgment chamber of the king.

— XX —

BEHIND THE WALL

They led Kenton to a narrow room in whose high walls were slitted windows. Its heavy door was solid bronze. Around its sides ran stone benches. In its center was another bench. The bowmen sat him on it, tied his ankles with leathern thongs, threw cloaks on its top and pressed him down upon them. They seated themselves two by two on three sides of the room, eyes fixed on black priest and captain, now ready.

The captain tapped the black priest on the shoulder.

“My reward?” he asked. “When do I get it?”

“When the slave is in my hands and not before,” answered Klaneth, savagely. “If you had been – wiser, you would have had it by now.”

“Much good it would be doing me, with an arrow through my heart or—” he shuddered – “wailing even now at the feet of the king’s left hand death!”

The black priest looked at Kenton evilly; bent over him. “Put no hope in the king’s favor,” he muttered. “It was his drunkenness that was speaking. When he awakens he will have forgotten. He will give you to me without question. No hope there!”

“No?” sneered Kenton, meeting the malignant eyes steadily. “Yet twice have I beaten you – you black swine.”

“But not a third time,” spat Klaneth. “And when the king awakens I will have not only you but that temple drab you love! Ho!” rumbled the black priest as Kenton winced, “that touches you, does it? Yes, I will have you both. And together you shall die – slowly, ah, so slowly, watching each other’s agonies. Side by side – side by side until slowly, slowly, my torturers have destroyed the last of your bodies. Nay, the last of your souls! Never before has man or woman died as you two shall!”

“You cannot harm Sharane,” answered Kenton. “Carrion eater whose filthy mouth drips lies! She is Bel’s priestess and safe from you.”

“Ho! You know that do you?” grunted Klaneth; then bent, whispering close to Kenton’s ear so softly that no one but him could hear. “Listen – here then is a sweet thought to carry you while I am away. Only while the priestess is faithful to the god is she beyond my reach. Now listen – listen – before the king awakes your Sharane shall have taken another lover! Yea! Your love shall lie in the arms of an earthly lover! And he will not be – you!”

Kenton writhed, striving to break his bonds. “Sweet Sharane!” whispered Klaneth leering. “Holy Vase of Joy! And mine now to break as I will – while the King sleeps!”

He stepped back to the soldier who had taken Kenton. “Come,” he said.

“Not I,” answered the soldier, hastily. “By the gods, I prefer this company. Also if I lose sight of this man – I might forever lose sight of that reward you owe me for him.”

“Give me his sword,” ordered Klaneth, reaching toward the blade of Nabu which the officer had retained.

“The sword goes with the man,” answered the captain, setting it behind him; he looked at the archers.

“That is true,” the bowmen nodded to each other. “Priest, you cannot have the sword.”

Klaneth snarled; his hands flew out. Six bows bent, six arrows pointed at his heart. Without word, the black priest strode out of the cell. An archer arose, dropped into place a bar, sealing the door. A silence fell. The officer brooded; now and then he shivered as though cold, and Kenton knew he was thinking of that Death who with smiling, tender eyes had pressed teeth of torture in his breast. The six bowmen watched him unwinkingly.

And at last Kenton closed his own eyes – fighting to keep back the terror of Klaneth’s last threat against his beloved; fighting against despair.

What plot had the black priest set going against her, what trap had he laid, to make him so sure that so soon he would have her in his hands – to break! And where were Gigi and Sigurd and Zubran? Did they know how he had been taken? A great loneliness swept over him.

How long his eyes were closed, or whether he had slept – he never could tell. But he heard as though from infinite distances away a still, passionless voice.

“Arise!” it bade him.

He opened his lids; lifted his head. A priest stood beside him, a priest whose long blue robes covered him from head to foot. Nothing could he see of the priest’s face.

He knew that his arms and ankles were free. He sat up. Ropes and thongs lay on the floor. On the stone benches the bowmen leaned one against the other asleep. The officer was asleep.

The priest pointed to his sword, the sword of Nabu lying across the sleeping soldier’s knees. Kenton took it. The priest pointed to the bar that held the door. Kenton lifted it and swung the door open. The blue priest glided through the doorway, Kenton close behind.

The blue priest drifted along the corridor for a hundred paces or so and then pressed against what, to Kenton’s sight, was a blank wall. A panel opened. Now they stood in a long corridor, dimly lighted. Along it they went in a great curve. It came to Kenton that this hidden passage followed the huge arc of the temple, that it ran behind the temple’s outer wall.

Now a massive bronze door closed the way. The blue priest seemed only to touch it. Yet it swung open; it closed behind them.

Kenton stood in a crypt some ten feet square. At one end was the massive door through which he had come; at the other was a similar one. At his left was a ten-foot slab of smooth, pallid stone.

The blue priest spoke – if indeed it were he speaking, since the passionless, still voice Kenton heard seemed, like that which had bidden him arise, to come from infinite distance.

“The mind of the woman you love – sleeps!” it said. “She is a woman walking in dream – moving among dreams that another mind has made for her. Evil creeps upon her. It is not well to let that evil conquer – Yet the issue rests on you – on your wisdom, your strength, your courage. When your wisdom tells you it is the time – open that farther door. Your way lies through it. And remember – her mind sleeps. You must awaken it – before the evil leaps upon her.”

Something tinkled on the floor. At Kenton’s feet lay a little wedge-shaped key. He stooped to pick it up. As he raised his head he saw the blue priest beside the far door.

The blue priest seemed but a wisp of wind-drawn smoke that, even as he looked, faded through the bronze and vanished!

Kenton heard the murmur of many voices, muffled, vague. He slipped from door to door, listening. The voices were not within the passage. They seemed to seep through the slab of pallid smooth stone. He placed an ear against it. The sounds came to him more distinctly, but still he could distinguish no words. The stone must be exceedingly thin here, he thought, that he could hear at all. He saw at his right a little shining lever. He drew it down.

A three-foot-wide, misty disc of light began to glow within the stone. It seemed to eat through the stone; it flashed out dazzlingly. Where the disc had been was a circular opening, a window. Silhouetted against it were the heads of a woman and two men. Their voices came now as clearly to his ears as though they stood beside him; over them came the wavelike murmur of a multitude. He drew back, fearing to be seen. The little lever snapped back into place. The window faded; with its fading the voices muted. He stared again at the smooth, pale wall.

Slowly he drew down the lever; once more he watched the apparent burning out of the solid stone; saw the three heads reappear. He had his free hand over the visible wall to the edge of the circle; higher he lifted it, into the disc itself. And ever he touched cold stone. Even that which was to his eyes an opening was to the questing fingers – stone!

He understood – this was some device of the sorcerers – the priests. A device to give them a peeping place, a listening post, within the crypt. Some knowledge of the properties of light not yet learned by the science of Kenton’s own world, control of a varying vibration that made the rock transparent from within but not from without. Whatever the secret, the stone was made as porous to the aerial waves of sound as to the etheric waves of light.

Keeping his grip upon the handle, Kenton peered out between the heads and over the shoulders of those so close to and still so unconscious of him.

— XXI —

BEFORE THE ALTAR OF BEL

The mists had lifted. They had become dense lurid clouds pressing down almost upon the top of the Zoned Temple. In front of him was a huge court paved with immense octagons of black and white marble. Trooping down upon this court like a forest of faery, halting in a wide semicircle around it, were hosts of slender pillars, elfin shafts all gleaming red and black whose tapering tops were crowned with carven, lace-tipped fronds glistening like gigantic ferns wet with dew of diamonds and sapphires. Upon the black and scarlet columns shone mysterious symbolings in gold and azure, in emerald and vermilion and silver. In halted myriads these pillars reached up toward the sullen, smoldering sky.

Hardly a hundred feet away was a golden altar, guarded by crouching Kerubs, man-headed, eagle-winged, lion-bodied, carven from some midnight metal. They watched at each corner of the altar with cruel, bearded faces set between paws and as alert as though alive. From the tripod on the altar a single slender crimson flame lifted, lance tipped and motionless.

In a vast crescent, a dozen yards in the van of the columns stood a double ring of bowmen and spearmen. They held back a multitude; men and women and children pouring out of the ordered grove of pillars and milling against the soldiers like wind-driven leaves against a well. Score upon score of men and women and children plucked from their own times and set down in this timeless world.

“The new priestess – they say she is very beautiful?” One of the men in front of Kenton had spoken. He was thin, white-faced, a Phrygian cap over his lank hair. The woman was of a bold and blown comeliness, black tressed, black-eyed. The man at her right was an Assyrian, bearded, wolf visaged.

“She was a princess, they say,” the woman spoke. “They say she was a princess in Babylon.”

“Princess in Babylon!” echoed the Assyrian, wolf face softening, homesickness in his voice – “Oh, to be back in Babylon!”

“The Priest of Bel loves her – so they say,” the woman broke the silence.

“The priestess?” whispered the Phrygian; the woman nodded. “But that is forbidden,” he muttered. “It is – death!” The woman laughed again.

“Hush!” it was the Assyrian, cautioning.

“And Narada – the God’s Dancer – loves the Priest of Bel!” the woman went on, unheeding. “And so – as always one must speed to Nergal!”

“Hush!” whispered the Assyrian.

There was a rumbling ruffle of drums, the sweet piping of a flute. Kenton sought the sounds. His gaze rested on half a score of temple girls. Five crouched beside little tambours upon whose heads rested their rosy thumbs; two held to red lips pierced reeds; three bent over harps. Within their circle lay what at first seemed to him a mound of shimmering spider web spun all of threads of jet, in which swarms of golden butterflies were snared. The mound quivered, lifted.

The sable silken strands had meshed a woman, a woman so lovely that for a heartbeat Kenton forgot Sharane. Dark she was, with the velvety darkness of the midsummer night; her eyes were pools of midnight skies in which shone no stars; her hair was mists of tempests snared in nets of silken gold. Sullen indeed was that gold, and in all of her something sullen that menaced the more because of its sweetness.

“There is a woman!” the bold eyes turned to the Assyrian. “She’ll have what she wants – my bed on it!”

There came a voice from beside her, wistful, dreamy, worshipping:

“Ah, yes! But the new priestess – she is no woman! She is Ishtar!”

Kenton craned his neck, looking for the speaker. He saw a youth, hardly more than nineteen, saffron-robed and slight. His eyes and face were those of a beautiful dreaming child.

“He is half mad,” the dark woman whispered to the Assyrian. “Ever since the new priestess came, he haunts this place.”

“We are going to have a storm. The sky is like a bowl of brass,” muttered the Phrygian. “The air is frightened.”

The Assyrian answered:

“They say Bel comes to his house in the storm. Perhaps the priestess will not be alone tonight.”

The woman laughed, slyly. Kenton felt desire to take her throat in his hands. There came a low clashing of thunder.

“Perhaps that is he, rising,” said the woman, demurely.

There was a throbbing of the harp-strings, a complaining from the tambours. A dancing girl sang softly:

“Born was Nala for delight, Never danced there feet so white; Every heart on which she trod. Dying owned her heel its god; Loose her girdle day or night – Born was Nala for delight!”

The brooding eyes of Narada flashed angrily. “Be quiet!” Kenton heard her whisper. There was a ripple of laughter among the girls; the two with the pipes trilled them softly; the drums murmured. But she who had sung sat silent over her harp with downcast eyes.

The Phrygian asked: “Is this priestess then really so beautiful?”

The Assyrian said: “I do not know. No man has ever seen her unveiled.” The youth whispered:

“When she walks I tremble! I tremble like the little blue lake of the temple when the breeze walks on it! Only my eyes live, and something grips my throat.”

“Peace!” a brown-eyed girl with kindly face and babe in arms spoke. “Not so loud – or it will be a bow string.”

“She is no woman! She is Ishtar! Ishtar!” cried the youth.

The soldiers nearby turned. Through them strode a grizzled officer, short sword in hand. Before his approach the others drew back; only the youth stood motionless. Right and left the sword carrier peered beneath bushy brows. Ere he could fix gaze on the youth a man in sailor’s cap and tunic of mail had walked between the two, gripped the youth’s wrist, held him hidden behind him. Kenton caught a glimpse of agate eyes, black beard – It was Zubran!

Zubran! But would he pass on? Could Kenton make him hear if he called? If his body could not be seen from without, could his voice penetrate the stone?

The sword bearer scanned the silent group, uncertainly. The Persian saluted him gravely.

“Silence here!” grunted the officer at last, and passed back among his men.

The Persian grinned; pushed the youth from him; stared at the dark woman with eyes bolder than her own. He jostled the Phrygian from his place; laid a hand upon the woman’s arm.

“I was listening,” he said. “Who is this priestess? I am newly come to this land and know nothing of its customs. Yet by Ormuzd!” he swore and dropped his arm around the woman’s shoulders. “It was worth the journey to meet you! Who is this priestess that you say is so beautiful?”

“She is the keeper of Bel’s Bower,” the woman nestled close to him.

“But what does she there?” asked Zubran. “Now if it were – you – I could understand without asking. And why does she come here?”

“The priestess lives in Bel’s Bower upon the top of the temple,” the Assyrian spoke. “She comes here to worship at his altar. When her worship is done she returns.”

“For such beauty as you say is hers,” remarked Zubran, “her world seems small indeed. Why, if she is so beautiful, is she content to dwell in so small a world?”

“She is the god’s,” answered the Assyrian. “She is the keeper of his house. If the god entered he might be hungry. There must be food for him in his house and a woman to serve it. Or he might be amor—”

“And so there must be a woman there,” interrupted the bold-eyed wench, smiling up at him.

“We have something like that in my country,” the Persian drew her closer. “But the priestesses seldom wait alone. The priests see to that – Ho! Ho!”

God! Would Zubran never come close enough to the wall? So close that Kenton might call to him? And yet – if he did! Would not those others hear him also—? And then—

“Have any of these priestesses who – wait—” Zubran’s voice purred – “Have any of these waiting priestesses ever – ah, entertained – the god?”

The youth spoke: “They say the doves speak to her – the doves of Ishtar! They say she is more beautiful than Ishtar!”

“Fool!” whispered the Assyrian. “Fool, be still! Will you bring bad luck upon us? No woman can be more beautiful than Ishtar!”

“No woman can be more beautiful than Ishtar,” sighed the youth. “Therefore she is – Ishtar!”

The Phrygian said: “He is mad!”

But the Persian stretched out his right arm, drew the youth to him.

“Have any of these priestesses ever held the god?” he asked.

“Wait” murmured the woman. “I will ask Narodach the archerer. He comes sometimes to my house. He knows. He has seen many priestesses.” she held the Persian’s arm fast about her girdle, leaned forward – “Narodach! Come to me!”

An archer turned; whispered to the men on each side of him; slipped from between them. They closed up behind him.

“Narodach,” asked the woman. “Tell us – have any of the priestesses ever held – Bel?”

The archer hesitated, uneasily.

“I do not know,” slowly he answered at last. “They tell many tales. Yet are they but tales? When first I came here there was a priestess in Bel’s house. She was like the crescent moon of our old world. Many men desired her.”

“Ho, archer,” rumbled the Persian. “But did she – hold the god?”

Narodach said: “I do not know. They said so – they said that she had been withered by his fires. The wife of the charioteer of the Priest of Ninib told me that her face was very old when they took away her body. She was a date tree that had withered before it had borne fruit, she said.”

“If I were a priestess – and so beautiful – I would not wait for a god!” the woman’s eyes clung to Zubran. “I would have a man. Yea – I would have many men!”

“There was another who followed,” said the archer. “She said the god had come to her. But she was mad – and being mad, the priests of Nergal took her.”

“Give me men, I say!” whispered the woman.

Said Narodach the archer musing: “One there was who threw herself from the Bower. One there was who vanished. One there was—”

The Persian interrupted: “It seems that these priestesses who wait for Bel are not – fortunate.”

Said the woman with intense conviction:

“Give me – men!”

There was a nearer clashing of thunder. In the lurid, ever-darkening sky, the clouds began a slow churning.

“There will be a great storm,” muttered the Phrygian.

The girl Narada had rebuked thrummed against her harp strings; she sang half maliciously, half defiantly:

“Every heart that sought a nest, Flew straightway to Nala’s breast – Born was Nala for delight—”

She checked her song. From afar came the faint sound of chanting; the tread of marching feet. Bowman and spearmen raised bows and spears in salute. Behind them the milling multitudes dropped to their knees. The Persian drew close to the wall. And his was now the only head in the circular window whose pane was stone.

“Zubran!” called Kenton, softly. The Persian turned startled face to the wall, then leaned against it, cloak tight around his face.

“Wolf!” he whispered. “Are you safe? Where are you?”

“Behind the wall,” whispered Kenton. “Speak softly.”

“Are you hurt? In chains?” muttered the Persian.

“I am safe,” answered Kenton. “But Gigi – Sigurd?”

“Searching for you,” the Persian said. “Our hearts have been well-nigh broken—”

“Listen,” said Kenton. “There is a clump of trees – close to the stairway above the garrison—”

“We know,” answered Zubran. “It is from them we make the steps and scale the temple. But you—”

“I will be in the Bower of Bel,” said Kenton. “Soon as the storm breaks – go there. If you do not find me – take Sharane, carry her back to the ship. I will follow.”

“We will not go without you,” whispered Zubran.

“I hear a voice speaking through the stone.” It was the Assyrian, kneeling. Zubran dropped from Kenton’s sight.

The chanting had grown louder; the marching feet were close. Then from some secret entrance of the temple there swept out into the open space a company of archers and a company of swordsmen. Behind them paced as many shaven, yellow-robed priests, swinging smoking golden censers and chanting as they walked. The soldiers formed a wide arc before the altar. The priests were silent upon a somber chord. They threw themselves flat on the ground.

Into the great court strode a single figure, tall as Kenton himself. A robe of shining gold covered him and a fold of this he held on raised left arm, completely covering his face.

“The Priest of Bel!” whispered the kneeling woman.

There was a movement among the temple girls. Narada had half risen. Never had there been such yearning, such bittersweet desire as that in her midnight eyes as the Priest of Bel passed her, unheeding. Her slender fingers gripped the cobwebs that meshed her; their webs were lifted by the swelling breast of her; shuddered with the sighs that shook her.

The Priest of Bel reached the golden altar. He dropped the arm that held the shrouding fold. And then Kenton’s stiff fingers almost loosed the shining lever.

He looked, as in a mirror, into his own face!

— XXII —

HOW NARADA DANCED

Breathlessly Kenton stared at this strange twin. There was the same square jaw, firm-lipped dark face, the same clear blue eyes.

His mind groped toward the black priest’s plot. Was this to be – Sharane’s lover? Some flash of understanding half illumined his mind – too brief to be more than half caught. It left him groping again.

Through the stone he heard the Persian cursing. Then—

“Wolf, are you behind me?” he muttered. “Are you truly behind me, Wolf?”

“Yes,” he whispered. “I am here, Zubran. That is not I! It is some sorcery.”

His gaze flew back to the Priest of Bel; began now to take note of subtle differences in their two faces. The lips were not so firm, the corners of the mouth drew down, there was hint of indecision about them and the chin. And the eyes were strained, shadowed with half wild, half agonized longing. Silent, tense, the Priest of Bel stared over the lifted head of Narada, her lithe body as rigid as his own, unheeding her, intent upon that hidden portal through which he had come.

The lanced, crimson flame upon the altar flickered; swayed.

“The gods guard us!” he heard the bold-eyed woman say.

“Be silent! What is the matter?” said the Assyrian.

The woman whispered: “Did you see the Kerubs? They glared at the priest! They moved toward him!”

The woman with the babe said: “I saw it! I am frightened!”

The Assyrian said: “It was the light on the altar. It flickered.”

Said the Phrygian low: “Perhaps it was the Kerubs. Are they not Bel’s messengers? Did you not say the priest loved Bel’s woman?”

“Silence there!” rang the voice of the officer from behind the double ring. The priests began a low chanting. In the eyes of the priest a fire began to glow; his lips quivered; his body bent forward as though drawn by an unseen cord. Across the wide place walked a woman – alone. She was cloaked from neck to feet in purple; her head was swathed in golden veils.

Kenton knew her!

His heart leaped toward her; his blood raced. He quivered under such shock of longing that it seemed as though his leaping heart must break beneath it.

“Sharane!” he called, forgetting; and again – “Sharane!”

She glided through the opened ranks of the men-at-arms kneeling to her as she passed. Straight to the altar she paced and stood silent, motionless beside the Priest of Bel.

There was a louder rolling of the metallic thunder. As it died away the priest turned to the altar, lifted his hands high. From his attendants droned a long, sustained humming upon a single deep note. Up and out swept the priest’s arms; seven times he bowed low before the crimson flame. He stood upright. Down upon their knees dropped archers and spearmen; with a rustling of bows, a muffled beating of spear shafts.

Still to that weird humming the Priest of Bel began his invocation:

“Oh merciful among the gods! O bull-necked among the gods! Bel Merodach, king of the heavens and the worlds! Heavens and earths are thine! Breather of life art thou! Thy house is prepared for thee! We worship and await.”

Kenton heard a whisper – tremulous, golden – “I worship and await!”

Sharane’s voice! The golden voice of Sharane playing upon every taut nerve of him like myriads of little fingers over stretched harp strings!

Again the Priest of Bel:

“O begetter! O self-begotten! O beautiful one who givest life to the babe! O merciful one who givest life to the dead! King art thou of Ezida! Lord of Emakhtila! A resting place for the King of Heaven is thy house! A resting place for the Lord of Worlds is thy house! We worship and await thee!”

And once more Sharane – tremulous – “I worship and await Thee!” The priest intoned:

“Lord of the Silent Weapon! Look favorably on thy house, O Lord of Rest! May Ezida speak peace to thee in thy house! May Emakhtila speak rest to thee in thy house! We worship and await thee!”

And again Sharane: “I worship and await Thee!” Now Kenton saw the priest make toward the altar a gesture in which lurked an inexplicable defiance. He turned and faced Sharane. His voice rang loudly, jubilantly:

“Full of delight is thy supremacy! Opener of the lock of morning art thou! Opener of the lock of evening art thou! To open the lock of the Heavens is thy supremacy! I worship and await thee!”

At the first words the humming of the priests ceased; Kenton saw them stir, glance at each other uncertainly; saw a ripple pass through kneeling soldiers and worshippers as their heads raised; heard murmuring, astonished, uneasy.

Beneath him the kneeling Assyrian muttered: “That was not in the ritual!”

The Persian asked: “What was not in the ritual?”

The woman said: “That the priest cried last. It is not Bel’s. It belongs to Our Lady Ishtar!”

The youth whispered: “Yes! Yes – he knows her too! She is Ishtar!”

The woman with the babe sobbed: “Did you see the Kerubs stretch their claws? I am frightened. I am frightened, and it is not good for the child’s milk. The light on the altar is like spilled blood!”

Said the Assyrian, uneasily: “I do not like it! It was not of Bel’s ritual! And the storm is coming fast!”

Narada arose, abruptly. Her handmaids bent over drums and harps; set their pipes to lips. A soft and amorous theme beat up from them, delicate, clinging – like the beating of the wings of countless doves, the clinging of countless little soft arms, the throbbing of countless little rosy hearts. Under it the body of Narada swayed like a green reed at the first touch of roving winds of spring. The multitude looked, sighed once and was still.

But Kenton saw that the priest’s eyes never left Sharane, standing like a woman asleep beneath her veils.

Louder the music sounded; quicker, throbbing with all love longing, laden with all passion; hot as the simoon. To it, as though her body drank in each calling, imperious note, turned it into motion, made it articulate in flesh, Narada began to dance.

In the midnight eyes that had been so sorrowful, many little leaping joyous stars danced. The scarlet mouth was a luring, honey-sweet flame promising unknown raptures; and the swarms of golden butterflies meshed within her gossamer nets of jet hovered, swept down, clung to and caressed the rose and pearl of her body as though she were some wondrous flower. They were clouds of golden butterflies darting upon her, covering with kisses all her loveliness, gleaming within the cloudy nets that swirled about her, yet hiding no single exquisite contour. Maddening, breathless, grew dance and music, and in music and dance Kenton watched mating stars, embracing suns, moons swollen with birth. Gathered in them he sensed all passion, all desire of all women under stars and suns and moons…

The music slowed, softened; the dancer was still; from all the multitude a soft sighing arose. He heard Zubran, his voice hoarse:

“Who is that dancer? She is like a flame! She is like the flame that dances before Ormuzd on the Altar of Ten Thousand Sacrifices!”

The woman jealously: “She danced the wooing of Bel by Ishtar. She has danced it many times. Nothing new in that.”

The Phrygian said, maliciously: “He asked who she is?” The woman said, spitefully: “Gods! That dance is no new thing, I tell you. Many women have danced it.”

The Assyrian said: “She is Narada. She belongs to Bel.”

The Persian said wrathfully: “Are all the fair women in this country Bel’s? By the Nine Hells – Cyrus the King would have given ten talents of gold for her!”

“Hush!” whimpered the Assyrian; and the other two echoed him – “Hush!”

Narada had begun once more to dance. The music grew louder. But now it was languorous; dripping sweetness; distilling the very dew of desire.

The blood hammered hot in Kenton’s veins – “She dances the surrender of Ishtar to Bell” It was the Assyrian, gloating.

The Persian stood upright.

“Aie!” he cried. “Cyrus would have given fifty talents of gold for her! She is a flame!” cried Zubran, and his voice was thick, clogged. “And if she is Bel’s – why then does she look so upon the priest?”

None heard him in the roaring of the multitude; soldiers and worshippers, none of them had eyes or ears for anything but the dancer.

Nor had Kenton!

Then witchery of the midnight woman was gone; raging at himself he beat against the stone. For the tranquility of Sharane had broken. Her white hand thrust aside the shrouding purple folds. She turned; moved swiftly away toward that hidden entrance from which she had come.

The dancer stopped; the music died; again came the uneasy movement of the multitude; a louder murmuring.

“That was not in the ritual!” The Assyrian sprang to his feet. “The dance is not yet finished.”

There was a clashing of thunder almost overhead.

“She grows impatient for the god,” the woman said, cynically.

“She is Ishtar! She is the moon hiding her face behind a little cloud!” The youth took a step toward the men-at-arms guarding the priestess.

The bold-eyed woman arose, caught his arm; spoke to the soldiers.

“He is mad! He lives at my house. Do not hurt him! I will take him away!”

But the youth broke away from her; thrust her aside. He darted through the guards and raced across the square to meet the advancing priestess. He threw himself at her hurrying feet. He hid his face in the hem of her cloak.

She paused, regarding him through her veils. Instantly Bel’s priest was at her side. He thrust a foot against the youth’s face; sent him rolling a yard away.

“Ho! Alrac! Druchar! Take this man!” he shouted. Two officers came running to him, swords drawn; the attendant priests clustered, whispering; all the multitude was silent.

The youth twisted, sprang upon his feet, faced the priestess.

“Ishtar!” he cried. “Show me your face. Then let me die!”

She stood silent, as though she neither heard nor saw. The soldiers seized him, drew back his arms. And then, visibly, strength flowed into the youth’s slight frame. He seemed to expand, to grow in height. He threw the soldiers from him; he struck the Priest of Bel across the eyes. He gripped the veils of the priestess.

“I will not die until I see your face, O Ishtar!” he cried – and so crying tore the veils away…

Kenton looked upon the face of Sharane.

But not the Sharane of the ship – vital, filled with the fire of life.

Here was a Sharane of wide, unseeing eyes; upon whose white brows dream sat throned; a mind that floated through linked labyrinths of illusion.

The Priest of Bel’s voice shrilled:

“Slay that man!”

The swords of the two captains bit through the youth’s breast.

He fell, still holding tight the veils. Sharane looked down upon him, unconcerned.

“Ishtar!” he gasped. “I have seen you – Ishtar!”

His eyes glazed. Sharane tore the veils from his stiffening hands; threw the tattered remnants over her face. She swept on to the temple – was gone from Kenton’s straining sight.

From the multitude a clamor arose. Archers and spearmen began to push back the throng through the forest of the slender, lacquered pillars; sifted among them; vanished with those they herded. Past the Priest of Bel went his soldiers and acolytes; and after them slipped the harpers, the pipers and the drum girls of Narada.

Within that vast court circled by the elfin shafts remained only dancer and priest. The lurid sky darkened steadily. The slow, churning movement of the clouds had become more rapid. The lanced flame on the altar of Bel shone brighter – angrily; like a lifted, scarlet sword. Around the crouching Kerubs the shadows thickened. The metallic thundering had become continuous, marching closer.

With the passing of Sharane, Kenton would have opened that other door of bronze. Something counseled him that the time had not yet come; that a little longer he must wait. And as he waited dancer and priest drifted to that strange window through which he peered.

Close to him they paused.

PART FIVE

— XXIII —

DANCER AND PRIEST

“Bel should be pleased with his worship, priest!” Kenton heard the dancer say.

The priest asked, dully: “What do you mean?”

Narada drew closer to him; her hands fluttered out to him.

“Shalamu,” she whispered. “Did I dance for the god? You know I danced for – you. And whom did you worship, Shalamu? The god? No – the priestess. And whom, think you, did she worship?”

“She worshipped Bel! Our Lord Bel who has – all,” the priest answered, bitterly.

Said the dancer, mockingly: “She worshipped herself, Shalamu!”

He repeated, stubbornly, wearily: “She worshipped Bel.”

Closer came Narada, touched him with fluttering, yearning hands.

“Does any woman worship a god, Shalamu?” she asked. “Ah – no! I am a woman – and I know. This priestess would be a god’s woman – no man’s. She holds herself too high, too precious, for man. She loves herself. She worships herself. She would bow down to herself as a god’s woman. Women make gods of men and then love them. But no woman loves any god she has not made, Shalamu!”

The priest said, sullenly: “Well – I worshipped her!”

The dancer said: “As she worshipped – herself! Shalamu – does she long to give joy to Bel? To our Lord Bel who has Ishtar? Can we give joy to the gods – to the gods who have all? The lotus rises to the sun – but is it to give joy to the sun that she rises? No! It is to give joy to herself. So the priestess! I am a woman – and I know.”

Her hands were on his shoulders; he took them in his own: “Why do you say these things to me?”

“Shalamu!” she murmured. “Look in my eyes. Look on my mouth – my breasts. Like the priestess I am the god’s, But I give myself to you – beloved!”

He said, dreamily: “Yea – you are beautiful!”

Her arms were round his neck, her lips close to his.

“Do I love the god?” she whispered. “When I dance is it to delight his eyes? It is for you I dance – beloved. It is for you I dare Bel’s wrath—” Softly she drew his head down on her breast – “Am I not fair? Fairer than this priestess who is Bel’s and worships herself nor will ever give herself to you? Are not my perfumes pleasing? No god possesses me – beloved!”

Dreamily he answered her again: “Yea – you are very fair.”

“I love you – Shalamu!”

He thrust her from him: “Her eyes are like the Pools of Peace in the Valley of Forgetfulness! When she comes near me the doves of Ishtar beat their wings above my head! She walks upon my heart!”

Narada drew back, scarlet lips pale, brows a menacing straight line:

“The priestess?”

“The priestess,” he answered. “Her hair is like the cloud that veils the sun at dusk. The wave of her robe scorches me as the wind from the desert noon scorches the palm The wave of her robe makes me cold as the wind of the desert night makes cold the palm.”

She said:

“That youth was bolder far than you, Shalamu.”

Kenton saw the red rush through the priest’s face.

“What do you mean?” he snarled.

“Why did you have the youth slain?” coldly as before come her voice.

He answered, hotly: “He did sacrilege. He—”

She stopped him, contemptuously: “Because he was bolder than you. Because he dared to tear the veils from her. Because you knew yourself the coward. This is why you had him slain!”

His hands twitched to her throat: “You lie! You lie! I would dare!”

Again she laughed; “You did not even dare to slay him – yourself!”

His hands were at her throat; she thrust them carelessly aside.

“Coward!” she said. “He dared to lift the veil from what he loved. He dared the wrath both of Ishtar and of Bel!”

The priest cried brokenly: “Would I not dare? Do I fear death? Do I fear Bel?”

Her eyes mocked him.

“Hai! You love so greatly!” she taunted. “The priestess awaits the god – in his lonely house! Perhaps he is not in the storm! Perchance he tarries with another maid – Oh, fearless one! Bold lover – take his place!”

He shrank back from her.

“Take – his – place!” he whispered.

“You know where the armor of the god is hidden. Go to her as the god!” she said.

For a long moment the priest stood, quivering. Then Kenton saw irresolution fly; decision take its place. He strode to the altar – down went the lanced flame; wavered; died. In the sudden dark the crouching Kerubs seemed monstrously to take wing.

There came a flash of the weird lightning,

By its irised flare he saw the Priest of Bel passing swiftly along that way Sharane had come and gone; saw Narada lying huddled in her nets of jet, the sipping flocks of golden butterflies at rest upon her; heard a low, heartbroken wailing.

Slowly Kenton’s hand began to slip from the lever. Now was the time to use that key, pass on where the blue priest had pointed. His hand froze upon the lever.

A shadow, blacker than the dusk without, had passed the window; stood over the dancer; a huge and unwieldy bulk – familiar,

Klaneth!

“Good!” rumbled the black priest, and touched her with his foot. “Now soon neither he nor Sharane shall trouble you more. And you have well earned that reward I promised you.”

Narada looked up at him with white and piteous face, stretched shaking hands out to him.

“If he had loved me,” she wailed, “never would he have gone. If he had loved me but a little – never would I have let him go. But he angered me – he shamed me, throwing back to me the love I offered him. Not for you, black snake, despite our bargain, did I send him to her – and to death!”

The black priest stared at her, then laughed.

“Whatever your reason – you sent him,” he said. “And Klaneth pays his debts.”

He dropped a handful of flashing jewels into her outstretched palms. She screamed, opened fingers as though the gems burned her; they fell and rolled about the checkered stones.

“If he had loved me! If he had loved me but a little!” sobbed Narada – and crouched again, a huddled heap, among her butterflies.

Kenton, to him now clear all the black priest’s plot, let the lever go; raced to the farther door of bronze, thrust the wedged key into it; slipped past the slowly opening edge, and ran down the passageway it had barred. Two flames burned in him as he raced along that passage – white flame of love for his woman, black flame of hate against Klaneth. He knew that wherever the Priest of Bel was bound there must be Sharane. The end – unless Kenton could reach the Bower of Bel in time and conquer – inevitable.

Narada had repented – but too late! The black priest had gambled – and the black priest had won!

Kenton cursed as he ran. If Sharane, meshed in ensorcelled dream, saw the Priest of Bel as the god himself – still would she have taken earthly lover! Her innocence could not save her. Klaneth would see to that.

And if Sharane should awaken – God! Would she not in the dawn of that awakening take the Priest of Bel for him – for Kenton!

But either way – the presence of priest and priestess in Bel’s Bower would be enough to damn them both. Yes – Klaneth would see to that.

He crossed a traverse passage: ran blindly down a sloping corridor along whose sides glared guarding chimera; stopped in front of a wide portal from which hung, motionless and rigid, folds that seemed carved from solid silver. Caution whispered to him; he put out a hand, parted the metallic curtainings, peered within…

He looked into his own room.

There it lay before him, his old room in his old world!

He saw the jeweled ship, glimmering, glittering – but as though he saw it through a fog; through a mist of fiery particles, half veiling it. The long mirror glinted behind that same luminous vapor. Infinitely small, in infinite numbers, the sparkling atoms hung between him and that room of his – back in New York!

And he – here in this strange world!

Misty was the room, nebulous, quivering now into plainer sight; now withdrawing into indefiniteness.

And as he stared at it, incredulous, the old bleak despair clutching him, he felt within his hands the curtains grow light as silken gauze, stiffen back into metal – alternately; slip from his hands, strengthen within them as his room steadied in the sparkling mist, dissolved within it into phantom outlines!

Yet ever as his room swung inward clearer, swung back dimmer, the outlines of the jeweled ship hardened, crystallized, shone forth brighter – summoning him, dragging him back!

— XXIV —

THE GODS – AND MAN’S DESIRE

Kenton braced himself; he held tight to the curtains. He fought with all his will to check their melting. The curtains were like bars between his old world and this of his great adventure.

A force, a pull like a strong undertow, dragged him forward each time they melted in his hands and the nebulous outlines of his room crisped into steadiness. Plainly he could pick out every detail of that room, the long mirror, the cabinets, the divan – the stains of his blood still wet upon the floor.

And always, whether room were melting mist or clear outline, the jeweled ship shining steadily – watchful.

Now he swung out and over that room; the ancient Chinese rug on its floor was below him – at once close and infinite distances away. He heard the first voices of those shrieking winds of space!

In that brief instant he realized that it was the shining toy itself drawing him back!

Something was reaching up and out to him from the dark deck of the ship! Something malignant and mocking – dragging him, dragging him to it!

Darker grew the black deck – stronger its pull – “Ishtar!” he prayed, gaze upon the rosy cabin. “Ishtar!” Did the cabin flash as though filled with sudden light? The outlines of his room melted; again the curtains were heavy in his hands; he stood once more on firm feet at the threshold of the House of the Moon God.

Once, twice, thrice more the room pulled back – but each time less real, more spectral. And against each pulse Kenton set his will; closed eyes and thrust away the vision of it with all his strength.

His will won. The room vanished; in that envanishment a finality not to be mistaken. The spell was broken, the subtle links snapped.

Caught by the reaction he clung to the curtains, knees weak and shaking. Slowly he found himself, resolutely parted the folds.

He looked now into a vast hall filled with mist of argent light; still was this mist, yet palpable – as though the rays that formed it were woven. Interlaced and luminous, the webbed mist made of the chamber a home of immensities, of tremendous distances. He thought, but was not sure, that there was motion within these silver webs – shadowy shapes half appearing, vanishing, never quite coming into full sight. Far away he caught another movement; a figure was coming forward; steadily, inexorably. It drew closer, slowly; it swam into sight – a man, golden-helmeted, over his shoulder a short cloak of gold shot through with scarlet, in his hand a golden sword; head bent, pushing on as though against some strong current.

It was the Priest of Bel clad in the raiment of his god!

Scarce breathing, Kenton watched him. The eyes so like his own were black with dread and awe – yet filled with will and purpose; indomitable. The mouth was set, the lips white, and in all the priest’s body Kenton sensed a tremor, a shuddering – deep as the priest’s soul. Whether real or but phantoms, he knew the terrors of this place were realities to this strange double of his.

The Priest of Bel passed, and Kenton, waiting until he was half hidden in the shining mists, slipped through the curtains, followed him.

Now Kenton heard a voice; a still voice, passionless as that which had bidden him arise from his bed of stone; and like that voice neither was it in the place wherein he trod nor within him. It was as though borne to him out of farthest space…

The voice of Nabu, God of Wisdom!

Listening, he felt himself not one man, but three – a single purposed Kenton who followed the priest and would follow him through hell so he led to Sharane; a Kenton who, tied by some inexplicable link to the mind of the priest, felt and saw and heard, suffered and feared even as he; and a Kenton who hearkened to the words of Nabu as coldly, as dispassionately as they were uttered, watched as coldly, as detachedly, all they pictured.

“The House of Sin!” the voice rang. “Chief of the Gods! Nannar! Begetter of Gods and men! Lord of the Moon! Lord of the Brilliant Crescent! Great of Horns! Nannar Perfect of Form! Decreer of Destiny! Self Created! Whose House is the first of the Zones and Whose Color is Silver!

“He passes through the House of Sin!

“He goes by the altars of chalcedon and of sard which are set with the great moonstones and with rock crystals, the altars where burn the white flames from which Sin the Fashioner created Ishtar! He sees the pale and shining serpents of Nannar writhe toward him and from the silver mists that veil the crescented horns of sin he sees the winged white scorpions dart upon him!

“He hears the sound of the tramping of myriads of feet, the feet of all the men to be born beneath the Moon! And he hears the sound of the sobbing of myriads of women, the sobbing of all the women to be born and to bear! He hears the clamor of the Uncreate!

“And he passes!

“For lo! Not the Begetter of Gods nor the awe of him may stand before man’s desire!”

So the voice rang – and was silent. And Kenton saw all these things, saw the shimmering white serpents writhe through the silver mists and strike at the priest; saw the winged scorpions dart upon him; visioned within the mists a vast and awful shape upon whose clouded brows the crescent of the moon was bound. In his own ears he heard the tramping of armies of the unborn, the sobbing of worlds of women yet unborn, the clamor of the Uncreate! Saw and heard – even, he knew, as did the Priest of Bel!

And followed.

The golden helm flashed high above him. Kenton paused at the base of a winding stairway whose broad steps circled upward, changing as they arose from pallid silver to glowing orange. He waited until the priest – never hastening, never looking back – had ascended; he passed into the place to which the stairway led; slipped after him.

He looked into a temple filled with crocused light even as that through which he had just come had been filled with webs of moonbeams. A hundred paces away marched the priest, and as Kenton moved on the still voice resumed its whispering:

“The House of Shamash! Offspring of the Moon! God of the Day! Dweller in the House of Luster! Banisher of Darkness! King of Judgment! Judge of Mankind! On Whose Head Resteth the Crown with the High Horns! In Whose Hands are Life and Death! Who cleanseth Man with His Hands like a Tablet of Burnished Copper! Whose House is the Second of the Zones and Whose Color is Orange!

“He passes through the House of Shamash!

“Here are the altars of opal set with diamonds and the altars of gold set with amber and the yellow sun-stones. Upon the altars of Shamash burn sandalwood and cardamon and verbena. He goes by the altars of opal and of gold; and he goes by the birds of Shamash whose heads are wheels of flame and who guard the wheel that turns within the House of Shamash and is a potter’s wheel upon which all the souls of men are shaped.

“He hears the noise of myriads of voices, the wailing of those who have been judged and the shouting of those who have been judged!

“And he passes!

“For lo! Not the King of Judgment nor the fear of him may stand before man’s desire!”

Again Kenton saw and heard all these things; and following the priest came to a second stairway whose steps merged from glowing orange into ebony black. And still following he stood, at last, in a great hall of gloom, the name of whose dread master he knew even before the still voice came murmuring to him out of hidden, secret space:

“The House of Nergal! The Mighty One of the Great Dwelling Place! King of the Dead! He who Scattereth the Pestilence! He Who Ruleth over the Lost! The Dark One without Horns! Whose House is the Third of the Zones and Whose Color is Black!

“He passes through the House of Nergal!

“He goes by Nergal’s altars of jet and of bloodstone! He goes by the red fires of civet and of bergamot that burn thereon! He goes by the altars of Nergal and the lions that guard them! The black lions whose eyes are as rubies and whose claws are blood red, the red lions whose claws are as black iron and whose eyes are as jet; and he passes the sable vultures of Nergal whose eyes are as carbuncles and whose heads are the fleshless heads of women!

“He hears the whimpering of the People of the Great Dwelling Place and he tastes the ashes of their passion!

“And he passes!

“For lo! Not the Lord of the Dead nor the dread of him may swerve man from his desire!”

Now the steps of the stairway by which Kenton ascended from the House of Nergal faded from ebon into crimson, and fiery, wrathful scarlet was the light that filled the place in which he stood, watching the Priest of Bel go steadily on.

“The House of Ninib!” whispered the voice. “Lord of Spears! Lord of the Battle! Master of the Shields! Master of the Hearts of Warriors! Ruler of the Strife! Destroyer of Opposition! Breaker of the Lock! The Smiter! Whose Color is Scarlet, Whose House is the Fourth of the Zones! Of shields and of spears are builded the altars of Ninib and their fires are fed with the blood of men and the tears of women, and upon the altars of Ninib burn the gates of fallen cities and the hearts of conquered kings! He goes by the altars of Ninib. He sees threaten him the crimson fangs of the boars of Ninib whose heads are wreathed with the right hands of warriors, the crimson tusks of the elephants of Ninib whose feet are ankleted with the skulls of kings, and the crimson tongues of the snakes of Ninib which lick up the cities!

“He hears the clashing of spears, the smiting of swords, the falling of walls, the crying of the conquered!

“And he passes!

“For lo! Since ever man was, the altars of Ninib have been fed with the fruits of man’s desire!”

Upon the fourth stairway he set his feet; ascended steps that ran from the vermilion of licking flame to the clear serene blue of untroubled skies, stood within a chamber all filled with calm, azure light. Closer now seemed the voice.

“The House of Nabu! Lord of Wisdom! Bearer of the Staff! Mighty One of the Waters! Lord of the Fields Who Openeth up the Subterranean Streams! The Proclaimer! He who Openeth the Ears of Understanding! Whose Color is Blue and Whose House is the Fifth of the Zones!

“The altars of Nabu are of blue sapphire and of emerald and from them shine clear amethysts! The flames that burn on the altars of Nabu are blue fires in whose light only the truth has shadow! And the flames of Nabu are cold flames nor is there any scent over his altars! He passes by the altars of sapphire and of emerald and their cold fires! He passes the fishes of Nabu which have women’s breasts but silent mouths! He passes the seeing eyes of Nabu which look forth from behind his altars and he touches not the staff of Nabu which holdeth up with wisdom the feet!

“Yea – he passes!

“For lo! – when did Wisdom stand before man’s desire!”

Up from the blue of Nabu’s House went the priest, and behind him on a stairway that merged from sapphire into rosy pearl and ivory climbed Kenton. Little, caressing tendrils of incense reached out to him as he went and all about him beat little languorous, linked notes of amorous sound; coaxing, calling, infinitely alluring, perilously sweet. Slowly, slowly Kenton followed him, listening to the voice, yet half heeding it, half forgetful of his quest, struggling with a vast desire to heed the calling, linked and amorous music; surrender to the spirit of this ensorcelled chamber – go no further – forget – Sharane!

“The House of Ishtar!” came the voice. “Mother of the Gods and of Men! The Great Goddess! Lady of the Morning and of the Evening! Full Bosomed! The Producer! She who Hearkeneth to Petition! The Mighty Weapon of the Gods! She who Slays and She Who Creates Love! Whose Color is Rose – pearl. And the House of Ishtar is the Sixth of the Zones!

“He passes through the House of Ishtar! Of white marble and of rose coral are her altars and the white marble is streaked with blue like a woman’s breast! Upon her altars burn ever myrrh and frankincense, attar and ambergris! And the altars of Ishtar are set with pearls both white and rose, with hyacinths and with turquoise and with beryls!

“He goes by the altars of Ishtar, and, like the pink palms of maidens desirous, the rose wreaths of the incense steal toward him. The white doves of Ishtar beat their wings about his eyes! He hears the sound of the meeting of lips, the throbbing of hearts, the sighs of women, and the tread of white feet!

“Yet he passes!

“For lo! Whenever did Love stand before man’s desire!”

From that chamber of amorous witcheries the stairway climbed, reluctant; shifting from its rosy pearl to flaming, flashing gold. And scaling it he stood within another vast place radiant as though it were the heart of the sun. Faster and faster the priest of Bel moved onward as though here all his terrors were concentrated, were crowding upon his hurrying heels!

“The House of Bel!” Rang the voice. “Merodach! Ruler of the Four Regions, Lord of the Lands! Child of the Day! Bull Necked! Elephant Thewed! Mighty One! Conqueror of Tiamat! Lord of the Igigi! King of Heavens and Earth! Bringer of Things to Completeness. Lover of Ishtar.

“Bel-Merodach, Whose House is the Seventh of the Zones, and Whose Color is Golden! Swiftly he passes through the House of Bel!

“The altars of Bel are of gold and rayed like the sun! On them burn the golden fires of the summer lightnings and the smoke of the incense hangs over them like the clouds of the thunderstorm! The Kerubs whose bodies are lions and whose heads are eagle heads, and the Kerubs whose bodies are bulls and whose heads are the heads of men guard the golden altars of Bel, and both are winged with mighty wings! And the altars of Bel are reared upon thews of elephants and are held upon the necks of bulls and the paws of lions!

“He goes by them! He sees the fires of the lightnings sink and the altar shake! In his ears is the sound of worlds crushed by the fist of Bel; of worlds breaking beneath the smiting of Bel!

“Yet he passes!

“For lo! Not even the Might of God may crush the desire of man!”

The voice ceased, it seemed to retreat to those far regions whence it had come. In its withdrawal Kenton sensed finality; knew it would sound no more for him there; that now he was thrown on his own wit and strength; must captain his own way henceforward.

Out from one side of the House of Bel jutted a squared buttress, perpendicular, fifty feet or more wide. It thrust itself into this temple within a temple like the gigantic pier of a bridge. Its top was hidden.

Down its smooth facade darted a broad and angled streak of gold that Kenton for an instant took to be a colossal ornament, a symboling of the darting lightning bolt of Bel. Closer he came to it, following the priest. And now he saw that the golden streak was no ornament. It was a stairway, fashioned to represent the leaping levin but – a stairway. A stepped stairway of sharply angled flights that, clinging to the mighty buttress wall, climbed from the floor of the House of Bel up to – what?

At the foot the priest of Bel faltered; for the first time he looked behind him; seemed half moved to retreat. Then with the same despairing gesture of defiance with which he had turned from the altar, he began to creep cautiously, silently up the angled stairs.

And Kenton, waiting again, until he was but a shadow in the shining mists, followed.

— XXV —

IN THE BOWER OF BEL

The tempest had struck. Kenton, climbing, heard thunderings like the clashing of armied shields; clanging of countless cymbals, tintamarre of millions of gongs of brass. Ever louder grew the clangor as he ascended; with it mingled now the diapason of mighty winds, staccato of cataracts of rain.

The stairway climbed the sheer wall of the buttress as a vine a tower. It was not wide – three men might march abreast up it; no more. Up it went, dizzily. Five sharp-angled flights of forty steps, four lesser-angled flights of fifteen steps he trod before he reached its top. Guarding the outer edge was only a thick rope of twisted gold supported by pillars five feet apart.

So high was it that when Kenton neared its end and looked down he saw Bel’s house only as a place of golden mists – as though he looked from some high mountain ledge upon a valley whose cloudy coverlet had just been touched by rays of morning sun.

The clinging stairway’s last step was a slab some ten feet long and six wide. Upon it a doorway opened – a narrow arched portal barely wide enough for two men to pass within it side by side. The doorway looked out, over the little platform, into the misty space of the inner temple.

The hidden chamber into which it led rested upon the head of the gigantic buttress.

One man might hold that stair end against hundreds. The doorway was closed by a single fold of golden curtains as heavy and metallic as those which had covered the portal of the Moon God’s Silver House. Involuntarily he shrank back from parting them – remembering what the parting of those argent hangings had revealed to him.

He mastered that fear; drew a corner of them aside.

He looked into a quadrangular chamber, perhaps thirty feet square, filled with the dancing peacock plumes of the lightnings. He knew it for his goal – Bel’s place of pleasance where Kenton’s love waited, fettered by dream.

He glimpsed the priest crouched against the further wall, rapt upon a white veiled woman standing, arms stretched wide, beside a deep window close to the chamber’s right hand corner. The window was closed by one wide, clear crystal pane on which the rain beat and the wind lashed. With thousands of brushes dipped in little irised flame the lightnings limned the loves of Bel broidered on hangings on the walls.

In the chamber were a table and two stools of gold; a massive, ivoried wooded couch. Beside the couch was a wide bellied brazier and a censer shaped like a great hour glass. From the brazier arose a tall yellow flame. Upon the table were small cakes, saffron colored, in plates of yellow amber and golden flagons filled with wine. Around the walls were little lamps and under each lamp a ewer filled with fragrant oil for their filling.

Kenton waited, motionless. Danger was gathering below him like a storm cloud with Klaneth stirring it in wizard’s cauldron. Perforce he waited, knowing that he must fathom this dream of Sharane’s – must measure the fantasy in which she moved, mind asleep, before he could awaken her. The blue priest had so told him.

To him came her voice:

“Who has seen the beatings of his wings? Who has heard the tramplings of his feet like the sound of many chariots setting forth for battle? What woman has looked into the brightness of his eyes?”

There was a searing flash, a clashing of thunder – within the chamber itself it seemed. When his own sight had cleared he saw Sharane, hands over eyes, groping from the window.

And in front of the window stood a shape, looming gigantic against the nickering radiance, and helmed and bucklered all in blazing gold – a god-like shape!

Bel-Merodach himself who had leaped there from his steeds of storm and still streaming with his lightnings!

So Kenton for one awed instant thought – then knew it to be the Priest of Bel in the stolen garments of his god.

The white figure, that was Sharane, slowly drew hands from eyes; as slowly let them fall, eyes upon that shining form. Half she dropped to her knees, then raised herself proudly; she searched the partly hidden face with her wide, green dreaming eyes.

“Bel!” she whispered, and again: “Lord Bel!”

The priest spoke: “O beautiful one – for whom await you?”

She answered: “For whom but thee, Lord of the Lightnings!”

“But why await you – me?” the priest asked, nor took step toward her. Kenton, poised to leap and strike, drew back at the question. What was in the mind of the Priest of Bel that he thus temporized?

Sharane spoke, perplexed, half-shamed:

“This is thy house, Bel. Should there not be a woman here to await thee? I – I am a king’s daughter. And I have long awaited thee!”

The priest said: “You are fair!” His eyes burned upon her – “Yes – many men must have found you fair. Yet I – am a god!”

“I was fairest among the princesses of Babylon. Who but the fairest should wait for thee in thy house? I am fairest of all—” So Sharane, all tranced passion.

Again the priest spoke:

“Princess, how has it been with those men who thought you fair? Say – did not your beauty slay them like swift, sweet poison?”

“Have I thought of men?” she asked, tremulously.

He answered, sternly. “Yet many men must have thought of you – king’s daughter. And poison, be it swift and sweet, must still bear pain. I am – a god! Yet I know that!”

There was a silence; abruptly he asked: “How have you awaited me?”

She said: “I have kept the lamps filled with oil; I have prepared cakes for thee and set out the wine. I have been handmaiden to thee.”

The priest said: “Many women have done all this – for men, king’s daughter – I am a god!”

She murmured: “I am most beautiful. The princes and the kings have desired me. See – O Great One!”

The irised lightnings caressed the silver wonder of her body, hardly hidden in the nets of her red gold hair unbound and fallen free.

The priest leaped from the window. Kenton, mad with jealousy that another should behold that white beauty, darted through the curtains to strike him down. Halfway he stopped short, understanding, even pity for the priest of Bel holding him back.

For the priest’s soul stood forth naked before his inner sight – and that soul was even as his own would have been he knew, had he been priest and the priest been Kenton.

“No!” cried Bel’s priest, and tore the golden helm of his god from his head, hurled sword away, ripped off buckler and cloak—

“No! Not one kiss for Bel! Not one heart beat for Bel!”

“What – shall I pander for Bel? No! It is the man you shall kiss – I! It is a man’s heart that shall beat against yours – mine! I – I! No god shall have you.”

He caught her in his arms, set burning lips to hers.

Kenton was upon him.

He thrust an arm under the priest’s chin; bent back the head until the neck cracked. The priest’s eyes glared up into his; his hands left Sharane and battered up at Kenton’s face; he twisted to break the latter’s grip. Then his body became limp; awe and terror visibly swept away his blind rage. For now the priest’s consciousness had taken in Kenton’s face – saw it as his own!

His own face was looking down upon him and promising him – death!

The god he had defied, betrayed – had struck! Kenton read his thoughts as accurately as though they had been spoken. He shifted grip, half lifted, half swung the priest high above the floor and hurled him against a wall. He struck; crashed down; lay there twitching.

Sharane crouched – veils caught up, held fast to her by rigid hands – on the edge of the ivoried couch. She stared at him, piteously; her wide eyes clung to his, bewildered; deep within her he sensed grapple of awakening will against the webs of dream.

One great throb of love and pity for her pulsed through him; in it no passion; to him at that moment she was no more than child, bewildered, forsaken, piteous.

“Sharane!” he whispered, and took her in his arms. “Sharane – beloved! Beloved – awaken!”

He kissed her on the cold lips, the frightened eyes.

“Kenton!” she murmured. “Kenton!” – and then so low he could barely hear – “Ah yes – I remember – you were lord of me – ages – ages – ago!”

“Wake, Sharane!” cried Kenton, and again his lips met and clung to hers. And now her lips warmed and clung to his!

“Kenton!” she whispered. “Dear lord – of me!”

She drew back, thrust into his arms little fingers that clutched like ten slow closing fingers of steel; in her eyes he saw the dream breaking as break the last storm clouds before the sun; in her eyes the dream lightened and darkened; lightened – became but cloudy, racing wisps.

“Beloved!” cried Sharane, and all awake, freed from all dream, threw arms around his neck, pressed lips all alive to his: “Beloved one! Kenton!”

“Sharane! Sharane!” he whispered, the veils of her hair covering him as she drew his face to her cheeks, her throat, her breast.

“Oh, where have you been, Kenton?” she sobbed. “What have they done to me? And where is the ship – and where have they taken me? Yet – what does it matter since you are with me!”

“Sharane! Sharane! Beloved!” was all he could say, over and over again, his mouth on hers.

Hands gripped his throat, strong hands, shutting off his breath. Choking, he glared into the mad eyes of the Priest of Bel. Broken, Kenton had thought him – and broken he had not been!

He threw right leg behind the priest’s; hurled himself back against the priest with all his strength. The priest fell, dragging Kenton with him. His hands relaxed just enough to let Kenton thrust one of his own between the strangling fingers and his throat. Like a snake the priest slid from under him, threw him aside, sprang to his feet. Quick as he, Kenton leaped up. Before he could draw sword the Priest of Bel was upon him again, one arm around him prisoning his right arm, the other with the elbow fending off Kenton’s left arm and tearing at his throat.

Far below, through the drumming of the blood in his ears, Kenton heard the faint throb of another drum, awakening, summoning, menacing – as though it had been a beat of the ziggurat’s own heart, alarmed and angry!

And far below Gigi, swinging with long apelike arms from the grapnel he had cast over the outer stairway’s edge, hears it, too; swarms with frantic speed up the rope, and with the same tremendous speed follow him first Zubran and close behind him the Viking.

“Alarm!” mutters Sigurd, and draws them under the protection of the skirting wall that they may hear him. “Pray Thor that the sentinels have not heard! Swift now!”

Hugging the wall, the three climb up and around the silver terrace of Sin, the Moon God. The lightnings have almost ceased, but the rain sweeps down in stinging sheets and the winds roar. The stairway is a rushing torrent half knee deep. Blackness of the great storms shrouds them.

Breasting wind and rain, stemming the torrent, they climb – the three.

About Bel’s high bower reeled Kenton and the priest, locked tight in each other’s arms, each struggling to break the other’s hold. Around them circled Sharane, the priest’s stolen sword in hand, panting, seeking opening to strike; finding none, so close were the two locked, so swiftly did back of priest, back of lover swirl before her.

“Shalamu! Shalamu!” the dancer of Bel stood at the golden curtains – whipped up through the terrors of the secret shrines by love, remorse, despair! white-faced, trembling, she clung to those curtains.

“Shalamu!” shrilled the dancer. “They come for you! The Priest of Nergal leads.”

The priest’s back was toward her, Kenton facing her. The priest’s head was bent forward, straining to sink teeth in his neck, tear out the arteries; deaf; blind to all but the lust to kill, his ears were closed to Narada.

And Narada, seeing Kenton’s face in the fitful light of the brazier, thought it that of the man she loved.

Before Sharane could move she had sped across the room.

She drove her dagger to the hilt in the back of the Priest of Bel!

Huddled for shelter in an alcove cut for them in the ziggurat’s wall, the sentinels of the silver zone feel arms thrust out of the storm. Two fall with necks snapped by Gigi’s talons, two fall under swift thrusts of Sigurd’s sword, two drop beneath the scimitar of the Persian, in that niche now lie only six dead men.

“Swift! Swift!” Sigurd leads the way past the silver zone. They round the orange zone of Shamash the Sun God.

Three deaths reach out of the void, and the sentinels of the orange zone lie dead behind the hurrying feet of the three.

They sense a deeper darkness at their left – the black walls of the zone of Nergal, God of the Dead—

“Swift! Swift!”

The Priest of Bel slid from Kenton’s opening arms; he dropped to his knees; he fell backward, dying eyes staring into those of the dancer.

“Narada!” he gasped, through bloody froth, “Narada – you—” The froth turned to a red stream.

The Priest of Bel was dead.

One look the dancer gave him, gave Kenton, and knew—

“Shalamu!” she wailed – and wailing flew at Kenton, dagger poised to strike. Before he could draw sword, before he could raise hands to beat her off, even before he could fall back, she was upon him. Down swept the blade, straight for his heart. He felt the bite of its point—

The point swerved, ripped down through the skin over his ribs. In that same instant Sharane had sprung, had caught the dancer’s hand, had wrested the dagger from it and driven it deep into Narada’s breast.

Like a young tree at the ax’s last blow the dancer stood for a heartbeat, shuddering, then down she dropped, prone upon the priest. She moaned and with the last flare of life flung arms around his head and laid lips to his.

Dead lips now on lips of the dead!

They stared at each other – Sharane with red blade in hand, Kenton with red rune on chest written by that blade – they stared down at the Priest of Bel and at Bel’s dancer; there was pity in Kenton’s eyes; there was no pity in Sharane’s.

“She would have killed you!” she whispered, and again;

“She would have killed you!”

A blinding flash filled the chamber: fast on its heels chaotic shatterings. The lightnings had begun afresh. Kenton ran to the doorway; parted, the curtains: listened. Below him the House of Bel lay tranquil in its misty aureate glow. He heard nothing – and yet; had there been sound could he have heard it in the tumult of the thunderings He saw nothing, heard nothing – and yet—

He sensed that danger was close; stealing up to them: perhaps even now creeping up the zigzags of those steps whose base was hidden. Torment and death for Sharane and for him – creeping, stealing, ever closer.

He ran back to the window. Gigi – Sigurd – Zubran! Where were they? Had they failed to make the outer stairway? Or were they marching up to him, cutting their way through the sentries? Were close?

Could they not meet them – Sharane and he?

The window was deep. Three feet of masonry stretched between the inner sill and the yard-wide, single pane that closed it. He drew himself in; saw that the pane was thick, transparent crystal held by a circle of metal, kept shut by levers thrust into niches within the casement of stone. One by one he lifted the levers. The window flew open; he was half pushed, half washed back into the chamber by the wind and rain volleying through. He battled forward against them; looked down over the outer sill—

The steps of the great stairway were full forty feet below him!

Between window and steps fell an almost perpendicular wall, streaming with storm, impossible to descend, equally as impossible to be scaled.

He peered on each side and above him.

The Bower of Bel was a huge cube set on the top of the conical temple. The window through which he peered was close to the edge of a side of this cube. Not more than a yard from his right hand was a corner of that cube; for twenty feet to his left its black wall stretched; its top was twenty feet above him.

He felt Sharane beside him; knew that she was trying to tell him something. Could not hear her in the shrieking of the tempest.

Set within the breast of a lightning flare the sentinels of Nergal see three silhouettes of doom spring out of the blackness. Swords bite among them. One shrieks and tries to flee. His cry is torn to tatters by the roaring gale; he is caught by long arms, long talons snap his neck; he goes whirling with the wind over the stairway’s wall.

And now the red zone’s sentries are dead within their niche.

And now the three pass by the blue zone of Nabu, the God of Wisdom and find no guards to challenge them; nor are there sentries before Ishtar’s white house, and none outside the golden zone of Bel. And here the curving stairway abruptly ends! Now they take counsel there, the three, scanning the smooth masonry rising above them without break. A wail that not even the tempest can still shudders past them – the heartbroken wailing of Bel’s dancer as she hurls herself on Kenton.

“That cry came from there!” Thus Sigurd, pointing outward where the window of Bel’s bower, hidden to them, faces the lightnings. And now they see that the wall of the great stairway merges into the side of the topping structure close to its corner. But the wall’s slope is such that none may stand upon it to peer round that comer; nor can one standing on the highest step see round that corner’s edge. “Use for your long arms, Gigi,” grunts the Viking:

“Stand close as you can to stair wall end. Here! Grip me by knees and thrust me outward. My back is strong and I can twist round that corner.”

Gigi takes him by the knees, lifts him; throws one muscle-gnarled dwarf leg over the wall for balance; thrusts Sigurd out with mighty arms.

And Sigurd, held against the side by the wind like a leaf, looks straight into the face of Kenton little more than a foot from him!

“Wait there!” howls the Viking, and signals Gigi with kick of foot to draw him back.

“The Wolf!” he tells them. “There – in a window so close he can draw me through to him! Lift me again, Gigi. When I kick – let me go! Then let Zubran follow by the same road. Stay you here, Gigi – for without you to draw us back there will be no return. Stay where you are with arms outstretched, ready to bear in to you whatever you touch. Quick now!”

Again he is swung outward; his wrists are caught in Kenton’s grip. Gigi loosens him. For an instant he swings in space and then is drawn up to the sill and over.

“Zubran comes!” he shouts to Kenton and runs to the doorway where Sharane stands, sword in hand.

And now the Persian, held by Gigi’s long arms, swings round the bower’s edge, is caught by Kenton; stands beside him.

Fanned by the gale rushing through the open window the brazier flamed like a torch: the heavy golden curtains were bellying; the little lights along the wall all blown out. The Persian leaned back, found the levers and snapped enough of them to hold the window shut. He gave Kenton’s hand one swift clasp; looked curiously at the bodies of priest and dancer.

“Gigi!” cried Kenton. “Is he safe there? Did none follow you?”

“None,” answered the Persian, grimly. “Or if they did – their hands are too shadowy to hold swords, Wolf. Gigi is safe enough. He waits to swing us to him as we crawl from the window – all except one of us,” he added, under his breath.

Kenton, thoughts on Gigi, the way to freedom, did nor hear that last odd phrase. He leaped to the door on one side of which stood watchful Sharane, on the other tense Sigurd. He drew her to him in fierce caress; loosed her and peered through the curtains. Far below him were dull gleamings, reflection from armored caps and coats of mail, glints of swords. A quarter of the way up the angled stair that led from Bel’s House to his Bower they were – soldiers, moving slowly, cautiously, silently; creeping to surprise, as they thought, Bel’s priest in dreaming Sharane’s arms!

There was time, minutes still, for him to put in action the thought swift-born within his brain. He set the golden helm of Bel on his head, fastened buckler, threw the scarlet threaded mantle, over his shoulders.

“Sigurd!” he whispered – “Zubran! Those who come must believe that here are only Sharane and – that man who lies there. Else before we could pass the middle terrace they will have given the alarm, soldiers will be pouring up the outer stairway and – we are done! Therefore when those below are close upon the door Sharane and I will leap out on them with swords. They will not try to slay us – only capture us. They will be confused – fall back. Then take Sharane swiftly and pass her out to Gigi. We will follow—”

“The first part of the plan is good, Wolf,” interrupted the Persian, smoothly. “But not the last. Nay – one must remain here until the others are safely away from the temple. Else when they had entered here, quickly will the black priest’s wit tell him what has happened. And there will be a ring around the place through which a regiment could not break. Nay – one must remain; stay behind for – a time.”

“I will stay,” said Kenton.

“Beloved!” whispered Sharane. “You go with me – or I go not at all!”

“Sharane—” began Kenton.

“Dear lord of mine—” she stayed him, serenely. “Do you think that ever again I will let you go from me – be parted from you? Never! In life or death – never!”

“Nay, Wolf – I stay,” said the Persian. “Sharane will not go without you. So that bars you – since go she must. Gigi cannot well remain – since he cannot get here to remain. That you will admit? Good! And Sigurd must go to show us the road back, since none but him knows it. Who is left? Zubran! The gods have spoken. Their argument is unanswerable.”

“But how will you get away? How find us?” groaned Kenton. “You say yourself that without Gigi’s help you cannot swing from the window!”

“No,” answered Zubran. “But I can make me a rope out of these bed coverings and the hangings. I can slip down that rope to the steps I glimpsed beneath me. And one may escape where five could not. I remember the road through the city and that road we took when we came out of the trees. Wait you there for me.”

“They are very close, Kenton!” called Sharane softly. Kenton ran to the doorway. A dozen steps below crept the soldiers, a score of them, treading noiselessly two by two, small shields ready, swords in hands; behind them a little knot of priests, yellow-robed and black-robed and among the black robes – Klaneth.

Crouched against the wall at Sharane’s right was Sigurd, hidden but set for swift guarding of her. The Persian dropped at Kenton’s left, pressed close to the wall where those who came forward might not see him.

“Cover the brazier,” whispered Kenton. “Put it out. Best have no light behind us.”

The Persian took it, but he did not touch the cover that would have killed the fires within. Instead, he shook it, covered the flame with embers, set it in a corner where the faint glow of the coals could not be seen.

The feet of the first pair of soldiers were almost on the top step, their hands reached out to draw aside the coverings of the narrow door.

“Now!” breathed Kenton to Sharane. He tore the curtains down. They stood, she in her white robes of priestess, he in the golden panoply of the god, confronting the soldiers. And they, paralyzed by that unexpected apparition, gaped at the twain.

Before they could recover from surprise Sharane’s blade flashed, Kenton’s sword struck like bolt of thin blue lightning. Down went the two leaders. Ere the man he had slain could fall, Kenton had snatched the shield from his arm, passed it to Sharane; slashed down again at the warriors behind.

“For Ishtar!” he heard Sharane cry – and saw her sword bite deep.

“The woman! The priest! Take them!” came the roar of Klaneth.

Down bent Kenton, raised a fallen soldier in his arms and hurled him straight into the pack. The body flailed them – as though alive! Down they went before it – rolling, cursing; down the flight they fell, soldiers and priests, Some there were who crashed into the slender railing, tore gaps in it, dropped and plunged like plummets through the mists to be broken on the floor of Bel’s House so far below.

Back Kenton leaped; caught Sharane in his arms, tossed her to Sigurd.

“To the window!” he bade. “Give her to Gigi!”

He darted before them; opened the pane. Far away now the lightnings glimmered; blackness had given way to darkest twilight; the rain still hissed in sheets driven by the howling wind. In that dark twilight he saw the dripping arms of Gigi stretched out round the Bower’s corner. He dropped back. The Viking slid past him, Sharane in his grip. For an instant she hung in air; she was caught by Gigi. She was drawn from sight.

There was a shouting from the inner stairway. The soldiers had rallied; were rushing up. Kenton saw Sigurd and the Persian lifting the heavy couch, throwing off its coverings, tilting it. They rocked it to the doorway, shoved it through, sent it crashing down the steps. There was another shouting, cries of agony, groanings. The bed had swept the men before it as a well hurled ball does the wooden pins. It had swept and crushed them – had swung across the stairway at turn of the highest lesser-angled ledge and had jammed there against the golden-roped rail – a barricade.

“Go Sigurd,” cried Kenton. “Wait for us by the woods. I fight here with Zubran.”

The Persian looked at him, a light of affection such as Kenton had never before seen there softening the agate eyes. He nodded to Sigurd.

As though it had been a signal prearranged, the Viking’s arms were instantly around Kenton. Strong as he had grown, Kenton could not break their grip. And Zubran whisked the golden helm of Bel from his head and set it on his own; tore loose the golden buckler, dropped his own coat of mail and fastened it in its place; took the scarlet-threaded mantle of the god and wrapped it half around his mouth, hiding his beard.

Then Kenton was carried like a struggling child to the window; was thrust out of it; was caught by Gigi and dropped beside the weeping Sharane.

The Viking turned and folded the Persian in his arms.

“No waiting, Northman! No sentiment now!” Zubran snapped, breaking away. “There can be no escape for me – you know that, Sigurd. The rope? Words – to satisfy the Wolf! I love him. The rope? Why, they would slide down it behind me like snakes. Am I a trembling hare to lead the hounds to the hiding places of my kind? Not I! Now go, Sigurd – and when you have gotten clear of the city tell them. And make for the ship as quickly as you can.”

Said the Viking, solemn: “Shield maidens are close! Odin takes the hero, no matter what his race! You sup with Odin All-Father in Valhalla soon, Persian!”

“May he have dishes that I have never tasted,” jested the Persian. “Out of the window, Norseman!”

And Zubran holding his knees, the Viking crawled out, and was caught by Gigi.

Then down the terraces, Sigurd leading, Sharane covered by Gigi’s great cloak, Kenton cursing still, flew the four of them.

— XXVI —

THE PASSING OF ZUBRAN

The Persian did not close the window after them. He let the wind stream through. He swaggered back through Bel’s Bower.

“By all the Daevas!” swore Zubran, “never have I known such feeling of freedom as now! Lo – I am all alone – the last man in the world! None can help me, none can counsel me, none can weary me! Life is simple at last – all there is to it is for me to slay until I am slain. By Ormuzd – how my spirit stands on tiptoe—”

He peered around the doorway.

“Never has that couch given man such trouble to mount!” he chuckled as he watched the soldiers below working to clear away the barrier.

Turning, he piled in the middle of Bel’s Bower the silken coverings of the bed. He ripped down the wall hangings and threw them on the heap. One by one he took the lamps and emptied them on the pyre; the oil in the ewers beneath them he poured upon it.

“That old world of mine,” mused the Persian as he worked, “how it wearied me! And this world has wearied me – by the Flame of Sacrifice, but it has! And I am sure that new world of the Wolf’s would weary me most of all. I am done with the three of them.”

He picked up the body of the Priest of Bel, carried it to the window.

“It will puzzle Klaneth more to find you outside than within,” he laughed, and slid the body over the sill.

He stood over the dancer.

“So beautiful!” whispered Zubran, and touched her lips, her breasts. “I wonder how you died – and why. It must have been amusing – that! I had no time to ask the Wolf. Well – you shall sleep with me, dancer. And perhaps when we awaken – if we do – you shall tell me.”

He stretched Narada out upon the oil-soaked pile. He took the smoking brazier and placed it close beside her…

There was a roaring from below; a trampling of feet on the stairway. Up streamed the soldiers, stronger now by scores. An instant Zubran showed himself at the doorway, Bel’s golden mantle twisted round his neck, half hiding his face.

“The priest! The priest!” they cried – and Klaneth’s voice bellowed over all—

“The priest! Slay him!”

The Persian stepped back to the cover of the wall, smiling. He picked up the shield Sharane had dropped.

Through the narrow doorway a soldier leaped, a second on his heels.

The scimitar hissed twice, swift as swiftest snake. The two fell under the feet of those pressing from behind, tripping them, confusing them.

And now up and down, thrusting, ripping, slashing, danced Zubran’s blade until its red sweat dyed his arm from hand to shoulder. In front of him grew a barricade of the dead.

Two by two only could they set foot upon the Bower’s threshold – and two by two steadily they fell, blocking that threshold from side to side with a steadily rising wall of bodies. At last their swords glinted toward him no more; he heard the forward ranks cry out behind the barrier; leaping upon the slain he saw them turn and press back those who, marching upward, tried to sweep them on.

The Persian flexed the weary muscles of his arm; laughed as he heard the voice of Klaneth:

“There is but one man there! Kill him – and bring me the woman. Ten times her weight in gold for him who takes her!”

They mustered; they rushed up the stairway like a racing snake; they clambered over the wall of the dead. The red drip of Zubran’s scimitar became a running rivulet—

An agony bit deep into his side, above the groin. A fallen swordsman had raised himself, thrust up his blade.

The Persian knew the wound was mortal!

He cut down at the grinning face, leaped again upon the dead, cleared the doorway with storm of strokes. He thrust his shoulder against the wall of bodies, threw them out. They spewed upon the steps, rolled down. They fell upon the climbing men, tripped them; pitched them off the rail-less edge of the stairway; sent them hurtling down through the mists, clutching at the air.

For twenty steps the stairway was clear!

An arrow whistled.

It cut through the twisted mantle around Zubran’s neck; pierced him where helm and gorget met. He drank the salt blood pouring down his throat.

The Persian staggered to the silken pile on which lay Narada. He caught a leg of the brazier and overturned its coals upon the oil-soaked cloths.

Thin flames arose. The blast from the opened window caught them and turned them into roaring fans of fire.

Through them Zubran crept; stretched himself out beside the body of the dancer; twisted, and gathered her in his arms.

“A clean death,” he whispered. “At the last… like all men… I return to the… gods of my fathers. A clean death! Take me – O Fire Immortal!”

A flame shot up beside him. It hovered, then bent.

The tip of the flame broadened.

It became a cup of fire filled with wine of flames!

Into that cup the Persian dipped his lips; he drank of its wine of fire; he breathed its incense.

His head fell back, unmarred; the dead face smiling. His head dropped upon Narada’s breasts.

The flames made a canopy over them; the flames tented them.

— XXVII —

HOW THEY FARED
BACK TO THE SHIP

Now the four for whose freedom the Persian had died were far away. Safely they had passed the terraces; the dead sentries lay as they had fallen. But as they went the four heard a humming begin inside the ziggurat like that of a disturbed and colossal hive, heard the great drum resume its throbbing and sped faster under cover of the wall of stone to where the grapnel of Gigi hung. One by one they slipped down its rope and into the sheltering trees. The tempest scourged them – but it shielded them. None was on the wide street to challenge their going. Emakhtila lay within its painted houses hiding from the storm.

When the cup of flame had dipped to the Persian’s lip they were well along the other way upon which opened the hidden path back to the ship.

When the soldiers had at last mustered courage to swarm the stairs once more, and with the black priest on their heels had poured within the silent Bower, the four were far beyond the clustered houses, stumbling through the deep mud of the farmside, the Viking at lead, Kenton guarding the rear – and watching, ever watching, for Zubran.

And back in that chamber where Zubran’s ashes lay mixed with the dancer’s, the black priest stood, mazed and with something of fear touching his wicked heart – until his wandering gaze caught gleam of the butterflies in Narada’s veils that had slipped from her when the Persian had lifted her, caught, too, the trail of blood that led to the open window. Staring out that window the black priest saw in the livid dusk the crumpled body of Bel’s priest – dead, white face raised to his own, forty feet below.

The priest! Then whose were the charred bodies on the pyre? Who had been the man fighting in golden helm and buckler, face hidden in the god’s mantle? So swift had been the sword play, so much had that man been hidden by the soldiers, so much by cover of the wall, that Klaneth watching from below had caught few glimpses of him; had taken it for granted that he was Bel’s priest.

Back ran the black priest; kicked savagely at the ashes of the pyre and what still lay among them.

Something clanged upon the floor – a broken scimitar! He knew that hilt – Zubran’s, the Persian!

Something glittered at his feet – a buckle, gems undulled by their bath of fire! He knew that, too – the buckle of Narada’s girdle!

Why then – these blackened forms were the Persian – the dancer!

Sharane had been freed!

The black priest stood rigid, face so dreadful that the soldiers shrank back from him, threw themselves against the walls, out of his way.

Then Klaneth plunged howling out of Bel’s Bower, down the angled stairway, through the secret shrines, on and on until he reached that cell where he had left Kenton with the six archers. He threw open the door, saw archers and officer deep in sleep and Kenton – gone!

And shrieking curses, staggered out of the cell, roaring for men to go forth to search the city for the temple drab and the slave; offering all he owned for them – all, all! If only they brought their pair back to him alive!

Alive!

By now the four had left the road and had halted in that wood where the hidden path began and where the Persian, in his craft, had bade them wait for him. And here Sigurd told them of Zubran’s sacrifice and why that sacrifice had been necessary. And Sharane wept and Kenton’s throat ached with sorrow and Gigi’s beady black eyes grew soft and his tears ran down the furrows of his wrinkles.

“What’s done – is done,” said Sigurd. “He sups, by now, with Odin and the heroes!”

Brusquely he shouldered by them and took the way.

On they went and on. The rain drenched them, the wind beat them. When storm lightened they went swiftly; when it darkened so that the Viking could no longer see the trail, they halted. On and on – beating back to the ship.

Now Sharane faltered and fell, nor could she rise again; and the three, clustering round her, saw that her thin sandals were in rags and that her slim feet were bare and bleeding and that for long each step must have been an agony. So Kenton took her in his arms and carried her, and when he tired Gigi took her; and Gigi was untiring.

And at last they came to where the ship lay hid. They hailed her and found the warrior maids on watch. To them they gave Sharane and they carried their mistress into her cabin and ministered to her.

Now arose discussion as to whether they should stay hid until the tempest had abated. At last they decided that they would not; that it was better to push out to sea than stay so close to Emakhtila and Nergal’s haunted place. So the chains were unshackled from the trees, the ship drawn out of shelter, her bow warped round and pointed to harbor’s mouth.

Then up came the hook; down dipped the oars. Slowly the ship gathered speed. She swung out round the point of rocks and, Sigurd at the steering oar, shot into the eye of the wind, breasted the roaring combers and leaped like a racer out into the open ocean,

Kenton, utterly spent, dropped where he stood. To him came Gigi, lifted and carried him into the black cabin.

Long squatted Gigi beside him, wide awake, though weary as he was, peering here and there with bright eyes; listening, watchful. For it seemed to Gigi that the black cabin was not as it had been when they had left it; it seemed to Gigi that he heard a whispering, ghosts of whispers, coming and going.

And now Kenton moaned and muttered in his deep sleep, gasped as though hands sought his throat. Gigi, pressing paw on Kenton’s heart, stilled him.

But after a time the watchful eyes of Gigi dulled, their lids dropped, his head nodded.

In the empty niche where the idol of Nergal had stood above the bloodstone slab of worship a darkness gathered, a cloudy shape of curdled shadows.

The shape darkened. Within it began to form the semblance of a face, a face that brooded upon the sleeping pair, hate filled, menacing—

Again Kenton groaned and fought for breath against nightmare terror. And the drummer threshed out long arms, leaped to his feet, glared about him—

Swiftly as it had come, before Gigi’s sleep-heavy eyes could open, the shadowy face had vanished – the niche was empty.

— XXVIII —

THE VISION OF KENTON

When Kenton awakened, it was the Viking and not Gigi who lay beside him, stripped and snoring. He must have slept long, for the drenched garments the Ninevite had taken off him were dry. He put on clout and tunic, slipped feet in sandals, threw over his shoulders a short cloak and softly opened the door. Blackness and dark twilight had given way to a pallid dusk that turned the sea a sullen gray. The rain had ceased, but all the world of the ship vibrated to the steady roar of a mighty wind pouring over it.

Before that wind the ship was flying, riding like a gull on the crests of giant waves; slipping back, as the swells passed, through smoothly onrushing floors of water like liquid slate; rising to fly again upon the crest of the next racing wave.

Kenton struggled up to the steersman’s place, the spindrift stinging his face like sleet. To one of the rudder oars clung Gigi, at the other were two slaves from the rowers’ pit. The Ninevite grinned at him; pointed to the compass. He looked and saw that the needle which held constant to Emakhtila pointed straight astern.

“Far behind us now is that den!” shouted Gigi.

“Go below!” cried Kenton in a pointed ear, and would have taken the oar from him. But Gigi only laughed, shook his head and pointed toward the cabin of Sharane.

“That is your course,” he roared. “Steer it!”

And buffeting the gale Kenton came to the door of the rosy cabin; opened it. Sharane lay asleep, cheek cradled in one slim hand, tresses covering her like a silken net of red gold. Two maids, watchful, crouched at her bedside.

As though he had called to her, she opened sleepy eyes – sleepy eyes that as she looked at him grew sweetly languorous.

“My own dear lord!” whispered Sharane.

She sat up, motioned the girls to go. And when they had gone she held out white arms to him. His own arms were around her. Like a homing bird she nestled in them; raised red lips to his.

“Dear lord of me!” whispered Sharane.

He heard no more the roaring wind – heard nothing but the whisperings, the sighings of Sharane; forgot all worlds save that which lay within Sharane’s tender arms.

Long they flew on the tempest’s wings. Twice Kenton took Gigi’s place at the rudder oars, twice the Viking relieved him before the great wind died and they sailed once more on dimpling, sparkling turquoise sea,

Then for those upon the ship a hunted life began – and a haunted one.

Far, far behind them must lie Emakhtila by now, and yet on all the four rested clear certainty of pursuit. No fear, no terror – but knowledge that the ship was a hunted thing; knowledge that they could out-wit, out-sail the fleet they knew must be combing these strange seas until they found a safe and secret harbor, there could be but one end for them. Nor did one of them believe, deep in his heart, that there was such sanctuary,

Yet they were happy. Full tide of life beat round Kenton and Sharane. They took their fill of Jove. And Sigurd sang old Sagas, and a new one he had made of Zubran the Persian, while he and Gigi beat out huge shields and arrows for the bows. The shields they set around the bulwarks at the ship’s bow and pierced them with rifts through which arrows could be winged. Two they fastened on each side of the stern to guard helmsman.

And Sigurd would chant of battle to come, and shield maidens who would hover over the ship ready to bear the soul of Sigurd, Trygg’s son, to his seat in Valhalla where Zubran awaited him. He sang of place for Kenton there, and Gigi too – but not when Sharane was in earshot, since in Valhalla was no place for women.

Hunted and – haunted!

Within the black cabin the shadows thickened and faded, grew stronger, passed and returned. Something of the dark Lord of the Dead was there, had retaken seizing of his deck. Nor Gigi nor the Viking cared to sleep in the black cabin now; they sought the open deck or the cabin of the warrior maids.

And the slaves murmured of shadows that flitted over the black deck and clustered at the rail and stared down upon them!

Once, while Sigurd drowsed over the tiller bar, he awakened to find that unaware to all the course of the ship had changed, that the greater needle of the compass pointed straight over the bow to – Emakhtila; that the ship was moving under the oars back to Sorcerers’ Isle!

Thereafter they steered two by two – Kenton and Sharane, Gigi and the Viking.

Nor was there power within Sharane to banish the shadows.

One isle they made and replenished food and water. There was good harbor there, a hidden cover and, beyond, a great forest beckoned them. Here they stopped for a time; talked of drawing the ship up shore, concealing her; then finding place within the woods to build fort; meet there whatever attack might come.

The Ship of Ishtar drew them back to her.

Restless were they all, uneasy on the land, each afraid in secret heart that the other three would make up minds to stay; and gay as children they were when the ship drove out again and dipped her bow to the crested waves while the clean sea wind shouted to them and the isle dropped behind.

“A prison,” laughed Kenton.

“No life, that!” growled Sigurd. “Hiding in a burrow till the dogs come to dig us out! Now we can see what comes.”

They met a long ship, a unireme like their own, but of twenty oars. It was a merchant carrier and heavily laden, and it would have fled from them. But the Viking cried that she must not escape to carry tidings to Emakhtila. So they pursued and rammed and sunk her with the chained slaves wailing at the oars – Kenton and Gigi and Sigurd ruthlessly, Sharane white-faced and weeping.

They met another – a light vessel no larger than the ship, but this time a war boat, a hunter. They feigned to flee and it gave chase. And when it was close to them the Viking swerved and fell astern; then drove the Ship of Ishtar swiftly against the other’s side, shearing the oars. Those on that vessel fought bravely; yet, hampered by the black priest’s command to take but not slay, they were no match for Gigi’s great mace, the Viking’s blade and Kenton’s sword of blue lightnings. They fell before them and the arrow storm from Sharane and her maids. But they took toll before they were ended. One of the warrior maids died with an arrow through her heart and both Gigi and Sigurd had their wounds.

In this craft they found store of metal for the Viking’s forge. Better still, balls of tow and oils to soak them in and flint to light them, strong shafts to carry the balls when blazing and oddly shaped crossbows to hurl the shafts with their heads of fire. All these and the metal they took. Then they sank that vessel with its living and its dead.

On sailed the ship and on; while Sigurd hammered out his long shields and Gigi and Kenton set the crossbows in place by rosy cabin and dark, with tow and oils and flint ready for the firing.

And time passed; nor did the tides of life that flowed strong through Kenton of the ship wane ever; waned not – grew stronger and more strong for him and for Sharane.

Lying beside his sleeping love Kenton awoke – or thought that he awakened – and opening his eyes saw not the cabin but two faces gazing down upon him from some unknown space; vast faces, vague and nebulous. Their shadowy eyes dwelt upon him.

One spoke – and lo, it was the voice that had guided him through the temple’s secret shrines! The voice of Nabu!

“Again Nergal centers his wrath upon the ship, O Ishtar!” it said. “The strife between him and your Sister-Self once more will trouble gods and men, deepening the shadows in myriad worlds. Great Mother – only you may end it!”

“My word went forth” – the other voice was like the wind rippling over thousands of harp strings – “my word went forth; and that Sister-Self of mine whom of old men have called the Wrathful Ishtar – has she not her rights? She has not conquered Nergal. Nor has Nergal conquered her. There has been no settlement such as I decreed. How, then, can my Sister-Self rest when the word I spoke in anger has not yet been resolved? And as long as she contends, so long must Nergal also who, too, is bound by that word.”

“Yet the flames you kindled within the souls of Zarpanit and Alusar, the flames that were the life of those souls – they did not perish,” the still voice whispered. “Did they not escape both your Wrathful Sister and Dark Nergal? And why, Ishtar? Was it not because you willed it so? Did you not hide them? What of that word of yours then?”

“Wise are you, Nabu!” came the voice of Ishtar. “Now let this man whose eyes we have opened see what that my priestess and her lover wreaked of ill when they brought into each other’s arms the Mother of Life and the Lord of Death! Let the man judge whether my anger were just or not!”

“Let the man judge!” echoed the voice of Nabu.

The vast faces faded. Kenton looked out upon depth upon depth, infinity upon infinity of space. Myriads of suns were hived therein and around them spun myriad; upon myriads of worlds. Throughout that limitless space two powers moved; mingled yet ever separate. One was a radiance that fructified, that gave birth and life and joy of life; the other was a darkness that destroyed, that drew ever from the radiance that which it had created; stilling them, hiding them in its blackness. Within the radiance was a shape of ineffable light and Kenton knew that this was the soul of it. In the darkness brooded a deep shadow, and he knew that this was its darker soul.

Before him arose the shapes of a man and a woman; and something whispered to him that the woman’s name was Zarpanit and the man’s Alusar, the priestess of Ishtar and the priest of Nergal. He saw in each of their hearts a wondrous, clear white flame. He saw the two flames waver, bend toward each other. And as they did so, shining threads of light streamed out from the radiance, linking the priestess with its spirit; while from the black core of the darkness threads of shadow ran out and cooled about the priest.

As the bending flames touched suddenly the shining threads and shadow threads were joined – for an instant were merged!

And in that instant all space shuddered, the suns rocked, the worlds reeled and all the rushing tides of life paused!

“Behold the sin!” rippled the voice of harp strings.

“Open his eyes wider!” came the still, cold voice.

And now Kenton beheld a radiant chamber in which sat dread powers, veiled in glories of light – all save one who hid in the darkness. Before them stood the priest and priestess and at the side of the priestess – Sharane!

Again he saw the white flames within the hearts of those two – untroubled, serene, indifferent to gods or angry goddess! Bending toward each other, unquenchable, immutable, indifferent to wrath of gods or their punishments!

That picture wavered, faded. Now upon the floor of that radiant chamber he saw priest and priestess, Sharane and Klaneth and around them the bodies of many women and men. There was a high altar half hidden by a cloud of sparkling azure mist. Within the mist, upon that altar, a wondrous ship was being built by unseen hands.

And ever as that ship grew Kenton saw, far beyond it as though it were its shadow cast into another dimension, another ship growing; a ship that seemed to build itself out of a turquoise sea in a world of silver clouds! Step by step that shadow ship followed the building of the puppet ship upon the altar.

He knew that the shadow was the real – the toy being shaped upon the altar was the symbol.

Knew, too, that symbol and reality were one; things linked by an ancient wisdom; things created by ancient powers, of which the fate and fortune of one must be the fate and fortune of the other.

Duoform! One a puppet and one real! And each the same!

Now the unseen hands within the mists of azure had finished the ship. They reached down and touched, one by one, the bodies of Ishtar’s priestess and Nergal’s priest, Sharane and Klaneth and all who lay around them. And as they touched, those still forms vanished. The unseen hands lifted and placed, one by one, little puppets on the puppet ship.

Upon the decks of the shadow ship on the turquoise sea in the world of silver clouds bodies lay – one by one they appeared there as the toys were set in place upon the toy ship on the altar!

At last there were no more still forms upon the floor of the council chamber of the gods. The ship was made and manned!

A beam shot out from the radiance that veiled Ishtar and touched the ship’s bow. A tendril of darkness uncoiled from the blackness in which brooded the Lord of the Dead and this darkness touched the ship’s stern. That picture wavered and fled,

There appeared another chamber; small, almost a crypt. In it stood a single altar. Over the altar hung a lamp nimbused by an aureole of azure; and the altar was of lapis lazuli and turquoise and studded with sapphires of clearest blue. And Kenton knew that this was some secret shrine of Nabu, Lord of Wisdom. On the altar rested the ship. As Kenton looked upon it, it was borne to him again that this jeweled toy, a gleaming symbol, was linked inseparably with that other; ship sailing in another space, another dimension; sailing on strange seas in an unknown world—

The ship on which he sailed!

And that as the toy fared, so fared the Ship of Ishtar; and as the Ship of Ishtar fared, so fared the toy; each threatened when one was threatened; sharing each the other’s fate.

That picture faded. He looked upon a walled city out of which towered a high temple, a terraced temple, a ziggurat. A host besieged city; its walls were covered with its defenders. He knew that the city was ancient Uruk and the high temple that in which the ships had been built. And as he looked, the besiegers broke through the walls; overwhelmed the defenders. He had a glimpse of red carnage – that picture fled.

Again he saw the crypt of Nabu. There were two priests there now. The ship rested upon the floor of a lattice of silvery metal. Over the altar hovered a little shining blue cloud. It came to him that the two priests were obeying a voice in that cloud; saving the ship and those who sailed on it from the invaders. They poured over it from huge basins a fine mortar that was like powder of ivory flecked with dust of pearls. It covered and hid the toy. Where the puppet ship had been was now a block of stone. The cloud vanished. Other priests entered; dragged the block out, through corridors and into the court of the temple. There they left it.

Into the court swarmed the victors, looting and slaying. But ever, unheeding, they passed the rough block by.

Now he looked upon another walled city, great and beautiful. He knew it for Babylon in the full moon of its power. Another ziggurat took its place. That melted and Kenton looked upon another secret shrine of Nabu. The block lay within it.

Flickered thereafter before him fleeting pictures of battles and of triumphs; pageant and disasters; quick, broken scenes of temple and city lost and won and lost once more; destroyed only to be built again in greater grandeur—

Then fallen – abandoned by the gods. Then crumbling – abandoned by man; the desert creeping on it; at the last covering it.

Then – forgotten!

There came a whirlpool of images, gray and indistinct in the swiftness of their passing. They steadied. He saw men working in the sands that were Babylon’s shroud. He recognized among them – Forsyth! He saw the block unearthed; borne away by tall Arabs; saw it crated into a primitive cart drawn by patient little rough-coated ponies; watched it tossing in the hold of a ship that sailed a sea he knew; watched it carried into his own house – He saw himself as he freed the ship! He looked again into the shadowy eyes. “Judge!” sighed the harp strings. “Not yet!” whispered the still voice. Kenton looked again into that immeasurable space wherein he had first seen radiant power and dark. But now he saw within it countless flames like those which had burned in the breasts of Ishtar’s priestess and the Lord of Death’s priest; saw infinity flecked and flaming with them. They burned deep down through the shadows, and by their light up from the darkness came groping multitude upon multitude of other flames that had been shrouded by the darkness. He saw that without those flames the radiance itself would be but a darkness!

He saw the ship as though it floated in that same space. As he gazed a deeper shadow flitted from the soul of the blackness and brooded over it. Instantly something of the soul of the radiance rayed out and met it. They strove, one against the other. The ship was a focus of hatred and of wrath from which, visibly, waves swung out in ever widening circles. As the waves circled outward from the ship the shadow lines that ran from the core of darkness grew darker, thicker, as though they sucked strength from those waves. But under their beat the radiance dulled and the countless flames flickered and swayed, and were troubled.

“Judge!” whispered the cold tones of Nabu. Now Kenton in this dream of his – if dream it was – faced dilemma; hesitated. No trivial matter was it to indict this power – Ishtar, goddess or whatever that power might be in this alien world where, certainly, it was powerful indeed. Besides, had he not prayed to Ishtar and had she not answered his prayer? Yes, but he had prayed to Nabu, too, and Nabu was Lord of Truth—

His thoughts shaped themselves into words of his own tongue, his familiar idioms.

“If I were a god,” he said, simply enough, “and had made things with life, things with lives to live, men and women or whatever they might be, I would not make them imperfect, so that they must, perforce through their imperfections, break my laws. Not if I were all powerful and all wise, as I have gathered gods – and goddesses – are supposed to be. Unless, of course, I had made them only for toys, to play with. And if I found that I had made them imperfect and that therefore they did wrong, I would think that it was I who was responsible for their sinning – since being all powerful and all wise I could have made them perfect but did not. And if I had made them for my toys I surely would not heap upon their heartbreak and misery, pain and sorrow – no punishments, O Ishtar – not if they were toys that could feel these things. For what would they be but puppets dancing through their day as I had fashioned them to do?”

“Of course,” said Kenton naively, and with no ironic intention, “I am no god – and most certainly could not be a goddess – nor until I came into this world have I had any conscious experience with either. Yet, speaking as a man, even if I had punished anyone who had broken my laws I would not let my anger run on and hurt any number of people who had nothing whatever to do with the original cause of my anger. Yet that, if what I have just beheld was true, is what this strife for the ship seems to bring about.

“No,” said Kenton, very earnestly, and quite forgetting the vague faces hovering about him. “I can’t see any justice in the torment of that priest and priestess, and if the struggle for the ship does the damage it appears to, I certainly would stop it if I could. For one thing I would be afraid that the shadow might get too thick sometime and put all the little flames out. And for another – if I had spoken a word in anger that made all that misery I wouldn’t let that word be stronger than myself. I wouldn’t as a man. And if I were a god or goddess – very certainly, indeed, I would not!”

There was a silence; then—

“The man has judged!” whispered the still voice.

“He has judged!” the vast ripple of the harp strings was almost as cold as that other. “I will recall my word! Let the strife end!”

The two faces vanished. Kenton raised his head and saw around him the familiar walls of the rosy cabin. Had it been all a dream? Not all – those scenes he had beheld had been too clear cut, too consecutive, too convincing.

Beside him Sharane stirred, turned his face to hers.

“What are you dreaming, Jonkenton?” she asked. “You were murmuring and muttering – strange words that I could not understand.”

He bent and kissed her.

“I greatly fear, heart of mine, that I have offended that goddess of yours,” he said.

“Oh – Jonkenton – but no! How!” Sharane’s eyes were terrified.

“By telling her the truth,” answered Kenton; then unveiled to Sharane all of his vision.

“I forgot she is – a woman!” he ended.

“Oh – but beloved, she is all women!” cried Sharane.

“Well – that makes it all the worse then!” said Kenton, ruefully.

He leaped up; threw his cloak about him and went out to talk to Gigi.

But Sharane sat thinking, long after he had gone, with troubled eyes; at last walked to the empty shrine; threw herself before it, prostrate; praying.

— XXIX —

HOW THE STRIFE
WAS ENDED

“What began on the ship must end on the ship!” said Gigi, nodding bald head wisely when Kenton had told him also of that vision of the two faces. “Nor do I think we shall have long to wait before we see that end.”

“And after?” asked Kenton.

“Who knows?” Gigi shrugged broad shoulders. “No rest for us. Wolf, while Klaneth lives. Nay – I think I know What this darkening of shadows on black deck means. By those shadows Klaneth watches us. They are the thread by which he follows us. Also my skin is sensitive, and it tells me the black priest is not so far away. When he comes – well, we conquer him or he conquers us, that is all. Also, I do not think that you can count on any help from Ishtar. Remember that in your vision she promised only that the strife of the Wrathful One and the Dark One should end. She made no promises, I gather, as to Sharane or you – or the rest of us.”

“That will be well,” said Kenton cheerfully. “As long as I am given chance to stand fairly, face to face with that swine bred from hell swill Klaneth, I am content.”

“But I think you gathered that she was not mightily pleased with what you had to say to her,” grinned Gigi slyly.

“That is no reason for her punishing Sharane,” answered Kenton, harking back to his old thought.

“How else could she punish you?” asked Gigi, maliciously – then suddenly grew serious, all impishness gone. “Nay, Wolf,” he said and laid paw on Kenton’s shoulder; “there is little chance for us. And yet – if all your vision were true, and the little flames you saw were real – what matters it…

“Only,” said Gigi, wistfully, “when those flames that were you and Sharane journey forth into space and another flame comes to you that once was Gigi of Nineveh – will you let it journey with you?”

“Gigi!” there were tears in Kenton’s eyes. “Where ever we go in this place or any other, no matter what may happen – you go with us as long as you will.”

“Good!” muttered Gigi.

Sigurd shouted at the rudder; he pointed over the ship’s bow. To Sharane’s door they sped and with her through the cabin of the maids and out beneath the sickled prow. Across the horizon ran a far flung line of towers and minarets, turrets and spires and steeples, skyscrapers and mosques; a huge chevaux-de-frise. From where they stood, the outlines of this bristling barrier seemed too regular, too smoothly shaped, to be other than the work of man.

Was it another city – the refuge they had sought? A place where they might stay, safe from Klaneth and his pack until they could sally forth to meet that pack and its master on more equal terms?

Yet if a city – what giants were they who had reared it?

The oars dipped faster; the ship sped; closer came the barrier – It was no city!

Up from the depths of the turquoise sea thrust thousands of rocks. Rocks blue and yellow, rocks striped crimson and vivid malachite; rocks all glowing ochre and rocks steeped in the scarlet of autumn sunsets; a polychrome Venice of a lost people of stone, sculptured by stone Titans. Here a slender minaret arose two hundred feet in air yet hardly more than ten in thickness; here a pyramid as great as Cheops’, its four sides as accurately faced – by thousands, far as eye could reach, the rocks arose in fantasies of multi-colored cone and peak, aiguille and minaret and obelisk, campanile and tower.

Straight up from the depths they lifted, and between them the sea flowed in a maze of channels both narrow and broad; in some of the channels smoothly, in others with swift eddies and whirlpools and racing torrents; and in others the sea lay like placid lakes.

There came another shout from the Viking, urgent, summoning – and with it the clangor of his sword beating upon the shield.

Down upon the ship and little more than a mile away rushed a long line of other ships, a score or more of them both single and double banked – boats of war racing on oars that dipped and rose with swiftness of sword blade stroke. Between them and the Ship of Ishtar drove a lean and black bireme leaping the waves like a wolf.

The pack of Klaneth with the black priest in the lead!

The pack, breaking out of the mists unseen by Sigurd, eyes like the others fast upon that colossal fantasy of stone that seemed to be the end of this strange world!

“In among the rocks!” cried Kenton – “Quick!”

“A trap!” said Sigurd.

“A trap for them as well as us then,” answered Kenton. “At the least, they cannot ring us there with their boats.”

“The only chance!” grunted Gigi.

The slaves bent their backs; through a wide channel between two painted monolithic minarets they flew. Behind them they heard a shouting, a baying as of hungry hounds in sight of a deer.

Now they were within the maze and the rowers must go slowly and the Viking’s rudder-craft was needed indeed, for the currents swung them, gripping at bow and stern, and the sheer rocks menaced. Twisting, turning, on and on they went until the painted decks closed from them sight of the open sea. Yet now, too, Klaneth and his fleet were in the maze. They heard the creak of the oars, the commands of the helmsmen, searching, ferreting them out.

Abruptly as though snapped out, light vanished and darkness fell! Darkness blotted out the channel they were following, blotted out the towering rocks. From the pursuing boats came horn blasts, orders shrill with fear, outcries.

A purplish glow sprang up within the blackness.

“Nergal!” whispered Sharane. “Nergal comes!”

The whole of the black deck was blotted out as though an inky cloud had dropped upon it and out of that cloud leaped Sigurd and ran to where the others stood.

And now from every quarter of the horizon whirled pillars of darkness. Their feet were in the sullen sea, their heads lost in the pall that spread above. Ahead of them drove a charnel odor, the breath of death.

“Nergal in all his might!” shuddered Sharane.

“But Ishtar – Ishtar promised the strife should end!” groaned Kenton.

“But she did not say how it would end!” wailed Sharane. “And, O Beloved – Ishtar comes no more to me – and all my power is gone!”

“Ishtar! Ishtar!” she cried – and caught Kenton in her arms. “Mother – my life for this man’s! My soul for his! Mother Ishtar—!”

The van of the whirling pillars was close; the circle between them and the ship swiftly narrowing. On the echo of Sharane’s cry a blinding light, pearl white and pearl rose flashed down upon them – on Sharane, the three men and the warrior maids crouched white-faced at Sharane’s feet.

High over their heads, thrice the height of the mast, a great globe of moon fire hung poised, effulgent, serene, and brighter, far brighter than a score of moons at full. From its periphery poured rays, enclosing the whole fore part of the ship as in a tent of light; a radiance that ringed them and in whose center they stood as though prisoned in a hollow cone whose top was the moon globe.

Around that radiant tent the pillared darknesses, churned, pressing for entrance; finding none.

Faint at first and far away began a keen-edged shrieking; louder it grew as though from racing hordes fresh loosed from Abaddon. The purple darkness lightened, turned to a lurid violet. It was pricked by countless points of crimson fire.

And now the myriads of fiery points were at the ship; striking like little snakes of fire at globe and sides of radiant tent, shooting at them like arrow heads of fire, thrusting like little lance tips of fire.

There was the whir and rustle of thousands of wings. Around calm globe and cone of light whirled doves of Ishtar in thousands. And as the points of fire struck and stabbed the doves darted to meet them. Like little living shields of shining silver they caught the thrusts of the fiery javelins upon their breasts.

Where were the doves coming from? Cloud upon cloud of them poured from above the moon orb yet, for each whose ashes were whirled away a score rushed in to meet the striking fires, and all the air was palpitant with the tumult of their wings.

The shrieking raised itself a full octave. The inky cloud that had leaped upon the black deck shot up towering, gigantic, into the heavens. The countless points of fire rushed together, coalesced. They became a crimson scimitar of fire that struck down upon shining orb and ship!

Before the first stroke could fall the phalanxes of the doves had wheeled; had formed themselves into a shield mighty enough to have been held and wielded by Ishtar’s own arm!

And ever as the scimitar of fire slashed and thrust at the radiant globe and ship, the shield of the doves met it. Fiery point and fiery edge struck and blackened the living argent – but could not pierce. And ever the seared wounds of that shield shimmered moon white, as soft, untouched silver breasts darted in and healed them.

In mid-sweep it met another sword of brilliant light – a sword forged all of those white flames he had seen in his vision and that were the life of that radiance that fructified the swarms of worlds!

The scimitar was dimming! No longer was its fire so crimson bright!

The moon orb pulsed; its radiance flamed wide, dazzling, blindingly, hurling back the darknesses. Swiftly as it had come it vanished! With it went the doves!

Kenton saw the gigantic scimitar pause, quiver uncertainly – as though the dread hand that held it had been stilled with sudden doubt – then down it swept once more.

The red scimitar fell shattered!

He heard a voice – the voice of Ishtar—

“I have beaten you, Nergal!”

And Nergal, snarling—

“A trick, Ishtar! Not with you, but with your Sister-Self was my warfare to be!”

And again Ishtar—

“No trick, Nergal! I never said that I would not fight you. Yet this I will grant – though you have lost the ship – I will not take it! The ship is free!”

Then Nergal, grudgingly, snarling still—

“The strife is ended! The ship is free!”

For one beat in time Kenton seemed to see a vast vague face gazing down upon the ship, a face in which were all the tendernesses of all mothers, all loving women beneath the sun – the shadowy eyes dwelt softly on Sharane, softly but enigmatically upon him—

The face was gone!

As when a shutter is dropped before a closed lamp, so the darkness had fallen; and abruptly as when the shutter is lifted so the darkness fled; light took its place.

The ship lay in a wide channel; around it the phantasmagoria of the sea floored city of stone. At port a thicket of obelisks all dull greens and glaring vermilions raised tops on high. Three arrow flights on starboard a pointed monolith arose, pyramidal, its pointed tip hundreds of feet in air.

Around an edge of it crept the black bireme of Klaneth!

— XXX —

THE LAST BATTLE

Sight of that lean boat that like a lank hound leaped at them was like wine to Kenton; like strong wine to all. Heavy upon them had hung the conflict just passed – they but midges, dancing helplessly now in the fierce radiance of life’s spirit, now stilling as helplessly in the blackness of life’s negation. The charnel odor was still in Kenton’s nostrils; the chill of the grave on his heart; the touch of the worm upon his eyes.

But there – there on the black priest’s ship – were things he knew!

Sword edges and arrow point; death – it might be; death with pulse beating like war drums; hot death striking in as the red tides of life rushed out; things understandable; reality.

He heard the golden clarion of Sharane’s defiance, the roar of Gigi, the shouting of Sigurd. And he was shouting too – challenging the black priest, taunting him, menacing him.

Silently the lean ship drove down on them. “Sigurd, to the helm!” Sanity returned to Kenton. “Make for a narrow channel. One we can row but one that will force them to draw in their upper bank of oars. Thus shall we equal their speed – at the least!”

The Norseman ran back to the tiller. The whistle of the overseer shrilled in the pit; the ship leaped forward.

It swept round the obelisks, the bireme now only two arrow flights behind, and into a wide lake of blue water bordered by a hundred domes, magenta set on huge cubes of damask; the turquoise tides ran between the mathematically spaced sides of the cubes in a hundred canals, each barely wide enough for the oars of the ship to dip without touching the stone.

“In there! Take any channel!” shouted Kenton. The ship heeled, darted to the closest opening. A flight of arrows from the bireme whistled into their wake – five ship lengths short!

The huge blocks with their mosqued tops bordered the narrow canal into which they had passed; for a full mile the open way stretched, straight ahead of them. A third through and they heard the bireme’s sweeps clanking, saw it come swinging on a single bank of oars into the entrance. Quicker, at Kenton’s command, dipped the ship’s blades; heavier than the ship, the bireme fell behind.

And as they flew through the blue water Kenton and Sharane took swift counsel with Gigi and Sigurd back at the stern.

“Ravens gather!” chanted Sigurd, eyes brightening with fey fires. “Shield maidens ride from Valhalla! I hear the feet of their horses!”

“They may return empty handed!” exclaimed Kenton. “Nay, Sigurd – now we have our only chance. None but Klaneth has smelled us out. Let us pick our place and give battle to him.”

“We are but seven, and there are many times seven on that bireme, Wolf,” said Gigi, doubtful it seemed – although his little eyes sparkled.

“I run no longer from the black swine!” cried Kenton, hotly. “I am weary of dodging and skulking. I say let us play the game out now! What does your thought tell you, Sharane?” he asked.

“My thought is as yours,” she told him, tranquilly. “As you will it, so is my will, beloved!”

“What do you say, Norseman?” asked Gigi. “Quick now – decide!”

“I am with the Wolf,” replied Sigurd. “No time better than now. In the old days when I was a dragon master there was a trick we played when we were chased. Have you seen the dog when the cat turns on him – ho! ho!” laughed Sigurd. “Swift flies the cat until it has reached a corner. And there it lurks until dog yelps past. Then out springs cat, digging deep its claws, striking at eyes, raking dog’s sides. Ho! Ho!” roared Sigurd. “Swift we would fly like the cat until we had found a place to turn and skulk. Then as other dragon sped by, out we would spring upon it; like the dog, loud would it howl while we clung and tore! Ho – let us find such a corner where we may lurk till this hell dog leaps past. Then we shall spring. Give me two of the maids to guard me here as I steer. You three with the other maid, stand by the crossbows and when I shear their oars, loose the fire shafts upon them.”

“In the meantime,” asked Gigi, face wrinkling, “what about their own arrows?”

“We must take our luck as it comes,” said Kenton. “Gigi, I am one with Sigurd – unless you have a better plan to offer.”

“No,” answered Gigi – “No – I have none, Wolf” – he lifted his great body, shook long arms on high.

“By the Hollow Hells and Ischak their Keeper,” roared Gigi, “I, too, am weary of running away! I ran away from my princess because of my bald head – and what luck did it bring me. By Nazzur the Eater of Hearts – by Zubran.” his voice softened – “who gave his life for us – I run no more! Pick your place, Wolf – you and Sigurd – and let us fight!”

He waddled away; then turned.

“The end of the channel draws close,” he said. “Sharane, between the hearts of you and your maids and their arrow points are only soft breasts and a fold of cloth. Don coats of mail like ours and caps and buskins and greaves for your knees. I go to put on another linked shirt and get me my mace.”

He dropped down the steps; Kenton nodded, and after Gigi trooped Sharane and her three women to doff their robes and kirtles, don battle garb.

“And after you have shorn their oars – if you do?” asked Kenton of the Viking, lingering.

“Then we return and ram,” said Sigurd. “So we did in the old days. The ship is lighter than the black priest’s galley and far more quickly can she turn. When we ram, be all of you at the bow ready to beat off any who try to drop abroad. After Klaneth’s galley is both shorn and rammed we can tear at it as we will – like the cat.”

The end of the canal was near; half a mile behind, the bireme clung to the ship’s wake.

Out of her cabin came Sharane and her three maids, four slender warriors in coats of mail, hair hidden under brown-linked caps, leathern buskins on legs and greaves at knees. They piled arrows on stern and bow; with Gigi seeing to it that crossbows were in order, tow and oil and flints ready.

The ship swept out of the canal, hung on reverse oars while Kenton and the Viking took survey. At left and right, in two great arcs, ran high walls of unbroken crimson rock. Smooth and precipitous, continuing they would make a circle a mile or more in diameter – but whether they did so continue Kenton could not see.

Out of the waters they walled, in its center if they encircled it, a huge pinnacle lifted, its needle point thrice the height of the walls, shutting off the further view. Its pedestal was one colossal block, octahedral, shaped like a star. But from it rayed the star points, long and narrow like titanic wedges, their ends fifty feet high and edged like a knife.

“We go to the left,” said Sigurd. “Let the black dog know which way we turn.”

Kenton leaped to the cabin’s top; waved derisive arms; heard shouting.

“Good!” rumbled Sigurd. “Now let them come. For here Wolf, we make our stand! Look” – he pointed as the ship drove past the first star point – “between the tip of stone and wall there is a little more than room for ship and galley to pass each other. Also the stone is high and hides us when we have passed. Yes, it is the place! Yet not here beyond the first star shall we lurk – Klaneth may expect that and come by it slowly and alert; nor beyond the second – for again he may come slowly though surely not so slowly as before. But not finding us there he will believe that we have but one thought – and that to run. So he will pass the third tip at speed to close in on us. And it is there that we shall leap out upon him!”

“Good!” Kenton, and dropped down to the deck; stood beside Sharane and Gigi.

And Gigi grunted approval and walked away to test once more the crossbows. But Sharane locked mailed arms around Kenton’s neck and drew his face close to hers and drank him with wistful eyes that seemed as though they could not drink enough of him. “Is it the end, beloved?” she whispered. “There shall be no end – for us, O heart of mine,” he answered.

They stood so, silent, while the second star point wheeled by. And now the third leveled its tip at them and Sigurd cried out to raise oars; and when the ship had swam a hundred yards or so, brought her sharply around. He called to him the overseer.

“We strike at the bireme’s left bank of oars,” he said. “No wish have I to run risk of splitting the ship on that edge of rock. When I shout, draw in your left sweeps. When we have sheared and passed, whip the slaves again into full speed. When we have rammed, reverse oars and pull free. Is it clear?”

The black’s eyes glistened; he bared white teeth; ran back to the pit.

Now from beyond the great stone wedge came faint rasp of sweeps, splashings of oars. Two of the warrior women sped back to Sigurd, crouched beside him, arrows ready at slits of the high shields. A tenseness gripped the ship.

“One kiss,” whispered Sharane, eyes now misty. Their lips clung.

Nearer came the oar sounds, closer, closer – faster-speeding—

A low whistle from the Viking, and the rowers bent back under sting of whip. A dozen strong strokes and the ship leaped like a dolphin straight for the star tip.

Past tip it shot; heeled as the Viking threw the rudder sharp to port.

Ten ship lengths ahead of them was the bireme, racing on its four fold multiple feet of oars like an enormous water spider. And as the ship flashed out and at it a roar arose from its crowded decks, a shouting confused and clamorous, medley of wild commands – and filling all that clamor, bewilderment.

The oars of the bireme faltered; stopped at midstroke; held rigid, just touching sea.

“Faster!” howled Sigurd and as the pit’s whip cracked, he drove with a twist of the rudder the ship down parallel to the course of the galley.

“In oars!” he howled again—

The prow of the Ship of Ishtar struck the bireme’s port oars. It swept through them like a blade through brittle stubble. Broken, splintered, the long shafts fell, holding back the rush of the Ship of Ishtar as little as though they had been straws. But in the bireme those who gripped the great handles fell back with ribs crushed, backs snapped, as the heavy stocks were flung against them.

Up from the ship’s side as it passed, up into the ranks staring down on it, ranks turned wooden with surprise of that unexpected attack, hissed the fireballs from the crossbows. Hissing like serpents of fire, expanding as the air fanned them, the fireballs struck – hurling back the soldiers, searing them, flaming up as they fell on deck and into open hold and touching with fingers of inextinguishable flame all that would burn.

Again the galley roared – and now with terror in its voice.

The Ship of Ishtar was clear; down thrust the withdrawn oars of it; straight ahead she flew into the wider space beyond the star tip of stone and circling wall. Swift once more the Viking turned her. Back raced the ship upon the bireme.

And the bireme swung helplessly, sidled grotesquely like a huge spider from one of whose sides all legs have been cut, slithered like that same spider toward the knife-edged tip of the stone star ray. From hold and deck little columns of smoke swirled.

Now Sigurd realized all that galley’s peril; saw that it was close to piercing stone ray; saw that he might drive it upon that ray; send stone blade biting into it; destroy it.

“Guard bow!” shouted Sigurd.

He threw back the rudder, made wider turn, hurtled upon the galley not at stern as he had planned but far toward midship. The ram of Ishtar’s ship struck and bit deep; prow too. Under the shock Kenton and the others toppled over and before they could set foot on bow fell prone on faces, clutching at deck.

Beneath the blow the bireme reeled, heeled until the seas sucked over its farther side. Down dipped its starboard oars seeking to thrust back from the menacing stone. The sweeps churned, but under the weight of the ship clinging to its flank, its bow turned sharply in.

It struck the knife edge of the rock.

There was a crackling as rock bit through hull.

“Ho!” roared the Viking. “Drown, you rats!”

Down upon the ship whistled an arrow cloud. The shafts shrilled over Kenton, staggering to his feet. They pierced deck and pit. Before the rowers could back sweeps, pull free, they dropped, hung limp over oars, bristling with quivering bolts.

On the ship’s bow fell a dozen grapples, holding it fast to the wrecked galley. Ropes whirled and sliding down them came the swordsmen.

“Back! Back to me!” shouted Sigurd.

The bireme shuddered, its gashed bow slid down the rock edge for a dozen feet or more, the water pouring over its fore deck. Up from the sea bobbed heads of soldiers, washed away and swimming for the ship. On the deck of the bireme a milling began as those on it fought to drop upon the ship.

“Back!” cried Kenton.

He caught Sharane’s arm; they ran with heads bent low as from the steerman’s place the arrows of Sigurd and his flanking maids winged into the mass of men swarming over the rosy cabin.

The bireme slipped again along the cleaving edge of stone; checked fall with bow half under water, yet held by the ship’s ram. But that last slipping had wrenched sharply down the ship’s own prisoned bow. As the deck tilted Kenton fell, dragging Sharane with him. He caught swift glimpse of men dropping from the bireme’s side; throwing themselves into the sea, striking for the ship.

He scrambled to his feet as the soldiers at the bow rushed. And now Gigi sprang past him, twirling his great mace. Kenton leaped to his side, Sharane at his heels.

“Back! Back to Sigurd!” grunted the Ninevite, club sweeping the soldiers before it like a flail among wheat.

“Too late!” cried Sharane.

Too late!

Men were swarming up the stern chains, clambering up from the sea, tearing away the shields.

From the bireme came a howling, frenzied and beastlike. At its sound even the soldiers halted, Gigi’s mace hung in air.

Then upon the Ship of Ishtar leaped – the black priest!

Pale eyes pools of hell fire, mouth an open square from which black hate flew screaming, he hurled himself through the swordsmen, dived under Gigi’s falling mace and flung himself on Kenton.

But Kenton was ready.

Out flashed the blue blade and met the thrust of the black priest’s sword. Quicker than he, that sword swept back, bit into that old wound in his side!

Kenton staggered, hilt half dropping from his hand.

Howling triumph Klaneth swept down the death blow.

Before it could fall Sharane had thrown herself between Kenton and priest, had parried the stroke with her own sword.

The left hand of the black priest shot out, dagger in its grip. He buried that dagger in Sharane’s breast!

Now all the world was but one red flame before Kenton – one red flame in which was nothing but Klaneth’s face. Ere the black priest could move, swifter than the lightning stroke, Kenton had struck.

His sword bit down, shearing away half the black priest’s face, leaving in place of cheek and jowl, only a red smear – swept on half through his shoulder.

The black priest’s sword clanged upon the deck.

The sword of Kenton bit again – straight through his neck.

The head of Klaneth leaped from his shoulders, struck the rail and whirled into the sea. For another instant the gross bulk of the body stood, the neck spouting. The body crashed.

No further heed paid Kenton to him nor to the bireme’s men. He bent over Sharane, raised her.

“Beloved!” he called, and kissed the pale lips, the closed eyes. “Come back to me!”

Her eyes opened, her slim hands made effort to caress him.

“Beloved!” whispered Sharane. “I… Cannot… I will… Wait…” Her head dropped upon his breast.

Kenton, standing there with his dead love in his arms, looked about the ship. Circling him were those who were left of the black galley’s crew, staring at him, silent, making no move.

“Sigurd!” he cried, paying no heed to them. On the helmsman’s deck where the Viking had fought was only a heap of slain.

“Gigi!” he whispered.

There was no Gigi! Where Gigi had wielded his giant flail the dead were thick.

“Sharane! Gigi! Sigurd!” Kenton sobbed. “Gone! All gone!”

The ship lurched; shuddered. He took a step forward, Sharane clasped to his breast.

A bow twanged; an arrow caught him in his side.

He did not care… let them kill him… Sharane was gone… and Gigi…

Why was it that he could no longer feel Sharane’s body in his arms?

Where had the staring soldiers gone?

Where was – the ship!

There was nothing around him but darkness – darkness and a roaring tempest sweeping toward him out of farthest space.

Through that darkness, seeking as he fled for sight of Sharane, reaching faltering bands for touch of her, whirled Kenton…

Swaying, weeping with heartbreak and weakness, he opened his eyes…

To look again upon his old room!

PART SIX

— XXXI —

THE SHIP GOES

Kenton stood there, half in stupor seeing less the room than swift fleeting pictures of that last battle. A bell struck three times.

Three o’clock! Of course… this was a world of time… not like the world of the ship…

The ship!

He staggered over to the shining mystery that had given him everything he had desired of life – and at the end had taken everything away.

Sharane!

There she lay… on the ivory deck… close to the rowers’ pit… a gleaming toy, a jeweled puppet with hilt of tiny dagger in breast…

Sharane who had held for him all joy, all sweetnesses, all desirable delicious things.

The headless manikin so close to her—

Klaneth!

He looked upon the black deck – why, where were all the dead? There on the rubber platform lay only three puppets, one with yellow hair and battered armor. Sigurd and the two warrior maids who had fought beside him! But where were the soldiers they had slain?

And there beyond the headless body of the black priest… was Gigi! Gigi with his great arms a-sprawl and his dwarf legs doubled under him! His dead – they too were gone!

Gigi! Kenton’s hand left Sharane, caressed him.

An agony bit deep into his side. It brought him to his knees. He thrust down his hand and clutched a feathered shaft. The arrow! Suddenly he knew that life was ebbing fast.

Beneath the other hand he felt the ship tremble. He stared at it, bewildered. In that brief moment of agony its bow had vanished, melted away – and with it the rosy cabin!

The ship lurched. As cabin had gone, so went the ivory deck almost up to the rowers’ pit and with it – Gigi!

“Sharane!” he sobbed and gripped the puppet tight. “Beloved!”

The ship crumbled to within an inch of where the toy lay.

“Sharane!” wailed Kenton – and above him the servants wakened to that heartbroken cry and came hurrying to his door.

He threw the last of his strength into his fingers, wrenched at the toy… it was loose… in his hand… he raised it to his lips…

And now where the ship had been was nothing but the oblong base of pearl-crested, lapis lazuli waves!

He knew what that meant. Down into the depths of the strange sea of that other world had gone the bireme, dragging with it as it went the Ship of Ishtar. As fared the symbol, so must fare the ship – and as the ship fared, so must fare the symbol. And had so fared!

There was a hammering at the door, and cries. He gave them no heed.

“Sharane!” they heard him cry, but now with voice that sang with joy.

Kenton fell forward, the toy woman at his lips, gripped tight in stiffening hand.

The base of little waves dissolved. Where ship and it had been something stirred and took form – a shadowy great bird with silver wings and breast and feet and bill of scarlet. It arose. It hovered over Kenton.

A dove of Ishtar.

It hovered – and was gone.

In crashed the door; the servants clustered at the threshold, peering into the darkened room.

“Mr. John!” quavered old Jevins. There was no answer.

“There’s something there – on the floor! Turn on the light!” whispered one.

The electrics gleamed upon a body stretched face down upon a bloodstained rug; a body in cut and torn mail dyed crimson; in its side the shaft of a black arrow; on one strong arm a wide bracelet of gold. Back from that body they shrank, looking at each other with fearful wondering eyes.

One bolder than the others advanced, turned the still form over.

Kenton’s dead face smiled up at them, peace upon it and a great happiness.

“Mr. John!” wept old Jevins, and kneeling lifted the head in his arms.

“What’s he got in his hand?” whispered a servant. The hand was at Kenton’s lips, clenched. They pried open the stubborn fingers.

But Kenton’s hand was—

Empty!

— THE END —

Serialized in
Argosy All-Story Weekly, 8 Nov–13 Dec, 1924

First book edition:
G.P. Putnam Sons, New York, 1926

SEVEN  FOOTPRINTS
TO   SATAN

— I —

The clock was striking eight as I walked out of the doors of the Discoverers’ Club and stood for a moment looking down lower Fifth Avenue. As I paused, I felt with full force that uncomfortable sensation of being watched that had both puzzled and harassed me for the past two weeks. A curiously prickly, cold feeling somewhere deep under the skin on the side that the watchers are located; an odd sort of tingling pressure. It is a queer sort of a sensitivity that I have in common with most men who spend much of their lives in the jungle or desert. It is a throwback to some primitive sixth sense, since all savages have it until they get introduced to the white man’s liquor.

Trouble was I couldn’t localize the sensation. It seemed to trickle in on me from all sides. I scanned the street. Three taxis were drawn up along the curb in front of the Club. They were empty and their drivers busy talking. There were no loiterers that I could see. The two swift side-rubbing streams of traffic swept up and down the Avenue. I studied the windows of the opposite houses. There was no sign in them of any watchers.

Yet eyes were upon me, intently. I knew it.

The warning had come to me in many places this last fortnight. I had felt the unseen watchers time and again in the Museum where I had gone to look at the Yunnan jades I had made it possible for rich old Rockbilt to put there with distinct increase to his reputation as a philanthropist; it had come to me in the theater and while riding in the Park; in the brokers’ offices where I myself had watched the money the jades had brought me melt swiftly away in a game which I now ruefully admitted I knew less than nothing about. I had felt it in the streets, and that was to be expected. But I had also felt it at the Club, and that was not to be expected and it bothered me more than anything else.

Yes, I was under strictest surveillance. But why?

That was what this night I had determined to find out.

At a touch upon my shoulder, I jumped, and swept my hand halfway up to the little automatic under my left armpit. By that, suddenly I realized how badly the mystery had gotten on my nerves. I turned, and grinned a bit sheepishly into the face of big Lars Thorwaldsen, back in New York only a few days from his two years in the Antarctic.

“Bit jerky, aren’t you, Jim?” he asked. “What’s the matter? Been on a bender?”

“Nothing like it, Lars,” I answered. “Too much city, I guess. Too much continual noise and motion. And too many people,” I added with a real candor he could not suspect.

“God!” he exclaimed. “It all looks good to me. I’m eating it up – after those two years. But I suppose in a month or two I’ll be feeling the same way about it. I hear you’re going away again soon. Where this time? Back to China?”

I shook my head. I did not feel like telling Lars that my destination was entirely controlled by whatever might turn up before I had spent the sixty-five dollars in my wallet and the seven quarters and two dimes in my pocket.

“Not in trouble, are you, Jim?” he looked at me more keenly. “If you are, I’d be glad to – help you.”

I shook my head. Everybody knew that old Rockbilt had been unusually generous about those infernal jades. I had my pride, and staggered though I was by that amazingly rapid melting away of a golden deposit I had confidently expected to grow into a barrier against care for the rest of my life, make me, as a matter of fact, independent of all chance, I did not feel like telling even Lars of my folly. Besides, I was not yet that hopeless of all things, a beachcomber in New York. Something would turn up.

“Wait,” he said, as someone called him back into the Club.

But I did not wait. Even less than baring my unfortunate gamble did I feel like telling about my watchers. I stepped down into the street.

Who was it that was watching me? And why? Someone from China who had followed after the treasure I had taken from the ancient tomb? I could not believe it. Kin-Wang, bandit though he might be, and accomplished graduate of American poker as well as of Cornell, would have sent no spies after me. Our, well – call it transaction, irregular as it had been, was finished in his mind when he had lost. Crooked as he might be with the cards, he was not the man to go back on his word. Of that I was sure. Besides, there had been no need of letting me get this far before striking. No, they were no emissaries of Kin-Wang.

There had been that mock arrest in Paris, designed to get me quickly out of the way for a few hours, as the ransacked condition of my room and baggage showed when I returned. A return undoubtedly much earlier than the thieves had planned, due to my discovery of the ruse and my surprise sally which left me with an uncomfortable knife slash under an arm but, I afterwards reflected pleasantly, had undoubtedly left one of my guards with a broken neck and another with a head that would not do much thinking for another month or so. Then there had been the second attempt when the auto in which I was rushing to the steamer had been held up between Paris and the Havre. That might have been successful had not the plaques been tucked among the baggage of an acquaintance who was going to the boat by the regular train, thinking, by the way, that he was carrying for me some moderately rare old dishes that I did not want to trust to the possible shocks of fast automobile travel, to which the mythical engagement on the day of sailing had condemned me.

Were the watchers this same gang? They must know that the jades were now out of my hands and safe in the museum. I could be of no further value to these disappointed gentlemen, unless, of course, they were after revenge. Yet that would hardly explain this constant, furtive, patient watching. And why hadn’t they struck long before? Surely there had been plenty of opportunities.

Well, whoever the watchers were, I had determined to give them the most open of chances to get at me. I had paid all my bills. The sixty-six dollars and ninety-five cents in my pocket comprised all my worldly goods, but no one else had any claim on it. Whatever unknown port I was clearing for with severely bare sticks and decks, it was with no debts left behind.

Yes, I had determined to decoy my enemies, if enemies they were, out into the open. I had even made up my mind as to where it should be.

In all New York the loneliest spot at eight o’clock of an October night, or any night for that matter, is the one which by day is the most crowded on all the globe. Lower Broadway, empty then of all its hordes and its canyon-like cleft silent, its intersecting minor canyons emptier and quieter even than their desert kin. It was there that I would go.

As I turned down Fifth Avenue from the Discoverers’ Club a man passed me, a man whose gait and carriage, figure and clothing, were oddly familiar.

I stood stock still, looking after him as he strolled leisurely up the steps and into the Club.

Then, queerly disturbed, I resumed my walk. There had been something peculiarly familiar, indeed disquietingly familiar, about that man. What was it? Making my way over to Broadway, I went down that street, always aware of the watchers.

But it was not until I was opposite City Hall that I realized what that truly weird familiarity had been. The realization came to me with a distinct shock.

In gait and carriage, in figure and clothing, from light brown overcoat, gray soft hat, to strong Malacca cane that man had been – Myself!

— II —

I stopped short. The natural assumption was, of course, that the resemblance had been a coincidence, extraordinary enough, but still – coincidence. Without doubt there were at least fifty men in New York who might easily be mistaken for me at casual glance. The chance, however, that one of them would be dressed precisely like me at any precise moment was almost nil. Yet it could be. What else could it be? What reason had anyone to impersonate me?

But then, for that matter, what reason had anyone to put a watch on me?

I hesitated, of half a mind to call a taxi, and return to the Club. Reason whispered to me that the glimpse I had gotten had been brief, that perhaps I had been deceived by the play of light and shadow, the resemblance been only an illusion. I cursed my jumpy nerves and went on.

Fewer and fewer became the people I passed as I left Cortlandt Street behind me. Trinity was like a country church at midnight. As the cliffs of the silent office buildings hemmed me I felt a smothering oppression, as though they were asleep and swaying in on me; their countless windows were like blind eyes. But if they were blind, those other eyes, that I had never for an instant felt leave me, were not. They seemed to become more intent, more watchful.

And now I met no one. Not a policeman, not even a watchman. The latter were, I knew, inside these huge stone forts of capital. I loitered at corners, giving every opportunity for the lurkers to step out, the invisible to become visible. And still I saw no one. And still the eyes never left me.

It was with a certain sense of disappointment that I reached the end of Broadway and looked out over Battery Park. It was deserted. I walked down to the Harbor wall and sat upon a bench. A ferryboat gliding toward Staten Island was like some great golden water bug. The full moon poured a rivulet of rippling silver fire upon the waves. It was very still – so still that I could faintly hear Trinity’s bells chiming nine o’clock.

I had heard no one approach, but suddenly I was aware of a man sitting beside me and a pleasant voice asking me for a match. As the flame flared up to meet his cigarette, I saw a dark, ascetic face, smooth-shaven, the mouth and eyes kindly and the latter a bit weary, as though from study. The hand that held the match was long and slender and beautifully kept. It gave the impression of unusual strength – a surgeon’s hand or a sculptor’s. A professional man certainly, I conjectured. The thought was strengthened by his Inverness coat and his soft, dark hat. In the broad shoulders under the cloak of the coat was further suggestion of a muscular power much beyond the ordinary.

“A beautiful night, sir,” he tossed the match from him. “A night for adventure. And behind us a city in which any adventure is possible.”

I looked at him more closely. It was an odd remark, considering that I had unquestionably started out that night for adventure. But was it so odd after all? Perhaps it was only my overstimulated suspicion that made it seem so. He could not possibly have known what had drawn me to this silent place. And the kindly eyes and the face made me almost instantly dismiss the thought. Some scholar this, perhaps, grateful for the quietness of the Park.

“That ferryboat yonder,” he pointed, seemingly unaware of my scrutiny. “It is an argosy of potential adventure. Within it are mute Alexanders, inglorious Caesars and Napoleons, incomplete Jasons each almost able to retrieve some Golden Fleece – yes, and incomplete Helens and Cleopatras, all lacking only one thing to round them out and send them forth to conquer.”

“Lucky for the world they’re incomplete, then,” I laughed. “How long would it be before all these Napoleons and Caesars and Cleopatras and all the rest of them were at each other’s throats – and the whole world on fire?”

“Never,” he said, very seriously. “Never, that is, if they were under the control of a will and an intellect greater than the sum total of all their wills and intellects. A mind greater than all of them to plan for all of them, a will more powerful than all their wills to force them to carry out those plans exactly as the greater mind had conceived them.”

“The result, sir,” I objected, “would seem to me to be not the super-pirates, super-thieves and super-courtesans you have cited, but super-slaves.”

“Less slaves than at any time in history,” he replied. “The personages I have suggested as types were always under control of Destiny – or God, if you prefer the term. The will and intellect I have in mind would profit, since its house would be a human brain, by the mistakes of blind, mechanistic Destiny or of a God who surely, if he exists, has too many varying worlds to look after to give minute attention to individuals of the countless species that crawl over them. No, it would use the talents of its servants to the utmost, not waste them. It would suitably and justly reward them, and when it punished – its punishments would be just. It would not scatter a thousand seeds haphazardly on the chance that a few would find fertile ground and grow. It would select the few, and see that they fell on fertile ground and that nothing prevented their growing.”

“Such a mind would have to be greater than Destiny, or, if you prefer the term, God,” I said. “I repeat that it seems to me a super-slavery and that it’s mighty lucky for the world that no such mind exists.”

“Ah!” he drew at his cigarette, thoughtfully, “but, you see – it does.”

“Yes?” I stared at him, wondering if he were joking. “Where?”

“That,” he answered, coolly, “you shall soon know – Mr. Kirkham.”

“You know me!” for one amazed moment I thought that I could not have heard aright.

“Very well,” he said. “And that mind whose existence you doubt knows – all of you there is to know. He summons you! Come, Kirkham, it is time for us to go!”

So! I had met what I had started out to find! They, whoever they were, had come out into the open at last.

“Wait a bit.” I felt my anger stir at the arrogance of the hitherto courteous voice. “Whoever you may be or whoever he may be who sent you, neither of you knows me as well as you seem to think. Let me tell you that I go nowhere unless I know where it is I’m going, and I meet no one unless I choose. Tell me then where you want me to go, who it is I’m to meet and the reason for it. When you do that, I’ll decide whether or not I’ll answer this, what did you call it – summons.”

He had listened to me quietly. Now his hand shot out and caught my wrist. I had run across many strong men, but never one with a grip like that. My cane dropped from my paralyzed grasp.

“You have been told all that is necessary,” he said, coldly. “And you are going with me – now!”

He loosed my wrist, and shaking with rage I jumped to my feet.

“Damn you,” I cried. “I go where I please when I please—” I stooped to pick up my cane. Instantly his arms were around me.

“You go,” he whispered, “where he who sent me pleases and when he pleases!”

I felt his hands swiftly touching me here and there. I could no more have broken away from him than if I had been a kitten. He found the small automatic under my left armpit and drew it out of its holster. Quickly as he had seized me, he released me and stepped back. “Come,” he ordered.

I stood, considering him and the situation. No one has ever had occasion to question my courage, but courage, to my way of thinking, has nothing whatever to do with bull-headed rashness. Courage is the cool weighing of the factors of an emergency within whatever time limit your judgment tells you that you have, and then the putting of every last ounce of brain, nerve and muscle into the course chosen. I had not the slightest doubt that this mysterious messenger had men within instant call. If I threw myself on him, what good would it do? I had only my cane. He had my gun and probably weapons of his own. Strong as I am, he had taught me that my strength was nothing to his. It might even be that he was counting upon an attack by me, that it was what he hoped for.

True, I could cry out for help or I could run. Not only did both of these expedients seem to me to be ridiculous, but, in view of the certainty of his hidden aides, useless.

Not far away were the subway stations and the elevated road. In that brilliantly lighted zone I would be comparatively safe from any concerted attack – if I could get there. I began to walk away across the Park toward Whitehall Street.

To my surprise he made neither objection nor comment. He paced quietly beside me. Soon we were out of the Battery and not far ahead were the lights of the Bowling Green Station. My resentment and anger diminished, a certain amusement took their place. Obviously it was absurd to suppose that in New York City anyone could be forced to go anywhere against his will, once he was in the usual close touch with its people and its police. To be snatched away from a subway station was almost unthinkable, to be kidnapped from the subway once we got in it absolutely unthinkable. Why then was my companion so placidly allowing each step to take me closer to this unassailable position?

It would have been so easy to have overpowered me just a few moments before. Or why had I not been approached at the Club? There were a dozen possible ways in which I could have been lured away from there.

There seemed only one answer. There was some paramount need for secrecy. A struggle in the Park might have brought the police. Overtures at the Club might have left evidence behind had I disappeared. How utterly outside the mark all this reasoning was I was soon to learn.

As we drew closer to the Bowling Green entrance of the subway, I saw a policeman standing there. I admit without shame that his scenic effect warmed my heart.

“Listen,” I said to my companion. “There’s a blue-coat. Slip my gun back into my pocket. Leave me here and go your way. If you do that, I say nothing. If you don’t I’m going to order that policeman to lock you up. They’ll have the Sullivan Law on you if nothing else. Go away quietly and, if you want to, get in touch with me at the Discoverers’ Club. I’ll forget all this and talk to you. But don’t try any more of the rough stuff or I’ll be getting good and mad.”

He smiled at me, as at some child, his face and eyes again all kindness. But he did not go. Instead, he linked his arm firmly in mine and led me straight to the officer. And as we came within earshot he said to me, quite loudly:

“Now come, Henry. You’ve had your little run. I’m sure you don’t want to give this busy officer any trouble. Come, Henry! Be good!”

The policeman stepped forward, looking us over. I did not know whether to laugh or grow angry again. Before I could speak, the man in the Inverness had handed the blue-coat a card. He read it, touched his hat respectfully and asked:

“And what’s the trouble, doctor?”

“Sorry to bother you, officer,” my astonishing companion answered. “But I’ll ask you to help me a bit. My young friend here is one of my patients. War case – aviator. He hurt his head in a crash in France and just now he thinks he is James Kirkham, an explorer. Actually, his name is Henry Walton.”

The blue-coat looked at me, doubtfully. I smiled, in my certain security.

“Go on!” I said. “What else do I think?”

“He’s quite harmless,” he gently patted my shoulder, “but now and then he manages to slip away from us. Yes, harmless, but very ingenious. He evaded us this evening. I sent my men out to trace him. I found him myself down there in the Battery. At such times, officer, he believes he is in danger of being kidnapped. That’s what he wants to tell you – that I am kidnapping him. Will you kindly listen to him, officer, and assure him that such a thing is impossible in New York. Or, if possible, that kidnappers do not conduct their captives up to a New York policeman as I have.”

I could but admire the deftness of the story, the half humorous and yet patient, wholly professional manner in which he told it. Safe now as I thought myself, I could afford to laugh, and I did.

“Quite right, officer,” I said. “Only it happens that my name really is James Kirkham. I never even heard of this Henry Walton. I never saw this man here until tonight. And I have every reason in the world to know that he is trying to force me to go somewhere that I have no intention whatever of going.”

“You see!” My companion nodded meaningly to the policeman, who, far from answering my smiles, looked at me with an irritating sympathy.

“I wouldn’t worry,” he assured me. “As the good doctor says, kidnappers don’t hunt up the police. Ye couldn’t be kidnapped in New York – at least not this way. Now go right along wit’ the doctor, an’ don’t ye worry no more.”

It was time to terminate the absurd matter. I thrust my hand into my pocket, brought out my wallet and dipped into it for my card. I picked out one and with it a letter or two and handed them to the blue-coat.

“Perhaps these identifications will give you another slant,” I said.

He took them, read them carefully, and handed them back to me, pityingly.

“Sure, lad,” his tone was soothing. “Ye’re in no danger. I’m tellin’ ye. Would ye want a taxi, doctor?”

I stared at him in amazement, and then down to the card and envelopes he had returned to me. I read them once and again, unbelievingly.

For the card bore the name of “Henry Walton,” and each of the envelopes was addressed to that same gentleman “in care of Dr. Michael Consardine” at an address that I recognized as a settlement of the highest-priced New York specialists up in the seventies. Nor was the wallet I held in my hand the one with which I had started this eventful stroll a little more than an hour before.

I opened my coat and glanced down into the inner pocket for the tailor’s label that bore my name. There was no label there.

Very abruptly my sense of security fled. I began to realize that it might be possible to force me to go where I did not want to, after all. Even from a New York Subway station.

“Officer,” I said, and there was no laughter now in my voice, “you are making a great mistake. I met this man a few minutes ago in Battery Park. I give you my word he is an utter stranger to me. He insisted that I follow him to some place whose location he refused to tell, to meet someone whose name he would not reveal. When I refused, he struggled with me, ostensibly searching for weapons. During that struggle it is now plain that he substituted this wallet containing the cards and envelopes bearing the name of Henry Walton in the place of my own. I demand that you search him for my wallet, and then whether you find it or not, I demand that you take us both to Headquarters.”

The blue-coat looked at me doubtfully. My earnestness and apparent sanity had shaken him. Neither my appearance nor my manner was that of even a slightly unbalanced person. But on the other hand the benign face, the kindly eyes, the unmistakable refinement and professionalism of the man of the Battery bench were as far apart as the poles from the puzzled officer’s conception of a kidnapper.

“I’m perfectly willing to be examined at Headquarters – and even searched there,” said the man in the Inverness. “Only I must warn you that all the excitement will certainly react very dangerously on my patient. However – call a taxi—”

“No taxi,” I said firmly. “We go in the patrol wagon, with police around us.”

“Wait a minute,” the blue-coat’s face brightened. “Here comes the Sergeant. He’ll decide what to do.” The Sergeant walked up.

“What’s the trouble, Mooney?” he asked, looking us over. Succinctly, Mooney explained the situation. The Sergeant studied us again more closely. I grinned at him cheerfully.

“All I want,” I told him, “is to be taken to Headquarters. In a patrol wagon. No taxi, Dr. – what was it? Oh, yes, Consardine. Patrol wagon with plenty of police, and Dr. Consardine sitting in it with me – that’s all I want.”

“It’s all right, Sergeant,” said Dr. Consardine, patiently. “I’m quite ready to go. But as I warned Officer Mooney, it means delay and excitement and you must accept the responsibility for the effect upon my patient, whose care is, after all, my first concern. I have said he is harmless, but tonight I took from him – this.”

He handed the Sergeant the small automatic.

“Under his left arm you will find its holster,” said Consardine. “Frankly, I think it best to get him back to my sanatorium as quickly as possible.”

The Sergeant stepped close to me and throwing back my coat, felt under my left arm. I knew by his face as he touched the holster that Consardine had scored.

“I have a license to carry a gun,” I said, tartly.

“Where is it?” he asked.

“In the wallet that man took from me when he lifted the gun,” I answered. “If you’ll search him you’ll find it.”

“Oh, poor lad! Poor lad!” murmured Consardine. And so sincere seemed his distress that I was half inclined to feel sorry for myself. He spoke again to the Sergeant.

“I think perhaps the matter can be settled without running the risk of the journey to Headquarters. As Officer Mooney has told you, my patient’s present delusion is that he is a certain James Kirkham and living at the Discoverers’ Club. It may be that the real Mr. Kirkham is there at this moment. I therefore suggest that you call up the Discoverers’ Club and ask for him. If Mr. Kirkham is there, I take it that will end the matter. If not, we will go to Headquarters.”

The Sergeant looked at me, and I looked at Consardine, amazed.

“If you can talk to James Kirkham at the Discoverers’ Club,” I said at last, “then I’m Henry Walton!”

We walked over to a telephone booth. I gave the Sergeant the number of the Club.

“Ask for Robert,” I interposed. “He’s the desk man.”

I had talked to Robert a few minutes before I had gone out. He would still be on duty.

“Is that Robert? At the desk?” the Sergeant asked as the call came through. “Is Mr. James Kirkham there? This is Police Sergeant Downey.”

There was a pause. He glanced at me.

“They’re paging Kirkham,” he muttered – then to the phone – “What’s that? You are James Kirkham! A moment, please – put that clerk back. Hello – you Robert? That party I’m talking to Kirkham? Kirkham the explorer? You’re certain? All right – all right! Don’t get excited about it. I’ll admit you know him. Put him back – Hello, Mr. Kirkham? No, it’s all right. Just a case of – er – bugs! Man thinks he’s you—”

I snatched the receiver from his hand, lifted it to my ear and heard a voice saying:

“ – Not the first time, poor devil—”

The voice was my very own!

— III —

The receiver was taken from me, gently enough. Now the Sergeant was listening again. Mooney had me by one arm, the man in the Inverness by the other. I heard the Sergeant say:

“Yes – Walton, Henry Walton, yes, that’s the name. Sorry to have troubled you, Mr. Kirkham. Goo’-by.”

He snapped up the ’phone and regarded me, compassionately.

“Too bad!” he said. “It’s a damned shame. Do you want an ambulance, doctor?”

“No, thanks,” answered Consardine. “It’s a peculiar case. The kidnapping delusion is a strong one. He’ll be quieter with people around him. We’ll go up on the subway. Even though his normal self is not in control, his subconscious will surely tell him that kidnapping is impossible in the midst of a subway crowd. Now, Henry,” he patted my hand, “admit that it is. You are beginning to realize it already, aren’t you—”

I broke out of my daze. The man who had passed me on Fifth Avenue! The man who had so strangely resembled me! Fool that I was not to have thought of that before! “Wait, officer,” I cried desperately. “That was an impostor at the Club – someone made up to look like me. I saw him—”

“There, there, lad,” he put a hand on my shoulder reassuringly. “You gave your word. You’re not going to welch on it, I’m sure. You’re all right. I’m telling you. Go with the doctor, now.”

For the first time I had the sense of futility. This net spreading around me had been woven with infernal ingenuity. Apparently no contingency had been overlooked. I felt the shadow of a grim oppression. If those so interested in me, or in my withdrawal, wished it, how easy would it be to obliterate me. If this double of mine could dupe the clerk who had known me for years and mix in with my friends at the Club without detection – if he could do this, what could he not do in my name and in my guise? A touch of ice went through my blood. Was that the plot? Was I to be removed so this double could take my place in my world for a time to perpetrate some villainy that would blacken forever my memory? The situation was no longer humorous. It was heavy with evil possibilities.

But the next step in my involuntary journey was to be the subway. As Consardine had said, no sane person would believe a man could be kidnapped there. Surely there, if anywhere, I could escape, find someone in the crowds who would listen to me, create if necessary such a scene that it would be impossible for my captor to hold me, outwit him somehow.

At any rate there was nothing to do but go with him. Further appeal to these two policemen was useless.

“Let’s go – doctor,” I said, quietly. We started down the subway steps, his arm in mine.

We passed through the gates. A train was waiting. I went into the last car, Consardine at my heels. It was empty. I marched on. In the second car was only a nondescript passenger or two. But as I neared the third car I saw at the far end half a dozen marines with a second lieutenant. My pulse quickened. Here was the very opportunity I had been seeking. I made straight for them.

As I entered the car I was vaguely aware of a couple sitting in the corner close to the door. Intent upon reaching the leathernecks, I paid no attention to them.

Before I had gone five steps I heard a faint scream, then a cry of—

“Harry! Oh, Dr. Consardine! You’ve found him!”

Involuntarily, I halted and turned. A girl was running toward me. She threw her arms around my neck and cried again:

“Harry! Harry! dear! Oh, thank God he found you!”

Two of the loveliest brown eyes I had ever beheld looked up at me. They were deep and tender and pitying, and tears trembled on the long black lashes. Even in my consternation I took note of the delicate skin untouched by rouge, the curly, silken fine bobbed hair under the smart little hat – hair touched with warm bronze glints, the nose a bit uplifted and the exquisite mouth and elfinly pointed chin. Under other circumstances, exactly the girl I would have given much to meet; under the present circumstances, well – disconcerting.

“There! There, Miss Walton!” Dr. Consardine’s voice was benignly soothing. “Your brother is all right now!”

“Now, Eve, don’t fuss any more. The doctor found him just as I told you he would.”

It was a third voice, that of the other occupant of the corner seat. He was a man of about my own age, exceedingly well dressed, the face rather thin and tanned, a touch of dissipation about his eyes and mouth.

“How are you feeling, Harry?” he asked me, and added, somewhat gruffly, “Devil of a chase you’ve given us this time, I must say.”

“Now, Walter,” the girl rebuked him, “what matter, so he is safe?”

I disengaged the girl’s arms and looked at the three of them. Outwardly they were exactly what they purported to be – an earnest, experienced, expensive specialist anxious about a recalcitrant patient with a defective mentality, a sweet, worried sister almost overcome with glad relief that her mind-sick runaway brother had been found, a trusty friend, perhaps a fiance, a bit put out, but still eighteen-carat faithful and devoted and so glad that his sweetheart’s worry was over that he was ready to hand me a wallop if I began again to misbehave. So convincing were they that for one insane moment I doubted my own identity. Was I, after all, Jim Kirkham? Maybe I’d only read about him! My mind rocked with the possibility that I might be this Henry Walton whose wits had been scrambled by some accident in France.

It was with distinct effort that I banished the idea. This couple had, of course, been planted in the station and waiting for me to appear. But in the name of all far-seeing devils how could it have been foretold that I would appear at that very station at that very time?

And suddenly one of Consardine’s curious phrases returned to me:

“A mind greater than all to plan for all of them; a will greater than all their wills—”

Cobwebs seemed to be dropping around me, cobwebs whose multitudinous strands were held by one master hand, and pulling me, pulling me – irresistibly… where… and to what?

I turned and faced the marines. They were staring at us with absorbed interest. The lieutenant was on his feet, and now he came toward us.

“Anything I can do for you, sir?” he asked Consardine, but his eyes were on the girl and filled with admiration. And at that moment I knew that I could expect no help from him or his men. Nevertheless, it was I who answered.

“You can,” I said. “My name is James Kirkham. I live at the Discoverers’ Club. I don’t expect you to believe me, but these people are kidnapping me—”

“Oh, Harry, Harry!” murmured the girl and touched her eyes with a foolish little square of lace.

“All that I ask you to do,” I went on, “is to call up the Discoverers’ Club when you leave this car. Ask for Lars Thorwaldsen, tell him what you have seen, and say I told you that the man at the Club who calls himself James Kirkham is an impostor. Will you do that?”

“Oh, Dr. Consardine,” sobbed the girl. “Oh, poor, poor brother!”

“Will you come with me a moment, lieutenant?” asked Consardine. He spoke to the man who had called the girl Eve – “Watch; Walter – look after Harry—”

He touched the lieutenant’s arm and they walked to the front of the car.

“Sit down, Harry, old man,” urged Walter.

“Please, dear,” said the girl. A hand of each of them on my arms, they pressed me into a seat.

I made no resistance. A certain grim wonder had come to me. I watched Consardine and the lieutenant carry on a whispered conversation to which the latter’s leathernecks aimed eager ears. I knew the story Consardine was telling, for I saw the officer’s face soften, and he and his men glanced at me pityingly; at the girl, compassionately. The lieutenant asked some question, Consardine nodded acquiescence and the pair walked back.

“Old man,” the lieutenant spoke to me soothingly, “of course I’ll do what you ask. We get off at the Bridge and I’ll go to the first telephone. Discoverers’ Club, you said?”

It would have been wonderful if I had not known that he thought he was humoring a lunatic.

I nodded, wearily.

“‘Tell it to the marines,’” I quoted. “The man who said that knew what he was talking about. Invincible but dumb. Of course, you’ll not do it. But if a spark of intelligence should miraculously light up your mind tonight or even tomorrow, please phone as I asked.”

“Oh, Harry! Please be quiet!” implored the girl. She turned her eyes, eloquent with gratitude, to the lieutenant. “I’m sure the lieutenant will do exactly as he has promised.”

“Indeed I will,” he assured me – and half winked at her.

I laughed outright, I couldn’t help it. No heart of any marine I had ever met, officer or otherwise, could have withstood that look of Eve’s – so appealing, so grateful, so wistfully appreciative.

“All right, lieutenant,” I said. “I don’t blame you a bit. I bet myself I couldn’t be kidnapped under a New York cop’s eye at a subway entrance. But I lost. Then I bet myself I couldn’t be kidnapped in a subway train. And again I’ve lost. Nevertheless, if you should get wondering whether I’m crazy or not, take a chance, lieutenant, and call up the Club.”

“Oh, brother,” breathed Eve, and wept once more.

I sank back into my seat, waiting another opportunity. The girl kept her hand on mine, her eyes, intermittently, on the leatherneck lieutenant. Consardine had seated himself at my right. Walter sat at Eve’s side.

At Brooklyn Bridge the marines got out, with many backward looks at us. I saluted the lieutenant sardonically; the girl sent him a beautifully grateful smile. If anything else had been needed to make him forget my appeal it was that.

Quite a crowd piled on the car at the Bridge. I watched them hopefully, as they stampeded into the seats. The hopefulness faded steadily as I studied their faces. Sadly I realized that old Vanderbilt had been all wrong when he had said, “The public be damned.” What he ought to have said was “The public be dumb.”

There was a Hebraic delegation of a half dozen on their way home to the Bronx, a belated stenographer who at once began operations with a lipstick, three rabbit-faced young hoods, an Italian woman with four restless children, a dignified old gentleman who viewed their movements with suspicion, a plain-looking Negro, a rather pleasant-appearing man of early middle age with a woman who might have been a school teacher, two giggling girls who at once began flirting with the hoods, a laborer, three possible clerks and a scattering dozen of assorted morons. The typical New York subway train congregation. A glance at right and left of me assayed no richer residue of human intelligence.

There was no use in making an appeal to these people. My three guardians were too far ahead of them in gray matter and resourcefulness. They could make it abortive before I was half finished. But I might drop that suggestion of calling up the Club. Someone, I argued, might have their curiosity sufficiently developed to risk a phone call. I fixed my gaze on the dignified old gentleman – be seemed the type who possibly would not be able to rest until he had found out what it was all about.

And just as I was opening my mouth to speak to him, the girl patted my hand and leaned across me to the man in the Inverness.

“Doctor,” her voice was very clear and of a carrying quality that made it audible throughout the car. “Doctor, Harry seems so much better. Shall I give him – you know what?”

“An excellent idea, Miss Walton,” he answered. “Give it to him.”

The girl reached under her long sport coat and brought out a small bundle.

“Here, Harry,” she handed it to me. “Here’s your little playmate – who’s been so lonely without you.”

Automatically I took the bundle and tore it open.

Into my hands dropped out a dirty, hideous old rag-doll!

As I looked at it, stupefied, there came to me complete perception of the truly devilish cunning of those who had me in their trap. The very farcicality of that doll had a touch of terror in it. At the girl’s clear voice, all the car had centered their attention upon us. I saw the dignified old gentleman staring at me unbelievingly over his spectacles, saw Consardine catch his eye and tap his forehead significantly – and so did everyone else see him. The Negro’s guffaw suddenly stopped. The Hebraic group stiffened up and gaped at me; the stenographer dropped her vanity case; the Italian children goggled at the doll, fascinated. The middle-aged couple looked away, embarrassed.

I realized that I was on my feet, clutching the doll as though I feared it was to be taken from me.

“Hell!” I swore, and lifted it to dash it to the floor.

And suddenly I knew that any further resistance, and further struggle, was useless.

The game was rigged up against me all the way through the deck. For the moment I might as well throw down my hand. I was going, as Consardine had told me, where the “greater intellect and will” pleased, whether it pleased me or not. Also I was going when it pleased. And that was now.

Well, they had played with me long enough. I would throw my hand down, but as I sat back I would have a little diversion myself.

I dropped into my seat, sticking the doll in my upper pocket where its head protruded grotesquely. The dignified old gentleman was making commiserating clucking noises and shaking his head understandingly at Consardine. One of the rabbit-faced youths said “Nuts” and the girls giggled nervously. The Negro hastily got up and retreated to the next car. One of the Italian children pointed to the doll and whined, “Gimme.”

I took the girl’s hand in both of mine.

“Eve, darling,” I said, as distinctly as she had spoken, “you know I ran away because I don’t like Walter there.”

I put my arm around her waist.

“Walter,” I leaned over her, “no man like you just out of prison for what was, God knows, a justly deserved sentence, is worthy of my Eve. No matter how crazy I may be, surely you know that is true.”

The old gentleman stopped his annoying clucking and looked startled. The rest of the car turned its attention like him, to Walter. I had the satisfaction of seeing a slow flush creep up his cheeks.

“Dr. Consardine,” I turned to him, “as a medical man you are familiar with the stigmata, I mean the marks, of the born criminal. Look at Walter. The eyes small and too close together, the mouth’s hardness deplorably softened by certain appetites, the undeveloped lobes of the ears. If I ought not be running loose – how much less ought he to be, doctor?”

Every eye in the car was taking in each point as I called attention to it. And each happened to be a little true. The flush on Walter’s face deepened to a brick red. Consardine looked at me, imperturbably.

“No,” I went on, “not at all the man for you, Eve.”

I gripped the girl closer. I drew her tightly to me. I was beginning to enjoy myself – and she was marvelously pretty.

“Eve!” I exclaimed. “All this time I’ve been away from you – and you haven’t even kissed me!”

I lifted up her chin and – well, I kissed her. Kissed her properly and in no brotherly manner. I heard Walter cursing under his breath. How Consardine was taking it I could not tell. Indeed I did not care – Eve’s mouth was very sweet.

I kissed her again and again – to the chuckles of the hoods, the giggles of the girls, and horrified exclamations of the dignified old gentleman.

And the girl’s face, which at the first of my kisses had gone all rosy red, turned white. She did not resist, but between kisses I heard her whisper:

“You’ll pay for this! Oh, but you’ll pay for this!”

I laughed and released her. I did not care now. I was going to go with Dr. Consardine wherever he wanted to take me – as long as she went with me.

“Harry,” his voice broke my thought, “come along. Here is our station.”

The train was slowing up for the Fourteenth Street stop. Consardine arose. His eyes signaled the girl. Her own eyes downcast, she took my hand. Her hand was like ice. I got up, still laughing. Consardine at my other side, Walter guarding the rear, I walked out upon the platform and up the steps to the street. Once I looked behind me into Walter’s face, and my heart warmed at the murder in it.

It had been touche for me with two of them at any rate – and at their own game.

A chauffeur in livery stood at the top of the steps. He gave me a quick, curious glance and saluted Consardine.

“This way – Kirkham!” said the latter, curtly.

So I was Kirkham again! And what did that mean?

A powerful car stood at the curb. Consardine gestured. Eve’s hand firmly clasped in mine, I entered, drawing her after me. Walter had gone ahead of us. Consardine followed. The chauffeur closed the door. I saw another liveried figure on the driver’s seat. The car started.

Consardine touched a lever and down came the curtains, closeting us in semi-darkness.

And as he did so the girl Eve wrenched her hand from mine, struck me a stinging blow across the lips and huddling down in her corner began silently to weep.

— IV —

The cab, one of expensive European make, sped smoothly over to Fifth Avenue and turned north. Consardine touched another lever and a curtain dropped between us and the driving seat. There was a hidden bulb that shed a dim glow.

By it I saw that the girl had recovered her poise. She sat regarding the tips of her shapely narrow shoes. Walter drew out a cigarette case. I followed suit.

“You do not mind, Eve?” I asked solicitously.

She neither looked at me nor answered. Consardine was apparently lost in thought. Walter stared icily over my head. I lighted my cigarette and concentrated upon our course. My watch registered a quarter to ten.

The tightly shaded windows gave no glimpse of our surroundings. By the traffic stops I knew we were still on the Avenue. Then the car began a series of turns and twists as though it were being driven along side streets. Once it seemed to make a complete circle. I lost all sense of direction, which, I reflected, was undoubtedly what was intended.

At 10:15 the car began to go at greatly increased speed and I judged we were out of heavy traffic. Soon a cooler, fresher air came through the ventilators. We might be either in Westchester or Long Island. I could not tell.

It was precisely 11:20 when the car came to a stop. After a short pause it went on again. I heard from behind us the clang of heavy metal gates. For perhaps ten minutes more we rolled on swiftly and then halted again. Consardine awoke from his reverie and snapped up the curtains. The chauffeur opened the door. Eve dropped out, and after her Walter.

“Well, here we are, Mr. Kirkham,” said Consardine, affably. He might have been a pleased host bringing home a thrice-welcome guest instead of a man he had abducted by outrageous wiles and falsehoods.

I jumped out. Under the moon, grown storm-promising and watery as a drunkard’s eye, I saw an immense building that was like some chateau transplanted from the Loire. Lights gleamed brilliantly here and there in wings and turrets. Through its doors were passing the girl and Walter. I glanced around me. There were no lights visible anywhere except those of the chateau. I had the impression of remoteness and of wide, tree-filled spaces hemming the place in and guarding its isolation.

Consardine took my arm and we passed over the threshold. On each side stood two tall footmen and as I went by them I perceived that they were Arabs, extraordinarily powerful. But when I had gotten within the great hall I stopped short with an involuntary exclamation of admiration.

It was as though the choicest treasures of medieval France had been skimmed of their best and that best concentrated here. The long galleries, a third of the way up to the high vaulted ceiling, were exquisite Gothic arrases and tapestries whose equals few museums could show hung from them and the shields and arms were those of conquering kings.

Consardine gave me no time to study them. He touched my arm and I saw beside me an impeccably correct English valet.

“Thomas will look after you now,” said Consardine. “See you later, Kirkham.”

“This way, sir, if you please,” bowed the valet, and led me into a miniature chapel at the side of the hall. He pressed against its fretted back. It slid away and we entered a small elevator. When it stopped, another panel slipped aside. I stepped into a bedroom furnished, in its own fashion, with the same astonishing richness as the great hall. Behind heavy curtains was a bathroom.

Upon the bed lay dress trousers, shirt, cravat, and so on. In a few minutes I was washed, freshly shaved and in evening clothes. They fitted me perfectly. As the valet opened a closet door a coat hanging there drew my sharp attention. I peered in.

Hanging within that closet was the exact duplicate of every garment that made up my wardrobe at the Club. Yes, there they were, and as I looked into the pockets for the tailor’s labels I saw written on them my own name.

I had an idea that the valet, watching me covertly, was waiting for some expression of surprise. If so he was disappointed. My capacity for surprise was getting a bit numb.

“And now where do I go?” I asked.

For answer he slid the panel aside and stood waiting for me to enter the lift. When it stopped I expected of course to step out into the great hall. Instead of that the opening panel revealed a small anteroom, oak paneled, bare and with a door of darker oak set in its side. Here was another tall Arab, evidently awaiting me, for the valet bowed me out of the elevator and re-entering, disappeared.

The Arab salaamed. Opening the door, he salaamed again. I walked over its threshold. A clock began to chime midnight.

“Welcome, James Kirkham! You are punctual to the minute,” said someone.

The voice was strangely resonant and musical, with a curious organ quality. The speaker sat at the head of a long table where places were laid for three. That much I saw before I looked into his eyes, and then for a time could see nothing else. For those eyes were of the deepest sapphire blue and they were the alivest eyes I had ever beheld. They were large, slightly oblique, and they sparkled as though the very spring of life was bubbling up behind them. Gem-like they were in color, and gem-like were they in their hardness. They were lashless, and as unwinking as a bird’s – or a snake’s.

It was with distinct effort that I tore my gaze from them and took note of the face in which they were set. The head above them was inordinately large, high and broad and totally bald. It was an astonishing hemisphere whose capacity must have been almost double that of the average. The ears were long and narrow and distinctly pointed at the tips. The nose was heavy and beaked, the chin round but massive. The lips were full, and as classically cut and immobile as of some antique Greek statue. The whole huge, round face was of a marble pallor, and it was unwrinkled, unlined and expressionless. The only thing alive about it were the eyes, and alive indeed they were – uncannily, terrifyingly so.

His body, what I could see of it, was unusually large, the enormous barrel of the chest indicating tremendous vitality.

Even at first contact one sensed the abnormal, and the radiation of inhuman power.

“Be seated, James Kirkham,” the sonorous voice rolled out again. A butler emerged from the shadows at his back and drew out for me the chair at the left.

I bowed to this amazing host of mine and seated myself silently.

“You must be hungry after your long ride,” he said. “It was good of you, James Kirkham, thus to honor this whim of mine.”

I looked at him sharply but could detect no sign of mockery.

“I am indebted to you, sir,” I answered, as urbanely, “for an unusually entertaining journey. And as for humoring what you are pleased to call your whim, how, sir, could I have done otherwise when you sent messengers so – ah – eloquent?”

“Ah, yes,” he nodded. “Dr. Consardine is indeed a singularly persuasive person. He will join us presently. But drink – eat.”

The butler poured champagne. I lifted my glass and paused, staring at it with delight. It was a goblet of rock crystal, exquisitely cut, extremely ancient I judged – a jewel and priceless.

“Yes,” said my host, as though I had spoken. “Truly one of a rare set. They were the drinking glasses of the Caliph Haroun-al-Raschid. When I drink from them I seem to see him surrounded by his beloved cup-companions amid the glories of his court in old Baghdad. All the gorgeous panorama of the Arabian Nights spreads out before me. They were preserved for me,” he went on, thoughtfully, “by the late Sultan Abdul Hamid. At least they were his until I felt the desire to possess them.”

“You must have exercised great – ah – persuasion, sir, to have made the Sultan part from them,” I murmured.

“As you have remarked, James Kirkham, my messengers are – eloquent,” he replied, suavely.

I took a sip of the wine and could not for the life of me hide my pleasure.

“Yes,” intoned my strange host, “a rare vintage. It was intended for the exclusive use of King Alfonso of Spain. But again my messengers were – eloquent. When I drink it my admiration for its excellences is shadowed only by my sympathy for Alfonso in his deprivation.”

I drank that wine, worshipfully. I attacked with relish a delicious cold bird. My eye was caught by the lines of a golden compote set with precious stones. So exquisite was it that I half arose to examine it more closely.

“Benvenuto Cellini made it,” observed my host. “It is one of his masterpieces. Italy kept it for me through the centuries.”

“But Italy would never voluntarily have let a thing like that go from her!” I exclaimed.

“No, quite involuntarily, oh quite, I assure you,” he answered, blandly.

I began to glance about the dimly lighted room and realized that here, like the great hall, was another amazing treasure chamber. If half of what my eyes took in was genuine, the contents of that room alone were worth millions. But they could not be – not even an American billionaire could have gathered such things.

“But they are genuine,” again he read my thoughts. “I am a connoisseur indeed – the greatest in the world. Not alone of paintings, and of gems and wines and other masterpieces of man’s genius. I am a connoisseur of men and women. A collection of what, loosely, are called souls. That is why, James Kirkham, you are here!”

The butler filled the goblets and placed another bottle in the iced pail beside me; he put liqueurs and cigars upon the table and then, as though at some signal, he withdrew. He disappeared, I noted with interest, through still another wall panel that masked one of the hidden lifts. I saw that he was a Chinese.

“Manchu,” observed my host. “Of princely rank. Yet he thinks to be my servant the greater honor.”

I nodded casually, as though the matter were commonplace and butlers who were Manchu princes, wine lifted from King Alfonso, goblets of an Arabian Nights’ Caliph and Cellini compotes everyday affairs. I realized that the game which had begun in Battery Park a few hours before had reached its second stage and I was determined to maintain my best poker face and manner.

“You please me, James Kirkham,” the voice was totally devoid of expression, the lips scarcely moved as it rolled forth. “You are thinking – ‘I am a prisoner, my place in the outer world is being filled by a double whom even my closest friends do not suspect of being other than I; this man speaking is a monster, ruthless and conscienceless, a passionless intellect which could – and would – blow me out if he desired as carelessly as he would blow out a candle flame.’ In all that, James Kirkham, you are right.”

He paused. I found it better not to look into those jewel-bright blue eyes. I lighted a cigarette and nodded, fixing my attention on the glowing tip.

“Yes, you are right,” he went on. “Yet you ask no questions and make no appeals. Your voice and hands are steady, your eyes untroubled. But back of all, your brain is keenly alert, poised on tiptoe to seize some advantage. You are feeling out for danger with the invisible antennae of your nerves like any jungleman. Every sense is alive to catch some break in the net you feel around you. There is a touch of terror upon you. Yet outwardly you show no slightest sign of all this – only I could detect it. You please me greatly, James Kirkham. Yours is the true gambler’s soul!”

He paused again, studying me over the rim of his goblet. I forced myself to meet his gaze and smile.

“You are now thirty-five,” he continued. “I have watched you for years. I was first attracted to you by your work in the French Espionage Service during the second year of the war.”

My fingers stiffened involuntarily about my glass. None, I had thought, had known of that hazardous work except the Chief and myself.

“It happened that you ran counter to no plans of mine,” the toneless voice rolled on. “So you – lived. You next came to my notice when you undertook to recover the Spiradoff emeralds from the Communists in Moscow. You ingeniously left with them the imitations and escaped with the originals. I did not care for them, I have much finer ones. So I allowed you to return them to those who had commissioned you. But the audacity of your plan and the cool courage with which you carried it out entertained me greatly. I like to be entertained, James Kirkham. Your indifferent acceptance of the wholly inadequate reward showed that it had been the adventure which had been the primal appeal. It had been the game and not the gain. You were, as I had thought, a true gambler.”

And now despite myself I could not keep astonishment from my face. The Spiradoff affair had been carried out in absolute secrecy. I had insisted upon none except the owner knowing how the jewels had been recovered. They had been resold for their value as gems and not with their histories attached… not even the Communists had as yet discovered the substitution, I had reason to believe, and would not until they tried to sell them. Yet this man knew!

“It was then I decided I would – collect – you,” he said. “But the time was not fully ripe. I would let you run awhile. You went to China for Rockbilt on the strength of a flimsy legend. And you found the tomb wherein, true enough, the jade plaques of that legend lay on the moldering breast of old Prince Sukantse. You took them and were captured by the bandit Kin-Wang. You found the joint in that cunning thief’s armor. You saw, and took, the one chance to escape with your loot. Gambler he was, and you knew it. And there in his tent you played him for the plaques with two years’ slavery to him as your forfeit if you lost.

“The idea of having you as a willing slave amused him. Besides, he recognized of what value your brain and courage would be to him. So he made the bargain. You detected the cards he had cunningly nicked before the game had gone far. I approve the dexterity and skill with which you promptly nicked others in the identical fashion. Kin-Wang was confused. Luck was with you. You won.”

I half arose, staring at him, fascinated.

“I do not wish to mystify you further.” He waved me back into my seat. “Kin-Wang is sometimes useful to me. I have many men in many lands who do my bidding, James Kirkham. Had you lost, Kin-Wang would have sent me the plaques, and he would have looked after you more carefully than his own head. Because he knew that at any time I might demand you from him!”

I leaned back with a sigh, the feeling that some inexorable trap had closed upon me, oppressive.

“Afterwards,” his eyes never left me, “afterwards, I tested you again. Twice did my messengers try to take the plaques from you. Purposely, in neither of those efforts had I planned for sure success. Else you would have lost them. I left in each instance a loophole that would enable you to escape had you the wit to see it. You had the wit – and again I was vastly entertained. And pleased.

“And now,” he leaned forward a trifle, “we come to tonight. You had acquired a comfortable sum out of the jades. But there seemed to be a waning interest in the game you know so well. You cast your eyes upon another – the fool’s gamble, the stock market. It did not fit in with my plans to let you win at that. I knew what you had bought. I manipulated. I stripped you, dollar by dollar, leisurely. You are thinking that the method I took was more adapted to the wrecking of some great financier than the possessor of a few thousands. Not so. If your thousands had been millions the end would have been the same. That was the lesson I wished to drive home when the time came. Have you learned the lesson?”

I repressed with difficulty a gust of anger.

“I hear you,” I answered, curtly.

“Heed!” he whispered, and a bleakness dulled for a breath the sparkling eyes.

“So too,” he went on, “it was of tonight. I could have had you caught up bodily and carried here, beaten or drugged, bound and gagged. Such methods are those of the thug, the unimaginative savage in our midst. You could have had no respect for the mind behind such crude tactics. Nor would I have been entertained.

“No, the constant surveillance which at last forced you out into the open, your double now enjoying himself at your Club – a splendid actor, by the way, who studied you for weeks – in fact, all your experiences were largely devised to demonstrate to you the extraordinary character of the organization to which you have been called.

“And I say again that your conduct has pleased me. You could have fought Consardine. Had you done so you would have shown yourself lacking in imagination and true courage. You would have come here just the same, but I would have been disappointed. And I was greatly diverted by your attitude toward Walter and Eve – a girl whom I have destined for a great work and whom I am training now for it.

“You have wondered how they came to be in that particular subway station. There were other couples at South Ferry, the elevated station and at all approaches to the Battery within five minutes after you had seated yourself there. I tell you that you had not one chance of escape. Nothing that you could have done that had not been anticipated and prepared for. Not all the police in New York could have held you back from me tonight.

“Because, James Kirkham, I had willed your coming!”

I had listened to this astonishing mixture of subtle flattery, threat and colossal boasting with ever-increasing amazement. I stood back from the table.

“Who are you?” I asked, directly. “And what do you want of me?”

The weird blue eyes blazed out, intolerably.

“Since everything upon this earth toward which I direct my will does as that will dictates,” he answered, slowly, “you may call me – Satan!

“And what I offer you is a chance to rule this world with me – at a price, of course!”

— V —

The two sentences tingled in my brain as though charged with electricity. Absurd as they might have sounded under any other circumstances, here they were as far removed from absurdity as anything I have ever known.

Those lashless, intensely alive blue eyes in the immobile face were – Satanic! I had long sensed the diabolic touch in every experience I had undergone that night. In the stillness of the huge body, in the strangeness of the organ pipe voice that welled, expressionless, from the almost still lips was something diabolic too – as though the body were but an automaton in which dwelt some infernal spirit, some alien being that made itself manifest through eyes and voice only. That my host was the exact opposite of the long, lank, dark Mephisto of opera, play and story made him only the more terrifying. And it has long been my experience that fat men are capable of far greater deviltries than thin men.

No, this man who bade me call him Satan had nothing of the absurd about him. I acknowledged to myself that he was – dreadful.

A bell rang, a mellow note. A light pulsed on a wall, a panel slid aside and Consardine stepped into the room. Vaguely, I noted that the panel was a different one than that through which the Manchu butler had gone. At the same time I recalled, aimlessly it seemed, that I had seen no stairway leading up from the great hall. And on the heels of that was recollection that I had noticed neither windows nor doors in the bedroom to which I had been conducted by the valet. The thoughts came and went without my mind then taking in their significance. That was to come later.

I arose, returning Consardine’s bow. He seated himself without salutation or ceremony at Satan’s right.

“I have been telling James Kirkham how entertaining I have found him,” said my host.

“And I,” smiled Consardine. “But I am afraid my companions did not. Cobham was quite upset. That was really cruel of you, Kirkham. Vanity is one of Cobham’s besetting sins.”

So Walter’s name was Cobham. What was Eve’s, I wondered.

“Your stratagem of the rag-doll was – demoralizing,” I said. “I thought I was rather restrained in my observations upon Mr. Cobham. There was so much more opportunity, you know. And after all, so much provocation.”

“The rag-doll was a diverting idea,” observed Satan. “And effective.”

“Diabolically so,” I spoke to Consardine. “But I find that was to have been expected. Just before you entered I discovered that I have been dining with – Satan.”

“Ah, yes,” said Consardine, coolly. “And you are no doubt expecting me to produce a lancet and open a vein in your wrist while Satan puts in front of you a document written in brimstone and orders you to sign away your soul in your blood.”

“I am expecting no such childish thing,” I replied with some show of indignation.

Satan chuckled; his face did not move but his eyes danced.

“Obsolete methods,” he said. “I gave them up after my experiences with the late Dr. Faustus.”

“Perhaps,” Consardine addressed me, blandly, “you think I may be the late Dr. Faustus. No, no – or if so, Kirkham,” he looked at me slyly, “Eve is not Marguerite.”

“Let us say, not your Marguerite,” amended Satan.

I felt the blood rush up into my face. And again Satan chuckled. They were playing with me, these two. Yet under that play the sinister note persisted, not to be mistaken. I felt uncomfortably like a mouse between a pair of cats. I had a sudden vision of the girl as just such another helpless mouse.

“No,” it was Satan’s sonorous voice. “No, I have become more modern. I still buy souls, it is true. Or take them. But I am not so rigorous in my terms as of old. I now also lease souls for certain periods. I pay well for such leases, James Kirkham.”

“Is it not time that you ceased treating me like a child?” I asked coldly. “I admit all that you have said of me. I believe all that you have said of yourself. I concede that you are – Satan. Very well. What then?”

There was a slight pause. Consardine lighted a cigar, poured himself some brandy and pushed aside a candle that stood between us, so I thought, that he could have a clearer view of my face. Satan for the first time turned his eyes away from me, looking over my head. I had come to the third stage of this mysterious game.

“Did you ever hear the legend of the seven shining footsteps of Buddha?” he asked me. I shook my head.

“It was that which made me change my ancient methods of snaring souls,” he said gravely. “Since it caused the beginning of a new infernal epoch, the legend is important. But it is important to you for other reasons as well. So listen.

“When the Lord Buddha, Gautama, the Enlightened One,” he intoned, “was about to be born, he was seen gleaming like a jewel of living light in his Mother’s womb. So filled with light was he that he made of her body a lantern, himself the holy flame.”

For the first time there was expression in the voice, a touch of sardonic unctuousness.

“And when the time came for him to be delivered, he stepped forth from his Mother’s side, which miraculously closed behind him.

“Seven footsteps the infant Buddha took before he halted for the worship of the devis, genii, rishis and all the Heavenly hierarchy that had gathered round. Seven shining footsteps they were, seven footsteps that gleamed like stars upon the soft greensward.

“And, lo! Even as Buddha was being worshipped, those shining footsteps of his stirred and moved and marched away, beginning the opening of the paths which later the Holy One would traverse. Seven interesting little John the Baptists going before him – Ho! Ho! Ho!” laughed Satan, from unchanged face and motionless lips.

“West went one and East went one,” he continued. “One North and one South – opening up the paths of deliverance to the whole four quarters of the globe.”

“But what of the other three? Ah – alas! Mara, the King of Illusion, had watched with apprehension the advent of Buddha, because the light of Buddha’s words would be a light in which only the truth had shadow and by it would be rendered useless the snares by which mankind, or the most of it, was held in thrall by Mara. If Buddha conquered, Mara would be destroyed. The King of Illusion did not take kindly to the idea, since his supreme enjoyment was in wielding power and being entertained. In that,” commented Satan, apparently quite seriously, “Mara was much like me. But in intelligence much inferior, because he did not realize that truth, aptly manipulated, creates far better illusions than do lies. However—”

“Before those laggard three could get very far away, Mara had captured them!”

“And then by wile and artifice and sorcery Mara seduced them. He taught them naughtiness, schooled them in delicious deceptions – and he sent them forth to wander!”

“What happened? Well, naturally men and women followed the three. The paths they picked out were so much pleasanter, so much more delectable, so much softer and more fragrant and beautiful than the stony, hard, austere, cold trails broken by the incorruptible four. Who could blame people for following them? And besides, superficially, all seven footprints were alike. The difference, of course, was in the ending. Those souls who followed the three deceitful prints were inevitably led back into the very heart of error, the inner lair of illusion, and were lost there: while those who followed the four were freed.”

“And more and more followed the naughty prints while Mara waxed joyful. Until it seemed that there would be none left to take the paths of enlightenment. But now Buddha grew angry. He sent forth a command and back to him from the four quarters of the world came hurrying the shining holy quartette. They tracked down the erring three and made them prisoners.”

“Now arose a problem. Since the erring three were of Buddha, they could not be destroyed. They had their rights, inalienable. But so deep had been their defilement by Mara that they could not be cleansed of their wickedness.”

“So they were imprisoned for as long as the world shall last. Somewhere near the great temple of Borobudur in Java, there is a smaller, hidden temple. In it is a throne. To reach that throne, one must climb seven steps. On each of these steps gleams one of Buddha’s seven baby footprints. Each looks precisely like the other – but, oh, how different they are. Four are the holy ones, guarding the wicked three. The temple is secret, the way to it beset with deadly perils. He who lives through them and enters that temple may climb to the throne.”

“But – as he climbs he must set his foot on five of those shining prints!”

“Now, after he has done this, hear what must befall. If of those five steps he has taken he has set his feet upon the three naughty prints, behold, when he reaches the throne, all of earthly desire, all that the King of Illusion can give him, is his for the wishing. To the enslavement and possible destruction of his soul, naturally. But if, of the five, three have been the holy prints, then is he freed of all earthly desire, freed of all illusion, free of the wheel, a Bearer of the Light, a Vessel of Wisdom – his soul one with the Pure One, eternally.”

“Saint or sinner – if he steps on the three unholy footprints, all worldly illusions are his, willy-nilly.”

“And sinner or saint – if he treads on three of the holy footprints, he is freed of all illusion, a blessed soul forever in Nirvana!”

“Poor devil!” murmured Consardine.

“Such is the legend.” Satan turned his gaze upon me again. “Now I never tried to collect those interesting footprints. They could have served no purpose of mine. I have no desire to turn sinners into saints, for one thing. But they gave me the most entertaining idea I have had for – shall I say – centuries?

“Life, James Kirkham, is one long gamble between the two inexorable gambles of birth and death. All men and all women are gamblers, although most are very poor ones. All men and all women have at least one desire during their lives for which they would willingly stake their souls – and often even their lives. But life is such a crude game, haphazardly directed, if directed at all, and with such confusing, conflicting, contradictory and tawdry rules.

“Very well, I would improve the game for a chosen few, gamble with them for their great desire, and for my own entertainment would use as my model these seven footsteps of Buddha.

“And now, James Kirkham, listen intently, for this directly concerns you. I constructed two thrones upon a dais up to which lead not seven but twenty-one steps. On each third step there shines out a footprint – seven of them in all.

“One of the thrones is lower than the other. Upon that I sit. On the other rests a crown and a scepter.

“Now then. Three of these footsteps are – unfortunate. Four are fortunate in the aggregate. He who would gamble with me must climb to that throne on which are crown and scepter. In climbing he must place a foot on four, not five of these seven prints.

“Should those four upon which he steps prove to be the fortunate ones, that man may have every desire satisfied as long as he lives. I am his servant – and his servant is all that vast organization which I have created and which serves me. His, my billions to do as he pleases with. His, my masterpieces. His, anything that he covets – power, women, rule – anything. What he hates I punish or – remove. His is the crown and scepter upon that throne higher than mine. It is power over earth! He may have – everything!”

I glanced at Consardine. He was nervously bending and unbending a silver knife in his strong fingers, his eyes glittering.

“But if he treads on the others?”

“Ah – that is my end of the gamble. If he treads upon the first of my three – he must do me one service. Whatever I bid him. If he treads on two – he must do my bidding for a year. They are my – minor leases.

“But if he treads on all my three” – I felt the blaze of the blue eyes scorch me, heard a muffled groan from Consardine – “if he treads on all my three – then he is mine, body and soul. To kill at once if it is my mood – and in what slow ways I please. To live – if I please, as long as I please, and then to die – again as I please. Mine! body and soul! Mine.”

The rolling voice trumpeted, grew dreadful. Satanic enough was he now with those weird eyes blazing at me as though behind them were flames from that very pit whose Master’s name he had taken.

“There are a few rules to remember,” the voice abruptly regained its calm. “One need not take the whole four steps. You may stop, if you desire, at one. Or two. Or three. You need not take the next step.

“If you take one step and it is mine, and go no farther, then you do my service, are well paid for it, and after it is done may ascend the steps again.

“So if you go farther and touch the second of my steps. After your year – if you are alive – you again have your chance. And are well paid during that year.”

I considered. Power over all the world! Every desire granted. An Aladdin’s lamp to rub! Not for a moment did I doubt that this – whatever he was – could do what he promised.

“I will explain the mechanism,” he said. “Obviously the relative positions of the seven steps cannot remain the same at each essay. Their combination would be too easy to learn. That combination I leave to chance. Not even I know it. Through that I get the cream of my entertainment.

“I sit upon my throne. I touch a lever that spins a hidden wheel over which roll seven balls, three marked for my steps, four marked for the fortunate ones. As those balls settle into place, they form an electrical contact with the seven footprints. As the balls lie, so lie the prints.

“Where I can see – and others if they are present – but not to be seen by the climber of the steps, is an indicator. As the – aspirant – sets his foot on the prints this indicator shows whether he has picked one of my three or one of his four.

“And there is one final rule. When you climb you may not look back at that indicator. You must take the next step in ignorance of whether that from which you have come was good for you or – evil. If you do weaken and look behind, you must descend and begin your climb anew.”

“But it seems to me that you have the better end of the game,” I observed. “Suppose one steps upon a fortunate step and stops – what does he get?”

“Nothing,” he answered, “but the chance to take the next. You forget, James Kirkham, that what he stands to win is immeasurably greater than what I win if he loses. Winning, he wins me and all I stand for. Losing, I win only one man – or one woman. Besides, for my limited leases I pay high. And give protection.”

I nodded. As a matter of fact I was profoundly stirred. Everything that I had experienced had been carefully calculated to set my imagination on fire. I thrilled at the thought of what I might not be able to do with – well, admit he was Satan – and his power at my beck and call. He watched me, imperturbably; Consardine, understandingly, with a shadow of pity in his eyes.

“Look here,” I said abruptly, “please clear up a few more things. Suppose I refuse to play this game of yours – what happens to me?”

“You will be set back in Battery Park tomorrow,” he answered. “Your double will be withdrawn from your club. You will find he has done no harm to your reputation. You may go your way. But—”

“I thought, sir, there was a but,” I murmured.

“But I will be disappointed,” he went on, quietly. “I do not like to be disappointed. I am afraid your affairs would not prosper. It might even be that I would find you such a constant reproach, such a living reminder of a flaw in my judgment that—”

“I understand,” I interrupted. “The living reminder would strangely cease someday to be a reminder – living.”

He did not speak – but, surely, I read the answer in his eyes.

“And what is to prevent me from taking your challenge,” I asked again, “going partly through with it, enough to get away from here, and then – ah—?”

“Betray me?” again the chuckle came through the motionless lips. “Your efforts would come to nothing. And as for you – better for you, James Kirkham, had you remained unborn. I, Satan, tell you so!”

The blue eyes scorched; about him in his chair seemed to grow a shadow, enveloping him. From him emanated something diabolic, something that gripped my throat and checked the very pulse of my heart.

“I, Satan, tell you so!” he repeated.

There was a little pause in which I strove to regain my badly shaken poise.

Again the bell sounded.

“It is time,” said Consardine. But I noticed that he had paled, knew my own face was white.

“It happens,” the organ-like voice was calm again, “it happens that you have an opportunity to see what becomes of those who try to thwart me. I will ask you to excuse certain precautions which it will be necessary to take. You will not be harmed. Only it is essential that you remain silent and motionless and that none read your face while you see – what you are going to see.”

Consardine arose, I followed him. The man who called himself Satan lifted himself from his chair. Huge I had guessed him to be, but I was unprepared for the giant that he was. I am all of six feet and he towered over me a full twelve inches.

Involuntarily I looked at his feet.

“Ah,” he said, suavely. “You are looking for my cloven hoof. Come, you are about to see it.”

He touched the wall. A panel slipped away revealing a wide corridor, not long, and windowless and doorless. He leading, Consardine behind me, Satan walked a few yards and pressed against the wainscoting. It slid back, soundlessly. He stepped through.

I walked after him and halted, staring blankly, into one of the most singular – rooms, chambers, no, temple is the only word that its size and character deserve to describe it – I stood staring, I repeat, into one of the most singular temples that probably man’s eyes had ever looked upon.

— VI —

It was suffused with a dim amber light from some concealed source. Its domed roof arched a hundred feet above me. Only one wall was straight; the others curved out from it like the inner walls of a vast bubble. The straight wall cut across what was the three-quarter arc of a huge hemisphere.

That wall was all of some lustrous green stone, malachite, I judged. And upon its face was carved in the old Egyptian style a picture.

The subject was the Three Fates, the Moerae of the ancient Greeks, the Parcse of the Romans, the Norns of the Norsemen. There was Clotho with the distaff upon which were spun the threads of human destiny, Lachesis guiding the threads, and Atropos with her shears that cut the threads when the trio so willed. Above the Fates hovered the face of Satan.

One of his hands grasped that of Clotho, he seemed to whisper to Lachesis, his other hand guided that of the Fate who wielded the shears. The lines of the four figures were lined in blues, vermilions and vivid green. The eyes of Satan were not upon the threads whose destinies he was controlling. They were looking out over the temple.

And whoever the unknown genius who had cut that picture, he had created a marvelous likeness. By some trick, the eyes blazed out of the stone with the same living, jewel-like brilliancy of those of the man who called himself Satan.

The curved walls of some black wood – teak or ebony. There was shimmering tracery upon them – like webs. I saw that they were webs; spider webs traced upon the black wood and glimmering like those same silken traps beneath the moon. By the hundreds and thousands they were interlaced upon the walls. They shimmered over the ceiling.

The floors of the temple lifted toward the back in row upon row of seats carved out of black stone and arranged like those of the old Roman amphitheaters.

But all of this I noted only after I had forced my gaze away from the structure that dominated the whole strange place. This was a flight of semicircular steps that swept out in gradually diminishing arcs from the base of the malachite wall. There were twenty-one of them, the lowest, I estimated, a hundred feet wide and the highest about thirty. They were each about a foot high and some three feet deep. They were of inky black stone.

At their top was a low dais upon which stood two elaborately carved thrones – one of black wood, and the other, resting on a pedestal which brought its seat well above the first, apparently of dull, yellow gold.

The black throne was bare. Over the back of the golden throne was a strip of royal purple velvet; upon its seat was a cushion of the same royal purple.

And upon that cushion rested a crown and scepter. The crown was ablaze with the multi-colored fires of great diamonds, the soft blue flames of huge sapphires; red glowings of immense rubies and green radiances that were emeralds. The orb of the scepter was one enormous diamond. And all its jeweled length blazed like the crown with gems.

Ranged down each side of the one and twenty steps were seven men in white robes shaped like the burnooses of the Arabs. If they were Arabs they were of a tribe I had never come across; to me they appeared more like Persians. Their faces were gaunt and of a peculiar waxen pallor. Their eyes seemed pupilless. Each carried in his right hand a snake-like rope, noosed like a lariat.

From every third ebon step a footprint shone out, the footprint of a child outlined as though by living fire.

There were seven of them, shining out with an unearthly brilliancy as though they themselves were alive and poised to march up those steps.

I had looked first at the crown and scepter, and the sight of them had fanned within me such desire as I had never known; a burning lust for possession of them and the power that went with them; a lust that shook me like a fever.

I had looked next at those gleaming marks of a babe’s feet, and the sight of them had stirred within me an inexplicable awe and terror and loathing as great as had been the desire which the sight of them had swiftly numbed.

And suddenly I heard Satan’s voice.

“Sit, James Kirkham!”

There was an armed chair, oddly shaped, almost against the circular wall and close beside the edge of the first curving step. It was somewhat like a lesser throne. I dropped into it, glad at the moment of its support.

Instantly, bands of steel sprang from the arms and circled my elbows; other bands bound my ankles, and from the back where my head rested a veil dropped, covering my face. Its lower edge, thick and softly padded, was drawn tight across my lips.

I was held fast, gagged, my face hidden all in an instant. I made no attempt to struggle. These, I realized, were the “precautions” of which my host had warned me. The bonds held but did not constrict, the silencing pad was not uncomfortable, the veil was of a material which, though it hid my face, enabled me to see as clearly as though it were not enveloping my head.

I saw Satan at the foot of the steps. His enormous body was covered from neck to feet by a black cloak. He paced slowly up the flight. As he trod upon the first step the white-robed, rope-bearing men bent before him, low. Not until he had seated himself upon the black throne did they straighten.

The amber light dulled and went out. Before there could be anything but a thin slice of darkness, a strong white light beat down upon thrones and steps. Its edge formed a sharp semicircle three yards away from the curve of the first. It bathed Satan, the fourteen guardians and myself. Under it the seven footprints leaped out more brilliantly, seeming to be straining against some invisible leash and eager to follow their master. The unwinking eyes of the man on the black throne and their counterparts in the stone behind him glittered.

I heard a movement at the rear of the temple among the seats of stone. There were rustlings as of many people seating themselves, faint whisperings of panels sliding back and forth in the black walls, opening of hidden entrances through which this unseen audience was streaming.

Who they were, what they were – I could not see. The semicircle of light glaring upon the steps and thrones formed an impenetrable curtain beyond which was utter darkness.

A gong sounded. Silence fell. Whatever that audience, the doors were now closed upon them; the curtain ready to rise.

Now I saw, high up and halfway between roof and floor, a globe gleam forth like a little moon. It was at the edge of the white light and as I watched its left half darkened. The right half shone undimmed, the black half was outlined by a narrow rim of radiance.

Abruptly the greater light went out again. For an instant only was the temple in darkness. The light blazed forth once more.

But now he who called himself Satan was not alone on the dais. No. Beside him stood a figure that the devil himself might have summoned from hell!

It was a black man naked except for a loin cloth. His legs were short and spindly; his shoulders inordinately wide, his arms long, and upon shoulders and arms the muscles and sinews stood out like blackened withes of thick rope. The face was flat-nosed, the jaw protruding, brutish and ape-like. Ape-like too were the close-set, beady eyes that burned like demon-lights. His mouth was a slit, and upon his face was the stamp of a ravening cruelty.

He held in one hand a noosed cord, thin and long and braided as though made of woman’s hair. In his loin cloth was a slender knife.

A sighing quavered out of the darkness beyond me as from scores of tightening throats.

Again the gong clanged.

Into the circle of light came two men. One was Consardine; the other a tall, immaculately dressed and finely built man of about forty. He looked like a highly bred, cultured English gentleman. As he faced the black throne I heard a murmur as of surprise and pity well up from the hidden audience.

There was a debonair unconcern in his poise, but I saw his face twitch as he glanced at the horror standing beside Satan. He drew a cigarette from his case and lighted it; in that action was a touch of bravado that betrayed him; nor could he control the faint tremor of the hand that held the match. Nevertheless, he took a deliberate inhalation and met the eyes of Satan squarely.

“Cartright,” the voice of Satan broke the silence. “You have disobeyed me. You have tried to thwart me. You have dared to set your will against mine. By your disobedience you almost wrecked a plan I had conceived. You thought to reap gain and to escape me. You even had it in your mind to betray me. I do not ask you if all this is so. I know it is so. I do not ask you why you did it. You did it. That is enough.”

“I have no intention of offering any defense, Satan.” answered the man called Cartright, coolly enough. “I might urge, however, that any inconvenience to which I have put you is entirely your own fault. You claim perfection of judgment. Yet in me you picked a wrong tool. Is the tool to blame or the artisan if that tool which he picks cannot stand up under the task for which that artisan selects it?”

“The tool is not to blame,” answered Satan. “But what does the artisan do with such a tool thereafter? He does not use it again. He destroys it.”

“The perfect artisan does not,” said Cartright. “He uses it thereafter for work for which it is fit.”

“Not when he has more than enough good ones to choose from,” said Satan.

“You have the power,” Cartright replied. “Nevertheless, you know I have answered you. I am simply an error of your judgment. Or if your judgment is perfect as you boast, then you deliberately picked me to fail. In either event, punish yourself, Satan – not me!”

For a long minute the black-robed figure regarded him. Cartright met the gaze boldly.

“I ask only for justice,” he said. “I ask no mercy of you. Satan.”

“Not – yet!” answered Satan, slowly, and the flaming eyes grew bleak and cold and once more a sighing passed me from the darkness of the temple.

There was another interminable minute of silence.

“Cartright, you have given me an answer,” the organ voice rolled out, emotionless. “For that answer you shall be credited. You have reminded me that a wise artisan uses a faulty tool only for work it can do without breaking. That too I set down for you.

“Now, Cartright, this is my decree. You shall take the four steps. Now. And all of them. You shall have, first of all, your chance to win that crown and scepter and the empire of earth that they carry with them. This if the four footprints that you tread upon are the four fortunate ones.

“And if you place your foot on three of the fortunate prints and on but one of mine – I forgive you. This in recognition of a certain justice in your parable of the artisan and the faulty tool.”

I saw Cartright’s tenseness slacken, a shadow of relief pass over his face.

“If you tread upon two of the fortunate prints and upon two of mine then I will give you a choice of a swift and merciful death or of joining my slaves of the kehjt. In brief, Cartright, you pick between the destruction of your body or slow annihilation of your soul. And that mercy I hold out to you in recognition of your claim that the wise artisan chooses some other use for the untrustworthy tool.”

Once more the sighing, and Cartright’s face paled.

“We come now to the last possibility – that on your journey upward you tread upon all three of my dainty little servants. In that case” – the voice chilled – “in that case, Cartright, you die. You die at the hands of Sanchal here by the cord. Not one death, Cartright. No, a thousand deaths. For slowly and with agony Sanchal’s cord shall drag you to the threshold of the gates of death. Slowly and with agony he shall drag you back to life. Again and again… and again… and again… until at last your torn soul has strength to return no more and crawls whimpering over that threshold whose gates shall close upon it… forever! Such is my decree! So is my will! So shall it be!”

The black horror had grinned evilly as he heard his name and had shaken with a ghastly gesture the cord of braided woman’s hair. As for Cartright, at that dreadful sentence the blood had drained from his face, the cigarette fallen from his fingers. He stood, all bravado gone. And Consardine, who all the while had been beside him, slipped back into the shadow, leaving him alone. Satan pressed down a lever which stood like a slender rod between the two thrones. There was a faint whirring sound. The seven gleaming prints of a child’s bare foot flashed as though fire had shot from them.

“The steps are prepared,” called Satan. “Cartright – ascend!”

The white-robed men stirred; they unslung the loops of their ropes and held the nooses ready, as though to cast swiftly. The black horror thrust his head forward, mouth slavering, his talons caressing his cord.

The silence in the temple deepened – as though all within had ceased to breathe Now Cartright walked forward, moving slowly, studying the gleaming footprints. Satan leaned back in his throne, hands hidden beneath his robe, his huge head having disconcertingly the appearance of being bodiless, floating over the dais as the head in the stone floated above the three Norns.

And now Cartright had passed by the first print and had walked up the two intervening steps. He set without hesitation his foot upon the second gleaming mark.

Instantly a glittering duplicate of it shone out upon the white half of the moon globe. I knew that he had trodden upon one of the fortunate steps.

But Cartright, the globe hidden from him, forbidden to turn – Cartright could not know it!

He shot a swift look at Satan, seeking some sign either of triumph or chagrin. The marble face was expressionless, the eyes unchanged. Nor was there any sound from the black seats.

He walked rapidly up the next two steps and again unhesitatingly set his foot on the next print.

And again another glittered out upon the pale field of the globe. Two chances he had won! Gone from him now was the threat of the thousand deaths. At most he would have his choice of merciful extinction or that mysterious slavery I had heard Satan name.

And again he could not know!

Once more he studied the face of his tormentor for some betraying expression, some hint of how his score stood. Immobile as before, it stared at him; expressionless too was the face of the monstrosity with the cord.

Slowly Cartright ascended the next two steps. He hesitated before the next devilish print, for minutes – and hours they seemed to me. And now I saw that his mouth had become pinched and that little beads of sweat stood out upon his forehead.

Plainly as though he were speaking, I could follow his thoughts. Had the two prints upon which he had trodden been Satan’s? And would the next condemn him to the torture of the cord? Had he trodden upon only one? Had he escaped as yet the traps that gave him over to Satan?

He could not know!

He passed that print and paced upward more slowly. He stood looking down upon the fifth footprint. And then, slowly, his head began to turn!

It was as though a strong hand were forcing it. The tormented brain, wrestling with the panic that urged it to look… to look behind… to see what the marks upon the moon-globe showed.

A groan came from his gray lips. He caught his head between his two hands, held it rigid and leaped upon the footprint before him.

And he stood there, gasping, like a man who has run a long race. His mouth hung open, drawing in sobbing breaths to the laboring lungs. His hair was wet, his face dripping. His haggard eyes searched Satan—

The white field of the globe bore a third shining symbol!

Cartright had won—

And he could not know!

My own hands were shaking; my body drenched with sweat as though it were I myself who stood in his place. Words leaped to my lips – a cry to him that he need fear no more! That his torment was over! That Satan had lost! The gag stifled them.

Upon me burst full realization of all the hellish cruelty, the truly diabolic subtlety and ingenuity of this ordeal.

Cartright stood trembling. His despairing gaze ate into the impassive face now not far above him. Did I see a flicker of evil triumph pass over it, reflected on the black mask of his torturer? If so, it was gone like a swift ripple on a still pond.

Had Cartright seen it? So it must have been, for the despair upon his own face deepened and turned it into a thing of agony.

Once more his head began to turn backward with that slow and dreadful suggestion of unseen compulsion!

He swayed forward, fighting against it. He stumbled up the steps. I knew with what destroying effort he dragged his eyes down to the next shining print. He poised over it a shaking foot—

And slowly, slowly, ever his head turned… back, back to the telltale globe!

He drew back the foot. He thrust it forward again… and again withdrew it. He sobbed. And I strained at my bonds, cursing and sobbing with him…

Now his head was half around, his face turned directly to me…

He recoiled from the print. His body swung about with the snap of a breaking spring. He looked at the globe and saw.

The three prints upon the fortunate field!

A vast sighing went up from the black amphitheater.

“The tool again betrays its weakness!” It was Satan’s voice. “Lo, deliverance was in your hands, Cartright. And like Lot’s wife, you turned to look! And now you must descend… and all is to do again. But wait. Let us see if you may not have lost something far greater than deliverance. That footprint upon which you could not summon the courage to tread. What was it? I am curious to know.”

He spoke in some strange tongue to the guard at the right of the print. The man came forward and pressed his foot upon the mark.

Out upon the pale semi-disk of the globe flashed out another shimmering print!

Crown and scepter! Empire of Earth! Not only free from Satan – but his master!

All this Cartright might have won.

And he had turned to look – and lost.

A groan went up from the darkness, murmurings. They were stilled by the dreadful laughter that rolled from Satan’s still lips.

“Lost! Lost!” he mocked. “Go back, Cartright, And climb again. And not twice, I think, will such luck as this come to you. Go back, traitor. And climb!” He pressed the lever and the hidden mechanism whirred and the seven prints flashed out.

Cartright tottered down the steps. He walked like a puppet whose legs are pulled by strings.

He stopped at the base of the steps. He turned, and again, like some marionette, began to climb, putting his foot automatically on each mark as he came to it. His eyes were fixed upon the scepter and the crown. His arms were stretched out to them. His mouth was drawn at the corners like a heartbroken child, and as he climbed he wept.

One – and a shining print sprang out on the black field of the globe.

Two – another.

Three – a print on the white side.

Four – a print on the black I

A roar of hellish laughter shook Satan. For an instant I seemed to see his black robe melt, become vaporous and change into an enveloping shadow. A blacker shadow seemed to hover over him.

And still his laughter roared and still Cartright climbed the steps, his eyes streaming, face contorted, gaze fixed upon the glittering baubles in the golden throne, arms reaching out for them…

There was a swishing sound. The black horror had leaned forward and cast his cord. It circled over Cartright’s head and tightened about his shoulders.

A tug, and he had fallen.

Then hand over hand, unresisting, the torturer pulled him up the steps and to him like a fish:

The light went out. It left a blackness made darker by the rolling, demonic laughter.

The laughter ceased. I heard a thin, wailing cry.

The light came on.

The black throne was empty. Empty too was the dais. Empty of Satan, of the torturer and of – Cartright!

Only the orb of the scepter and the crown glittered mockingly on the golden throne between the two lines of watching, white-robed men.

— VII —

I felt a touch upon my arm, sprang back and faced Consardine. On his face was a shadow of that horror I knew was on my own.

The bands around my arms and legs sprang back, veil and gag were lifted from me. I leaped from the chair. And again blackness fell.

The amber glow returned, slowly. I looked toward the back of the temple. Empty now was the amphitheater of all that hidden audience whose sighing and murmuring had come to me. I stared back at the steps.

Golden throne and its burden had vanished. Gone were all but two of the white-robed figures. These stood guarding the black throne.

The blue eyes of the stone Satan blazed out at me. The seven shining prints of a child’s foot sparkled.

“They opened his way into Paradise, and he weakened, and they led him straight into Hell.”

Consardine stared at the seven shining footsteps, and on his face was that avid look I had seen on faces bent over the rouge-et-noir tables at Monte Carlo; faces molded by the scorching fingers of the gambler’s passion which is a lust exceeding that for women; faces that glare hungrily at the wheel just before it begins to spin and that see not the wheel but the golden booty its spinning may draw for them from Fortune’s heaped hands. Like them, Consardine was seeing not the gleaming prints but that enchanted land to which they led where all desire was fulfilled.

The web of Satan’s lure had him!

Well, despite what I had just beheld, so had it me. I was conscious of an impatience, a straining desire to put my own luck to the test. But in it, stronger far than the desire to gain the treasures he had promised was the desire to make that mocking, cold and merciless devil do my bidding as he had made me do his.

Consardine broke the spell that held him and turned to me.

“It’s been rather an evening for you, Kirkham,” he said. “Do you want to go to your room now, or will you stop in my quarters and have a nightcap with me?”

I hesitated. I had a thousand questions to ask. And yet I felt even more the necessity of being by myself and digesting what I had heard and seen since I had been brought to this place. Besides – of my thousand questions how many would he answer? Reasoning from my recent experiences, few. He, himself, ended the uncertainty.

“You’d better go to bed,” he said. “Satan desires you to think over what he has proposed to you. And, after all, I am not permitted” – he caught himself hastily – “I mean I can add nothing to what he did say. He will want your answer tomorrow – or rather” – he glanced at his watch – “today, since it is nearly two o’clock.”

“What time shall I see him?” I asked.

“Oh, not till afternoon, surely,” he answered. “He” – a slight shudder passed over him – “he will be occupied for hours still. You may sleep till noon if you wish.”

“Very well,” I said, “I’ll go to my room.”

Without further comment he led me back toward the amphitheater, and up to the rear wall. He pressed, and one of the inevitable panels slid away revealing another of the little elevators. He looked back at the footprints before closing the panel. They glimmered, alertly. The two white-robed guards stood at the sides of the black throne, their strange eyes intent upon us.

Again he shivered, then sighed and closed the slide. We stepped out into a long, vaulted corridor sheathed with slabs of marble. It was doorless. He pressed upon one of the slabs and we entered a second lift. It stopped and I passed out of it into the chamber where I had changed into evening clothes.

Pajamas had been laid out for me on the bed, slippers and a bathrobe were on an easy chair. On a table were decanters of Scotch, rye and brandy, soda, a bowl of ice, some fruit and cakes, several boxes of my favorite cigarettes – and my missing wallet.

I opened the latter. There were my cards and letters and my money all intact. Making no comment, I poured myself out a drink and invited Consardine to join me.

“To the fortunate steps,” he raised his glass. “May you have the luck to pick them!”

“May you,” I answered. His face twitched, a haggard shadow dimmed his eyes, he looked at me strangely, and half set down his drink.

“The toast is to you, not to me,” he said at last and drained his glass. He walked across the room. At the panel he paused.

“Kirkham,” he spoke softly, “sleep without fear. But – keep away from these walls. If you should want anything, ring the bell there” – he pointed to a button on the table – “and Thomas will answer it. I repeat – do not try to open any of these panels. And if I were you I would go to sleep and do no more thinking until you awaken. Would you like, by the way, a sleeping draught? I am really a doctor, you know,” he smiled.

“Thanks,” I said, “I’ll need nothing to make me sleep.”

“Good night,” he bade me, and the panel closed.

I poured myself another drink and began to undress. I was not sleepy – far from it. Despite Consardine’s warning I went over the walls both of the bed chamber and bathroom, touching them cautiously here and there. They seemed solid, of heavy wood, beautifully grained and polished. As I had thought, there were no windows or doors. My room was, in truth, a luxurious cell.

I switched off the lights, one by one and, getting into the bed, turned off the last light upon the side table.

How long I had lain there in the darkness, thinking, before I sensed someone in the room besides myself I do not know. Perhaps half an hour at most. I had heard not the slightest sound, but I knew with absolute certainty that I was no longer alone. I slipped out of the light covering, and twisted silently to the foot of the bed. There I crouched upon one knee, ready to leap when my stealthy visitor had reached its side. To have turned on the light would have put me completely at his mercy. Whoever it was, he evidently thought me asleep and his attack, if attack there was to be, would be made where he would naturally suppose my body to lie. Well, my body was in an entirely different place, and it was I who would provide the surprise.

Instead of an attack came a whisper:

“It’s me, Cap’n Kirkham – ’Arry Barker. For God’s sake, sir, don’t myke no noise!”

I seemed to know that voice. And then I remembered. Barker, the little cockney Tommy that I had run across, bled almost white, in a shell-torn thicket of the Marne. I had given first aid to the little man and had managed to carry him to a field hospital. I had happened to be for some days in the town where was the base hospital to which he had finally been taken and had dropped in regularly to talk to him, bringing him cigarettes and other luxuries. His gratitude to me had been dog-like and touching; he was a sentimental little beggar. Then I had seen him no more. How in the name of Heaven had he come to this place?

“You remember me, Captain?” the whispering voice was anxious. “Wyte a bit. I’ll show you…”

There was the flash of a small light held in a cupped hand so that it illuminated for a second only the speaker’s face. But in that second I recognized it as Barker’s – shrewd and narrow, sandy hair bristling, the short upper lip and buck teeth.

“Barker – well, I’ll be damned!” I swore softly, but did not add that the sight of him was so welcome that had he been close enough I would have embraced him.

“S-sh!” he cautioned. “I’m fair sure there ain’t nobody watchin’. You can’t always tell in this Gord awful plyce, though. Tyke me ’and, sir. There’s a chair over there just beside where I come through the wall. Sit in it an’ light a cigar. If I ’ear anything I can slip right back – an’ all you’re doin’ is sittin’ up smokin’.”

His hand caught mine. He seemed to be able to see in the dark for he led me unerringly across the floor and pressed me into the cushioned seat.

“Light up, sir,” he said.

I struck a match and lighted a cigar. The flare showed the room, but no Barker. I flicked it out and after a moment I heard his whisper close to my ear.

“First thing I want to say, sir, is don’t let ’im scare you with that bunk about bein’ the devil. ’E’s a devil right enough, a bloody, blinkin’ one, but ’e ain’t the devil. ’E’s pullin’ your leg, sir. ’E’s a man just like me an’ you. A knife in ’is black ’eart or a bullet through ’is guts an’ you’d see.”

“How did you know I was here?” I whispered.

“Seen you in the chair,” he answered. “’Ere’s my ’and. When you want to sye anything, squeeze it an’ I’ll lean my ear close. It’s syfer. Yes, seen you in the chair – out there. Fact is, sir, I’m the one that looks after that chair. Look after a lot of such damned things ’ere. That’s why ’e lets me live. Satan, I mean.”

He went back to his first theme, bitterly.

“But ’e ain’t the devil, sir. Always remember ’e ain’t. I was brought up Gord-fearin’. Pentecosters, my people was. Taught me Satan was in ’ell, they did. An’ won’t ’e just give this bloody swine particular ’ell for tykin’ ’is nyme in vyne when ’e gets ’im in ’ell! Christ, ’ow I’d like to see it.

“From h’outside lookin’ in,” he added hastily.

I pressed his hand and felt his ear close to my lips.

“How did you get here, Harry?” I murmured. “And who is this – Satan, and what’s his real game?”

“I’ll tell you the ’ole tale, Captain,” he answered. “It’ll tyke a little time, but Gord knows when I’ll get the chance again. That’s why I beat it to you quick as I could. The bloody beast is gloatin’ over that poor devil Cartright. Watchin’ ’im die! The rest is either sleepin’ or drinkin’ themselves blind. Still, as I said, we’ll tyke no chances. You let me talk an’ ask your questions afterwards.”

“Go on,” I said.

“I was an electrician before the war,” came the whisper in the dark. “None better. Master at it. ’E knows I am. It’s why ’e let me live, as I told you. Satan – augh-h-h!

“Things was different after the war. Jobs ’ard to get an’ livin’ ’igh. Got lookin’ at things different, too. Seen lots of muckers what hadn’t done a thing in the war but live cushy and pile up loot. What right ’ad they to ’ave all they ’ad when them as ’ad fought an’ their families was cold an’ ’ungry?

“’Andy with my ’ands I always was. An’ light on my feet. Climb! Climb like a cat. Climb like a bloody centipede. An’ quiet! A spook in galoshes was a parade compared to me. I ain’t praisin’ myself, sir. I’m just tellin’ you.

“Syes I to myself, ‘’Arry, it’s all wrong. ’Arry, it’s time to turn your talents to account. Time to settle down to real work, ’Arry.’

“I was good from the very start at the new trade. I kept goin’ ’igher an’ ’igher. From villas to apartment ’ouses, apartment ’ouses to mansions. Never once caught. King Cat ’Arry they called me. Swarm up a water pipe as easy as porch pillar, up an apartment ’ouse wall as easy as a water pipe. Master at my new trade just like my old.

“Then I met Maggie. They only myke one like Maggie once, sir. Quick with ’er fingers! She made ’Oudini an’ ’Errman look like slow movies. An’ a lydy. Regular Clare Vere de Vere when she wanted to be!

“Lot’s of swell mobsmen wanted to myke Maggie. She’d ’ave none of them. All wrapped up in ’er work she was. ‘’Ell!’ she’d sye, just like a duchess, ‘what do I want with a ’usband? ’Ell,’ she’d sye, ‘A ’usband is about as much use as a ’eadache!’ Sort of discouragin’, was Maggie.

“Captain, we was crazy h’about each other right off. Married we was, quick. Took a nice ’ouse down in Maida Vale. Was I ’appy? Was she? Gord!

“‘Now, Maggie,’ I syes after we come back from the ’oneymoon, ‘there ain’t no reason for you workin’ no more. I’m a good provider. I’m a ’ard an’ conscientious worker. All you ’ave to do is enjoy yourself an’ make our ’ome comfortable an’ ’appy.’

“An’ Maggie said, ‘Righto, ’Arry.’

“I was wearin’ I remember a stick pin she’d give me for a weddin’ present. Big ruby in it. An’ a watch she’d give me, an’ a nifty ring with pearls. Admired ’em I ’ad when I see ’em on a couple of toffs at the ’otel we stopped at. An’ that night when we went to our room she ’anded ’em to me as a present! That was the kind of a worker Maggie was.”

I suppressed a chuckle with difficulty. This whispered-in-the-dark romance of the conscientious soldier and able electrician turned into just as able and conscientious a burglar was the one touch needed to make the night complete. It washed away the film of horror in my mind and brought me back to normal.

“Night or two lyter I was takin’ a dye off an’ we went to the theayter. ‘’Ow do you like that pin, ’Arry?’ whispers Maggie an’ shoots a look at a sparkler in the toff’s tie next me. ‘Ain’t it pretty,’ syes I, ’eedlessly.’ ‘’Ere it is!’ syes Maggie when we get ’ome.

“‘Now, Maggie,’ I syes, ‘I told you I don’t want you to work no more. Ain’t I the good provider I promised? Can’t I get all the pins I want, myself? All I want, Maggie, is a snug, comfortable, ’appy ’ome when I come back from a ’ard night’s work an’ my wife to welcome me. I won’t ’ave you workin’, Maggie!”

“‘Righto, ’Arry,’ syes she.

“But, Captain, it wasn’t all right. It got so that when we went out together I didn’t dare to look at a man’s tie or ’is watch or nothin’. I couldn’t even stand an’ admire things in shops. Sure’s I did, there when we got ’ome or the next dye would be the things I’d admired. An’ Maggie so proud like an’ pleased she’d got ’em for me that I ’adn’t the ’eart – Oh, it was love all right, but – Oh, ’ell!

“She’d be waitin’ for me when I got ’ome. But if I’d wyke up from sleep before my time, she was out. An’ when I’d wyke up after she got back, first thing I’d see was laces, or a fur coat, or a ring or two lyde out on the tyble.

“She’d been workin’ again!

“‘Maggie, I’d sye, ‘it ain’t right. It ’urts my pride. An’ ow’ll it be when kiddies come? With their daddy out workin’ all night an’ sleepin’ while their mother’s out workin’ all dye an’ sleepin’ while their daddy’s workin’ – ’ell, Maggie, they might as well be h’orphants!’

“But ’twas no good, Captain. She loved ’er work more than she did me, or maybe she just couldn’t tell us apart.

“An’ at last I ’ad to leave ’er. Fair broke my ’eart, it did. I loved ’er an’ my ’ome. But I just couldn’t stand it.

“So I come to America. Me, King Cat ’Arry, an exile because my wife couldn’t stop workin’.

“Did well, too. But I wasn’t ’appy. One dye I was out in the country an’ I ran across a big wall. Fair built to tempt me, it was. After while I come to a pair of gates, iron and a guard house behind ’em. Gates not barred. Solid.

“‘Goramighty!’ syes I to myself. ‘It must be the Duke of New York lives ’ere.’ I reconnoitered. That wall must ’ave been five miles long. I ’id around an’ that night I climbed on top of it. Nothin’ but trees an’ far-off lights shinin’ as though it was a big castle.

“First thing I look for is wires. There was a wire just at the h’inner edge of the wall. Careful I was not to touch it. Charged, I guessed it. I looked over an’ took a chance at shootin’ my flash. There was two more wires down at the base just where anyone would land on ’em if they shinned down the wall. An’ it was a twelve-foot drop.

“Anybody else would have been discouraged. But they didn’t nyme me King Cat for nothin’. Took a leap, I did. Landed soft as a cat. Sneaked through the trees like a weasel. Came up to the big ’ouse.

“Saw a ’ole lot of queer people goin’ in an’ around. After while most of the lights went out. Swarmed up a place I’d spotted an’ found myself in a big room. An’ Cripes, the stuff in that room! It fair myde my ’ed swim. I picked up a few tysty bits, an’ then I noticed something funny. There wasn’t no doors to that room! ‘’Ow the ’ell do they get in?’ I asked myself. An’ then I looked around at the windows I’d come through.”

“Goramighty, Captain, I fair fell out of my shirt! There wasn’t no windows. They’d disappeared. There wasn’t nothin’ but wall!”

“An’ then a big light blazed up an’ out of the walls come about a dozen men with ropes an’ a big man after them. I shriveled when he turned them h’eyes of ’is on me. Scared! If I’d nearly fell out of my shirt before, now I was slippin’ from my pants.

“Well, it was this bloody bloke Satan, y’understand. ’E just stood scorchin’ me. Then ’e started to ask me questions.

“Captain, I told ’im everythin’. Just like ’e was Gord. ’E ’ad me fair kippered. Told ’im all about bein’ an electrician, an’ my new work, an’ about Maggie. Just as I been tellin’ you, only more so. ’Strewth, sir, ’e ’ad my life from the time I was out of swaddles.

“’E laughed. That awful laugh. You’ve ’eard it. ’Ow, ’e laughed! An’ next thing I knows I’m standin’ at ’is table an’ tellin’ it all over to Consardine.

“An’ ’ere I’ve been ever since, Cap’n Kirkham. ’E put me under sentence of death, sir, an’ sooner or later ’e’ll do for me. Unless ’e’s done for first. But ’e finds me very useful, ’e does, an’ ’e won’t do for me as long as I’m that to ’im. Also ’e syes I entertain ’em. Fair prize ’og for entertainment ’e is! Gets me in there with Consardine an’ others and mykes me tell ’em about my work, an’ ambitions an’ my sacredest sentiments. All about Maggie, too. Everything about ’er, sir.

“Gord, ’ow I ’ate ’im! The muckin’, bloody, blue-eyed son of a mangy she-dog! But ’e’s got me! ’E’s got me! Like ’e’s got you!”

The little man’s voice had risen dangerously high. The shrill edge of hysteria was beginning to creep into it. All along I had sensed the tension under which he was laboring. But aside from the welcome diversion of his unintentionally droll story, I had realized the necessity of letting him run along and pour out his heart to me. Mine was perhaps the first sympathetic ear he had encountered since his imprisonment in this place. Certainly I was the only friend, and it must have seemed to him that I had dropped down from Heaven. I was deeply touched by the swiftness with which he had flown to me as soon as he had recognized me. That he had run grave risks to do this seemed sure.

“Quiet, Harry! Quiet!” I whispered, patting his hand. “You’re not alone now. Between the two of us, we ought to find some way to get you free.”

“No!” I could almost see the despairing shake of his head. “You don’t know ’im, sir. There wouldn’t be a bit of use in my gettin’ away. ’E’d ’ave me in no time. No. I can’t get away while ’e’s alive.”

“How did you know where I was? How did you find me?” I asked.

“Come through the walls,” he said. “There ain’t an honest stairs or door in this ’ole place. Nothin’ but passages in the walls, an’ panels that slide, an’ lifts all over, thick as the seeds in a pumpkin. Satan, ’e’s the only one that knows the ’ole combination. Consardine, ’e’s ’is right ’and man ’ere, knows some of ’em. But I know more than Consardine. I ought to. Been ’ere nigh on two years now, I ’ave. Never once been out. ’E’s warned me. If I go outside ’e does for me. Been creepin’, creepin’, creepin’, round like a rat in the walls whenever I got the chance. A lot of wires to look after, too, an’ that learned me. I don’t know all – but I know a ’ell of a lot. I was close behind you and Consardine all the time.”

“What is Satan?” I asked. “I mean, where does he come from – admitting it’s not from Hell?”

“I think he’s part Rooshian and part Chink. ’E’s got Chink in ’im, sure. Where ’e was before ’e come ’ere, I don’t know. I don’t dare ask questions. But I found out ’e took this plyce about ten years ago. An’ the people who tore it apart inside an’ fixed up the panels an’ passages were all Chinks.”

“But you can’t look after a place like this all by yourself, Harry,” I considered. “And I can’t see Satan giving many the chance to learn the combination.”

“’E lets me use the kehjt slyves,” he answered astonishingly.

“That’s twice tonight I’ve heard their name,” I said. “What are they?”

“Them?” there was loathing and horror in his voice. “They fair give you the creeps. ’E feeds ’em with the kehjt. Opium, coke, ’asheesh – they’re mother’s milk compared to it. Gives each one of ’em ’is or ’er particular Paradise – till they wake up. Murder’s the least of what they’ll do to get another shot. Them fellows in the white nightgowns that stood on the steps with their ropes, was some of ’em. You’ve ’eard of the Old Man of the Mountains who used to send out the assassins. Feller told me about ’em in the war.

“Satan’s gyme’s the syme. One drink of it an’ they can’t do without it. Then he gets ’em believin’ if they get killed for ’im ’e can stick their souls where they get forever the ’appiness the kehjt gives ’em ’ere only occasionally. Then! They’ll do anything for Satan! Anything!”

I broached the question I had long been waiting to ask.

“Do you know a girl named Eve? Big brown eyes and—”

“Eve Demerest,” he answered. “Poor kid! ’E’s got ’er all right. Gord, what a shyme! ’E’ll drag ’er down to ’ell, an’ she’s an angel, a – Careful! Smoke up!”

His hand jerked from mine. I heard a faint sound from the opposite wall. I drew upon my cigar, and stretched and sighed. Again the sound, the veriest ghost of one.

“Who’s there?” I called, sharply.

A light flashed up and by the wall, beside an opened panel, stood Thomas, the valet.

“Did you call, sir?” he asked. His eyes glanced swiftly around the room, then came to rest on mine, and there was suspicion in them.

“No,” I said, indifferently.

“I am sure the bell rang, sir. I was half asleep—” he hesitated.

“Then you were dreaming,” I told him.

“I’ll just fix your bed for you, sir, while I’m here.”

“Do,” I said. “When I’ve finished my cigar I’ll turn in.”

He made it up and drew a handkerchief from his pocket. A coin dropped upon the floor at his feet. As he stooped to pick it up it slipped from his fingers and rolled beneath the bed. He got down upon his knees and felt about. It was very neatly done. I had been wondering whether he would boldly look under the bed or devise some such polite stratagem.

“Will you have a drink, Thomas?” I asked him, cordially, as he stood up, once more searching the room with his eyes.

“Thank you, sir, I will,” he poured himself a rather stiff one. “If you don’t mind I’ll get some plain water.”

“Go ahead,” I bade him. He walked into the bathroom and turned on the light. I continued to smoke serenely. He emerged, satisfied apparently that there was no one there. He took his drink and went to the panel.

“I hope you will sleep, sir.”

“I shall,” I answered cheerfully. “Turn out the light as you go.”

He vanished, but I was certain that he was still behind the wall, listening. And after a little while I yawned loudly, arose, walked over to the bed and making what noise I could naturally, turned in.

For a little while I lay awake, turning over the situation in the light of what Barker had told me. A castle with no stairs or “honest doors.” … A labyrinth of secret passages and sliding panels. And the little thief creeping, creeping through the walls, denied the open, patiently marking down one by one their secrets. Well, there was a rare ally, indeed, if I should need one.

And Satan! Dealing out Paradise by retail to these mysterious slaves of his potent drug. Promising Paradise to those others by his seven shining footsteps. What was his aim? What did he get out of it?

Well, I would probably know more this afternoon after I had obeyed his second summons.

And Eve? Damn that prying Thomas for interrupting just as I was finding out something about her.

Well, I would play Satan’s game – with a few reservations.

I went to sleep.

— VIII —

When I woke up, Thomas was at the closet selecting a suit. I heard the taps running in the bath. How long he had been in the room I could not tell. No doubt he had made a thorough search of it. Lazily I wondered what it had been that had aroused his suspicions. I looked at my watch. It had stopped.

“Hello, Thomas,” I hailed him. “What’s the time?”

He popped out of the wardrobe like a startled rabbit.

“It’s one o’clock. I wouldn’t have disturbed you, sir, but the Master is expecting you to breakfast with him at two.”

“Good.” I made for the bath. As I splashed around, the half-formed plan upon which I had gone to sleep suddenly crystallized. I would try my luck at the footprints at once. But – I would not go the distance. Not this time. I would step upon two of them and no more. There was much I wanted to know before running the risk of delivering myself over to Satan body and soul.

What I hoped was that only one of the two would be his. At the worst I would incur a year’s bondage. Well, I did not mind that so much either.

I had, in fact, determined to match my wits against Satan rather than my luck.

I did not want to escape him. My keenest desire was to be incorporated among his entourage, infernal or not. Barker gave me a unique advantage. Out of it might well come the opportunity to tumble this slanting blue-eyed devil off his black throne, break his power and – well, why mince words – loot him.

Or, to put it more politely, recover from him a thousand fold what he had so casually stripped me of.

That had been twenty thousand dollars. To wipe off the debt at that rate I must strip Satan of twenty millions—

That would be a good game indeed. I laughed.

“You seem quite gay, sir,” said Thomas.

“The birds, Thomas,” I said, “are singing everywhere. Everywhere, Thomas. Even here.”

“Yes, sir,” he answered, looking at me dubiously.

It was a quarter of two when I had finished. The valet walked me into the hall and out again, stopping the lift this time at a much higher level. Again I emerged into a small antechamber whose one door was guarded by two tall slaves.

Passing through it, I was dazzled by a flood of sunshine. Then the sunshine seemed to gather itself and center upon the girl who had half risen from her seat at the table as I entered. It was Eve, but a far different Eve than she who had so ably aided in my kidnapping the night before. Then I had thought her extraordinarily pretty; now I realized how inadequate was the adjective.

The girl was beautiful. Her clear brown eyes regarded me gravely, studying me with a curious intentness. Her proud little head had the poise of a princess, and the sunlight playing in her hair traced a ruddy golden coronet within it; her mouth was sweeter even than I had found it.

And as I looked at the lips I had kissed so ruthlessly, a quick rose tinted her face.

“Eve – this is Mr. Kirkham,” it was Consardine’s voice, faintly amused. “Miss Demerest and you have met, I think.”

“I think,” I answered, slowly, “that I am seeing Miss Demerest for the first time. I am hoping that she – will consider it so.”

It was as near to an apology as I could come. Would she take the proffered olive branch? Her eyes widened as though with reproachful surprise.

“To think,” mused Eve, mournfully, “that a man could so soon forget having kissed me! It seems hardly a compliment, does it, Dr. Consardine?”

“It seems,” said Consardine, truthfully, “impossible.”

“Ah, no,” sighed Eve. “No, Mr. Kirkham. I can’t think it is our first meeting. You have, you know, such a forceful way of impressing one with your personality. And a woman cannot forget kisses so easily.”

I flushed. That Eve was a consummate little actress she had given me plenty of convincing proof. But what did this bit of by-play mean? I could not believe that she was so bitterly offended by my actions in the Subway; she was too intelligent for that. Yet if she distrusted me, disliked me, how could I help her?

“My remark,” I said, “was prompted wholly by politeness. The truth is, Miss Demerest, that I consider those kisses generous payment for any inconveniences of my interesting journey here.”

“Well, then,” she said coldly, “you have made your trade and the slate is clean. And do not trouble to be polite with me, Mr. Kirkham. Just be yourself. You are much more amusing.”

I choked back an angry retort and bowed.

“Quite right,” I returned, as coldly as she. “After all there seems to be no reason why I should be polite to you.”

“None at all,” she answered indifferently. “And, frankly, the less I come into contact with even your natural self, Mr. Kirkham, the better it will be for both of us.”

That was an oddly turned phrase, it flashed upon me. And there was an enigmatic something deep in the brown eyes. What did she mean? Was she trying to convey to me some message that Consardine would not suspect? I heard a chuckle and turned to face – Satan.

I could not know how long he had been listening. As his gaze rested on the girl I saw a momentary flashing of the brilliant eyes, and a flicker passed over his face. It was as though the hidden devil within him had licked its lips.

“Quarreling! Oh fie!” he said unctuously.

“Quarreling? Not at all,” Eve answered coolly. “It happens that I dislike Mr. Kirkham. I am sorry – but it is so. It seemed to me better to tell him, that we may avoid each other in the future except, of course, when you find it necessary for us to be together, Satan.”

It was disconcerting, to say the least. I made no effort to hide my chagrin. Satan looked at me and chuckled again. I had a curious conviction that he was pleased.

“Well,” he purred, “even I have no power over personal prejudices. All that I can do is to make use of them. In the meantime – I am hungry.”

He seated himself at the table’s head; Eve at his right hand, I at his left and Consardine beside me. The Manchu butler and another Chinese served us.

We were in a tower room, clearly. The windows were set high above the floor and through them I could see only the blue sky. The walls were covered with Fragonard and Boucher panels, and I had no doubt that they had been acquired by the “eloquence” of Satan’s messengers. The rest of the chamber was in keeping; furnished with that same amazing eclecticism and perception of the beautiful that I had noted in the great hall and in the room where I had first met the blue-eyed devil.

Eve, having defined my place – or lack of place – in her regard, was coolly aloof to me but courteous, and sparkling and witty with Satan and Consardine. The drama of the temple and Cartright’s punishment seemed to be forgotten by the three of them. Satan was in the best of humors, but in his diabolic benignity – it is the only way I can describe it – was, to me, the sinister suggestion of a wild beast playful because its appetite has been appeased, an addict of cruelty mellowed by the ultimate anguish to which he has subjected a sacrifice. I had a vivid and unpleasant picture of him wallowing like a tiger upon the torn carcass of the man whom he had sent out of life a few hours before through the gateways of hell.

Yet the sunlight stripped him of much of his vague terror. And if he was, as Barker had put it, “an ’og for entertainment” he was himself a masterly entertainer. Something had shifted the conversation toward Jenghis Khan and for half an hour Satan told us stories of that Ruler of the Golden Horde and his black palace in his lost city of Khara-Khoto in the Gobi that wiped all the present out of my mind and set me back, seeing and hearing, into a world ten centuries gone; stories tragic and comic. Rabelaisian and tender – and all as though he had himself been a witness to what he described. Indeed, listening, it seemed to me that he could have been nothing else. Devil or not, the man had magic.

And at the end he signaled the two servants to go, and when they had gone he said to me, abruptly: “Well, James Kirkham, is it yes or no?” I feigned to hesitate. I leaned my head upon my hand and under its cover shot a glance at Eve. She was patting her mouth with slim fingers, suppressing a yawn – but there was a pallor upon her face that had not been there a moment before. I felt Satan’s will beating down upon me, tangibly.

“Yes – or no?” he repeated.

“Yes,” I said, “if, Satan, you will answer one question.”

“It is always permitted to ask,” he replied. “Well, then,” I said, “I want to know what kind of an – employer you are before I make a play that may mean life service to me. A man is his aims plus the way he works to attain them. As to your methods, I have had at least an illuminative inkling. But what are your aims? In the olden days, Satan, the question would have been unnecessary. Everybody who dealt with you knew that what you were after were souls to keep your furnaces busy. But Hell, I understand, has been modernized with its Master. Furnaces are out of date and fuel therefore nothing like so valuable. Yet still, as of old, you take your prospective customers up a high mountain and offer them the kingdoms of Earth. Very well, the question. What, Satan, do you get out of it now?”

“There you have one reason for my aversion to Mr. Kirkham,” murmured Eve. “He admits nothing that cannot be balanced in a set of books. He has the shopkeeper outlook.”

I ignored this thrust. But once more Satan chuckled from still lips.

“A proper question, Eve,” he told her. “You forget that even I always keep my accounts balanced – and present them when the time comes for payment.”

He spoke the last words slowly, contemplatively, staring at her – and again I saw the devil’s gloating flicker over his face. And she saw it too, for she caught her lip between her teeth to check its trembling.

“Then answer,” I spoke abruptly to draw his attention from her back to me. He studied me as though picking the words to reply.

“Call it,” he said at last, “amusement. It is for amusement that I exist. It is for that alone that I remain upon a world in which, when all is said and done, amusement in some form or guise is the one great aim of all, the only thing that makes life upon it tolerable. My aim is, therefore, you perceive, a simple one. But what is it that amuses me?

“Three things. I am a great playwright, the greatest that has ever lived, since my plays are real. I set the scenes for my little single acts, my farces and comedies, dramas and tragedies, my epics. I direct the actors. I am the sole audience that can see every action, hear every line, of my plays from beginning to end. Sometimes what began as a farce turns into high tragedy, tragedies become farces, a one-act diversion develops into an epic, governments fall, the mighty topple from their pedestals, the lowly are exalted. Some people live their lives for chess. I play my chess with living chessmen and I play a score of games at once in all corners of the world. All this amuses me. Furthermore, in my character as Prince of Darkness, which I perceive, James Kirkham, that you do not wholly admit, my art puts me on a par with that other super-dramatist, my ancient and Celestial adversary known according to the dominant local creed as Jehovah. Nay, it places me higher – since I rewrite his script. This also amuses me.”

Under the suave, sardonic mockery I read truth. To this cold, monstrous intellect, men and women were only puppets moving over a worldwide stage. Suffering, sorrow, anguish of mind or body were to it nothing but entertaining reactions to situations which it had conceived. Like the dark Power whose name Satan had taken, souls were his playthings. Their antics amused him. In that he found sufficient reward for labor.

“That,” he said, “is one of the three. The second? I am a lover of beauty. It is, indeed, the one thing that can arouse in me what may be called – emotion. It happens now and then that man with his mind and eyes and heart and hands makes visible and manifest something which bears that stamp of creative perfection the monopoly of which tradition ascribes to the same Celestial adversary I have named. It may be a painting, a statue, a carved bit of wood, a crystal, a vase, a fabric – any one of ten thousand things. But in it is that essence of beauty humanity calls divine and for which, in its blundering way, it is always seeking – as it is amusement. The best of these things I make from time to time my own. But – I will not have them come to me except by my own way. Here enters the third element – the gamble, the game.

“For example. I decided, after mature reflection, that the Mona Lisa of da Vinci, in the Louvre, had the quality I desired. It could not, of course, be bought; nor did I desire to buy it. Yet it is here. In this house. I allowed France to recover an excellent duplicate in which my experts reproduced perfectly even the microscopic cracks in the paint. Only now have they begun to suspect. They can never be sure – and that amuses me more than if they knew.

“James Kirkham, men risk their lives over the globe in search of treasure. I tell you that never, never since mankind began, was there ever such a treasure trove as this house of mine. The fortunes of the ten richest men in all the world could not buy it. It is more precious than all the gold in the Bank of England.

“Its values in dollars and pounds is nothing to me. But to possess this pure essence of beauty, to dwell with it, that is – much! And to know that the best of my ancient adversary’s choicest inspirations are mine, Satan’s – that is amusing! Ho! Ho!” he roared.

“Third and last,” he checked his laughter, “is the game. Collector of souls and beauty I am. Gambler am I, too, and as supreme in that as in my collecting. It is the unknown quantity, the risk, that sharpens the edge of my enjoyment of my plays. It is what gives the final zest to my – acquirements. And I am a generous opponent. The stakes those who play with me may win are immeasurably higher than any I could win from them. But play with me – they must!”

For a moment he stared at me, huge head thrust forward.

“As for the rest,” he said, “I have, as you surmised, no further interest in stoking my traditional furnaces. What happens to any man after he leaves this earth concerns me no longer. I have given up my ancient domain for this where I am amused so well. But, James Kirkham” – his blue eyes blazed out at me – “those who cross me find that I have lost none of my old skill as a Hell maker. Now are you answered?”

“Fully, sir,” I bowed. “I will gamble with you. And, win or lose, you shall have no occasion to find fault with me. But, by your leave, one more question. You have said that he who mounts the four fortunate steps can have anything that he desires. Very well, if I do so can I have” – I pointed to Eve – “her?”

I heard a gasp from Eve, watched Satan bend toward me, scrutinizing me with eyes in which a menacing coldness had appeared. Consardine spoke:

“Oh, come, now, Kirkham, be reasonable. Eve’s been honest with you. She’s made it pretty plain you’re not an acceptable candidate for bridegroom.”

I sensed a certain anxiety in his voice; the desire to placate. Placate whom – me or Satan? It interested me, hugely. Perhaps Consardine—

“Marry – you? Not for anything in this world, not to save my life, not to save myself torture!”

Eve’s voice was shrill with anger. She had sprung to her feet and stood, eyes flashing wrath, red danger signals on her cheeks. I met Satan’s gaze, squarely.

“Have I mentioned – marriage?” I asked him, blandly.

He took, as I had thought he would, the worst interpretation out of that. I saw the menace and suspicion fade away as swiftly as it had come. Yes, he took the worst interpretation, but – so did Eve.

“Satan,” she stamped her foot and thrust her chair from her with such force that it went careening over on its side, “Satan, I have a question, too. If I take the steps will you give me this man to do with as it pleases me?”

Satan looked from one to the other of us. Very evidently the situation gave him much gratification. The blue eyes sparkled and there was a benignant purr in his voice when he spoke.

“To both of you I must answer – no. No, to you, Eve, because James Kirkham has accepted my challenge to the gamble of the steps. That being so, I could not withdraw if I would. He must have his chance. Also, if he should lose to me for one undertaking or enter my service for a year, I am bound to protect him. I am bound also to give him his other chances, should he claim them. But, Eve – if he should decide to gamble no more – why, then, ask me again.”

He paused and stared at me. I had no doubt as to his meaning.

“And no to you, James Kirkham,” he said, “because all that I have said to Eve as to your position applies equally to hers. She too has her right to her chances. But” – his voice lost its benignity and grew heavy – “there is another reason. I have decreed for Eve a high destiny. Should she fulfill it – she will be far above the reach of any man. Should she shirk it—”

He did not finish the sentence; only brooded upon her with unwinking, blazing eyes. I watched the blood slowly drain from her cheeks, saw her own eyes falter and drop. There was a sharp snap and a tinkle of glass. Consardine’s hand had been playing with a heavy goblet of thick crystal and now, tightening around it, had crushed it as though it had been made of paper. He thrust the hand into his pocket, but not before I had seen blood upon it. Satan’s eyes dwelt upon him inscrutably.

“Strength like yours, Consardine,” he said, “is often dangerous – to its owner.”

“Faith, Satan,” Consardine answered, ruefully, “I was dreaming, and thought it was a neck I held in my hand.”

“A warning, I should say,” said Satan, grimly, “to leave that particular neck alone.”

“I’ve no choice,” laughed Consardine, “since the throat I had in mind was of an old enemy these ten years dead.”

For another moment or two Satan studied him, but made no further comment. He turned to me.

“You have decided,” he said. “When will you mount the steps?”

“Any time,” I answered. “The sooner the better. Now, if it’s possible. I’m feeling lucky.”

“Consardine,” he said, “have the temple prepared. Bid those who are here assemble in half an hour, Eve.”

He watched them go, the girl through a panel with never a look at me, Consardine by way of the door that led into the tiny anteroom. For long minutes Satan sat silent, regarding me. I smoked calmly, waiting for him to speak.

“James Kirkham,” he said at last, “I have told you before that you please me. Everything I have seen of you since then pleases me even more. But I must warn you of one thing. Do not let whatever chagrin or feeling of dislike that you have toward Eve Demerest be the cause of the slightest harm coming to her. You are not one that I have to threaten, but – heed this warning.”

“I put her out of my mind, Satan,” I answered. “Yet I confess I’m a bit curious about that high destiny you’ve promised her.”

“The highest destiny,” again there was the fateful heaviness in his voice. “The highest honor that could come to any woman. I will tell you, James Kirkham, so you may know how urgent is my warning. Sooner or later I shall be compelled to visit other of my worlds. When that time comes I shall turn this one over to my son and heir, and his mother shall be – Eve!”

— IX —

I consider it one of my few enough major victories that I took the shock of that infernal enunciation with perfect outward composure. Of course, in a way, I had been prepared. In spite of the rage and hatred that seethed up in me, I managed to raise my glass with a steady hand and my voice held nothing but the proper surprise and interest. “That is an honor, sir, indeed,” I said. “You will pardon me if I express a certain wonder as to your choice. For you, I would have thought, some empress, at least one of royal blood—”

“No, no,” he interrupted me, but I knew that he swallowed with relish my flattery, “you do not know the girl. You let your prejudice blind you. Eve is as perfect as any of the masterpieces I have gathered around me. To her beauty she adds brains. She has daring and spirit. Whatever – to me – otherwise desirable qualities may be lacking in her to pass on to my son, I can supply. He will be – my son. His training will be in my hands. He will be what I make him.”

“The son of Satan!” I said.

“Satan’s own son!” a flame leaped from his eyes. “My true son, James Kirkham.”

“You will understand,” he went on, “that there is in this nothing of what is called – love. Something of emotion, yes – but only that emotion which any truly beautiful thing calls up in me. It is intrinsically, solely, a matter of selective breeding: I have had the same idea before, but – I was not fortunate in my selections.”

“You mean—”

“They were girl children,” he said somberly. “They were disappointments. Therefore, they ceased to be.”

And now behind the imperturbable, heavy mask of his face I glimpsed the Chinese. Perceptibly the slant of the eyes had accentuated, the high cheek bones became more prominent. I nodded, thoughtfully.

“But if again you are—” I had meant to add “disappointed.”

He caught me up with a touch of that demonic fury he had shown at the ordeal of Cartright.

“Do not dare say it! Do not dare think it! Her firstborn shall be a son! A son, I say!”

What I might have answered, what have done, I do not know. His sudden deadliness, his arrogance, had set my smoldering wrath ablaze again. Consardine saved me. I heard the door open and the menacing gaze turned from me for a moment. It gave me my chance to recover myself.

“All is prepared, Satan,” Consardine announced. I arose eagerly, nor was that eagerness feigned. I was conscious of the beginning of a curious excitement, a heady exaltation.

“It is your moment, James Kirkham.” Satan’s voice was again expressionless, his face marble, his eyes sparkling. “But a few minutes – and I may be your servant. The world your plaything! Who knows! Who knows!”

He stepped to the farther wall and opened one of the panels.

“Dr. Consardine,” he said, “you will escort the neophyte to the temple.”

He brooded upon me, almost caressingly – I saw the hidden devil lick its lips.

“Master of the world!” he repeated. “And Satan your loyal slave! who knows!”

He was gone. Consardine drew a deep breath. He spoke, in carefully matter-of-fact fashion.

“Want a drink before you try it, Kirkham?”

I shook my head, the tingling excitement increasing.

“You know the rules,” he said briskly. “You step on any four of the seven footprints. You can stop at any one of them you choose, and abide by the consequences. One of Satan’s gives you to him for one – service; two give you to him for a year; three – and you are his forever. No more chances for you then, Kirkham. Hit the four fortunate ones and you sit on the top of the world, just as he promised you. Look back while you’re on the climb, and you have to begin all over again. All clear?”

“Let’s go,” I said, somewhat huskily – my throat felt oddly dry.

He led me to the wall and through it into one of the marble-lined corridors. From that we passed into a lift. It dropped. A panel slid aside. Consardine leading, I stepped out into the webbed temple.

I was close to the base of the steps, just within the half-circle of brilliant light that masked the amphitheater. From it came a faint rustling and murmuring. Foolishly, I hoped that Eve had picked out a good seat. I realized that I was trembling. Cursing myself silently, I mastered the tremor, praying that it had been too slight to be noticed.

I looked up at the black throne, met Satan’s mocking eyes and my nerves steadied, my control clicked into place. He sat there in his black robe, just as I had seen him the night before. The blue jeweled eyes of his stone counterpart glittered behind him. Instead of the fourteen white-robed, pallid-faced men with the noosed ropes there were but two, midway up the steps. And something else was missing. The black-visaged fiend of an executioner!

What did that mean? Was it Satan’s way of telling me that even if I trod upon his three prints he would not have me killed? Or at least that I need not fear death until I had finished the work for which he had picked me?

Or was it a trap?

That was the more likely. Somehow I could not conceive Satan thus solicitously though subtly reassuring me of a suspended sentence. Was it not, rather, that by cutting down his guards and eliminating his torturer he had schemed to plant that very thought? Lure me on to make the full gamble and go the limit of the four steps in the belief that if I lost I was sure of a reprieve that might give me time to escape him?

Or, admitting that his present purpose was benevolent, if I did lose, might it not suddenly occur to him that he would derive greater amusement from evoking his hellish servant with the cord of woman’s hair and giving me to him – like Cartright.

As Cartright had, I studied his face. It was inscrutable, nothing in it to guide me. And now, far more vividly than when I had watched that despairing wretch being hauled in to his torment, did I realize the infernal ingenuity of this game. For now it was I who had to play it.

I dropped my eyes from Satan’s. They fell upon the seven shining footprints and followed them up to the golden throne. Crown and scepter glittered upon it. Their gem fires beckoned and called to me. Again the excitement seized me, tingling along every nerve.

If I could win them! Win them and what they stood for!

Satan pressed down the lever between the two thrones. I heard the whirring of the controlling mechanism and saw the seven marks of the childish foot shine with intenser light.

“The steps are ready,” he intoned, and thrust his hands beneath his black robe. “They await their conqueror, the chosen one of fortune! Are you he? Ascend – and learn!” I walked to the steps, mounted and set my foot unhesitatingly upon the first of the prints. Behind me, I knew, its symbol glimmered on the telltale of the luminous globe—

On Satan’s side – or mine?

Again I ascended, more slowly, and paused at the next print. But it was not to weigh its probabilities of good or evil that I halted. The truth is that the gambler’s fever was rising high within me, crazily high, undermining my determination to limit this first game of mine with Satan to only two of the footsteps.

Common sense bade me go slow and get back my grip upon my judgment. Common sense, fighting for time, moved me past that mark and slowly on to the next.

I trod upon it. There was another symbol on the telltale – mine – or Satan’s?

Now the fever had me wholly. My eyes were bright with it as Satan’s own. My heart was thumping like a drum, my fingers cold, a dry electric heat beating about my head. The little feet of fire seemed to quiver and dance with eagerness to lead me on.

“Take me!” beckoned one.

“Take me!” signaled another.

The jeweled crown and scepter summoned. On the golden throne I saw a phantom – myself, triumphant, with crown upon my head, scepter in my hand, Satan at my beck and the world at my knees!

It may be true that thoughts have form, and that intense emotion or desire leave behind something of themselves that persists, lives on in the place where it was called forth and wakes, ravening, when someone moved by the same impulses that created it appears in that place. At any rate, it was as though the ghosts of desire of all those who had ascended those steps before me had rushed to me and, hungering for fulfillment, were clamoring to me to go on.

But their will was also my will. I needed no urging. I wanted to go on. After all, the two prints upon which I had trodden might well be fortunate ones. At the worst, by all the laws of chance, I should have broken even. And if so then there would be no more risk in making one more throw than I had already resolved to incur.

What did the telltale show?

Ah, if I could but know! If I could but know!

And suddenly a chill went through me, as though the ghosts of despair of all those who had mounted before me and lost had pressed back the hungry wraiths of desire.

Glitter of crown and scepter tarnished and grew sinister.

For an instant I saw the seven shining prints not as those of a child’s foot, but as of a cloven hoof!

I drew back up and looked up at Satan. He sat head bent forward, glaring at me, and with distinct shock I realized that with full force of his will he was commanding me to proceed. Instantly after that apperception came another. It was as though a hand touched my shoulder, drawing me still further back, and clearly as though lips were close to my ear I heard a counter-command, imperative—

“Stop! Stop now!”

The voice of – Eve!

For another minute I stood, shaken by the two contending impulses. Then abruptly a shadow lifted from my mind, all fever fled, the spell of the shining prints and lure of crown and orb broke. I turned my face, reeking with sweat, once more to Satan.

“I’ve had enough… for this… time!” I panted.

He stared at me silently. I thought that behind the cold sparkle of his gaze I read anger, thwarted purpose, a certain evil puzzlement. If so, it was fleeing. He spoke.

“You have claimed the player’s right. It was yours to stop when you willed. Look behind you.”

I swung around and sought the telltale globe.

Both of the prints upon which I had trodden had been – Satan’s!

— X —

I was Satan’s bond servant for a year, bound to do whatsoever he commanded me.

The balance of that afternoon I had spent in my room, alternating between intensive thought and hope of Barker cat-footing it out of the wall. It was plain that my liberty was still limited. Not yet might I run with the pack. Tentative overtures to Consardine following my retreat from the steps, a hint that perhaps I ought to make a tour of this citadel of the Prince of Darkness now I was enlisted among his legionaries, had met courteous but firm rebuff. He had gravely prescribed, as a doctor, the quietness of my chamber as a sedative for the nervous strain I had just undergone.

What I had hoped for, of course, had been a chance to run across Eve. Reflection assured me that it was much more important at the moment to get in touch with the little cockney burglar.

As I waited I tried to analyze the fever that had so swept me off my feet. I had thought myself cooler headed, better balanced. The fact is that I was both ashamed of myself and uneasily puzzled. If I admitted that the intensity of the passion I had felt had been due to Satan’s will, an actual compelling force pouring down upon me as I climbed the steps – well, at least that was an explanation to soothe my smarting pride.

But if it left me with the comforting thought that my will was quite as strong as I had deemed it, it involved the humiliating alternative that it was far weaker than Satan’s. I took no credit for abstaining from that next step which might have given me to him forever. It had been the warning whisper, whether from Eve’s mind or my own subconscious one, that had pulled me back.

And Satan’s attitude puzzled me. Why had he been so bent on forcing me upward? Had it been simply the natural instinct of the gambler? The urge to win? Had the sight of those two symbols flashing out one after the other on his side of the telltale aroused the blood-lust in him? If one or both of them had been on my side of the globe would he have shown the same eagerness?

Or had he from the beginning willed me to go the limit and lose?

And if so – why?

I could find no answer to the questions, nor did Barker appear. And at last, Thomas aiding, I dressed and was escorted by way of walls and lifts to still another immense and vaulted chamber that in size and trappings might have been a feast hall of the Medicis in the golden prime of that magnificent clan. There were a score or more men and women at a great oval table with Satan at the head, his flawless evening dress giving him an oddly accentuated sardonic note. Plainly I was late, but as plainly informality was the custom.

“Our newest recruit – James Kirkham.”

With no more introduction than this, Satan waved me to my appointed place. The others smiled and nodded and went on talking.

As I seated myself I saw with secret amazement that my right-hand neighbor was a certain famous actress whose name was seldom missing from Broadway’s electrics. My rapid glance around the table showed me a polo player of enviable American lineage and international reputation, and a brilliant attorney high in the councils of Tammany Hall. The others were unknown to me, but one and all bore the stamp of unusual intelligence. If this were a representative slice of Satan’s court, then indeed his organization must be quite as extraordinary as he had boasted. Eve was not there. Cobham was.

Walter sat at the actress’s right. As the dinner went on I exerted myself to be pleasant to him. For my own reasons, I wanted no lurking enemies just then. He was a bit stiffish at first, then mellowed. He drank freely, but, I noted with interest, not so freely as he would have liked. Very clearly Walter loved to look upon the wine when it was not only red, but all along the rainbow. I thought at first that it was the restraint he had placed upon himself as to the rate of his consumption that stirred up in him antagonism against other inhibitions, and particularly that of discretion in expression of opinion. Then I realized it was the drink itself that bred in Cobham a stern passion for truth, a contempt for euphemisms and circumlocutions. What he wanted was the plain fact unadorned, and no evasions. As he put it, “no tampering with the formula.” He was in fact an in-vino-veritas drinker of Fundamentalist fervor. Also he was amusing, and the actress was vastly entertained by our cross-conversation.

Some day or other soon, I resolved, I would usefully irrigate Walter into such condition that he could not bear to leave even a shred of covering on the clear-eyed goddess of the verities. I was astonished to find that he was a chemist and spent much time in his laboratory in the chateau. That explained his remark about the formula. He was very explicit in telling me what an amazing chemist he was. I was to learn later that he had not exaggerated. That is why I have lingered over his picture.

It was a wonderful dinner, with a high note of sophistication and delicately reckless gayety that had a constantly ringing undertone as of fine steel. The only hints as to our peculiar position were when the distinguished attorney, glancing at me, proposed a toast to “the happy near damned,” and when Satan sent for a casket and displayed some of the most magnificent jewels I had ever seen.

He told their histories. This emerald set in turquoise was the seal which Cleopatra had pressed upon the letters she wrote to Anthony; this necklace of diamonds was the one with which the Cardinal de Rohan had thought to buy the favors of Marie Antoinette, and so had set in motion that trial which had been one of the midwives of the Revolution, and finally cost the unhappy queen her head; this coronet had shone among the curls of Nell Gwynne, set there by Charles, her royal lover; this ring with its regal rubies had been given by Montespan to the poisoner La Voiture for a love philter to warm the cooling heart of the Roi du Soleil.

At last he gave the flashing little Frenchwoman who sat at his right a bracelet of sapphires that had been, he said, Lucrezia Borgia’s. I wondered what she had done to deserve it, and if there were ironic significance in his naming of its old owner. If so, it made no difference in her delight.

And it gave me an enormously increased respect for Satan’s power that in this gathering there was no melodramatic secrecy, no masking, no stale concealment of names by numbers. His people met face to face. Evidently any thought of mutual betrayal was incredible, their faith in Satan’s protection absolute. That all of them, or many of them, had witnessed my ordeal of the steps I had no doubt – nor that they had watched the tragedy of Cartright. There was nothing to show it in their behavior.

They bade good night to Satan. I arose and would have gone with them, but his eyes caught mine and he shook his head.

“Remain with me, James Kirkham,” he commanded.

And soon we were alone, the table cleared, the servants gone.

“And so,” his lashless eyes glittered at me over the edge of his great goblet, “and so – you have lost!”

“Yet not as much as I might have, Satan,” I smiled, “since had I gone but a bit higher my fall might have been like that ancient one of yours – straight into Hell.”

“A journey,” he said blandly, “never devoid of interest. But a year soon passes, and then you shall have your chance again.”

“To fall, you mean?” I laughed.

“You gamble against Satan,” he reminded me, then shook his head. “No, you are wrong. My plans for you require your presence on earth. I commend, however, your prudence in climbing. And I admit you – surprised me.”

“I have then,” I arose and bowed, “begun my bondage with a most notable achievement.”

“May we both find your year a profitable one,” he said. “And now, James Kirkham – I claim my first service from you!”

I seated myself, waiting, with a little heightening of the pulse, for him to go on.

“The Yunnan jades,” he said. “It is true that I arranged matters so that you might retain them, if you were clever enough. It is also true that it would have amused me to have possessed the plaques. I was forced to choose between two interests. Obviously whichever way the cards fell I was bound to experience a half-disappointment.”

“In other words, you observed, sir,” I remarked, solemnly, “that even you cannot have your cake and eat it, too.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Another blunder of a bunglingly devised world. The museum has the jades; well, they shall keep them. But they must pay me for my half-disappointment. I have decided to accept something else that the museum owns which has long interested me. You shall – persuade – them to let me have it, James Kirkham.”

He raised his glass to me, ceremoniously, and drank; I followed suit, with no illusion as to the word he had used.

“What is it,” I asked, “and what is to be my method of – persuasion?”

“The task,” he said, “will not be a difficult one. It is, in truth, in the nature of the initial deed all knights of old were compelled to perform before they could receive the accolade. I follow the custom.”

“I bow to the rules, sir,” I told him.

“Many centuries ago,” he continued, “a Pharaoh summoned his greatest goldsmith, the Benvenuto Cellini of that day, and commanded him to make a necklace for his daughter. Whether it was for her birthday or her bridal, none knows. The goldsmith wrought it of finest gold and carnelian and lapis lazuli and that green feldspar called aquamarine. At one side of the golden cartouche that bore in hieroglyphs the Pharaoh’s name, he set a falcon crowned with the sun’s disk – Horus the son of Osiris, God, in a fashion, of Love, and guardian of happiness. On the other the winged serpent, the uraeus, bearing the looped cross, the crux ansata, the symbol of life. Below it he made a squatting god grasping sheaves of years and set upon his elbow the tadpole symbol of eternity. Thus did the Pharaoh by amulets and symbols invoke an eternity of love and life for his daughter.

“Alas for love and human hope and faith! The princess died, and the Pharaoh died and in time Horus and Osiris and all the gods of ancient Egypt died.

“But the beauty which that forgotten Cellini wrought in that necklace did not die. It could not. It was deathless. It lay for centuries with the mummy of that princess in her hidden coffin of stone. It has outlived her gods. It will outlive the gods of today and the gods of a thousand tomorrows. Undimmed, its beauty shines from it as it did three thousand years ago when the withered breast on which it was found throbbed with life and sobbed with love and had, it may be, its fleeting shadow of that same beauty which in the necklace is immortal.”

“The necklace of Senusert the Second!” I exclaimed. “I know that lovely thing, Satan.”

“I must have that necklace, James Kirkham!”

I looked at him, disconcerted. If this was what he thought an easy service, what would he consider a difficult one?

“It seems to me, Satan,” I hazarded, “that you could hardly have picked an object less likely to be yielded up by any – persuasion. It is guarded day and night. It lies in a cabinet in the center of a comparatively small room, in fact, and designedly, in the most conspicuous part of that room – constantly under observation—”

“I must have it,” he silenced me. “You shall get it for me. I answer now your second question. How? By obeying to the minute, to the second, without deviation, the instructions I am about to give you. Take your pencil, put down these o’clocks, fix them unalterably in your memory.”

He waited until I had obeyed the first part of his command.

“You will leave here,” he said, “at 10:30 tomorrow morning. Your journey will be so timed that you may drop out of the car and enter the museum at precisely one o’clock. You will be wearing a certain suit which your valet will give you. He will also pick out your overcoat, hat and other articles of dress. You must, as is the rule, check your coat at the cloak room.

“From there you must go straight to the Yunnan jades, the ostensible object of your visit. You may talk to whom you please, the more the better, in fact. But you must so manage that at precisely 1:45 you enter alone the north corridor of the Egyptian wing. You will interest yourself in its collections until 2:05, when you will enter, upon the minute, the room of the necklace. It has a guard for each of its two entrances. Do they know you?”

“I’m not sure,” I answered. “Probably so. At any rate, they know of me.”

“You will find an excuse to introduce yourself to one of the guards in the north corridor,” he continued, “provided he does not know you by sight. You will do the same with one of the guards in the necklace room. You will then go to one of the four corners of that room, it does not matter which, and become absorbed in whatever is in the case before you. Your object will be to keep as far from you as possible either of the two attendants who, conceivably, might think it his duty to remain close to such,” he raised his goblet to me, “a distinguished visitor.

“And, James Kirkham, at precisely 2:15 you will walk to the cabinet containing the necklace, open it with an instrument which will be provided for you, take out the necklace, drop it into the ingenious pocket which you will find in the inside left of your coat, close the case noiselessly and walk out.”

I looked at him, incredulously.

“Did you say – walk out?” I asked.

“Walk out,” he repeated.

“Carrying with me, I suppose,” I suggested satirically, “the two guards.”

“You will pay no attention to the guards,” he said.

“No?” I questioned. “But they will certainly be paying attention to me, Satan!”

“Do not interrupt me again,” he ordered, sternly enough. “You will do exactly as I am telling you. You will pay no attention to the guards. You will pay no attention to anything that may be happening around you. Remember, James Kirkham, this is vital. You will have but one thought – to open the case at exactly 2:15 and walk out of that room with Senusert’s necklace in your possession. You will see nothing, hear nothing, do nothing but that. It will take you two minutes to reach the cloak room. You will go from there straight to the outer doors. As you pass through them you will step to the right, bend down and tie a shoe. You will then walk down the steps to the street, still giving no attention to whatever may be occurring around you. You will see at the curb a blue limousine whose chauffeur will be polishing the right-hand headlight.

“You will enter that car and give the person you find inside it the necklace. The time should then be 2:20. It must not be later. You will drive with that person for one hour. At 3:20 you will find the car close to the obelisk behind the museum. You will descend from it there, walk to the Avenue, take a taxi and return to the Discoverers’ Club.”

“The Discoverers’ Club, you said?” I honestly thought in my astonishment that it had been a slip of his tongue.

“I repeat – the Discoverers’ Club,” he answered. “You will upon arriving there go straight to the desk and tell the clerk on duty that you have work to do that demands absolute concentration. You will instruct him not to disturb you with either telephone calls or visitors. You will say to him that it is more than likely reporters from the newspapers will try to get in touch with you. He will tell them that you left word that you would receive them at eight o’clock. You will impress it upon him that the work which you have to do is most important and that you must not be disturbed. You will further instruct him to send up to your room at seven o’clock all the late editions and extra editions of the afternoon newspapers.”

He paused.

“Is all clear?” he demanded.

“All except what I am to say to the reporters,” I said.

“You will know that,” he replied enigmatically, “after you have read the newspapers.”

He sipped from his goblet, regarding me appraisingly.

“Repeat my instructions,” he ordered.

Soberly, I did so.

“Good,” he nodded. “You understand, of course, that this small adventure is not the one that prompted my decision to acquire you. That will be a real adventure. This is in the nature of a test. And you must pass it. For your own sake, James Kirkham – you must pass it.”

His jewel-hard eyes held a snake-like glitter. Mad as the performance he had outlined seemed, he was in deadly earnest, no doubt about that. I did not answer him. He had left me nothing to say.

“And now,” he touched a bell, “no more excitement for you tonight. I am solicitous for the welfare of my subjects, even those on – probation. Go to your room and sleep well.”

A panel opened and Thomas stepped from the lift and stood waiting for me.

“Good night, Satan,” I said.

“Good night,” he answered, “and however good it be, may your night tomorrow be a better one.”

It was close to eleven o’clock. The dinner had lasted longer than I had realized. I found everything comfortable in my bedroom, told Thomas so and dismissed him. In about half an hour and two brandies and sodas I turned out the lights and went to bed hoping for Barker.

Waiting wide-eyed in the darkness I went over my amazing instructions. I was, it was plain, part of a more or less intricate jig-saw puzzle. I saw myself as a number of pieces that I must fit in at the exact moments to click the whole design. Or better, I was a living chessman in one of those games in which Satan delighted. I must make my moves at the designated times. But what would his other chessmen be doing? And suppose one of them moved a bit too soon or too late? Then where would I be in this unknown game?

The picture of the glittering-eyed, bald devil on the malachite slabs behind the two thrones came to me – Satan’s double directing the hands of the Fates. Oddly enough, it reassured me. The ethics of the matter did not bother me greatly. After all, the bulk of the treasures in any museum is loot; loot of graves, of tombs, of lost cities – and what is not, has been stolen, the most of it, time and again.

But aside from all that – there was nothing else for me to do except obey Satan. If I did not, well – that was an end to me. I had no doubt of it. And Satan would go on. As for betraying him – why, I did not even know the place of my polite imprisonment.

No, if it was in the cards that I might beat Satan, I must play the game with him. There was no other way.

And what was any necklace beside – Eve!

I turned my mind to memorizing my instructions. It put me to sleep. Nor did Barker awaken me.

— XI —

Before the faithful Thomas could arrive next morning, I was up and in the bath. I accepted without question the suit he laid out for me. It was one I had never known I possessed. On the inner side of the coat, the left, was a wide pocket. It was deep and across the top ran a line of tiny, blunt-edged hooks. I examined them, carefully. The pendent fringes of Senusert’s necklace were about six inches long. Its upper strand could be dropped upon the hooks and the whole ornament would then hang from them freely without causing any betraying protuberance through the cloth. It was, as Satan had indicated, ingeniously made for holding that particular treasure.

He handed me, too, a superbly fitting gray overcoat entirely new to me, but I was interested to note, with my name on the inside pocket, my own soft hat and Malacca cane.

And at last he gave me a curiously shaped little instrument of dull gray steel and – a wrist watch!

“I have a watch, Thomas,” I said, studying the odd small instrument.

“Yes,” he answered, “but this keeps the Master’s time, sir.”

“Oh, I see.” Admiringly I reflected that Satan was taking no chances upon his pawns’ timepieces; all, evidently, were synchronized; I liked that. “But this other affair. How does it work?”

“I meant to show you, sir.”

He went to a wall and opened a closet. He carried out what appeared to be a section of a strong cabinet with a sash of glass covering it.

“Try to open it, sir,” he said.

I tried to lift the top. It resisted all my efforts. He took the steel tool from me. It was shaped like a chisel, its edge razor sharp, its length about four inches, broadening abruptly from the edge to an inch and a half wide handle. In this handle was a screw.

He thrust the razor edge between the top sash and bottom support and rapidly turned the screw. The tool seemed to melt into the almost invisible crack. There was a muffled snap, and he lifted the lid. He handed me back the instrument, smiling. I saw that the edge had opened like a pair of jaws and that through them had been thrust another blade like a tongue. The jaws had been raised and the tongue pushed forward by incredibly powerful levers. The combination had snapped the lock as though it had been made of brittle wood.

“Very easy to manage, sir,” said Thomas.

“Very,” I replied, drily. And again I felt a wave of admiration for Satan.

I breakfasted in my room and, escorted by Thomas, entered the waiting car at exactly 10:30. The curtains were down and fastened. I thought of using that irresistible little instrument in my pocket. It was an impulse my better judgment warned me not to obey.

At precisely one o’clock I walked through the doors of the museum, keenly conscious both of the empty pocket designed to hold old Senusert’s pectoral, and the tool that was to put it there.

I checked my overcoat and hat and cane, nodding to the attendant who had recognized me. I went straight to the jades and spent half an hour, looking them and some rare similar objects over in company with an assistant curator who had happened along. I rid myself of him and at 1:45 to the second strolled into the north corridor of the Egyptian wing. I did not have to introduce myself to the guards there. They knew me. By two o’clock I was close to the entrance of the necklace room.

At 2:05 by Satan’s watch I entered it. If my heart was beating somewhat more quickly, I did not show it. I looked casually about the room. A guard stood close to the opposite entrance, the second guard halfway between me and the central case that was my goal. Both of them scanned me carefully. Neither of them knew me.

I walked over to the second guard, gave him my card and asked him a few questions about a collection of scarabs I knew were to be exhibited. I saw his official suspicion drop away from him as he read my name, and his replies were in the tone that he would have taken to an official of the museum. I walked over to the southeast comer of the room and apparently lost myself in a study of the amulets there. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the two guards meet, whisper and look at me respectfully. They separated and resumed their places.

Satan’s watch showed 2:10. Five minutes to go!

Swift glances about the room revealed a dozen or more sightseers. There were three couples of manifest respectability, middle-aged outlanders. A girl who might have been an artist, a scholarly looking, white-haired man, a man with German professor written plain upon him, two well-dressed Englishmen discussing learnedly the mutations of the Tet hieroglyphic in well-bred, low, but carrying voices, and an untidy-looking woman who seemed to be uncertain what it was all about, and two or three others. The Englishmen and the girl were standing beside the cabinet that held the necklace. The others were scattered about the room.

Satan’s watch registered 2:14.

There was a scurrying of feet in the north corridor. A woman screamed, terrifyingly. I heard a shout:

“Stop him! Stop him!”

A figure flashed by the door. A woman running. Close after her darted another, a man. I caught the glint of steel in his hand.

The watch marked 2:15. I walked over to the cabinet of the necklace, my right hand clutching the opening tool.

The turmoil in the corridor was growing louder. Again the woman screamed. The people in the room were rushing toward the door. The guard from the far entrance ran past me.

I stood before the cabinet. I thrust the razor edge of the little chisel between the flange of the top and the side. I turned the screw. There was a click, and the lock had snapped.

The screaming ended in a dreadful gasping wail. There was another rush of feet by the door. I heard an oath and the fall of a heavy body.

I withdrew my hand from the cabinet, the necklace in it. I dropped it into my pocket, running its upper strand over the line of tiny hooks.

I walked to the entrance through which I had come. One of the guards was lying upon the threshold. The German was bending over him. The girl I had taken for an artist was crouched beside him, hands over her eyes, crying hysterically. From the armor room across the corridor came an agonized shrieking – a man’s voice this time.

I went on, between the two black sarcophagi at the entrance to the wing, out into the great hall where the Gobelin tapestries hang, and passed through the turnstile. The guard had his back turned, listening to the sounds which, both because of distance and the arrangement of rooms and corridors, were here barely audible.

I took my coat from the attendant, who, it was clear, had heard nothing.

Walking to the entrance, I stepped to the right as Satan had bade and, leaning over, fumbled with a shoe lace. Someone brushed past me, into the museum.

Straightening, I proceeded to the steps. Down on the sidewalk two men were fighting. A group had gathered around them, I saw a policeman running up. Those upon the steps beside myself were absorbed in watching the combatants.

I passed down. A dozen yards to my left was a blue limousine, the chauffeur paying no attention to the fighters, but polishing with a piece of chamois the right headlight of his car.

Strolling to it, I saw the chauffeur jump from his polishing, throw open the door and stand at attention beside it, his alert gaze upon me.

Satan’s watch registered 2:19.

I stepped into the car. The curtains were drawn and it was dark. The door closed behind me and it was darker still.

The car started. Someone moved. Someone spoke softly, tremulously eager.

“Are you all right, Mr. Kirkham?”

Eve’s voice!

— XII —

I struck a match. Eve turned her head quickly away, but not before I had seen the tears in her eyes and how pale was her face.

“I’m quite all right, thank you,” I said. “And everything, so far as I know, has gone exactly according to Satan’s schedule. I know that I have. The necklace is in my pocket.”

“I w-wasn’t worrying about th-that,” said Eve in a shaky little voice.

Her nerve was badly shattered, there was no mistaking that. Not for a moment did I think that any anxiety about me was the cause of it. That she had thoroughly understood Satan’s sinister implications the night before was certain. Probably she had had forebodings. But now she knew.

Nevertheless, for one reason or another, she had felt anxiety for me. I moved closer.

“Satan made it perfectly clear to me that my continued health and getting the necklace were closely tied up together,” I told her. “I am obeying his instructions to the letter, naturally. My next move is to give the necklace to you.”

I slipped it off the hooks in my pocket.

“How do you turn on the lights?” I asked her. “I want you to be sure that what I give you is what our Master is expecting to get.”

“D-don’t turn them on,” whispered Eve. “Give me the – d-damned thing!”

I laughed. Sorry for her as I was, I couldn’t help it. Her hands crept out and touched me. I caught them in mine and she did not withdraw them. And after a time she drew closer, pressing against me like a frightened child. She was crying, I knew, but I said nothing, only slipped an arm around her and let her cry. Yes, very much like a little frightened child was Eve, weeping there in the darkness and clutching my hands so tightly. And in my heart I cursed Satan in seven tongues, a cold, implacable hatred growing within me.

At last she gave a little laugh and moved away.

“Thank you, Mr. Kirkham,” she said tranquilly. “You make always a most dependable audience.”

“Miss Demerest,” I told her bluntly, “I’m done with fencing. You’re panic-stricken. You know why – and so do I.”

“Why should I be frightened?” she asked.

“At the destiny Satan promised you,” I answered. “You know what it is. If you have any doubts at all about it, let me tell you that he left me with none after you had gone from the room last night.”

There was a silence, and then out of the darkness came her voice, small and despairing.

“He means to – take me! He will – take me! No matter what I do! I’d kill myself – but I can’t! I can’t! Oh, God, what can I do? Oh, God, who can help me!”

“I can make a damned good try at it,” I told her, “if you’ll only let me.”

She did not answer immediately, sitting silently, fighting for self-control. Suddenly she snapped on the light and leaned toward me, tear-washed eyes searching mine, and voice firm as though she had come to some momentous decision.

“Tell me, Mr. Kirkham, what made you stop after the second footprint? You wanted to go on. Satan was urging you on. Why did you stop?”

“Because,” I said, “I heard your voice telling me to go no farther.”

She drew a sharp breath that was like a sob.

“Is that the truth, Mr. Kirkham?”

“It is God’s own truth. It was as though you stood beside me, touching my shoulder and whispered to me to stop where I was. To climb no higher. Those devilish jewels on the crown and scepter were calling me out of a thousand mouths. But when I heard you – or thought I did – I heard them no longer.”

“Oh!” Eve’s eyes were rapt, her cheeks no longer pale, her exclamation a song.

“You did call!” I whispered.

“I watched you from back there beyond the light, with the – others,” she said. “And when the second foot shone out on Satan’s side I tried with all my strength of will to send my thought out to you, tried so desperately to warn you. Over and over I prayed as you stood there hesitating – ‘Oh, kind God, wherever you are, let him hear me! Please let him hear me, dear God!’ and you did hear—”

She stopped and stared at me with widening eyes and swiftly the color deepened in her cheeks.

“And you knew it was my voice!” whispered Eve. “But you would not have heard, or, hearing, would not have heeded, unless – unless—”

“Unless?” I prompted.

“Unless there were something outside our two selves ready to help us,” said Eve, a bit breathlessly.

She was blushing now up to her eyes; and I was quite sure that the reason she had given was not exactly that which caused the blush, not the one that had been on the tip of her tongue a moment before.

My own theory of what had happened was more materialistic. Something within me had sensitized my mind, not something without. I’ve never run across any particularly convincing evidence of disembodied energies acting as spiritual springs to soften the bumps in a bad piece of road on this earthly tour of ours. I much preferred a good tangible Providence like the little cockney burglar with his knowledge of Satan’s trick walls. However, such things may be; and if it gave Eve any comfort to believe it, then let her. So I nodded solemnly and assured her it must be true.

“But,” I asked, “is there no one among all Satan’s people with whom you have come in contact who might be persuaded to work against him?”

“Not one,” she said. “Consardine likes me – I think he would go far to protect me. But he is tied to Satan. So are all of them. Not only by fear – you saw what happened to Cartright – but by other reasons as well. Satan does pay highly, Mr. Kirkham. Not only in money, but in other things – he has dreadful power… unholy power. Oh, it’s not just money that people want! Nor all that he gives them! You can’t even dream as yet…”

“Drugs?” I suggested, unimaginatively.

“You’re being stupid – deliberately,” she said. “You know very well what Lucifer was supposed to be able to give. And he can… and he does… and even those who have lost to him still have the hope that they may do something that will give them another chance – or that his caprice will.”

“Has such a thing ever happened?”

“Yes,” she replied, “it has. But don’t think it was because he was capable of mercy.”

“You mean it was simply a play to hold them tighter by dangling the hope of freedom under their noses?”

“Yes,” she said. “So their usefulness would not be weakened by despair.”

“Miss Demerest,” I asked her bluntly, “why should you think I am any different from these others?”

“You did not come to him of your own will,” she said. “And you are no slave to his seven shining prints.”

“I came pretty close to being so last night,” I said, somewhat ruefully.

“They haven’t – got you,” she whispered. “Not like the others. And they won’t. They mustn’t get you, Mr. Kirkham.”

“I don’t intend to let them,” I told her, grimly. She gave me her other hand at that. I glanced at my watch and jumped. “There’s only a little more than ten minutes left to us,” I said. “We’ve not even spoken of any plan. We’ve got to meet again – quickly. And we’ve got to keep right on hoodwinking Satan.”

“That will be the great difficulty, of course,” she nodded. “But I’ll take care of that. And you understand now, don’t you, that it was that necessity that made me treat you so outrageously?”

“Even before Satan’s confession to me, I suspected something of the sort,” I grinned. “And of course you understand that my equally outrageously sounding proposition to him to turn you over to me was just a following of your lead.”

“Better than that,” she answered softly. “I knew what you really did mean.”

Again I shot a glance at my watch. Six minutes – just about time.

“Look here,” I said abruptly. “Answer me truly. When did it first occur to you that I might be the one to get you out of this trap?”

“Wh-when you kissed me,” she whispered.

“And when did you get the idea of camouflaging what you thought about me?”

“R-right after you began kissing me.”

“Eve,” I said, “do you see any necessity for camouflage at this moment?”

“No,” answered Eve, ingenuously. “Why?”

“This is why!” I dropped her hands, drew her to me and kissed her. And Eve put her arms around my neck tightly and kissed me quite as whole-heartedly. And that was that uniquely satisfactory that.

“It’s a coincidence,” I murmured against her ear a moment or two later, “but the exact second you had that idea was the precise second I decided to stick the game out.”

“Oh – Jim!” sighed Eve. This time she kissed me.

The car was going more slowly. I cursed helplessly Satan’s inflexible schedule.

“Eve,” I said swiftly, and thrust the necklace of Senusert in her hands, “do you know a little Englishman named Barker? The electrician? He seems to know you.”

“Yes,” she answered, eyes wide with wonder. “I know him. But how—”

“Get in touch with him as soon as you can,” I bade her, “I haven’t time to explain. But Barker’s to be trusted. Tell him he must get to me in my room the first night I return. By hook or crook, he’s got to. You understand?”

She nodded, eyes wider.

“Arrange it,” I said, “so that you’ll be there that night, too.”

“All right – Jim,” said Eve.

I looked at my watch. I had one and three-quarters minutes more. We put it to excellent use.

The car stopped.

“Remember Barker,” I whispered.

I opened the door and stepped out. It closed behind me and the car rolled off. The obelisk was near by. I walked around it obediently. As I started for Fifth Avenue I saw a man on another path about a hundred feet from me. His overcoat and hat were the same as mine. He swung a Malacca cane. A vast curiosity struck me? Was it my double? I started toward him, and halted. If I followed him I was disobeying Satan’s instructions. Less than at any time did I want to do that. Reluctantly I turned and let him go.

I hailed a taxi and started to the Club. There was a rosy light outside the windows; I felt like singing; the walkers on the Avenue seemed to skip gaily. Eve had gone a bit to my head.

Suddenly the rosiness dimmed, the song died. Reason began to function. No doubt the absence of the necklace had been soon discovered. The doors of the museum would have been closed, and none allowed to depart without being searched. Perhaps the alarm had been sounded even as I had gone down the steps. It might be that I had been the only one who had gotten out.

If that were so, then, obviously, I must be suspected. I had deliberately drawn the attention of the guards to me, not only in the corridor, but in the treasure room. They would remember me. Why had I slipped away, ignoring the disturbances, if I had not had some strong reason? What reason could I have had except making away with the necklace?

Or supposing the theft had not been discovered until after the museum had been emptied. Still, I would find it difficult to explain why I had so rapidly made my exit; been the only one to take no interest in the happenings.

Had Satan missed a move in his complicated game, made an error in his deliberate calculations? Or had he coldly planned to have suspicion rest upon me? Whether he had or not, it must.

In no easy frame of mind I dismissed the taxi and entered the Club.

“Back early, Mr. Kirkham,” smiled the clerk at the desk as he handed me my keys. Quite evidently he had no suspicion that the Kirkham who had gone out a few hours before and the one who had just returned were two distinct persons. My double, I reflected, must be good indeed.

“I’m going to be almighty busy for the next few hours,” I told him. “I’ve some writing to do that will demand my entire concentration. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing, of sufficient importance to break in on me. It’s very likely that there will be telephone calls and visitors. Tell everybody that I’m out. If it’s reporters, tell them I’ll see them at eight o’clock. Slip copies of all the afternoon papers up to me at seven o’clock. Not before. Get me the latest editions. And no matter who calls, don’t let me be bothered.”

“I’ll put an extra key in your box,” he said. “It always looks better.”

I went to my room. Locking the door, I made a minute inspection. On my desk was my three-day accumulation of mail. There were not many letters, none was important; all had been opened. Two were invitations to speak at dinners. Carbon copies of notes of regret were attached to them. My signature upon them was perfect. My double’s powers of imitation were clearly not limited to voice and appearance. My reason for declining, I was much interested in learning, was that I would not be in the city on the dates of the dinners. So? Where the devil, I wondered, was I to be?

Beside my typewriter was a bulky document. Riffling its pages I discovered that it was a report upon the possibilities of certain mineralized lands in China. It was addressed to that same brilliant attorney who had toasted the “near-damned” at Satan’s feast of the night before. It was corrected and annotated in my own handwriting. I had, of course, no knowledge of its purpose, but I was sure that the lawyer would be able to discuss it with easy familiarity if circumstances forced it to his attention. My confidence in Satan revived. I felt much more comfortable.

I looked through the pockets of my clothes, hanging in the closet. There was not even a scrap of paper.

Seven o’clock came, and with it a discreet knock at my door. It was Robert, the night clerk, with a bundle of the evening papers. His eyes were rather wide, and I could see questions sticking out all over him. Well, he couldn’t be more curious about what I had to say regarding what was in those papers than I was to know what was in them. Nor would it do to let him suspect the extent of my ignorance.

So I took them from him with a discouragingly faraway air, and absent-mindedly closed the door in his face.

The headlines leaped out at me from the first I opened:

TRIPLE TRAGEDY AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM; PRICELESS RELIC MISSING

WOMAN MURDERED BEFORE EYES OF GUARDS AND VISITORS, HER SLAYER KILLED BY ANOTHER WHO COMMITS SUICIDE WHEN HE IS CAPTURED

EXPLORER KIRKHAM BAULKS THIEVES, GIVES THE ALARM THAT CLOSES DOORS WHEN MYSTERIOUS SERIES OF FATAL STABBINGS THROWS TREASURE HOUSE INTO CHAOS

ROBBER HIDES OLD EGYPTIAN PRINCESS’S NECKLACE AND MAKES ESCAPE – METROPOLITAN TO BE CLOSED UNTIL SEARCH REVEALS IT

In different words, all the rest of the headlines said about the same thing. I read the stories. Now and then I had the feeling that somebody was shooting a fine spray of ice-water between my shoulder blades. I quote from the most complete account.

An unknown woman was stabbed to death this afternoon in the Metropolitan Museum of Art before the eyes of half a dozen guards and some twenty or more visitors.

Her murderer tried to escape, but before he could get far was attacked by the companion of the woman, tripped, and a knife thrust through his heart.

The second slayer was caught after a chase. As he was being taken to the Curator’s office to await the police, he collapsed. He died within a few seconds, the victim, apparently, of some swift poison which he had managed to slip into his mouth.

Both the murders and the suicide occurred close to the Egyptian room where are kept some of the choicest treasures of the museum. Taking advantage of the confusion, someone forced open the case containing the ancient necklace given to his daughter by the Pharaoh Senusert II. The necklace, a priceless relic of the past, and long the admiration of thousands of visitors, was taken. Its removal from the building was frustrated, however, by the alertness of Mr. James Kirkham, the noted explorer, who caused the doors to be locked before anyone could leave the museum.

Search of everyone within the walls failed to reveal the stolen treasure. It is supposed that the thief became panic-stricken when he found that no one could get out, and tucked the necklace away in some hidden corner. Whether he did it thinking to return and recover it, or merely to get rid of it cannot, of course, be known. The museum will be closed to visitors until it is found, which, thanks to Mr. Kirkham’s quick thinking, is only a matter of time.

Neither the museum authorities nor the police believe that there is any connection between the tragedy and the theft, the latter having obviously been a sudden temptation born from the opportunity-giving confusion.

Well, I reflected, I could tell them better than that. And if the museum remained closed until they found the necklace there, the door hinges would have a chance to become rusty.

But three lives the price of the bauble! I resumed the reading with cold horror at my heart.

It was shortly after two o’clock when one of the guards in the Egyptian wing first took special notice of the woman and the two men. They were talking together earnestly, discussing seemingly an exhibit of ushabtiu figures, toy-like wooden models from a tomb. The woman was about thirty, attractive, blonde and apparently English. The men were older and the guard took them to be Syrians. What had particularly drawn his attention to them was the curious pallor of their faces and the out-of-the-ordinary largeness of their eyes.

“Looked like dopes,” he says, “and then again they didn’t. Their faces weren’t a sick white, more of a transparent. They didn’t behave like dopes, either. They seemed to be talking sensible enough. Dressed top-notch, too.”

He put them down finally as foreigners, and relaxed his attention. In a few minutes he noticed one of the men walking by him. It was later ascertained that this man had accompanied the woman when she entered the museum about 1:30. The cloak room attendant’s attention had also been attracted by their pallor and their curious eyes. This man passed the entrance to the small room where the Senusert necklace was on display with other ancient jewels. He turned into the next corridor and disappeared.

The woman had continued talking to the second man, who, it appears, came into the museum a little before two o’clock.

Suddenly the guard heard a scream. He swung around and saw the two struggling together, the woman trying to ward off blows from a long knife with which the man was stabbing at her. The guard, William Barton, shouted and ran for them. At the same time, visitors came running in from all directions, drawn by the cries.

They got in Barton’s way, and he could not shoot for fear of hitting the woman or some of the excited spectators.

The whole affair was a matter of seconds. The knife plunged into the woman’s throat!

The murderer, brandishing his red blade, burst through the horror-stricken onlookers and ran in the direction the first man had gone. As he was close to the door of the necklace room the people who had been in it came rushing out. With them was one of the two guards who keep watch there. They piled back, falling over each other in their haste to get out of reach of the knife. There was a panic-stricken scramble, which the second guard tried to quiet. In the meantime, the murderer had come face to face with the woman’s companion at the turn of the next corridor. He struck at the latter and missed, and fled into the armor room with the other close behind him, a knife now in his own hand.

The pair gripped and fell, rolling over the tiled floor, and each striving to plunge his dagger into the other. Guards and visitors were piling in from every side, and the place was in pandemonium.

Then they saw the hand of the pursuer flash up and down. The under man shrieked – and the knife was buried in his heart!

The killer leaped to his feet, and began to run blindly. With the guards and others after him he darted out into the Egyptian wing corridor.

There they cornered him and brought him down.

He was beaten half into insensibility. As he was being carried to the Curator’s office, his body went limp, and heavy. They put him down.

He was dead!

Either shock or some quick and powerful poison which he had taken when he had realized escape was impossible had killed him. The autopsy will decide which.

The whole tragedy had occurred in an almost incredibly brief time. Less than five minutes had elapsed between the first scream of the woman and the third death.

But it was time enough to give the necklace thief his opportunity.

Among the visitors at the museum was Mr. James Kirkham, the noted explorer, who recently brought to America the famous Yunnan jades which Mr. Rockbilt presented to the Metropolitan. Mr. Kirkham had been preparing an exhaustive report upon mining possibilities in China for a certain powerful American syndicate. He had been working on it for the last two days with intense concentration, and felt the need this afternoon of a little relaxation. He decided to spend a couple of hours at the museum.

He had strolled into the Egyptian room where the necklace was kept and was studying some amulets in a case in a far corner when he heard the woman’s scream. He saw those who were in the room running and followed them. He did not see the killings, but was a witness to the capture of the second man.

Preoccupied by the necessity of completing his report, and deciding that he had had enough “relaxation,” Mr. Kirkham started to leave. He had just reached the doors of the museum when a suspicion seized him. Trained by the necessities of his occupation to keenest observation, he recalled that while he was hastening to the entrance of the necklace room, following the others, someone had brushed past him going into the room. He recalled also hearing immediately afterward a sharp click, like the forcing of a lock. With his attention focused upon what was going on without, the impressions then carried with them no significance.

But now it seemed that they might be important.

Mr. Kirkham turned back instantly, and ordered the alarm to be sounded which at once closes the doors of the museum. As he is well known at the Metropolitan, he was as instantly obeyed.

And it was that trained observation of his and quick thinking which beyond all doubt foiled the thief of the necklace.

There followed an account of the discovery of the raped cabinet, the verification of the fact that no one had gone out of the museum either during or after the disturbances, the searching of everybody in the Curator’s offices, and the careful shepherding of them out one by one so no one could stop and pick up the necklace from wherever it had been hidden. It interested me to find that I had demanded to be searched with the rest, despite the Curator’s protests!

I came to my interview, substantially the same in all the papers.

“The truth is,” so I was quoted as having said, “I feel a bit guilty that I did not at once realize the importance of those impressions and turn back into the room. I could probably have caught the thief red-handed. The fact is that my mind was about nine-tenths taken up with that infernal report which must be finished and mailed tonight. I have a vague idea that there were about a dozen people in the room, but not the slightest recollection of what they looked like.

“When I heard the woman scream, it was like being jarred out of sleep. My progress to the door was half-automatic. It was only when I was about to go out of the museum that memory began to function, and I recalled that furtive brushing past me of someone and the clicking noise.

“Then, of course, there was only one thing to be done. Make sure that nobody got out until it was determined whether or not anything had been stolen. The entrance guard deserves great credit for the promptness with which he sounded that alarm.

“I agree with the Curator that there can be no connection between the theft and the killings. How could there possibly be? Someone, and he can be no professional because any professional would know that there was no way of selling such a thing, had a sudden crazy impulse. His probable next thought was one of sincere repentance and an intense desire to get rid of the necklace instantly. The only problem is finding where he slipped it.

“You say it was a lucky thing for the museum that I turned back when I did,” smiled Mr. Kirkham. “Well, I think it was a mighty lucky thing for me. I wouldn’t like being in the position that having been the first one out of the museum – and maybe the only one, for the theft would soon have been discovered – would have put me.”

At this the Curator, despite his anxiety, laughed heartily.

There was more to the story, much more; but that was all I was quoted as saying. The guard whom I had seen lying across the threshold told how he had been knocked down in the backward rush, and somebody “had kicked me in the ear, or something.” The second guard had joined in the chase. One paper had a grisly “special” about the possibility of the thief having crawled into one of the suits of armor and dying within it, of thirst and hunger. The writer evidently thought of armor as an iron box in which one could hide like a closet.

All the accounts agreed that there was little chance of identifying the three dead. There was not a thing in their clothing or about them to give a single clew.

Well, there it all was. There was my alibi, complete. There were Satan’s chessmen now all properly clicked into place, including the three who would never be moved again. It wasn’t nice reading for me, not at all. Particularly did I wince at the Curator’s amusement that my honesty could come into question.

But again my double had done a good job. It had been he, of course, who had slipped by me as I had bent to tie my shoe, smoothly taking up my trail without apparent break. And it had been he whom I had passed at the obelisk as I had slipped as smoothly back into his. No one had noticed me come down the museum’s steps and enter the automobile that held Eve. The diversion on the sidewalk had made sure of that. There were no gaps in the alibi.

And the three dead people who had furnished the diversion in the museum that had enabled me to steal the necklace? Slaves of Satan’s mysterious drug, the kehjt. The description of their strange eyes and their pallor proved that – if I had needed proof. Satan’s slaves, playing faithfully the parts he had given them, in blissful confidence of a perpetual Paradise for their immediate reward.

I read the stories over again. At eight o’clock the reporters were sent up to my room. I restrained myself severely to the lines of my early interview. Their visit was largely perfunctory. After all, there was not much that I could say. I left the report that had “preoccupied” me so greatly lying where they could see it.

I went even further. Taking the hint from my double’s remarks, I sealed and addressed it and asked one of them to drop it into the Post Office for me on his way back to his paper.

When they had gone, I had dinner sent up to my room.

But when I went to bed, hours later, it was with a cold little sick feeling at the pit of my stomach. More than at any time, I was inclined to credit Satan’s version of his identity.

For the first time I was afraid of him.

— XIII —

Early next morning, the telephone rang, awakening me. The clerk at the desk was on the other end. There was an urgent message for me, and the bearer had instructions to wait until I had read it. I told him to send it up. It was a letter. I opened it and read:

“You have done well, James Kirkham. I am pleased with you. Visit your friends at the museum this afternoon. You will receive further instructions from me tomorrow. S.”

I phoned the desk to dismiss the messenger, and to send me up breakfast and the morning papers.

It was a good story, and they had spread upon it. It surprised me, at first, that they had given so much more space to the theft of the necklace than they had to the murders and suicide. Then I realized, inasmuch as there was no suspicion of any connection between them, that this was sound newspaper judgment. After all, the lost lives were only three among millions. They had been – and they were not. There were many more.

But the necklace was unique.

That, I reflected, was undoubtedly the way Satan felt about it. Certainly those three lives had seemed to him nothing like so important as had the necklace. And quite plainly the newspapers agreed with him.

The three bodies remained in the morgue, unidentified. The museum, after an all-night search, had been unable to find the necklace. That was all there was new, if new it could be called.

I went downstairs, and carried on the inevitable discussions of the affair with various members of the Club. At one o’clock a messenger brought me another letter. The name on the envelope was that of an important legal firm of which the brilliant attorney was the head.

In it was a check for ten thousand dollars.

The accompanying note complimented me upon my report. The check, it said, was for that and further possible services. For the latter only, of course, in the nature of a retainer. Other work which I might be asked to do would be paid for commensurately.

Again Satan had spoken the truth. He did pay well. But the “other work”?

At three o’clock I went to the museum. I had no difficulty in passing the barricade. In a fashion, I was a hero. The Curator was unhappy, but hopeful. I, when I departed, was much more unhappy than he, and, so far as the recovery of the necklace was concerned, with no hopes whatever. Obviously, I was at pains to conceal both of these states of mind from him.

The day went by without further word from Satan, or from any of his servitors. As the hours passed, I became more and more uneasy. Suppose that this one thing was all that he had wanted of me? That, now I had carried it out, I was to be cast aside! Hell might be his realm, but with Eve therein it was Paradise to me. I did not want his gates closed against me. Nor, cast out, could I storm them. I did not know where they were. What sleep I had that night was troubled indeed, swinging between bitter rage and a nightmarish sense of irretrievable loss.

When I opened Satan’s letter next morning it was with the feeling that the angel with the flaming sword had stood aside from the barred doors of Eden and was beckoning me in.

“I am having a house party, and you will find congenial company. You can have your mail called for at the Club, daily. On second thought, I won’t take no for an answer. A car will come for you at four o’clock. S.”

On the surface, nothing but a cordial, insistent invitation to have a little holiday. Actually, a command. Even had I wanted to, I would have known better than to refuse.

My conscience abruptly ceased to trouble me. With a light heart I packed a traveling bag, gave my instructions at the desk, and waited impatiently for the hour to roll around. Precisely at four, a smart limousine stopped in front of the Club, as smartly a liveried chauffeur entered, saluted me respectfully and, in the manner of one who knew me well, took my bag and ushered me into the car.

Here I had immediate proof that I had passed my novitiate and had been accepted by Satan. The curtains were up. I was to be allowed to see where I was going.

We went up Fifth Avenue and turned to the Queensborough Bridge. We went over it into Long Island. In about forty minutes we had struck the entrance of the Vanderbilt Speedway. We did its forty-five miles to Lake Ronkonkoma in a flat fifty minutes. We turned north toward the Sound, passed through Smithtown and out the North Shore road, A little after six we swung toward the Sound again, and in a few minutes came to a narrow private road penetrating a thick growth of pine and oak. We took it. A couple of hundred yards farther on we paused at a cottage where my driver gave a slip of some sort to a man who had walked out to stop us. He carried a high-powered rifle, and was plainly a guard. A mile or so farther on we came to another cottage and the process was repeated.

The road began to skirt a strong high wall. I knew it was the one Barker had told me about, and I wondered how he had managed to evade these outer guards. At 6:30 we stopped at a pair of massive steel gates. At a signal from the chauffeur they opened. We rolled through, and they clanged behind us.

Under the high wall, on each side of the road, was a low, domed structure of heavy concrete. They were distinctly warlike defenses. They looked as though they might house machine guns. Several men came out of them, questioned my driver, inspected me through the windows, and waved us on.

My respect for Satan was steadily mounting.

Fifteen minutes more and we were at the doors of the chateau. It lay, I figured, about ten miles on the New York side of Port Jefferson, in the densely wooded section between it and Oyster Bay. It was built in a small valley, and probably little if any of it could be seen from the Sound which, I estimated, must be about three-quarters of a mile away. So extensive were the grounds through which we had come and so thickly wooded, that I doubted if the house could be seen even from the public roads.

Consardine welcomed me. I had the impression that he was curiously glad to see me. I had been shifted to new quarters, he told me, and he would stay with me, if I didn’t mind, while I dressed for dinner. I told him that nothing would delight me more. I meant it. I liked Consardine.

The new quarters were fresh evidence of my promotion. There was a big bedroom, a bigger sitting-room and a bath. They were rather more than wonderfully furnished, and they had windows. I appreciated the subtlety of this assurance that I was no longer a prisoner. The efficient Thomas was awaiting me. He grinned openly at my bag. My clothes had been already laid on the bed. Consardine chatted as I bathed and dressed.

Satan, he said, would not be with us this night. He had ordered Consardine, however, to tell me that I had fulfilled his every expectation of me. Sometime tomorrow he would have a talk with me. I would find an engaging lot of people at dinner. Afterwards there would be a bridge game which I could join or not, as I pleased. We did not discuss the affair of the necklace, although Thomas must have known all about it.

I wanted rather badly to ask if Eve would be at the table, but decided not to risk it. When we had reached the dining room, by three of the wall passages and two of the lifts, she was not there.

We were eighteen, all told. My companions were all that Consardine had promised, interesting, witty, entertaining. Among them a remarkably beautiful Polish woman, an Italian count and a Japanese baron, the three frequently featured in the news. Satan’s webs spread wide.

It was an excellent dinner among excellent company – no need to go into detail. There was no discussion of our absent host, nor of our activities. Back of my mind throughout it was a strong impatience to get to my rooms and await Barker. Did he know of my change of quarters? Could he get to me? Was Eve in the chateau?

The dinner ended, and we passed into another room where were the bridge tables. There were enough partners for four, and two persons left over. It gave me my chance to avoid playing. Unfortunately for my plans, it gave Consardine the same opportunity. He suggested that he show me some of the wonders of the place. I could not refuse, of course.

We had looked over half a dozen rooms and galleries before I was able decently to plead weariness. Of what I saw I will not write, it is not essential. But the rareness and beauty of their contents stirred me profoundly. Satan, so Consardine told me, had an enormous suite in which he kept the treasures dearest to him. What I had seen had only been a fraction of what the chateau contained, he said.

We looked in on the bridge game on our way back. Others had drifted in during our absence, and several more tables were going.

At one of them, with Cobham for her partner, sat Eve.

She glanced up at me as I passed and nodded indifferently. Cobham got up and shook hands with great friendliness. It was plain that all his resentment was gone. While I was acknowledging introductions, Eve leaned back, humming. I recognized the air as one of the new jazzy songs:

“Meet me, darling, when the clocks are chiming twelve – at midnight, When the moonlight Makes our hearts bright—”

I needed no moonlight to make my own heart bright. It was a message. She had seen Barker.

After a moment or two, I pressed Consardine’s foot. Eve was being deliberately impolite, yawning and riffling the cards impatiently. Cobham gave her an irritated glance.

“Well,” she said, rudely, “are we playing bridge or aren’t we? I’m serving notice – twelve o’clock sees me in bed.”

Again I understood; she was underscoring the message.

I bade them good night, and turned away with Consardine. Another little group came in, and called to us to stay.

“Not tonight,” I whispered to him. “I’m jumpy. Get me out.”

He looked at Eve, and smiled faintly.

“Mr. Kirkham has work to do,” he told them. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

He, took me to my rooms, showing me, as we went, how to manipulate the panels through which we passed and the lifts.

“In the event of your changing your mind,” he said, “and wanting to come back.”

“I won’t,” I told him. “I’ll read a while and go to bed. Truth is, Consardine, I don’t feel as though I could stand much of Miss Demerest tonight.”

“I’m going to speak to Eve,” he answered. “There’s no reason for your being made uncomfortable.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” I said. “I’d rather handle the situation myself.”

“Have it your own way,” he replied, and went on to tell me that Thomas would awaken me in the morning. Satan would probably send a message by him. If I wanted the valet I could call him by the room ’phone. The ’phone gave me an impression of privacy that the bell had not. Thomas, I inferred, was no longer on duty as my guard. I was very glad of that.

Consardine bade me good night. At last I was alone.

I walked to the windows. They were not barred, but they were covered with a fine steel mesh quite as efficient. I turned out all the lights but one, and began to read. My watch showed 10:30.

It was very still. The time went slowly. It was close to eleven when there came a hoarse whisper from the bedroom:

“’Ere I am, Cap’n, an’ bloody glad to see you!”

Despite my absolute certainty that Barker would appear, my heart gave a great leap, and a load seemed to slip from me. I jumped into the bedroom and shook him by the shoulders.

“And, by God, Barker, but I’m glad to see you!” I said.

“Got your message,” he grinned, his little eyes snapping. “Ain’t no need to ’ide in ’ere, though. Nobody’s goin’ to come bargin’ in on you now, they ain’t. Ace ’igh, you are with Satan. A reg’ler one of ’em. Tysty bit o’ work, Cap’n, you done. Tyke it from me what knows what good work is.”

He took a cigar, lighted it and sat down, eyeing me admiringly.

“A tysty bit o’ work,” he repeated. “An’ you with no trainin’! I couldn’t ’ave done better myself.”

I bowed, and pushed the decanter over to him.

“Not me,” he waved back. “It’s all right if you’re goin’ to sleep an’ got a ’oliday. But old John Barleycorn ain’t no use in our line o’ work, sir.”

“I’m just a beginner, Harry,” I said apologetically, and set the decanter down untouched. He watched me approvingly.

“When Miss Demerest told me,” he resumed, “you could fair ’ave wyved me over with a feather. Bring ’im to me, syes she, the minute you can. If I’m sleepin’ or wykin’ it mykes no difference, I want ’im she syes. Any hour it’s syfe, she syes, but don’t you let ’im run no risks. ’Ell on seein’ you she is, sir.”

“She just let me know she’d be back in her room by twelve,” I said.

“All right, we’ll be there,” he nodded. “Got any plans? To squash ’im, I mean.”

I hesitated. The thought in my mind was too nebulous as yet even to be called an idea. Certainly too flimsy to be brought out for inspection.

“No, Harry, I haven’t,” I answered him. “I don’t know enough about the game. I’ve got to have a chance to look around. I know this though – I’m going to get Miss Demerest free of Satan or go out doing my damnedest.”

He cocked an ear at me, like a startled terrier.

“And if that’s the only way, I’ll pick the time and place to make sure that I take Satan with me,” I added.

He hitched his chair close up to mine.

“Cap’n Kirkham,” he said earnestly, “that’s the last plye to make. The very last plye, sir. I’d be ’ot for it if we could get anybody else to do it. An’ if nobody knew we was behind it. But there ain’t nobody ’ere who’d do for ’im, sir. Nobody. It’s like pryin’ for a mountain to fall on ’im, or the h’earth to swaller ’im, sir.”

He paused for a moment.

“It’s just this, Cap’n. If you do for ’im, or I do for ’im, we got to do for ’im knowin’ there ain’t no out for us. Not h’even a bloody ’arf-chance of us gettin’ awye. The kehjt slyves’d see to that if nobody else did. What! Us tykin’ their ’Eaven from ’em? Suicide it’ll be, Cap’n, no less. An’ if they suspect Miss Demerest knows anything about it – Gord, I ’ates to think of it! No, we got to find some other wye, Cap’n.”

“I meant – only if there was no other way,” I said. “And if it comes to that I don’t expect you to figure in it. I’ll go it alone.”

“Now, Cap’n, now, Cap’n!” he said, short upper lip quivering over buck teeth and face contorted as though on the edge of tears. “You ain’t got no call to talk like that, sir. I’m with you whatever you do. ’Ell, ain’t we partners?”

“Sure we are, Harry,” I answered quickly, honestly touched. “But when it comes to killing, well – I do my own. There’s no reason why you should run any suicidal risks for us.”

“Ow!” he snarled. “There ain’t, ain’t there? Ow, the ’ell there ain’t! Maybe you think I’m ’avin’ a ’appy ’oliday runnin’ around these walls like a bloody rat? A decent, Gord-fearin’ jail I wouldn’t ’ave a word to sye against. But this – what is it? Just plain ’ell! An’ you an’ Miss Demerest like my own family! No reason, ain’t there! Christ, don’t talk like that, Cap’n!”

“There, there, Harry, I didn’t mean it quite that way,” I said, and patted his shoulder. “What I mean is to leave Satan to me, and, if the worst does come about, try to get Miss Demerest away.”

“We stand together, Cap’n,” he answered stubbornly. “If it comes to killin’ I’ll be in it” – he hesitated, then muttered, “but I wish to Gord I could be sure any honest bullet would do for ’im.”

That touched me on the raw. It came too close to some damnably disconcerting doubts of my own.

“Snap out of it, Harry,” I said sharply. “Why, the first thing you told me was that Satan’s only a man like you and me. And that a bullet or a knife would do for him. Why the change of heart?”

“I was braggin’,” he muttered. “I was talkin’ loud to keep my pecker up. ’E ain’t exactly what you’d call human, sir, now is he? I said ’e wasn’t the devil. I never said ’e wasn’t a devil. An’ – an’ – Oh, Gord, ’e’s so bloody ’uge!” he ended helplessly.

My uneasiness increased. I had thought I had an anchor in Barker’s lack of superstition about Satan. And now it apparently had him by the throat. I tried ridicule.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” I sneered. “I thought you were hard-boiled, Harry. Satan tells you he comes from Hell. Sure, where else could he come from, you tell yourself. I suppose if somebody told you the story of Little Red Riding Hood you’d think every old woman with a shawl was a wolf. Go hide under the bed, little man.”

He looked at me somberly.

“’Ell’s behind ’im,” he said. “An’ ’e’s got all the passwords.”

I began to get angry. One reason was that in arguing against him I had also to argue against myself. After all, he was only voicing my thoughts that I was reluctant to admit were my own.

“Well,” I told him, “if he’s made you think that, he’s got you licked. You’re no use to me, Harry. Go back to your walls and creep. Creep around them and stay alive. Devil or no devil, I fight him.”

I had thought to prick him. To my surprise, he showed no resentment.

“An’ devil or no devil, so do I,” he said quietly. “Tryin’ to pull my leg, ain’t you, Cap’n? You don’t ’ave to. I told you I was with you, and I am. I’m through bein’ a rat in the walls. That’s all, Cap’n Kirkham.”

There was a curious dignity about Barker. I felt my face grow hot. I was ashamed of myself. After all, he was showing the highest kind of courage. And surely it was better for him to spread out his fears in front of me than to let them ride him in secret. I thrust my hand out to him.

“I’m damned sorry, Harry—” I began.

“No need to be, sir,” he checked me. “Only there’s lots about this plyce an’ – ’im – that you don’t know about yet. I do, though. Maybe there wouldn’t be no ’arm in showin’ you a bit. Maybe you’d be seein’ a wolf or two yourself. What time is it?”

There was a hint of grimness in his voice. I grinned to myself, well pleased. There was good hard metal in the little man. It was a challenge he was throwing down to me, of course. I looked at my watch.

“Twenty after eleven,” I said. “So that you keep a certain appointment at midnight – lead on, Macduff.”

“Your shirt,” he said, “would look like a light’ouse in the dark. Put on another suit.”

I changed rapidly into the most unobtrusive of the wardrobe’s contents.

“Got a gun?” he asked.

I nodded, pointing to my left armpit. I had replenished my personal arsenal, of which Consardine had deprived me, while at the Club.

“Throw it in a drawer,” he bade me, surprisingly.

“What’s the idea?” I asked.

“No good,” he said, “you might be tempted to use it, Cap’n.”

“Well, for God’s sake,” I said, “if I was, there would be good reason.”

“Might just as well carry along an alarm clock,” said Barker. “Do you just as much good, Or ’arm. Mostly ’arm. We don’t exactly want no h’advertisin’ on this trip, Cap’n.”

My respect for Harry took an abrupt upward swing. I dropped my gun into the casual mouth of a nearby vase. I unslung my armpit holster, and poked it under a pillow.

“Get thee behind me, Temptation,” I said. “And now what?”

He dipped into a pocket.

“Sneakers,” said Barker, and handed me a pair of thick rubber soles. I slipped them over my shoes. He fumbled in another pocket.

“Knucks,” he dropped a beautiful pair of brass knuckles in my hand. I thrust my fingers through them.

“Good,” said Barker. “They ain’t got the range of a gun, but if we ’ave to get violent we’ll ’ave to see it’s quiet like. Get up close an’ ’it ’ard an’ quick.”

“Let’s go,” I said.

He snapped off the lights in the outer room. He returned, moving with absolute silence, and took my hand. He led me to the bedroom wall.

“Put your ’and on my shoulder, an’ step right be’ind me,” he ordered. I had heard no sound of a panel, and could distinguish no opening in the blackness. But a panel had opened, for I walked through what a moment before had been solid wall. He halted, no doubt closing the aperture. He swung off at a right-angle, I following. I had counted fifty paces before he stopped again. The corridor was a long one. He flashed a light, brief as the blink of a firefly. Before me was one of the little lifts. He pressed my arm, and guided me in. The lift began to drop. He drew a faint sigh, as of relief.

“There was dynger along there,” he whispered. “Now it’ll be fair clear goin’!”

The descent of the elevator seemed very slow. When it stopped, I was sure that we must be well below the floor of the great hall, somewhere down among the foundations.

“What we’re goin’ into is one of ’is private wyes,” again he whispered. “I don’t think even Consardine knows it. An’ we won’t meet Satan on it. ’Cause why? I’m goin’ to show you.”

We slipped out of the lift, and crossed what was apparently a ten-foot-wide corridor, black as a windowless dungeon. We passed, I conjectured, through its opposite wall, and along another passage of eighteen short paces. Here Barker paused, listening.

Then in front of me a hair line of faint light appeared. Slowly, ever so slowly, it widened. Barker’s head became silhouetted against it. Cautiously he advanced, peering out. Then he nodded, reassuringly. He moved forward.

We were in a dimly lighted, narrow corridor. It was hardly wide enough for two men to walk side by side. It was lined and paved with some polished black stone into which the light, from some hidden source, seemed to sink and drown. We were at one end of it. The floor fell in a gradual ramp for a hundred yards or more, and there the way either ceased or curved, the light was so faint and the effect of the polished stone so confusing I could not tell which.

“Looks like a h’alley into ’Ell, don’t it?” muttered Harry. “Well, in a minute or two try to sye it ain’t.”

He set grimly forth down it, I at his heels. We came to the part that had perplexed me, and I saw that it was a curve, a sharp one. The curve was unlighted, its darkness relieved only by faint reflections from behind. I could not see its end. We moved on into the thickening gloom. The floor had become level.

Suddenly Barker halted, his mouth close to my ear.

“Lay down. Not a sound now when you look in. On your life! Don’t ’ardly breathe!”

I looked through the crack. I felt a cold prickling along my spine and in the roots of my hair.

A little below me and not more than fifty feet away sat Satan. And he was opening the gates of his Black Paradise to the dying souls of his kehjt slaves!

The meaning of the scene struck clear with my first glimpse of it. Satan was leaning forward from a massive throne of heavy black stone cushioned in scarlet and standing on a low broad dais. His robes were scarlet. At his side squatted the ape-faced monstrosity of an executioner, Sanchal. At his left hand stood two figures with veiled faces. One of them held a deep ewer, and the other a golden goblet.

At Satan’s feet was a woman, rising from her knees. She was not old, fair haired, and must once have been very beautiful. Her body, seen through the one white robe that was her only covering, was still so. Her wide eyes were fixed with a dreadful avidness upon another golden goblet in Satan’s hand. Her mouth was half open, her lips drawn tight against her teeth. Her body quivered and strained as though she were about to leap upon him.

The executioner whirred the loop of his cord, and grinned. She shrank back. Satan lifted the goblet high. His voice rolled out, sonorous and toneless.

“You, woman who was Greta von Bohnheim, who am I?”

She answered as tonelessly.

“You are Satan.”

“And what am I, Satan?”

She replied:

“You are my God!”

I felt Barker shudder. Well, I was doing a little shivering myself. The infernal litany went on.

“You shall have no God but me!”

“I have no God but you, Satan!”

“What is it, woman, that is your desire?”

Her hands were clenched, and she drew them up to her heart. Her voice was tremulous, and so low that barely could I hear it.

“A man and a child who are dead!”

“Through me they shall live again for you! Drink!”

There was faint mockery in his voice, and derision in his eyes, as he handed the goblet to the woman. She clutched it in both hands, and drained it. She bowed low, and walked away. She passed out of the narrow range of my vision, stepping ever more firmly, face rapt, lips moving as though she talked with one unseen who walked beside her.

Again I felt the cold creep down my back. In what I had beheld there had been something diabolic, something that truly savored of the Prince of the Damned. It betrayed itself in Satan’s cold arrogance and pride during the blasphemous litany. It was in his face, his glittering eyes, and in the poise of his huge body. Something truly of Hell that possessed him, emanated from him, hovered around him. As though, as once before I have tried to describe it, as though he were a mechanism of flesh and blood in which a demon had housed itself.

My gaze followed the woman until I could see her no more. The chamber was immense. What I could see of it through the crack must have been less than a third of it. The walls were of rose marble, without hangings or ornamentation of any kind. There were pierced openings like the mouths of deep niches over which silvery curtains fell. There was a great fountain that sent up tinkling jets of water out of a blood-red bowl. Couches of the rosy stone were scattered about. They were richly covered and on them lay, as though sleeping, men and women. There must have been dozens of these, for there were a score of them within my limited vision alone. I could not see the roof.

I thought that these curtained apertures might be cubicles or cells in which the slaves dwelt.

A gong sounded. The curtains were plucked aside. In each of the openings stood a slave, their eyes fastened upon Satan with a horrid eagerness. I shivered. It was like an eruption of the damned.

Satan beckoned. A man stepped forward toward the dais. I took him for an American, a Westerner. He was tall and lanky, and in his gait something of the rocking habit of the range rider. His face was the hawk-like type that the mountain country breeds, and, curiously, it made the peculiar pallor and dilated eyes mask-like and grotesque. His mouth was thin and bitter.

Like the woman, he prostrated himself before Satan. The veiled figure with the goblet held it out to the ewer bearer who poured into it a green liquid. The cup bearer handed the goblet to Satan.

“Rise,” he commanded. The suppliant sprang to his feet, burning gaze upon the cup. The unholy ritual began again!

“You, man who was Robert Taylor, who am I?”

“You are Satan!”

“And what am I, Satan?” Again the blasphemous avowal: “You are my God!”

“You shall have no God but me!”

“I have no God but you, Satan!”

“What is it, man, that is your desire?” The slave straightened, his voice lost its lifelessness. His face grew cruel as that of the executioner’s own.

“To kill the man I hate… to find him… to ruin him… to kill him slowly in many ways!”

“As you killed him once – too swiftly,” said Satan maliciously, and then, again tonelessly:

“Through me you shall find him whom you hate, and slay him as you desire! Drink!”

He drank and passed. Twice more I heard the clang of the summoning gong, and twice I watched the white faces of these doomed ones with their avid eyes appear through the silver curtains and disappear behind them. I heard one man ask for dominance over a kingdom of beasts. Another for a Paradise of women.

And Satan promised, and gave them the green draught. The kehjt!

The subtle, devilish drug that gave to its drinkers the illusion of fulfilled desire. That turned the mind upon itself, to eat itself. And that by some hellish alchemy dissolved the very soul.

I stared on, fascinated, Eve forgotten. But if I had forgotten, Barker had not. The crack through which I was looking closed. He touched me, and we arose. Soundlessly we slipped up the ramp through the dim, black passage. I felt a bit sick.

It had been no nice picture, that of Satan wallowing in the worship of those slaves of his, dealing them out love and hate, dark power and lust, sardonically and impartially giving each what he or she most desired.

Illusions, yes. But more real than life to the drinkers when the drug had them. But, God, their awakening!

And after that awakening the burning craving to escape reality! To return to that place of illusion to which the kehjt was the only key!

No wonder that the three of the museum affair had gone to their deaths with such blind obedience!

And, if Satan was not what he pretended, very surely he was not disgracing that power whose name he had taken.

I had paid little attention to where we were going, blindly following Barker’s lead.

“Well,” he whispered, suddenly, “was I right? Wasn’t it a h’alley into ’Ell? What price Satan now, Cap’n?”

I came back to myself with nerves jumping.

“A drug dealer,” I answered him. “A dope den à la Ritz. That’s all. I’ve seen opium joints in China that would make it look like a trench dugout. And the pipe hitters there would cut your throat for a pill just as quick as these would for Satan.”

Neither of which assertions was at all true, but it gave me comfort to say them.

“Yes?” he said, cynically. “Well, it’s a good wye to think. I ’opes you keep on thinkin’ that wye, Cap’n.”

I hoped that I might begin to think so.

“Soft along ’ere,” he whispered. We were moving like ghosts in the darkness of a passage. I had an indistinct memory of having entered several lifts. Of even the probable location of my room I had not the slightest idea.

“’Ere we are,” he muttered, and stood for an instant listening. I thrust my hand into the pocket where I had slipped my wrist watch, that its illuminated dial might not betray us. I took a swift look. It was almost half past midnight.

Barker drew me forward. There was a faint scent in the air, a delicate fragrance.

Eve’s! We were in her room.

— XIV —

“Beat her to it,” I whispered incautiously.

There was a rustle, as of someone sitting hastily up in bed.

“Who’s there?” came Eve’s voice, softly. “I’ve got my finger on the alarm!”

“It’s me – Jim,” I answered, as softly as she, but mighty hastily.

“Jim!” A subdued light gleamed suddenly. “Where have you been? I’ve been worried to death about you!”

Eve was leaning forward from her pillows, brown eyes wide and luminous, silken mop of hair a bit tousled. She looked like a wakeful little girl who had been exasperatedly pulling it. She was, also, the prettiest thing I had ever seen. Every time I looked at Eve she seemed prettier. I wondered where she was going to stop. She had on some sort of a lacy pink negligee. All the rest of my life, I knew, my heart would beat faster whenever I saw a lacy pink negligee, even when it was only in a shop window.

She slipped out of bed, ran straight to me, and kissed me. It was so pleasant that I entirely forgot everything else.

I became aware of a queer noise behind me. Harry was teetering from side to side, his hands clasped, his eyes half closed and moist, his face ecstatic, and he was crooning like an affectionate parrot. He was a sentimental little burglar, Harry.

Eve looked, and laughed.

“If you want to say ‘Bless you, my children,’ go ahead, Harry,” she said mischievously.

He blinked, snapped out of it, and grinned at her.

“Made me think of me an’ Maggie,” he said. “Just like when we was courtin’. Fair warmed my ’eart, it did.”

“Well,” I said, “I move that this meeting comes to order. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, and not much time to do it. What’s the chance of us being interrupted, Eve?”

“Hardly any,” she answered. “Frankly, everybody does as they like about having room parties. So everybody is extraordinarily discreet about visiting without an invitation. On the other hand, Jim, you’re the one person it wouldn’t do to have found here. Our aversion to each other has been so marked, darling, you know. Satan would be bound to hear about it. And the second he did—”

She didn’t have to finish the sentence. I had a very clear idea of what Satan would do.

“It would be hard to explain Barker, too,” she added.

“How about it, Harry?” I asked him. “Likely to be any calls for you? Any awkward searching parties?”

“Not unless something big goes wrong,” he said. “If they look for me in my room, I can say I was workin’ somewhere else. Satan won’t be ’untin’ me, that’s certain.”

“Well,” I said, “we have to take some chances. But we’ll talk low and in the dark.”

Eve stepped over, and put out the lamp. She drew aside the heavy curtains from one of the windows. A faint light flickered in from the moon hidden behind a hazy sky. Barker and I moved the chaise longue to a shadowed corner. The three of us sat down upon it.

We talked. Not the slightest use of setting down a word of it. We got nowhere. A few schemes gleamed brightly for an instant, and then went glimmering like will-o’-the-wisps. The spell of what I had beheld in Satan’s unholy shrine was heavy on me, try as I would to throw it off. I had to fight a sense of futility. We were like three flies in a web of the Temple of the Footsteps. If we got out of one, it was only to find ourselves in another. But steadily Eve’s warm, soft body pressing against mine, her courage, her trust, armed me against the devastating sapping of my confidence. There was a way. There must be a way.

More than an hour had passed, and we had found not a solitary clew to it.

And Barker had been growing fidgety, nervously abstracted.

“What’s the matter, Harry?” I asked him at last.

“I’m h’uneasy, sir,” he said. “I don’t know why. But I ’ave a feelin’ somethin’s wrong somewhere.”

It struck me as funny.

“You’re devilish well right there is,” I couldn’t help chuckling. “It’s what we’ve been giving all this time trying to right.”

“No,” he said soberly. “I’m bl— I’m h’unusually h’uneasy. An’ I’m never that wye h’unless somethin’s b— ’orrible wrong. Cap’n, I think we’d better call it a night an’ get back.”

I hesitated. As I say, we had gotten nowhere. At any moment one of us might get a flash that would open up a way out. Truth was, of course, I didn’t want to leave Eve. But there was no denying the little man’s distress. And if he should go and not be able to return – well, then I would be in a pretty fix. I hadn’t the slightest idea of where my room was, or how to get to it.

“We’ve decided a lot of things won’t do,” said Eve. “It sounds Pollyanna-ish, I know, but it really is some progress. The day may bring some new ideas. We’ll meet again tonight.”

“All right,” I said. “We’ll go, Harry.”

By the involuntary breath of relief he drew, I realized how troubled he was. Eve slipped to the windows, and let drop the curtains. The room resumed its original darkness. I felt her hand touch mine, and then her arms were around my neck.

“It’s going to seem a long, long time till tonight, Jim, darling,” whispered Eve.

“’Urry!” came Harry’s whisper. “’Urry up, Cap’n!”

I cautiously began to make my way toward where he stood by the wall.

“Gord!” I heard him gasp.

The word was thick with terror. I leaped forward.

The ray of the flashlight struck Barker full in the face. A hand shot out with the quickness of a snake, and caught his throat. I saw his face distorted with agony as his own two hands flew up to break that merciless grip.

The light struck me in the eyes, dazzling me. I ducked, and dived in. Before I could touch whoever it was that held it, the flash dropped to the rug and Barker’s body hit me like a bag of sand hurled by an elephant. I staggered back with a grunt. The lights in the room flashed up.

Just in front of me, menacing me with his automatic, stood Consardine!

And Consardine’s eyes were cold and deadly. There was death in them. They flashed from me to Eve. His face softened, as though with relief from some fear. Swiftly it gave way to bewilderment, incredulity. It grew hard and deadly again. The muzzle of the gun pointing at me never wavered. At my feet Harry gasped, and staggered up dizzily. I put an arm out and steadied him.

“What are these men doing here, Eve?”

Consardine’s voice was still and flat, as though he were holding himself in check by enormous effort. I had read the thought behind those swiftly changing expressions. First, that we had crept into Eve’s room for some sinister purpose. Then – suspicion of Eve herself. I must wipe that out. Keep Eve out of it. Play on Consardine’s first card. I answered before she could speak.

“You’re rather – impetuous, Consardine,” I said in a voice as hard as his own. “But your gun makes that safe, I suppose, when you let loose on an unarmed man. I was restless, and decided to go back to the bridge game. I got lost in your cursed rabbit warren. I ran across this man here who told me that he was working around the place. I asked him to guide me back to my room. By some damned irony, he managed to make the mistake of all mistakes of getting me into Miss Demerest’s. Believe me, I was quite as anxious to get away as she was for me to go. Miss Demerest, I think you will confirm what I say?”

I turned to her. It was an open lead, and it sounded plausible enough. Consardine paid no attention to me whatever.

“I asked you, Eve, what these men are doing here?” he repeated.

Eve looked at him steadily for a moment, and then walked over and stood beside me.

“Dr. Consardine,” she said, “Mr. Kirkham is lying like a gentleman, to save me. The truth is that I asked him to come and see me. And I asked Barker to guide him to me. Both of them are entirely innocent of anything except courteously doing as I asked. The whole responsibility is mine.”

The veins suddenly stood out on Consardine’s temples, and the gun in his hand wavered. His face flushed. The cold fury had given way to hot anger. He might be just as dangerous, but I had a flash that Eve knew what she was doing, that her instinct had been truer than mine.

“So!” said Consardine thickly. “You thought you could make a fool out of me! Dupe me! I don’t enjoy being fooled, and I don’t enjoy being a dupe. How long have you two known each other?”

“We never set eyes on each other until you brought us together,” said Eve.

“And why did you send for him?”

“To get me away from Satan,” answered Eve, steadily. “What else?”

He regarded her with smoldering eyes.

“And why did you think he could do that?” he asked her.

“Because I love him! And because he loves me!” said Eve quietly.

He stared at us. Then abruptly all anger fled, his eyes softened.

“Good God,” said Consardine. “You Babes in the Wood!”

Eve put her hand out to him. He took it, patting it gently. He looked us over carefully again, as though we were some new and puzzling specimens. He turned out all the lights except the shaded one beside Eve’s bed, strode over to the window, and peeped out the curtains. He came back to us.

“Let’s talk this over,” he said. “Barker, I’m sorry I choked you. Kirkham, I’m sorry I bowled you over. I’m sorry, too, that I misjudged you. And glad I did. Eve, I wasn’t spying on you from out there. You were on my mind. You have been, child, for some time. I could see how restless and disturbed you were at the game. I thought – it was something else. You were on my mind, I say. I thought that perhaps you had not gone to bed. And that a talk with me, who am more than old enough to be your father, might help. There were – some things I had to say. I stood out there for minutes, hesitating. I thought I might slip the panel a mite and see if you were up – or awake. I thought you might be crying. And just as I was about to do it, it opened and I heard Barker curse. Then the rest happened. That’s all.”

I gave him my hand. Barker grinned widely, and saluted.

“Had I better be goin’, sir?” he asked.

“Not yet,” said Consardine. “Kirkham, how long have you known Barker?”

“’E syved my life, ’e did,” broke in Harry. “’E pulled me out o’ ’Ell. An’ while we’re all tellin’ the truth, Dr. Consardine, I’ll sye I’m fair set on doin’ the syme by ’im an’ ’is young lydy.”

I gave Consardine a brief account of my acquaintance with Barker. He nodded, approvingly.

“First,” he said, “it will be well to clarify the situation by stating my own position. I am Satan’s servant. I am bound by a certain oath to him. I took that oath with open eyes, fully realizing all that it entailed. I came to him voluntarily, not like you, Kirkham. I recognize that your oath was under duress, and that therefore you are entitled to act in ways that I am not. I do not break my voluntary oath nor my word. Besides that I am convinced that if I did I would not live long. I have a foolish partiality for living. I could cheat Satan of his pleasure in my torture, but – I do not believe in any existence beyond the grave, and I find life, at times, vastly interesting. Furthermore, I have certain standards of living, appetites, desires and likings which my contact with Satan insures of satisfaction. Away from him they certainly would not be satisfied. Also I was an outlaw when I came to him. Outlaw I am, but hunted outlaw I would be without his protection. First and last – there is my oath.

“Let it be understood, then, that any assistance that I can promise you will be largely negative. It will consist of warning you of pitfalls to avoid, and of closing my eyes and ears to what I may see or hear. Like this affair tonight, for instance.”

“It is all we could ask, sir,” I said. “And a great deal more than I had any right to expect.”

“And now I say to you, Kirkham,” he went on, “that I think you have little chance to win against Satan. I think that the road you have picked has death at its end. I tell you so because I know you have courage, and you should be told what is in my mind. And I say it before you, Eve, because you too have courage. And you must consider, child, whether you should allow your lover to take this almost certain risk of death, or whether you should do – something else.”

I looked into Eve’s face. Her mouth was quivering, and her eyes were tortured.

“What – what is the something else, Dr. Consardine?” she whispered.

“Become Mme. Satan, I suppose!” I answered for him. “Not while I’m alive.”

“That,” he acquiesced quietly, “of course. But it is not what I had in mind—” He hesitated, shot a glance at Harry and quickly switched to another thought, or back, rather, to his old one.

“Understand,” he said, “I want you to win, Kirkham. In any way that does not break my oath to Satan, or threaten my prejudice for remaining alive, I will help you. At least – I will keep my hands off. But realize this – I am Satan’s servant. If he orders me to take you, I shall take you. If he orders me to kill you, I shall – kill you.”

“If Jim dies, I die. If you kill him, you kill me,” said Eve tranquilly. She meant it. He knew she meant it, and he winced.

“Nevertheless, child, I would do it,” he told her. And I knew he meant that. So did Eve.

“You – you started to – you were about to speak of another way—” she faltered.

“I do not want you to tell me your plans, Kirkham,” he interrupted her, quickly. “Only this. Do any of them involve your trying to kill Satan?”

I hesitated. It was a dangerous question to answer. After all, Consardine had warned me he could be trusted only so far. What did he consider the limits of his oath?

“I perceive they do,” he had interpreted my silence. “Well, it is the one thing you must not attempt. It is the one thing that is impossible. You may think you can kill him while you and he are alone. Kirkham, I tell you Satan is never alone. Always there are guards hidden about – in the walls, in secret places. Before you could fire, they would have you winged. And there is Satan’s abnormal quickness of mind. He would perceive your thought before it could be transformed into action. If you tried it while others were about, they would have you down before you could fire a second shot – assuming that you managed to get in a first one. And Satan has an unhuman vitality. I do not believe one bullet or two could kill him any more than they could an elephant. The real point is, however, that you would never get the chance.”

Well, Consardine did not know everything – that was clear. With that stone in the wall of the slavers’ hall up half an inch instead of a quarter, and a rifle poking through the crack, I would not have given much for Satan’s survival. Assuming, of course, that basically he was human.

“Furthermore,” he went on, almost as in answer to my thought, “suppose you did perform what I believe the impossible – kill him. Still there could be no escape for you. Better to be slain at once. There is not a place on earth where you could hide from the vengeance of his people. For it is not only by fear that Satan rules. Far from it. As he has told you, he pays his servants well. His continuance means ease, luxury, safety, power – most of the things of life for which man commonly strives – to more people than you can imagine. Satan has his splendid side as well as his dark one. And his people are scattered over all the globe. Many of them are more highly placed than you, as yet, can dream. Is it not so, Eve?”

“It is so,” she said, and the trouble in her eyes grew.

“Satan’s throne does not rest upon the backs of cringing slaves,” he said. “As always, he has his princes and his legions. To sum up. I do not believe you can kill him. If you try and fail, you die – horribly. And Eve is not saved. If you did kill him, you die as inevitably. Eve would be saved from him – yes. But will she have her freedom at such a price?”

“No! No!” cried Eve, and stood in front of me, arms outstretched, despair in her face.

“Consardine,” I said abruptly, “why does Satan hide his hands when the climbers go up the steps?”

“What’s that? What do you mean?” He stared at me.

“I’ve seen him on the black throne three times,” I said. “Twice with Cartright, once with myself. He pulls the lever, and then he hides his hands under the robe. What does he do with them, Consardine?”

“Are you hinting that the steps are a crooked game? That’s absurd, Kirkham!” His voice was amused, but I saw his strong hands clench.

“I’m hinting nothing,” I answered. “I – wonder. You must have seen many go up those steps. Have you ever seen Satan’s hands in the open while they were mounting? Think back, Consardine.”

He was silent. I could see him marshaling in his memory those he had beheld beckoned by the shining footprints. And his face had whitened.

“I – can’t tell,” he said at last. “I didn’t notice. But – I don’t think so.”

He jumped to his feet.

“Nonsense!” he said. “Even so – it means nothing!”

I was shooting in the dark. No, not quite. I was giving substance to that shadowy thought, that nebulous suspicion, I had feared to bring out before Barker.

“No?” I said. “Do you believe, then, that Satan, with all his genius for details, his setting up of the cards, his discounting of every chance – do you believe that Satan would leave any door open through which one could come and rule him? Has crown and scepter ever been won?”

“Yes,” he replied, disconcertingly. “Unfortunately for the doubt with which you nearly netted me, Kirkham, they have. I have been with Satan eight years. Three times I have seen the steps conquered!”

That was like a slap in the face. For the moment it silenced me. Not so Eve.

“What became of them?” she asked.

“Well,” he looked at her, uneasily, “one of them wanted something – something rather peculiar. He died of it in six months.”

“Yes,” drawled Eve, “so he died of it. What about the others?”

“One of them died in an aeroplane accident between London and Paris,” he said. “She was on her way to – what she wanted. Not even Satan could have helped that. Everybody was burned.”

“Rather unlucky, weren’t they?” asked Eve, innocently. “Both of them. But the third?”

“I don’t know,” said Consardine, half angrily. “I suppose he’s all right. He went to Asia. I’ve never heard of him since then. He wanted a sort of a hidden little pocket kingdom where he could do as he pleased. Satan gave it to him.”

“Two dead, and one – disappeared,” mused Eve. “But don’t you think that you ought to have heard something about that third one, Dr. Consardine? Couldn’t you find out what became of him? Maybe – maybe, he died, too, like the others.”

“As Eve says, two of them didn’t last long,” I said. “The third is doubtful. If you were in Satan’s place, Consardine, wouldn’t it occur to you that it was advisable to keep up hope in the aspirants by showing them now and then that it could be done? It would to me. And, still assuming that we thought like Satan, wouldn’t we handpick our successful climbers? I would. But I wouldn’t pick the kind that would be likely to live long, would you? Or if they were well and hearty, a little accident might be arranged. Like that Croydon air bus you’ve mentioned, for instance.”

“Gorblyme!” gasped Harry. “The swine! That wouldn’t be ’ard to do. An’ I’ll bet ’e done it!”

“What does Satan do with his hands when he hides them under his robe?” I repeated.

“And what became of that third winner?” murmured Eve.

On Consardine’s forehead little beads of sweat stood out. He was trembling.

“See here, Consardine,” I said, “you told us you didn’t like being a dupe. You didn’t like being fooled. Suppose Satan has been making a colossal mock of you – and the others. What happens?”

I saw the effort with which he mastered himself. It frightened me a bit. After all, I hadn’t the slightest evidence to back up what I had been hinting. And if Consardine thought that I was deliberately deceiving him—

But I wasn’t. The doubts I had raised were entirely legitimate. Satan did hide his hands. The bad after-luck of the step conquerors had been something that Consardine had known, not we.

“Barker,” he turned to Harry, “have you ever looked over the mechanism that Satan tells us controls the choice of the shining footprints? Answer me! Is it what he says it is?”

Barker wrung his hands, looking first at him and then at Eve and me, piteously. He swallowed once or twice.

“Answer me,” ordered Consardine.

“Gord ’elp me, Cap’n,” Harry turned to me desperately, “I never wanted to lie so ’ard in my life. I want to sye I ’aven’t seen it. Or that it don’t work them bloody prints. But Gord ’elp me, Miss Demerest, I ’ave looked it over. An’ it does work ’em, Dr. Consardine. It does, just as ’e syes it does!”

Well, that was that. It knocked, apparently, my theories clean through the vanishing point. For a moment I had hoped that the little man would be diplomatic. Say, at least, that he didn’t know. But I could not deny him his right to tell the truth – if he felt like it.

“That’s all right, Harry,” I said cheerfully. “What we’re looking for is the truth. And what you say settles everything, I suppose.”

“I’d like to ’ave lied, Cap’n,” he half whimpered. “But, ’ell, I couldn’t.”

Consardine, I suddenly noticed, was behaving rather oddly. He did not seem at all like one whose faith in Satan had been impregnably re-enforced. He seemed, indeed, more disturbed than ever.

“Barker,” he said, “you’d better go now. I will see Captain Kirkham back to his room.”

Harry slid over to one of the walls. He bowed to us, miserably. A panel opened, and he was gone. Consardine turned to us.

“Now, Eve,” he said, “I’ll tell you what brought me here tonight. I told you that you’d been on my mind. So you have. Damnably. I wanted to save you from Satan. I had a way to suggest. I stole the idea from Shakespeare. You remember the stratagem by which the honest friar schemed to get Juliet to her Romeo? And cheat their respective warring families? Their Satan, in a sense.”

“The draught that would make her appear to be dead,” whispered Eve.

“Exactly,” nodded Consardine. “It was something like that which I was about to propose to you. To treat you, from my medical knowledge, in such a way that the health and beauty and spirit which makes you so desirable to Satan would fade – temporarily. To put you in such condition as obviously to make impossible, at least in the near future, his personal plans for you. And to keep you in that condition until he had found a substitute for his paternal impulses – or something else happened.

“There was risk to it, certainly. Great risk to you, Eve. The waiting might be too long – I might not be able to restore to you what I had taken from you. Yet you might have preferred that risk to the certainty of – Satan’s arms. I was going to let you decide.”

“Was going to?” repeated Eve breathlessly. “Of course I’ll take the risk. Oh, Dr. Consardine – it seems like the way out!”

“Does it?” asked he grimly. “I think not – now. The original scheme from which I stole my idea came to grief, you remember, because of Romeo. Well, I was reckoning without Romeo. I didn’t know there was one.”

“I – I don’t quite – get that,” said Eve.

“Child,” he took her hands, “are you willing to give up your lover? Never see him, never meet him, never communicate with him? Not for weeks or months, but for years? Kill your love for him, or live on, starving upon memories?”

“No,” answered Eve directly, and shook her curly head.

“And even if you persuaded her to, Consardine, what do you think I would be doing?” The bare suggestion stirred in me resentment and stubborn anger. “Fold my hands and turn my eyes Heavenward and meekly murmur, ‘Thy will be done!’ Not me!”

“I’m persuading no one, Kirkham,” he replied quietly. “I’m only pointing out that it’s the only way the thing could be done. If I did to Eve what I have described, what would happen? Treatment here for a time, of course, so Satan could see her failing. Then her removal somewhere, for other doctors to look after her. Her symptoms could not be feigned. They would have to be real. The medical fraternity is not wholly represented by me in Satan’s entourage. He has some highly placed specialists among his dependents. And if he had not, he could call them in. And would, unless at the very outset he was persuaded that her condition would inevitably mean a faulty maternity weakness in offspring. Forgive me, child, for talking so plainly, but it’s no time to be beating around the bush.

“The specialists I could take care of. Hoodwink. I could have been a very great” – he hesitated, and sighed – “well, no matter. But Satan has set his will on you, Eve. He will not lightly give up his purpose. If it were only as a woman that he desired you, it would not be so difficult. But you are more than that to him, far more. You are to be the bearer of his child. Not upon my word alone, much as he trusts my judgment, would he relinquish you as unfit. He would have to be convinced beyond all doubt – and therein lies the danger to you and possibly – death.”

He paused, looked pityingly into her troubled eyes.

“Too great a risk,” I said. “I’ll try my way first, Consardine.”

“Enter Romeo,” he smiled faintly. “You’ll have to, Kirkham. You’ve made the other impossible. You think that life would be worthless without Eve, I take it?”

“I don’t think it, I know it,” I answered.

“And you feel the same way about – Jim?”

“Yes,” she said softly. “But – to save his life—”

“It wouldn’t,” said Consardine. “I know men and women. No matter what you made up your mind to do, Eve, he would be working and planning to get you away. Nor are you exactly the kind to sit down, as he expresses it, with meekly folded hands. He would be trapped, sooner or later. It might very likely follow that the trick would be discovered. Then I would have to give up my foolish prejudice for living. I won’t take the chance of that. But assume that you do escape. Together. You would be two hares running around the world with the hounds constantly at your heels. Satan’s hounds, always on the move. Always with his threat hanging over you. Would such a life be worth living? There might be a child. Be sure that Satan’s vengeance would not spare it. I repeat – would such a life be worth living?”

“No,” I said, and Eve drew a deep breath and shook her head.

“What can we do!” she whispered.

Consardine strode once across the room, and back. He stood before me, and I saw that again the veins in his forehead were standing out like cords, and that his gray eyes were hard and cold as steel. He tapped me thrice on the breast with his clenched fist.

“Find out what Satan does with his hands when he hides them!” he said.

He turned from us, plainly not trusting himself to speak further. Eve was staring at him, wondering, even as I, at the intensity of the rage that was shaking him.

“Come, Kirkham,” he had mastered himself. He ran his fingers through Eve’s bob, ruffling it caressingly.

“Babes in the Wood,” he repeated.

He walked to the panel, slowly. Considerately.

“Tonight,” I whispered to Eve.

Her arms were around my neck, her lips pressed to mine.

“Jim – dear!” she whispered, and let me go.

I looked back as I passed through the opening. She was standing as I had left her, hands stretched out to me, eyes wide and wistful. She was like a lonely little child, afraid to go to bed. I felt a deeper twinge at my heart. A strengthening of resolve. The panel closed.

In silence I followed Consardine as he led me to my room. He entered with me and stood for a moment staring at me somberly. Quite suddenly I felt dog-tired.

“I hope you sleep better tonight than I shall,” said Consardine, abruptly.

He was gone. I was too tired to wonder what he had meant by that. I managed to get out of my clothes, and was asleep before I could draw the bed covers over me.

— XV —

The ringing of the telephone aroused me. I reached out for it, only half awake, not in the least realizing where I was. Consardine’s voice brought me out of my lethargy like a bucket of water.

“Hello, Kirkham,” he said. “Don’t want to spoil your beauty sleep, but how about having breakfast with me, and then taking a canter? We’ve some excellent horses, and the morning’s too nice to be wasted.”

“Fine,” I answered. “I’ll be down in ten minutes. How will I find you?”

“Ring for Thomas. I’ll be waiting.” He hung up.

The sun was streaming through the windows. I looked at my watch. It was close to eleven. I had slept soundly about seven hours. I rang for Thomas.

Sleep, a plunge and the brilliant sunshine were charms that sent the shadow of Satan far below the rim of the world. Whistling, I hoped half-guiltily that Eve felt as fit. The valet brought me out what Barker would have called a “real tysty ridin’ rig.” He convoyed me to a sunny, old-world lovely room looking out on a broad, green terrace. There were a dozen or so nice-looking people breakfasting at small tables. Some of them I had met the night before.

Over in a corner I saw Consardine. I joined him. We had an extremely pleasant meal, at least I did. Consardine did not seem to have a care on earth. His talk had a subtly sardonic flavor that I found most stimulating. So far as the conversation was concerned, our encounter in Eve’s room might never have been. He made no slightest reference to it. Nor, following his lead, did I.

We went from there to the stables. He took a powerful black gelding that whinnied to him as he entered. I mounted a trim roan. We rode at a brisk canter along bridle paths that wound through thick woods to scrub pine and oak. Now and then we met a guard who stood at attention, and saluted Consardine as we passed by. It was a silent ride.

We came abruptly out of the woods. Consardine reined in. We were upon the cleared top of a low hillock. Below us and a hundred yards away sparkled the waters of the Sound.

Perhaps a quarter mile out lay a perfect beauty of a yacht. She was about two hundred feet long and not more than thirty in beam. Seagoing and serviceable, and built for speed as well. Her paint and brass shone, dazzling white and golden.

“The Cherub,” said Consardine, dryly. “She’s Satan’s. He named her that because she looks so spotless and innocent. There is a more descriptive word for her, however, but not a polite one. She can do her thirty knots, by the way.”

My gaze dropped from the yacht to a strong landing that thrust out from the shore. A little fleet of launches and speed boats were clustered near it. I caught a glimpse of an old-fashioned rambling house nestled among the trees near the water’s edge.

My eyes followed the curve of the shore. A few hundred feet from the pier was a pile of great rocks, huge boulders dropped by the glacier that once covered the Island. I started, and looked more closely.

Upon one of them stood Satan, black-cloaked, arms folded, staring out at the gleaming yacht. I touched Consardine’s arm.

“Look!” I whispered, “Sat—” I stopped. The rock was bare. I had turned my eyes from it for the barest fraction of a second. Yet in that time Satan had disappeared.

“What did you see?” asked Consardine.

“Satan,” I said. “He was standing on that pile of rocks. Where could he have gone!”

“He has a hole there,” he answered indifferently. “A tunnel that runs from the big house to the shore.”

He swung around to the woods. I followed. We rode along for a quarter of an hour more. We came out into a small meadow through which ran a brook. He dismounted, and dropped the reins over the black’s neck.

“I want to talk to you,” he said to me.

I gave the roan its freedom, and sat down beside Consardine.

“Kirkham, you’ve set my world rocking under my feet,” he said curtly. “You’ve put the black doubt in me. Of the few things that I would have staked my life on, the first was that Satan’s gamble of the seven footprints was a straight one. And now – I would not.”

“You don’t accept Barker’s testimony, then?” I asked.

“Talk straight, Kirkham,” he warned, coldly. “Your implication was that Satan manipulated the telltale from the Black Throne. With his hidden hands. If so, he has the cunning to do it in a way that Barker, going over the other mechanism, would never suspect. You know that. Talk straight, I tell you.”

“The thought that Barker might be wrong occurred to me, Consardine,” I said. “I preferred to let it occur to you without my suggesting it. I had said enough.”

“Too much – or not enough,” he said. “You have put the doubt in me. Well, you’ve got to rid me of it.”

“Just what do you mean by that?” I asked him.

“I mean,” he said, “that you must find out the truth. Give me back my faith in Satan, or change my doubt into certainty.”

“And if I do the latter—” I began eagerly.

“You will have struck a greater blow at him than any with knife or bullet. You will be no longer alone in your fight. That I promise you.”

His voice was thick, and the handle of his riding crop snapped in the sudden clenching of his strong hand.

“Consardine,” I said bluntly, “why should the possibility of Satan’s play being crooked move you so? You are closest to him here, I gather. His service, so you say, brings you all that you desire. And you tell me he is the shield between you and the law. What difference, then, does it make to you whether his gamble of the seven footprints is on the level or isn’t?”

He caught my shoulder, and I winced at the crushing grip.

“Because,” he answered, “I am under Satan’s sentence of death!”

“You!” I exclaimed, incredulously.

“For eight years,” he said, “that threat has been over me. For eight years he has tormented me, as the mood swayed him. Now with hint of the imminent carrying out of that sentence. Now with half-promise of its wiping out, and another trial at the steps. Kirkham, I am no coward – yet death fills me with horror. If I knew it to be inevitable, I would face it calmly. But I believe it to be eternal blackness, oblivion, extinction. There is something in me that recoils from that, something that shrinks from it with a deadly terror, with loathing. Kirkham, I love life.

“Yet if the gamble was straight, he was within his rights. But if it was not straight – then all those eight years he has played with me, made a mock of me, laughed at me. And still laughing, would have watched me go to whatever death he had decreed, unresisting, since I would have believed that by my oath I was so bound.

“And that, Kirkham, is not to be endured. Not by me!

“Nor is that all. I have watched many men and women take the steps, risking all on Satan’s word. And I have seen some of them go to death, as calmly as I would have done, their honor, like mine, rooted in dishonor. And others go broken and wailing. Like Cartright. While Satan laughed. And there are more who live like me on Satan’s sufferance. And all this on a cast of loaded dice? If so, then I tell you, Kirkham, it is not a thing to be borne! Nor shall it be borne!”

He plucked at his collar, gasping, as though it choked him.

“God!” he whispered. “To pay him back for that! If it is true… I would face death… singing… but I must know if it is true.”

I waited until he had regained control.

“Help me find out whether it is or not,” I said. “It may well turn out to be an impossible job for me – alone.”

He shook his head.

“You have Barker to help you,” he replied.

“I don’t want to run him into any more risks.” I would cover up the little man as much as I could. “There’s a certain amount of prowling involved, Consardine. We might run across somebody not so well disposed as you. But the three of us ought to be able to settle matters one way or the other quickly.”

“No,” he said, stubbornly. “Why should I? It is up to you, Kirkham. It is you who have raised the doubt. It is you who must resolve it. One way or the other. After all, your suspicions are based upon the vaguest evidence. A triviality, and two, or it may be three, perfectly explicable happenings. The chances that you are wrong are enormously greater than those that you are right. Why should I risk my life upon them? I have already gone far. I have promised you neutrality, and somewhat more. I will go no further. Take Barker. I promise neither to see nor hear you should I meet you in your – wanderings. But at this time I will not invite certain death by joining you in them. I have been reasonably content. If you are wrong, I shall still be. If you are right – ah, then, I repeat, you will be no longer alone.

“In the meantime – Michael Consardine holds fast to his place in the sun.”

He chirruped to the black gelding, and mounted it. There was no use in further argument, that was plain. We rode away, through the woods, and after a while turned back to the chateau.

I left him at the stable, and went to my rooms to change. There was a note pinned to my pillow. It was from Satan. A casual sort of message. He hoped I was enjoying myself as I deserved, and would see me about nine o’clock that evening.

The rest of the day passed uneventfully. The more I thought over Consardine’s talk, the more I sympathized with his viewpoint. Also, oddly enough, the higher rose my spirits. I sat down to dinner in a pleasantly reckless state of mind.

Consardine was at the head of the board as on the previous night. I had Cobham for companion. I saw Eve toward the far end. She ignored me. It was difficult for me to do the same toward her.

Cobham had been drinking. For some reason he seemed to feel a certain responsibility for me. He paid no attention to anyone else, nor would he let me. He was vastly interesting, but as the time wore on I began to feel a profound distaste for Cobham. He was expounding his theories of life as a mere electrochemical reaction. He made it clear that neither the individual nor the mass meant anything to him in terms of what is commonly called humanity. He was appallingly callous about it.

He seemed to have no more feeling about men and women than he would have about his test tubes. Rather less, I fancied. In fact, that was what men and women appeared to him to be, just a lot of animated test tubes with minute curiosity-provoking differences in their contents. And he saw no reason why they should not be broken, or emptied or the contents changed in the way of experimentation. He sketched a few rather awful experiments with gases upon the kehjt slaves. At least, I hoped that the unfortunate subjects had been the slaves. He did not say so.

Listening, I was convinced that of the two, Satan might be the more humane. Cobham kept on drinking steadily. The only effect of the liquor was to make him more coldly, inhumanly scientific.

“You’ve got too much sentiment in your ferment, Kirkham,” he said. “You probably think that life is sacred, to use the cant word, not to be destroyed unless by dire necessity. Bosh! It is no more sacred than the current I turn on or off at will from my lamps, nor the ferments in my tubes that I end at will. Whenever did Nature give a damn about the individual? Neutralize the weakening ingredient in you, Kirkham, and you might become a great man. I can do it for you, if you will let me.”

I promised to think it over.

At 8:30 Satan appeared. I had been wondering where I was to see him. Consardine yielded his place, and Satan beckoned me to sit at his left hand.

“To my new follower, James Kirkham,” he raised his glass. “I am much pleased with him.”

They drank to me, standing. I saw Eve pointedly set down her glass untouched. So, as she had meant him to do, did Satan.

At 8:45, as though at some signal, the company began to drift out of the room. In a few minutes there remained only Satan, Cobham and myself. It rather surprised me to see Consardine leave. Servants cleared the table, and at a nod from Satan withdrew.

“There is a ship,” he said abruptly, “that sails from Havre within three days. She is the Astarte. A slow boat. She carries some things of superlative beauty which I feel it time for me to claim. There is a painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, another by Romney. There is a ewer of rock crystal and twelve rock crystal cups, marvelously engraved and set with great cabochon sapphires and rubies. They were made, it may be, in ancient Crete for Queen Pasiphae. At least, they are immemorially old. And to them an unknown genius gave his best. They were long hidden in the Kremlin. The Communists have sold them. There is a necklace of emeralds upon each of which is graven one of the Metamorphoses of Ovid. There is nothing like it in the world.”

He paused, then bent his head toward me.

“I must have them, James Kirkham. You and Cobham shall get them for me.”

I bowed, awaiting further enlightenment. Cobham, I noticed, had not drunk anything since Satan’s entrance. He did not show at all what he had drunk. He sat silent, eyes upon the glass with which his fingers played; cynical, a faint smile upon his full lips. Yet I felt that he was watching me covertly, as though awaiting something. Whatever Satan was about to tell me, I suspected that he had already gone over it with him.

“I have selected you as leader,” Satan went on, “not only because the task may demand the exercise of unusual resourcefulness, but also that close obedience to orders which you have proved to me you can exercise. I am merely outlining the venture tonight so you may be turning it over in your mind. You will receive your detailed instructions before you sail.”

Sail? That meant leave Eve! I moved restlessly. I suppose my discomfort showed in my face. At any rate, he sensed it.

“Yes,” he said. “The transfer will not be made on land after the Astarte arrives. I prefer to make it on the high seas. You are to engage in what the prejudiced would call piracy, James Kirkham. Ah, well, it is a romantic calling.”

He eyed me, faint malice in the sparkling gaze.

“And you have your romantic side,” he purred. “I admire it. For I, too, have mine. Therefore, I envy you, somewhat, this venture.”

“And I am grateful,” I smiled, meeting his scrutiny squarely. But the palms of my hands had grown suddenly moist.

“The Astarte,” he continued, “will take the southern route. There is little likelihood of her encountering any serious storms at this time of year in those latitudes. On the day she sails, you and Cobham will set out in my yacht which I perceived you admiring today. Besides her crew, the yacht will carry a dozen of my drinkers of the kehjt. They will be for use in emergency. But it is my hope that none such may arise. The Cherub – is it not a lovely name? – the Cherub will leave ostensibly for a coastwise voyage. On the first day out, the night rather, the Cherub will cease to be her angelic self – yes, I assure you there were girl cherubs as well as boy ones. She will be cunningly changed to the semblance of the Sea Wolf, the yacht of an eminently respectable financier which at that moment will be logging along its unsuspecting way to Havana. This also in case of emergency. And, of course, the name of the Sea Wolf will replace that of the Cherub wherever the name is noticeable.

“You will circle the Astarte two days later at a designated section, keeping out of sight, of course. Her speed is fifteen knots, yours thirty. You will be able, therefore, to stop her, remove what I desire, and get back here – again the innocent, spotless Cherub – at least two days before she can arrive in port.”

My heart, which had been growing steadily heavier, lightened. Satan intended no mischief to the ship then, or to its crew. Else he would not speak of her return. Cobham gave a short bark, like a suppressed laugh. The cynicism of his smile had deepened. Satan’s blue stare rested upon him for an instant. Cobham moved uneasily.

“You have planned, of course, sir,” I said, “how we are to stop the Astarte.”

“Naturally,” he answered. “I am coming to that. At this time of year, this boat would not carry more than a hundred persons. Some of the passengers she does carry will be my people. But beside that, I have arranged it so that there will be even fewer than usual. A number of staterooms have been reserved for a tourists’ club. But, oddly, just before the Astarte is to sail, these reservations will be canceled. There will have been an unavoidable change of plans. The generous representative of the club will waive all claims upon the reservation money, and the line will be guaranteed indemnity. The Astarte, because of the anxiety of the owners of the objects I intend to acquire, will not delay her sailing. I think there will be not more than thirty passengers, of whom ten, at least, will be of my following.

“Very well, James Kirkham. We come now to the night of your adventure. All that afternoon you have been following the Astarte at a distance of ten miles. It is a moonless night. At nine o’clock there is a concert going on in the saloon. The few passengers are a happy little family party. They are probably all there. So are some of the officers. You have put out your lights and have steamed up to within four miles.

“There will be a signal from the Astarte which you will answer. At the moment of that signal, two men assigned to that task will hurl a few bombs into the engine room of the Astarte. The bombs will be filled with a certain gas, the invention of Mr. Cobham. Immediately thereafter the occupants of the engine room will take no further interest in their work. A third man of mine will slip into the engine room and bring the boat to a standstill.”

He paused, scrutinizing me; I felt upon me again the covert glance of Cobham. By some miracle I managed to keep from my face the horror I felt in my heart; managed to make my voice indifferent and steady as I spoke:

“Well, that wipes out the engine room crew. Then what?”

For many moments Satan did not answer me. His brilliant eyes searched me. I drove from my mind the swift picture that had come into it of men choking and writhing on the floor of the Astarte’s engine room. I bore his gaze, frowning as though puzzled. Whether he had found what he had been hunting I do not know, but suddenly its disconcerting intensity diminished.

“Oh, fie, James Kirkham!” he said unctuously, “it is not necessary to kill. The gas I refer to is not lethal. It is a sleep gas. Its effect is practically instantaneous. At least, it acts within five seconds. But it is harmless. Six hours, and its breathers awaken without even a headache. How bloodthirsty he thinks us, Cobham!”

Something warned me to hide my relief, even as I had hidden my dread.

“We still have the officers and the crew,” I said indifferently. “What happens to them? Frankly, in all you have outlined, Satan, I seem to be nothing but an onlooker. A messenger boy. Where are my piratical thrills?”

“The venture at this point passes into your hands,” he answered. “You will by this time have drawn up beside, the Astarte and will board her with Cobham and a sufficient force to take charge. Conditions may now arise which I can foresee, but must trust to your ingenuity and courage to meet. There will be much confusion on board the Astarte. You must see to it that no boats are launched, and that no one escapes from her. Before you board, the captain, and a mate or two, may have suffered some slight accident. Nothing serious. No, no. Merely disabling. Then again – they may not. You may have their resistance to overcome. Without bloodshed, if you can. But with or without – it must be overcome. Then weather conditions may complicate matters. I think you will not find it too tame, James Kirkham.”

Nor did I. I had an uneasy feeling that Satan was not presenting me with the full picture.

“In your final instructions you will find definite information as to the location of what you are to bring to me,” he said. “The objects are in a strong safe in a steel storeroom. So precious are the jewels that only the captain will know the combination of the safe. You need waste no time trying to persuade him to tell it to you. There will be with you an expert to whom the safe will have no mysteries. After you have recovered the things for me, you will cut loose from the Astarte and make all speed home, taking off from her, before starting, certain of my people on board her who would find it embarrassing to remain. That is all.”

I considered for a moment. What he meant was that some of his agents on the Astarte would be questioned and might be recognized for what they were. Well, how about us on the Cherub?

“Have you considered the probability of someone on the Astarte identifying us later, sir?” I began.

“You will all be masked, of course,” he interrupted, smoothly. Cobham moved suddenly, impatiently.

“The wireless,” I suggested. “I suppose that will be disabled before the engine room attack?”

“It will not be necessary,” he answered. “The yacht carries extraordinarily strong batteries. At the moment of the signal, the Astarte’s radio will be blanketed, her waves strangled. There will be no message from her that can break through the barrier the able operator of the Cherub will interpose.”

I sat for a moment in thought. Everything seemed to be plain. And yet – I felt a cold unease, a boding depression. There was something else, something deadly sinister hiding behind Satan’s smooth phrases.

“I trust you were satisfied with the rewards of your necklace venture,” he broke the current of my thoughts. “The rewards of this one will be proportionately greater, naturally. The invitation to join me cut your vacation rather short. What would you say to taking, after the affair, a six months’ trip? You shall go where you please, and as you please, and do as you please. At my expense, of course. You may also spend what you please, let me add.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said, “but I feel no need of a vacation. And frankly, I find my contacts with you infinitely more interesting than anything I could hope to experience away from you.”

His face was inscrutable as ever, but I felt that I had pleased him.

“Well,” he said, “we shall see. Only continue as you have begun, James Kirkham, and you shall have no cause to complain of my generosity.”

He arose. I stood up, politely; Cobham, cautiously. Satan for a moment considered us.

“How are you spending the evening?” he asked me.

“Cobham spoke of us joining the bridge game,” I answered, “but if you have any other desire—”

Cobham had done nothing of the sort. He had said so much, however, that I hoped he might take it for granted that he had. I particularly did not want to be separated from Cobham just then. If Satan had thought, as I half feared, of asking either of us to accompany him, he changed his mind. He nodded, and walked toward the wall.

“It would be a good idea,” he turned beside the opened panel, “to look over the Cherub tomorrow. Familiarize yourself with her. Good night.”

Cobham sat silently for a good minute, staring at the point where Satan had disappeared.

“That was damned decent of you, Kirkham,” he said at last, slowly. “I don’t know how you guessed it, but I couldn’t have stood much more of Satan tonight. Damned decent!”

He stretched out a hand to the brandy. I grinned – Cobham had remembered, then, and was aware of my maneuver. He poured his goblet half full of the liquor and drank it neat.

“Damned decent,” he repeated, and I saw the brandy take hold of him swiftly. “Have a drink with me.”

I poured myself a small one. Again he half filled his glass and tossed it off.

“A damned shame,” he muttered, “treating you like a child. Treating a man like you as if you were in swaddles. You’re a man, you are, Kirkham. You’ve got guts, you have, Kirkham. Why should you be coddled? Lied to? God damn it, Kirkham, you deserve the truth!”

So! It was coming, was it! That hidden, sinister something I had sensed was getting ready to crawl from Cobham’s lips.

“Have a drink with me,” I said, and tipped the decanter. “Who’s treating me like a child?”

He glared at me, drunkenly.

“You think that gas is going to put that engine room crew to sleep, eh?” he chuckled. “Nice little lullaby for poor tired sailors? Sweet little chemical sl-slumber song composh-composed by Pa Satan and M-Ma Cobham? Well, Kirkham, you’re damned well right it’s going put ’em to sh-sleep. Forever!”

I poured myself another brandy, and drank it composedly.

“Well, what of it?” I asked. “A long sleep or a short one – what does it matter?”

“What’s it matter? What’s it matter!” he stared at me, then brought his fist down with a thump on the table. “By God, I was right! Told Satan you had the guts! Told him needn’t – needn’t tamper with the form – florm – formula with you! What’s it matter, he asks. Have a drink with me.”

I drank with him. He began to shake with laughter.

“Masks!” he said. “You wanted masks so people on Astarte couldn’t ren – recognize you later. Later! Ha! Ha! Later! That’s good, that is. Hell, man, there’s not going to be any later for them!”

The room swam around me. What was Cobham saying now?

“Not exactly accurate. Say – twenty minutes later. Twenty minutes later – bonk! goes nice bomb. Gentlemanly bomb. Quiet, dignified. But strong. Bonk! Out goes bottom of the Astarte. No boats. Kehjt drinkers have tended to them. Astarte sunk without trace! Bonk! Swoo-oosh! Bubbles! Finish!”

He became drunkenly plaintive.

“Don’t – don’t believe fooled old Kirkham for a minute. Don’t believe he thought Satan would run rish-risk anybody on Astarte running across one of us. Anybody telling police about wicked pirates holding ’em up in mid-ocean. To hell with the witnesses! That’s Satan’s motto. Make it ’nother unfathomed mish-mystery of the ocean. That’s best way. That’s Satan’s way.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m damned glad to hear it. It was the one thing that I was uneasy about—”

The drunkenness dropped from Cobham like a castoff cloak. His face became white and pinched. The glass fell from his hand.

Out of a darkened corner of the room walked Satan!

— XVI —

It was a crisis. And a bad one. There was no doubt about that. A time for quick thinking, if ever there was one. I cared nothing about what happened to Cobham. That callous devil could have been whisked to Hell without my turning a hair. But I, myself, was in the gravest danger of sharing his fate. If Satan thought that I had deliberately drawn his confidences he would waste no time asking for explanations. The fact that I had not accepted his word would in itself call for my punishment.

Worst of all, I had caught him lying to me. He might decide that would render me useless to him thereafter. But that was secondary. The paramount thing was that it made him, as the Chinese say, “lose face.” If his ancestry was what Barker believed, that was the one unforgivable affront. Whether it was or was not, I knew that Satan’s infernal intellect was clothed with as infernal a pride. And that pride had been wounded.

My only chance for escape lay in healing the wound before Satan knew that I had perceived it. I jumped to my feet and walked towards him.

“Well,” I laughed, “have I passed the test?”

Instantly he caught it. Whether, at the moment, he believed me as naive as my question implied, I could not know. Still, after all, why not? It was exactly the kind of trap, or rather experiment, he had been teaching me to expect him to conceive.

Nor did I know how long he had been listening. Had he intentionally left Cobham and me together to see what would happen? And heard all? Probably. If so there had been no single word I had spoken upon which his suspicion could feed. At any rate, to follow my lead was the only way he could maintain his pride. Save his face. He followed it.

“Cobham,” he said, “you were right.”

He turned to me.

“Tell me, James Kirkham, when did you first suspect that you were under test? I am curious to know exactly how keen that perception of yours is.”

He waved to me to be seated, and dropped into his own chair. I kept my eyes steadily averted from Cobham.

“The first thing that puzzled me, Satan,” I said, “was your attitude toward the Astarte. It would certainly not have been mine. That dead men tell no tales, is a safe and sane old rule. I would have followed your instructions – but,” I added, boldly, “I would not have approved of them.”

His eyes never left me as I spoke. I felt his will beating against mine like a hammer, endeavoring to strike out the truth.

“When did your suspicion become certainty?” he asked.

“At the moment you appeared here,” I told him.

Suddenly I let some of my anger find vent.

“I’ll stand for no more such experiments upon me, Satan,” I cried, with a cold fury that had none of its roots in the matter in hand, but was real enough nevertheless. “Either I am to be trusted wholly, or I am not to be trusted at all. If you do trust me and I fail you – well, you have the remedy in your hands and I am ready to pay the penalty. But I’ll not be the subject of any more laboratory experiments, like a child in a psychological clinic. By God, I won’t!”

I thought that I had won. Not only won, but that I had leaped into higher regard than Satan had ever held me. If those gem-hard eyes could be said to soften, they did.

“I agree, James Kirkham,” he said, quietly. “Yet I am glad that I put you to this test. Since it has fully revealed to me what dependence I can place upon you.”

“I made my decision. I gave my word,” I said, a little stiffly. “As long as you play fair with me, I obey your orders, Satan. Let that be understood, and you will find no more loyal servant.”

“I do understand, James Kirkham,” he answered.

I ventured to look at Cobham. He had regained some of his color. He was watching me, queerly.

“Cobham,” I laughed, “you could be as good an actor as you are a chemist.”

“Cobham – has been – very valuable to me,” said Satan. “And never more than tonight.”

I saw a deep shudder shake Cobham. I feigned to observe nothing. Satan arose.

“Come with me, Cobham,” he said: “There are matters we must discuss. And you—” he looked at me.

“I’ll turn in,” I said. “I know the way.”

He strode across the room, Cobham following. Once he turned and shot me a strange glance. There was gratitude in it – and there was deadly terror.

I walked over to the panel that was the beginning of the road to my room.

“James Kirkham,” I turned, and saw Satan standing by the opposite wall. His bulk almost hid Cobham, now in front of him.

“Sir?” I answered.

“James Kirkham,” he said, “I was never better pleased with you than I am now. Good night.”

“I am glad, sir,” I replied. “Good night.”

The panel behind him clicked open. I pressed upon a hidden spring, the wall parted. Before me was the tiny elevator. I entered it. Satan and Cobham were passing through that other wall.

I caught a glimpse of two of the kehjt slaves, cords in hands, gliding to Cobham’s side.

As my panel closed I thought I saw them pinion his arms!

And now I was in my rooms. Eve would be expecting me, but I had no desire to make further excursion that night. That Satan had taken my bait, I was reasonably sure. But Cobham was in for punishment – how severe I could not tell. The emphasis Satan had put upon that “has been” in speaking of his usefulness was ominous. Cobham had caught the threat. And there had been that swift vision of the slaves closing in on him. I would be on Satan’s mind, whatever he believed. It was possible that he might summon me; might even come to me.

It was best to stay where I was. Barker would be along sooner or later. I would send him with a message to Eve.

I snapped out all the lights except a dim one in the living room, undressed, and turned in. I lay there, smoking, I felt more than a little sick, and filled with a hot, helpless rage. The affair of the Astarte would have been bad enough even as Satan had outlined it. Cobham’s revelations made it hideous. I would go on with it, of course. There was nothing else to do. If I refused, it would be the end both of Eve and myself. And someone else would take my place. Cobham, in fact, had made it imperative that I should go. I must find some means of averting that ruthless destruction of the treasure ship. Obviously, the chances were that would mean the end for me also. But it had to be done. I knew that if I stood aside and let those helpless people go down, I could never more live at peace with myself. I knew that Eve would feel the same about it.

What I hoped most desperately was that we could find the way to break Satan before the time came for my sailing.

Suddenly I was aware that someone was in the outer room. I slipped noiselessly out of bed and to the curtains. It was Barker.

I beckoned to him.

“Careful, Harry,” I whispered. “Come in here, and keep those ears of yours wide open. Things have been happening.”

Briefly I sketched the developments of the day, from my conversation with Consardine to Cobham’s drunken disclosures and his sinister shepherding by Satan. I could feel the little man shiver at that.

“Gord,” he muttered. “Cobham’s a proper devil, but I’m sorry for ’im. Satan, ’e’ll see ’e don’t no more talkin’. We got to work quick, Cap’n.”

“I’ve an unbreakable hunch that my work is to stay right in this room,” I told him. “And if you don’t think that is going to be the hardest kind of work, with Miss Demerest expecting me, you’re wrong.”

“No,” he said, “you’re right, sir. An’ I’ve got to get h’out quick as may be. ’Ere’s what I come to tell you. I h’acted like a bloody dummy last night when you ’inted about Satan an’ what ’e done when ’e ’id ’is ’ands. Fair took me off my feet, you did, just like Consardine. I ’adn’t been away from you five minutes before I saw ’ow it could be done. ’Ell, I saw a dozen wyes it could be done.”

“Right,” I whispered, “but cut the explanations. How are we going to find out if he does it?”

“That’s what ’as been rackin’ my brains all dye,” he answered. “’Ow to get in the Temple an’ look over the black throne. The gold one sinks down an’ under, but the black one’s built in. An’ there’s two of the kehjt slyves watchin’ it in there h’every hour of the dye an’ night. Four-hour shifts they got, an’ you can bloody well wyger ’e picks proper plucked ’uns for that duty, Cap’n.”

“No trouble gettin’ in, there’s ’arf a dozen trick entrances back of them thrones. Ten minutes, an’ we’d know what was what. But ’ow the bloody ’ell to get them ten minutes? No good shootin’ the paste-faced blighters. That’ll bring ’em all down on us. No good killin’ ’em nohow. The minute they found ’em Satan’d know what the gyme was.”

He was silent for a moment.

“Cripes!” he said at last, “if we could only get some bloomin’ h’angel to drop down an’ ’old a glass of the kehjt under their noses! They’d follow it like a ’ungry lion would a bone! An’ see no thin’ else!”

I caught his shoulders, heart thumping.

“By God, Harry! You’ve hit it!” My voice was shaking. “Do you know where he keeps that hell brew? Can you get at it?”

“Sure I know,” he said, “An’ there ain’t none better at my trade than me, Cap’n, as I told you. I’d sye I could get it. But then what?”

“We’ll be the angel,” I told him. “It works quick, I know that. How long does it keep them under?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “Some longer, some shorter. We’d ’ave our ten minutes, though, an’ a lot to spare—

“Cripes!” he chuckled. “What a gyme! If they wake up before the relief comes they ain’t likely to say nothin’. An’ if they don’t, they ain’t likely to get a chance to say nothin’. An’ if they do get a chance either way, who the ’ell would believe ’em?”

“Get the stuff,” I said. “Try to get it tomorrow. And now play safe. Get out of here. If you can manage it, tell Miss Demerest not to look for me tonight. Tell her not to worry. But take no chances. Harry, you’re a wonder. If you were a girl, I’d kiss you. Scoot!”

Again he chuckled; another moment and I knew he had gone.

I went into the other room and put out the dim light. For the first time since I had fallen into Satan’s hands I felt free of that damnable depression – oppression, rather – which had shadowed me. It was as though a door had begun to open. A door of escape.

I slept soundly. I awakened once in the night from a dream that Satan was standing over me, watching me. Whether it was all a dream, I do not know. Perhaps he had really entered to resolve some lingering doubt. If so, my sleep must have reassured him, for it was that of one who had not a care on his mind. I lost no time worrying about it; in another moment I was asleep again.

The next day passed quickly enough. I was up early. As I was dressing, the ’phone rang. It was Consardine. He said that Satan wished me to go out to the yacht after I had breakfasted. He, Consardine, would accompany me.

There had been no change of plans, then. I was still cast for my piratical role.

When I entered the breakfast room, Consardine was waiting for me. We ate together. I was itching with curiosity about Cobham. But I asked no questions, nor did Consardine speak of him. We walked down to the boat landing, talking of this and that. Tacitly, neither of us made any reference to the conversation of the previous day. It must have been uppermost in his mind, as it was in mine. Yet, after all, there was nothing more to say. He had made his position sufficiently plain.

A cutter was waiting for us, and took us out to the Cherub. The yacht was as beautiful inside as out. The captain was a squat, thickset, broad-shouldered Newfoundlander. He was introduced to me as Captain Morrisey. It may or may not have been the name his parents gave him. Probably not. He was a genial pirate. A hundred years back, and he would have been floating the Jolly Roger. The first mate was a clean-cut saturnine chap with the hall mark of Annapolis. The crew were as hard-boiled looking a lot as any the Marine Corps ever produced.

The discipline was military and perfect. It reached its apotheosis in the engine room. The engines, specially designed, oil-burning Diesels, were marvels. So interested was I that lunch time came around before I realized it. I had not been mistaken about Morrisey. He told us tales of smuggling and gun- and rum-running in which he had been active before he had signed with Satan. Born a hundred years too late for the Black Flag, he had done his best with the material at hand. He was a pirate, but I liked him.

When we got back to the chateau, I found a summons from Satan. With many misgivings I obeyed it. The misgivings were all wrong. I spent two of the most fascinating hours I had ever known. I was guided to that part of the great house which was Satan’s own intimate domain. I cannot begin to describe what I saw there, nor the atmosphere of those dozen or more chambers, large and small, wherein that dark strange soul took its delight. Each of them was a temple in which the mysterious, indefinable and eternal spirit that humanity calls beauty and has always worshiped and sought to capture had become incarnate. A living thing.

And Satan was different. He was transformed – gentle, no mockery either in word or look. He talked only of the treasures about us. It came to me that he loved beauty even more than he did power; that he considered power only as a means toward beauty. And that, evil though he was, he knew beauty better than anyone alive.

When I left him, his spell upon me was strong. I had to fight against the conviction that what I had beheld justified him as to any means he had taken to get it; that the true criminal was he who would try to thwart him. Absurd as it may seem, I felt myself hideously guilty in the plans I was harboring. It was with difficulty that I held myself back from confessing them, throwing myself on his mercy, swearing myself to him. I think that only the thought of Eve kept me from doing so.

That was, perhaps, his object. But I had to tell myself so, over and over again after I had left him, to banish the loathing I felt about going on against him. If this seems deplorable weakness, I can only say that he who thinks so would not if he had been subjected to that same sorcery, and had listened to Satan preaching in the heart of the miracle he had fashioned.

If it was a trap, I escaped it. But to this day – I do not know whether in the greater sense Satan was not right.

The company at dinner helped me to throw off the obsession. A brisk bridge game afterward did more. It was close to midnight when I returned to my rooms. I had not seen Eve all day. Consardine had mentioned, casually, as we were going in to dinner, that she had gone to town, and probably would not return that night. I took it as a hint that it would be useless for me to venture to her room.

I dropped off to sleep hoping for Barker. He did not come.

There were some truly charming people at the breakfast table next morning. Among them an Australian major, a soldierly and engaging scoundrel. We went riding together, following a different road than that which I had covered with Consardine. At one point it ran parallel to the driveway. A smart little roadster hummed by, headed for the chateau. Eve was driving it. She waved. The Australian took the greeting to himself, remarking that there went a damned nice girl. Everything seemed suddenly brighter. It meant that I would see her that night. At least, that was what I thought then.

After we had stabled the horses, I hung about the pleasant terrace. Maybe I would get another glimpse of Eve, maybe even a whispered word. About four o’clock Consardine appeared and dropped down at the table beside me.

Consardine seemed ill at ease. We had a drink or two, and talked of this and that, but it was plain that something was on his mind. I waited for him to speak, not without a certain apprehension. At last he sighed, and shook his great shoulders.

“Well,” he said, “unpleasant medicine gets no sweeter while we hesitate over taking it. Come along with me, Kirkham. Satan’s orders.”

I remembered vividly his declaration that if his master commanded him, he would unhesitatingly take me prisoner. I felt a distinct shock.

“Does that mean that I am under arrest?” I asked.

“Not at all,” he answered. “There is something – someone – Satan wishes you to see. Do not ask me his purpose. I do not know it. I might guess, but – ask me no questions. Let us go.”

I went with him, wondering. When he finally stopped we were, I thought, in one of the towers, certainly we had gone far above the ground floor. We were in a small, bare room. More a crypt, in fact, than a room. One of its walls was slightly curved, the bulge toward us. Consardine walked over to this wall, and beckoned me beside him. He touched a hidden spring. An aperture about a foot square, like a window, opened at the level of my eyes.

“Look through,” he said.

The place into which I peered was filled with a curiously clear and palely purplish light. It was distinctly unpleasant. I became aware of a thin droning sound, faint but continuous, upon one note. I was not enough of a musician to place the note, but it was quite as high as that made by the rapid vibration of a bee’s wings. That, too, was unpleasant. Light and droning had a concentration-shattering quality, a blurring effect upon the mind.

At first glance I thought that I was looking into a circular place in which was a crowd of men, all facing a common center. Then I realized that this could not be so, since all the men were in exactly the same attitude, crouching upon one knee. There seemed to be thousands of these crouching men, line after line of them, one behind the other, growing smaller and smaller and vanishing off into immense distances.

I looked to right and to left. There were the kneeling men, but now in profile. I raised my eyes to the ceiling of the place. And there they appeared to hang, heads downward.

I stared again at those facing me. It was strange how the purplish light and the droning clouded one’s thought. They held back, like two hands, the understanding from fulfillment.

Then I realized abruptly that all those thousands of faces were – the same.

And that each was the face of Cobham!

They were the face of Cobham, drawn and distorted, reflected over and over again from scores of mirrors with which the place was lined. The circular walls were faceted with mirrors, and so was the globed ceiling, and all these mirrors curved down to a circular mirrored slab about seven feet in diameter which was their focus.

Upon this slab knelt Cobham, glaring at the countless reflections of himself, reflected with sharpest accuracy by that clear and evil purplish light.

As I looked, he jumped to his feet and began to wave his arms, crazily. Like regiments of automatons, the reflections leaped with him, waving. He turned, and they wheeled as one man in diminishing rank upon rank. He threw himself down upon his face, and I knew that unless his eyes were closed his face still stared up at him, buoyed, it must have seemed, upon the backs of the thousands reflected upon the slab from the mirrors in the ceiling. And I knew that no man could keep his eyes closed long in that room, that he must open them, to look and look again.

I shrank back, trembling. This thing was hellish. It was mind-destroying. There could be no sleep. The drone rasped along the nerves and would not permit it. The light was sleep-killing, too, keying up, stretching the tense nerves to the breaking point. And the mimicking hosts of reflections slowly, inexorably, led the mind into the paths of madness.

“For God’s sake… for God’s sake…” I turned to Consardine half-incoherent, white-lipped. “I’ve seen… Consardine… a bullet would be mercy…”

He drew me back to the opening.

“Thrust in your head,” he said, coldly. “You must see yourself in the mirrors, and Cobham must see you. It is Satan’s order.”

I tried to struggle away. He gripped my neck and forced my head forward as one does a puppy to make him drink.

The wall at this point was only a couple of inches thick. Held helpless, my head was now beyond that wall. Cobham had staggered to his feet. I saw my face leap out in the mirrors. He saw it, too. His eyes moved from one reflection to another, striving to find the real.

“Kirkham!” he howled. “Kirkham! Get me out!”

Consardine drew me back. He snapped the opening shut.

“You devil! You cold-blooded devil!” I sobbed, and threw myself upon him.

He caught my arms. He held me as easily as though I had been a child, while I kicked and writhed in futile attempt to break the inexorable grip. And at last my fury spent itself. Still sobbing, I went limp.

“There, there, lad,” he said, gently. “I am not responsible for what you’ve seen. I told you it was unpleasant medicine. But Satan ordered it, and I must obey. Come with me. Back to your rooms.”

I followed him, all resistance for the moment gone from me. It was not any affection for Cobham that had so stirred me. He had probably watched others in the mirrored cell from that same window. If the necessity had arisen, I would have shot Cobham down without the slightest feeling about it. Nor had the ordeal of Cartright shaken my nerve at all like this. Bad as that had been, it had been in the open, with people around him. And Cartright, so it seemed, had been given some chance.

But this torture of the many-mirrored cell, with its sleep-slaying light and sound, its slow killing, in utter aloneness, of a man’s mind – there was something about that, something not to be put in words, that shook me to the soul.

“How long will he – last?” I put the question to Consardine as we passed in to my rooms.

“It is hard to say,” he answered, gently again. “He will come out of that room without memory. He will not know his name, nor what he has been, nor anything that he has ever learned. He will know nothing of all these hereafter – ever. Like an animal, he will know when he is hungry and thirsty, cold or warm. That is all. He will forget from minute to minute. He will live only in each moment. And when that moment goes it will be forgotten. Mindless, soulless – empty. I have known men to come to it in a week, others have resisted for three. Never longer.”

I shivered.

“I’ll not go down for dinner, Consardine,” I said.

“I would, if I were you,” he said gravely. “It will be wiser. You cannot help Cobham. After all, it is Satan’s right. Like me, Cobham had taken the steps and lost. He lived at Satan’s will. And Satan will be watching you. He will want to know how you have taken it. Pull yourself together, Kirkham. Come down, and be gay. I shall tell him that you were only interested in his exhibition. What, lad! Will you let him know what he has made you feel? Where is your pride? And to do so would be dangerous – for any plans you may have. I tell you so.”

“Stay with me till it’s time to go, Consardine,” I said. “Can you?”

“I intended to,” he answered, “if you asked me. And I think both of us can stand putting ourselves outside of an extra-sized drink.”

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I poured. The glass in my hand shook and spilled.

“I’ll never want to look in one again,” I told him.

He poured me another drink.

“Enough of that,” he said briskly. “You must get it from your mind. Should Satan be at dinner – thank him for a new experience.”

Satan was not at dinner. I hoped that he would receive a report, as no doubt he did, of my behavior. I was gay enough to satisfy Consardine. I drank recklessly and often.

Eve was there. I caught her glancing at me, puzzled, now and then.

If she had known how little real gayety there was in my heart, how much of black despair, she would have been more puzzled still.

— XVII —

I sat late at dinner, with a few others who, like me, had declined the bridge game. It was close to twelve when I returned to my room. I had the feeling that I would see Barker this night, whether or not he had been successful in getting hold of the kehjt.

Alone, the memory of Cobham and the mirrored cell swept back on me with full force. Why had Satan willed me to look upon the prisoner? Why to see myself in those cursed glasses? And why had he decreed that Cobham must see me?

To the first two questions there could be but one answer. He meant it as a warning. He was not, then, wholly satisfied with my explanation. And yet, if he were not, would he not have used harsher measures? Satan was not given to taking chances. I decided that he was satisfied, but nevertheless wished to give me a warning of what might happen to me if he should ever become not so.

Why, if Cobham’s memory was to be destroyed, he should have wished him to take note of me peering in upon him, I could not tell. There seemed no answer to that, unless it was one of his whims. But, again, Satan’s whims, as he called them, were never without reason. I gave it up, reluctantly and uneasily.

It was twelve-thirty when I heard a jubilant whisper from the bedroom.

“Got it, Cap’n!”

I walked into the bedroom. My nerves had suddenly grown taut, and there was a little ache in my throat. The moment had come. There could be no withdrawing now. The hand was ready to be played. And, without doubt, Death in a peculiarly unpleasant mood was the other player.

“’Ere it is!” Barker thrust a half-pint flask into my cold fingers. It was full of that green liquor which I had watched Satan give to the slaves in the marble hall. The kehjt.

It was a clear fluid, with an elusive sparkle as of microscopic particles catching the light. I uncorked the flask and smelled it. It had a faintly acrid odor with an under-taint of musk. I was about to taste it when Barker stopped me.

“Keep awye from it, Cap’n,” he said earnestly. “That stuff was brewed in ’Ell, it was. You’re close enough.”

“All right,” I re-corked the flask. “When do we go?”

“Right awye,” he answered. “They chynged the blighters in the Temple at midnight. Syfe to start now as at anytime. Oh, yes—”

He fished down in a pocket.

“Thought I’d best bring along some of the scenery,” he grinned.

He held out a pair of the golden cups into which the veiled figure with the ewer had poured the kehjt.

“Did you have a hard time getting the stuff, Harry?” I asked.

“It was touch an’ go,” he said soberly. “I ’ate to think of gettin’ them cups back. I ’ates to think of it, but it’s got to be done. Still,” he added, hopefully, “I’m good.”

“I’ll say you are, Harry,” I told him.

He hesitated.

“Cap’n,” he said, “I won’t ’ide from you; I feel as if we was h’about to slip into a room what’s got a ’undred snakes in every corner.”

“You’ve nothing on me, Harry,” I answered cheerfully. “I think maybe it’s got a snake carpet and scorpion curtains.”

“Well,” he said, “let’s go.”

“Sure,” I said, “let’s go.”

I snapped off the lights in the outer room. We passed through the wall of the bedroom into a dimly lighted passage. A little along it and we went into one of the lifts. We dropped. We came out into a long passage, transverse to the first; another short drop, and we were in a pitch dark corridor. Here Harry took my hand and led me. Suddenly he stopped and flashed his light against the wall. He pressed his finger upon a certain spot. I could not see what had guided him, but a small panel slid aside. It revealed an aperture in which were a number of switches.

“Light control,” Barker’s mouth was close to my ear. “We’re right be’ind the chair you set in. Lie down.”

I slipped to the floor. He dropped softly beside me. Another panel about six inches wide and a foot high opened with the noiseless swiftness of a camera shutter.

I looked into the Temple.

The slit through which I was peering was at the level of the floor. It was hidden by the apparatus in which I had been prisoned when Cartright climbed to his doom. By craning my neck, I could see between its legs a horizontal slice of the whole immense chamber.

A brilliant light poured directly upon the black throne. It stood there empty – but menacing. About a dozen feet on each side of it was one of the kehjt slaves. They were tall, strong fellows, white robed, with their noosed cords ready in their hands. Their pallid faces showed dead-white under the glare. The pupilless eyes were not dreaming, but alert.

I caught a glitter of blue eyes behind the black throne. The eyes of the Satan of the pictured stone. They seemed to watch me, malignantly. I turned my gaze abruptly away from them. I saw the back of the Temple.

It, too, was illumined by one strong light. It was larger even than I had sensed it to be. The black seats ranged upward in semicircles, and there were at least three hundred of them.

The slit through which I had been looking closed. Barker touched me, and I arose.

“Give me the dope,” he whispered. I handed him the flask of the kehjt; he had kept the golden cups.

Again he flashed his light upon the switches. He took my hands and placed them upon two.

“County sixty,” he said. “Then open them switches. It puts out the lights. Keep your ’ands on ’em till I get back. Start now like this – one – two—”

He snapped out the flash. Although I had heard no sound, I knew he was gone. At the sixtieth count I pulled open the switches. It seemed a long time, standing there in the dark. It was probably no more than three or four minutes.

As noiselessly as he had gone, Barker was back. He tapped my hands away, and pressed the switches in place.

“Down,” he muttered.

We slid to the floor. Once more the observation panel flew open.

The two guardians of the black throne were standing where I had last seen them. They were blinking, dazed by the swift return of the glaring light. And they were nervous as hunting dogs who had sensed a quarry. They were quivering, twirling their noosed cords, peering here and there.

I saw upon the black throne the two golden cups of the kehjt.

The slaves saw them at the same moment.

They stared at them, incredulously. They looked at each other. Like a pair of automatons moved by the same impulse, they took a step forward, and stared again at the glittering lure. And suddenly into their faces came that look of dreadful hunger. The cords dropped. They rushed to the black throne.

They seized the golden cups. And drank.

“Gord!” I heard Barker mutter. He was gasping and shuddering like one who had taken an icy plunge. Well, so was I. There had been something infinitely horrible in that rush of the pair upon the green drink. Something infernal in the irresistible tidal rush of desire that had swept their drugged minds clear of every impulse but that single one. To drink.

They turned from the black throne, the golden cups still clasped in their hands. I watched first one and then the other sink down upon the steps. Their eyes closed. Their bodies relaxed. But still their fingers gripped the cups.

“Now!” said Barker. He shut the slit, and closed the panel that hid the switches. He led me quickly along the dark corridor. We turned a sharp corner. There was the faintest of rustling sounds. Light streamed out in my face from a narrow opening.

“Quick!” muttered Barker, and pushed me through.

We stood on the dais, beside the black throne. Below us sprawled the bodies of the two guardians. The seven shining footprints glimmered up at me, watchfully.

Barker had dropped upon his knees. The lever which Satan had manipulated to set at work the mechanism of the steps lay flat, locked within an indentation in the stone cut out to receive it when at rest. Barker was working swiftly at its base. A thin slab moved aside. Under it was an arrangement of small cogs. He reached under and moved something. The telltale globe swung down from the ceiling.

Barker released the lever, cautiously. He brought it to upright, then pressed it downward, as I had seen Satan do. I heard no whirring, and understood that the little man had in some way silenced it.

“You got to go down and walk up, Cap’n,” he whispered. “Make it snappy, sir. Tread on every one of them prints.”

I ran down the steps, turned, and came quickly up, treading firmly on each of the shining marks. I turned at the top of the stairs and looked at the telltale globe. From the pale field three symbols shone out, from Satan’s darker field gleamed four. My heart sank.

“Cheer up,” said Harry. “You look fair crumpled. No need. It’s what I expected. Wyte a moment.”

He fumbled around among the cogs again, lying flat, his head half hidden in the aperture.

He gave an exclamation, and leaped to his feet, face sharpened, eyes glittering. He ran over to the black throne, pawing at it like an excited terrier.

Suddenly he threw himself into it and began pressing here and there at the edge of the seat.

“’Ere,” he beckoned me. “Sit where I am. Put your fingers ’ere and ’ere. When I tell you, press ’em in ’ard.”

He jumped aside. I seated myself on the black throne. He took my hands and placed my fingers in a row about five inches long. They rested upon seven indentations along the edge, barely discernible. Nor did what I touched feel like stone. It was softer.

Barker slipped over to the cogs and resumed his manipulation of them.

“Press,” he whispered. “Press ’em all together.”

I pressed. The indentations yielded slightly under my fingers. My eyes fell upon the telltale. It had gone blank. All the shining marks upon it had disappeared.

“Press ’em now, one at a time,” ordered Barker.

I pressed them one at a time.

“The swine,” said Barker. “The bloody double-crossin’ swine! Come ’ere, Cap’n, and look.”

I dropped beside him and peered down at the cogs. I looked from them up at the telltale. And stared at it, only half believing what I saw.

“Got him!” muttered Harry. “Got him!”

He worked rapidly on the cogs, and closed the slab upon them. The telltale swung back to its resting place in the ceiling.

“The cups,” he said. He ran down the steps and took the golden goblets that had held the kehjt from the still resisting fingers of the dreaming guardians.

“Got him!” repeated Harry.

We swung back of the black throne. Barker slid aside the panel through which we had entered. We passed out into the dark passageway.

A wild jubilance possessed me. Yet in it was a shadow of regret, the echo of the afternoon’s hours of beauty’s sorcery.

For what we had found ended Satan’s power over his dupes forever.

Dethroned him!

— XVIII —

We had reached the dimly lighted corridor wherein lay the entrance to my rooms. Barker halted with a warning gesture.

“Listen!” he breathed.

I heard a noise, faint and far away; a murmuring. There were men moving somewhere behind the walls, and coming toward us. Could they have found the drugged slaves so soon?

“Get into your room. Quick,” whispered Harry.

We started on the run. And halted again. Ten feet ahead of us a man had appeared. He had seemed to melt out of the wall with a magical quickness. He leaned against it for a moment sobbing. He turned his face toward us—

It was Cobham!

His face was gray and lined and shrunken. His eyes were so darkly circled that they looked, in that faint illumination, like the sockets of a skull. They stared vaguely, as though the mind behind them were dimmed. His lips were puffed and bleeding as though he had bitten them through time and time again.

“You’re Kirkham!” he staggered forward. “Yes, I remember you! I was coming to you. Hide me.”

The murmuring sounds were closer. I saw Barker slip the brass knuckles over his fingers and make ready to leap upon Cobham. I caught his arm.

“No use,” I warned him. “They’d find him. The man’s more than half mad. But they’d make him tell. I’ll take him. Hurry! Get out of sight!”

I seized Cobham’s arm, and raced him to the panel that opened into the bedroom. I opened it, and thrust him through. Barker at my heels, I slipped in and closed the slide.

“Get in that closet,” I ordered Cobham, and shoved him among my clothes. I shut the doors and moved quickly with Barker into the outer room.

“Good!” he muttered, “but I don’t fancy this.”

“It’s the only way,” I said. “I’ll have to figure some way to get rid of him later. I don’t believe they’ll come in here. They won’t suspect me. Why should they? Still – there’s the chance. If they found you here, then the fat would be in the fire. Is there any way you can dig right out without too much risk?”

“Yes,” the little man’s voice and eyes were troubled. “I can myke the getawye all right. But, Gord, I don’t like leavin’ you, Cap’n!”

“Beat it!” I said brusquely. “Get to Consardine. Tell him exactly what we found. Tell Miss Demerest what’s happened. If anything does go wrong, it’s all up to you, Harry.”

He groaned. I heard a faint noise in the bedroom. I walked over to the door and looked in. It was Cobham, stirring in the closet. I tapped upon it.

“Be quiet,” I told him. “They may be here any minute.”

I snapped all the lights on, full. I went back to the other room. Barker was gone.

I threw off my coat and vest, and piled some books on the reading table. I fixed myself comfortably, lighted my pipe and began to read. The minutes passed slowly. Every nerve was tense, and every sense alert. But I flattered myself I was giving an excellent impersonation of one entirely absorbed in what I was reading.

And suddenly I knew that eyes were upon me. That someone was standing behind me, watching me.

I went on reading. The silent scrutiny became intolerable. I yawned and stretched, arose and turned—

Satan stood there.

He was cloaked from neck to feet in scarlet. At his back were half a dozen of the kehjt slaves. Two more were standing by the open panel in the bedroom.

“Satan!” I exclaimed, and the surprise I put into the words was genuine. Whatever the possibilities I had admitted, that Satan himself would head the manhunt had not been among them.

“You are startled, James Kirkham,” there seemed a hint of solicitude in the expressionless voice. “I, too, was startled when, knocking at your wall, you failed to answer.”

“I did not hear you,” I said, truthfully. Had he really knocked?

“You were, I see, deep in your book,” he said. “But you wonder, perhaps, why your silence should have disturbed me? I am in pursuit of a fugitive, a dangerous man, James Kirkham. A desperate man, I fear. The trail led us by here. It occurred to me that he might have attempted to hide in your rooms, and that resisting him you had come to harm.”

It sounded reasonable enough. I remembered the extraordinary favor he had shown me that afternoon. My doubts were lulled; I let myself relax.

“I thank you, sir,” I told him. “But I have seen no one. Who is the man—”

“The man I seek is Cobham,” he interrupted me.

“Cobham!” I stared at him as though I had not understood. “But I thought that Cobham—”

“You thought that Cobham was in the room of the mirrors,” he interrupted. “You have wondered, without doubt, why I had put him there. You thought that he was one of my trusted aides. You thought him most valuable to me. So he was. Then suddenly that Cobham whom I trusted and who was valuable – ceased to be. Another spirit entered him, one that I cannot trust and that therefore can never be other than a menace to me.”

With a sinking heart I saw the cold mockery in the hard bright eyes, realized that he had raised his voice as though to let it carry throughout the rooms.

“That poor departed Cobham,” he intoned, “shall I not avenge him? Yea, verily. I will punish that usurping spirit, torment it until it prays to me to loose it from that body it has stolen. My poor, lost Cobham! He will not care what I do with that body that once was his – so he be avenged.”

There was no mistaking the mockery now. I felt my throat contract.

“You say you saw nothing?” he asked me.

“Nothing,” I answered. “If anyone had come in the rooms I would have heard them.”

Instantly I realized the error of that, and cursed myself.

“Ah, no,” said Satan, smoothly. “You forget how immersed you were in your reading. You did not hear me. Either when I knocked or when I entered. I cannot let you run the risk of him being hidden here. We must search.”

He gave an order to the slaves attending him. Before they could move, the closet door in the bedroom flew open. Cobham leaped out.

His first jump took him halfway to the opened panel. I caught the gleam of steel in his hand. In an instant he was at the two slaves guarding the opening. One went down gurgling, his throat slit. The other stumbled back, hands holding his side, blood spurting through his fingers.

And Cobham was gone.

Satan gave another curt order. Four of the six behind him raced away and through the panel.

The other two closed in on me, pinioning my arms to my sides with their cords.

Satan considered me, the mockery in his eyes grown devilish.

“I thought he would come here,” he said. “It was why, James Kirkham, I let him escape!”

So that, too, had been a web of Satan’s weaving! And he had snared me in it!

Suddenly an uncontrollable rage swept me. I would lie no more. I would wear a mask no more. I would never be afraid of him again. He could hurt me, damnably. He could kill me. He was probably planning to do both. But I knew him for what he was. He was stripped of his mystery and – I still had an ace in the hole of which he knew nothing. I drew a deep breath, and laughed at him.

“Maybe!” I said cynically. “But I notice that you couldn’t keep him from escaping this time. The pity of it is that he didn’t slit your damned black throat as he went, instead of that poor devil’s yonder.”

“Ah,” he answered, with no resentment, “truth begins to pour out of the stricken Kirkham as water poured for Moses from the stricken rock. But you are wrong once more. It is long since I have enjoyed a manhunt. Cobham is an ideal quarry. It was why I left the panel open. He will last, I hope, for days and days.”

He spoke to one of the two kehjt drinkers guarding me. I did not understand the tongue. The slave bowed and slipped out.

“Yes,” Satan turned to me, “he will probably last for days and days. But you, James Kirkham, equally as probably will not. Cobham cannot escape. Neither can you. I shall consider tonight with what form of amusement you shall furnish me.”

The slave who had gone out entered with six others. Again Satan instructed them. They massed about me, and guided me toward the wall. I went, unresisting. I did not look back at Satan.

But as I passed through the wall I could not shut my ears to his laughter!

— XIX —

A day had gone and another night had come before I saw Satan again. Before, in fact, I saw anyone except the pallid-faced drinkers of the kehjt who brought my food.

I had been taken, I conjectured, to one of the underground rooms. It was comfortable enough, but windowless and, of course, doorless. There they had unbound my arms and left me.

And then, my rage swiftly ebbing, hopelessness took possession of me. Barker would make every effort to get to Consardine. I was sure of that. But would he be able to get to him in time? Would Consardine accept his word for what we had discovered? I did not think so. Consardine was of the kind that has to be shown. Or, supposing he did believe, would his own hot wrath lead him to some hasty action that would set him with Cobham and myself? Leave Satan triumphant?

And what of Eve? What might she not do when she heard from Harry what had happened to me? For I had no doubt that the little man would soon find a way of finding out what had occurred.

What deviltries upon me was Satan hatching for his – amusement?

My night had not been an exactly hilarious one. The day had dragged endlessly. When I faced Satan I hoped that I showed no signs of those hours.

He had entered unannounced, Consardine with him. He wore the long black cloak. His eyes glittered over me. I looked from him to Consardine. Had Barker seen him? His face was calm, and he regarded me indifferently. My heart sank.

Satan sat down. Without invitation, I followed suit. I pulled out my cigarette case, and politely offered Satan one; a bit of childish bravado for which I was immediately sorry. He paid no attention to the gesture, studying me.

“I am not angry with you, James Kirkham,” Satan spoke. “If I could feel regret, I would feel it for you. But you, yourself, are wholly responsible for your plight.”

He paused. I made no answer.

“You would have deceived me,” he went on. “You lied to me. You attempted to save from my justice a man I had condemned. You put your will against mine. You dared to try to thwart me. You have endangered my venture regarding the Astarte, if indeed you have not negatived it. You are no more to be trusted. You are useless to me. What is the answer?”

“My elimination, I suppose,” I replied, carelessly. “But why waste time justifying one of your murders, Satan? By this time, I should think, murder would be second nature to you, no more to be explained than why you eat when you are hungry.”

His eyes flickered.

“You deliberately invited Cobham’s confidences, and you would have attempted to prevent the sinking of the Astarte, knowing that I had decreed it,” he said.

“Right,” I agreed.

“And you lied to me,” he repeated. “To me!”

“One good lie deserves another, Satan,” I answered. “You began the lying. If you had come clean with me, I’d have told you not to trust me with that job. You didn’t. I suspected you hadn’t. Very well, the man who lies to me in one thing will lie in another.”

I shot a swift glance at Consardine. His face was as indifferent as ever, imperturbable as Satan’s own.

“The minute Cogham let the cat out of the bag, I lost all faith in you,” I went on. “For all I know, your assassins on the Cherub might have had their orders to do away with me after I had pulled your chestnuts. As I once heard another of your dupes say – blame yourself, Satan. Not me.”

Consardine was watching me intently. I was feeling pretty reckless by now.

“Father of Lies,” I said, “or to give you another of your ancient titles, Prince of Liars, the whole matter can be summed up in two short sentences. You can’t trust me, and I know too much. All right. For both of those conditions you have only yourself to thank. But I also know you. And if you think I’m going to beg you for any mercy – you don’t know me.”

“Consardine,” he said, tranquilly, “James Kirkham had such good material in him. He could have been so useful to me. It’s a pity, Consardine. Yes, it is a pity!”

He regarded me benevolently.

“Although, frankly, I do not see how the knowledge can profit you,” he said, “I feel that you should know the error that betrayed you. Yes, I wish to help you, James Kirkham,” the great voice purred, “for it may be that there is a land to which we go when this mortal coil is cut. If so, it is probably much like this. You may even find me or my counterpart there. You will not care to repeat your mistakes.”

I listened to this sinister jesting silently; after all, I was curious.

“Your first error was your reference to the bridge game. I noted the surprise it caused Cobham. You were too precipitate. You could just as well have waited your time. Remember, then, if you should reach that next world, never to be precipitate.

“Obviously, you had a reason. Equally obviously, it was my cue to discover that reason. Lesson two – in that world to which you may shortly be traveling, be careful to give to your opponent no cue to eavesdrop.

“When I re-entered, you ingenuously forbore to notice Cobham’s very apparent consternation. You studiously kept your eyes from him during the ensuing conversation. That was too naive, James Kirkham. It showed you underestimated the intelligence you were seeking to convince. Your proper move was complete and instant indignation. You should have sacrificed Cobham by accusing him to me. In that bright new world in which you may or may not soon find yourself, never underestimate your opponent.

“But I gave you still another chance. Knowing Cobham, I knew that after my careful – ah – treatment – his mind would fasten upon you as a refuge, his only refuge. He was given the treatment, he saw you, and then he was allowed to escape. He came, as I thought he would, straight to you. If, at the moment he entered your rooms, you had caught him, sounded the alarm, again – sacrificed him, perhaps I would still have believed in you. It was weakness, sentimentality. What was Cobham to you? Remember, then, in your new sphere, to eschew all sentimentality.”

Out of that cynical harangue two facts apparently shone clear. Satan did not know that I had gone out of my rooms, nor that I had encountered Cobham outside them. I took some comfort from that. But – had Cobham been caught? Would he tell?

“By the way, how is Cobham?” I asked, politely.

“Not so well, not so well, poor fellow,” said Satan, “yet he was able to give me an enjoyable afternoon. At present he is lying in the darkness of a crypt near the laboratory, resting. Shortly he will be given an opportunity to leave it. During his carefully guided wanderings thereafter, he will have the chance to snatch a little food and drink. I do not wish him to wear himself out in his efforts to amuse me. Or, to put it another way, it is not my intention to allow him to die of exhaustion or famine. No, no, the excellent Cobham will provide me with many merry hours still. I shall not send him back to my little mirrors. They have drawn his fangs. But at the last I will inform him of your interest, since, I am quite sure, you will be unable.”

He arose.

“James Kirkham,” said Satan, “in half an hour you shall be judged. Be ready at that time to appear in the Temple. Come, Consardine.”

My hope that he would leave Consardine with me went crumbling. Desperately I wanted to talk to him. He followed Satan out. The wall closed behind him. He had not even turned his head.

I remembered Cartright. Consardine had brought him in, stood beside him before he had begun the ordeal of the steps. Probably he would return for me.

But he did not. When the half hour had elapsed four of the kehjt drinkers came for me. Two in front of me, two behind me, they marched me through long corridors and up steep ramps of stone. They halted. I heard the sound of a gong. A panel opened. The slaves would have pushed me in, but I struck aside their hands and stepped through. The panel closed.

I stood within the Temple.

I was within the semi-darkness beyond the ring of brilliant light beating down upon the steps. I heard a murmuring. It came from my left where the amphitheater circled. I caught movement there, glimpses of white faces. The seats seemed full. I thought I heard Eve’s voice, whispering, vibrant—

“Jim!”

I could not see her.

I looked toward the dais. It was as it had been when I had watched Cartright stumble up toward it. The golden throne gleamed. On it glittered the jeweled scepter and crown.

Upon the black throne sat Satan.

Squatting beside him, fiend’s face a-grin, twirling his cord of woman’s hair, was Sanchal, the executioner.

Again the gong sounded.

“James Kirkham! Approach for judgment!” Satan’s voice rolled out.

I walked forward. I paused at the foot of the steps, within the circle of light. The seven glimmering prints of the child’s foot stared at me out of the black stone.

Guarding them, seven upon each side, stood the white-robed slaves of the kehjt. Their eyes were fixed upon me.

The thoughts went racing through my brain. Should I cry out the secret of the black throne to those who sat silent, watching me from the circled seats of stone? I knew that before I uttered a dozen words the cords of the kehjt slaves would be strangling me. Could I make one swift dash up the steps and grapple with Satan? They would have me before I had reached halfway.

One thing I might do. Take the steps leisurely. Make my fourth and final one the sixth of the shining prints. Their arrangement was irregular. The sixth was not far from the black throne. Closer than the seventh. I could leap from it upon Satan. Sink fingers and teeth into his throat. Once I had gripped I did not believe it would be easy for any to tear me away, were I alive or dead.

But Barker? Barker might have his plan. It would not be like the little man to lurk hidden, and supinely let me pass. And Consardine? But did Consardine know?

And Eve!

The thoughts jostled. I could not think clearly. I held fast to my last idea, fixing my gaze upon Satan’s throat just below the ear. There was where I would sink my teeth.

But was I to be allowed to take the steps?

“James Kirkham,” Satan’s voice rolled forth, “I have set upon the throne of gold the crown and scepter of worldly power. It is to remind you of that opportunity which your contumacy has lost to you, forever.”

I looked at them. For all that I cared they might be bits of colored glass. But I heard a faint sighing from the hidden seats.

“James Kirkham, you would have betrayed me! You are a traitor! It remains now but to decree your punishment!”

He paused again. In all the Temple there was no sound. The silence was smothering. It was broken by a sibilant whirring, the twirling of the noose in the talons of the executioner. Satan raised a hand, and it was stilled.

“Yet I am inclined to be merciful,” – only I, perhaps, caught the malicious glint in the jewel-bright eyes. “There are three things which man has to which he clings hardest. In the last analysis, they are all he has. One is contained in the other – yet each is separate. They are his soul, his personality and his life. By his soul I mean that unseen and not yet accurately located essence upon which religion lays such stress, considers immortal, and that may or may not be. By personality I mean the ego, the mind, that which says – I am I, the storehouse of old memories, the seeker of new ones. Life I need not define.

“Now, James Kirkham, I offer you a choice. Upon one side I place your soul, upon the other your life and your mind.

“You may join my drinkers of the kehjt. Drink it, and your life and your ego are safe. From time to time you will be happy, happy with an intensity that normally you would never be. But you lose your soul! You will not miss it – at least not often. Soon the kehjt will be more desirable to you than ever that usually troublesome guest – somewhere within you.”

He paused again, scrutinizing me.

“If you do not drink the kehjt,” he continued, “you take the steps. If you tread upon my three, you lose your life. Slowly, in agony, at the hands of Sanchal.

“If you tread upon the four fortunate ones, you shall have your life and your soul. But you must leave with me your ego, that which says I am I, all your memories. It will not be dangerous to you, it will not be painful. I will not give you to the mirrors. A sleep – and then a knife, cunningly cutting here and there within your brain. You will awaken as one new-born. Literally so, James Kirkham, since from you will have been taken, and taken forever, all recollection of what you have been. Like a child you will set forth upon your new pilgrimage. But with life – and with your precious soul unharmed.”

And now I heard a whispering behind me from the dark amphitheater. Satan raised his hand, and it was stilled.

“Such is my decree!” he intoned. “Such is my will! So shall it be!”

“I take the steps,” I said, with no hesitation.

“Your guardian angels,” he said unctuously, “applaud without doubt your decision. You remember that they have no power where Satan rules. I thought that would be your choice. And now, to prove how little strained is the quality of my mercy, I offer you, James Kirkham, a door for escape – escape with life and mind and soul, all three of them, intact!”

Now I stared at him, every sense alert. Well I knew that there was no mercy in Satan. Knowing, too, the secret of the steps, the diabolic mockery of that offer of his was an open page to me. But what blacker diabolism was coming? I was soon to learn.

“The roots of this man’s offense against me,” he turned his gaze toward the amphitheater, “were in sentiment. He placed the welfare of others before mine. Let this be a lesson to all of you. I must be first.

“But I am just. Others he could save, himself he could not save. Yet there may be one who can save him. He gives up, it is probable, his life because he dared to stand between me and the lives of others.

“Is there one who will stand between me and his life?”

Once more there came a murmuring, louder now, from the hidden darkness of the Temple; whisperings.

“Wait!” he raised a hand. “This is what I mean. If there is one among you who will step forth and take but three of the steps in his place, then this is what shall happen. If two of the shining prints are fortunate, both shall go forth free and unharmed! Yes, even with rich reward.

“But if two of the steps are mine – then both shall die and by those same torments which I have promised James Kirkham.

“Such is my decree! Such is my will! So shall it be!

“And now, if such person there be, let him step forth.”

I heard a louder murmuring. I believed that he suspected I had not been alone. It might even be that this was a trap for Barker. I did not know to what lengths the little man’s devotion might take him. At any rate, it was a line thrown out for the unwary. I walked hastily forward to the very base of the steps.

“I can do my own climbing, Satan,” I said. “Set your game.”

The murmuring behind me had grown louder.

Satan’s immobility dropped from him.

For the first time I watched expression transform the mask of his face. And that transformation was at first utter incredulity, then a rage that leaped up straight from the Pit. Plainly, as though that heavy face had melted away under it, I saw the hidden devil stand forth stark naked. I felt a touch upon my arm.

Eve stood beside me!

“Go back!” I whispered to her, fiercely. “Get back there!”

“Too late!” she said, tranquilly.

She looked up at Satan.

“I will take the steps for him, Satan,” she said.

Satan raised himself up from the black throne, hands clenched. He glanced once at the executioner. The black leaned forward, loop whirling. I threw myself in front of Eve.

“Your word, Satan,” came a voice from the amphitheater, a voice I did not recognize. “Your decree!”

Satan glared out into the darkness, striving to identify the speaker. He signed to the executioner, and the black dropped the whirling cord. Satan sank into his throne. With dreadful effort he thrust back the freed devil that had snatched away the mask. His face resumed its immobility. But he could not banish that devil from his eyes.

“It was my decree,” he intoned monotonously, but there was something strangled in the voice. “So shall it be. You offer, Eve Demerest, to take the steps for him?”

“Yes,” she answered.

“Why?”

“Because I love him,” said Eve, calmly.

Satan’s hands twisted beneath his robe. The heavy lips contorted. Upon the enormous dome of his bald head tiny drops of sweat suddenly sprang out, glistening.

Abruptly, he reached forward, and drew back the lever; the shining prints glimmered out as though touched with fire—

I heard no whirring of the hidden cogs!

What did that mean? I looked at Satan. Either I had been mistaken, or else in the rage that ruled him he had not noticed. I had no time to speculate.

“Eve Demerest,” the rolling tones still held their curiously strangled note, “you shall take the steps! And all shall be according to my decree. But this I tell you – none who has ever taken them and lost has died as you shall die. What they went through was Paradise, measured against that which you shall undergo if you lose. And so shall it be with your lover.

“First you shall see him die. Before he passes, he will turn from you with loathing and with hate… that ever he knew you. And then I shall give you to Sanchal. But not for him to slay. No, no! Not yet! When he is through with you the drinkers of the kehjt shall have you. The lowest of them. It shall be after them that Sanchal shall possess you again… for his cords and his knives and his irons… for his sport… and for mine!”

He pulled at the neck of his cloak as though it choked him. He signaled to the slaves who stood on the bottom steps. He gave them some command in the unknown tongue. They slithered toward me. I tensed my muscles, about to make one despairing rush upon the blazing-eyed devil in the black throne.

Eve covered her face with her hands.

“Jim, darling,” she whispered swiftly, under their shelter, “go quietly! Barker! Something’s going to happen—”

The slaves had me. I let them lead me over to the chair from which I had watched Cartright mount to his doom. They pressed me into it. Arm and leg bands snapped into place. The veil dropped over my head. They marched away.

A whisper came from below and behind me:

“Cap’n! The clamps don’t hold! There’s a gun right be’ind the slide. It’s open. I’m in a ’ell of a ’urry. When you see me next, grab it an’ get busy.”

“Eve Demerest!” called Satan, “the steps await! Ascend!”

Eve walked forward steadily. Unhesitating, she put her foot upon the first of the shining prints.

A symbol leaped out in the fortunate field of the swinging globe. I heard a murmur, louder than before, go up from the darkened amphitheater. Satan watched, immobile.

She mounted, and set her foot in the next gleaming mark of the child’s foot—

I saw Satan bend suddenly forward, glaring at the telltale, stark disbelief in his eyes. From the amphitheater the murmuring swelled into a roar.

A second symbol shone out in the fortunate field

She had won our freedom!

But how had it happened? And what was Eve doing—

She had mounted to the third point. She pressed upon it.

Out upon the telltale sprang a third symbol to join the other two!

Satan’s face was writhing. The roaring at the back of the Temple had become a tumult. I heard men shouting. Satan was fumbling frantically under his robe—

And now Eve sped up the intervening steps between her and the dais. As she passed them, she trod upon each of the gleaming prints. And as she trod, out upon the fortunate field appeared, one after the other, a shining symbol.

Seven of them – in the fortunate field!

None in Satan’s!

The roaring had become deafening. Satan leaped from the black throne. The wall behind him opened. Out sprang Barker, automatic in his hand.

Now he was at Satan’s side, the barrel of the gun thrust into his belly. The tumult in the Temple stilled, as though a cloud of silence had fallen upon it.

“’Ands up!” snarled the little man. “Wye up! Two ticks an’ I scatter your guts h’over the map!”

Up went Satan’s hands, high over his head.

I threw myself forward. The clamps of the chair gave so suddenly that I slipped to my knees. I reached back into the slit, and felt the barrel of a pistol. I gripped it – the executioner Sanchal was crouching, ready to spring. I shot from the floor, and with an accuracy that gave me one of the keenest joys I had ever known, I drilled Sanchal through the head. He fell sideways, flopping half down the steps.

The kehjt slaves stood dazed, irresolute, waiting command.

“One move o’ them bastards, an’ you’re in pieces,” I heard Harry say. “Tell ’em, quick!”

He jabbed the muzzle of the gun viciously into Satan’s side.

Satan spoke. The voice that came from his lips was like that which one hears in nightmare. To this day I do not like to remember it. It was a command in the unknown tongue, but I had a swift, uneasy suspicion that it held more than the bare order to remain quiet. The slaves dropped their ropes. They slid back toward the walls.

I took the steps on the jump. Eve was beside Barker. I ranged myself at Satan’s other side. She slipped behind him, and joined me.

The tumult in the amphitheater burst out afresh. Men were struggling together in the semi-darkness. There was a rush down from the seats. The edge of the brilliant circle was abruptly lined with figures.

Out from them stepped Consardine.

His face was chalk-white. His eyes burned with a fire that matched Satan’s own. He held his hands before him with fingers curved like talons. He stalked forward like a walking death. And his eyes never left Satan.

“Not yet,” whispered Barker. “Stop ’im, Cap’n.”

“Consardine!” I called. “Stop where you are.”

He paid no heed. He walked on, slowly, like a sleepwalker, the dreadful gaze upon Satan unwavering.

“Consardine!” I called again, sharply. “Stop! I’ll drop you. I mean it. I don’t want to kill you. But another step, and I drop you. By God, I will!”

He halted.

“You… will not… kill him? You will… leave… him for me?”

Consardine’s voice was thin and high. It was Death speaking.

“If we can,” I answered him. “But keep those others back. One move against us and Satan goes. And some of you with him. We’ve no time to pick friends from foes.”

He turned and spoke to them. Again they were silent, watching.

“Now then, Cap’n,” said Barker, briskly, “stick your gun in ’im, and move ’im over ’ere. I’m goin’ to show ’em.”

I thrust the automatic just under Satan’s lower ribs, and pushed him toward the throne of gold. He moved over unresistingly, quietly, almost stolidly. He did not even look at me. I studied him, the vague apprehension growing stronger. He was intent upon Consardine. His face had regained all its impassivity. But the Devil looked out of his eyes, unchained. It came to me that he believed Consardine to be the arch-traitor, that it was he who had set the snare! That we were Consardine’s tools!

But why this apparently passive resignation? Even with our guns at his belly, it was not what I would have expected of Satan. And it seemed to me that besides the murder in his gaze there was a certain contempt. Had he, also, a final ace in the hole? My uneasiness increased, sharply.

“Now look, all o’ you. I’m goin’ to show you what the double-crossin’ swine ’as been doin’ to you.”

It was Barker speaking. I did not dare turn my eyes from Satan to see what he was doing. But there was no need. I knew.

“Promisin’ you this an’ that,” went on the cockney drawl. “Sendin’ you to ’Ell! An’ all the time larfin’ up ’is sleeves at you. Larfin’ fit to die, ’e was. An’ you like a parcel o’ trustin’ h’infants. I’m goin’ to show you. Miss Demerest, will you please walk down an’ then walk up them prints again?”

I saw Eve go down the steps.

“Wyte a second.” She halted at the bottom. “’Ere I am sittin’ in ’is throne. I pull the lever. But h’after I’ve pulled it, I press on the h’edge of the seat. Like this. Now, Miss Demerest. Walk up.”

Eve ascended, stepping upon each of the shining prints.

I could see, out of the corner of my eye, the telltale. Nothing appeared upon it. No symbol, either upon darkened field or lighted.

There was no sound from the watchers. They seemed dazed, waiting what was to come next.

“Didn’t make a damned bit o’ difference where you trod,” said Barker. “It didn’t register. ’Cause why? When I pressed on the h’edge of the throne, a little plate slipped down under there where the machinery is. An’ at the same time, the cogs what myde the contacts what flashed the signals on the globe got moved over to another set o’ contacts. The steps’d work all right when ’e wanted ’em to. They was always set right when ’e was off ’is throne. But after ’e’d set ’imself on ’is bloody black chair ’e’d ’ide ’is ’ands an’ press an’ disconnect ’em. ’Ell, a flock o’ elephants could o’ walked up ’em then an’ they’d never give a blink!”

The tumult broke out afresh; men, and women, too, crying out, cursing. They surged forward, farther into the ring of light.

“Back!” I shouted. “Hold them back, Consardine!”

“Wyte!” yelped Barker. “Wyte! That ain’t ’arf what the swine’s done to you!”

The uproar died. They stared up at us again. Consardine had moved to the very bottom of the steps. His face was, if possible, whiter. His eyes glared upon Satan from rings, black as though painted. He was panting. I wished Harry would hurry. Consardine was near the end of his restraint. I didn’t want to shoot him.

All of this I had seen incompletely. Suddenly I had the thought that Satan was listening, listening not to anything within the Temple, but for some sound far away. That he was willing, willing with complete concentration of all his unholy power for some certain thing to happen. And as I watched I seemed to see a flicker of triumph pass over the marble face.

“Now,” came Barker’s voice, “I’m goin’ to show you. ’Ere on the syme h’edge is seven little plyces. Rubber, set in the stone. After ’e’d disconnected the contacts from the steps, ’e put ’is finger tips on each o’ them plyces. Three of ’em was linked up to the contacts so’s they’d flash the marks on ’is side the telltale. The other four was rigged up to flash ’em on your side. When any o’ you tread on a print ’e’d press the button ’e wanted. Up’d go the mark, of the one ’e’d picked. You didn’t make them marks show up. ’E did!’ ’E ’ad you goin’ and comin’.

“Wyte a minute! Just a minute!” Clearly Barker was enjoying himself. “I’m going to sit in ’is chair an’ show you. Goin’ to show you just what blinkin’ bloody fools he myde out o’ you.”

“Jim!” there was alarm in Eve’s voice, close to my ear. “Jim! I’ve just noticed. There were seven of the kehjt drinkers along that wall. Now there are only six. One of them has slipped away!”

At that instant I knew for what Satan had been listening and waiting. I had been right when I had sensed in his command to the slaves something more than an order to be quiescent. He had bade them watch for an opportunity that would let one of them creep away and raise the alarm.

Loose upon those who threatened him the horde of those soulless, merciless devils to whom Satan was a god since he, and only he, could open to them their Paradise.

In the absorption of us all in the drama of Satan’s unmasking, a slave had found that opportunity. Had been gone – how long?

The thoughts flashed through my head in a split second.

And at that same instant the Hell which had been piling up slowly and steadily in the Temple like thunder heads broke loose.

Without warning, swiftly as the darting of a snake, Satan’s arm struck down. It caught my arm. It sent my automatic hurtling, exploding as it flew. I heard Eve scream, heard Barker’s sharp yelp.

I saw Consardine leaping up the steps, straight for Satan. Abruptly the whole Temple was flooded with light. Like an image caught between the opening and shutting of a camera shutter, I had a glimpse of Bedlam. Those who would have followed Consardine and those who were still faithful to Satan struggling for mastery.

Satan’s hands swept in to catch me, lift me, hurl me against Consardine. Quicker than he, I dropped, twisting, and threw myself with every ounce of my strength against his legs.

He tottered. A foot slipped upon the edge of the dais. He reeled down a step or two, swaying in effort to regain his balance.

Consardine was upon him!

His hands gripped Satan’s throat. The mighty arms of Satan wrapped themselves around him. The two fell. Locked, they went rolling down the steps.

There was a howling, like packs of wolves. At the back of the Temple and at the two sides, the panels flew open. Through them seethed the kehjt slaves.

“Quick, Cap’n!”

Barker spun me around. He pointed to the throne of gold.

“Be’ind it!” he grunted, and ran.

I caught Eve’s arm and we raced after him. He was on his knees, working frantically at the floor. Something clicked, and a block slid aside. I saw a hole down which dropped a narrow flight of steps.

“Go first,” said Barker. “Quick!”

Eve slipped through. As I followed I caught a glimpse of the Temple through the legs of the throne. It was a seething place of slaughter. The knives of the kehjt slaves were flashing. Men were shooting. From side to side was battle. Of Satan and Consardine I saw nothing. There were a dozen of the slaves rushing up the stairs toward us—

Barker shoved me down the hole. He jumped after me, landing almost on my head. The slab closed.

“’Urry!” gasped Barker. “Gord! If ’e gets us now!”

The stairs led into a bare and small chamber of stone. Over our heads we could hear the tumult. The feet of the fighters beat on the ceiling like drums.

“Watch the stairs. Where’s your gun? ’Ere, tyke mine,” Barker thrust his automatic into my hand. He turned to the wall, scrutinizing it. I ran back to where the narrow stairs entered the chamber. I could hear hands working at the block.

“Got it!” cried Barker. “’Urry!”

A slab had opened in the wall. We passed through. It shut behind us. I could see no place in the wall to mark where it had been.

We stood in one of those long and dimly lighted corridors that honeycombed Satan’s house.

Clearly to us came the turmoil of the fighting above us.

There were five quick sharp explosions.

And, then, abruptly, as though at some command, the turmoil was stilled.

— XX —

The effect of that abrupt silencing of the tumult overhead was disconcerting, to put it mildly. The five sharp reports had been less like pistol shots than those of a rifle. But who had been shooting, and how could so few bullets have ended such a melee as I had glimpsed?

“They’re quiet! What does it mean?” whispered Eve.

“Somebody’s won,” I said.

“Satan – you don’t think Satan?” she breathed.

Whether Consardine had done for Satan or Satan for him, I had no means of knowing. Desperately I hoped that Consardine had killed him. But whether he had or had not, my betting upon the general battle was with the kehjt drinkers. They swung a wicked knife, and they didn’t care. If Consardine had choked Satan’s life out of him, the kehjt slaves had in all probability sent Consardine’s life after Satan. I didn’t tell Eve that.

“Whether Satan has lost or won, his power is gone,” I told her. “There’s little to fear from him now.”

“Not if we can get out of this blinkin’ ’ole without gettin’ scragged, there ain’t,” said Harry, gloomily. “It’s only fair to tell you I’d a lot rather be ’earin’ that Bank ’Oliday goin’ on up there.”

“What’s the matter with you?” I asked.

“It’d keep their minds off us, for one thing,” he looked askance at Eve. “But that ain’t the ’ole of it.”

“Will you kindly not regard me as a sensitive female, Barker,” said Eve with considerable acerbity. “Never mind considering my feelings. What do you mean?”

“All right,” said Barker. “I’ll tell you stryte then. I don’t know where the ’ell we are.”

I whistled.

“But you knew your way here,” I said.

“No,” he answered, “I didn’t. I took a long chance on that, Cap’n. I knew about the trap be’ind the gold throne an’ the room under it. It’s where ’e stows it, an’ I been there, from up above. I took a chance there was another wye out. I was lucky enough to find it. But ’ow to get from ’ere – I don’t know.”

“Hadn’t we better be moving along, somewhere?” said Eve.

“We sure had,” I said. “We’ve only got one gun. Those slaves may come piling in any minute.”

“I move we tyke the right ’and,” said Harry. “We’re somewhere close to Satan’s private quarters. I know that. You keep the gun, Cap’n.”

We moved along the corridor, cautiously. Barker kept scanning the walls, shaking his head, and mumbling. Something had been puzzling me ever since Eve had walked forth from the dark amphitheater to take my place at the steps. It seemed as good a time as any to satisfy my curiosity.

“Harry,” I asked, “how did you work it so that all the prints registered only on that one side of the globe? What kept Satan from doing his double-crossing as usual from the black throne? He was trying hard enough. Did you get back into the Temple again after we’d left?”

“I fixed it before we went, Cap’n,” he grinned. “You saw me fussin’ with the machinery after we’d tried it out, didn’t you?”

“I thought you were readjusting it,” I said.

“So I was,” he grinned more broadly. “Settin’ it so the steps threw all the contacts on the lucky side o’ the telltale. Settin’ it so ’is little arryngement in ’is chair wouldn’t myke no contacts at all. Took a chance, I did. Thought mybe the next Temple meetin’ would be on account o’ you. Only thing I was afryd of was ’e’d miss the noise when ’e pulled the little lever. I couldn’t ’elp that. Thank Gord, ’e didn’t. ’E was too mad.”

“Harry,” I took the little man by the shoulders, “you’ve surely paid me back in full and more for whatever I did for you.”

“Now, now,” said Barker, “wyte till we’re out—”

He halted.

“What’s that?” he whispered.

There had been another sharp explosion, louder than those we had heard before the silence had dropped upon the Temple. It was closer, too. The floor of the corridor trembled. Quick upon it came another.

“Bombs!” exclaimed Barker.

There was a third explosion, nearer still.

“Cripes! We got to get out o’ here!” Barker began questing along the walls like a terrier. Suddenly he grunted, and stopped.

“Got something,” he said. “Quiet now. Stand close be’ind me while I tyke a look.”

He pressed upon the wall. A panel slid aside revealing one of the small lifts. He drew a long breath of relief. We crowded in.

“Down or up?” he closed the panel on us.

“What do you think?” I asked him.

“Well, the Temple’s on the ground floor. We’re just under it. If we go down, we’ll be somewhere around that slyves’ den. If we go up, we got to pass the Temple. If we can get by, an’ keep on goin’ up – well, it’s ’ardly likely there’ll be as many slyves over it as under an’ around it, Cap’n.”

“Up we go,” said Eve, decisively.

“Up it is,” I said.

He sent the lift upward, slowly. There was a fourth explosion, louder than any of the others. The frame of the elevator rattled. There was a sound of falling masonry.

“Getting close,” said Eve.

“If we could bryke into Satan’s rooms, we’d ’ave a chance o’ findin’ that private tunnel of ’is,” Barker stopped the lift. “It’s somewhere close by. It’s our best bet, Cap’n. With any luck at all, we could come out syfe on the shore.”

“I’ll bet that by now everybody on the place knows what’s going on, and is somewhere around here,” I said. “We could lift one of those speed boats and get away.”

“I smell something burning,” said Eve.

“Cripes!” Barker sent the lift up at the limit of its speed, “I’ll sye you do!”

A crack had opened in the wall in front of us. Out of it had shot a jet of smoke.

Suddenly Barker stopped the lift. He slid aside a panel, cautiously. He peered out, then nodded to us. We stepped into a small room, paved and walled with a dull black stone. On one side was a narrow door of bronze. It was plainly an antechamber. But to what?

As we stood there, hesitating, we heard two more explosions, one immediately following the other. They seemed to be upon the floor where we were. From below us came another crash, as of a falling wall. The lift from which we had just emerged went smashing down. Out of the open panel poured a dense volume of smoke.

“Gord! The ’ole bloody plyce is on fire!” Barker jammed the panel shut, and stared at us, white faced.

And suddenly I thought of Cobham.

Cobham, with his gentlemanly bomb that was to blow the bottom out of the Astarte. Satan had said that he had been driven into hiding near the laboratory. Had Cobham seen his chance to escape during the rush of the kehjt slaves to aid Satan? Had he found his way clear, gone straight to the laboratory, and was he now strewing in crazed vengeance the death and destruction he had garnered there?

I tried the bronze door. It was unfastened. Gun ready, I slowly opened it.

We were at one end of that amazing group of rooms, that shrine of beauty, which Satan had created for himself. That place of magic whose spell had so wrought upon me not so long ago that I had gone forth from it, half-considering the giving up of Eve, the placing of my whole allegiance in Satan’s hands. There was a thin veil of smoke in the silent chamber. It dimmed the tapestries, the priceless paintings, the carvings of stone and wood. We crossed its floor, and looked into a larger treasure room. At its far side where were its doors, the smoke hung like a curtain.

From behind the smoke, and close, came another explosion.

Through the curtain stumbled Satan!

At sight of him we huddled together, the three of us. My mouth went dry, and I felt the sweat wet the roots of my hair. It was not with fear. It was something more than fear.

For Satan, stumbling toward us, was blind!

His eyes were no longer blue, jewel-hard and jewel-bright. They were dull and gray, like unpolished agates. They were dead. It was as though a flame had seared them. There was a red stain over and around them, like a crimson mask.

He was cloakless. Black upon the skin of his swollen neck were the marks of strangling fingers. Consardine’s.

One arm hung limp. The other clasped to his breast a little statue of ivory, an Eros. Of all those things of beauty which he had schemed and robbed and slain to possess, that statue was, I think, the thing he loved the best; the thing in which he found the purest, perfect form of that spirit of beauty which, evil as Satan was, he knew and worshiped.

He stumbled on, rolling his great head from side to side like a blinded beast. And as he came, tears fell steadily from the sightless eyes and glistened on the heavy cheeks.

Through the curtain of smoke, following him, stalked Cobham.

A bag was slung over his left shoulder. It bulged, and as he emerged he dipped a hand within it. In his hand when he drew it out was something round, about as big as an orange, something that gleamed, with a dully metallic luster.

As Cobham walked, he laughed; constantly, even as Satan wept.

Cobham halted.

“Satan!” he called. “Stop! Time for a rest, dear Master!”

The stumbling figure lurched on, unheeding. The jeering note in Cobham’s voice fled; it became menacing.

“Stop, you dog! Stop when I tell you. Do you want a bomb at your heels?”

Satan stood still, shuddering, the little statue clasped closer.

“Turn, Satan,” jeered Cobham. “What, Master, would you deny me the light of those eyes of yours!”

And Satan turned.

Cobham saw us.

The hand that held the bomb flew up.

“Walter!” cried Eve, and leaped in front of me, arms outstretched. “Walter! Don’t!”

I had not tried to shoot. To be honest, I had not thought of it. The paralysis with which the sight of Satan had touched me still held me. Eve’s swift action saved us more surely than a bullet would have.

Cobham’s arm dropped to his side. Satan did not turn. I doubt even if he heard. He was past all except his agony and the voice of his tormentor, and that, it came to me, he obeyed only to save from destruction the thing he was clasping.

“Eve!” some of the madness was swept from Cobham’s face. “Who’s with you? Come closer.”

We moved toward him.

“Kirkham, eh? and little ’Arry. Stop where you are. Put your hands up, both of you. I owe you something, Kirkham. But I don’t trust you. Eve, where do you think you’re going?”

“We’re trying to get away, Walter,” she said gently. “Come with us.”

“Come with you? Come with you!” I saw the madness fill his eyes again. “I couldn’t do that. There’s only a part of me here, you know. The rest of me is in a room full of little mirrors. A part of me in every one of those mirrors. I couldn’t go away and leave them.”

He paused, seemingly to consider the matter. The smoke grew thicker. Satan never moved.

“Disintegrated personality, that’s it,” said Cobham. “Satan did it. But he didn’t keep me there long enough. I got away. If I’d stayed a little longer, all of me would have gone into the mirrors. Into them and through them and away. As it is,” said Cobham with a dreadful, impersonal gravity, “the experiment remains unfinished. I can’t go away and leave those bits of myself behind. You see that, Eve?”

“Careful, Eve. Don’t cross him,” I muttered. He heard me.

“Shut up, you, Kirkham. Eve and I will do the talking,” he said, viciously.

“We could help you, Walter,” she said, steadily. “Come with us—”

“I went to the Temple,” he interrupted her, speaking quite calmly, the shattered mind abruptly taking another path, “I had my bombs with me. I distributed a few of them. I used the sleep gas. Consardine was at the bottom of the steps. His back was broken. Satan was just getting up from him. He covered his mouth and nose and ran. I caught him. A little spray across the eyes with something I was carrying. That was all. He made for here like a rat to his hole. Blind as he was—”

The mood had changed. He roared his crazy laughter.

“Come with you! Leave him! After what he’s done to me? No, no, Eve. Not if you were all the angels in Heaven. We’ve had a nice long walk, Satan and I. And when we go, we go together. With all the little bits of me in his damned mirrors going, too. A long, long journey. But I’ve arranged it so we’ll have a swift, swift start!”

“Cobham,” I said. “I want to save Eve. The tunnel to the shore. Will you tell us how to find it? Or is the way to it blocked?”

“I told you to shut up, Kirkham,” he leered at me. “Everybody used to obey Satan. Now Satan obeys me. Therefore everybody obeys me. You’ve disobeyed me. Walk over to that wall, Kirkham.”

I walked to the wall. There was nothing else to do.

“You want to know how to get to the tunnel,” he said when I had reached it, and turned. “Go into that anteroom. Through the right wall there – listen to me, you ’Arry,” he shot a malicious look at me. “Six panels left along the corridor. Through again into another passage. Go down the ramp to the end. Through it at the last panel, right. That’s the start of the tunnel. So much for that. Now, Kirkham, let’s see whether you’re going with them. Catch.”

He raised his arm and threw the bomb at me.

It seemed to come to me slowly. I seemed to have plenty of time to think of what would happen to me if I missed it, or dropped it, or caught it too roughly. Luck was with me. I did none of the three.

“All right, you go,” grinned Cobham. “Keep it in case you meet any of the slaves. I think I cleaned them all out in the Temple. Gas bombs, Kirkham, gas bombs. They’re lying up there asleep and toasting.”

Again he roared with laughter.

“Get out!” he snarled suddenly.

We walked back through the other room. We did not dare look into each other’s faces. At the door, I glanced back. Cobham was watching us.

Satan had not stirred.

We passed through the door, and closed it.

We got out of the little antechamber as quickly as we could. It was pretty bad with the smoke, and rather too much like a furnace. The first corridor was uncomfortably choky, too. The second was entirely clear. When we reached its end, Barker had a bit of trouble with the panel. Finally it swung open, like a door.

Before us was not, as I had expected, the entrance to the tunnel, but a bare, stone room about twenty feet square. Opposite us was a massive steel door closed with heavy bars. On each side of it was a kehjt drinker. They were big fellows, armed with throwing cords and knives. In addition to these they had carbines, the first guns I had seen in the hands of the slaves.

I had thrust Cobham’s bomb in my pocket. For an instant I thought of using it. Then common sense told me that it might bring the place crashing down about us, at any rate seal the tunnel entrance. I dropped my hand on my automatic. But by that time the guards covered us with their rifles. The only reason that they had not shot on sight, I suppose, was that they had recognized Barker.

“’Ullo! ’Ullo! What’s the matter with you?” Barker stepped toward them.

“What are you doing here?” one of the slaves spoke, and by the faint accent in the deadened voice I thought that he had been Russian before he had become – what he was.

“Satan’s orders,” answered Harry brusquely, and gestured to the guns. “Put ’em down.”

The slave who had spoken said something to the other in that unfamiliar tongue I had heard Satan use. He nodded. They lowered their carbines, but held them in readiness.

“You have his token?” asked the slave.

“You got it, Cap’n,” Barker turned his head to me quickly, then back to the guard. “No, you ’aven’t. I ’ave—”

I had read the message in his eyes. My hand was on the automatic. I shot from the hip at the second guard. His hand flew up to his breast and he toppled.

At the instant of the report, Barker hurled himself at the legs of the challenging slave. His feet flew from beneath him, and down he crashed. Before he could arise I had put a bullet through his head.

I felt no compunction about killing him. The kehjt drinkers had never seemed to me to be human. But whether human or not, I had killed far better men for much less reason during the war. Barker dropped upon the guard he had tripped, and began to search him. He arose with a bunch of small keys and ran to the steel door. It could not have been more than a minute before he had the bars down and the door open. The tunnel lay before us, long, cased with stone and dimly lighted.

“We’ve got to tyke it on the double,” Barker jammed the heavy valve shut. “I didn’t like what ’e said about ’im an’ Satan goin’ awye together quick. I think ’e fixed it to blow up the lab’ratory. An’ there’s enough stuff there to move the northeast corner of ’Ell.”

We set off at a run down the tunnel. After we had gone about a thousand feet we came to another wall. It closed the way, making of the passage apparently a blind alley.

Barker worked feverishly at it, going over it inch by inch with nimble fingers. A block dropped suddenly, sliding downward as though in grooves. We passed through the opening. And ran on.

The lights blinked out. We halted, in darkness. The ground quivered under our feet. The quivering was followed by a deep-toned roar like the bellow of a volcano. I threw an arm around Eve. The floor of the tunnel heaved and rocked. I heard the crash of stones falling from its roof and sides.

“Gord! There goes Satan!” Barker’s voice was hysterically shrill.

I knew it must be so. Satan had – gone. And Cobham. And all those, dead and alive, in the chateau – they, too, were gone. And all the treasures of Satan, all the beauty that he had gathered about him – gone. Blasted and shattered in that terrific explosion. Things of beauty irreplaceable, things of beauty for which the world must be poorer forever – destroyed for all time. Wiped out!

I had a sensation of sick emptiness. My very bones felt hollow. I felt a remorse and horror as though I had been party to some supreme sacrilege.

Eve’s arms were around my neck, tightly. I heard her sobbing. I thrust away the weakening thoughts, and held her to me close, comforting her.

The stones ceased falling. We went on, picking our way over them by the gleam of Barker’s flashlight. The tunnel had been badly damaged. If ever I prayed, I prayed then that no fall of stone or slip of earth had blocked it against us. If so, we were probably due to die like penned-in rats.

But the damage lessened as we drew further away from the center of the explosion, although now and again we heard the crashing of loosened stones behind us. We came at last to a breast of rocks, rough hewn, a formidable barrier that closed the tunnel, and must be, we knew, its further end.

Barker worked long at that, and I, too, and both of us at times despairingly, before we found the key to its opening. At last, when the flash was dying, a boulder sank. We breathed cool, fresh air. Close to us we heard the ripple of waves. Another minute and we stood upon that pile of rocks where I had seen Satan looking out over the waters of the Sound.

We saw the lights of the Cherub. She had come closer to shore. Her searchlight was playing upon the landing, sweeping from it along the road that led through the woods to the great house.

We crept down the rocks, and began to skirt the shore to the landing. At our right, the sky was glowing, pulsing. The tops of the trees stood out against the glow like the silhouettes of trees in a Japanese print.

Satan’s funeral pyre.

We reached the pier. The searchlight picked us up. We went forward boldly. Barker dropped into a likely-looking launch that was fastened to the landing. Those on the yacht must have thought we were making ready to come to them. They held the light steady upon us.

The engines of the launch started to hum. I lowered Eve into it, and jumped after her. Barker threw the propeller into first speed, and then into direct drive. The launch shot forward.

There was no moon. A mist was on the waters. The glow of Satan’s pyre cast a red film on the sluggish waves.

Barker steered for the yacht. Suddenly he swung sharply to port, and away from her. We heard shouts from her decks. The mists thickened as we sped on. They dimmed the beam. And then it lost us and swept back to the pier.

Barker headed the launch straight for the Connecticut shore. He gave me the wheel, and went back to nurse the engines. Eve pressed close to me. I put my arm around her and drew her closer. Her head dropped upon my shoulder.

My thoughts went back to the burning chateau. What was happening there? Had the great explosion and the glare of the flames brought outsiders to it as yet, volunteer firefighters from the neighboring villages, police? It was not likely. The place was so isolated, so difficult of access. But on the morrow, surely they would come. What would they find? What would be their reception? How many had escaped from the chateau?

And those who had been trapped in Satan’s house? Those who had fallen before his slaves and Cobham’s bombs? Among them had been men and women of high place. What an aftermath their disappearance would have! The newspapers would be busy for a long time about that.

And Satan! In the last analysis – a crooked gambler. Betrayed at the end by the dice he himself had loaded. Had he but played his game of the seven footprints straight he would have been unconquerable. But he had not – and all his power had rested on a lie. And his power could be no stronger than that which upheld it.

It was Satan’s lie that had betrayed him.

Crooked gambler – yes, but more, much more than that—

Would his vengeance follow us, though he was gone?

Well, we would have to take our chances.

I shook off the oppression creeping over me, turned resolutely from the past to the future.

“Eve,” I whispered, “all I’ve got is what’s left of sixty-six dollars and ninety-five cents that was my sole capital when I met you.”

“Well, what of it?” asked Eve, and snuggled in my arm.

“It’s not much for a honeymoon trip,” I said. “Of course, there’s the ten thousand I got for the museum job. I can’t keep that. It’ll have to go back to the museum. Marked ‘Anonymous Donor.’”

“Of course,” said Eve, indifferently. “Oh, Jim, darling, isn’t it good to be free!”

Barker moved forward, and took the wheel from me. I put both arms around Eve. Far ahead of us the lights of some Connecticut town sparkled. They evoked a painful memory. I sighed.

“All those treasures – gone!” I groaned. “Why didn’t I have the sense to snatch that crown or scepter off the gold throne when I had the chance?”

“’Ere’s the crown, Cap’n,” said Barker.

He fished down into a pocket. He drew out the crown and dropped it into Eve’s lap. Its jewels blazed up at us. We stared at them, and from them to Barker, and from Barker back to them – unbelievingly.

“Crown’s a bit crumpled,” remarked Barker, easily. “’Ad to bend it to stow it awye. Grabbed the scepter, but it slipped. ’Adn’t time to pick it up. Picked up a few other tysty bits, though.”

He poured a double handful of rings and necklaces and uncut gems over the glittering crown. We stared at him, still speechless.

“Split ’em two wyes,” said Harry, “so long as you an’ Miss Eve’s goin’ to be one. I only ’opes they’re real.”

“Harry!” whispered Eve, breathlessly. She leaned over and kissed him.

He blinked, and turned back to the wheel.

“Reminds me o’ Maggie!” muttered Harry, forlornly.

I felt something round and hard in my pocket. Cobham’s bomb! With a little prickling of the scalp, I dropped it gingerly over the side.

The shore lights had crept nearer. I scooped the jewels from Eve’s lap and thrust them into Barker’s pocket.

I clasped Eve close, and turned her face up to mine.

“Just like me an’ Maggie!” whispered Harry, huskily.

I put my lips to hers, and felt hers cling. Life was very sweet just then.

Eve’s lips were sweeter.

— THE END —

Serialized in 5 parts
Argosy All-Story Weekly, 2 Jul 1927

First book edition:
Boni & Liveright, New York, 1928

THE  FACE
IN  THE  ABYSS

— I —

SUARRA

Nicholas Graydon ran into Starrett in Quito. Rather, Starrett sought him out there. Graydon had often heard of the big West Coast adventurer, but their trails had never crossed. It was with lively curiosity that he opened his door to his visitor.

Starrett came to the point at once. Graydon had heard the legend of the treasure train bringing to Pizarro the ransom of the Inca Atahualpa? And that its leaders, learning of the murder of their monarch by the butcher-boy Conquistador, had turned aside and hidden the treasure somewhere in the Andean wilderness?

Graydon had heard it, hundreds of times; had even considered hunting for it. He said so. Starrett nodded.

“I know where it is,” he said.

Graydon laughed.

In the end Starrett convinced him; convinced him, at least, that he had something worth looking into.

Graydon rather liked the big man. There was a bluff directness that made him overlook the hint of cruelty in eyes and jaw. There were two others with him, Starrett said, both old companions. Graydon asked why they had picked him out. Starrett bluntly told him – because they knew he could afford to pay the expenses of the expedition. They would all share equally in the treasure. If they didn’t find it, Graydon was a first-class mining engineer, and the region they were going into was rich in minerals. He was practically sure of making some valuable discovery on which they could cash in.

Graydon considered. There were no calls upon him. He had just passed his thirty-fourth birthday, and since he had been graduated from the Harvard School of Mines eleven years ago he had never had a real holiday. He could well afford the cost. There would be some excitement, if nothing else.

After he had looked over Starrett’s two comrades – Soames, a lanky, saturnine, hard-bitten Yankee, and Dancret, a cynical, amusing little Frenchman – they had drawn up an agreement and he had signed it.

They went down by rail to Cerro de Pasco for their outfit, that being the town of any size closest to where their trek into the wilderness would begin. A week later with eight burros and six arrieros, or packmen, they were within the welter of peaks through which, Starrett’s map indicated, lay their road.

It had been the map which had persuaded Graydon. It was no parchment, but a sheet of thin gold quite as flexible. Starrett drew it out of a small golden tube of ancient workmanship, and unrolled it. Graydon examined it and was unable to see any map upon it – or anything else. Starrett held it at a peculiar angle – and the markings upon it became plain.

It was a beautiful piece of cartography. It was, in fact, less a map than a picture. Here and there were curious symbols which Starrett said were signs cut upon the rocks along the way; guiding marks for those of the old race who would set forth to recover the treasure when the Spaniards had been swept from the land.

Whether it was clue to Atahualpa’s ransom hoard or to something else – Graydon did not know. Starrett said it was. But Graydon did not believe his story of how the golden sheet had come into his possession. Nevertheless, there had been purpose in the making of the map, and stranger purpose in the cunning with which the markings had been concealed. Something interesting lay at the end of that trail.

They found the signs cut in the rocks exactly as the sheet of gold had indicated. Gay, spirits high with anticipation, three of them spending in advance their share of the booty, they followed the symbols. Steadily they were led into the uncharted wilderness.

At last the arrieros began to murmur. They were approaching, they said, a region that was accursed, the Cordillera de Carabaya, where only demons dwelt. Promises of more money, threats, pleadings, took them along a little further. One morning the four awakened to find the arrieros gone, and with them half the burros and the major portion of their supplies.

They pressed on. Then the signs failed them. Either they had lost the trail, or the map which had led them truthfully so far had lied at the last.

The country into which they had penetrated was a curiously lonely one. There had been no sign of Indians since more than a fortnight before, when they had stopped at a Quicha village and Starrett had gotten mad drunk on the fiery spirit the Quichas distill. Food was hard to find. There were few animals and fewer birds.

Worst of all was the change which had come over Graydon’s companions. As high as they had been lifted by their certitude of success, just so deep were they in depression. Starrett kept himself at steady level of drunkenness, alternately quarrelsome and noisy, or brooding in sullen rage.

Dancret was silent and irritable. Soames seemed to have come to the conclusion that Starrett, Graydon and Dancret had combined against him; that they had either deliberately missed the trail or had erased the signs. Only when the pair of them joined Starrett and drank with him the Quicha brew with which they had laden one of the burros did the three relax. At such times Graydon had the uneasy feeling that all were holding the failure against him, and that his life might be hanging on a thin thread.

The day that Graydon’s great adventure really began, he was on his way back to the camp. He had been hunting since morning. Dancret and Soames had gone off together on another desperate search for the missing marks.

Cut off in mid-flight, the girl’s cry came to him as the answer to all his apprehensions; materialization of the menace toward which his vague fears had been groping since he had left Starrett alone at the camp, hours ago. He had sensed some culminating misfortune close – and here it was! He broke into a run, stumbling up the slope to the group of gray-green algarrobas, where the tent was pitched.

He crashed through the thick undergrowth to the clearing.

Why didn’t the girl cry out again? he wondered. A chuckle reached him, thick, satyr-toned.

Half crouching, Starrett was holding the girl bow fashion over one knee. A thick arm was clenched about her neck, the fingers clutching her mouth brutally, silencing her; his right hand fettered her wrists; her knees were caught in the vise of his bent right leg.

Graydon caught him by the hair, and locked his arm under his chin. He drew his head sharply back.

“Drop her!” he ordered.

Half paralyzed, Starrett relaxed – he writhed, then twisted to his feet.

“What the hell are you butting in for?”

His hand struck down toward his pistol. Graydon’s fist caught him on the point of the jaw. The half-drawn gun slipped to the ground and Starrett toppled over.

The girl leaped up, and away.

Graydon did not look after her. She had gone, no doubt, to bring down upon them her people, some tribe of the fierce Aymara whom even the Incas of old had never quite conquered. And who would avenge her in ways that Graydon did not like to visualize.

He bent over Starrett. Between the blow and the drink he would probably be out for some time. Graydon picked up the pistol. He wished that Dancret and Soames would get back soon to camp. The three of them could put up a good fight at any rate… might even have a chance to escape… but they would have to get back quickly… the girl would soon return with her avengers… was probably at that moment telling them of her wrongs. He turned—

She stood there, looking at him.

Drinking in her loveliness, Graydon forgot the man at his feet – forgot all else.

Her skin was palest ivory. It gleamed through the rents of the soft amber fabric, like thickest silk, which swathed her. Her eyes were oval, a little tilted, Egyptian in the wide midnight of her pupils. Her nose was small and straight; her brows level and black, almost meeting. Her hair was cloudy, jet, misty and shadowed. A narrow fillet of gold bound her low broad forehead. In it was entwined a sable and silver feather of the caraquenque – that bird whose plumage in lost centuries was sacred to the princesses of the Incas alone.

Above her elbows were golden bracelets, reaching almost to the slender shoulders. Her little high-arched feet were shod with high buskins of deerskin. She was lithe and slender as the Willow Maid who waits on Kwannon when she passes through the World of Trees pouring into them new fire of green life.

She was no Indian… nor daughter of ancient Incas… nor was she Spanish… she was of no race that he knew. There were bruises on her cheeks – the marks of Starrett’s fingers. Her long, slim hands touched them. She spoke – in the Aymara tongue.

“Is he dead?”

“No,” Graydon answered.

In the depths of her eyes a small, hot flame flared; he could have sworn it was of gladness.

“That is well! I would not have him die—” her voice became meditative – “at least – not this way.”

Starrett groaned. The girl again touched the bruises on her cheek.

“He is very strong,” she murmured.

Graydon thought there was admiration in her whisper; wondered whether all her beauty was, after all, only a mask for primitive woman worshiping brute strength. “Who are you?” he asked.

She looked at him for a long, long moment.

“I am – Suarra,” she answered, at last.

“But where do you come from? What are you?” he asked again. She did not choose to answer these questions.

“Is he your enemy?”

“No,” he said. “We travel together.”

“Then why—” she pointed again to the outstretched figure – “why did you do this to him? Why did you not let him have his way with me?”

Graydon flushed. The question, with all its subtle implications, cut.

“What do you think I am?” he answered, hotly. “No man lets a thing like that go on!”

She looked at him, curiously. Her face softened. She took a step closer to him. She touched once more the bruises on her cheek.

“Do you not wonder,” she said, “now do you not wonder why I do not call my people to deal him the punishment he has earned?”

“I do wonder,” Graydon’s perplexity was frank. “I wonder indeed. Why do you not call them – if they are close enough to hear?”

“And what would you do were they to come?”

“I would not let them have him – alive,” he answered. “Nor me.”

“Perhaps,” she said, slowly – “perhaps that is why I do not call.”

Suddenly she smiled upon him. He took a swift step toward her. She thrust out a warning hand. “I am – Suarra,” she said. “And I am – Death!” A chill passed through Graydon. Again he realized the alien beauty of her. Could there be truth in these legends of the haunted Cordillera? He had never doubted that there was something real behind the terror of the Indians, the desertion of the arrieros. Was she one of its spirits, one of its – demons? For an instant the fantasy seemed no fantasy. Then reason returned. This girl a demon! He laughed.

“Do not laugh,” she said. “The death I mean is not such as you who live beyond the high rim of our hidden land know. Your body may live on – yet it is death and more than death, since it is changed in – dreadful – ways. And that which tenants your body, that which speaks through your lips, is changed – in ways more dreadful still!… I would not have that death come to you.”

Strange as were her words, Graydon hardly heard them: certainly did not then realize their meaning, lost as he was in wonder at her beauty.

“How you came by the Messengers, I do not know. How you could have passed unseen by them, I cannot understand. Nor how you came so far into this forbidden land. Tell me – why came you here at all?”

“We came from afar,” he told her, “on the track of a great treasure of gold and gems; the treasure of Atahualpa, the Inca. There were certain signs that led us. We lost them. We found that we, too, were lost. And we wandered here.”

“Of Atahualpa or of Incas,” the girl said, “I know nothing. Whoever they were, they could not have come to this place. And their treasure, no matter how great, would have meant nothing to us – to us of Yu-Atlanchi, where treasures are as rocks in the bed of a stream. A grain of sand it would have been, among many—” she paused, then went on, perplexedly, as though voicing her thoughts to herself – “But it is why the Messengers did not see them that I cannot understand… the Mother must know of this… I must go quickly to the Mother…”

“The Mother?” asked Graydon.

“The Snake Mother!” her gaze returned to him; she touched a bracelet on her right wrist. Graydon, drawing close, saw that this bracelet held a disk on which was carved in bas-relief a serpent with a woman’s head and woman’s breast and arms. It lay coiled upon what appeared to be a great bowl held high on the paws of four beasts. The shapes of these creatures did not at once register upon his consciousness, so absorbed was he in his study of that coiled figure. He stared close – and closer. And now he realized that the head reared upon the coils was not really that of a woman. No! It was reptilian.

Snake-like – yet so strongly had the artist feminized it, so great was the suggestion of womanhood modeled into every line of it, that constantly one saw it as woman, forgetting all that was of the serpent.

The eyes were of some intensely glittering purple stone. Graydon felt that those eyes were alive – that far, far away some living thing was looking at him through them. That they were, in fact, prolongations of someone’s – something’s – vision.

The girl touched one of the beasts that held up the bowl. “The Xinli,” she said. Graydon’s bewilderment increased. He knew what those animals were. Knowing, he also knew that he looked upon the incredible.

They were dinosaurs! The monstrous saurians that ruled earth millions upon millions of years ago, and, but for whose extinction, so he had been taught, man could never have developed.

Who in this Andean wilderness could know or could have known the dinosaurs? Who here could have carved the monsters with such lifelike detail as these possessed? Why, it was only yesterday that science had learned what really were their huge bones, buried so long that the rocks had molded themselves around them in adamantine matrix. And laboriously, with every modern resource, haltingly and laboriously, science had set those bones together as a perplexed child would a picture puzzle, and put forth what it believed to be reconstructions of these long-vanished chimera of earth’s nightmare youth.

Yet here, far from all science it must surely be, someone had modeled those same monsters for a woman’s bracelet. Why then – it followed that whoever had done this must have had before him the living forms from which to work. Or, if not, had copies of those forms set down by ancient men who had seen them. And either or both these things were incredible, Who were the people to whom she belonged? There had been a name – Yu-Atlanchi.

“Suarra,” he said, “where is Yu-Atlanchi? Is it this place?”

“This?” She laughed. “No! Yu-Atlanchi is the Ancient Land. The Hidden Land where the six Lords and the Lords of Lords once ruled. And where now rules only the Snake Mother and – another. This place Yu-Atlanchi!” Again she laughed. “Now and then I hunt here with – the—” she hesitated, looking at him oddly – “So it was that he who lies there caught me. I was hunting. I had slipped away from my followers, for sometimes it pleases me to hunt alone. I came through these trees and saw your tetuane, your lodge. I came face to face with – him. And I was amazed – too amazed to strike with one of these.” She pointed to a low knoll a few feet away. “Before I could conquer that amaze he had caught me. Then you came.”

Graydon looked where she had pointed. Upon the ground lay three slender, shining spears. Their slim shafts were of gold; the arrow-shaped heads of two of them were of fine opal The third – the third was a single emerald, translucent and flawless, all of six inches long and three at its widest, ground to keenest point and cutting edge.

There it lay, a priceless jewel tipping a spear of gold – and a swift panic shook Graydon. He had forgotten Soames and Dancret. Suppose they should return while this girl was there. This girl with her ornaments of gold, her gem-tipped spears – and her beauty!

“Suarra,” he said, “you must go, and go quickly. This man and I are not all. There are two more, and even now they may be close. Take your spears, and go quickly. Else I may not be able to save you.”

“You think I am—”

“I tell you to go,” he interrupted. “Whoever you are, whatever you are, go now and keep away from this place. Tomorrow I will try to lead them away. If you have people to fight for you – well, let them come and fight if you so desire. But take your spears and go.”

She crossed to the little knoll and picked up the spears. She held one out to him, the one that bore the emerald point.

“This,” she said, “to remember – Suarra.”

“No,” he thrust it back. “Go!”

If the others saw that jewel, never, he knew, would he be able to start them on the back trail – if they could find it. Starrett had seen it, of course, but he might be able to convince them that Starrett’s story was only a drunken dream.

The girl studied him – a quickened interest in her eyes.

She slipped the bracelets from her arms, held them out to him with the three spears.

“Will you take these – and leave your comrades?” she asked. “Here are gold and gems. They are treasure. They are what you have been seeking. Take them. Take them and go, leaving that man here. Consent – and I will show you a way out of this forbidden land.”

Graydon hesitated. The emerald alone was worth a fortune. What loyalty did he owe the three, after all? And Starrett had brought this thing upon himself. Nevertheless – they were his comrades. Open-eyed he had gone into this venture with them. He had a vision of himself skulking away with the glittering booty, creeping off to safety while he left the three unwarned, unprepared, to meet – what?

He did not like that picture.

“No,” he said. “These men are of my race, my comrades. Whatever is to come – I will meet it with them and help them fight it.”

“Yet you would have fought them for my sake – indeed, did fight,” she said. “Why then do you cling to them when you can save yourself, and go free, with treasure? And why, if you will not do this, do you let me go, knowing that if you kept me prisoner, or – killed me, I could not bring my people down upon you?”

Graydon laughed.

“I couldn’t let them hurt you, of course,” he said. “And I’m afraid to make you prisoner, because I might not be able to keep you free from hurt. And I won’t run away. So talk no more, but go – go!”

She thrust the gleaming spears into the ground, slipped the golden bracelets back on her arms, held white hands out to him.

“Now,” she whispered, “now, by the Wisdom of the Mother, I will save you – if I can.”

There was the sound of a horn, far away and high in the air it seemed. It was answered by others closer by; mellow, questing notes – with weirdly alien beat in them.

“They come,” the girl said. “My followers. Light your fire tonight. Sleep without fear. But do not wander beyond these trees.”

“Suarra—” he began.

“Quiet now,” she warned. “Quiet – until I am gone.”

The mellow horns sounded closer. She sprang from his side and darted away through the trees. From the ridge above the camp he heard her voice raised in one clear shout There was a tumult of the horns about her – elfin and troubling. Then silence.

Graydon stood listening. The sun touched the high snowfields of the majestic peaks toward which he faced, touched them and turned them into robes of molten gold. The amethyst shadows that draped their sides thickened, wavered and marched swiftly forward.

Still he listened, hardly breathing.

Far, far away the horns sounded again; faint echoings of the tumult that had swept about the girl – faint, faint and fairy sweet.

The sun dropped behind the peaks; the edges of their frozen mantles glittered as though sewn with diamonds; darkened into a fringe of gleaming rubies. The golden fields dulled, grew amber and then blushed forth a glowing rose. They changed to pearl and faded into a ghostly silver, shining like cloud wraiths in the highest heavens. Down upon the algarroba clump the quick Andean dusk fell.

Not till then did Graydon, shivering with sudden, inexplicable dread, realize that beyond the calling horns and the girl’s clear shouting he had heard no other sound – no noise either of man or beast, no sweeping through of brush or grass, no fall of running feet.

Nothing but that mellow chorus of the horns.

— II —

THE UNSEEN WATCHERS

Starrett had drifted out of the paralysis of the blow into a drunken stupor. Graydon dragged him over to the tent, thrust a knapsack under his head, and threw a blanket over him. Then he went out and built up the fire. There was a trampling through the underbrush. Soames and Dancret came up through the trees.

“Find any signs?” he asked.

“Signs? Hell – no!” snarled the New Englander. “Say, Graydon, did you hear somethin’ like a lot of horns? Damned queer horns, too. They seemed to be over here.”

Graydon nodded, he realized that he must tell these men what had happened so that they could prepare some defense. But how much could he tell?

Tell them of Suarra’s beauty, of her golden ornaments and her gem-tipped spears of gold? Tell them what she had said of Atahualpa’s treasure?

If he did, there would be no further reasoning with them. They would go berserk with greed. Yet something of it he must tell them if they were to be ready for the attack which he was certain would come with the dawn.

And of the girl they would learn soon enough from Starrett.

He heard an exclamation from Dancret who had passed on into the tent; heard him come out; stood up and faced the wiry little Frenchman.

“What’s the matter wit’ Starrett, eh?” Dancret snapped. “First I t’ought he’s drunk. Then I see he’s scratched like wildcat and wit’ a lump on his jaw as big as one orange. What you do to Starrett, eh?”

Graydon had made up his mind, and was ready to answer.

“Dancret,” he said, “Soames – we’re in a bad box. I came in from hunting less than an hour ago, and found Starrett wrestling with a girl. That’s bad medicine down here – the worst, and you two know it. I had to knock Starrett out before I could get the girl away from him. Her people will probably be after us in the morning. There’s no use trying to get away. We don’t know a thing about this wilderness. Here is as good as any other place to meet them. We’d better spend the night getting it ready so we can put up a good scrap, if we have to.”

“A girl, eh?” said Dancret. “What she look like? Where she come from? How she get away?”

Graydon chose the last question to answer.

“I let her go,” he said.

“You let her go!” snarled Soames. “What the hell did you do that for? Why didn’t you tie her up? We could have held her as a hostage, Graydon – had somethin’ to do some tradin’ with when her damned bunch of Indians came.”

“She wasn’t an Indian, Soames,” said Graydon, then hesitated.

“You mean she was white – Spanish?” broke in Dancret, incredulously.

“No, not Spanish either. She was white. Yes, white as any of us. I don’t know what she was.”

The pair stared at him, then at each other.

“There’s somethin’ damned funny about this,” growled Soames, at last “But what I want to know is why you let her go – whatever the hell she was?”

“Because I thought we’d have a better chance if I did than if I didn’t.” Graydon’s own wrath was rising. “I tell you that we’re up against something none of us knows anything about. And we’ve got just one chance of getting out of the mess. If I’d kept her there, we wouldn’t have even that chance.”

Dancret stooped, and picked up something from the ground, something that gleamed yellow in the firelight.

“Somet’ing funny is right, Soames,” he said. “Look at this!”

He handed the gleaming object over. It was a golden bracelet, and as Soames turned it over in his hand there was the green glitter of emeralds. It had been torn from Suarra’s arm, undoubtedly, in her struggle with Starrett.

“What that girl give you to let her go, Graydon, eh?” Dancret spat. “What she tell you, eh?”

Soames’s hand dropped to his automatic.

“She gave me nothing. I took nothing,” answered Graydon.

“I t’ink you damned liar,” said Dancret, viciously. “We get Starrett awake,” he turned to Soames. “We get him awake quick. I t’ink he tell us more about this, oui. A girl who wears stuff like this – and he lets her go! Lets her go when he knows there must be more where this come from – eh, Soames! Damned funny is right, eh? Come now, we see what Starrett tell us.”

Graydon watched them go into the tent. Soon Soames came out, went to a spring that bubbled up from among the trees; returned, with water.

Well, let them waken Starrett; let him tell them whatever he would. They would not kill him that night, of that he was sure. They believed that he knew too much. And in the morning—

What was hidden in the morning for them all?

That even now they were prisoners, Graydon was sure. Suarra’s warning not to leave the camp had been explicit. Since that tumult of the elfin horns, her swift vanishing and the silence that had followed, he no longer doubted that they had strayed, as she had said, within the grasp of some power as formidable as it was mysterious.

The silence? Suddenly it came to him that the night had become strangely still. There was no sound either of insect or bird, nor any stirring of the familiar after-twilight life of the wilderness.

The camp was besieged by silence!

He walked away through the algarrobas. There was a scant score of the trees. They stood like a little leafy island peak within the brush-covered savanna. They were great trees, every one of them, and set with a curious regularity; as though they had not sprung up by chance; as though indeed they had been carefully planted.

Graydon reached the last of them, rested a hand against a bole that was like myriads of tiny grubs turned to soft brown wood. He peered out. The slope that lay before him was flooded with moonlight; the yellow blooms of the chilca shrubs that pressed to the very feet of the trees shone wanly in the silver flood. The faintly aromatic fragrance of the quenuar stole around him. Movement or sign of life there was none.

And yet—

The spaces seemed filled with watchers. He felt their gaze upon him. He knew that some hidden host girdled the camp. He scanned every bush and shadow – and saw nothing. The certainty of a hidden, unseen multitude persisted. A wave of nervous irritation passed through him. He would force them, whatever they were, to show themselves.

He stepped out boldly into the full moonlight.

On the instant the silence intensified. It seemed to draw taut, to lift itself up whole octaves of stillnesses. It became alert, expectant – as though poised to spring upon him should he take one step further.

A coldness wrapped him, and he shuddered. He drew swiftly back to the shadow of the trees; stood there, his heart beating furiously. The silence lost its poignancy, drooped back upon its haunches – watchful.

What had frightened him? What was there in that tightening of the stillness that had touched him with the finger of nightmare terror? He groped back, foot by foot, afraid to turn his face from the silence. Behind him the fire flared. His fear dropped from him.

His reaction from his panic was a heady recklessness. He threw a log upon the fire and laughed as the sparks shot up among the leaves. Soames, coming out of the tent for more water, stopped as he heard that laughter and scowled at him malevolently.

“Laugh,” he said. “Laugh while you can. Maybe you’ll laugh on the other side of your mouth when we get Starrett up and he tells us what he knows.”

“That was a sound sleep I gave him, anyway,” jeered Graydon.

“There are sounder sleeps. Don’t forget it,” Dancret’s voice, cold and menacing came from the tent.

Graydon turned his back to the tent, and deliberately faced that silence from which he had just fled. He seated himself, and after a while he dozed.

He awakened with a jump. Half-way between him and the tent Starrett was charging on him like a madman, bellowing.

Graydon leaped to his feet, but before he could defend himself the giant was upon him. The next moment he was down, overborne by sheer weight. The big adventurer crunched a knee into his arm and gripped his throat.

“Let her go, did you!” he roared. “Knocked me out and then let her go! Here’s where you go, too, damn you!”

Graydon tried to break the grip on his throat. His lungs labored; there was a deafening roaring in his ears, and flecks of crimson began to dance across his vision. Starrett was strangling him. Through fast dimming sight he saw two black shadows leap through the firelight and clutch the strangling hands.

The fingers relaxed. Graydon staggered up. A dozen paces away stood Starrett. Dancret, arms around his knees, was hanging to him like a little terrier. Beside him was Soames, the barrel of his automatic pressed against his stomach.

“Why don’t you let me kill him!” raved Starrett. “Didn’t I tell you the girl had enough green ice on her to set us up the rest of our lives? There’s more where it came from! And he let her go! Let her go, the—”

Again his curses flowed.

“Now look here, Starrett,” Soames’s voice was deliberate. “You be quiet, or I’ll do for you. We ain’t goin’ to let this thing get by us, me and Dancret. We ain’t goin’ to let this double-crossin’ louse do us, and we ain’t goin’ to let you spill the beans by killin’ him. We’ve struck somethin’ big. All right, we’re goin’ to cash in on it. We’re goin’ to sit down peaceable, and Mister Graydon is goin’ to tell us what happened after he put you out, what dicker he made with the girl and all of that. If he won’t do it peaceable, then Mister Graydon is goin’ to have things done to him that’ll make him give up. That’s all. Danc’, let go his legs. Starrett, if you kick up any more trouble until I give the word I’m goin’ to shoot you. From now on I boss this crowd – me and Danc’. You get me, Starrett?”

Graydon, head once more clear, slid a cautious hand down toward the pistol holster. It was empty. Soames grinned, sardonically.

“We got it, Graydon,” he said. “Yours, too, Starrett. Fair enough. Sit down everybody.”

He squatted by the fire, still keeping Starrett covered. And after a moment the latter, grumbling, followed suit. Dancret dropped beside him.

“Come over here, Graydon,” said Soames. “Come over here and cough up. What’re you holdin’ out on us? Did you make a date with her to meet you after you got rid of us? If so, where is it – because we’ll all go together.”

“Where’d you hide those gold spears?” growled Starrett “You never let her get away with them, that’s sure.”

“Shut up, Starrett,” ordered Soames. “I’m holdin’ this inquest. Still – there’s something in that. Was that it, Graydon? Did she give you the spears and her jewelry to let her go?”

“I’ve told you,” answered Graydon. “I asked for nothing, and took nothing. Starrett’s drunken folly had put us all in jeopardy. Letting the girl go free was the first vital step toward our own safety. I thought it was the best thing to do. I still think so.”

“Yeah?” sneered the lank New Englander, “is that so? Well, I’ll tell you, Graydon, if she’d been an Indian maybe I’d agree with you. But not when she was the kind of lady Starrett says she was. No, sir, it ain’t natural. You know damned well that if you’d been straight you’d have kept her here till Danc’ and me got back. Then we could all have got together and figured what was the best thing to do. Hold her until her folks came along and paid up to get her back undamaged. Or give her the third degree until she gave up where all that gold and stuff she was carrying came from. That’s what you would have done, Graydon – if you weren’t a dirty, lyin’, double-crossin’ hound.”

Graydon’s anger flared up. |

“All right, Soames,” he said. “I’ll tell you. What I’ve said about freeing her for our own safety is true. But outside of that I would as soon have thought of trusting a child to a bunch of hyenas as I would of trusting that girl to you three. I let her go a damned sight more for her sake than I did for our own. Does that satisfy you?”

“Aha!” jeered Dancret. “Now I see! Here is this strange lady of so much wealth and beauty. She is too pure and good for us to behold. He tell her so and bid her fly. ‘My hero!’ she say, ‘take all I have and give up this bad company.’ ‘No, no,’ he tell her, t’inking all the time if he play his cards right he get much more, and us out of the way so he need not divide, ‘no, no,’ he tell her. ‘But long as these bad men stay here you will not be safe.’ ‘My hero,’ she say. ‘I will go and bring back my family and they shall dispose of your bad company. But you they shall reward, my hero, oui!’ Aha, so that is what it was!”

Graydon flushed; the little Frenchman’s malicious travesty had shot uncomfortably close. After all, Suarra’s unasked promise to save him could be construed as Dancret had suggested. Suppose he told them he had warned her that whatever the fate in store for them he was determined to share it, and would stand by them to the last? They would not believe him.

Soames had been watching him, closely.

“By God, Danc’,” he said, “I guess you hit it He changed color. He’s sold us out.”

He raised his automatic, held it on Graydon – then lowered it.

“No,” he said, deliberately. “This is too big a thing to let slip by bein’ too quick on the trigger. If your dope is right, Danc’, and I guess it is, the lady was mighty grateful. All right – we ain’t got her, but we have got him. As I figure it, bein’ grateful, she won’t want him to get killed. She’ll be back. Well, we’ll trade him for what they got that we want. Tie him up.”

He pointed the pistol at Graydon. Unresisting, Graydon let Starrett and Dancret bind his wrists. They pushed him over to one of the trees and sat him on the ground with his back against its bole. They passed a rope under his arms and hitched it securely around the trunk; they tied his feet.

“Now,” said Soames, “if her gang show up in the morning, well let ’em see you, and find out how much you’re worth. They won’t rush us. There’s bound to be a palaver. And if they don’t come to terms – well, Graydon, the first bullet out of this gun goes through your guts. That’ll give you time to see what we do to her before you die.”

Graydon did not answer him. He knew that nothing he might say would change them from their purpose. He made himself as comfortable as possible, and closed his eyes. Once or twice he opened them, and looked at the others. They sat beside the fire, heads close together, talking in whispers, their faces tense, and eyes feverish with the treasure lust. After a while Graydon’s head dropped forward. He slept.

— III —

THE WHITE LLAMA

It was dawn when Graydon awakened.

Someone had thrown a blanket over him during the night, but he was, nevertheless, cold and stiff. He drew his legs up and down painfully, trying to start the sluggish blood. He heard the others stirring in the tent. He wondered which of them had thought of the blanket, and why he had been moved to that kindness.

Starrett lifted the tent flap, passed by him without a word and went on to the spring. He returned and busied himself, furtively, about the fire. Now and then he looked at the prisoner, but seemingly with neither anger nor resentment. He slipped at last to the tent, listened, then trod softly over to Graydon.

“Sorry about this,” he muttered. “But I can’t do anything with Soames and Dancret. Had a hard time persuading ’em even to let you have that blanket. Take a drink of this.”

He pressed a flask to Graydon’s lips. He took a liberal swallow; it warmed him.

“Sh-h,” warned Starrett. “Don’t bear any grudge. Drunk last night. I’ll help you, if—” He broke off, abruptly; busied himself with the burning logs. Out of the tent came Soames.

“I’m goin’ to give you one last chance, Graydon,” he began, without preliminary. “Come through clean with us on your dicker with the girl, and we’ll take you back with us, and all work together and all share together. You had the edge on us yesterday, and I don’t know that I blame you. But it’s three to one now and the plain truth is you can’t get away with it. So why not be reasonable?”

“What’s the use of going over all that again, Soames?” Graydon asked, wearily. “I’ve told you everything. If you’re wise, you’ll let me loose, give me my guns and I’ll fight for you when the trouble comes. For trouble is coming, man, sure – big trouble.”

“Yeah!” snarled the New Englander. “Tryin’ to scare us, are you? All right – there’s a nice little trick of drivin’ a wedge under each of your finger nails and a-keepin’ drivin’ ’em in. It makes ’most anybody talk after awhile. And if it don’t, there’s the good old fire dodge. Rollin’ your feet up to it, closer and closer and closer. Yeah, anybody’ll talk when their toes begin to crisp up and toast.”

Suddenly he bent over and sniffed at Graydon’s lips.

“So that’s it!” he faced Starrett, tense, gun leveled from his hip pocket. “Been feedin’ him liquor, have you? Been talkin’ to him, have you? After we’d settled it last night that I was to do all the talkin’. All right, that settles you, Starrett. Dancret! Danc’! Come here, quick!” he roared.

The Frenchman came running out of the tent.

“Tie him up,” Soames nodded toward Starrett. “Another damned double-crosser in the camp. Gave him liquor. Got their heads together while we were inside. Tie him.”

“But, Soames,” the Frenchman hesitated, “if we have to fight, it is not well to have half of us helpless, non. Perhaps Starrett he did nothing—”

“If we have to fight, two men will do as well as three,” said Soames. “I ain’t goin’ to let this thing slip through my fingers, Danc’. I don’t think we’ll have to do any fightin’. If they come, I think it’s goin’ to be a tradin’ job. Starrett’s turnin’ traitor, too. Tie him, I say.”

“Well, I don’t like it—” began Dancret; Soames made an impatient motion with his automatic; the little Frenchman went to the tent, returned with a coil of rope, and sidled up to Starrett.

“Put up your hands,” ordered Soames. Starrett swung them up. But in mid-swing they closed on Dancret, lifted him like a doll and held him between himself and the gaunt New Englander.

“Now shoot, damn you!” he cried, and bore down on Soames, meeting every move of his pistol arm with Dancret’s wriggling body. His own right hand swept down to the Frenchman’s belt, drew from the holster his automatic, leveled it over the twisting shoulder at Soames.

“Drop your gun, Yank,” grinned Starrett, triumphantly. “Or shoot if you want. But before your bullet’s half through Dancret here, by Christ, I’ll have you drilled clean.”

There was a momentary, sinister silence – it was broken by a sudden pealing of tiny golden bells.

Their chiming cleft through the murk of murder that had fallen on the camp; lightened it; dissolved it as the sunshine does a cloud. Soames’ pistol dropped; Starrett’s iron grip upon Dancret relaxed.

Through the trees, not a hundred yards away, came Suarra.

A cloak of green covered the girl from neck almost to slender feet. In her hair gleamed a twisted string of emeralds. Bandlets of gold studded with the same gems circled her wrists and ankles. Behind her a snow-white llama paced, sedately. There was a broad golden collar around its neck from which dropped strands of little golden bells. At each of its silvery sides a pannier hung, woven it seemed from shining yellow rushes.

And there was no warrior host around her. She had brought neither avengers nor executioners. At the llama’s side was a single attendant. Swathed in a voluminous robe of red and yellow, the hood of which covered his face. His only weapon was a long staff, vermilion. He was bent, and he fluttered and danced as he came on, taking little steps backward and forward – movements that carried the suggestion that his robes clothed less a human being than some huge bird. They drew closer, and Graydon saw that the hand that clutched the staff was thin and white with the transparent pallor of old, old age.

He strained at his bonds, a sick horror at his heart. Why had she come back – like this? Without strong men to guard her? With none but this one ancient? And decked in jewels and gold? He had warned her; she could not be ignorant of what threatened her. It was as though she had come thus deliberately – to fan the lusts from which she had most to fear.

“Diable!” whispered Dancret – “the emeralds!”

“God – what a girl!” muttered Starrett, thick nostrils distended, a red flicker in his eyes.

Soames said nothing, perplexity and suspicion replacing the astonishment with which he had watched the approach. Nor did he speak as the girl and her attendants halted close beside him. But the doubt in his eyes grew, and he scanned the path along which they had come, searching every tree, every bush. There was no sign of movement, no sound.

“Suarra!” cried Graydon, despairingly, “Suarra, why did you return?”

She stepped over to him, and drew a dagger from beneath her cloak. She cut the thongs binding him to the tree. She slipped the blade beneath the cords that fettered his wrists and ankles; freed him. He staggered to his feet.

“Was it not well for you that I did come?” she asked, sweetly.

Before he could answer, Soames strode forward. And Graydon saw that he had come to some decision, had resolved upon some course of action. He made a low, awkward, mocking bow to the girl; then spoke to Graydon.

“All right,” he said, “you can stay loose – as long as you do what I want you to. The girl’s back and that’s the main thing. She seems to favor you a lot, Graydon. I reckon that gives us a way to persuade her to answer our questions. Yes, sir, and you favor her. That’s useful, too. I reckon you won’t want to be tied up an’ watch certain things happen to her, eh—” he leered at Graydon. “But there’s just one thing you’ve got to do if you want things to go along peaceable. Don’t do any talkin’ to her when I ain’t close by. Remember, I know the Aymara as well as you do. And I want to be right alongside listenin’ in all the time, do you see? That’s all.”

He turned to Suarra.

“Your visit has brought great happiness, maiden,” he spoke in the Aymara. “It will not be a short one, if we have our way – and I think we will have our way—” There was covert menace in the phrase, yet if she noted it she gave no heed. “You are strange to us, as we must be to you. There is much for us each to learn, one of the other.”

“That is true,” she answered, tranquilly. “I think though that your desire to learn of me is much greater than mine to learn of you – since, as you surely know, I have had one not too pleasant lesson.” She glanced at Starrett.

“The lessons,” he said, “shall be pleasant – or not pleasant, as you choose.”

This time there was no mistaking the menace in the words, nor did Suarra again let it pass. Her eyes blazed sudden wrath.

“Better not to threaten!” she warned. “I, Suarra, am not used to threats – and if you will take my counsel you will keep them to yourself hereafter!”

“Yeah, is that so?” Soames took a step toward her, face grown grim and ugly. There came a dry chuckling from the hooded figure in red and yellow. Suarra started; her wrath vanished, she became friendly once more.

“I was hasty,” she said to Soames. “Nevertheless, it is never wise to threaten unless you know the strength of what it is you menace. And remember – of me you know nothing. Yet I know all that you wish to learn. You wish to know how I came by this – and this – and this—” she touched her coronal, her bracelet, her anklets. “You wish to know where they came from, and if there are more of them there, and if so, how you may possess yourself of as much as you can carry away. Well, you shall know all that. I have come to tell you.”

At this announcement, so frank and open, all the doubt and suspicion returned to Soames. Again his eyes narrowed and he searched the trail up which Suarra had come.

“Soames,” Dancret gripped his arm, and his voice and hand were both shaking, “the baskets on the llama. They’re not rushes – they’re gold, pure gold, pure soft gold, woven like straw! Diable! Soames, what have we struck!”

Soames’s eyes glittered.

“Better go over and watch where they came up, Danc’,” he answered. “I don’t quite get this. It looks too cursed easy to be right. Take your rifle and squint out from the edge of the trees while I try to get down to what’s what.”

“There is nothing to fear,” said the girl, as though she had understood the words, “no harm will come to you from me. If there is any evil in store for you, you yourselves will summon it – not we. I have come to show you the way to treasure. Only that. Come with me and you shall see where jewels like these” – she touched the gems meshed in her hair – “grow like flowers in a garden. You shall see the gold come streaming forth, living, from—” she hesitated; then went on as though reciting some lesson – “come streaming forth like water. You may bathe in that stream, drink from it if you will, carry away all that you can bear. Or if it causes you too much sorrow to leave it, why – you may stay with it forever; nay, become a part of it, even. Men of gold.”

She turned from them, and walked toward the llama.

They stared at her and at each other; on the faces of three, greed and suspicion; bewilderment on Graydon’s.

“It is a long journey,” she faced them, one hand on the llama’s head. “You are my guests – in a sense. Therefore, I have brought something for your entertainment before we start.”

She began to unbuckle the panniers. Graydon was aware that this attendant of hers was a strange servant – if servant he was. He made no move to help her. Silent he stood, and motionless, face covered.

Graydon stepped forward to help the girl. She smiled up at him, half shyly. In the depths of her eyes was a glow warmer than friendliness; his hands leaped to touch hers.

Instantly Soames stepped between them.

“Better remember what I told you,” he snapped.

“Help me,” said Suarra. Graydon lifted the basket and set it down beside her. She slipped a hasp, bent back the soft metal withes, and drew out a shimmering packet She shook it and it floated out on the dawn wind, a cloth of silver. It lay upon the ground like a web of gossamer spun by silver spiders.

Then from the hamper she brought forth cups of gold, and deep, boat-shaped golden dishes, two tall ewers whose handles were winged serpents, their scales made, it seemed, from molten rubies. After them small golden-withed baskets. She set the silver cloth with the dishes and the cups. She opened the little baskets. In them were unfamiliar, fragrant fruits and loaves and oddly colored cakes. All these Suarra placed upon the plates. She dropped to her knees at the head of the cloth, took up one of the ewers, snapped open its lid and from it poured into the cups clear amber wine.

She raised her eyes to them; waved a white hand, graciously.

“Sit,” she said. “Eat and drink.”

She beckoned to Graydon; pointed to the place beside her. Silently, gaze fixed upon the glittering hoard, Starrett and Dancret and Soames squatted before the other plates. Soames thrust out a hand, took up one and weighed it, scattering what it held upon the cloth.

“Gold!” he breathed.

Starrett laughed, crazily, and raised his wine-filled goblet to his lips.

“Wait!” Dancret caught his wrist ‘Eat and drink,’ she said, eh? “Eat, drink and be merry – for tomorrow we die, eh – is that it?”

Soames started, his face once more dark with suspicion.

“You think it’s poisoned?” he snarled.

“Maybe no – maybe so,” the little Frenchman shrugged. “Anyway I t’ink it better we say ‘After you’ to her.”

The girl looked at them, then at Graydon, inquiringly. “They are afraid. They think it is – that you have—” Graydon stumbled. “That I have put sleep – or death in it? And you?” she asked.

For answer, Graydon raised his cup and drank.

“Yet it is natural,” she turned to Soames. “Yes, it is natural that you three should fear this, since – is it not so – it is what you would do if you were we, and we were you? But you are wrong. I tell you again that what there may be to fear is only that which is in yourselves.”

She poured wine into her own cup and drank it; broke off a bit of Starrett’s bread and ate it; took a cake from Dancret’s plate and ate that; set white teeth in one of the fruits.

“Are you satisfied?” she asked them. “Oh, be very sure that if it is in my wish to bring death to you, it is in no such shape as this.”

For a moment Soames glared at her. He jumped to his feet strode over to the hooded figure and snatched aside the cowl. The uncovered face was like old ivory. It was seamed with scores of fine lines. It was a face stamped with an incredible ancientness – but the eyes were as bright and as youthful as their setting was ancient.

It stared at Soames, inscrutably. For a dozen heartbeats the gaunt New Englander stared back. Then, slowly, he let the hood drop. He returned to the silver cloth. As he passed, Graydon saw that all color had drained from his cheeks. He threw himself down at his place, and drank deep of the wine, the hand that raised the goblet shaking.

He drank, and drank again from the flagon. And soon, whatever the terror he had felt, the wine drowned it The first ewer and a second, drawn by Suarra from the llama’s panniers, were emptied by the three before Soames lurched to his feet.

“You’re all right, sister,” he said, half-drunkenly. “Just keep on treatin’ us like this, and we’ll end by all bein’ little pals together.”

“What does he say?” asked Suarra of Graydon.

“He approves of your – entertainment,” answered Graydon, dryly.

“Good,” Suarra, too, arose. “Then let us be going.”

“We’re going, sister, never fear,” grinned Soames. “Danc’, you stay right here and watch things. Come on, Bill—” he slapped Starrett on the back. “Everything’s just fine. Come on, Graydon – bygones is bygones.”

Starrett scrambled up. He linked his arm in the New Englander’s. They staggered over to the tent. Dancret, upon whom the wine seemed to have had little effect, settled down on a boulder just beyond the fire and began his watch, rifle at readiness.

Graydon lingered. Soames had forgotten him, for a time at least. He meant to make the best of that time with this strange maid whose beauty and sweetness had touched him as no other woman’s ever had. He drew so close that the fragrance of her cloudy hair rocked him; so close that her touching shoulder sent a flame through him.

“Suarra—” he began. She turned, and silenced him with slender fingers on his lips.

“Not now—” she whispered. “Not now – tell me nothing now of what is in your heart – Not now – nor, it may be, ever! I promised that I would save you – if I could. Of that promise was born another—” her glance turned to the silent figure, meaningly. “So speak to me not again,” she went on hurriedly, “or if you must speak – let it be of – commonplace things.”

She began packing the golden cups and dishes. He set about helping her. He thought, ruefully, that this was a commonplace thing enough to satisfy her. She accepted his aid without comment, looked at him no more.

When the last shining cup was in the pannier, he turned and went toward the tent to get together his duffle, pack his burro. The voices of Starrett and Soames came to him.

“But she’s not Indian, Soames,” Starrett was speaking. “She’s whiter than you and me. What are they? And the girl – Christ!”

“What they are we’ll find out, never fear,” and Soames.

“To hell with the girl – take her if you want her. But I’d go through a dozen hells to get to the place where that stuff they’re carryin’ samples of comes from. Man – with what we could carry out on the burros and the llama and come back for – man, we could buy the world.”

“Yes – unless there’s a trap somewhere,” said Starrett, dubiously.

“We’ve got the cards in our hands,” the wine was wearing off Soames. “What’s against us? An old dummy and a girl. Now, I’ll tell you what I think. I don’t know who or what they are, but whoever or whatever, you can bet there ain’t many of ’em. If there was, they’d be landing on us hard. No – they’re damned anxious to get us away and they’re willin’ to let us get out with what we can to get us away. They want to get rid of us, quick and cheap as possible. Yeah – that’s what they want. Why – because they damn well know the three of us could wipe ’em all out.”

“Three of us?” echoed Starrett. “Four, you mean. There’s Graydon.”

“Graydon don’t count – the louse! Thought he’d sold us out, didn’t he? All right – we’ll fix Mister Graydon when the time comes. Just now he’s useful to us on account of the girl. She’s stuck on him. But when the time comes to divide – there’ll be only three of us. And there’ll only be two of us – if you do anything like you did this morning.”

“Cut it out, Soames,” growled Starrett. “I told you it was the hooch. I’m through with that, now that we’ve seen this stuff. I’m with you to the limit Do what you want with Graydon. But – I want the girl. I’d be willing to make a bargain with you – give up a part of my share.”

“Oh, hell,” drawled Soames. “We’ve been together a good many years. Bill. There’s enough and plenty for the three of us. You can have the girl for nothing.”

Little flecks of red danced before Graydon’s eyes. Hand stretched to tear open the tent flap, he checked himself.

That was no way to help Suarra. Unarmed, what could he do? In some way, he must get his guns. And the danger was not imminent – they would do nothing before they reached that place of treasure to which Suarra had promised to lead them.

He stole back a dozen paces, waited for a moment or two; then went noisily to the tent. He thrust aside the flap and entered.

“Been a long time comin’,” snarled Soames. “Been talkin’ – after what I told you?”

“Not a word,” lied Graydon, cheerfully – he busied himself with his belongings. “By the way, Soames, don’t you think it’s time to stop this nonsense and give me back my guns?”

Soames made no answer.

“Oh, all right then,” said Graydon. “I only thought that they would come in handy when the pinch comes. But if you only want me to look on while you do the scrapping – well, I don’t mind.”

“You’d better mind,” said Soames. “You’d better mind, Graydon! If the pinch comes – we’re takin’ no chances of a bullet in our backs. That’s why you’ve got no guns. And if the pinch does come – well, we’ll take no chances on you, anyway. Do you get me?”

Graydon shrugged. In silence the packing was completed; the tent struck; the burros loaded.

Suarra stood awaiting them at the side of the white llama. Soames walked up to her, drew from its holster his automatic, balanced it in outstretched hand.

“You know what this is?” he asked her.

“Why, yes,” she answered. “It is the death weapon of your kind.”

“Right,” said Soames. “And it deals death quickly, quicker than spears or arrows—” He raised his voice so there could be no doubt that her silent attendant must also hear – “Now, I and these two men here carry these and others still more deadly. This man’s we have taken from him. Your words may be clearest truth. I hope they are – for your sake and this man’s and his who came with you. You understand me?” he asked, and grinned like a hungry wolf.

“I understand.” Suarra’s eyes and face were calm. “You need fear nothing from us.”

“We don’t,” said Soames. “But you have much to fear – from us.” Another moment he regarded her, menacingly; then shoved his pistol back into his holster.

“You go first,” he ordered. “Your man behind you. And then him—” he pointed to Graydon. “We three march in the rear – death-weapons ready.”

In that order they passed through the giant algarrobas, and out into the oddly park-like spaces beyond.

— IV —

THE THING THAT FLED

They had traveled over the savanna for perhaps an hour when Suarra turned to the left, entering the forest that covered the flanks of a great mountain. The trees closed on them. Graydon could see no trail, yet she went on without pause. Another hour went by and the way began to climb, the shade to deepen. Deeper it became and deeper, until the girl was but a flitting shadow.

Once or twice Graydon had glanced at the three men behind him. The darkness was making them more and more uneasy. They walked close together, eyes and ears strained to catch the first faint stirrings of ambush. And now, as the green gloom grew denser still, Soames ordered him to join Dancret and Starrett. He hesitated, read murder in the New Englander’s eyes, realized the futility of resistance and dropped back. Soames pressed forward until he was close behind the cowled figure. Dancret drew Graydon between himself and Starrett, grinning.

“Soames has changed his plan,” he whispered. “If there is trouble, he shoot the old devil – quick. He keep the girl to make trade wit’ her people. He keep you to make trade wit’ the girl. How you like – eh?”

Graydon did not answer. When the Frenchman had pressed close to him, he had felt an automatic in his side pocket. If an attack did come, he could leap upon Dancret, snatch the pistol and gain for himself a fighting chance. He would shoot Soames down as remorselessly as he knew Soames would shoot him.

Darker grew the woods until the figures in front were only a moving blur. Then the gloom began to lighten. They had been passing through some ravine, some gorge whose unseen walls had been pressing in upon them, and had now begun to retreat.

A few minutes longer, and ahead of them loomed a prodigious doorway, a cleft whose sides reached up for thousands of feet. Beyond was a flood of sunshine. Suarra stopped at the rocky threshold with a gesture of warning, peered through, and beckoned them on.

Blinking, Graydon walked through the portal. He looked out over a grass-covered plain strewn with huge, isolated rocks rising from the green like menhirs of the Druids. There were no trees. The plain was dish-shaped; an enormous oval as symmetrical as though it had been molded by the thumb of some Cyclopean potter. Straight across it, three miles or more away, the forests began again. They clothed the base of another gigantic mountain whose walls arose, perpendicularly, a mile at least in the air. The smooth scarps described an arc of a tremendous circle – round as Fujiyama’s sacred cone, but many times its girth.

They were on a wide ledge that bordered this vast bowl This shelf was a full hundred feet higher than the bottom of the valley whose side sloped up to it like the side of a saucer. And, again carrying out that suggestion of a huge dish, the ledge jutted out like a rim. Graydon guessed that there was a concavity under his feet, and that if one should fall over the side it would be well-nigh impossible to climb back because of the overhang. The surface was about twelve feet wide, and more like a road carefully leveled by human hands than work of nature. On one side was the curving bowl of the valley with its weird monoliths and the circular scarp of the mysterious mountain; on the other the wooded cliffs, unscalable.

They set forth along the rim-like way. Noon came, and in another ravine that opened upon the strange road they had snatched from saddle bags a hasty lunch. They did not waste time in unpacking the burros. There was a little brook singing in the pass, and from it they refilled their canteens, then watered the animals. This time Suarra did not join them.

By mid-afternoon they were nearing the northern end of the bowl. All through the day the circular mountain across the plain had unrolled its vast arc of cliff. A wind had arisen, sweeping from the distant forest and bending the tall heads of the grass far below them.

Suddenly, deep within the wind, Graydon heard a faint, far-off clamor, a shrill hissing, as of some on-rushing army of serpents. The girl halted, face turned toward the sound. It came again – and louder. Her face whitened, but when she spoke her voice was steady.

“There is danger,” she said. “Deadly danger for you. It may pass and – it may not. Until we know what to expect you must hide. Take your animals and tether them in the underbrush there—” she pointed to the mountainside which here was broken enough for cover – “the four of you take trees and hide behind them. Tie the mouths of your animals so that they can make no noise.”

“So!” snarled Soames. “So here’s the trap, is it! All right, sister, you know what I told you. We’ll go into the trees, but – you go with us where we can keep our hands on you.”

“I will go with you,” she answered, gravely.

Soames glared at her, then turned abruptly.

“Danc’,” he ordered, “Starrett – get the burros in. And Graydon – you’ll stay with the burros and see they make no noise. We’ll be right close – with the guns. And we’ll have the girl – don’t forget that.”

Again the hissing shrilled down the wind.

“Be quick,” the girl commanded.

When the trees and underbrush had closed in upon them it flashed on Graydon, crouching behind the burros, that he had not seen the cloaked famulus of Suarra join the retreat and seek the shelter of the woods. He parted the bushes, and peered cautiously through them. There was no one upon the path.

A sudden gust of wind tore at the trees. It brought with it a burst of the hissing, closer and more strident, and in it an undertone that thrilled him with unfamiliar terror.

A thing of vivid scarlet streaked out from the trees which here were not more than a half a mile away. It scuttled over the plain until it reached the base of one of the monoliths. It swarmed up its side to the top. There it paused, apparently scanning the forest from which it had come. He caught the impression of some immense insect, but touched with a monstrous, an incredible suggestion of humanness.

The scarlet thing slipped down the monolith, and raced through the grasses toward him. Out of the forest burst what at first glance he took for a pack of huge hunting dogs – then realized that whatever they might be, dogs they certainly were not. They came forward leaping like kangaroos, and as they leaped they glittered green and blue in the sunlight, as though armored in mail of emeralds and sapphires. Nor did ever dogs give tongue as they did. From them came the hellish hissing.

The scarlet thing darted to right, to left, frantically; then crouched at the base of another monolith, motionless.

From the trees emerged another monstrous shape. Like the questing creatures, it glittered – but as though its body were cased in polished jet. Its bulk was that of a giant draft-horse. Its neck was long and reptilian. At the base of its neck, astride it, was a man.

Graydon cautiously raised his field glasses and focused them on the pack. Directly in his line of vision was one of the creatures which had come to gaze. It stood rigid, its side toward him, pointing like a hunting dog.

It was a dinosaur!

Dwarfed to the size of a Great Dane, still there was no mistaking it. He could see its blunt and spade-shaped tail which with its powerful, pillar-like hind legs made a tripod upon which it squatted. Its body was nearly erect. Its short forelegs were muscled as powerfully as it’s others. It held these forelegs half curved at its breast, as though ready to clutch. They ended in four long talons, chisel shaped. One of which thrust outward like a huge thumb.

And what he had taken for mail of sapphire and emerald were scales. They overlapped like those of the armadillo. From their burnished surfaces and edges the sun struck out the jewel glints.

The creature turned its head upon its short, bull neck. It seemed to stare straight at Graydon. He saw fiery red eyes set in a sloping, bony arch of broad forehead. Its muzzle was that of a crocodile, but smaller and blunted. The jaws were studded with yellow, pointed fangs.

The rider drew up beside it. Like the others, the creature he rode was a true dinosaur. It was black scaled and longer tailed, with serpentine neck thicker than the central coil of the giant python.

The rider was a man of Suarra’s own race. There was the same ivory whiteness of skin, the more than classic regularity of feature. But his face was stamped with arrogance, indifferent cruelty. He wore a close-fitting suit of green that clung to him like a glove, and his hair was a shining golden. He sat upon a light saddle fastened at the base of the long neck of his steed. Heavy reins ran up to the jaws of the jetty dinosaur’s small, snake-like head.

Graydon’s glasses dropped from his shaking hand. What manner of man was this who hunted with dinosaurs for dogs and a dinosaur for steed!

He looked toward the base of the monolith where the scarlet thing had crouched. It was no longer there. He caught a gleam of scarlet in the high grass not a thousand feet away. The thing was scuttering toward the rim—

There was a shrieking clamor like a thousand hissing fumaroles. The pack had found the scent, were leaping forward like a glittering green and blue comber.

The scarlet thing jumped up out of the grasses. It swayed upon four long and stilt-like legs, its head a full twelve feet above the ground. High on these stilts of legs was its body, almost round and no bigger than a half-grown boy’s. From the sides of the body stretched two sinewy arms – like human arms pulled out to twice their normal length. Body, arms and legs were covered with fine scarlet hair. Its face, turned toward its pursuers, Graydon could not see.

The pack rushed upon it. The thing hurled itself like a thunderbolt straight toward the rim.

Graydon heard beneath him a frantic scrambling and scratching. Gray hands came over the edge of the road, gripping the rock with foot-long fingers like blunt needles of bone. They clutched and drew forward. Behind them appeared spindling, scarlet-haired arms.

Over the edge peered a face, gray as the hands. Within it were two great unwinking round and golden eyes.

A man’s face – and not a man’s!

A face such as he had never seen upon any living creature… yet there could be no mistaking the humanness of it… the humanness which lay over the incredible visage like a veil.

He thought he saw a red rod dart out of air and touch the face – the red rod of Suarra’s motley-garbed attendant Whether he saw it or not, the clutching claws opened and slid away. The gray face vanished.

Up from the hidden slope arose a wailing, agonized shriek, and a triumphant hissing. Then out into the range of his vision bounded the black dinosaur, its golden-haired rider shouting. Behind it leaped the pack. They crossed the plain like a thunder cloud pursued by emerald and sapphire lightnings. They passed into the forest, and were gone.

Suarra stepped out of the tree shadows, the three adventurers close behind her, white-faced and shaking. She stood looking where the dinosaurs had disappeared, and her face was set, and her eyes filled with loathing.

“Suarra!” gasped Graydon. “That thing – the thing that ran – what was it? God – it had the face of a man!”

“It was no man,” she shook her head. “It was a – Weaver. Perhaps he had tried to escape. Or perhaps Lantlu opened a way for him that he might be tempted to escape. For Lantlu delights in hunting with the Xinli—” her voice shook with hatred – “and a Weaver will do when there is nothing better!”

“A Weaver? It had a man’s face!” It was Soames, echoing Graydon.

“No,” she repeated. “It was no – man. At least no man as you are. Long, long ago his ancestors were men like you – that is true. But now – he is – only a Weaver.”

She turned to Graydon.

“Yu-Atlanchi by its arts fashioned him and his kind. Remember him, Graydon – when you come to our journey’s end!”

She stepped out upon the path. There stood the cowled figure, waiting as tranquilly as though it had never stirred. She called to the white llama, and again took her place at the head of the little caravan. Soames touched Graydon, arousing him from the troubled thought into which her enigmatic warning had thrown him.

“Take your place, Graydon,” he muttered. “We’ll follow. Later I want to talk to you. Maybe you can get your guns back – if you’re reasonable.”

“Hurry,” said Suarra, “the sun sinks, and we must go quickly. Before tomorrow’s noon you shall see your garden of jewels, and the living gold streaming for you to do with it as you will – or the gold to do as it wills with you.”

She looked the three over, swiftly, a shadow of mockery in her eyes. Soames’ lips tightened.

“Get right along, sister,” he said, sardonically. “All you have to do is show us. Then your work is done. We’ll take care of the rest.”

She shrugged, carelessly. They set forth once more along the rimmed path.

The plain was silent, deserted. From the far forests came no sound. Graydon strove for sane comprehension of what he had just beheld. A Weaver, Suarra had named the scarlet thing – and had said that once its ancestors had been men like themselves. He remembered what, at their first meeting, she had told him of the powers of this mysterious Yu-Atlanchi. Did she mean that her people had mastered the secrets of evolution so thoroughly that they had learned how to reverse its processes as well? Could control – devolution!

Well, why not? In man’s long ascent from the primeval jelly on the shallow shores of the warm first seas, he had worn myriad shapes. And as he moved higher from one form to another, changing to vertebrate, discarding cold blood for warm, still was he kin to the fish he caught today, to the furred creatures whose pelts clothed his women, to the apes he brought from the jungles to study or to amuse him. Even the spiders that spun in his gardens, the scorpion that scuttled from the tread of his feet, were abysmally distant blood-brothers.

When St. Francis of Assisi had spoke of Brother Fly, Brother Wolf, Brother Snake, he had voiced scientific truth.

All life on earth had a common origin. Divergent now and Protean shaped, still man and beast, fish and serpent, lizard and bird, ant and bee and spider, all had come from those once similar specks of jelly, adrift millions upon millions of years ago in the shallow littorals of the first seas. Protalbion, Gregory of Edinburgh had named it – the first stuff of life from which all life was to develop.

Were the germs of all those shapes man had worn in his slow upward climb still dormant in him?

Roux, the great French scientist, had taken the eggs of frogs and, by manipulating them, had produced giant frogs and dwarfs, frogs with two heads and one body, frogs with one head and eight legs, three-headed frogs with legs numerous as centipedes’. And he had produced from these eggs, also, creatures which in no way resembled frogs at all.

Vornikoff, the Russian, and Schwartz, the German, had experimented with still higher forms of life, producing chimera, nightmare things they had been forced to slay – and quickly.

If Roux and the others had done all this – and they had done it, Graydon knew – then was it not possible for greater scientists to awaken those dormant germs in man, and similarly create – such creatures as the scarlet thing? A spider-man!

Nature, herself, had given them the hint. Nature from time to time produced such abnormalities – human monsters marked outwardly if not inwardly with the stigmata of the beast, the fish, even the crustacean. Babies with gill slits in their throats babies with tails; babies furred. The human embryo passed through all these stages, from the protoplasmic unicell up – compressing the age-long drama of evolution into less than a year.

Might it not well be, then, that in Yu-Atlanchi dwelt those to whom the crucible of birth held no secrets; who could dip within it and mold from its contents what they would?

A loom is a dead machine upon which fingers work more or less clumsily. The spider is both machine and artisan, spinning and weaving more surely, more exquisitely than can any lifeless mechanism worked by man. What man-made machine had ever approached the delicacy, the beauty of the spider’s web?

Suddenly Graydon seemed to behold a whole new world of appalling grotesquerie – spider-men and spider-women spread upon huge webs and weaving with needled fingers wondrous fabrics, mole-men and mole-women burrowing, opening mazes of subterranean passages, cloaca, for those who had wrought them into being; amphibian folk busy about the waters – a phantasmagoria of humanity, monstrously twinned with Nature’s perfect machine, while still plastic in the womb!

Shuddering, he thrust away that nightmare vision.

— V —

THE ELFIN HORNS

The sun was half-way down the west when they came to the end of the oval plain. Here the mountain thrust out a bastion which almost touched the cliff at the right. Into the narrow cleft between the two they filed, and through the semi-gloom of this ravine they marched over a smooth rock floor, their way running always up, although at an easy grade. The sun was behind the westward peaks and dusk was falling when they emerged.

They stood at the edge of a little moor. Upon the left, the arc of the circular mountain resumed its march. The place was, indeed, less a moor than a barren. Its floor was clean white sand. It was dotted with hillocks, mounds flat-topped as though constantly swept by brooms of wind. Upon the slopes of these mounds a fall grass grew sparsely. The hillocks arose about a hundred feet apart, with a singular regularity, like tumuli, graves in a cemetery of giants. The little barren covered about five acres. Around it clustered the forest. He heard the gurgling of a brook.

Suarra led them across the sands until she reached a mound close to the center of the place.

“You will camp here,” she said. “Water is close by. You may light a fire, and you can sleep without fear. By dawn we must be away.”

She left them, and walked with red-and-yellow robe toward one of the neighboring knolls. The white llama followed her. Graydon had expected Soames to halt her, but he did not. Instead, his eyes flashed some message to Dancret and Starrett. It seemed to Graydon they were pleased that the girl was not to share their camp, that they welcomed the distance she had put between them.

And their manner toward him had changed. They were comradely once more.

“Mind takin’ the burros over to water?” asked Soames. “We’ll get the fire goin’, and chow ready.”

Graydon nodded and led the animals over to the brook. Taking them back after they had drunk their fill, he looked over at the mound to which Suarra had gone. At its base stood a small square tent, glimmering in the twilight like silk. Tethered close to it was the white llama, placidly munching grass and grain. Its hampers of woven golden withes were still at its sides. Neither Suarra nor the hooded man was visible. They were, he supposed, within the tent.

At his own hillock a fire was crackling and supper being prepared. As he came up, Starrett jerked a thumb at the little tent.

“Took it out of the saddlebags,” he said. “Looked like a folded umbrella and went up like one. Who’d ever think to find anything like that in this wilderness!”

“Lots of things I t’ink in those saddlebags we have not yet seen maybe,” whispered Dancret.

“You bet,” said Soames. “An’ the loot we’ve already seen’s enough to set us all up for life. Eh, Graydon?”

“She has promised you much more,” answered Graydon, troubled by the under-current in the New Englander’s voice.

“Yeah,” said Soames, “yeah – I guess so. But – well, let’s eat.”

The four sat around the burning sticks, as they had for so many nights before his fight with Starrett. And, to Graydon’s astonishment, they ignored the weird tragedy of the plain; avoided it, swiftly changed the subject when twice, to test them, he brought it up. Their talk was all of the treasure so close to them, and of what could be done with it when back in their own world. Piece by piece they went over the golden hoard in the white llama’s packs; discussed Suarra’s jewels and their worth. It was as though they were bent upon infecting him with their own avarice.

“Hell! Why, with only her emeralds none of us’d have to worry!” Starrett repeated, with variations, over and over.

Graydon listened with increasing disquiet There was something behind this studied avoidance of the destruction of the scarlet thing by the dinosaurs, this constant reference to the rich loot at hand, the reiterated emphasis upon what ease and luxuries it would bring them all.

Suddenly he realized that they were afraid, that terror of the unknown struggled with treasure lust. And that therefore they were doubly dangerous. Something was hidden in the minds of the three to whose uncovering all this talk was only the preamble.

At last Soames looked at his watch.

“Nearly eight,” he said, abruptly. “Dawn breaks about five. Time to talk turkey. Graydon, come up close.”

The four drew into a huddle in the shelter of the knoll. From where they crouched, Suarra’s tent was hidden – as they were hidden to any watchers in that little silken pavilion looking now like a great silver moth at rest under the moonlight.

“Graydon,” began the New Englander, “we’ve made up our minds on this thing. We’re goin’ to do it a little different. We’re glad and willin’ to let bygones be bygones. Here we are, four white men among a bunch of God knows what. White men ought to stick together. Ain’t that so?”

Graydon nodded, waiting.

“All right, then,” said Soames. “Now here’s the situation. I don’t deny that what we seen today gave us all a hell of a jolt. We ain’t equipped to go up against anything like that pack of hissin’ devils. But, an’ here’s the point, we can beat it out an’ come back equipped. You get me?”

Again Graydon nodded, alert to meet what he sensed was coming.

“There’s enough stuff on that llama and the girl to make all comfortable,” went on Soames. “But also it’s enough to finance the greatest little expedition that ever hit the trail for treasure. An’ that’s just what we plan doin’, Graydon. Get the hampers an’ all that’s in ’em. Get the stuff on the girl. Beat it, an’ come back. We’ll get together a little crowd of hard-boiled guys. The four of us’ll take half we find an’ the others’ll divide the other half. We’ll pack along a couple of planes, an’ damn soon find out where the girl comes from. I bet those hissin’ devils wouldn’t stand up long under machine guns an’ some bombs dropped from the flyin’ crates. An’ when the smoke clears away we’ll lift the loot an’ go back an’ sit on the top of the world. What you say to that?”

Graydon fenced for time.

“How will you get the stuff now?” he asked. “And if you get it, how will you get away with it?”

“Easy,” Soames bent his head closer. “We got it all planned: There’s only the girl an’ that old devil in that tent. They ain’t watchin’, they’re too sure of us. All right, if you’re with us, we’ll just slip over there. Starrett and Danc’, they’ll take care of the dummy. No shootin’. Just slip a knife’ between his ribs. Me an’ you’ll attend to the girl. We won’t hurt her. Just tie her up an’ gag her. Then we’ll stow the stuff on a couple of burros, an’ beat it.”

“Beat it where?” asked Graydon. He edged a bit closer to Dancret, ready to jerk the automatic from his pocket.

“Beat it out, damn it!” growled Soames. “Me an’ Starrett seen a peak to the west both of us recognized when we come in here. Once we hit it I know where we are. An’ travelin’ light an’ all night we can be well on our way to it by this time tomorrow. These woods ain’t so thick an’ it’s full moon.”

Graydon moved his hand cautiously and touched Dancret’s pocket. The automatic was still there. Before he made that desperate move he would try one last appeal – to fear.

“But you’ve forgotten one thing, Soames,” he said. “There would be pursuit. What could we do with those hell-beasts on our track? Why, man, they’d be after us in no time. You couldn’t get away with anything like that.”

Instantly he realized the weakness in the argument.

“Not a bit of it,” Soames grinned evilly. “That’s just the point Nobody’s worryin’ about that girl. Nobody knows where she is an’ she don’t want ’em to. She was damned anxious not to be seen this afternoon. No, Graydon – I figure she slipped away from her folks to help you out. I take my hat off to you – you’re a quick worker an’ you sure got her hooked. The only one that might raise trouble is the old devil. He’ll get the knife before he knows it. Then there’s only the girl. She’ll be damned glad to show us the way out, happen we get lost again. But me an’ Starrett know that peak, I tell you. We’ll carry her along so she can’t start anybody after us, an’ when we get where we know the country we’ll turn her loose for a walk back home. An’ none the worse off either – eh, boys?”

Starrett and Dancret nodded.

Graydon feigned to consider. He knew exactly what was in Soames’ mind – to use him in the cold-blooded murder the three had planned and, once beyond the reach of pursuit, to murder him, too. Nor would they ever allow Suarra to return to tell what they had done. She would be slain – after they had thrown her to Starrett.

“Come on, Graydon,” whispered Soames, impatiently. “It’s a good scheme, an’ we can work it. Are you with us? If you ain’t—”

His knife glittered in his hand. Simultaneously Starrett and Dancret pressed close. Their movement gave him the one advantage he needed. He thrust his hand into the Frenchman’s pocket, plucked out the gun and as he did so landed a side kick that caught Starrett in the groin. The big man rolled over, groaning. Graydon leaped to his feet. But before he could cover Soames, Dancret’s hands were around his ankles, his legs jerked from under him.

“Suarra!” shouted Graydon as he fell. At least, his cry might awaken and warn her. A second shout was choked in mid-utterance. Soames’ bony hands were around his neck.

He reached up, and tried to break the strangling clutch. It gave a little, enough to let him grasp one breath. Instantly he dropped his hold on Soames’ wrists, hooked the fingers of one hand in the corner of the New Englander’s mouth, pulling with all his strength. There was a sputtering curse from Soames, and his hands let go. Graydon tried to spring up, but an arm of the gaunt man slipped over the back of his head and held his neck in the vise of bent elbow against shoulder.

“Knife him, Danc’,” snarled Soames.

Graydon suddenly twisted, bringing the New Englander on top of him. He was barely in time for, as he did so, Dancret struck, his blade just missing Soames. Soames locked his legs around his, trying to jerk him over in range of the little Frenchman. Graydon sank his teeth in the shoulder pressing him. Soames roared with pain and rage; threshed and rolled trying to shake off the grip of Graydon’s jaws. Around them danced Dancret, awaiting a chance to thrust.

There came a bellow from Starrett.

“The llama! It’s running away! The llama!”

Involuntarily, Graydon loosed his teeth. Soames leaped up. Graydon followed on the instant, shoulder lifted to meet the blow he expected from Dancret.

“Look, Soames, look!” the little Frenchman was pointing. “He’s loose! Christ! There he goes – wit’ the gold – wit’ the jewels—”

The moon had gathered strength, and under its flood the white sands were a silver lake in which the hillocks stood like tiny islands. Golden hampers gleaming on its sides, the white llama was flitting across that lake of silver, a hundred paces away and headed for the cleft through which they had come.

“Stop it!” shouted Soames, forgetting all else. “After it, Starrett! That way, Danc’! I’ll head it off!”

They ran out over the shining barren. The llama changed its pace, trotted leisurely to one of the mounds, and bounded to its top.

“Close in! We’ve got it,” cried Soames. The three ran to the hillock, on which the white beast stood looking calmly around. They swarmed up the mound from three sides.

As their feet touched the sparse grass a mellow note rang out, one of those elfin horns Graydon had heard chorusing so gayly about Suarra that first day. It was answered by others, close and all about. Again the single note. And then the answering chorus swirled toward the hillock of the llama, hovered over it, and dropped like a shower of winged sounds upon it.

Graydon saw Starrett stagger as though under some blow, then whirl knotted arms as though warding off invisible attack. A moment the big man stood thus, flailing with frantic arms. He cast himself to the ground and rolled down to the sands. The notes of the elfin horns swarmed away from him, to concentrate upon Soames. He had thrown himself face downward on the slope of the mound and was doggedly crawling to the top. He held one arm stiffly, shielding his face.

Shielding his face against what?

All that Graydon could see was the hillock and on it the llama bathed in the moonlight, Starrett at the foot of the mound and Soames now nearly at its crest. Dancret, upon the opposite side, he could not see at all.

The horn notes were ringing in greater volume, scores of them, like the bugles of a fairy hunt. What it was that made those sounds was not visible to him, nor did they cast any shadow in the brilliant moonlight. But he heard a whirring as of hundreds of wings.

Soames had reached the edge of the mound’s flat summit. The llama bent its head, contemplating him. As he scrambled over that edge and thrust out a hand to grasp its bridle, it flicked about, sprang to the opposite side and leaped to the sands.

The clamor of the elfin horns about Soames had never stilled. Graydon watched him wince, strike out, bend his head and guard his eyes as though from a shower of blows. And whatever was that attack of the invisible, it did not daunt him. He leaped across the mound and slid down its side, close behind the llama. As he reached the base, Starrett arose, swaying drunkenly.

The horn notes ceased abruptly, like candles blown out by a sudden blast. Dancret came running around the slope. The three stood arguing, gesticulating. Their clothes were ripped to rags, and as Soames shifted and the moonlight fell full upon him, his face showed streaked with blood.

The llama was walking across the sands, as slowly as though it were tempting them to further pursuit. It was strange how its shape now stood out sharply, and now faded almost to a ghostly tenuity. When it reappeared, it was as if the moonbeams thickened, swirled, wove swiftly, and spun it from themselves. The llama faded – and then grew again upon the warp and woof of the rays like a pattern on an enchanted loom.

Starrett’s hand swept down to his belt. Before he could cover the white beast with his automatic, Soames caught his wrist. He spoke wrathfully, peremptorily. Graydon knew he was warning Starrett of the danger of the pistol crack, urging silence.

The three scattered, Dancret and Starrett to the left and right to flank the llama, Soames approaching it cautiously to keep from frightening it into a run. But as he neared it, the animal broke into a gentle lope and headed for another hillock.

For an instant Graydon thought he saw upon the crest of that mound the figure in motley, red staff raised and pointing at the llama. He looked more intently and decided his eyes had played a trick upon him, for the crest was empty. The llama leaped lightly up to it As before, Soames and the two others closed in. They swarmed up the mound.

Instantly the elfin horns rang out – menacingly. The three hesitated, stopped their climbing. Then Starrett slid down, ran back a few paces, raised his pistol and fired. The white llama fell.

“The fool! The damned fool!” groaned Graydon.

The silence that followed the shot was broken by a tempest of the elfin horns. It swept down up the three. Dancret shrieked, and ran toward the camp, beating the air as he came. Half-way, he dropped and lay still. And Soames and Starrett they, too, were buffeting the air with great blows, ducking and dodging. The elfin horns were now a raging tumult – death creeping into their notes.

Starrett fell to his knees, arose and lurched away. He fell again, not far from Dancret and lay as still as he. And now Soames went down, fighting to the last. The three lay upon the sands, motionless.

Graydon shook himself into action, and leaped forward. He felt a touch upon his shoulder. A tingling numbness ran through his body. With difficulty he turned his head. Behind him was the figure in motley. His red staff it was that had taken from him all power to move, even as it had paralyzed the spider-man and sent him into the jaws of the dinosaurs.

The red staff pointed to the three bodies. Instantly, as at some command, the clamor of the horns lifted from around them, swirled high in the air – and stilled. At the top of the hillock the white llama was struggling to its feet. A band of crimson ran across one silvery flank, the mark of Starrett’s bullet. The llama limped down the mound.

As it passed Soames it nosed him. The New Englander’s head lifted. He tried to arise, and fell back. The llama nosed him again. Soames squirmed up on hands and knees; eyes fixed upon the golden panniers, he began to crawl after the beast.

The white llama walked slowly, stiffly. It came to Starrett’s body and touched him as it had Soames. And Starrett’s massive head lifted and he tried to rise, and failing even as had Soames, began like him to crawl behind the animal.

The white llama paused beside Dancret. He stirred, and lurched, and followed it on knees and hands.

Over the moon-soaked sands, back to the camp they trailed – the limping beast with the blood dripping from its wounded side. Behind it the three crawling men, their eyes fixed upon the golden-withed panniers, their mouths gasping, like fish being drawn up to shore.

The llama reached the camp fire and passed on. The crawling men reached the fire and were passing in the llama’s wake. The figure in motley lowered his rod.

The three men ceased their crawling. They collapsed beside the embers as though all life had abruptly been withdrawn.

The strange paralysis lifted from Graydon as swiftly as it had come upon him; his muscles relaxed, and power of movement returned, Suarra ran by him to the llama’s side, caressed it, strove to stanch its blood.

He bent over the three. They were breathing stertorously, eyes half closed and turned upward so that only the whites were visible. Their shirts had been ripped to ribbons. And on their faces, their breasts and their backs were dozens of small punctures, the edges clean cut as though by sharp steel punches. Some were bleeding, but on most of them the blood had already dried.

He studied them, puzzled. The wounds were bad enough, of course, yet it did not seem to him that they accounted for the condition of the three. Certainly they had not lost enough blood to cause unconsciousness; no arteries had been touched, nor any of the large veins.

He took a bucket and drew water from the brook. Returning, he saw that Suarra had gotten the llama upon its feet again, and over to her tent. He stopped, loosed the golden panniers, and probed the wound. The bullet had plowed almost through the upper left flank, but without touching the bone. He extracted the lead and bathed and dressed the injury with strips of silken stuff the girl handed him. He did it all silently, nor did she speak.

He drew more water from the brook, and went back to his own camp. He saw that the hooded figure had joined the girl. He felt its hidden eyes upon him as he passed. He spread blankets, and pulled Soames, Dancret and Starrett up on them. They had passed out of the stupor, and seemed to be sleeping naturally. He washed the blood from their faces and bodies, and dabbed iodine into the deepest of the peck-like punctures. They showed no sign of awakening under his handling.

Graydon covered them with blankets, walked away from the fire, and threw himself down on the white sands. Foreboding rested heavily on him, a sense of doom. And as he sat there, fighting against the depression sapping his courage, he heard light footsteps, and Suarra sank beside him. His hand dropped upon hers, covering it. She leaned toward him, her shoulder touched him, her cloudy hair caressed his cheek.

“It is the last night, Graydon,” she whispered, tremulously. “The last night! And so – I may talk with you for awhile.”

He answered nothing to that, only looked at her and smiled. Correctly she interpreted that smile.

“Ah, but it is, Graydon,” she said. “I have promised. I told you that I would save you if I could. I went to the Mother, and asked her to help you. She laughed – at first.

“But when she saw how serious it was with me, she was gentle. And at last she promised me, as woman to woman – for after all the Mother is woman – she promised me if there was that within you which would respond to her, she would help you when you stood before the Face and—”

“The Face, Suarra?” he interrupted her.

“The Face in the Abyss!” she said, and shivered. “I can tell you nothing more of it. You – must stand before it. You – and those three. And, oh Graydon – you must not let it conquer you… you must not…”

Her hand drew from beneath his, clenched it tight. He drew her close to him. For a moment she rested against his breast.

“The Mother promised,” she said, “and then I knew hope. But she made this condition, Graydon – if by her help you escape the Face, then you must straightway go from this Forbidden Land, nor speak of it to any beyond its borders – to no one, no matter how near or dear. I made that promise for you, Graydon. And so” – she faltered – “and so – it is the last night.”

In his heart was stubborn denial of that. But he did not speak, and after a little silence she said, wistfully—

“Is there any maid who loves you – or whom you love – in your own land, Graydon?”

“There is none, Suarra,” he answered.

“I believe you,” she said, simply, “and I would go away with you – if I could. But I cannot. The Mother loves and trusts me. And I love her – greatly. I could not leave her even for—”

Suddenly she wrenched her hand from his, clenched it and struck it against her breast.

“I am weary of Yu-Atlanchi! Yes, weary of its ancient wisdom and its deathless people! I would go into the new world where there are babes, and many of them, and the laughter of children, and life streams swiftly, passionately – even though it is through the opened Door of Death that it flows at last. For in Yu-Atlanchi not only the Door of Death but the Door of Life is closed. And there are few babes, and of the laughter of children – none.”

He caught the beating hand and soothed her.

“Suarra,” he said, “I walk in darkness, and your words give me little light. Tell me – who are your people?”

“The ancient people,” she told him. “The most ancient. Ages upon ages ago they came here from the south where they had dwelt for other ages still. One day the earth rocked and swung. It was then that the great cold fell, and the darkness and the icy tempests. And many of my people died. Then those who remained journeyed north in their ships, bearing with them the remnant of the Serpent-people who had taught them the most of their wisdom. And the Mother is the last of that people.

“They came to rest here. At that time the sea was close and the mountains had not yet been born. They found hordes of the Xinli occupying this land. They were larger, far larger, than now. My people destroyed most of them, and bred down and tamed those they spared, to their own uses. And here for another age they dwelt as they had in the south, where their cities were now beneath mountains of ice.

“Then there were earth shakings, and the mountains began to lift. Their wisdom was not strong enough to keep the mountains from being born, but they could control their growth around their city. Slowly, steadily, through another age the mountains uprose. Until at last they girdled Yu-Atlanchi like a vast wall – a wall which could not be scaled. Nor did my people care; indeed, it gladdened them. Because by then the Lords and the Mother had closed the Gate of Death. And my people cared no more to go into the outer world. And so they have dwelt – for other ages more.”

Again she was silent, musing. Graydon looked at her, struggling to hide his incredulity. A people who had conquered death! A people so old that their ancient cities were covered by the Antarctic ice! The latter – well, that was possible. Certainly, the South Polar continent had once basked beneath a warm sun. Its fossils of palms and other vegetation that could only have lived at tropical temperatures were proof of that. And quite as certainly what are now the poles at one time were not. Whether the change had come about from a sudden tipping of the earth’s axis, or a gradual readjustment, science was not agreed. But whatever it was that had happened, it must have taken place at least a million years ago. If Suarra’s story were true, if she were not merely reciting myth, it placed the origin of man back into an inconceivable antiquity.

And yet… it might be… there were many mysteries… legends of lost lands and lost civilizations that must have some basis in fact… the Mother Land of Mu, Atlantis, the unknown race that ruled Asia from the Gobi when that dread desert was a green Paradise… yes, it might be. But that they had conquered Death? No! That he did not believe.

He spoke with an irritation born of his doubts.

“If your people were so wise why did they not come forth and rule this world?”

“Why should they have?” she asked in turn. “If they had come forth what could they have done but build the rest of earth into likeness of this Yu-Atlanchi – as it was built in likeness of that older Yu-Atlanchi? There were none too many of them. Did I not say that when the Door of Death was closed so also was the Door of Life? It is true that always there have been some who elect to throw open these doors – my father and my mother were of these, Graydon. But they are few – so few! No, there was no reason why they should go beyond the barrier. All that they needed, all that they wanted, was here.

“And there was another reason. They had conquered dream. Through dream they create their own worlds; do therein as they will; live life upon life as they will it. In their dreams they shape world upon world – and each of these worlds is as real to them as this is to you. And so – many let the years stream by while they live in dream. Why should they have gone or why should they go out into this one world when they can create myriads of their own at will?”

“Suarra,” he said, abruptly. “Just why do you want to save me?”

“Because,” she murmured, slowly, “because you make me feel as I have never felt before. Because you make me happy – because you make me sorrowful! I want to be close to you. When you go – the world will be darkened—”

“Suarra!” he cried, and drew her, unresisting now, to him. His lips sought hers and her lips clung.

“I will come back,” he whispered. “I will come back, Suarra.”

“Come back!” her soft arms tightened round his neck, “Come back to me – Graydon!”

She thrust him from her, leaped to her feet.

“No! No!” she sobbed. “No – Graydon! I am wicked. No – it would be death for you.”

“As God lives,” he told her, “I will come back to you.”

She trembled; leaned forward, pressed her lips again to his, slipped from his arms and ran to the silken tent. For a moment she paused there – stretched wistful hands toward him; and was hidden in its folds. There seemed to come to him, faintly, heard only by his heart, her voice—

“Come back! Come back – to me!”

— VI —

THE FACE IN THE ABYSS

The white sands of the barren were wan in the first gleam of the dawn. A chill wind was blowing down from the heights. Graydon walked over to the three men, and drew their blankets aside. They were breathing normally, seemed to be deep in sleep, and the strange punctured wounds had closed. And yet – they looked like dead men, livid and wan as the pallid sands beneath the spreading dawn. He shivered again, but this time not from the touch of the chill wind.

He drew his automatic from Soames’ belt, satisfied himself that it was properly loaded and thrust it into his pocket. Then he emptied all their weapons. Whatever the peril they were to meet, he was convinced that it was one against which firearms would be useless. And he had no desire to be again at their mercy.

He went back to the fire, made coffee, threw together a breakfast and returned to the sleeping men. As he stood watching them, Soames groaned and sat up. He stared at Graydon blankly, then stumbled to his feet. His gaze roved round restlessly. He saw the golden panniers beside Suarra’s tent. His dull eyes glittered, and something of crafty exultance passed over his face.

“Come, Soames, and get some hot coffee in you,” Graydon touched his arm.

Soames turned with a snarl, his hand falling upon the butt of his automatic. Graydon stepped back, his fingers closing upon the gun in his pocket. But Soames made no further move toward him. He was looking again at the panniers, glinting in the rising sun. He stirred Starrett with his foot, and the big man staggered up, mumbling. The movement aroused Dancret.

Soames pointed to the golden hampers, then strode stiffly to the silken tent, useless pistol in hand, Starrett and Dancret at his heels. Graydon began to follow. He felt a light touch on his shoulder. Suarra stood beside him.

“Let them do as they will, Graydon,” she said. “They can harm no one – now. And none can help them.”

They watched silently as Soames ripped open the flap of the silken tent and passed within. He came out a moment later, and the three set to work pulling out the golden pegs. Soames rolled tent and pegs together and thrust them into one of the hampers. They plodded back to camp, Starrett and Dancret dragging the hampers behind them.

As they passed Graydon, he felt a wonder filled with vague terror. Something of humanness had been withdrawn from them, something inhuman had taken its place. They walked less like men than like automatons. They paid no heed to him or the girl. Their eyes were vacant except when they turned their heads to look at the golden burden. They reached the burros and fastened the hampers upon two of them.

“It is time to start, Graydon,” urged Suarra. “The Lord of Folly grows impatient.”

He stared at her, then laughed, thinking her jesting. She glanced toward the figure in motley.

“Why do you laugh?” she asked. “He stands there waiting for us – the Lord Tyddo, the Lord of Folly, of all the Lords the only one who has not abandoned Yu-Atlanchi. The Mother would not have let me take this journey without him.”

He looked at her more closely – this, surely, was mockery. But her eyes met his steadily, gravely.

“I bow to the wisdom of the Mother,” he said, grimly. “She could have chosen no fitter attendant. For all of us.”

She flushed; touched his hand.

“You are angry, Graydon. Why?”

He did not answer; she sighed, and moved slowly away.

He walked over to the three. They stood beside the embers of the fire, silent and motionless. He shivered – they were so much like dead men, listening for some dread command. He felt pity for them.

He filled a cup with coffee and put it in Soames’ hand. He did the same for Starrett and Dancret. Hesitantly, jerkily, they lifted the tins to their mouths, and gulped the hot liquid. He handed them food, and they wolfed it. But always their faces kept turning to the burros with their golden loads. Graydon could stand it no longer.

“Start!” he called to Suarra. “For God’s sake, start!”

He picked up the rifles of the others and put them in their hands. They took them, as mechanically as they had the coffee and the food.

Now Suarra’s enigmatic attendant took the lead, while between him and the girl plodded the burros.

“Come on, Soames,” he said. “Come, Starrett. It’s time to go, Dancret.”

Obediently, eyes fixed upon the yellow hampers, they swung upon the trail, marching side by side – gaunt man at left, giant in the center, little man at right. Like marionettes they marched. Graydon swung in behind them.

They crossed the white sands, and entered a trail winding through close growing, enormous trees. For an hour they passed along this trail. They emerged from it, abruptly, upon a broad platform of bare rock. Before them were the walls of a split mountain. Its precipices towered thousands of feet. Between them, was a narrow rift which widened as it reached upward. The platform was the threshold of this rift.

He whom Suarra had called the Lord of Folly crossed the threshold, behind him Suarra; and after her the stiffly marching three. Then over it went Graydon.

The way led downward. No trees, no vegetation of any kind, could he see – unless the ancient, gray and dry lichen that covered the path and whispered under their feet could be called vegetation. But it gave resistance, that lichen; made the descent easier. It covered the straight rock walls that arose on each side. The light that fell through the rim of the gorge, hundreds of feet overhead, was faint. But the gray lichen seemed to take it up and diffuse it. It was no darker than an early northern twilight; every object was plainly visible. Down they went and ever down; for half an hour; an hour. Always straight ahead the road stretched, never varying in the width and growing no darker.

The road angled. A breast of rock jutted abruptly out of the cliff, stretching from side to side like a barrier. The new path was darker than the old. He had an uneasy feeling that the rocks were closing high over his head; that what they were entering was a tunnel. The gray lichen dwindled rapidly on the walls and underfoot And as they dwindled, so faded the light.

At last the gray lichen ceased to be. He moved through a half darkness in which barely could he see, save as shadows, those who went before. And now he was sure that the rocks had closed overhead, burying them. He fought against a choking oppression that came with the knowledge.

And yet – it was not so dark, after all. Strange, he thought, strange that there should be light at all in this covered way – and stranger still was that light. It seemed to be in the air – to be of the air. It came neither from walls nor roof. It seemed to filter in, creeping, along the tunnel from some source far ahead. A light that was as though it came from radiant atoms that shed their rays as they floated slowly by.

Thicker grew these luminous atoms whose radiance only, and not their bodies, could be perceived by the eye. Lighter and lighter grew the way.

Again, and as abruptly as before, it turned.

They stood within a cavern that was like a great square auditorium to some gigantic stage. Perhaps it was the smooth wall of rock a hundred yards ahead that gave Graydon that suggestion. It was like a curtain, raised an inch above the floor. Out of that crack flowed the radiant atoms whose slow drift down the tunnel filled it with the ever-growing luminosity. Here they streamed swiftly, like countless swarms of fireflies each carrying a tiny lamp of diamond light.

As he searched for some outlet to the place, the rocky curtain moved. It slid soundlessly aside for a yard or more. He turned – beside him gaunt man, little man, giant man, stood with blank, incurious eyes—

He thought he saw the red staff of the Lord of Folly pass over their heads… how could that be?… there stood the silent figure in motley, rod in hand, far off at the entrance of the cavern.

He heard the nasal cursing of Soames, a bellow from Starrett, the piping of Dancret. He swung round to them. Gone, all gone, was that unnatural deadness which had so perplexed him, gone all vagueness of action and of purpose. They were alive, alert – again their old selves.

“What the hell’s this place, Graydon? How the hell did I get here?” Soames caught his wrist in iron grip. Suarra answered for him.

“This is the treasure house I promised you—”

“Yeah?” the savage snarl silenced her. “I’m talkin’ to you, Graydon. How did I get here? You know, Danc’? You, Bill?”

Their own amazed faces gave him his answer. He swung the rifle against Graydon’s side.

“Come clean!”

Again Suarra answered, tranquilly.

“What matter how you came, since you are here – the four of you. There, where the light streams out, is the cavern where the jewels grow from the walls like fruit, and the gold streams like water. They are yours for the taking. Go take them.”

He lowered the rifle; studied her, wickedly.

“And what else is there, sister?”

“There is nothing else there,” she said. “Except a great face carved of stone.”

Slow seconds passed as he weighed her.

“Only a face carved of stone, eh?” he said at last “Well, then – we will all go to look at it together. Call your man over here.”

“No,” she said, steadily. “We go no farther with you. You must go alone. I have told you and I tell you again – you have nothing to fear except what may be in yourselves. You fools!” She stamped her foot in sudden wrath – “If we had wished to kill you, could we not have abandoned you to the Xinli? Have you forgotten last night when you pursued the llama? I have fulfilled my promise to you. Argue no more. And beware of me – beware how you anger me further!”

Now Graydon saw Soames’ face whiten as she spoke of the llama, and saw him glance furtively at Dancret and Starrett who, too, had paled. The New Englander stood for a minute in thought. When he spoke it was quietly, and not to her.

“All right. As long as we’ve come this far we won’t go without takin’ a look at the place. Danc’, take your gun an’ go over there where we came in. Cover the old dummy, an’ keep watch. Bill an’ me’ll hold on to the girl an’ you. Mister Graydon, you go an’ take a peep at the joint, an’ tell us what you see. You can take your gun. If we hear you shootin’, we’ll know there’s somethin’ there except gold and jewels an’ – what was it – yeah, a stone face. March, Mister Graydon – on your way.”

He gave him a push toward the radiant opening, and he and Starrett closed in on each side of the girl Graydon noticed that they were careful not to touch her. He caught a glimpse of Dancret at the cavern’s opening. Suarra lifted her face to him. In her eyes were sorrow, agony – and love!

“Remember!” he said. “I am coming back to you!”

Soames could not know the hidden meaning of that farewell; he took its obvious one.

“If you don’t,” he sneered, “it’s goin’ to be damned hard on her! I’m tellin’ you, fellow.”

Graydon did not answer. He walked over to the curtain’s edge, swinging his automatic free as he went. He went past the edge, and full into the rush of the radiance. The opened passage was little more than ten feet long. He reached its end, and stood there, motionless. The pistol dropped from his nerveless hand, and clattered upon the rock.

He looked into a vast cavern filled with the diamonded atoms. It was like an immense hollow globe that had been cut in two, and one-half cast away. The luminosity streamed from its curving walls, and these walls were jet black and polished like mirrors. The rays that issued from them seemed to come from infinite depths within them, darting up and out with prodigious speed – like rays shot up through inconceivable depths of black water beneath which blazed a sun of diamond incandescence.

Out of these curving walls, hanging to them like the grapes of precious jewels in the enchanted vineyards of the Paradise of El-Shiraz, like flowers in a garden of the King of the Jinns, grew clustered gems!

Great crystals, cabochon and edged, globular and angled, alive under that jubilant light with the very soul of fire that is the lure of jewels. Rubies that glowed with every rubrous tint from that clear scarlet that is sunlight streaming through the finger tips of delicate maids to deepest sullen red of bruised hearts; sapphires that shone with blues as rare as that beneath the bluebird’s wings and blue as deep as those which darken beneath the creamy crest of the Gulf Stream’s crisping waves; huge emeralds that gleamed now with the peacock verdancies of tropic shallows, and now were green as the depths of a jungle glade; diamonds that glittered with irised fires or shot forth showers of rainbowed rays; great burning opals; gems burning with amethystine flames; unknown jewels whose unfamiliar beauty checked the heart with wonder.

But it was not the clustered jewels within this chamber of radiance that had released the grip of his hand upon the automatic and had turned him into stone.

It was – the Face!

From where he stood a flight of Cyclopean steps ran down into the heart of the cavern. At their left was the semi-globe of gemmed and glittering rock. At their right was – space. An abyss, whose other side he could not see, but which fell sheer away from the stairway in bottomless depth upon depth.

The Face looked at him from the far side of the cavern. Bodiless, its chin rested upon the floor. Colossal, its eyes of pale blue crystals were level with his. It was carved out of the same black stone as the walls, but within it was no faintest sparkle of the darting luminescences.

It was man’s face and the face of a fallen angel’s in one;

Luciferean; imperious; ruthless – and beautiful. Upon its broad brows power was enthroned – power which could have been godlike in beneficence, had it so willed, but which had chosen instead the lot of Satan.

Whoever the master sculptor, he had made of it the ultimate symbol of man’s age-old, remorseless lust for power. In the Face this lust was concentrate, given body and form, made tangible. And within himself, answering it, Graydon felt this lust stir and awaken, grow swiftly stronger, rise steadily like a wave, lapping and threatening to submerge the normal barriers that had restrained it.

Something deep within him fought against this evil rising tide; fought to hold him back from the summoning Face; fought to drag his eyes from the pallid blue ones.

And now he saw that all the darting rays, all the flashing atoms, were focused full upon the Face, and that over its brow was a wide circlet of gold. From the circlet globules of gold dripped, like golden sweat. They crept sluggishly down its cheeks. From its eyes crept other golden drops, like tears. And out of each corner of the merciless mouth the golden globules dribbled like spittle. Golden sweat, golden tears and golden slaver crawled and joined a rivulet of gold that oozed from behind the Face, thence to the verge of the abyss, and over its lip into the depths.

“Look into my eyes! Look into my eyes!”

It seemed to him that the Face had spoken – that it could not be disobeyed. He did obey. Up leaped the wave, breaking all bonds.

Earth and the dominion of earth, that was what the eyes of the Face were promising him! And from them and into him streamed a flaming ecstasy, a shouting recklessness, a jubilant sense of freedom from every law.

He tensed himself to leap down the steps, straight to that gigantic mask of black rock that sweated, wept and slavered gold; to take from it what it offered; to pay it whatever it should demand of him in return—

A hand gripped his shoulder, a voice was in his ears – Soames’ voice:

“Takin’ a hell of a long while, ain’t you—”

Then a high-pitched, hysterical shouting:’

“Bill – Danc’ – come quick! Look at this! Christ—”

He was hurled down to the stone; sent rolling. Rushing feet trampled him, kicked him, knocked the breath from him. Gasping, he raised himself on hands and knees, struggled to rise.

Abruptly, the shouts and babble of the three were silenced. Ah… he knew why that was… they were looking into the eyes of the Face… it was promising them what it had promised him…

He made a heart-straining effort. He was up! Swaying, sick, he glared into the cavern. Racing down the-steps, half-way down them, were gaunt Soames, giant Starrett, little Dancret.

By God – they couldn’t get away with that! Earth and the dominion of earth… they were his own for the taking… the Face had promised them to him first…

He leaped after the three—

Something like the wing of an immense bird struck him across the breast. The blow threw him back, and down again upon hands and knees. Sobbing, he regained his feet, stood swaying, then staggered to the steps… the eyes of the Face… the eyes… they would give him strength… they would—

Stretched out upon the radiant air between him and the Face, her misty length half-coiled, was the phantom shape of that being, part woman and part serpent, whose image Suarra bore upon her bracelet – that being she had named the Snake Mother.

At one and the same time real and unreal, she floated there. The diamonded atoms swirled round and through her. He saw her – and still plainly through her he could see the Face. Her purple eyes were intent upon his.

The Snake Mother… who had promised Suarra as woman to woman that she would help him… if he had that within him which could avail itself of her help.

Suarra!

With that memory, his rage and the poison that had poured into him from the eyes of the Face vanished. In their place flowed shame, contrition, a vast thankfulness.

He looked fearlessly into the eyes of the Face. They were but pale blue crystals. The face itself was nothing but carved rock. Its spell upon him was broken!

He looked down the stairway. Soames, Starrett and Dancret were at its end. They were still running – running straight toward the Face. In the crystalline luminosity they stood out like moving figures cut from black cardboard. They were flattened by it – three outlines, sharp as silhouettes cut from black paper. Lank and gaunt silhouette, giant silhouette and little one, they ran side by side. And now they were at the point of the huge chin. He watched them pause there for an instant, striking at each other, each trying to push the others away. Then as one, and as though answering some summons irresistible, they began to climb up the cliffed chin – climbing up to the cold blue eyes and to what those eyes promised.

And now they were in the full focus of the driving rays, the storm center of the luminous atoms. For an instant they stood out, still like three men cut from cardboard, a little darker than the black stone.

They grayed, their outlines grew misty. They ceased their climbing. They writhed—

They faded out!

Where they had been, hovered three wisps of stained cloud. The wisps dissolved.

In their place were three great drops of gold.

Sluggishly the three globules began to roll down the Face. They drew together. They became one. This dribbled slowly down to the crawling golden stream; was merged with it; was carried to the lip of the abyss—

Over into the gulf.

From high over that gulf came a burst of the elfin horns, a rush of unseen wings. And now, in the strange light of that cavern, Graydon saw them. Their bodies were serpents, silver scaled. They were winged. They dipped and drifted and eddied before the Face on snowy pinions, like those of ghostly birds of paradise.

Large and small, some the size of the great python, some no longer than the asp, they whirled and coiled and spun through the sparkling air, trumpeting triumphantly, calling to each other with their voices like elfin horns, fencing joyously with each other with bills that were like thin, straight swords.

Winged serpents, paradise-plumed, whose bills were sharp rapiers. Winged serpents sending forth their paeans of fairy trumpets while that crawling stream of which Soames – Dancret – Starrett – were now a part dripped, dripped, slowly, so slowly, down into the abyss.

Graydon dropped upon the step, sick in every nerve and fiber of his being. He crept past the edge of the rock curtain, out of the brilliancy of the diamonded light, out of the sight of the Face and out of hearing of the trumpet clamor of the flying serpents.

He saw Suarra, running to him.

And consciousness left him.

— VII —

THE GUARDED FRONTIER

The dim greenness of a forest glade shadowed Graydon when he opened his eyes. He was lying upon his blanket, and close beside him was his burro, placidly nibbling the grass.

Someone stirred in the shadow and came toward him. It was an Indian, but Graydon had never seen an Indian quite like him. His features were clean cut and delicate, his skin was more olive than brown. He wore a corselet and kilt of quilted blue silk. There was a thin circlet of gold around his forehead, upon his back a long bow and quiver of arrows, and in his hand a spear of black metal. He held out a silken-wrapped packet.

Graydon opened the packet. Within was Suarra’s bracelet of the Snake Mother and a caraquenque feather, its shaft cunningly inlaid with gold.

“Where is she who sent me these?” he asked. The Indian smiled, shook his head, and laid two fingers over his lips. Graydon understood – upon the messenger had been laid the command of silence. He restored the feather to its covering, and thrust it into the pocket over his heart. The bracelet he slipped with some difficulty over his own wrist.

The Indian pointed to the sky, then to the trees at his left. Graydon knew that he was telling him they must be going. He nodded and took the lead-strap of the burro.

For an hour they threaded the forest – trail-less so far as he could see. They passed out of it into a narrow valley between high hills. These cut off all view of the circular mountain, even had he known in what direction to look for it. The sun was half down the western sky. They reached, at dusk, a level stretch of rock through which a little stream cut a wandering channel. Here, the Indian indicated by signs that they would pass the night.

Graydon hobbled the burro where it could graze, made a fire and began to prepare a sketchy meal from his dwindling stores. The Indian had disappeared. Shortly he returned with a couple of trout. Graydon cooked them.

Night fell and with it the Andean cold. Graydon rolled himself up in his blanket, closed his eyes, and began to reconstruct, as far as possible, every step of the afternoon’s journey; impressing upon his memory each landmark he had carefully noted after they had emerged from the trees. Soon these blended into a phantasmagoria of jeweled caverns, great faces of stone, dancing old men, in motley – then Suarra floated among these phantoms, banishing them. And then she, too, vanished.

It was long after noon when, having passed through another belt of trees, the Indian halted at the edge of a plateau stretching for unknown distances west and east. He pushed aside some bushes and pointed down. Graydon, following the pointing finger, saw a faint trail a hundred feet beneath him – some animal’s runway, he thought, not marked out by human feet He looked at the Indian, who nodded, pointed to the burro and to Graydon, then down to the trail and eastward. Pointed next to himself, and back the way they had come.

“Plain enough!” said Graydon. “Frontier of Yu-Atlanchi. And here is where I’m deported.”

The Indian broke his silence. He could not have understood what Graydon had said, but he recognized the name of Yu-Atlanchi.

“Yu-Atlanchi,” he repeated gravely, and swung his hand behind him in a wide gesture. “Yu-Atlanchi! Death! Death!”

He stood aside, and waited for Graydon and the burro to pass him. When man and beast had reached the bottom, he waved his hand in farewell. He slipped back into the forest.

Graydon plodded on for perhaps a mile, eastward as he had been directed. He sank in the underbrush and waited for an hour. Then he turned back, retraced his way, and driving the burro before him reclimbed the ascent. He had but one thought, one desire – to return to Suarra. No matter what the peril – to go back to her. He drew over the edge of the plateau, and stood listening. He heard nothing. He pushed ahead of the burro – walked forward.

Instantly, close above his head, a horn note rang out – menacingly, angrily. There was a whirring of great wings.

Instinctively, he threw up his arm. It was the one upon whose wrist he had fastened the bracelet of Suarra. The purple gems flashed in the sun. He beard the horn note sound again, protestingly. There was a whistling flurry in the air close beside him, as of some unseen winged creature striving frantically to check its flight.

Something struck the bracelet a glancing blow. Something like a rapier-point thrust through his shoulder just where it joined the base of his neck. He felt the blood gush forth. Something struck his breast. He toppled over the verge of the plateau, and rolled over and over down to the trail.

When he came to his senses, he was lying at the foot of the slope with the burro standing beside him. He must have lain there unconscious for a considerable time, for shoulder and arm were stiff, and the stained ground testified he had lost much blood. There was a gash above his temple where he had struck a stone during his fall.

He got up, groaning. The shoulder wound was in an awkward place for examination, but so far as he could tell, it was a clean puncture. Whatever had made the wound had passed through the muscles of the shoulder and neck. It must have missed the artery by a hair, he thought, painfully dressing the stab.

Whatever had done it? Well, he knew what had wounded him. One of those feathered serpents he had seen above the abyss of the Face! One of those Messengers, as Suarra had called them, which had so inexplicably let the four of them pass the frontiers of the Forbidden Land.

It could have killed him… it had meant to kill him… what had checked its slaying thrust… diverted it? He strove to think… God, how his head hurt! What had stopped it… Why, the bracelet, of course… the glint of the purple gems.

But that must mean the Messengers would not attack the wearer of the bracelet That it was a passport to the Forbidden Land. Was that why Suarra had sent it to him? So that he could return?

Well, he couldn’t determine that now… he must heal his wounds first… must find help… somewhere… before he could go back to Suarra…

Graydon staggered along the trail, the burro at his heels. It stood patiently that night while he tossed and moaned beside the ashes of a dead fire, and fever crept slowly through every vein. Patiently it followed him the next day as he stumbled along the trail, and fell and rose, and fell and rose, sobbing, gesticulating, laughing, cursing – in the scorching grip of that fever. And patiently it trotted after the Indian hunters who ran across Graydon when death was squatting at his feet, and, who being Aymara and not Quicha, carried him to the isolated little hamlet of Chupan, nearest spot in all that wilderness where there were men of his own color who could look after him; and doctored him with their own unorthodox but highly efficient medicines as they went.

Two months passed before Graydon, wounds healed and his strength back, could leave Chupan. How much of his recovery was due to the nursing of the old padre and his household, and how much to the doses the Indians had forced into him, he did not know. Nor did he know how much he had revealed in his ravings. But, he reflected, these had probably been in English, and none in Chupan, nor the Indian hunters had a word of that language. Yet it was true that the old padre had been strangely disturbed about his leaving, had talked long about demons, their lures and devices, and of the wisdom of giving them wide berth.

During his convalescence there had been plenty of time for him to analyze what he had beheld; rationalize it; dissolve its mystery. Had the three actually turned into globules of gold? There was another explanation – and a far more probable one. The cavern of the Face might be a laboratory of Nature, a crucible wherein, under unknown rays, transmutation of one element into another took place. Within the rock out of which the Face was carved might be some substance which by these rays was transformed into gold. Fulfillment of that old dream… or inspiration… of the ancient alchemists which modern science is turning into reality. Had not Rutherford, the Englishman, succeeded in turning an entirely different element into pure copper by depriving it of an electron or two? Was not the final product of uranium, the vibrant mother of radium – dull, inert lead?

The concentration of the rays upon the Face was terrific. Beneath the bombardment of those radiant particles of energy the bodies of the three might have been swiftly disintegrated. The three droplets of gold might have been oozing from the rock behind them… the three had vanished… he had seen the drops… thought the three changed into them… an illusion.

And the Face did not really sweat and weep and slaver gold. That was the action of the rays upon it. The genius who had cut it from the stone had manipulated that… Of course!

The lure of the Face? Its power? A simple matter of psychology – once one understood it. That same genius had taken the stone, worked upon it, and reproduced so accurately man’s hunger for power that inevitably, he who looked upon it responded. The subconsciousness, the consciousness as well, leaped up in response to what the Face portrayed with such tremendous fidelity. In proportion to the strength of that desire within him was the strength of the response. Like calls to like. The stronger draws the weaker. A simple matter of psychology. Again – of course!

The winged serpents – the Messengers? There, indeed, one’s feet were solidly on scientific fact. Ambrose Bierce had deduced in his story “The Damned Thing” that there might be such things: H. G. Wells, the Englishman, had played with the same idea in his “Invisible Man”; and de Maupassant had worked it out, just before he went insane, in his haunting tale of the Horla. Science knew the thing was possible, and scientists the world over were trying to find the secret to use in the next war.

Yes, the invisible Messengers were easily explained. Conceive something that neither absorbs light nor throws it back. In such case the light rays stream over that something as water in a swift brook streams over a submerged boulder. The boulder is not visible. Nor would be the thing over which the light rays streamed. The light rays would curve over it, bringing to the eyes of the observer whatever image they carried from behind. The intervening object would be invisible. Because it neither absorbed nor threw back light, it could be nothing else.

There is a traveler in the desert. Suddenly he sees before him a rivulet and green palms. They are not there. They are far behind the mountain at whose base they seem to be. The rays of light carrying their images have struck upward, angled over the mountain, struck down, and have been reflected in denser hot air. It is a mirage. The example was not entirely analogous, but the basic principle was the same.

Ah, yes, thought Graydon – the winged Messengers were not hard to understand. And as for their shape – is not the bird but a feathered serpent, or feathered lizard? The plumes of the bird of paradise are only developments of the snake’s scales. Science says so. The bird is a feathered serpent. The first bird, the Archeopterix, still had the jaws and teeth and tail of its reptilian ancestors.

But – these creatures understanding and obeying human command? Well, why not? The dog could be trained to do the same thing. There was nothing to puzzle about in that. The dog is intelligent. There was no reason why the flying serpents should have less intelligence than the dog. And that explained the recognition of Suarra’s bracelet by the unseen creature that had attacked him.

The Snake Mother? – well, he’d have to see her before he believed in anything half-snake and half-woman. Let that be.

Having explained everything except the Serpent-woman to his own satisfaction, Graydon ceased to think, and in consequence grew rapidly better.

When he had fully recovered, he tried to pay some of his debt of life to whomsoever it was he owed that life. He sent messengers to Cerro de Pasco for funds, and other things. The padre could have the altar trappings he had long wished for, and what he gave the Indians made them thank their patron saints or secret gods that they had found him.

He had been lucky, too. He had lost his rifle in his wanderings, and his messengers had been able to pick up a superior, high-power gun in Cerro.

And now, with plenty of ammunition, four automatics, and all the equipment he needed, Graydon was on his way back to the hidden haunted trail. With him was that same patient burro which had shared his adventures in the Hidden Land.

Since leaving Chupan he had borne steadily toward the Cordillera. For the past few days he had seen no trace of Indians. Something whispered to him to be cautious.

Cautious? He smiled at the thought. It was hardly the word for this journey – one man headed deliberately into the range of the power Suarra had named Yu-Atlanchi! Cautious! Graydon laughed outright. Yet, he reflected, one probably could exercise caution even in invading Hell. And Suarra’s land, from what he had seen of its phenomena, seemed rather close to some such place of the damned, if not well over its borders. Lingering upon this interesting idea, he took stock of his assets for its invasion.

A first class rifle and plenty of ammunition; four serviceable automatics, two in one of the packs, one at his belt and one tucked in a holster under his armpit. Good enough – but Yu-Atlanchi might have, and probably did have, weapons that could make these look like a bushman’s bow and arrow. And what use would automatics and rifles be against the scaly armor of the dinosaurs?

What else had he? A flicker of purple light from his wrist answered him – the gleam of the jewels in Suarra’s bracelet. That would be worth a hundred guns and pistols – if it were passport to the Forbidden Land.

When dusk fell on the fourteenth day of his journeying, he was in a little valley between sparsely wooded, close-lying ranges. A friendly stream gurgled and chuckled close to him. He made camp beside the brook, stripped the burro, hobbled it, and turned it loose to graze. He built his fire, boiled his tea, and prepared his supper. He measured with his eyes the southern range of hills. Till now he had been lucky in being able to follow the valleys, with few climbs and none of them a stiff one. Here, a mountain lay directly in his path. About two thousand feet high, he reckoned it; not difficult to get over. The trees marched all the way up to its summit, singly and in platoons, and always with the curious suggestion of careful planting.

He lay for awhile, thinking. His right arm was stretched outside his blanket. In the light of the dying fire the purple gems in the bracelet gleamed and waned – gleamed and waned. Larger they seemed to grow – and larger still. Sleep swept over Graydon.

He slept, and he knew that he slept. Still, even in his sleep he saw the gleaming purple jewels. He dreamed – and they guided his dream. He passed swiftly over a moonlit waste. Ahead of him frowned a black barrier. It shrouded him and was gone. He had a glimpse of an immense circular valley rimmed by sky-piercing peaks. He caught the glint of a lake, the liquid silver of a mighty torrent streaming out of the heart of a cliff. He had wheeling visions of colossi, gigantic shapes of stone bathed in the milky flood of the moon, each guarding the black mouth of a cavern.

A city rushed up to meet him; a city ruby-roofed and opal-turreted and fantastic as though built by Djinns from the stuff of dreams.

He came to rest within a vast and columned hall from whose high roof fell beams of dimly azure light. High arose those columns, unfolding far above into wide petalings of opal and emerald and turquoise flecked with gold.

He saw – the Snake Mother!

She lay coiled in a nest of cushions just beyond the lip of a wide alcove set high above the pillared pave. Between her and him the azure beams fell, curtaining the immense niche with a misty radiance that half-revealed, half-shadowed, her.

Her face was ageless – neither young nor old; free from time, free from the etching acid of the years. She might have been born yesterday – or a million years ago.

Her eyes, set wide apart, were round and luminous; they were living jewels filled with purple fires. Her forehead was wide and low; her nose delicate and long, the nostrils a little dilated. Her chin was small and pointed. Her mouth was small, and heart-shaped; her lips were a vivid scarlet.

Down her narrow, childish shoulders flowed hair that gleamed like spun silver. It arrow-headed into a point on her forehead. It gave her face that same heart shape in which her lips were formed – a heart of which the pointed chin was the basal point.

She had little high breasts, uptilted. Her face, neck, shoulders and breasts were the hue of pearls suffused faintly with rose. Her coils began just below her tilted breasts. They were half buried in a nest of silken cushions; thick coils and many; circle upon circle of them, covered with gleaming heart-shaped scales; each scale as exquisitely wrought as though by an elfin carver-of-gems; opaline; mother-of-pearl.

Her pointed chin was cupped in hands as small as a child’s. Like a child’s were her slender arms, their dimpled elbows resting on her topmost coil.

On her face which was both face of woman and face of serpent – and in some strange fashion neither serpent nor woman – there dwelt side by side an awesome wisdom and a weariness beyond belief—

The Serpent-woman – memory of whom or of her sisters may be the source of those legends of the Naga Princesses whose wisdom reared the cities of the vanished Khmers in the Cambodian jungles; yes, and may be the source of those persistent stories of serpent-women in the folklore of every land.

May even be the germ of truth in the legend of Lilith, first wife of Adam, whom Eve ousted.

It was thus that Graydon saw her – or thus he thought he saw her. For again and again that question of whether she was as she seemed to him to be, or whether he saw her as she willed him to see her, was to rise to torment him.

He thrilled to the beauty of that little heart-shaped face, the glistening argent glory of her hair, the childish exquisiteness of her.

He gave no heed to her coils, her – monstrousness. It was as though she reached down into his heart and plucked some deep hidden string, silent there since birth.

And in that dream – if dream it was – he knew that she was aware of all this and was well pleased. Her eyes softened, and brooded upon him; the rose-pearl coil upon which was her body raised until her head swayed twice the height of a tall man above the alcove’s pave. She nodded toward him. She raised her little hands to her forehead and cupped them; then with oddly hieratic gesture lowered them, tipping the palms as though she poured from them.

Beyond her was a throne that seemed cut from the heart of a colossal sapphire. It was oval, ten feet or more in height, and hollowed like a shrine. It rested upon, or was set within, the cupped end of a pillar of milky rock-crystal It was empty, although around it clung, he thought, a faint radiance. At its foot were six lesser thrones. One was red as though carved from ruby; one was black as though cut from jet; the four thrones between the two were yellow gold.

The crimson lips of the Snake Mother opened; a slender, pointed, scarlet tongue flicked out and touched them. Whether she spoke or did not speak, Graydon heard her thought.

“I will hold up the hands of this man. Suarra loves him. He pleases me. Except for Suarra, I have no interest in those who dwell in Yu-Atlanchi. The desire of the child flies to him. So let it be! I grow weary of Lantlu and his crew. For one thing, Lantlu draws closer than I like to that Shadow of Nimir they call the Dark Master. Also, he would take Suarra. He shall not.”

“By the ancient compact,” the Lord of Folly spoke – “by that compact, Adana, you may not use your wisdom against any of the Old Race. Your ancestors swore it. It was sworn to long and long and long ago, before the ice drove us north from the Homeland. The oath has never been broken. Even you, Adana, cannot break that oath.”

“S-s-s-s!” the Snake Mother’s scarlet tongue flickered wrathfully – “Say you so! There was another side to that compact. Did not the Old Race swear never to plot against any of us, the Serpent-people? Yet Lantlu and his followers plot with the Shadow. They plot to free Nimir from the fetters which long ago we forged for him. Free, he will seek to destroy us… and why should he not… and perhaps he may!

“Heed that, Tyddo! I say perhaps he may! Lantlu plots with Nimir, who is our enemy; therefore he plots against me – the last of the Serpent-people. The ancient compact is broken. By Lantlu – not by me.”

She swayed forward.

“Suppose we abandon Yu-Atlanchi? Pass from it as did my ancestors, and the Lords who were your peers? Leave it to its rot?”

The Lord of Folly did not answer.

“Ah, well, where there is little left but folly, you of course must stay,” she nodded her childish head toward him. “But what is there to keep me? By the wisdom of my people! Here was a race of hairless gray apes that we took from their trees. Took them and taught them, and turned them into men. And what have they become? Dwellers in dream, paramours of phantoms, slaves of illusion. The others – swinging ever toward the darkness, lovers of cruelty; retainers of beauty, outwardly – and under their masks, hideous. I sicken of them. Yu-Atlanchi rots – nay, it is rotten. Let it die!”

“There is Suarra,” said the Lord of Folly, softly. “And there are others who are still sound. Will you abandon them?”

The Serpent-woman’s face softened.

“There is Suarra,” she whispered, “and there are – others. But so few! By my ancestors, so few!”

“If it were their fault alone!” said the Lord of Folly.

“But it is not, Adana. Better for them had we razed the barrier that has protected them. Better for them had we let them make their own way against the wilderness, and what of enemies it held. Better for them had we never closed the Door of Death.”

“Peace!” answered the Serpent-woman, sadly. “It was my woman’s tongue speaking. Yet there is a deeper reason why we may not abandon them. This Shadow of Nimir seeks a body. What this Shadow is, how strong Nimir still may be, what he has forgotten of his old arts, or what new arts he has learned through the ages – I do not know. But this I do know – if this Shadow seeks a body, it is to free Nimir from the stone. We must prepare for battle, Old One. Nimir freed, and victorious – we must go! Nor would our going be orderly and as we may desire. And in time he would spread his dominion over all the world, as other ages ago he planned to do. And that must not be!”

The Lord of Folly stirred upon the red throne, flapping about like a great red and yellow bird, uneasily.

“Well,” said the Serpent-woman, practically, “I am glad I cannot read the future. If it is to be war, I have no desire to be weakened by knowing I am going to lose. Nor to be bored by knowing I am going to win. If one must exert oneself to such a degree as such war promises, one is surely entitled to the interest of uncertainty.”

Graydon, for all the incredible weirdness of what he seemed to be seeing and hearing, chuckled involuntarily at this, it was so amazingly feminine. The Serpent-woman glanced at him, as though she had heard him. There was a half-malicious twinkle in her glowing eyes.

“As for this man who seeks Suarra,” she said, “let him come and find me! There is much in what you have said of our error in making life too easy for Yu-Atlanchi, Tyddo. Let us not repeat it. When this man, by his own wit and courage, has found the way to me, and stands before me in body as now he stands in thought, I will arm him with power. If we win, Suarra shall be his reward. In the meantime, for sign, I shall send my winged Messengers to him, that they may know him – and also that he may know he need fear them no more.”

The temple faded, and disappeared. Graydon seemed to hear around and above him a storm of elfin buglings. He thought that he opened his eyes, threw off the blanket and arose—

And that all around him, glimmering with pale silver fires, were circles upon circles of the silver-feathered serpents! Whirling and wheeling in countless spirals; hundreds upon hundreds of them, great and small, their plumes gleaming, fencing gayly with long rapier beaks, horn notes ringing—

And were gone.

At dawn he threw together a hasty breakfast, caught the burro and adjusted the packs upon it. Whistling, he set forth, up the mountain. The ascent was not difficult. In an hour he had reached the summit.

At his feet the ground sloped down to a level plain, dotted with huge standing stones. Up from this plain and not three miles from where he stood arose the scarps of a great mountain. Its precipices marched in the arc of an immense circle, on and on beyond sight—

The ramparts of Yu-Atlanchi!

— VIII —

THE LIZARD MEN

There could be no doubt of it. Behind the barrier upon which he looked lay Yu-Adanchi – and Suarra! The plain studded with the giant menhirs was that over which the spider-man had scuttled. The path along which Graydon had trodden on his way to the Face must be just below him.

He heard high overhead a mellow bugle-call. Three times the notes sounded, then thrice again – from the base of the slope whose top he trod; from far out on the plain; and, last close to the mountain wall.

He began to descend.

It was early afternoon when he reached the mountain. The rock was basaltic, black and adamantine. Its scarps thrust almost perpendicularly from the plain. They were unscalable; at least, those before him were. Which way should he go? As though answering his question he heard once more the mellow horn note high in the air, and southward.

“South it is,” said Graydon, cheerfully, and resumed his march.

His eye caught a verdancy, a green banner streaming down the face of the escarpment a hundred feet or more above its base. As he drew near, he saw that there had been a shattering of the rock at this point. Rubble studded with immense boulders lay piled against the cliff. Bushes and small trees had found foothold and climbed to the top of the breast.

Studying the breast to determine its cause, Graydon saw a narrow crack in the rock wall above the mound. Curiosity drove him to examine it The burro watched him until he was half-way up the hill, and then with a protesting bray scrambled after him.

He pressed on. He pushed, through the last of the bushes. Here he found that the end of the fissure was about four feet wide. It was dark within it. He knelt and shot around the rays of his searchlight. Rocks littered the floor, but the place was dry. He came out, and began to collect his firewood.

When he had thrown down the last armload of faggots, he walked back along the fissure. A hundred paces and his light fell upon a rock wall – the end of it, he supposed. But he found when he reached it that the cleft made an abrupt turn. He heard water dripping, at his left, drops were exuding from the stone, were caught in a small natural basin, then trickled away in a thin stream. He turned his flash upward. He could see no roof, but neither could he see the sky.

Well, he would do some exploring next morning. He drove the burro into the shelter, and tethered it to a spur of rock. After he had eaten, he rolled himself up in his blanket and went to sleep.

He awakened early, the desire hot within him to see where the fissure led. Without bothering to breakfast, he swung down it. When he had gone about three hundred paces past the tiny spring, the passage turned sharply, this time resuming its original direction. Not far ahead was a gray, palely luminous curtain. He snapped off his flash, and crept forward – It was daylight.

He looked down a rift in the mountain, a hundred feet wide, with smoothly precipitous walls. It ran due east, facing the rising sun. There was no other way to account for the volume of light that filtered down into the narrow canyon. Its floor was level and smooth. Along one side it ran the trickle of the spring. There was no vegetation – not even the hardy, rock-loving lichens.

Graydon went back, watered the burro and tethered it among the bushes.

“Eat hearty, Sancho Panza,” he said. “God alone knows when you get your next meal.”

He made a fire and broke his own fast. He waited until the burro had filled itself, fastened on the packs, and finally, with considerable difficulty, got the little brute to the canyon door. After that, it ambled along ahead of him contentedly enough.

For a mile the canyon ran as straight as though laid out by a surveyor’s level. Then it began to turn and twist, widen and narrow, dip and climb. Small rocks and boulders appeared in ever-growing numbers on its floor. The trickle, augmented by other seepages from the cliffs, had grown into a small brook. The rocky walls had changed from black to a reddish-yellow. A stunted, pallid vegetation grew sparsely beside the flowing water and among the broken stones.

From time to time he caught glimpses of roughly rounded holes high up the cliffs at his right, apertures that seemed to be the mouths of tunnels or caves. They stared at him from the ocherous rock like huge pupilless eyes. With that sharpening of the faculties the wilderness effects, Graydon sensed that something deadly lurked there. He watched them warily, rifle ready. There was a taint in the air, a faintly acrid, musky odor, vaguely familiar. It was like – now what was it like? It was like the reek of alligators in some infested, sluggish, jungle creek.

The taint in the air grew stronger. The number of the cave mouths increased. The burro began to show nervousness, halting and sniffing.

The canyon made another of its abrupt turns. From beyond the angle that hid the way from Graydon there came an appalling outburst of hissings and gruntings. At the same time gusts of the musky stench smote his nostrils, nauseating him. The burro stood stock-still.

He heard the cries of men. He sprang forward; turned the corner. Just ahead of him were three Indians like the one who had led him to the frontier of the Forbidden Land, but in yellow instead of blue. Circling them, tearing at them with fangs and claws, were a score or more of creatures which at first glance he took for giant lizards. And at second, realized that they were, if not men, at least semi-human.

The things stood a little over four feet high. Their leathery skins were a dirty yellow. They balanced themselves upon squat, stocky legs whose feet were like paws, flat and taloned. Their arms were short and muscular. Their hands were pads, duplicates almost of their feet, but with longer claws.

It was their faces that chilled Graydon’s blood. There was no mistaking the human element in them. They were man and lizard inextricably, inexplicably, mingled – as man and spider had been mingled in the scarlet thing Suarra had named the Weaver.

Beyond their narrow, pointed foreheads their heads were covered with scarlet scales which stood upright like multiple cockscombs. Their eyes were red, round and unwinking. Their noses were flat, but under them their jaws extended in a broad six-inch snout armed with yellow fangs, strong and cruel as a crocodile’s. They had no chins, and only rudiments of ears.

What sickened him most was that around their loins were filthy strips of cloth.

The three Indians stood back to back in a triangle, battering at the lizard-men with maul-headed clubs of some shining metal. That they had given good account of themselves a half dozen of the creatures, heads crushed in, gave proof. But now in rapid succession first one Indian and then a second was pulled to the ground and hidden by the loathsome bodies.

Graydon threw off his paralysis and shouted to the remaining Indian.

He raised his rifle, took rapid aim, and fired. The lizard-man he had picked out staggered under the impact of the bullet, then dropped. At the report, echoing like a miniature peal of thunder from the rocky walls, the pack turned as one toward him, fanged mouths open and staring, bodies crouched, glaring at him with the unwinking red eyes.

The Indian stooped, lifted the body of one of his comrades, and sprang clear. Freed from fear of hitting him, Graydon emptied his rifle into the creatures. He rapidly reloaded his magazine. Then, as he began dropping them, they broke from their stupor, leaped for the walls, and like true lizards swarmed up the sheer faces of the cliffs. Hissing and screeching, they darted into the black mouths of the caves. They vanished into their dark depths.

The Indian stood with his wounded comrade in his arms. There was amazement and awe on his finely featured brown face. Graydon threw the rifle thong around his neck, and held out both hands in the universal gesture of peace. The Indian gently lowered the other to the ground, and bowed low, the backs of his hands to his forehead.

Graydon walked toward the Indian. He stopped for a moment to look more closely at the creatures his bullets had dropped. He saw that only those whose skulls had been pierced by the high power bullets lay there. And the limbs of these drew up and down spasmodically as though they still lived. One of them had been shot straight through the heart. But still that heart beat on. He could see the leathery yellow chest throb with its pulsations. Only those whose skulls had been crushed by the clubs seemed quite dead.

And again the perverted humanness of these things shook him.

One of them lay face down. The stained breech-clout had slipped off. At the base of its spine was a blunt, scaled tail.

He was aware of the first Indian beside him. He saluted again, and methodically began to crush with his club the heads of those Graydon had shot.

“This,” he said in the Aymara, “so they cannot live again. It is the only way.”

Graydon walked over to the second Indian. He was unconscious and badly mauled, but not necessarily fatally, so he thought, going carefully over the wounds. He took his emergency kit out of the saddlebag, treated and bandaged the worst of them. He looked up to see the other Indian standing over him, watching with eyes in which the awe was stronger, “If we can get him to some place where those brutes can’t interrupt, I can do more for him,” said Graydon, also in the Aymara tongue, rising.

“A little way,” answered the Indian, “and we shall be safe from them, Mighty Lord!”

“Let’s go,” said Graydon, in English, grinning at the title.

He bent down and lifted the wounded man’s shoulders. The Indian took his feet. Burro once more in the lead, they made their way down the canyon.

The openings of the caves watched them. Within them nothing stirred, but Graydon felt upon him the gaze of malignant eyes – the devil eyes of the lizard-men hidden in the shadow of their dens.

— IX —

IN THE LAIR OF HUON

The cliff burrows of the lizard-men became fewer; at last the precipices were clean of them. The Indians gave them no attention whatever, satisfied apparently of Graydon’s ability to handle any fresh assault by the monsters.

The man they were carrying groaned, opened his eyes, and spoke. His comrade nodded, and set his feet on the ground. He stood upright, looking at Graydon with the same amazement his fellow had shown, and then, as he saw the bracelet of the Snake Mother, with the same awe. The first Indian spoke rapidly, too rapidly, for Graydon to understand. When he had finished, the second took his hand, laid it first upon his heart and then upon his forehead.

“Lord,” he said, “my life is yours.”

“Where is it that you go?” Graydon asked.

They looked at each other, uneasily.

“Lord, we go to our own place,” answered one at last, evasively.

“I suppose you do,” said Graydon. “Is that place – Yu-Atlanchi?”

Again they hesitated before replying.

“We do not go into the City, Lord,” said the first Indian, finally.

Graydon weighed their evasiveness, their reluctance to give him straight answer, wondering how far he might trust their gratitude. They had asked him no questions whence he had come, nor why, nor who nor what he was. But that reticence had been due to courtesy or some other potent reason; not to any lack of curiosity, for clearly that burned in each. He felt he could expect no such consideration from others he might meet, once he was inside the Hidden Land. He could look for no help, at least not yet, from the Snake Mother. He was convinced that his vision of the Temple had been no illusion. The guiding buglings of the flying serpents, and his immunity from them was proof to him of that. And the Serpent-woman had said that he must win to her by his own wit and courage before she would aid him.

He could not win to her by blundering into Yu-Adanchi like any reckless fool. But where could he hide until he had been able to reconnoiter, to make some plan…

“You,” he turned to the wounded man, decision made for good or bad, “have said your life is mine?”

The Indian again took his hand, and touched it to heart and forehead.

“I would enter Yu-Atlanchi,” said Graydon, “but for a time I would not be seen by others there. Can you guide me, give me shelter, none but you knowing of my presence, until such time as I choose to go my own way?”

“Do you jest with us, Mighty Lord?” asked the first Indian. “What does one who wears the symbol of the Mother, and who wields this,” he pointed to the rifle, “need of our guidance? Are you not a messenger of… her? Did not those who are her servants let you pass? Lord, why jest with us?”

“I do not jest,” said Graydon, and, watching them narrowly, added, “Know you the Lord Lanflu?”

Their faces hardened, their eyes became suspicious; he knew that the two hated the master of the dinosaur pack. Good, he would tell them something more.

“I seek the Mother,” he said. “If I am not her messenger, I at least am her servant The Lord Lantlu stands between her and me. There are reasons why I must cope with him without her help. Therefore I must have time to plan, and he must know nothing of me until I have made my plan.”

There was relief in their faces, and a curious elation. They whispered.

“Lord,” said the first, “will you swear by the Mother,” again they made reverence to the bracelet, “raise her to your lips and swear by her that what you have said is truth; that you are no friend nor – spy – of the Lord Lantlu?”

Graydon raised the bracelet.

“I do swear it,” he said. “May the Mother destroy me utterly, body and spirit, if what I have told you is not truth.”

He kissed the tiny coiled figure.

Once more the Indians whispered.

“Come with us, Lord,” said the one who had vowed himself to Graydon. “We will take you to the Lord Huon. Until we come to him, ask us no more questions. You have asked us for shelter against the Lord Lantlu. We guide you to the only shelter against him. And you shall have it – if the Lord Huon wills it. If he does not will it – we will go with you or die with you. Can we do more?”

“By God!” said Graydon, touched to the heart, “neither you nor any man could do more for another. But I do not think that your Lord Huon, whoever he may be, will hold grudge against you for bringing me to him.”

Rapidly he went again over the wounded man; the tears and gashes were bad enough, but no arteries had been cut and no vital organs touched.

“You have lost much blood,” Graydon told him. “I think we should carry you.”

But he would not have it so.

“It is but a little way now,” he said. “There is poison in the fangs and claws of the Urd, the lizard-men. The water of flame which you poured into my wounds burned most of it away, but not all I feel it, and it is better that I walk if I can.”

“The Urd poison carries sleep,” explained the first Indian. “The sleep ends in death. The Mighty Lord’s water of flame conquered that sleep and made him awaken. Now he fears if he is carried he may sleep again, since, he says, the flame-water has ceased to burn.”

Graydon smiled at the description of the iodine that he had used on the wounds. Nevertheless, the reasoning was sound enough. If the venom of the lizard-men had a narcotic action, then in the absence of any neutralizing agent the exercise of walking would help throw off the poison. He lifted the bandages from the deepest gashes and poured more iodine into them. By the tightening of the muscles, he knew that the stuff bit.

“It is good,” said the Indian, “the water of flame burns.”

“It burns the poison,” said Graydon cheerfully. “If you have any other medicine, it will be well to use it.”

“There is such where we go,” said the first Indian. “But had it not been for yours, Lord, he would now be well advanced in the Urd sleep – and that is no peaceful one. Now let us go as quickly as we can.”

They resumed their way along the canyon. They had traveled probably a mile when, abruptly, the two walls of the cliffs swung toward each other. Separating them was a fissure some twenty feet wide, clean cut as though chiseled out of the rocks, and black as a starless night.

“Wait here,” said the first Indian, and walked to the fissure’s mouth. He drew from his pouch something that seemed to be a globe of rock crystal about as big as a tennis ball, its back cased in a cone of metal. He raised the globe above his head. A light sprayed from it into the tunnel. It was not a ray; it was like a swiftly moving, luminous ball of cloud. He dropped the globe back into his pouch, and beckoned.

They entered the fissure. It was no longer dark. It was filled with a pale luminosity, as though the cloud from the globe had dispersed a phosphorescent mist. They walked on a thousand feet or more. The Indian did not use the globe again, yet the light persisted.

He halted. Graydon saw that the fissure had ended. Outside was blackness. Far below was the sound of rushing water. The Indian raised the cone. Again the luminous cloud sprayed out.

Graydon gasped. The luminous vapor was speeding over an abyss. Suddenly the face of a cliff sprang out, a hundred yards away. The cloud of light had impinged upon it. Instantly a part of the cliff lifted like an immense curtain. Out of the revealed portal shot a metal tongue, flat, ten feet wide. It licked over the abyss, following the path of light. It halted at their feet. The Indians smiled at Graydon, reassuringly. “Follow me, Lord,” one said. “There is no danger.” Graydon stepped upon the span, the burro at his heels.

The roar of the torrent, hundreds of feet below, came up to him.

They reached the end of that strange bridge. The Indians drew up beside him. They marched on for fifty paces. Looking back, he saw the entrance to the passage like a great gate of twilight. He heard a soft sighing, and the rectangle of twilight was blotted out. The curtain of rock had fallen.

Now light was all around him, soft and suffused as though it were a quality of the air itself. He stood in a chamber that was a hollow cube perhaps a hundred feet square. Walls and roof were of polished black stone, and in the stone were tiny, swiftly moving luminous corpuscles like those he had watched stream out of the ebon walls of the cavern of the Face. They were the source of the light.

The place was empty, no sign of the passage through which they had come, nor of openers of the rock, nor machinery that controlled its opening; nor was there sign of door; nor was there trace of openings within the other walls. Yet Graydon heard a murmuring as of many people whispering within the chamber, and then a curt sentence, too rapidly spoken for him to understand.

The unwounded Indian saluted, and walked forward a few paces. He answered the challenger in the same rapid speech. But Graydon had no difficulty in getting his meaning. He was telling of the battle with the lizard-men. He finished; there was a brief silence, and then from the Unseen speaker came another quick command. The Indian beckoned.

“Lord, hold up the bracelet,” he said.

By now, of course, Graydon had realized that the unseen speaker was not really in the rock chamber, but behind the wall. His voice was carried by some tube device no doubt, and there were probably peepholes. Still, he could see no sign of either, the shining black surface seemed unpierced, smooth as unbroken glass. He lifted the wrist on which was the golden image of the Snake Mother. The purple eyes gleamed. There was a louder burst of the murmurings, exclamations; another command.

“Lay down your weapon, Lord,” said the Indian, “and go forward to the wall.”

And then as Graydon hesitated:

“Do not fear. We will stand beside you—” The voice of the unseen speaker interrupted, sternly. The Indian shook his head, and took his stand beside Graydon, his comrade at the other hand. Graydon, knowing they had been ordered to remain behind while he went on alone, laid his rifle upon the floor, and whispered to them to obey. He walked forward, loosening the pistol in his armpit holster. And as he halted, the light blinked out.

Only for a moment did the darkness hold. When the radiance returned a third of the wall had vanished. Where it had been there stretched a corridor, wide and well lighted. On each side of it was a file of the Indians. Another file stood between him and the pair with the burro. They carried spears tipped with some shining black metal; they bore small round shields of the same substance. Their straight black hair was held by narrow fillets of gold. They were naked except for short kilts of quilted yellow silk. All this Graydon saw in one swift glance before his gaze came to rest upon the man beside him.

He was a giant of a man, his face that of a pure-blood of Suarra’s and Lantlu’s race; or had been, before catastrophic fight had marred it. He stood a good eight inches over Graydon’s six-foot height His hair was silver white, cut to the nape of his neck and held by a fillet of amber lacquer. From right temple to chin ran four parallel lines of livid scars. His nose had been broken and flattened. From his shoulders fell a coat-of-mail of the black metal, linked like those the Crusaders wore. It was gathered in at his waist by a belt. Chain mail breeches covered his thighs and legs to the knees, baggily. The lower legs were protected by greaves from knees to the ankles of the sandaled feet. His right arm had been cut off at the elbow, and attached to that elbow by a band of gold and held by a shoulder harness was a murderous three-foot metal bar. In his belt was a short double ax, twin to those which were the symbols of ancient Crete.

Formidable enough he was, but Graydon, looking into his eyes, drew from them reassurance. There were wrinkles of laughter at their corners, and humor and toleration that even his present suspicion and puzzlement could not entirely efface. Nor, despite his silver hair, was he old; forty at most, Graydon judged.

He spoke in the Aymara, and with a gusty, huskily roaring bass.

“And so you want to see Huon! Well, so you shall. And do not think us lacking in gratitude that I kept you waiting so long, and took from you your weapon. But the Dark One is subtle, and Lantlu, may his Xinli shred him, is like him. Nor would this be the first time that he has tried to foist spies upon us in the guise of those who would do us service. Regor is my name, Black Regor some call me. My blackness is not that of the Dark One, yet I, too, am subtle. But it may be that you know nothing of this Dark One – eh, lad?”

He paused, eyes shrewd.

“Some little I have heard of him,” answered Graydon, cautiously.

“Eh, some little you have heard of him! Well, and what did that little make you think of him?”

“Nothing!” answered Graydon, quoting an Aymara proverb that holds certain obscurely improper implications, “nothing that would make me want to sit cheek by jowl and break eggs with him.”

“Ho! ho!” roared the giant, and swung his bar dangerously close. “But that is good! I must tell Huon that—”

“And besides,” said Graydon, “is he not the enemy of – her?” He lifted the bracelet.

Black Regor checked his laughter; gave an order to the guard.

“Walk beside me,” he told Graydon. Looking back before obeying, he saw one of the two Indians pick up his rifle gingerly, and both of them take up the march on each side of the burro. He wondered uneasily, as he tried to match Regor’s strides, whether he had locked the gun before dropping it; then decided that he had.

A graver doubt began to grow. He had been building up a fabric of hope based on the idea that Huon, whoever he might be, was bitter enemy of Lantlu, would welcome his aid and help him in return for it. And he had intended to tell him the whole story of his encounter with Suarra, and what had followed. Now this seemed too naive of him. The situation was not so simple as all that. After all, what did he know of these people with their sinister arts – their spider-folk and their lizard-folk and God alone knew what other monstrosities?

And what, after all did he really know of that utterly weird, incredible creature – the Snake Mother?

Graydon felt a momentary despair. He resolutely put it aside. He would have to recast his ideas, that was all. And he had few enough minutes in which to do it. Better make no plans at all until he met this Huon, and had a chance to gauge him.

A sharp challenge brought him back to alertness. Before him the corridor was barred by immense doors of the black metal. Guarding them was a double file of the yellow-kilted soldiers, the first rank made up of spears, and the second of archers bearing long metal bows. They were captained by a thick-set, dwarfish Indian whose double ax almost dropped from his hand as he caught sight of Graydon.

To him Regor whispered. The captain nodded, and stamped upon the floor. The valves of the great door separated, folds of filmy curtains like a waterfall of cobwebs through which an amber sun was shining billowing out between them.

“I go to tell Huon of you,” rumbled Regor. “Wait patiently.” He melted within the webs. The door closed silently behind him.

And silently Graydon waited; silently the yellow-kilted guards stared at him, and long minutes passed by. A bell sounded; the great doors parted. He heard a murmur from beyond the webs. The captain beckoned to the two Indians. Driving the burro before him they passed into the hidden room. A still longer time, and then once more the bell and the opened door. The captain signaled, and Graydon walked forward and through the webs.

His eyes were dazzled by what seemed sunlight flooding through amber glass. Details sharpened. He had a vague impression of walls covered with tapestries of shifting hues. He blinked up, and saw that the roof of the chamber was of the same polished stone as the corridors, amber colored instead of black, and that the intenser light came from denser spirals of the radiant swirling corpuscles.

A woman laughed. He looked toward the laughter – and leaped forward, the name of Suarra on his lips. Someone caught him by the arm and held him back—

And suddenly he knew that this laughing woman was not Suarra.

She lay stretched upon a low couch, head raised and resting upon one long white hand. Her face was older, but still it was the exquisite twin of Suarra’s, and like Suarra’s was her cloudy midnight hair. There the resemblance ended. Upon that lovely face was a mockery alien to the sweetness of the girl. There was a touch of cruelty upon the perfect lips, and something of inhuman withdrawal in the clear dark eyes – nothing of the tenderness within Suarra’s; something, rather, of what he had seen on the face of Lantlu when the dinosaur pack had sighted the Scarlet Weaver. A slender white foot swung over the edge of the couch, negligently balancing upon a toe of a silken sandal.

“Our unbidden guest seems impetuous, Dorina,” came a man’s voice, speaking the Aymara. “If simple tribute to your beauty, I applaud. Yet to me it seemed to savor something of – recognition.”

The speaker had risen from a chair at the head of the couch. His face was of that extraordinary beauty which seemed the heritage of all this strange race. The eyes were the deep blue that usually promises friendliness, but there was none of it in them now. Like Regor, his ruddy hair was filleted with amber. Under the white, toga-like robe that covered him, Graydon sensed the body of an athlete.

“You know I am no Dream Maker, Huon,” drawled the woman. “I am a realist. Where but in dreams could I have met him? Still, although no Dreamer – perhaps – had I known—”

Her voice was faintly languishing, but there was malicious mockery in the glance she gave Graydon. Huon flushed, his eyes grew bleak; he spoke one sharp word. Immediately, Graydon’s chest was encircled as though by a vise, crushing his ribs, stifling him. His hands flew up to break that grip, and closed on a thin, stringy arm that seemed less flesh than leather. He twisted his head. Two feet above him was a chinless, half-human face. Long, red elf locks fell over its sharply sloping forehead. Its eyes were round and golden, filled with melancholy; filled, too, with intelligence.

A spider-man!

Another stringy arm covered with scarlet hair circled his throat. A third caught him under the knees and lifted him on high.

He heard a roar of protest from Regor. Blindly, he struck out at the chinless face close to his, and as he struck, the purple stones in the golden bracelet flashed like a tiny streak of fire. He heard a grunt from the spider-man, a sharp cry from Huon.

He felt himself falling, falling ever faster through blackness – then felt and heard no more.

— X —

OUTLAWS OF YU-ATLANCHI

His senses were struggling back; a gusty voice was shouting wrathfully.

“He wears the ancient symbol of the Mother. He passes her Watchers. He routs the stinking Urd who serve the Dark One, spittle on his name! Each alone enough to win a hearing! I tell you again, Huon, here was a man to be received with courtesy; one who had a tale to tell and that tale a matter of concern not only to you but all the Fellowship. And you toss him to Kon, unheard! What of Adana when she learns of it? By every jeweled scale of her coils, we have yearned lustily enough for her aid, and never broken through her indifference! This man might have won her to us!”

“Enough, Regor, enough!” It was Huon’s voice, depression in it.

“It is not enough,” stormed the giant. “Was it the Dark One bade you do this? By the Lord of Lords, the Fellowship must deal with you!”

“You are right, of course, Regor. It is your duty to summon the Fellowship, if you think best. I am sorry and I am ashamed. When the stranger awakens from his swoon, and indeed I am sure it is no worse, I will make amends to him. And the Fellowship, not I, shall decide what is to be done with him.”

“All of which does not seem to flatter me,” said Dorina, sweetly suave, and too sweetly. “Do you hint, Regor, that I am an agent of the Dark One, for clearly it was I who gave the impulse to Huon’s rage?”

“I hint nothing—” began the giant, and was interrupted by Huon.

“Dorina, I will answer that. And I say to you that it is no unfamiliar doubt to me. Be careful that sometime you do not change that doubt to certainty. For then I will kill you, Dorina, and there is no power in Yu-Atlanchi, nor above it nor below it, that may save you.”

It was said calmly enough, but with a cold implacability.

“You dare say that, Huon—”

Graydon knew that more of truth often enters ears thought closed than those believed open. Therefore he had kept quiet, listening, and mustering his strength. A quarrel among these three could not help him. He groaned, and opened his eyes, and thereby silenced whatever had been on the woman’s tongue to say. He looked up into Huon’s face, in which was nothing but concern; at Dorina, her black eyes blazing, long white hands clenched to her breast in effort to control her rage.

His eyes fell upon a scarlet figure beyond them both. It was Kon, the spider-man, and Graydon forgot his danger and all else, contemplating him.

He was something that might have stepped out of one of Dürer’s nightmare fantasies of the Witches’ Sabbath, stealing from the picture into reality through a scarlet bath. And yet there was nothing demonic, nothing of the Black Evil, about him. Indeed, he was touched with a grotesque charm, as though created by a master in whom the spirit of beauty was so vital that even in shaping a monster it could not be wholly lost.

The spider-man’s head hung three feet above Huon’s. The torso, the body, was globular, and little bigger than a lad’s. The round body was supported on four slender stilt-like legs; from the center of it stretched out two more, longer by half than the others and terminating in hands or claws whose fingers, delicately slender and needle pointed, were a foot in length.

He had no neck. Where head joined body there was a pair of small arms whose terminations were like the hands of a child. And over these hands was the face, chinless and earless, framed in matted red locks. The mouth was human, the nose a slender beak. Except for face and hands and feet, which were slate gray, he was covered with a vivid scarlet down.

But the eyes, the great lidless lashless eyes of phosphorescent gold, were wholly human in expression, sorrowful, wondering, and apologetic, too – as though Huon’s present mood were reflected in them. Such was Kon, highest of all his kind in Yu-Atlanchi, whom Graydon was destined to know much more intimately.

He staggered up, Regor’s arm supporting him. He looked straight at the woman.

“I thought,” he muttered, “I thought – you were – Suarra!”

The anger flew from Dorina’s face; it sharpened, as though with fear; Huon’s grew intent; Regor grunted.

“Suarra!” breathed the woman, and loosed her clenched hands.

If Suarra’s name brought fear to her, and Graydon felt a fleeting wonder at that, it carried no such burden to Regor.

“I told you, Huon, that this was no ordinary matter,” he cried jubilantly, “and here is still another proof. Suarra whom the Mother loves – and he is friend of Suarra! Ha – there is purpose here, a path begins to open—”

“You go a little too fast along it,” broke in Huon warningly, yet with a certain eagerness, a repressed excitement. He spoke to Graydon.

“For what has occurred, I am sorry. Even if you are an enemy – still I am sorry. Our welcome to strangers is never too cordial, but this ought not to have happened. I can say no more.”

“No need,” answered Graydon, a bit grimly. “If not too cordial, at least the welcome was warm enough. It is forgotten.”

“Good!” There was a flash of approval in Huon’s eyes. “Whatever you may be,” he went on, “we are hunted men. Those who would destroy us are strong and cunning, and we must ever be alert against their snares. If you come from them, there is no harm in telling you this, since you already know it. But if you seek the Snake Mother and – Suarra – and have happened upon us by chance, it is well for you to know we are outlaws of Yu-Atlanchi, although we are no enemies of those two. Convince us of your honesty, and you shall go from us unharmed, to follow your fortune as you choose; or if you ask our aid, remembering that we are outlaws, we will give you aid to the limit of our means. If you fail to convince us, you shall die as all the baits sent to trap us have died. It will be no pleasant death; we do not delight in suffering, but it is wisdom to discourage others from following you.”

“Fair enough,” said Graydon.

“You are not of our race,” Huon said. “You may be a prisoner sent to betray us, your life and liberty the promised rewards. The bracelet you wear may have been given you to blind us. We do not really know that you passed the Messengers. You may have been guided through the lairs of the Urd, and set down where you met the men who brought you here. That you slew some of the Urd proves nothing. There are many, and their lives are less than nothing to Lantlu and the Dark One whose slaves they are. I tell you all this,” he added with a touch of apology, “that you may know the doubts you must dissipate to live.”

“And fair enough,” said Graydon again. Huon turned to the woman, who had been studying Graydon with a wholly absorbed, puzzled intentness ever since he had named Suarra.

“You will stay with us and help us judge?” he asked.

“As if,” drawled Dorina, and stretching herself upon the couch, “as if, Huon, I had the slightest intention of doing anything else!”

Huon spoke to the spider-man; a red arm stretched out and brought a stool to Graydon’s feet. Regor lowered his bulk upon another; Huon dropped into his chair. The eyes of that strange quartet upon him, Graydon began his story.

A little he told them of the world from which he had come, and his place in it; as briefly as he could, of his trek into the Forbidden Land with the three adventurers; and of his meeting with Suarra. He heard Regor growl approval as he sketched his battle with Starrett, saw Huon’s eyes warm. He told of Suarra’s return next morning. And as he spoke of the Lord of Folly, he saw conviction of his truth begin to steal into their faces, and deepen as he told of his glimpse of Lantlu among his hissing pack. But he was amazed to see it turn to such a horror of belief as it did when his story led them into the cavern of the great stone Face.

For as he described that visage of ultimate evil, and the seeming transmutation of the three men into globules of golden sweat, Dorina covered her face with shaking hands, and the blood was drained from Huon’s own, and Regor muttered; only Kon, the spider-man, stood unmoved, regarding him with his sorrowful, shining golden eyes.

And this could only mean that none of them had ever seen the Face – and that therefore there were in Yu-Atlanchi secrets hidden even from its dwellers. Some obscure impulse bade him be cautious. So he said nothing of his vision of the Temple, but told them of his awakening, of the Indian he had found beside him as guide, and of his impulsive return. He showed them the scar of the wound that had been its penalty.

“As for what it was that summoned me back,” he said, “I cannot tell you – at least not now. It was a summons I might not disobey—” and that was true enough, he thought, as the face of Suarra came before him, and her appeal echoed in his heart.

“It is all I can say,” he repeated. “And all I have said is truth. How the summons came to me has no bearing upon the matter, since because of it I am here. Stay – there is something else—”

He took from his pocket the packet that held Suarra’s caraquenque plume, opened it and held it toward them.

“Suarra’s,” breathed Dorina, and Huon nodded.

There was no question of their belief now. It might be well to put a spur to their own self-interest.

“And still there is one more thing,” he said slowly. “Regor has spoken of some purpose. Of that purpose, it may be I know as little as you. But this happened—”

He told them of the elfin bugles that had led him across the plain of the monoliths, and finally to the cleft in the ramparts. Huon drew a deep breath and stood erect, hope blazing upon his face, and Regor leaped to his feet, swinging his clubbed arm in a whistling circle.

Huon clasped Graydon’s shoulders. “I believe!” he said, voice shaking; he turned to Dorina:

“And you?”

“Of course it is truth, Huon!” she answered; but some swift calculation narrowed her lids and clouded her face, and Graydon thought for an instant she looked menacingly at him.

“You are our guest,” said Huon. “In the morning you shall meet the Fellowship and repeat to them what you have told us. And then you shall decide whether to call upon us for help, or go on alone. All that is ours is yours for the asking. And – Graydon—” he hesitated, and then with abrupt wistfulness – “by the Mother, I hope you throw your lot with ours! Regor, see to it that the little beast is cared for. Take this, Graydon,” he stooped and picked up the rifle. “Tomorrow you shall show us what it is. I will take you to your quarters. Wait for me, Dorina.”

He took Graydon by the arm, and led him toward the wall of the room opposite that which he had entered. He parted the webs.

“Follow,” he bade.

Graydon looked back as he passed after him. Dorina was standing, watching him with that menacing speculation stronger upon her face.

Graydon passed through the webs and followed Huon’s broad back into another faintly sparkling, black-walled corridor.

— XI —

THE DEATHLESS PEOPLE

“Up, lad, bathe and break your fast. The Fellowship will soon be gathering, and I am here to take you to them.”

Graydon blinked uncomprehendingly at his awakener. Regor stood at the foot of his couch, on his face a broad smile that his scars turned into the grin of a benevolent gargoyle. He had changed the chain armor for the close-fitting garments that seemed to be the fashion of Yu-Atlanchi’s men. Black Regor he still was, however, for these were black, and black was the cloak that hung from his immense shoulders.

Graydon looked around that chamber to which Huon had led him, at the thick rugs which were like spun silk of silver, the walls covered by the webs of shadowy silver through which ran strange patterns of a deeper argent, webs which were drawn aside at one end of the room to reveal a wide alcove in which a sunken pool sparkled. He drew together the threads of memory.

Huon had watched and talked while two silent brown men had bathed and massaged away his weariness and the marks of Kon’s talons. And then had sat with him whilst he had eaten unfamiliar meats which two Indian girls, with wide wondering eyes, had set before him in dishes of crystal. Huon himself had poured his wine, asking many questions about the people who dwelt outside the Hidden Land. He had not seemed much interested in their arts or sciences or governments; but avidly so upon how death came to them, and what was done with the old, the customs of mating, whether there were many children and their upbringing. Ever and ever be had returned to the subject of death and the forms in which it came, as though it held for him some overpowering fascination.

And, at last, he had sat silent, thinking; then, sighing, had said:

“So it was in the old days – and which is the better way?”

He had risen, abruptly, and passed out of the chamber; the light had dimmed, and Graydon had thrown himself upon the couch to sink into deep slumber.

Why had Huon dwelt so persistently upon death? There was something about that which vaguely troubled Graydon. Suddenly he recalled that Suarra had said her people had closed the Door of Death. He realized that he had not taken her literally. But might it be truth—

He roused himself from his reverie, shook himself impatiently, and rising, walked over to the pool, splashed about and dried himself upon silken cloths. He returned to his chamber to find a table set with fruits, and with what seemed like wheaten cakes, and milk. He dressed quickly, and sat down to it. Not till then did Regor speak.

“Lad,” he said, “I told you that I am a subtle one. Now my subtlety tells me that so are you, and that very subtly you held back much from your story last night. Notably – your command from the Mother.”

“Good Lord,” exclaimed Graydon, in the Aymara equivalent “There’s nothing subtle in that discovery. I warned you I couldn’t tell you how—”

He stopped, afraid that he had hurt the giant’s feelings. But Regor smiled broadly.

“I’m not referring to that,” he said. “What you were careful not to mention was the reward the Mother promised you if you obeyed her summons – and managed to reach her.”

Graydon jumped, in his astonishment, choking on a bite of the wheaten cake.

“Ho! ho!” roared Regor, and gave him a resounding whack upon the back. “Am I not a subtle one, eh?

“Dorina is not here now,” he muttered slyly, looking up at the ceiling, “nor am I bound to tell Huon all I hear.”

Graydon swung around on his stool and looked at him.

Regor looked back quizzically, yet with such real friendship in his eyes that Graydon felt his resolve waver. There was something about Huon, as there had been about Lantlu, that made him feel lonely; something alien, something unhuman. Whether it was their beauty, so far beyond any dream of classic, antique sculpture, or whether it lay deeper, he did not know. But he felt none of it concerning this man. Regor seemed of his own world. And certainly he had demonstrated his kindliness.

“You can trust me, lad,” Regor answered his thought. “You were wise last night, but what was wisdom then may not be so now. Would this help you to decide – that I know Suarra, and love her as my own child?”

It turned the scale in Graydon’s mind.

“A bargain, Regor,” he said. “Question for question. Answer mine, and I’ll answer yours.”

“Done!” grunted Regor, “and if we keep them waiting let the Fellowship chew their thumbs.”

Graydon went straight to the matter that was troubling him.

“Huon asked me many questions last night. And the most of them were about death in my own land, its shapes, how it came to us; and how long men lived there. One would think he knew nothing of death except that which comes by killing. Why is Huon so curious about – death?”

“Because,” said Regor, tranquilly, “Huon is deathless!”

“Deathless!” echoed Graydon, incredulously.

“Deathless,” repeated Regor, “unless, of course, someone kills him, or he should choose to exercise a certain choice which all of us have.”

“Which all of you have!” echoed Graydon again. “You, too, Regor?”

“Even I,” answered the giant, bowing urbanely.

“But surely not the Indians,” cried Graydon.

“No, not they,” Regor replied, patiently.

“Then they die,” Graydon was struggling desperately to find some flaw in what seemed to him a monstrous condition. “They die, like my people. Then why have they not taught Huon all that death can be? Why ask me?”

“There are two answers to that,” said Regor with quite a professional air. “First, you – and therefore your race – are much closer to us than are the Emer, or as you call them, the Aymara. Therefore, Huon argues, he might learn from you what would probably come out of the Door of Death for us if it should be decided to reopen that door upon Yu-Atlanchi – all Yu-Atlanchi. It is, by the way, one of the matters that has made us outlaws. The second answer is, however, all-embracing. It is that, except in the rarest of cases, the Emer do not live long enough for anyone to find out how they might possibly die except in the distressingly similar manner in which they do. I mean, they are killed before they have opportunity to die otherwise! It is another of the matters that has made us outlaws.” Graydon felt a nightmarish creep. Was Suarra too – deathless? And if so, then in the name of God how old was she? The thought was definitely unpleasant. They were unhuman, those hidden people; abnormal! Surely Suarra, with all her sweetness, was not one of these – monsters! He did not dare ask; approached the question obliquely.

“Dorina too, I suppose?” he asked.

“Naturally,” said Regor, placidly.

“She looks very like Suarra,” hazarded Graydon. “She might be her sister.”

“Oh, no,” said Regor. “Let me see – she was, I believe, the sister of Suarra’s grandmother – yes, or her great-grandmother. Something like that, at any rate.”

Graydon glared at him suspiciously. Was Regor after all making game of him?

“A sort of an aunt,” he observed, sarcastically.

“You might say so,” agreed Regor.

“Hell!” shouted Graydon, in utter exasperation, and brought down his fist on the table with a crash. Regor looked startled, then chuckled.

“What does it matter?” he asked. “One of your day-old babes, if it had the brain to think, would probably consider you an ancient as you do me. But it would accept it as natural. All these things are comparative. And if our ages offend you,” he added, unctuously, “be thankful that it is Dorina who is Suarra’s great-grandmother’s sister, and not the other way about.”

Graydon laughed; this was comforting common sense after all. And yet – Suarra centuries old, perhaps! Not Primavera, not the fresh young Springtide maid he had thought her! Well, there was no use crying about it. It was so, or it wasn’t. And if it were so – still she was Suarra. He thrust the whole matter aside.

“One more question, and I’m ready for yours. None of you thoroughly believed me until I told you of the Face, and what I told you frightened you. Why?”

Now it was Regor who was troubled; his face darkened, then paled, the scars standing out like livid welts.

“And again you are frightened,” Graydon said, curiously. “Why?”

“At a Shadow,” answered Regor, and with effort. “At an evil Shadow which you have turned to substance. At an ancient tale – which you have turned to truth. Let be – I say no more.”

A shadow… the Serpent-woman had spoken of a shadow… linking it with this enemy they called the Dark One… there had been a name… The Shadow of… ah, yes – he had it now.

“You speak,” he said, “in riddles. As though I were a child. Do you fear to name this Shadow? Well, I do not – it is the Shadow of Nimir.”

Roger’s jaw dropped; closed with a snap. He took a menacing step toward Graydon, face hard, eyes bleak, with suspicion.

“You know too much, I think! And knowing, fear too little—”

“Don’t be a fool,” said Graydon, sharply. “If I knew why you feared, would I ask? I know the name, and that is all – except that he is foe of the Mother. How I came to know it, I will tell you later – after you have answered my question. And with no more riddles.”

For a full minute the great man glared at him, then shrugged his shoulders, and sat facing him.

“You shook me,” he said, quietly enough. “Of all the Fellowship, I alone, or so I think, know the name of Nimir. It has been forgotten. The Lord of Evil – that name all know. But not the name he bore before—”

He leaned over toward Graydon, laid his hand on his shoulder, and his stern mouth quivered.

“By the Power above us all, I want to believe you, lad!”

“I would not have this hope die!”

Graydon reached up, and pressed the clutching hand. “And by the Power above us all – you can believe, Regor.”

Regor nodded, face tranquil once more.

“Thus then it is,” he began. “This is the ancient story. That long, long ago Yu-Adanchi was ruled by the Seven Lords and Adana, the Snake Mother. They were not as other men, these Lords. Masters of knowledge, holders of strange secrets, wielders of strange powers. Both death and life they had conquered, holding back death at will, doing as they willed with life. They came to this land with the Mother and her people, age upon age long gone. Through their wisdom, they had ceased to be entirely human – these Lords. Or at least – we would not think them so; though men like us they must once have been.

“There came a time when one of them plotted secretly against the others, scheming to wrest their power from them. Himself, to rule supreme. And not alone in Yu-Atlanchi, but over all earth, all living things his slaves. Himself enthroned. All powerful. God on earth. Slowly, steadily, he armed himself with dread powers unknown to the others.

“When he felt his strength had ripened – he struck. And almost won. And would have won – had it not been for the guile and wisdom of the Mother.

“That Lord was – Nimir.

“They conquered him – but they could not destroy him. Yet by their arts they could fetter him. And this they did, so the ancient story ran, preparing a certain place, and by their arts prisoning him within the rock there.

“Out of that rock they carved a great Face, in the likeness of Nimir’s own. It was not in mockery… they had some purpose… but what that purpose might have been… none knows. And by their arts they set in action within that place forces which would keep him bound fast as long as the land – or Nimir – endured. Of fruit of jewels or flowing gold, such as you described, the tale said nothing.

“All this being done, the Six Lords and Adana, the Mother, returned to Yu-Atlanchi. And for long the old peace reigned.

“Time upon time passed. One by one those whose eyes had beheld the Lord of Evil grew weary, and opened the Door of Death. Or opened the Door of Life, brought babes through it, and then passed through the dark portal, that being the price of children in Yu-Atlanchi! So there came a day when in all this hidden land there was none of its people left who knew the whole truth except a handful among the Dream Makers, and who would believe a Dream Maker?

“That war whose stakes had been a world, faded into a legend, a parable.

“Then, not so long ago as time is measured in Yu-Atlanchi, there came the rumor that this evil Lord had reappeared. A Shadow of him rather; a Darkness that whispered; bodiless but seeking a body; promising all things to those who would obey him; whispering, whispering that he was the Lord of Evil. And that the Urd, the lizard-people, were his slaves.

“When first we heard this rumor of the Shadow and its whisperings, we laughed. A Dream Maker has awakened, we said, and someone has believed him. But as the Shadow’s following increased, we laughed not so loudly. For cruelty and wickedness grew swiftly, and we realized that whether Lord of Evil or another, there was poison at the roots of the ancient tree of Yu-Atlanchi.

“Of all the six Lords there remained only one, and the Mother and he had long withdrawn from us. We sought audience with the Mother, and she was indifferent. Then Lantlu seized power, and life in the ancient city became intolerable to many of us. Following Huon, we found refuge in these caverns. And ever darker through the years grew the Shadow over Yu-Atlanchi. But still we said – He is not that ancient Lord of Evil!

“And then – you come. And you tell us – ‘I have seen that secret place! I have looked into the eyes of the Face!’”

Regor arose and paced the room; there were little drops of sweat on his forehead.

“And now we know that the Shadow has not lied, and that it and the Lord of Evil are one. That he has found means of partial escape, and that once again embodied, as he seeks to be, will have power to break all his bonds, find full release, and rule here and in time over earth, as ages ago he was baulked from doing.”

Again he took up his restless pacing, and again halted, facing Graydon.

“We fear, but it is not death we fear,” he said, and it was like an echo of Suarra. “It is something infinitely worse than any death could ever be. We fear to live – in such shapes and ways as this Lord of Evil and Lantlu could devise. And would devise for us, be sure of that.”

He covered his face with his cloak. When he uncovered it he had himself in hand once more.

“Well, lad, courage,” he rumbled. “Neither Lantlu nor the Dark Master has us yet! Your turn now. What was it the Mother promised you?”

And Graydon, with a dull horror knocking at his own heart, told him fully all that he had heard and seen in that vision of his. Regor listened, silent. But, steadily, hope grew in his eyes; and when Graydon had repeated the Serpent-woman’s threat against Lantlu, he leaped to his feet with an oath of joy.

“Win to her you must and shall!” he said. “I am not saying it will be easy. Yet there are ways – yes, there are ways. And you shall bear a message to the Mother from us – that we stand ready to join her and fight as best we can beside her. And that there are perhaps more in Yu-Atlanchi worth the saving than she thinks,” he added a little bitterly. “Say to her that we, at least, each and all of us, will gladly lay down our lives if by doing so, we can help her conquer.”

From somewhere far away came the mellow golden note of a bell.

“The Fellowship has gathered,” said Regor. “It is the signal. When you come before them say nothing of what you have just told me. Repeat only your story of last night.”

“Dorina will be there. And I have told you nothing. You understand, lad?”

“Right,” answered Graydon.

“And if you’re a good lad,” said Regor, pausing at the curtained door and poking his bar into Graydon’s ribs, “if you’re a really good lad. I’ll tell you something else.”

“Yes, what?” said Graydon, intent.

“I’ll tell you how old Suarra really is!” answered Regor, and, laughing, marched through the doorway.

— XII —

THE SECRET ANCIENT CITY

Graydon decided that he would have to revise his estimate of Black Regor. He had laughed inwardly at his boasts of subtlety, considering him as transparent as air. He knew now that he had been wrong. The sly reference to Suarra’s years showed how accurately Regor had read him. That, however, was only one egg of the omelette. More significant had been his perception that Graydon had held back the most vital part of his story.

There was, besides, his independence of thought, manifest both in word and action; Huon’s man he might be, but he was master of his own judgment. His distrust of Dorina was proof of that. And certainly the way in which last night he had infected Huon with that sinister doubt of her had been subtle enough. Also he had a sense of humor, and somehow Graydon was quite sure Huon had none.

The corridor along which they were passing was not long. It ended against a huge door of the black metal, guarded by the yellow-kilted Indians.

“Remember!” warned Regor. The door slid aside, revealing webs of curtains. He parted them, and Graydon followed him through.

He stood at the threshold of an immense chamber from whose high ceiling poured light, golden and dazzling as though from full sun. His vision clearing, he saw curving across the wide floor a double semicircle of seats that appeared cut from rose coral. Occupying them were a hundred or more of Huon’s people, the men in yellow, the women dressed in vivid color; and each and all of them, his swift glance told him, possessed of that disturbing beauty which was the heritage of this unknown race.

Graydon, studying them, trembled again at the touch of the strange loneliness.

There was a low dais facing the semicircle, on it a wide and cushioned bench of the rose coral, and in front of it a pedestal, like a speaker’s rostrum. Dorina sat there, and rising from her side was Huon. He came swiftly down, greeted Graydon most courteously, and taking him by hand led him up to the dais where Dorina acknowledged his bow by a negligent lifting of black lashes and a careless word. Regor dropped down beside her; then Huon turned him toward the others, raising the wrist that held the bracelet, at sight of which there was another murmuring and hands lifted in salutation.

“This,” began Huon, “is the Fellowship, outlaws of Yu-Atlanchi, haters of and hated by Lantlu and the Dark Master, loyal children of the Mother, and ready to serve her if she will so allow. Something I have told them of your story, and that we three believe you. Yet, though they call me leader, still am I only one of them. It is their right to judge you. Speak – they listen.”

Graydon mustered his words; then launched his tale. Ever more tensely they listened as that tale progressed, and it came to him that, so far as judgment of him was concerned, this hearing was only a formality; that they had been convinced of his genuineness by Huon before he had entered. With that thought came a greater assurance, and as he sensed their growing sympathy and approval, a greater ease, so that his speech flowed more readily.

And when at last he had led them to the cavern of the Face, all doubt of this was ended, for now they leaned forward in rigid attention, pallid, with whitened lips and in their eyes was horror – they were like seraphs, Graydon thought, hearing suddenly that Satan and his legions had broken through a gate of Heaven. But if there was horror, there was no sign of panic, nor of despair, and no weakening of spirit apparent upon those masks of beauty that stared at him so raptly. When he had ended, a long sigh went up, and a silence fell.

“You have heard,” Huon broke that silence. “Now let any who doubts this man rise and question him.”

A murmuring ran through the Fellowship as one turned to the other; little groups formed and whispered. Then came a voice from among them.

“Huon, we believe. And quickly must he reach the Mother. Remains now to decide how to do it.”

“Graydon,” Huon turned to him, “last night I promised you that if we believed, you should go your own way, as your own wit might guide you – or you could throw in your lot with us, and call upon our wits to help you. And now you must decide. Stay—” he said, as Graydon was about to speak, “we cozen none with fair promises which we know are doubtful of performance. And it may well be that our help would be more harmful to you than otherwise. Before you decide, see the board upon which the game must be played.”

He strode down from the dais and over to the farther end of the chamber. He thrust aside the thick hangings which covered its wall. Behind them was a gleaming black stone. Huon rested his hand upon it, and slowly a circular aperture opened. A little gust of fragrant air came dancing in.

Graydon looked out upon hidden Yu-Atlanchi. Far beneath him sparkled the blue waters of a long lake. Huon’s lair was at one narrowed end of it. Beaches of golden sand and flowering marshes bordered it. Beyond the marshes was thick forest, marching mile upon mile away, to be thrust back at last like a green wave by cliffs, sheer and gray and thousands of feet high. He looked down the lake, following its ever-widening southward course. There was a faint haze over the landscape, but far away he saw a splotch of color, as though a gigantic jewel box had been spilled there. Opposite it, the cliffs marched forward and out into the water, narrowing the lake once more. And set in these cliffs was a row of huge black ovals, like windows opening into darkness. Beside each of them was a gigantic figure.

Of course! That splotch of spilled jewels was the secret ancient city. The oval shadows were those caverns he had glimpsed when summoned by the Serpent-woman; the guarding shapes were the colossi – and there at the left where a precipice made a mighty buttress, leaning against its green and ebon breast, was a rod of shining silver. It was the cataract of his vision.

Huon handed him a mask of crystal, and he set it over his eyes. The splotch of color leaped forward, swam in front of him and resolved itself into a towered and turreted city, a city built by Djinns with blocks and scales of red glowing gold and gleaming silver, and roofed with tiles of turquoise and sapphire, smoldering ruby and flashing diamond. He could see the spume of the cataract waving like signaling veils. He saw that no two of the colossi were alike, that some were shaped like women, and that some, like the gods of ancient Egypt, bore the heads of animals and birds. A hundred feet in height he judged them. His eyes lingered on one, a naked woman’s body, heroically proportioned, yet exquisite. Her face was that of a grinning frog.

Behind the city was a long low hill. Crowning it was a building whose proportions dwarfed even the columned immensity of ancient Karnak. It was of white marble, and it brooded over the jeweled city like a white-robed vestal. Its front was pillared, but the enormous columns were without ornament. It was of Cyclopean simplicity, aloof; and, like the colossi, it seemed to watch.

He saw no streets; there were leafy lanes on which was sparse movement. West, south and east, his gaze was checked by the sky-reaching ramparts of the mountains. The hidden land was a vast circular bowl some thirty miles in diameter, he estimated.

“There,” Huon was pointing at the temple, “is your goal. There dwells the Mother – and Suarra.”

The aperture closed; Huon let the curtains drop, and led Graydon back to the dais.

“You have seen,” he said. “What you could not see were the obstacles that lie between you and that temple, the way to which seems so near and open. The city is well guarded, Graydon, and all its guards are Lantlu’s men. You could not get to the Temple without being caught a score of times. Therefore, dismiss all hope that you can reach the Mother by stealth, unaided. Inevitably you would be taken before Lantlu. By the ancient law, your life would be forfeit.

“But it might be that if you went boldly into the city, showing your bracelet as passport, and demanding in its name audience with the Mother – it might be that thus simply you could gain your end. It might be that Lantlu, mazed by the mystery of how you passed the Messengers, of how you were guided to Yu-Atlanchi, would not dare slay you nor hold you back from the Mother.”

“The best he would do,” growled Regor, “since whatever Lantlu may be he is no fool, would be to greet you fairly, find out all he could from you, put you off on the pretext that the Mother must be prepared for your visit, probably slip some drug into your drink, and while you slept take counsel with the Dark Master as to what was to be done with you. I do not think you would ever reach the Mother by that route.”

There was a murmur of assent from the Fellowship, and Huon himself nodded agreement.

“Still, he should weigh the chance,” he said. “Now, if you reject that plan, there is the matter of our aid. Frankly, Graydon, it can be none too great. Those of the Old Race who still live are not many. There are in all perhaps two thousand of us. Of these, we account for a scant hundred. Of those within the city, some three hundred more are with us, and serve us better by being there than here. Of those remaining, the Dream Makers number half a thousand. They are not concerned with anything of earth. The others are with Lantlu, one with him in his amusements and aims, followers, more or less, of the Dark Master.

“We are in no position to take issue in the open with Lantlu. He controls the Xinli, both the hunting packs, and those which are ridden – and these latter are as formidable as the hunters. Through the Dark Master he controls the Urd, the lizard-men. Against all these we have for weapons swords and lance, bow and arrow and battle mace. Once we had weapons of a different kind – sounds that went forth like swift sparks, flaming, and slew all upon whom they fell; shadows that flitted where they were willed to go, and turned to ice all upon which they rested; shapes of flame that consumed all living things upon which they rested; and other strange devices of death. But, so our legends run, after a certain war, these were taken and hidden away in one of the caverns, so that never might we use them upon each other. Or it may be they were destroyed. At any rate, we have them not. I tell you this, Graydon,” added Huon a trifle bitterly, “to show you why it is we do not take you by the hand and go marching up to the white Temple with you. If we had but one of those weapons of the old ones—”

“If we had but one, we would march with you so,” roared Regor. “The Mother knows where they are, if they still exist, and, therefore, you must get to her and persuade her to let us have them. By all the Hells, if the Dark Master is the Lord of Evil – then Adana had better be looking for her own safety! Maybe he, too, knows where those weapons are hidden!”

“This we can do, Graydon,” went on Huon. “We can arrange to hide you with friends in the city, if we can get you there undiscovered. After that we must plot to get you into the Temple. That done, if Lantlu tries to take you, it will be open war between the Mother and him. And that, frankly, is what interests us. The danger is in your discovery before you can reach her. Yet I do believe you have a better chance to win to her with our help than unaided!”

“I too,” answered Graydon. “But whether so or not, Huon, something tells me that our fortunes are interwoven. That if I win, there is hope for you, and for all those who would see life changed in Yu-Atlanchi. At any rate, if you will accept me, I throw in my lot with you.”

Huon’s face lightened, and he caught Graydon’s hands, while Regor muttered and struck him on the shoulder, and from the Fellowship arose a hum of relief. And suddenly through it struck the voice of Dorina, sweetly languid.

“But it seems to me that you have missed the simplest solution of all. Clearly, it was Suarra as much as the Mother who brought Graydon here. And clearly Suarra is, to say the least, interested in him. And Suarra is the Mother’s favorite. Well then – let word be sent secretly to Suarra that Graydon has returned, let her say where she will meet him; then, having met, let her tell him how best he can reach Adana.”

Graydon saw Regor look at her suspiciously, but Huon hailed the suggestion, and after a little discussion the Fellowship approved it. And so it was decided that a messenger be sent at once to Suarra to tell her of Graydon’s presence, and as proof that this was so he wrote at Regor’s suggestion one brief line – by your caraquenque feather on my heart this is truth – that and no more. Also, at Regor’s suggestion, the place of meeting was set at the first of the caverns of the colossi which was close to the great cataract and almost at the lake’s level.

“There is none to stop her or question her going there,” urged Regor. “She can say she is sent by the Mother, for a purpose of her own. None will dare interfere – and why should they? She has visited the caverns before. It should be well after dusk, say the fifth hour. I and a half-dozen of us will be sufficient guard for Graydon. I know a way that has few dangers of discovery.”

So it was settled. The message was prepared for Suarra, and its carrier, one of the Indians, departed. Graydon did not have a clear idea how it was to be gotten to her. Vaguely, he gathered that it would be passed along through other Indians not known to be enemies of the rulers, until it reached the Emers who were the servants and bodyguard of the Temple, owing no allegiance to any except the Snake Mother and the Lord of Folly. They would see that Suarra got it.

That day, Graydon spent with Huon and the Fellowship and found them gay, witty, and delightful companions, the women of perilous charm. He dined with them. Dorina, oddly, paid him marked attention, but Huon’s jealousy slept. Like Huon, she was curious about death, and that part of his evening he spent at her side Graydon did not find so gay. At last she was silent for many minutes, then said:

“If Huon wins this fight and comes to rule Yu-Atlanchi, he threatens to open the Door of Death for all of us. Why should we not have the right to choose?”

Without giving him time to answer, she stared at him through narrowed lids, and said with utmost finality:

“Well, I for one do not intend to die! You can tell the Mother so – if you ever reach her!”

And abruptly turned away and left him.

Later on, as he was turning in, Regor had come and sat and talked with him.

“Lad,” he said, “I have forebodings. It was in my own mind to suggest that meeting with Suarra, nevertheless I like it ill coming from Dorina. So Suarra is to meet us not at the fifth hour, but the third. Also, the place will not be the first cavern, but the cavern of the Frog-woman.”

“But the message has gone,” said Graydon. “How is Suarra to know?”

“Don’t worry about that,” retorted the giant. “In my subtle fashion, I sent a message of my own with that other. Even the messenger who bore it did not know what it was. If we get a caraquenque feather back from Suarra, it means she understands. If we don’t – why, then we’ll have to go to the first cavern.”

He nodded gloomily.

“I repeat. I don’t like that idea coming from Dorina. Oh, well—”

He grumbled a good-night, and stalked out.

— XIII —

CAVERN
OF THE FROG-WOMAN

The morning of the third day Graydon heard from Regor that Suarra had got his message, and had set that night for their meeting. She had sent a plume of the caraquenque bird to show she had understood, and would be at the cavern of the Frog-woman.

“Not even Huon knows it is there we go,” said Regor. “If he did, Dorina would wheedle it out of him. And two nights’ sleep have not diminished my distrust. In making that suggestion she had something more in mind than making easy your way to Adana, or gratifying your desire to see the young woman whose aunt, in a manner of speaking, she is,” he ended with a grin.

Graydon had given considerable thought to that matter himself; and now he repeated to Regor his curious conversation with Dorina.

“She may,” he said, “plan a trap to deliver me to Lantlu. She may reason that if I get to the Mother, the issue will be joined at once. Then, if Lantlu is conquered, Huon will rule and open the Door of Death, whatever that may be, which she so greatly dreads. Whereas, if I am put out of the way definitely, things will probably go on much as now, which will give her time to persuade Huon from his resolve. That is the only basis I can think of for your suspicions, if there is any basis for them.”

Regor listened thoughtfully.

“It is no secret that Dorina opposes Huon in that matter. There has always been that conflict between them. His desire for children is as strong as hers for deathlessness. Before we came here, he urged her to join him in opening the two Doors. She would not. There are other women who would. But Huon is a one-woman man. He would kill Dorina if he found her in treachery, but he will be the father of no other woman’s child.” He paced the room, grumbling.

“You have given words to my thoughts, true enough,” he stopped his pacing. “Yet there is another side to the matter which I do not think Dorina would overlook. If you are trapped, so in all probability will be Suarra. She runs great risk in meeting you. Enough to secure her condemnation by the Council, which Lantlu controls – it would mean at best her outlawry. The Council would be within its rights in so dealing with her. But if I know anything of women, and remember the Snake Mother is woman, she would not allow that foster-child of hers to suffer. And then the issue would be joined indeed, and in a way that only the destruction of Lantlu or Adana herself could end.”

“And that, if you are right, is exactly what Dorina does not want.”

“Good God, Regor!” exclaimed Graydon, aghast. “Why didn’t you let me know that before I told them how Suarra came back to me? Surely that puts her in Lantlu’s power if that hell-cat gets the information to him.”

“No,” answered the giant, “no, it doesn’t. You see, lad, then she had the Lord Tyddo with her. She was but obeying his bidding.”

“Perhaps he’ll come with her tonight,” said Graydon, hopefully.

“No,” Regor shook his head, “no, I don’t believe he will. This is different. Then there were four of you, going to punishment. And if it had not been for the Mother, you would have gone rolling down the abyss, a bit of golden sweat with the others. The Mother interfered there, and I think she would again – for Suarra. But she might not for you. Also, you told me she said you must win to her by your own wit and courage. So, I hardly think that we can count on any protection tonight beyond what we ourselves devise.”

Again he grumbled, inarticulately. “Furthermore,” he pointed his bar at Graydon like a finger, “Adana is woman, and therefore changeable. She might decide that, after all, you are not essential to Suarra’s welfare, or she might grow momentarily weary of the whole matter, and that brief abstraction might occur at a most unfortunate time for you—”

“Hell!” cried Graydon, springing up, “you are certainly a cheerful companion, Regor!”

“Well,” chuckled Regor, “if it’s a cheerful thought you want, here is one. The Mother is woman true enough – but certainly not human woman. Therefore neither of us can possibly know what she may or may not do!”

He left Graydon to wrestle with the depressing conviction that he was completely right.

The balance of the day Graydon spent with Huon and certain members of the Fellowship, as he had the day before, all of them eager to know more of that world which had grown up outside the Hidden Land. Dorina did not appear. They were interested in his rifle and pistols, skeptical as to their effect upon the dinosaurs; like children, they were more interested in the explosions than the work of the bullets. The Xinli, they explained, were vulnerable only in one unprotected place in their necks under the jaw, and an upward thrust from a lance into this spot was about the one way to kill them. There were some two hundred in the hunting packs, and not more than a score of the monsters used for riding. They bred scantily, and their numbers were slowly but steadily lessened by fights among themselves. The greater creatures were tractable as horses, and could be ridden by anyone. The packs were ravening devils over which only Lantlu had complete control. There was an amphitheater where races of the great dinosaurs were regularly held; and it was also the arena of combats between selected fighters of the hunting packs and small bands of the lizard-men, raids upon whom were periodically made to keep down their numbers. And now Graydon discovered why none of the Indians died in ways that would have given Huon the enlightenment he sought as to the varied guises of death. When they began to age they were fed to the packs.

Then, too, it appeared, Lantlu had a passion for hunting human game. Offenders against the law, and offenders against him, were often taken – openly in the case of the first and secretly in that of the other – beyond the barriers, given a start and run down. That, he also discovered, was how Regor had gotten his scars and lost his arm. Daring to oppose Lantlu in one of his cruelties, he had been trapped, loosed and hunted. He had managed to evade the pursuers, all except one questing dinosaur; had fought and killed it. Fearfully wounded, he had by some miracle of vitality reached Huon’s lair, and had there been nursed back to life. Lantlu’s price for his capture was only a little less than that for Huon’s.

Rapidly Graydon’s understanding of this lost people clarified. Scant remnants of what must have been a race more advanced than any following it on earth – a race that had reached a peak of scientific attainment never afterward touched by man – they were all that was left of a mighty wave of prehistoric civilization, a little pool fast becoming stagnant Over-sheltered, over-protected, made immune from all attack and necessity for effort, they had retained the beauty of their bodies; but initiative, urge to advance, impulse to regain the lost knowledge of their ancestors had atrophied, or at best was comatose to the point of extinction. Except for that beauty – and the disquieting thought of their age – they seemed normal people, charmingly courteous.

Apparently there had been a sharp line of cleavage among them. Huon and the Fellowship were atavists, throwbacks to a more humane period of the race. Lantlu and his followers had been carried in the opposite direction, toward cruelty, indifference to suffering, pleasure in its infliction, dropping steadily to the black nadir of evil which made them fit tools for the Dark One. Those whom they called the Dream Makers were entirely withdrawn from all that was human, static. And Graydon believed that he could understand why Huon desired to open those mysterious Doors which would, so far as span of years was concerned, rid them of that deathlessness which had been the curse of the race; a vague conviction that by doing this he would get back to the well-springs of the youth of his people, recover from them their olden strength.

For now Graydon accepted that deathlessness as fact. Studying Kon, he could not doubt that the science which had effected that monstrous blend of man and spider was entirely capable of performing the lesser miracle of indefinitely prolonging life. The lizard-folk were other proof of it. And above all was the Serpent-woman, Adana, the Snake Mother, by her indubitable reality saying to him:

“When such as I can be, and where such as I am, all things are possible!”

The day wore on, dusk began to fall within the mountain-rimmed bowl of the Hidden Land. A little before the time set to start, Regor brought him a suit of the black chain mail, and he and Huon fastened it upon him. It was oddly light and flexible. Greaves, and the ankle-high, tanned footwear he rejected, preferring his own stout boots. He girdled himself with his own belt, and thrust into it one of his automatics and some extra clips of cartridges. Although he could not get at it, he left the second automatic in its holster under his left armpit – why he did not know, except that the familiar feel of it gave him more confidence. He saw that they had not much confidence in his own weapons, so to satisfy them he let Regor fasten to his belt a scabbard holding a short, stabbing sword of the black metal, and took from him one of the curiously shaped maces. If there was to be any fighting, said Regor, it would be at close quarters; and Graydon reflected that the giant knew what he was talking about, and that the strange weapons might be useful. He told himself that he would put his first trust in the automatic.

His rifle was a problem. Since there was a probability that Suarra might have some plan for his reaching the Snake Mother which would prevent his return to the lair, he did not want to leave it behind. If the possible fighting was to be of the hand-to-hand variety Regor predicted, the rifle would not only be secondary to pistol and mace or sword, but a handicap; he compromised by asking that one of the Indian soldiers be allowed to carry it, and march close behind him or at his side when possible. They agreed to this. Then Huon placed upon his head a cap of mail, padded, close-fitting, covering his ears and falling upon his shoulders.

And when this had all been done, he set his hands on Graydon’s shoulders.

“Graydon,” he said, “something tells me that with your coming the balances of Yu-Atlanchi’s fate, so long motionless, begin to move. You are the new weight that disturbs them, and whether for good or for evil – who knows? Whether, when they come to rest again, Lantlu will have outweighed those who oppose him, or whether he will be outweighed – who knows? But it comes to me that change sweeps swiftly down on Yu-Atlanchi – in one way or another the old order is close to its end. And that you and I, Graydon, will never again meet here – will meet but once more, and briefly… and part under a crimson sky… from which shadows drop… slaying shadows and cold… cold slaying shadows that clash with shapes of flame… and then… meet never again…’Till then – fare you well, Graydon!” He turned abruptly, and strode out of the room. “Now I wonder—” muttered Graydon, and shivered, as though two hands of ice had rested fleetingly on his shoulders where Huon’s had been.

“I wonder, too,” said Regor, brusquely. “But at least you two are to meet again, it seems. Therefore Death does not stalk you tonight.”

They passed from that room into a guard chamber where a dozen of the kilted Aymara awaited them. They were sturdy men, armed with maces and spears, in their girdles the short stabbing swords. To one, Regor handed the rifle, and explained what he was to do. The Indian looked at it doubtfully, until Graydon, smiling, snapped the safety lock back and forth a few times, showing him that the trigger could not move with the catch on. Reassured, he threw the thong over his head, and took his place, the rifle dangling at his side.

Regor led the way. They marched at first along a wide, well-lighted tunnel from which ran smaller passages. As they walked along Graydon reflected that the barrier walls must be honeycombed with these corridors and caverns, both great and little; wondered whether they had been shaped by nature or cut out by the ancient Yu-Atlanchan’s; and if by the latter, for what purpose. He had also given much thought to the luminous properties of the walls, but without discovering their secret. Either the rock had been covered with some vitreous substance possessing radioactive qualities unknown to modern science, or the ancients had found some way to treat the atomic structure of the stone so that luminous centers were created at the intersection of certain of the crystalline planes. There was no warmth to the light, which had in it much of the soft brilliancy of the firefly. It cast no shadows.

They had gone well over a mile when the tunnel widened into a crypt, and ended there against a solid wall.

“And here,” said Regor, speaking for the first time, “our danger begins.”

He stood close to the wall, listening; then took from his belt one of the cone-shaped objects. He pressed it against a carved symbol at the level of his shoulder. A six-foot section of the wall began to rise slowly like a curtain. When it was a few inches from the floor, two of the Indians dropped upon their bellies and peered through the opening. The curtain rose a foot higher; they wriggled under it and disappeared. Regor’s hand fell, and the stone’s motion ceased. Perhaps five minutes went by, and then the pair wriggled back, and nodded to the giant. Again he pressed the cone to the symbol. The rock rose swiftly, leaving a squat portal through which the Emers, bending, streamed, with Regor and Graydon at their heels.

A few yards of this crouching progress, and Graydon straightened. He looked out into a vast cavern filled with a faint reddish light so faint indeed that it was barely removed from darkness. He turned to Regor, and saw that he was thrusting the cone back into his girdle. The wall through which they had come was unbroken, with no trace of the passage.

The Indians formed a circle around the two of them, and, noiselessly as ghosts, began a quick march. Graydon, about to speak, caught Regor’s warning gesture. The reddish darkness closed about them. Through the dim and strangely oppressive light they sped, over a floor of yellow sand. How the Indians guided themselves he could not tell, but there was no uncertainty in their movements and their swift pace never slackened.

Suddenly they closed around him, touching him, and at that instant they passed out of the murk into absolute blackness. They did not lessen their speed. There came a grunt from Regor, like a long-held breath, and a whispered command. The Indians halted. A ball of the cloudy luminescence flashed out and raced ahead of them. Behind it a pallid light grew, as though it had clothed the particles of air with a misty spray of phosphorescence. They went down a sharply sloping passage which the light had revealed, a thousand feet, two thousand feet, before the glow began to dim.

Five times the luminous ball shot ahead of them, lighting their way through the unbroken tunnel. Four miles and more they must have gone since they had left the lair, and the pace was beginning to tell on Graydon. Again the faint light was dimming, but far ahead was an oval opening behind which there seemed to be a flood of moonbeams. Now they were out of the passage and through that opening. And there Graydon paused, transfixed with amazement and awe.

It was another caverned space whose walls and roof he could not see. It was filled with silvery light like the woven rays of full moons of Spring. Under that light, upon low couches, lay cushioned the bodies of score upon score of women and men, each of their faces stamped with the unearthly beauty of Yu-Atlanchi, and as though asleep. Across the cavern, and back into the mountain as far as his vision could go, they lay. At first he thought that they were sleeping; then he saw that no breath raised their breasts. Staring at silken hair, golden and black and ruddy bronze, at red lips and blossoms of fair bosoms, he thought them exquisitely tinted statues.

Touching the hair, the cheek of one close to him, he realized that they were no effigies, but bodies once instinct with life; transmuted now by some alchemy of this mysterious land not into stone but into imperishable substance retaining both the coloring of the body when it had been living flesh, and its texture.

“Yu-Atlanchi’s dead!” said Regor. “The ancient ones who passed before the Gate of Death was closed. And those who since that time opened of their own will that Gate, so new life might stream among us. The dead!”

The Indians were uneasy, eager to be going. Quickly they left that silent place of the dead, and even Regor seemed to be relieved when they had passed into another passage through the rock.

“A few steps more, lad,” he rumbled, “and we are out. And here the way is not beset with such dangers. We have passed under five of the great caverns, the place of the dead was the sixth; we skirt the entrances of three more and then we are at the Frog-woman’s. And by every scale of the Mother – I will be glad to get once more into the open.”

And shortly they passed cautiously out of that passage, and Graydon felt the fresh air upon his face, and looked up into a sky where a half-moon dipped in and out of scurrying clouds.

They dropped down upon a narrow trail. Here the Indians re-formed, part going ahead of them, the others following. At left, the verdure rose high, masking the lake. Looking upward and back, he saw the colossal figure of a woman, in pure white stone, with arms raised to the Heavens – the guardian of that cavern through which they had just passed. Then the vegetation closed round him.

The trail was easy to follow, not dark even when the clouds covered the moon. Louder, and even louder came the roar of the cataract. Through gaps in the trees and bushes, he caught glimpses of the monstrous figure of the Frog-woman, on watch at the entrance of the black oval that was the mouth of her cavern.

The path began to rise. It passed behind a high ledge and became a steep flight of narrow steps. He climbed these. He stood in the shadow close to the opening of the Frog-woman’s cavern. He looked up at that colossal figure, a squatting woman, unclothed, and carved of some green stone that glistened beneath the moon as though its rays were falling spray. Her grotesque face grinned at him above the exquisite shoulders and breasts. Beside her gaped the cavern’s mouth, inky black.

He was at the inner edge of an immense platform of smooth stone. Directly opposite him, a half-mile across the lake, was the secret city.

More than ever, under the moon, did it seem a city built by Djinns. It was larger, far larger, than he had thought it. Its palaces thrust up their fantastic turrets and domes; their gay colorings as of lacquer of jewels were changed and softened into a tapestry that spread for mile upon mile, an immense rug each of whose irised patterns was surrounded by arabesques of dark green, and black, and white, the foliage and flowers of the trees that circled the dwellings. From minaret and tower and dome sprang tiny arches of light, delicate moon-bows, spanning them like bridges. In the air, above the green and black, and threading them, tiny dancing lights flashed and vanished and flashed out again, fireflies, he thought, playing among the trees. At the right, looking down upon the city, was the Temple, vestal white, majestic, serene.

Somewhere within it might be – Suarra! Perhaps she would not be able to meet him here after all. With half his mind he hoped that she would not, for Huon’s farewell still echoed in his heart, and he feared for her. And half his mind willed fiercely that she should come – let the perils be what they may.

There was a rustle close beside him. A little hand caught his. He looked down into soft dark eyes, a tress of cloudy hair kissed his cheek, rocking him with its fragrance.

“Suarra!” he whispered, and again – “Suarra!”

“Graydon!” her sweet voice murmured. “You did come back to me – beloved!”

Her arms were around his neck, her lips were close to his, and slowly, slowly, they drew closer. They met, and clung – and for a time there were no such things in all the world as peril or suffering, sorrow or death.

— XIV —

SHADOW OF THE LIZARD MASK

The shadow of the Frog-woman, sharply outlined by the moonlight, lay in fantastic profile from side to side of the great platform. Behind them was the blackness of her cavern, and between them and the city the lake shone like a vast silver mirror, waveless, no sign of life upon it. Below the platform, the Indians watched. The Frog-woman’s head seemed to bend lower, listening to their whispering.

“Graydon! Graydon!” Suarra was weeping. “You should not have returned! Oh, but it was wicked of me to call you back!”

“Nonsense!” rumbled Regor. “You love each other, don’t you? Well, then, what else was there for him to do? Besides, he has made strong friends – Huon and Black Regor, and one stronger than all of us, or by Riza the Lightning Eater he wouldn’t be here! I mean the Mother herself. Child,” he said slyly, “has she instructed you how to take him back to her?”

“Ah, Regor,” sighed Suarra, “far from it. It is what weighs so upon my heart. For when I received your message I told her straightway of it, and asked her aid, but told her also that with it or without it, still must I go. She only nodded, and said: ‘Naturally – since you are woman.’ Then after a little silence she spoke again: ‘Go, Suarra – no harm shall come to you.’ ‘I ask protection for him, Mother,’ I said, and she did not answer. And I asked:

“‘Mother Adana, will you not summon him to you through me, so that none will dare harm him?’ The Mother shook her head: ‘If he loves you he will find his own way to me.’”

“No one saw you? No one followed you?” questioned Regor.

“No,” said Suarra, “no, I’m quite sure they did not. We went through the Hall of the Weavers, and into the secret way that leads beneath the cataract, thence out and by the hidden path along the shore.”

“You came silently? You heard nothing, saw nothing, as you passed the first cavern?”

“Very silently,” she answered. “And as for the cavern, the path dips far below it, so that one can neither see it nor be seen from it. And I heard nothing – nothing but the voice of the torrent.”

“Where was Lantlu?” Regor still did not seem satisfied.

“They fed the Xinli tonight!” she said, and shivered.

“Then,” said Regor with satisfaction, “we know at least where he is.”

“Well,” Graydon spoke, “the upshot of the matter seems to be that much depends upon my doing obeisance in person to the Mother. And she has put it severely up to me to accomplish that—”

“Graydon,” Suarra interrupted softly, “there is another way for us. If you wish it – I will go with you to Huon! I love the Mother. But if you wish it – I will not return to her. I will go with you to the Fellowship. This will I do for you, beloved. I would not have you meet any of the deaths of Yu-Atlanchi, and I think they throng thickly about your path to Adana. With Huon, we can live and be happy – for a time at least.”

Now Graydon heard Regor gasp at this, and felt that he waited with anxiety for his answer, although he said nothing. He was tempted. After all, there was a way out for them from Huon’s lair. And once beyond the barrier, it was probable that the Snake Mother would hold back her hand, not loose the winged Watchers upon them – for Suarra’s sake. And if he could get Suarra safely away, what did he care about Yu-Atlanchi or any who dwelt within it?

Swiftly, other thoughts came. The Mother had aided him, not once but twice. She had saved him from the Face! She had bade her Messengers protect and guide him.

She had challenged his loyalty and his courage. And she had shown that in some measure she trusted him.

And then there was – this Dark One! This Shadow of Nimir, Lord of Evil, which menaced her… Huon and the Fellowship, who also had trusted him… and Regor… pinning his hopes upon his meeting with the Serpent-woman to rid the land of evil and to deliver them all from outlawry.

No, he could not run from all this, not even for Suarra! He told her so. And why.

He felt Regor relax. He had the curious feeling that in some way that weirdly beautiful, unhuman creature named Adana had been following his thoughts, approved his decision, and because of it had come to some final determination of her own which till now had hung in the balance.

Nor did Suarra seem much surprised. So little that he wondered whether that proposal had been her own devising.

“Well,” she said, quietly, “then we must make some other plan. And I have thought of one. Listen carefully, Regor. In seven nights the moon is full and on that night is the Ladnophaxi – the Feast of the Dream Makers. All will be at the amphitheater. There will be few guards in the city. Take Graydon back to Huon. On the fifth night from this, slip out of the lair and around the head of the lake and through the marshes. Let Graydon be dressed as one of the Emer, stain his face and body, make him a black wig cut as the Emer wear their hair. His gray eyes we cannot change, and so must risk.

“You know the palace of Cadok. He is secret foe of Lantlu and friend of Huon, and of you – but that I need not tell you. Get Graydon there. Cadok will hide him until the night of the Ladnophaxi. I will send a guide to be trusted. That guide will lead him to the Temple – and so he shall find his way to the Mother. And it shall be by his courage and wit; For it will take courage. And was it not his wit that rejected my proposal to him. So shall the terms of the Mother be fulfilled.”

“It is a good plan!” rumbled Regor. “By the Mother, it is as good a plan as though it came from her! Thus shall it be. And now, Suarra, prepare to go. You have been here long – and at every heartbeat fear creeps closer to me, and I am little used to fear.”

“It is a good plan,” said Graydon. “And, heart of hearts, go now as Regor bids. For I, too, fear for you.”

Her soft arms were round his neck, her lips on his, he felt her cheeks wet with tears.

“Beloved!” she whispered, and again – “Beloved!” And she was gone.

“Hr-r-r-mp!” Regor drew a great sigh of relief. “Well, the path grows clearer. Now is there nothing for us to do but return and wait the fifth night. And begin to stain you up,” he chuckled.

“Wait!” Graydon was listening with all his nerves. “Wait, Regor! There might be danger… she might be waylaid. Listen…”

For several minutes they stood quiet, and heard no sound.

“She’s safe enough,” grumbled Regor at last. “You heard her say the Mother promised her. But we’re not, lad. Our path back is just as dangerous as it was coming. Let’s start…”

He whistled softly to the watching guards. They came gliding back upon the platform. Graydon, deep in thought, followed abstractedly with his eyes the fantastic profile of the Frog-woman’s shadow. The moon had moved higher in the heavens, and cast a sharp shadow of the colossal head upon the smooth face of rock that was the beginning of the cavern’s farther wall. He stared at it, awakened from his abstraction, fascinated by its grotesqueness.

And as he watched he saw appear beside it another shadow – the shadow of a gigantic lizard head that crept closer to it. He turned to trace it.

Out from the cliff at the level of the Frog-woman’s shoulder peered the head of a lizard-man – an immense head twice at least the size of any he had seen. Its red eyes glared down at him, its great jaws opened.

“Regor!” he cried, and reached to his belt for his automatic. “Regor! Look!”

There was a sickening reek of musk around him. Claws gripped his ankles and threw him to the rock. As he fell, the thing whose head had cast the shadow slid down the face of the stone – and he saw that its body was that of a man! Knew that it was a man, and the head but a mask!

He grappled with the creature that had thrown him. He heard Regor shouting. His fingers clutched and slipped from the leathery skin. Its jaws were so close that the fetid breath sickened him. And while he fought it, he wondered why it did not tear him with its fangs. His hand touched the hilt of the short sword in his belt. He drew it, and thrust the point haphazard upward. The lizard-man screeched, and rolled from him.

As he struggled to his feet, he saw that he had been drawn yards back into the cavern. On the platform was Regor, his deadly bar smiting up and down and around, mowing the hissing pack of the lizard-folk milling about him. Beside the giant were but two of Huon’s Indians, fighting as desperately as he.

At the edge of the platform stood the man in the lizard mask. Around him, guarding him, was a ring of Indians dressed in kilts of green. He was laughing and that sound of human laughter coming through the ranged jaws was hideous.

“Caught!” shouted the lizard mask. “Trapped, old fox! Kill – but you’ll not be killed! Not here, Regor! Not here!” “Graydon!” bellowed Regor. “To me, Graydon!” “Coming!” he cried, and leaped forward. There was a rain of bodies upon him, leathery bodies.

Clawed hands gripped him. He fought desperately to keep his feet—

There was only one Indian now beside Regor, the one who bore his rifle. As Graydon struggled, he saw this soldier’s spear wrested from him, saw him throw the rifle thong over his head and raise the gun like a club. And as he did so there came a flash from its barrel and a report that echoed in the cavern mouth like thunder – and another and another in quick succession.

Now Graydon was down and could see no more, smothered under the lizard-men.

And now thongs were all about him, trussing his arms to his sides, binding together his legs. He was carried swiftly back into the dense darkness. One glimpse he had of the cavern mouth before it was blotted from his sight.

It was empty. Regor and the Indian, the man in the lizard mask and his soldiers, lizard-men – all were gone!

The lizard-men carried Graydon along gently enough. There was a considerable body of them; he could hear them hissing and squalling all around him, and the musky saurian stench was almost overpowering. As far as he could tell, he had sustained no wounds of any kind. The armor accounted for part of this, but not for all, since it had not protected his hands and face, and he had lost his cap of mail in the scramble. He recalled that the creatures had made no attempt to use their talons or fangs upon him, that they had overcome him by sheer swarming weight – as though they had been ordered to capture but not to harm him.

Ordered? But that would mean whoever had issued the order had known he would be at the cavern of the Frog-woman that night! And in turn that meant they had been betrayed despite all Regor’s precautions.

Dorina!

Her name seemed to leap out of the darkness in letters of fire.

Another thought came to him that rocked him. If his coming had been foreknown by Huon’s enemies, then the reason for it must also have been known. Good God – had Suarra been taken after all!

There had been a deliberate attempt to cut him away from Regor, that was certain. It had begun with the first stealthy attack which had drawn him back into the cavern; its second phase had been the rush of the hidden lizard-men upon him, and the wave that had surged up around Regor forming between them a ringed barrier.

Ever and ever as the hissing pack carried him on through the blackness his mind came back to Dorina – Dorina, who would not open the Door of Life with Huon; Dorina, who did not want him to meet the Mother until she had persuaded Huon to keep shut the Door of Death – Dorina, who did not want to die!

He wondered how far they had gone through this blackness within which the lizard people moved as in broad daylight. He could not tell how fast was their pace. Yet it seemed to him that it must have gone several miles. Were they still in the Frog-woman’s cavern? What did the colossus guard in this vast lightless space, if hers it was?

He passed out of that blackness, without warning, as though he had been carried through an impalpable curtain.

Red light beat upon his eyes, brighter than the dim, rubrous haze through which he had gone so cautiously with Regor when they had left the lair, but of the same disturbing quality of darkness, shot through with crimson rust of light. All around him were the lizard-men, a hundred or more. He was being borne upon the heads of eight of the creatures, raised upon the pads of their forearms. Under that weird light their leathery skins were dull orange; the cockscombs of scarlet scales cresting their reptilian skulls were turned by it into a poisonous purple. They padded, hissing to each other, over the yellow sand.

He was lying upon his back, and the effort of turning his head was painful. He stared up. He could see no roof above him, nothing but the rusted murk. Steadily the light grew less dim, though never losing its suggestion of inherent darkness. Suddenly the lizard-men set up a louder and prolonged hissing. From somewhere far ahead came an answering sibilation. Their pace grew more rapid.

The red light abruptly lost much of its haziness. His bearers halted and lowered him to his feet. Hooked talons were thrust under his bonds and stripped them from him. Graydon stretched cramped arms and legs, and looked about him.

A hundred feet in front was an immense screen of black stone. It was semicircular in shape, and curved like a shallow shell. Its base was all of another hundred feet between the ends of its arc; its entire surface was pierced and cut with delicate designs through which ran strange patterns, unknown symbols.

Close to its center was a throne of jet, oddly familiar. With a prickling of his scalp he was suddenly aware that it was the exact duplicate of the sapphire throne of the Lord of Lords in the Temple. Screen and throne were upon a dais raised a few feet above the floor, and up to it ran a broad ramp. Between the throne and the head of the ramp was an immense bowl of the same ebon stone, its base imbedded in the rock. It was, he thought, like an oversized baptismal font, one designed for giants’ children. At the end of each wing of the curved screen was what, at that distance, seemed to be a low stone bench.

Empty was the black throne, empty the dais – were they empty? He searched them with his eyes. Of course they were empty! Then whence came his feeling that from every inch of that raised place within the screen something – someone – was regarding him, measuring him, weighing him, reading him with a cold malignant amusement… something evil… something incredibly evil… like the force that had streamed out upon him from… from the Face in the abyss…

He turned his back to the dais, with conscious effort. He faced a horde of the lizard-people. There were hundreds of them, grouped in orderly ranks, and at about the same distance away from him as the black throne. They stood silent, red eyes intent upon him. They were so close together that their scarlet crests seemed to form a huge, fantastically tufted carpet. Among them were lizard-women and children. He stared at them, small things like baby demons, little needled yellow fangs glistening between the pointed jaws, small eyes glittering upon him like goblin lanterns.

He looked to right and left. The cavern was distinguishable in a circle perhaps half a mile in diameter. At that distance the clearer light in which he stood ended, bounded by the red rust murk. To his right, the smooth yellow sand stretched to the boundary of that murk.

At his left was a garden! A garden of evil!

There, a narrow stream ran over the floor of the cavern in curves and intricate loops. It was crimson, like a stream of sluggishly running blood. Upon its banks were great red lilies, tainted and splotched with venomous greens; orchid blooms of sullen purple veined with unclean scarlets; debauched roses; obscene thickets of what seemed to be shoots of young bamboo stained with verdigris; crouching trees from whose branches hung heart-shaped fruits of leprous white; patches of fleshy leafed plants from whose mauve centers protruded thick yellowish spikes shaped like hooded adders down whose sides slowly dripped glistening drops of some dreadful nectar.

A little breeze eddied about him. It brought the mingled scents of that strange garden, and these were the very essence of it, distillation of its wickedness. They rocked him with blasphemous imaginings, steeped him with evil longings. The breeze lingered for a breath, seemed to laugh, then fled back to the garden and left him trembling.

He feared that garden! Yes, the fear of it was as strong as the fear of the black throne. Why did he fear it so? Evil, unknown and undreamed evil, was in it. It was living evil – ah, that was it! Vital evil! A flood of evil life pulsed and ran through every bloom, every plant and tree… evil vitality… they drew it from that stream of blood… but, ah, how strong one who fed upon their life might grow…

As that dark thought crept into Graydon’s mind, something deep within him seemed to awaken, to repulse it with cold contemptuous strength and to take stern control of his brain. His assurance and all his old courage returned to him. He faced the black throne fearlessly.

He felt its invisible occupant thrust out at him, search for some loophole in his defense, withdraw as though puzzled, drive against him viciously, as if to break him down, and then withdrew again. Immediately, as in obedience to a command, the lizard-people surged forward, driving him toward the ramp. At its foot he hesitated, but a half dozen of the creatures padded from the ranks, closed round him, and pushed him upward. They pressed him to the stone bench at the right of the screen, and down upon it. As he tried to break from those who were holding his arms, he felt the others at his feet. Something circled his ankles; there were two sharp clicks. The lizard-men padded away from him.

Graydon arose from the bench and looked down at his feet. There was a metal ring around each ankle, attached to thin chains running back under the bench. He wondered how long the chains were. He took a step, and another and another, and still the chains did not check him. He reached down and pulled one of them to him until it grew taut. Measuring it, he estimated that it was precisely long enough to enable him to mount to the seat of the black throne. Having thus verified an unpleasant suspicion. Graydon hastily returned to the stone bench.

He heard a subdued hissing, the padding of many feet The lizard-folk were going. Close-packed, they poured away, a tawny flood of leathery waves crested with leaping tongues of scarlet None looked back at him. They reached the encircling murk and vanished within it.

Graydon was alone, in the silence – alone with the evil garden and the throne of jet.

Slowly the red radiance that fell upon the dais began to dim and thicken, as though a spray of black light were sifting through it.

Denser it grew about the throne of jet, and upon the throne a deeper shadow formed. Shapeless, wavering at first, slowly it condensed, ceased wavering, took outline. Within the throne sat the shadow of a man. Faceless, featureless, cloudy hands gripping the arms of the throne, woven of the black atoms within the crepuscular rust – a man’s shadow!

The faceless head leaned forward. It had no eyes, yet Graydon felt its eyes upon him. It had no lips, yet its lips began to whisper.

He heard the voice of the Dark One! The whispering of the Shadow of Nimir, Lord of Evil!

— XV —

“LEND ME YOUR BODY,
GRAYDON!”

The voice of the Shadow was sweet, liquid as a flute heard from a forest at dusk. It lulled his fears, relaxed his guard.

“I know you, Graydon!” ran the whisper. “Know why you came to Yu-Atlanchi. Know how hopeless is your quest – without me. I brought you here, Graydon, commanding no harm to be done you. Else you would have been slain at the cavern. Do not fear me! You do not fear me, Graydon?”

He felt an oddly pleasant lethargy creeping over him as he listened to the melodious whisper.

“No,” he said, half-drowsily. “No, I do not fear you, Nimir.”

“Ah,” the Shadow drew itself up from the throne, something of the lulling sweetness left his voice, something of menace took its place. “So you know me!”

The spell upon Graydon loosened, his mind leaped to alertness. The Shadow saw it, and all the dulcet, soothing lure flowed back into its whisper.

“But that is well! It is very well, Graydon. You have been told many lies about me, without doubt. You have seen these people of Yu-Atlanchi. They are in decadence. They rot. But had they in the olden days followed my counsel, they now would be a great people – strong, vital, rulers of the world. And the old wisdom would not have perished. It would have shaped a new and better world.

“You have seen these people, Graydon, and I think you have weighed them. Do you believe they have reason to thank those who banished me and so condemned them to this end? I would not have abandoned them as did those other Lords, leaving them to a charlatan and a Snake-woman, who, not being human, therefore cannot understand the human need. I would have led them onward and upward to greater strength and greater wisdom. I would have placed them on the heights, Graydon, only the stars above them – not left them in the swamp, there to stagnate and decay. You believe me, Graydon?”

Graydon considered. It was a little difficult to think with this pleasantly lazy feeling holding one; there was a curious exhilaration in it, too. But yes, yes – it was all true. It was clear, cold logic. He had thought the same thing himself, in a way. Certainly it was a damnable thing for those Lords, whoever they might have been, to have gone calmly off as though they had no responsibility for the people. Who was the charlatan? Why, the Lord of Fools, of course. And the Mother? Half a snake! Damned apt descriptions. He quite agreed.

“Right, Nimir – you’re right!” he said, nodding solemnly.

A ghost of perfume from the garden stole to him. He drank it greedily. Odd he had thought it evil! It wasn’t. He felt damned good, and the scent made him feel even better. What was evil, anyway? Only a point of view. Not a bad sort this Shadow. Quite logical – reasonable…

“You are strong, Graydon,” the Shadow’s whisper was sweeter still. “Strong! You are stronger than any man of Yu-Atlanchi. Strong of body and strong of mind. You are like those of the Old Race whom I would have raised to the skies had it not been for trickery. It was not strength that defeated me, but the wiles of the Snake-woman who cares nothing for man – remember that, Graydon, the Snake who cares nothing for man! It was not to harm you but to test your strength that I just now wrestled with you. You were strong enough to resist me. I was glad of that, Graydon, for then I knew that at last I had found the man I need!”

So he was the man Nimir needed, eh? Well, he was a good man, a hell of a good man. He had gotten this far without help from anybody, hadn’t he? No, wait a minute – somebody had helped him. Who was it? No matter – he was a good man. But somebody had helped him… somebody…

The whisper of the Shadow broke smoothly into his groping thought.

“I need you, Graydon! It is not yet too late to remake this world as it ought to be; not yet too late to right the wrong to humanity wreaked by the ancient treachery to me. But I must have a body to do it, Graydon. A strong body to hold me. Lend me your body, Graydon! It will be but for a time. And during that time you shall share it with me; you shall see as I see, enjoy as I shall enjoy, share my power and drink the wine of my victories. And when I have grown to my old strength, then, Graydon, I will leave you in full possession, and I will make it immortal – aye, deathless as long as the sun endures! Let me share your body, Graydon – strong Graydon!”

Now the whispering ceased. Strong wine surged through Graydon’s veins, a rich, heady, reckless flood of life. He heard the blast of conquering trumpets! He was Genghis Khan, sweeping over kingdoms with his broom of Tartar horsemen; he was Attila lifted upon the shields of his roaring Huns; Macedonian Alexander trampling the world under his feet; Sennacherib holding all Asia like a goblet! He drank deep of power! He was drunk with power!

Was drunk! Was drunk? Who dared say that he, Nicholas Graydon, Master of the World, could be drunk! Well, all right – he was drunk, then. That was another funny idea – who wanted to be master of the world if all you got out of it was a drunk? Anybody could get drunk – therefore anybody who was drunk was master of the world! That was a funny idea… logical… have to tell that logical Shadow that funny idea…

He found himself wide awake and roaring with laughter. He stared stupidly about him, and no longer felt desire for laughter. For he was half-way to the throne of jet – and the Shadow was bending, bending over it, beckoning him, urging him on, and whispering – whispering—

The spell that had held him, the lure that had played him, as a fish is played, half into the Shadow’s creel, dropped from him. Loathing for that cloudy shape on the black throne, loathing for himself, bitter anger, swept him as he staggered back to the stone bench and dropped upon it, face hidden in shaking hands.

What had saved him? Not his consciousness, that thing he called himself. Something deep within his subconsciousness, something unalterably sane which had neutralized by ironic humor the poison his ears had been drinking. And now Graydon was afraid! So afraid that in sheer desperation he forced himself to lift his head and look straight at the Shadow.

It was staring at him, faceless head resting upon one misty hand. He sensed within it that same perplexity as when at first, unseen, it had striven to beat down his defenses – sensed, too, an infernal rage. Abruptly both were cut off; in their place flowed to him a current of calmness, deep peace. He strove to resist it, recognizing it for the trap it was; but it would not be repulsed; it lapped round him like little waves, caressing him, soothing him.

“Graydon!” came the whisper. “I am pleased with you, Graydon! But you are wrong to deny me. You are stronger than I thought, and that is why I am pleased with you. The body I share must be strong, very strong. Share your body with me, Graydon!”

“No! No! By God, no!” groaned Graydon, hating himself for the desire he felt to rush to this shadowy thing and let it merge itself with him.

“You are wrong! I will not harm you, Graydon. I do not want that strong body which is to be my home weakened. What is it you hope? Is it help from Huon? His days are few. Dorina has delivered him to Lantlu, even as she delivered you to me. Before the Feast of the Dream Makers his lair will be taken, and Huon and all left alive will feed the Xinli, or me – or pray that they had!”

The whisper died, as though the Shadow had paused to watch the effect of this announcement. If it was to test the lethargy that steeped Graydon, it was satisfied; he made no motion, nor did his face change from its fixed, fascinated stare.

“Lend me your body, Graydon! The Snake cannot help you. Whether you lend or not, soon shall I be incarnate. I would have your body rather than a weaker one – only to share, Graydon, only to share – and that but for a little while. Power, immortality, wisdom beyond all others! These shall be yours! Lend me your body, Graydon! You desire one woman? What is one woman to those you can possess! Look, Graydon, look—”

Graydon’s dazed eyes followed the pointing cloudy hand. He saw the evil blooms of the garden dipping and nodding to each other as though alive. He heard a witch song, a luting choral woven with arpeggios of lutes and tinkling sistrums which was the garden-given voice. A gust swept up from it and embraced him. As he breathed its fragrance wild-fire touched his blood. The nodding flowers vanished, blood-red stream vanished; the corroding light of rusted black atoms became lucent. Close to his feet was a rippling, laughing little brook, beyond it a copse of beech and birch. And from the copse women came streaming women of wondrous beauty, white nymphs and brown; full-breasted Bacchantes; slender, virginal dryads. They held out to him desirous arms, their eyes promised him undreamed delights. They came to the verge of the rill, beckoning him, calling him to them with voices that fanned the fire in his blood to flaming ecstasy of desire.

God – what women! That one with the coronal of bronze tresses might have been High Priestess of Tanith in the secret garden of her temple in old Carthage! And that one with the flood of golden hair might be white Aphrodite herself! Why, any one of them would make the fairest of houris in Mohammed’s Paradise look like a kitchen maid! Fiercer grew the fire in his veins – he leaped forward…

Stop! That girl who has stepped out from the others – who is she? She has midnight hair, and it covers her face. She’s weeping! Why is she weeping when all her sisters are singing and laughing? He once had known a girl whose hair was that same mist of midnight – who? No matter… whoever she had been, none who resembled her must weep! She herself must never weep… what was her name… Suarra!

A wave of pity swept through him, quenching the witchfires in his blood.

“Suarra!” he cried. “Suarra! You must not weep!” And with that cry he felt a tingling shock. The wave of beckoning women vanished. The girl of the misty hair vanished. Gone was laughing brook, and copse of birch and beech. The evil garden swayed before him. He stood more than half-way to the throne of jet. From it, the Shadow was leaning far out, quivering with eagerness, and whispering – whispering—

“Lend me your body, Graydon! All these you shall have if you will but lend me your body! Lend me your body, Graydon!”

“Curse you!” groaned Graydon, and then – “No, you devil! No!”

The Shadow stood erect. The pulse of rage that drove from it struck him like a material blow. He reeled under it, stumbled back to the safety of his bench. The Shadow spoke, and gone was all sweetness from its tone; its whisper was malignant, cold with purpose.

“You fool!” it said. “Now hear me. I shall have your body, Graydon! Deny me as you will, still shall I have it. Sleep, and I who do not sleep will enter it. Fight sleep, and when weariness saps that strength of yours, I will enter it. For a time you shall dwell within it with me, like a slave condemned, so tortured by what you see that again and again you will pray me to blot you out! And, because your body pleases me so, I will be merciful and give you this hope to dwell upon. After I am wearied of you, I will blot you out! Now, for the last time, will you submit to me? Lend me your body, share its tenancy with me, not as a slave but as master of all I have promised you?”

“No!” said Graydon, steadily.

There was a swirling upon the jet throne. It was empty of the Shadow. But still through the light upon the dais sifted the black atoms, and although that throne seemed empty, Graydon knew that it was not. And that the dark power was still there, watching, watching him.

Waiting to strike!

Graydon sat upon his bench, motionless as a man of stone. How many hours had passed since the whispering Shadow had gone, he did not know. His body was numb, but his mind was awake, brilliantly awake. He could not feel his body at all. His mind was like a tireless sentinel upon a sleeping tower. It was like an unquenchable light in a darkened castle. All his being was in that serene concentration of consciousness. He felt neither hunger nor thirst. He did not even think. That which was he, endured; withdrawn wholly into itself; unconquerable in a timeless world.

At first it had not been so. He had been sleepy, and he had fought sleep. He had dozed, and had felt the Shadow reach forth, touching him, testing his resistance. With what had seemed the last of his strength he had fought it back. He had striven to shut his mind from his surroundings, replace them with memory pictures of sane scenes. Sleep had again stolen upon him. He had awakened to find himself away from the bench, creeping toward the black throne. He had fled back in panic, thrown himself down, holding to the sides of the bench like a shipwrecked sailor to a spar.

He realized that the Shadow had its limitations, that it could not possess him unless it could draw him to its throne, or he mounted it of his own volition. As long as he remained upon the bench he was safe. After he had realized that, he did not dare close his eyes.

He wondered if by fixing his mind on her he could get in touch with the Snake Mother. If he could reach the bracelet on his arm, concentrate his gaze upon the purple stones, he might reach her. The sleeve of the coat-of-mail covered it too tightly, he could not get at it. And suppose she should summon him as she had before! Would not the Shadow leap into his unguarded body? The sweat dropped from his cold forehead. Frantically he shut the Serpent-woman from his thoughts.

He remembered the automatic beneath his armpit. If he could only get at that, it would give him a chance. At any rate, he could prevent the Shadow from getting his body to use it in any shape. It wouldn’t be much good to Nimir with its brains blown out! But there was no opening in the suit through which he could reach it. He wondered whether by some device he could persuade the lizard-men, if they came back, to strip him. There would be time enough for him to use the gun before they could take it from him.

And then slowly his consciousness had withdrawn to this impregnable fortress. He no longer feared sleep; sleep was of another world. He feared nothing. When that sentinel which was his very essence abandoned its post, it would leave his body dead. Of no value to the Dark One as a habitation. He knew that, and was content that it should be so.

The rusted light about the black throne began to thicken, as it had when first the Shadow appeared to him. Shapeless, wavering at the beginning as then, the thing took form, condensed into sharp outline. He watched, with the detached interest of a casual spectator.

The Shadow took no notice of him, did not even turn its faceless head to him. It sat upon the throne, motionless as Graydon himself, gazing toward the further wall of murk through which the lizard-people had gone. It raised a hand, as though in summons.

There was a far-away thudding of padding feet, scores of them; a faint chorus of hissings that swiftly grew louder. He did not turn his head to look, could not if he had the desire. The padding feet came close and stopped, the hissing ceased, the musky fetor of the lizard-folk crept round him.

Up the ramp strode the man in the lizard mask.

The hideous head rested upon broad shoulders, the body was powerful, graceful, clad in close-fitting green. In his hand was a heavy, thonged whip. He paid no attention to Graydon. He walked to the foot of the jet throne, and bowed low to the Shadow.

“Master! Hail, Dark Master!” the voice that issued from the fanged jaws was melodious and faintly mocking, its arrogance thinly covered. “I have brought you another vessel into which it may please you to pour the wine of your spirit!”

Now it seemed to Graydon that the Shadow looked upon the man in the lizard mask with a malice greatly to be dreaded; but if so, it went unnoticed by him, and the Shadow’s whisper held all its sweetness as it answered.

“I thank you, Lantlu—”

Lantlu! Graydon’s serenity was shaken. On the instant he regained his poise, and none too soon – for the Shadow had turned its face swiftly toward him, as a fisherman twitches his line when he feels the fish nibble at his bait.

“I thank you, Lantlu,” it repeated, “but I have found, I believe, the perfect vessel. It is now being reshaped somewhat upon the wheel, since it thinks itself designed for other purposes.”

Lantlu turned the red eyes of his mask at Graydon, and walked over to him.

“Ah, yes,” he said, “the hopeful fool from beyond who is to deliver Yu-Atlanchi from you and me, Master! Who conspires with Huon, the weakling, to shake our power. Who slinks through the night to meet his love. His love! You dog – even to look at one upon whom I had set my seal! And Suarra – to give her lips to such as you! Faugh! She would mate with the Urd! Well, after I take her, she shall.”

Now at this, Graydon’s citadel was shaken indeed; he felt his body again and tensed it to spring at Lantlu’s throat. With almost audible clang the opening gates of his mind closed, that aloof consciousness resumed its sway, secure, bulwarked once more from attack. And again it was none too soon, for even as they closed he felt the Shadow thrust upon them. And like a sentence written in one flaming symbol, he read that no matter what he heard, or what he beheld, he must not again heed it. Or the Shadow would reel him in!

Lantlu raised his whip, poised it to bring it slashing down across Graydon’s face.

“What?” he sneered. “So even that does not arouse you! Well, this may!”

The whip whistled down—

“Stop!” the whisper from the throne was thick with menace. Lantlu’s arm was jerked back as though a stronger hand had gripped his wrist, the whip fell to the stone.

“You shall not touch this man! I, the Shadow of Nimir, tell you so!” the whispering was venom made articulate. “That is my body you would have dared to strike! My body you would have dared deface! Sometimes you annoy me, Lantlu. Beware that you do not do it once too often!”

Lantlu stooped, and as he picked up the whip his hand was shaking, but whether with fear or rage Graydon could not tell. He raised his head and spoke, the old arrogance in his voice.

“Everyone to his taste, Dark Master,” he said boldly. “And since you approve of his body, I suppose there is excuse for Suarra. But it is not one I would choose, with all Yu-Atlanchi to pick from until I found one strong enough.”

“There is something more to a body than its shape, Lantlu,” whispered the Shadow, sardonically. “Precisely as there is something more to a head than a skull. It is why he beat you just now, although you are free and he is in chains. I had supposed you knew this.”

Lantlu quivered with rage, his hand clenched again about the whip. But he mastered himself.

“Well,” he said, “he shall see the fruit of his folly. The vessel I bring you. Dark Master, is he who was to shelter this chosen one of yours.”

He whistled. Up the ramp, arms held by two of the lizard-men, stumbled a Yu-Atlanchan tall as Lantlu himself. All the beauty of his face was wiped away by the fear that distorted it. His yellow hair dripped with the sweat of terror. He glared at the cloudy shape within the throne with eyes of nightmare. And as he glared, foam puffed from his lips in tiny bubbles.

“Come, Cadok, come!” jeered Lantlu. “You do not appreciate the honor shown you. Why, in a breath you will be no longer Cadok! You will be the Dark One! An apotheosis, Cadok – the only living apotheosis in all Yu-Atlanchi! Smile, man, smile!”

At this sinister jesting Graydon again thought that the Shadow’s unseen gaze rested upon the lizard mask darkly, but as before there was nothing of threat in its voice when it spoke.

“I am sure this vessel is too weak to hold me—” the Shadow leaned forward, studying the trembling noble, impersonally. “Indeed, were I not sure, I would not pour myself into him, Lantlu, since there upon the bench is the body I desire. But I will enter him… I think that I am a little weary… and at the least he will refresh me…”

Lantlu laughed, cruelly. He signaled the lizard-men. They ripped from Cadok his clothing, stripped him mother-naked. The Shadow bent, beckoning him. Lantlu gave him a quick push forward.

“On to your high reward, Cadok!”

And suddenly the face of Cadok was wiped clean of its nightmare terror. It became the face of a child. Like a child’s face it wrinkled, and great tears poured down his cheeks.

Eyes fixed upon the beckoning Shadow, he walked to the throne of jet and mounted it.

The Shadow enveloped him!

For an instant Graydon could see nothing but a lurid mist in which Cadok writhed. The mist wrapped him closer, forcing itself within him. The Yu-Atlanchan’s great chest swelled, his muscles knotted in agony.

And now his whole body seemed to expand as though rushing out to cover that part of the mist which still clung around him, unable to enter. The outline of his naked body became nebulous, cloudy, as though flesh and mist had merged into something less material than flesh, more material than the avid vapor.

The face of Cadok seemed to melt, the features to run together, then reassemble—

Upon the straining, tortured body was the Face in the abyss!

No longer stone!

Alive! The pale, sparkling blue eyes looked out over the cavern, at the lizard-folk, now prostrate, groveling upon their bellies, heads hidden; upon Lantlu with Satanic amusement, upon Graydon with a glint of triumph.

Abruptly, what had been the body of Cadok shriveled and collapsed. It twisted and rolled down from the throne to the dais. It lay there, twitching and strangely shrunken to half the size it had been.

Upon the throne sat only the Shadow.

But now the Shadow was less tenuous, closer knit, as though that which had gone from the body of Cadok, leaving it so shrunken, had been absorbed by it. It seemed to breathe. The Luciferean face was still visible within it, the pale blue eyes still glittered.

Again Lantlu laughed and whistled. The two Urd upon the dais hopped to their feet, picked up the shriveled body, carried it to the garden and threw it into the red stream.

Lantlu raised his hand in careless salute to the jet throne, turned on his heel with never a glance at Graydon, and marched away swinging his whip, the Urd pack at his heels.

“Not you, but he is the fool, Graydon!” whispered the Shadow. “He serves my purpose now, but when I… Better lend me your body, Graydon, than have me take it! I will not treat you as I did Cadok. Lend me your body, Graydon! I will not torture you. I will not blot you out, as I threatened. We shall dwell together, side by side. I will teach you. And soon you will look back upon the man you now are, and wonder why you ever thought to resist me. For never have you lived as you shall live, Graydon! No man on earth has ever lived as you shall live! Lend me your body, Graydon!”

But Graydon was silent.

There came from the Shadow a whispering laugh. It wavered – and was gone!

Graydon waited, like a hare which has heard the fox go from where it hides, but lingers to be sure. After a time he knew definitely that the Shadow had departed. There was nothing of it left; no unseen crouching power awaiting its chance to strike. He relaxed, stood upon numb and uncertain feet, fighting a violent nausea.

And as he stood, he felt a touch upon his ankle, looked down and saw reaching from behind the edge of the carven screen a long and sinewy arm covered with scarlet hair. The needled, pointed fingers felt carefully around the metal link that fettered him, snapped it open, crept to the other and released it while Graydon stood staring stupidly, unbelievingly, at it.

A face peered round the screen’s edge, chinless, scarlet elf locks falling over a sloping forehead, golden eyes filled with melancholy staring at him.

The face of Kon, the spider-man!

— XVI —

THE PAINTED CHAMBER

Kon’s face was distorted by what was undoubtedly intended for a reassuring smile. Graydon, limp with reaction from his ordeal, dropped to his hands and knees. Kon reached over the side of the dais and lifted him up as easily as though he had been a puppy. Grotesque though he was, Graydon saw him then as more beautiful than any of those phantom women who had almost lured him into the Shadow’s net. He put his arms around the hairy shoulders and clung tightly to them. The spider-man patted him on the back with his little upper hands, making odd comforting clicking sounds.

From the garden came a shrill humming as of thousands of bees in swarm. Its flowers and trees were bending and twisting as though blown by a strong wind. Kon’s huge eyes scanned it doubtfully, then, with Graydon still held close, he slipped around the edge of the screen. The humming in the garden rose octaves higher in pitch, threatening and – summoning.

As they turned its edge, Graydon saw that the screen was not detached as he had supposed. It was in reality a sculptured alcove, cut from the front of a buttress which thrust into the red cavern like the prow of a ship. A smooth cliff of black rock angled back from it.

Crouching at the base of this cliff, their scarlet hair causing them to be barely discernible in the rubrous haze, were two more spider-men. They arose as Kon swung toward them. Graydon had a sense of weird duplication as they regarded him with their sorrowful golden eyes – as though not one Kon had come for him, but three. Clutched in the terminations of their four middle arms, or feet, were long metal bars like that which Regor wore, but unlike his, they had handgrips and ended in spiked knobs. Two of these bars they passed to Kon. Mingled now with the insistent humming of the garden was a faint hissing undertone, far away, and rapidly growing closer; the clamor of the Urd.

Graydon wriggled in Ken’s arm, and motioned to be set down. The spider-man shook his head. He clicked to the others, gripped his two bars in the opposite hand, and dropping upon four of his stilts turned sharply from the wall of rock. He scuttled toward the wall of murk half a mile away. His comrades ranged on each side of him. They ran bent almost double, with the speed of a racing horse. They entered the rusty murk. The humming and hissing lessened to a faint drone, were swallowed by the silence.

Ahead, a barrier of reddish rock sprang out of the haze, vanishing in the heights above. At its base were great boulders, fallen from the cliff, and among them hundreds of smaller ones, smooth and ochreous, and shaped with a queer regularity. The spider-men slowed to a walk, scanning the face of the precipice. Suddenly Graydon smelled the reek of the lizard-folk, knew those oddly similar boulders for what they were—

“Kon!” he cried, pointing. “The Urd!”

The boulders moved, sprang up, rushed upon them – a pack of the lizard-men, hissing, slaver dripping from ranged jaws, red eyes glowing.

Before they could turn, the pack was all around them. Kon dropped upon three stilts, out swung two other stilts whirling the great bars. His comrades rose on their hinder legs, a bar gripped in each of their four free hands. They flailed through the first ranks of the encircling pack, mowing them down. They re-formed into a triangle, back to back. Into the center of this triangle Kon set Graydon with an admonitory click. Out swung the bars again, cracking the pointed skulls of the Urd, unable to strike with their stumpy arms under that deadly ring, or to break through it.

The spider-men retreated slowly along the base of the cliff, cutting their way as they went. Graydon could no longer watch the fight, intent upon keeping his feet as he walked over the writhing bodies which paved the way. He heard a sharp clicking from Kon, felt his arm embrace and lift him. There was a quick rush forward. They had waded through the waves of the Urd. Down upon four stilts they dropped, and raced away, clicking triumphantly as they sped along. The hissing of the pack and the pad of their pursuing feet died.

Their pace decreased, they went more and more slowly, Kon studying the scarp. He halted, set Graydon down, and pointed to the cliff. High above the floor of the cavern, set in the red rock face, was an oval black stone. The spider-man scuttled up to it, raised his long arms, and began feeling delicately around it. He gave a satisfied click, and keeping his talons upon a spot at the side of the stone, beckoned to Graydon.

He took his hand, and placed it against the cliff with the fingers spread wide and the heel of the hand pressing hard against the rock. Thrice he did this, and then, lifting him, carefully placed his fingers where his own claws had rested. Graydon understood. He was showing him where some mechanism was located which Kon’s sharp-pointed digits could not motivate. He pressed fingers and heel of hand as directed.

A stone moved slowly upward like a curtain, revealing a dark tunnel. Kon clicked to his comrades. The pair passed warily through the black opening, bars ready. Soon they reappeared and conferred. The spider-man patted Graydon on the back, and pointing to the tunnel, followed him into it. Here Kon again felt along the inner edge of the opening until he had found what he sought, and again he pressed Graydon’s hand upon a spot which seemed to his touch precisely the same as the surrounding surface, as had the outer lock. The curtain of rock dropped, leaving him in utter blackness.

Darkness evidently meant no more to the spider-men than it did to the lizard-folk, for he heard them moving on ahead of him. Momentary panic seized him that they might not be able to understand his limitations and would leave him behind. Before he could cry out, Kon’s arm was around him, had lifted him up and carried him away.

On they went, and on, through the darkness. Graydon felt rise around him a fine, impalpable dust, so fine that only by the millstones of incalculable ages could it have been ground to such tenuity. It told him that this passage was one unused by the lizard-folk or any other, and evidently it told the spider-men the same thing, for they went on confidently, with increased speed.

The darkness began to gray; now he could see the walls of the tunnel; and now they passed out of it into an immense chamber cut in the living rock. Dim within it as the light might be, it seemed glaring daylight to Graydon after the rust haze of the Shadow’s cavern and the blackness of the passage. It came through fissures in the far side of the place. The impalpable dust was thick upon its floor.

In its center was a huge oval pool in which glimmered water, and around whose raised rim squatted a score of figures like gray gnomes. They were motionless, rigid. The spider-men drew together and clicked busily to each other, looking about them with obvious perplexity. Graydon walked over to the pool and touched one of the squatting gnomes. It was stone. He looked at the figures more closely. They were carven effigies of hairless, tailless, gray ape-men. Their long upper lips dropped to mouths beneath which were well-defined chins. The sinewy hands of their long arms knuckled the stone on which they sat. Their foreheads, though retreating, were semi-human. In the stone sockets of their eyes were gems resembling smoky topazes. With these topaz eyes they stared at the pool with something of that same puzzled melancholy which filled the golden eyes of Kon and his mates.

Walking around them, Graydon saw that they were both male and female, and that each wore a crown. He bent closer. The crowns were miniature sculptures of Serpent-people, serpent-men and serpent-women, their coils twisted round the heads of the gray ape-men like the sun-snake upon the Uraeus crown of the Pharaohs.

Down into the still pool a flight of yellow marble steps fell, vanishing in its depths.

Wondering, he walked over to a fissure, and as he drew near he saw that this whole face of the chamber had been broken away by the same force, earthquakes or subsidences perhaps, which had opened up the fissures. He peered out. He looked over the plain of the monolithic stones beyond the barrier. The chamber was at the very edge of the sky-reaching wall.

The sun was low – was it rising? If so, the time he had spent with the Shadow had been but a night. He had thought it much longer. He watched for awhile – the sun was setting. His ordeal had lasted a night and a day.

He turned back to Kon, suddenly aware that he was both thirsty and hungry. Under the direct light from the fissures, the wall through which they had come stood out clearly. Looking at it he halted, forgetting both hunger and thirst.

Along all its thousand-foot length it was covered with paintings. Paintings by lost masters, as rich in detail as Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, landscapes as mystically beautiful as those of El Greco or Davies, portraiture as true as Holbein’s or Sargent’s, colorful as Botticelli, fantastic – but only so, he knew, because they pictured an unknown world; nothing in them of the fantasy of the unreal. He ran back to examine them.

Here was a city of rose-coral domes whose streets were bordered by scaled trees red and green, with foliage like immense ferns. Along them the serpent-people were borne in litters upon the heads of the gray ape-men. And here was a night scene with the constellations looking serenely down upon smooth fields covered with rings of pale green radiance through which the serpent-people moved in some strange ritual.

There was something peculiar about those constellations – he studied them. Of course, the outline of the Dipper, the Great Bear, was not the same shape as now. The four stars of its bowl were closer for one thing, a perfect square. And there was Scorpio – its claws not an arc but a straight bar of stars.

Why, if that picture of them were true, it showed the heavens as they must have been hundreds of thousands of years ago. How many ages before those distant orbs could shift to the position they seem to occupy today? It dizzied him.

And there was something peculiar about the pictures of the serpent-people. They lacked that human quality, so marked and so weird, of the Mother. Their heads were longer, flatter, reptilian. Their bodies above their coils were plainly development of the saurian; unmistakably evolved from a reptilian stem. He could accept them as realities – since in varying environments the evolution of almost any kind of intelligent creature is possible. He realized that it was the abrupt transition from serpent to woman that made the Serpent-woman incomprehensible; unreal.

Again he knew the haunting doubt – was she in reality as he had seen her, or, by some unknown power of will, did she create in the minds of those who looked upon her, illusion of childish body and heart-shaped face of exquisite beauty? He went back to the pool and scanned more closely the crowns upon the gray ape-men. They were like the serpent-people upon the wall. He compared them with the bracelet on his wrist. Well, whoever had carved that had seen the Serpent-woman as he had.

Wondering, he went back to his study of the painted wall. He looked long at the painting of a vast swamp in which monstrous bodies floundered; from its mud hideous heads peered, and over it great winged lizards flapped on leathery bat-like wings. He stared even longer at the next. It was the same swamp; in the foreground was a group of the serpent-people. They lay coiled behind what appeared to be an immense crystal disk. The disk seemed to be swiftly revolving. And all over the morass, battling with the monsters, were winged shapes of flame. They held a core of brilliant incandescence from which sprang two nebulously radiant wings, like those of the sun’s corona seen during some eclipses. These winged shapes appeared to pulse abruptly out of empty air, dart upon the monsters and fold their lambent wings about them.

And there was another city… the city across the lake from the cavern of the Frog-woman was a miniature of it, but there were no mountains around it. It came to him that this was the Yu-Atlanchi of the immemorial past, from which the serpent-people and those they had fostered had fled before the flood of ice whose creeping progress all their arts could not check… He saw a fleet of strange ships, one of them fighting off the attack of a group of gigantic seasaurians whose heads reared high above its masts…

The history of a whole lost world was within that painted cavern. It held the pictured record of a lost era of earth’s history.

He saw that at one time the paintings had covered all four walls. They were almost obliterated on two sides, completely so on that of the fissures. Only where the passage had opened were the pictures complete.

What had this chamber been? Why abandoned? He was again aware of thirst. He walked back to the pool. He heard a warning click from Kon. Graydon pointed to the pool and to his throat. For full measure, he rubbed his belly and made the motions of chewing. The spider-man nodded, scuttled to the yellow steps and down them. He dipped a hand in the water, smelled of it; cautiously tasted it He nodded approvingly, bent down and sucked in a huge draft.

Graydon knelt and scooped up handfuls. It was cold and sweet.

Kon clicked to his comrades. They went searching about the fissures, and presently returned with large pieces of brown fungi. Kon took a bit, dipped it into water, bit off a corner and handed the balance of it to Graydon. He accepted it doubtfully, but tasting it found that it absorbed the water like a sponge and was somewhat like bread with a pleasant yeasty flavor. He took another piece and dipped it. The three Weavers squatted beside him. All solemnly sopped their fungi in the pool and chewed it.

And suddenly Graydon began to laugh. Surely no man had ever dined as he was dining – squatting there beside the weird pool with the three scarlet grotesques, dipping mushrooms in the water with topaz-eyed, hairless, gray ape-men looking on, and the history of a lost epoch spread out before him for his entertainment. He laughed and laughed, with swiftly growing hysteria.

Kon looked at him, clicking inquiringly. Graydon could not stop his laughing, nor the sobbing hiccoughs that now began to punctuate it. Kon took him up in his long arms, and swung him to and fro like a baby.

Graydon clung to him; the hysteria passed away. And in passing it took with it all the taint of the Shadow’s whispers, all the hateful lure of the evil garden. The film of evil which lay upon his mind passed away like scum on water under a strong cleansing wind.

He was sleepy, he had never felt so sleepy! Now he could sleep without fear of the Shadow creeping into him. Kon wouldn’t let anything like that happen. The light was dimming fast… sun must be almost down… he’d sleep for a few minutes…

Cradled in the arms of the spider-man, Graydon dropped into deepest, dreamless sleep.

— XVII —

TAKING OF HUON’S LAIR

Dawn was filtering into the painted cavern. Graydon sat up and looked uncomprehendingly about him. He was upon a bed of moss. One of the spider-men squatted close to him, studying him with puzzled, sad eyes. There was no sign of the others.

“Where’s Kon?” he asked. The spider-man answered with a string of rapid clicks.

“Kon! Hey, Kon!” called Graydon.

The Weaver sensed his anxiety, and its reason; he sidled to him, patted him with his small upper hands, nodding and softly clicking. Graydon gathered he was being told there was nothing to worry about. He smiled and patted the Weaver upon a shoulder. The spider-man seemed much pleased. He scuttled over to the crevices, returning with the bread-like fungi. The two went down to the pool and breakfasted; the Weaver keeping up an amiable succession of clicks between bites, and Graydon companionably answering with a totally unrelated monologue. He felt refreshed, ready to cope with anything.

There was a movement in one of the large crevices. Through it came the scarlet body of Kon, and following him the second Weaver. The trio clicked busily. Kon waited until Graydon had finished his last piece of fungi, beckoned him and moved over to the crevice through which he had entered. The other spider-men crawled through it, vanishing. Kon followed, and disappeared. His long red arm stole back into the slit, and looked out. Far below was the plain of the monoliths.

Kon’s arm crooked round him, and drew him out. Graydon’s head swam, for below him was a sheer half-mile drop.

The spider-man was hanging to the face of the cliff, his supple fingers gripping cracks and projections which only they could have made use of. He tucked Graydon under his arm, and began to crawl along the precipice. Graydon looked down just once more, and was convinced he would feel better if he kept his eyes on the rock. They swung along for about two thousand feet Another crevice appeared. Kon thrust him through it, and scrambled after him.

They were in a wide passage which had probably once run into the painted cavern. The same destructive agency had been at work. Its end was blocked by a rock fall, and its wall was pierced by scores of holes and fissures. Its floor was littered with fallen stone. Kon looked doubtfully at Graydon and stretched out his arm. Graydon shook his head violently, tired of being carried around like a baby. They set off down the corridor, but his progress was comparatively slow; so slow that Kon shortly picked him up with a conciliatory click. The three Weavers set off at a fast pace over the debris. He resigned himself. After all, as well ride a spider-man as a camel or an elephant; if one had never seen a camel or an elephant they would seem just as unusual as Kon and his kind.

The passage darkened, blackened and finally curved into a caverned space filled with a dim twilight. There were no fissures. The light was the same as that which streamed from the walls in Huon’s lair, but here it seemed to be dying, old and outworn, as though the force which produced it were almost spent. The place was a vast storehouse. Graydon caught glimpses of enigmatic mechanisms of crystal arid black metal, among them huge globes of silver; once he saw something which appeared to be the hull of a ship, and once he passed by what was certainly one of the crystal disks painted in the battle in the primeval swamp. They loomed all around him, these vague, shrouded shapes of mystery. The spider-men paid no attention to them, threading their way rapidly.

They entered another black tunnel. They had gone along this for a mile or more when Kon gave a click of warning.

He set Graydon down, and the four stood listening. He heard men walking slowly and cautiously, and not far away. A cloudy light abruptly impinged upon the wall of the tunnel, as though a little luminous ball of cloud had been thrown against it. It came from a transverse passage only a few yards ahead. The spider-men gripped their bars, stole softly forward.

Before they could reach the opening, a man’s head projected around the side – a head whose hair was silvery-white over a stained bandage, the scars of claws upon its cheek—

“Regor!” shouted Graydon, and rushed by the spidermen.

The giant bounded into the tunnel, embracing him, bellowing amazed joy. The spider-men came forward, clicking like castanets. From the transverse passage emerged five of the Fellowship men, clothing torn, carrying swords and maces and small round shields; all showed the marks of heavy fighting; After them trooped a dozen of the Emers with spears and swords and the same small shields, kilts tattered and none of them without some wound.

One of these grinned at him out of a battered face and held up his rifle.

“How the devil did you know where to look for me?” demanded Graydon when at last Regor had grown coherent.

“I wasn’t looking for you, lad,” he answered. “I was looking for a way into the Temple to tell Suarra of your capture, hoping she would raise such a storm about it that the Mother could not refuse to aid you – if you were still alive. Also I admit hoping this would involve protection for myself and these with me. And on second thought, I’m not so sure I am glad I did find you. It was our only hope, and now I have no excuse to appeal to Adana.” He grinned.

“Protection!” exclaimed Graydon. “I don’t understand you, Regor. You must have gotten back to the lair safely.”

“The lair is sacked!” said Regor. “Ripped open, gutted. Huon is prisoner of Lantlu. The Fellowship, what’s left of it, dispersed, wandering like us about these burrows.” “Good God!” Graydon was aghast. “What happened?” “Dorina did it,” said the giant, and there was a murmur of hatred from the others. “Something told me to kill her, when I managed to get back to the lair after you had disappeared. But I wasn’t sure she had betrayed us. Last night, while we were asleep, she opened a secret door to Lantlu and a few of his friends. They stole in and killed quietly and quickly the guards at the great door. Dorina lifted it, and let in more of Lantlu’s supporters and a pack of the Urd. There was no time for us to gather. Many were slaughtered in their beds. After that it was group fighting all over the place. I saw them drag Huon down and truss him. Some of our Emers managed to escape – how much of the Fellowship, I don’t know. Not many, I fear. We were fortunate. They added a few more scars to my decorations,” he touched the bandage, “but they paid for it.”

“Dorina!” whispered Graydon, “Dorina! Then the Shadow did not lie!” Regor started, looked at him keenly. “Lad – you’ve seen the Shadow! The Dark Master!” “I’ll say I have!” said Graydon, grimly, in his own tongue, then in the Aymara, “I was his guest for a night and a day. He was bargaining for my body!”

Regor drew back a step, scrutinizing him. He clicked to Kon and the spider-man answered at some length. When he finished, Regor stationed the Indians at guard at the opening through which they had come, and seated himself on a block of fallen stone.

“Now, tell me everything. And this time – keep nothing back.”

Graydon did, from the first stealthy onslaught of the hidden lizard-man. Regor and the five Yu-Atlanchans listened, silent, fascinated. When he told the fate of Cadok, Regor groaned, his face livid, and beat his breast with clenched fist.

“Good lad! Good lad!” he muttered brokenly, when Graydon had ended, and sat for a time in thought.

“That cavern where you thought you saw a ship,” he broke his silence. “If you are right – it was a ship. One of those upon which our ancestors came to the Hidden Land with the serpent-people, and preserved there with many other precious things. So long has that cavern been locked away, unentered, that it was thought to be but another legend, a wonder tale. None but the Snake Mother and the Lord of Folly remembers the way into it, unless it be Nimir. And if he does, it is plain he has not given the secret to Lantlu.

“The cavern of the Lost Wisdom!” there was awe in Regor’s voice. “And it exists! By the Mother, what we have forgotten! How we have fallen from the ancient strength! Once, Graydon, so the story runs, there was a wide entrance to it opening upon the lake. This was blocked with rocks, and the rocks melted, by some device the Old Ones knew, after the war that ended in the prisoning of Nimir. So cunningly was it done that none now can tell that sealed place from the surrounding stone. Yet I have heard a way was left to it from the Temple, through which the Lords and the Snake Mother passed from time to time when desire came to them to look again upon its ancient treasures. Once in, I think we can find its door, and if we do I have that which will open it.”

He drew Graydon aside.

“Did you think I had abandoned you, lad?” he whispered, huskily. “The Urd were too thick around me to break through. Although I fought as never before. Then by lucky chance that Emer over there who held your noisy weapon set it going. The Urd scattered squealing and even Lantlu dropped from the platform. But you were nowhere in sight, or hearing. I knew you had been carried off. The Emer and I were away before Lantlu could gather his pack together. When I reached the lair, we took council. It was Huon’s idea to send Kon after you. Huon was strange – strange as when he bade you farewell. There was a cavern of red-dust light, he said. There Kon and his Weavers must search. They must start, he said, from the opening through which we passed when we left the lair… always have we known that there was danger of meeting the Urd in that place… but never dreamed that it was a way to the throne of the Dark One. Back, far back you must go, Huon told Kon. And then… his face became drawn and white as when he spoke of the slaying shadows dropping from the red sky… and he told of a black precipice ending in a black shrine beside a garden. There they would find you.”

“I opened that door and let them out. I watched them merge at once into the murk, and realized how wisely Huon had picked them. Kon says they made their way swiftly far, far back, seeing no Urd, until at last the black cliff sprang up before them. Now which way to follow that wall, he did not know; by chance decided upon the left. On they went and on until he heard the sound of many Urd, and a man’s voice, and a voice which Kon says ‘spoke without a man to hold it.’ They waited until the Urd had gone away and until the bodiless voice had gone—”

“And there you were, in the black shrine beside the garden! Strange… strange that Huon…”

He paused, shaking his head perplexedly.

“That little beast of yours is done for, I fear,” he said. “But just before the raid I took some of your weapon’s food.”

He called the Indian who held the gun. Graydon took it, rejoicing in the feel of it. The Emer thrust a pouch out to him. Within it were about a hundred cartridges and several, clips for his automatics. He looked the rifle over, it was unharmed. He loaded it.

“Put your hand through the slit of this damned armor, Regor,” he said. “Reach up under my arm and give me what you find there.”

Regor obeyed, drew out the automatic. Graydon thrust it into his belt. He felt much better; swords and maces were all right in their way, but every man knew his own weapons best.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Regor whistled to the guard, and touched Kon. The spider-man beside him, he led the way up the black passage, retracing Graydon’s journey. The two Weavers fell in behind them, Graydon and the Fellowship men followed, the Indians brought up the rear. Regor did not depend upon Kon’s eyes for guidance. Now and again he cast ahead of him the vaporous, light-stimulating ball.

They came to that place Regor had called the Cavern of Lost Wisdom. As he crossed its threshold, he dropped upon his knees and kissed the floor. The Yu-Atlanchans whispered among themselves but did not imitate him.

They threaded their way through it in the crepuscular dusk of the dying atoms; past the dim, vague shapes of the mysterious machines, past immense coffers of metals red and gray that held, Graydon wondered, what relics of the lost world; by the huge silvery globes they went, and he saw that upon them were traced enigmatic symbolings in lacquers of gold and blue; they came to the shadowy hull of the great ship, and here again Regor bent his knee. On and on they went, through the dusk, past the science, the art, the treasures of the serpent-people and the mighty forefathers of the Yu-Atlanchans. They came to their end, and looked out over an empty space whose further side they could not see.

“We must cross there,” Regor said, “until we come to the rock that seals the ancient entrance. The corridor of the Lords, so said he who told me of this, is at its edge and in the direction of the cataract, which is at the right. The tunnel runs under the lake and skirts the amphitheater of the Xinli. There we must go softly, for I do not know whether other passages may not open into the one we travel. If so, it seems to me they must be sealed – indeed, must be, since the Old Ones planned to shut this cavern off for all time. Still, we will take no chances. And, somewhere near, there is an entrance into the tunnel which Suarra traveled from the Hall of the Weavers that night she met us.”

They set off across the empty space. They came at length to a wall of rock which appeared to be formed of boulders fused by volcanic heat. Regor grunted complacently. They skirted the wall to the right until Regor saw, set high within the rock, an oval black stone like that Kon had searched for in the red cavern.

Regor clicked to the spider-man. Kon felt carefully around the stone as he had the other, turned and shook his head. Regor took from his belt the cone he had used to open the door from the lair and gave it to him. Light sprayed from it as the red Weaver pressed it methodically over the face of the barrier. The rock began slowly to open, like the two valves of a sliding door. They peered into a corridor, much more brilliantly lighted, dropping at an easy decline. After they had entered, Kon pressed the cone to the inner sides. The rock portal closed. Look closely as he might, Graydon could see no traces of it; the rock was smooth and unlined.

They went through that passage for a mile or more. Straight at first, it soon began to twist tortuously, as though it had been cut from some soft, meandering vein.

“We have passed beneath the lake, I know that if nothing else,” whispered Regor.

Abruptly the corridor terminated in a small crypt. Two of its walls bore a black oval. Regor looked at them, and scratched his head.

“By Durdan the Hairy!” he grumbled. “There were so many turns that I know not which side is toward the Temple and which away from it.”

Nor could the others help him.

“Well,” he decided, “we go to the right.”

Kon manipulated the cone. Almost immediately a stone slid upward. They were in a tunnel brighter still, and running at right angles.

“If this is right, then we go right again,” said Regor. They slipped along, cautiously. They stepped out of the tunnel without warning into a guard chamber in which were half a dozen Emer soldiers, not in yellow but in green-kilted kirtles, and an officer, a noble clad also in Lantlu’s green.

These stared at the motley intruders, like men of wood. Before they could recover from their amazement, Regor signaled Kon. Instantly the three spider-men sprang upon the Indians and throttled them. Regor’s strong fingers went round the officer’s throat. And all so quickly that Graydon himself had had no time to move.

Regor loosened his grip, and raised his bar. Kon scuttled over, stood behind the Yu-Atlanchan, pinioned his arms.

“So right was wrong!” muttered Regor. “Speak softly, Ranena. Answer briefly. What place is this?”

Ranena glanced at the bodies of his guards at the feet of the two Weavers, and little beads of sweat stood out on his forehead.

“No need to treat me so, Regor,” he said thickly. “I have never been your enemy.”

“No?” asked Regor suavely, “and yet I thought I saw you in the lair last night. Perhaps I was mistaken. However – answer quickly, Ranena!”

“It guards a way to the amphitheater,” the answer came sullenly. As though to confirm him, there came a rumbling as of far-away thunder, and the sound of cheering. “They race the Xinli,” he added.

“And Lantlu, of course, is there?” asked Regor.

A shade of malice crossed Ranena’s fine face.

“And Dorina,” he said.

“What have they done with Huon?”

“Listen, Regor,” Ranena’s clear eyes darkened craftily, “if I tell you where Huon is and how to reach him, will you promise not to kill me, but truss me up and gag me before you go to him?”

“What have they done with Huon?” repeated Regor.

He clicked to the spider-man. One of Kon’s hands covered Ranena’s mouth, with the others he began slowly to lift his arms behind him and twist them. Ranena writhed, his face distorted with agony. He nodded.

Kon withdrew his hand, lowered his arms. Little drops of blood ran down the cheek where the needled fingers had pierced it.

“After the next race – he fights the Xinli,” he groaned.

“So!” said Regor quietly. “So! And now do I see that though right was wrong, wrong has become right!”

He signaled Kon. The spider-man bent back Ranena’s neck and snapped it.

Regor looked down into the glazing eyes, and turned to his Indians.

“You and you—” he pointed in turn to six of them, “dress yourselves in their clothes. Notalu,” he spoke to one of the Yu-Atlanchans, “strip Ranena, and change your yellow for his green. Then watch. Probably none will come, but if they do – slay them swiftly before they have a chance to cry out I will leave you two of the Weavers – you know how to command them. Kon goes with me. But first we must get rid of this carrion.”

He clicked to Kon. The spider-man picked up the bodies, and carried them into the corridor which Ranena had said led to the amphitheater. They laid the stiffening figures along its walls, out of sight of the guard room. They returned and two of them dropped behind the stone benches, hidden.

“Now let us see what can be done for Huon,” said Regor.

They stole down the corridor, past Ranena, glaring at them with dead eyes.

There was a blaze of sunlight, dazzling Graydon. Squares of black danced in it. He heard the thunder of monstrous feet.

His vision cleared. He stood before a door grated with heavy metal bars. He looked through it into the arena of the dinosaurs.

— XVIII —

THE ARENA
OF THE DINOSAURS

The floor of the arena was an immense oval about five hundred feet across, a half-mile in length, and covered with smooth yellow sand. Around this oval ran a wall of polished, jade-green stone four times the height of a tall man. There were grated openings in it here and there, a few much larger than that through which he peered. Beyond the wall, tier upon tier of stone seats stretched back to the amphitheater’s rim a hundred and fifty feet on high. Here banners streamed. Within the greater oval was a smaller one, made of a thick, four-foot wall; the two made a track about fifty feet wide.

Almost directly opposite Graydon was a wide section thronged with the Yu-Atlanchans. Slender, green lacquered pillars arose from its supporting silken awnings. It was like a gigantic flower garden with the gay and vivid hues of the women’s garments blossoming out of the dominant green which evidently was Lantlu’s chosen color.

Bordering this enclosure of the nobles was a double file of the green-kirtled Emers bearing javelins and bows; then came a wide and empty area of the seats, another double file of the soldiers, and beyond them thousands of the Indians in holiday dress. And beyond them stretched untenanted tier upon tier – proof of the dwindling numbers of the ancient people.

In the curiously clear air, distances were foreshortened. At the very front he saw Lantlu, surrounded by a group of laughing nobles. Who was the woman beside him?

Dorina!

He heard Regor cursing, knew he, too, had seen her.

But Dorina was not laughing with the others. She sat, chin on clenched hands, looking somberly across the arena, staring straight at where they hid, as though – as though she watched them. Graydon drew hastily back.

“Will that weapon of yours reach her?” Regor’s face was black with hate.

“Easily – but I’d rather try it on Lantlu,” answered Graydon.

“No – on neither of them. Not now—” he shook his head, recovering his control. “It would bring us no closer to Huon. But that rotting daughter of a carrion eater, that buala – to come to watch him die!”

“Well, she doesn’t seem very happy about it,” said Graydon.

Regor groaned, and began searching around the sides of the grating.

“We must get this open,” he grumbled. “Get Huon to us when they let him out… where’s the cursed lock… then we can run back to the tunnel and get away by that other door… better send Kon to carry him back… no, Kon can run faster than any of us, but not faster than the arrows… they’ll fill him with them before he is half-way there… no, we’ll have to wait… by the Seven… ah, there it is!”

There was the sound of bolts slipping. He tried the door. It was open. Twice they locked and unlocked it, and to make certain no time would be wasted on it when the moment came, Graydon marked the pressure spots with the end of a cartridge.

There was a fanfare of trumpets. A grating below Lantlu swung open. Out of it leaped six of the riding Xinli. Tyrannosaurs, thunder-lizards dwarfed like those of the hunting packs, but not so greatly. Monstrous black shapes shining as though covered with armor of finely cut jet. Their thick tails, twice as long as their bodies, tapered to a point; the tails curved up, twitching restlessly. Their small reptilian heads turned nervously upon long, slender, snake-like necks. They bent forward upon hind legs heavy and cylindrical as those of an elephant. They held their small forelegs close to their breasts, like kangaroos – whose attitude when at rest, in fact, almost precisely simulated that of these dinosaurs.

Where the slender necks ran into the sloping shoulders a rider sat, each clad in different color, like jockeys. They were of the nobles, and despite their height they were monkey-small against the bulk of their steeds. They squatted upon little saddles, stirruped, holding reins which manipulated a massive bit. The dinosaurs champed at these bits, hissing and grumbling, striking at each other with their absurdly small heads like spirited racers at the starting post, chafing to be gone.

There was another fanfare of the trumpets, and immediately upon it the thundering of the huge feet. The Xinli did not hop, they ran as a man runs, legs pumping up and down like pistons. Necks stretched rigidly ahead of them, they swept round the oval course. They passed Graydon in a bunch and with the speed of an express train. The wind from their passing rushed through the grating like a whirlwind. He shuddered, visualizing what would happen to a file of men trying to oppose those projectiles of sinew and bone.

They passed the enclosure of the nobles like a rushing black cloud. From Yu-Atlanchans and Indians came a storm of cheering. And now, as they neared him again, Graydon saw that there was another phase to this racing of the dinosaurs. They were no longer grouped. Two were in the lead, a rider in green and one in red. The green rider was trying to force the red over against the inner wall of the course. The four thundering close behind seemed to be in melee, each jockeying to force the other against the same low buttresses. The boa-like necks of the Xinli writhed and twisted, the small heads darting at each other like striking snakes.

The rider in green suddenly lurched his mount against that of the red. The red rider made a desperate effort to lift his monster over the barricade. It stumbled, went crashing down into the island. The rider went flying from it like a red ball from a tennis racket, struck the sand, rolled over and over and lay still. The green rider drew ahead of the ruck; a rider in purple drew out of it and came thundering down upon him, striving to keep the other between himself and the low rail. A burst of cheering drowned the thunder of the Xinli’s flying feet.

Again they rushed past, the green rider now two lengths ahead of the purple, the three remaining riders spread out in line close behind them. They charged by the stand of the nobles and, sliding in a cloud of the yellow sand, came to halt. There was a wilder burst of cheering. They padded back, and Graydon saw a glittering circlet tossed down to the green rider.

The dinosaurs filed through the opening and out of sight. Soldiers came through it when they had disappeared, picked up the limp body of the red rider, and carried him away. One of them took the reins of the dinosaur he had ridden and which had stood stupidly, head lowered, since its fall. He led it off like a horse through the gate. The gratings clanged.

There was another loud fanfare of the trumpets. A silence fell upon the arena. Another grating opened, close by the other—

Out of it walked Huon.

He carried a short sword and a javelin, upon his left arm was one of the little round shields. He stood for a moment, blinking in the dazzling sun. His eyes rested upon Dorina. She shrank and hid her face in her hands – then lifted her head and met Huon’s gaze defiantly.

He began to raise his javelin, slowly, slowly. Whatever was his thought, he had no chance to carry it into action. A grating not a hundred feet from him swung softly open. Out upon the yellow sand sprang one of the dwarfed dinosaurs of the hunting packs. While it halted there, motionless, glaring around, Graydon learned how much can pass through the mind in the time it takes to draw a single breath. He saw Lantlu lean forward with ironic salute to the man Dorina had betrayed. He saw the fighting Xinli in every detail – the burnished scales of sapphire blue and emerald green that covered it gleaming like jewels, its forelegs, short and powerfully thewed, its talons like long curved chisels protruding from the flat hands, the vicious flailing tail, the white-fanged jaws, the eyes of flaming red set wide apart like a bird’s on each side of the visored head.

His rifle was at his shoulder, the sights upon Lantlu. He hesitated – should he drop Lantlu or try for the dinosaur? In only one place was it vulnerable to a bullet, through one of those little red eyes. Wavering, he turned the sights upon it, drawing finest bead… no, better not risk that tiny target… back again to Lantlu… but he was leaning, half-hidden behind Dorina, talking to someone beside her… steady, steady till he swings back… ah, that was it… Hell, Regor’s moved the grating, spoiled the aim…

All in a breath this went racing through Graydon’s mind. And then the dinosaur was rushing upon Huon. Regor was shaking his arm, pointing at the charging monster, beseeching him to shoot. Hell… there was no use in a wild shot… the bullet would ricochet off those scales like armor plate… better try Lantlu… what use would that be now… better wait… better wait for a chance at the devilish brute…

Huon leaped backward, out of the path of the dinosaur’s rush. It whirled within its own length, sprang back at him with talons upraised to smite. It leaped. Huon dropped upon one knee, thrust upward with the javelin at the unprotected spot in its throat. The javelin struck, but not deeply enough to kill. The shaft snapped close to the hilt. The dinosaur hissed, pivoted in mid-leap, and dropped to its feet a few yards away. It felt of its throat with oddly human gesture, then began to circle Huon warily, flexing the muscles of its arms like a shadow-boxer. Huon kept pacing it, broken javelin shifted to his left hand, sword in the other, shield on left arm and close to his breast. “Huon! I’m coming! Hold fast!”

Shouting, Regor rushed by Graydon, and out over the sand. His cry shattered the silence that, except for the hissing of the wounded dinosaur, had hung over the arena. A deeper silence, one of sheer stupefaction, followed. Huon stared at the running figure. The dinosaur turned its head. The sun fell straight upon one of the crimson eyes. It stood out against the skull like a small bull’s-eye of fire. Graydon drew quick sight on that red target and fired.

The crack of the rifle echoed over the arena. The dinosaur sprang high, somersaulted, and hopped staggering over the sand, clawing at its head. From the crowded tiers arose a great sigh like the first sough of a tempest, a surging of bodies. Past Graydon, clicking violently, raced Kon in Regor’s wake. He raised the rifle upon Lantlu, and saw him drop behind the protecting wall as though something had whispered warning.

Dorina sat motionless, looking down at Huon. She was like one who knew her weird was upon her.

Regor was half across the arena, Kon scuttling beside him. Huon, looking not once again behind him, eyes fixed on the woman, stepped a pace nearer the wall.

He hurled his broken javelin. There was a flash of light as it sped. The light was quenched in Dorina’s breast.

Silence again for another long moment. And then the whole amphitheater roared. A shower of arrows fell round the outlaw of the lair. Kon sped past Regor, caught Huon in an arm, and came racing back. Graydon emptied his rifle into the line of archers; the storm of arrows abruptly ceased.

The trumpets sounded, peremptorily. Through opened gratings and down over the wall streamed the green-kirtled Emers. Closer to them, from each side ran others emerging from the nearer openings. Kon was close, Regor drawing near. Graydon, with burning desire for just one machine gun, emptied his rifle into those who menaced them from the sides. They halted. The frenzied dinosaur raised its head and came charging with great leaps down upon the line of soldiers pursuing Regor. They scattered out of its path. The giant swung shut the heavy doors and set the bars. The dinosaur hurled himself against them, tearing at them with its steel-like claws, dripping yellowish blood from a skull partly shattered by Graydon’s bullet.

“You’re damned hard to kill!” he muttered, and raised the rifle for another close, certain shot at the unhurt eye.

“No!” panted Regor, and caught his arm. “It will hold that door for us.”

Huon, dropped upon his feet by the spider-man, stood like an automaton, head bent. And suddenly deep sobs shook him.

“It’s all right now, lad – it’s all right now!” comforted the giant.

An arrow flew past the dinosaur, through the grating, barely missing Graydon, then another and another. He heard the blaring of many trumpets, angry, summoning.

“Best move quickly!” grunted Regor. Arm around Huon, he ran back through the corridor, Graydon at his heels, the little hands of Kon patting him approvingly, affectionately, as they went The others pressed close behind. They came to the guard chamber. They opened the secret door though which they had entered that place, and closed it with the clatter of pursuing feet already near. And in the little crypt Kon sought and found the means of unlocking the passage beneath the left-hand oval stone.

They closed that last portal. They set off in silence down the corridor into which it had opened, to the haven of the Temple.

— XIX —

THE SNAKE MOTHER

They went silently, Regor’s arm around Huon’s shoulders. The five Fellowship men had passed the Weavers; they marched with drawn swords behind their chief. The Indians followed Graydon. Whenever he turned he found their eyes upon him – as though they now regarded him as their leader. The one who carried his rifle had plainly become a personage, stepping proudly ahead of his fellows almost on Graydon’s heels. They came to the end of the passage, and opened without difficulty its entrance.

They stepped out of it into the columned hall of Graydon’s dream!

The beams of dimly azure light played down from its soaring, vaulted roof like the lanced rays of the aurora. Mistily radiant, they curtained a spacious alcove raised high above the tesselated, opaline pave. Behind their veil Graydon saw a sapphire throne, and lesser thrones of red, golden and black at its base of milky crystal – the seats of the Seven Lords.

A girl stood there, just beyond the top of a broad flight of steps dropping from the alcove, a girl with white hands clasped tightly to her breast, red lips parted in wonder, soft black eyes staring at him incredulously—

“Graydon!” she cried, and took a swift step toward him. “Suarra!” the warning voice was lisping, tinglingly pure, in it the trilling of birds. A pillar of shimmering mother-of-pearl shot up behind the girl; over her shoulder peered a face, heart-shaped, coiffed with hair like spun silver, purple-eyed—

The Snake Mother!

“Let us see who are these visitors who come so unceremoniously in the train of your man,” she lisped, “and by a way I thought surely none now in Yu-Atlanchi knew.”

She raised a little hand, in it a sistrum within whose loop, instead of bars, a glistening globule danced like quicksilver.

Regor stifled an exclamation and dropped upon his knees, the others hastily following suit with the exception of the spider-men, who stood quietly watching. Graydon hesitated, then also knelt.

“Ah, so you have remembered your manners!” there was faint mockery in the tinkling voice. “Come nearer. By my ancestors – it is Regor – and Huon… and since when did you don Lantlu’s green, Notalu? It is long since you bent the knee to me, Regor.”

“That is not my fault, Mother!” began Regor, indignantly. “Now that is not just—”

A trilling of laughter silenced him.

“Hot-tempered as ever, Regor. Well, for a time at least, you shall have much practice in that neglected duty. You too, Huon, and the others of you—”

Graydon heard the giant groan with relief, saw his scarred face light up; his bellow interrupted her.

“Homage to Adana! We are her men now!” He bent until his bandaged brow touched the floor.

“Yes!” said the Mother, softly, “but for how long – ah, that even I cannot tell…” She dropped the hand that held the quivering globe, bent further over Suarra’s shoulder, beckoned to Graydon – “Come up to me. And do you shut that door behind you, Regor.”

Graydon walked to the alcove, mounted the steps, his fascinated eyes upon the purple ones fixed upon him so searchingly. As he drew close, the Serpent-woman moved from behind the girl, the shimmering pillar from which sprang her childish body between him and Suarra. And he felt again that curious, deep-seated throb of love for this strange being – like a harp string in his heart which none but she could pluck. He knelt again, and kissed the tiny hand she held out to him. He looked up into her face, and it was tender, all age-old weariness gone, her eyes soft – and he had not even memory of those doubts which had risen in the Painted Cavern; so strong her witchery – if witchery it was.

“You have been well brought up, child,” she murmured. “Nay, daughter—” she glanced at Suarra, mischievously, “be not disturbed. It is only to my years that he does reverence.”

“Mother Adana—” began Suarra, face burning—

“Oh, go over there and talk, you babes,” the scarlet, heart-shaped lips were smiling. “You have much to say to each other. Sit on the golden thrones, if you like. What were you thinking then, Suarra’s man? That a golden throne was symbol to you of journey’s end? Surely, you were. Why it should be, I do not know – but that was your thought. Well then, take one.”

Graydon, beginning to rise, dropped back on his knee. When she had spoken of the golden thrones lines of an old negro spiritual had cropped up in his head—

When I’m through with this weary wanderin’, When I’m through, Lawd! I’ll sit on a golden throne—

The Snake Mother was laughing. She beckoned Suarra. She took the girl’s hand and put it in Graydon’s. She gave them a little push away.

“Regor,” she called. “Come to me. Tell me what has happened.”

Swinging his bar, marching jauntily, Regor approached. Suarra drew Graydon back to a nest of curtains at the rear of the alcove. He watched Regor mount beside the Serpent-woman, saw her bend her head to him, prepare to listen. Then he forgot them entirely, absorbed in Suarra, overflowing with concern for him, and curiosity.

“What did happen, Graydon?” her arm slipped round his neck. “We had gone quickly, and were close to the cataract. It was very noisy, but I thought I heard your weapon. I hesitated, thinking to return. But there was no further sound, so I went on. And Regor and the others – how did they get their wounds?”

“Lantlu sacked the lair. Huon was betrayed by Dorina. Lantlu took Huon and matched him against one of his cursed Xinli. We rescued him. Huon killed Dorina,” he told her, staccato.

“Dorina betrayed him! He killed her!” Her eyes widened.

“She was an aunt of yours, in some way, wasn’t she?” he asked.

“Oh, I suppose so – in a way – long, long ago,” she answered.

And suddenly he determined to settle once for all that question which had been tormenting him – he’d find out if she was one of these “deathless ones” or just the normal girl she seemed… if she was like the rest of them, then he’d have to accept the fact he loved a girl old enough to be his great-grandmother, maybe – if she wasn’t, then he didn’t give a damn about all the rest of the puzzles—

“See here, Suarra,” he demanded, “how old are you?” “Why, Graydon, I’m twenty,” she answered, wonderingly. “I know,” he said, “but do you mean you’re twenty, or that you were twenty, the Mother alone knows how many years ago, when you closed those infernal Gates, whatever they may be, on yourself?”

“But, beloved,” said Suarra, “why are you so disturbed? I’ve never gone into the Chamber of the Gates! I’m really twenty – I mean not staying twenty, but getting older every year.”

“Thank God!” exclaimed Graydon, fervently, a load rolling from his mind. “Now after the good news, comes the bad. Lantlu, and most of Yu-Atlanchi, I gather, are out hunting for us at this very moment.”

“Oh, but that doesn’t matter,” said Suarra, “now that the Mother has accepted you.”

Graydon had his doubts about the accuracy of that, but he did not trouble her with them. He began the tale of his adventures. In the middle of his first sentence he heard a hissing exclamation from the Serpent-woman; heard Regor rumble—

“It is truth. Kon found him there.”

He looked toward them. The Snake Mother’s eyes were upon him. She beckoned him; and when he stood beside her she raised herself, swayed forward until her face was almost touching his.

“The Shadow, Graydon – tell me of it. From the moment you saw it appear upon the black throne. Nay wait – I would see while you tell me—” she placed a hand upon his forehead – “now speak.”

He obeyed, going step by step over his ordeal. He lived it again; so vivid were the pictures of it that it was as though his brain were a silver screen upon which a camera unreeled them. At his recital of the death of Cadok he felt the hand upon his forehead tremble; he spoke of Kon, and the hand dropped away.

“Enough!”

She drew back; she regarded him, thoughtfully; there was something of surprise in her gaze, something of wonder – something, the odd idea came to him, of the emotion a mathematician might feel if in a mass of well-studied formulae he should suddenly come across an entirely new equation.

“You are more than I thought, Graydon,” she echoed that odd ideation. “Now I wonder… up from the gray ape-men you came… yet all I know of men is from those who dwell here… what else have you developed, you who have grown up beyond our barrier… I wonder…”

Silent again, she studied him; then – “You thought the Shadow real – I mean, no shadow, no shade, not – immaterial—”

“Material enough, substantial enough to pour itself into Cadok,” he interrupted. “Substantial enough to destroy him. It poured into Cadok like water in a jar. It sucked from him – life. And for – ten heartbeats – the Shadow was no Shadow, Mother. If indeed you saw into my mind you know whose face it wore.” “I saw,” she nodded. “Yet still I cannot believe. How can I believe when I do not know—” She stopped; she seemed to be listening. She raised her self upon her coils until her head was a full foot above tall Regor. Her eyes were intent, as though she looked beyond the walls of that great chamber. She dropped back upon her coils, the rosy pearl of her body slowly deepening.

“To me, Huon!” she called. “Your men with you. Kon—” she clicked some command, pointed to the opposite side of the alcove.

Again she listened.

“Suarra,” she pointed toward the girl, “Suarra, go you to your rooms.”

Then, as Suarra faltered, “Nay, stand behind me, daughter. If he has dared this – best for you to be near me!”

Once more the Serpent-woman was quiet; gaze withdrawn. Huon and his men climbed the steps; ranked themselves where she had bade: Suarra stepped by Graydon.

“She is angry! She is very angry!” she whispered. She passed behind the Serpent-woman’s coils.

And now Graydon heard a faint, a far-away clamor; shouts and ring of metal on metal. The tumult drew close. At a distant end of the columned place was a broad entrance over which the webbed curtains fell. Abruptly, these were torn apart, ripped away, and through the opening poured blue-kirtled Emer soldiers, fighting to check some inexorable pressure slowly forcing them back.

Then over them he saw the head of Lantlu, and behind and around him a hundred or more of his nobles.

They made their way through the portal. The Emer fought desperately, but gave way, step by step, before the push of long javelins in the hands of those who drove them. None fell, and Graydon realized that their assailants were deliberately holding back from killing, striving only to break through.

“Stop!” the cry of the Snake Mother had in it something of the elfin buglings of her winged Messengers, the flying, feathered serpents. It halted the struggling ranks.

“Dura!” an officer of the blue-kirtled Emer faced her, saluting. “Let them through! Escort them to me!”

The guards drew aside, formed into two lines; between them Lantlu and his followers marched to the foot of the steps. He smiled as he beheld Graydon, his eyes glinted as they roved from Regor to Huon and his band.

“All here, Bural!” he spoke to a noble beside him whose face was as beautiful and cruel as his. “I had not hoped for such luck!”

He made an ironic obeisance to the Serpent-woman.

“Hail, Mother!” Rank insolence steeped the greeting. “We ask your pardon for our rough entrance, but your guards have evidently forgotten the right of the Old Race to do you homage. We knew that you would punish them for their forgetfulness, so we did them no harm. And it seems we have come barely in time to save you, Mother, since we find you beset by dangerous men. Outlaws whom we have been seeking. Also an outlander whose life was forfeit when he entered Yu-Atlanchi. Evil men. Mother! We will lift their menace from you!”

He whispered to Bural, and took a swaggering step up the stairway. Up came the javelins of the nobles, ready to hurl, as they followed him. Graydon threw his rifle to his shoulder, finger itching on the trigger. Under stress, he reverted unconsciously to his English.

“Stop! Or I’ll blow your rotten heart out of you! Tell them to drop those javelins!”

“Silence!” the Mother touched his arm with the sistrum, a numbing shock ran through it; the gun fell at his feet.

“He said you would be safer where you are, Lantlu. Safer still with javelins lowered. He is right, Lantlu – I, Adana, tell you so!” lisped the Snake Mother.

She raised the sistrum high. Lantlu stared at the quivering globe, a shade of doubt on his face. He halted, spoke softly to Bural; and the javelins were lowered.

The Serpent-woman swayed slightly, rhythmically, to and fro, upon the upper pillar of her coils.

“By what right do you demand these men, Lantlu?”

“By what right! By what right?” he looked at her with malicious, assumed incredulity. “Mother Adana! Do you grow old – or forgetful like your guards? We demand them because they have broken the law of Yu-Atlanchi, because they are outlaws, wolf-heads, to be taken where and how it may be. By right of the old law, Mother, with which, by virtue of a certain pact between your ancestors and mine, you may not interfere. Or if you do – then, Mother, we must save your honor for you, and take them nevertheless. Bural – if the outlander stoops to pick up his weapon, skewer him. If one of those outlaws moves toward his, let the javelins loose. Are you answered. Mother?”

“You shall not have them,” said the Serpent-woman, serenely. But the pillar of her body swayed in slowly widening arcs, her neck began to arch, thrusting her head forward – like a serpent poising to strike.

Suarra slipped from behind her, thrust her arm through Graydon’s. Lantlu’s face darkened.

“So!” he said, “Suarra! With your lover! Your people howl for you, you wench of the Urd! Well – soon they shall have you—”

Red light flashed before Graydon’s eyes, there was a singing in his ears. Hot hatred, dammed up since Lantlu had taunted him in the shrine of the Shadow, swept him. Before the Serpent-woman could stay him, he leaped down the steps, and shot a hard fist squarely into the sneering face. He felt the nose crunch under the blow. Lantlu tottered, staggered back. He recovered his poise with catlike quickness; he rushed at Graydon, arms flexed to grip him.

Graydon ducked under his clutching arms, drove two blows upward into his face, the second squarely upon his snarling mouth. And again he felt bone give. Lantlu reeled back into the arms of Bural.

“Graydon! Come to me!” the Snake Mother’s cry was peremptory, not to be disobeyed.

He walked slowly back up the steps, head turned on the watching nobles. They made no move to stop him. Half-way up, he saw Lantlu open his eyes, break away from Bural’s hold, and glare uncomprehendingly about him. Graydon halted, fierce elation filling him, and again, unknowing, he spoke in his own language.

“That’ll spoil some of your beauty!”

Lantlu glared up at him, vacantly; he wiped a hand over his mouth, stared at its scarlet wetness stupidly.

“He says your women will find it difficult to admire you hereafter,” trilled the Serpent-woman. “Again he is right!”

Graydon looked at her. The little hand holding the sistrum was clenched so tightly that the knuckles shone white, her red forked tongue flickered upon her lips, her eyes were very bright… The Mother, he thought, might be angry with him, but she appeared to be uncommonly enjoying the sight of Lantlu’s battered countenance… he had seen women at the prize ring watch with exactly that expression the successful mauling progress of their favorite. He drew up beside her, nursing his bruised knuckles.

And now Lantlu was trying to break from the hands of his men who were holding him… Graydon rather admired him at that moment… certainly the brute had courage… quite a hog for punishment…

“Lantlu!” the Snake Mother raised herself until her head swayed a man’s full height over them, her eyes were cold purple gems, her face like stone – “Lantlu – look at me!”

She lifted the sistrum. The globe stopped its quicksilver quivering, and out of it sprang a ray of silvery light that flashed on Lantlu’s forehead. Instantly he ceased his struggling, grew rigid, raised his face to her. The silvery ray flashed across the faces of his followers, and they too stiffened into men of wood, silent.

“Lantlu! Carrion carrier for Nimir! Listen to me! You have defiled the Temple, the only one of all the Old Race to do that. By violence you have forced your way to me, Adana, of the Older Race who fed your forefathers with the fruit of our wisdom. Who made you into men. You have mocked me! You have dared to raise armed hands against me! Now do I declare the ancient pact between my people and yours broken – broken by you, Lantlu. Now do I, Adana, declare you outlaw, and outlaws all those with you. And outlaw shall be all who hereafter throw their lot with yours. I cast you out! Go to your whispering Shadow, tell it what has befallen you. Go to your Dark Master, Lantlu, and beg him to make you whole again, restore your beauty. He cannot – not he, whose craft has grown so weak that he cannot find himself a body. Let this comfort you. Tempted as he may have been, he will not now try to hide behind that face of yours. Tell him that I, who worsted him long time ago, I, Adana, who prisoned him in the stone, am awake, and on guard, and will meet him once again when the hour has struck – aye, and worst him again. Aye, utterly destroy him! Go, you beast lower than the Urd – Go!”

She pointed with the sistrum to the tattered curtains. And Lantlu, head swaying in weird mimicry of hers, turned stiffly, and paced away. Behind him, heads swaying, went his nobles. The blue-kirtled soldiers herding them, they passed from sight.

The Serpent-woman’s body ceased its movement, her pillared coil dropped, she rested her little pointed chin on Suarra’s shoulder. Her purple eyes, no longer cold or glittering, weighed Graydon quizzically.

“As the brutes fight!” she mused. “I think there must be something human in me after all – so to enjoy those blows and the sight of Lantlu’s face. Graydon, for the first time in ages, you have lifted all boredom from me.”

She paused, smiling at him.

“I should have slain him,” she said. “It would have saved much trouble. And many lives – maybe. But then he would have had no time to mourn his vanished beauty – nor to eat his vain heart out over it. No, oh no – I could not relinquish that, not even for many lives. Augh-h!—” she yawned, “and for the first time in ages, I am sleepy.”

Suarra leaned against the side of the alcove. A golden bell sounded. A door opened and through it came four comely Indian women, carrying a cushioned litter. They set it beside the Serpent-woman, stood waiting, arms crossed on brown breasts, heads bowed. She swayed toward it, stopped—

“Suarra,” she said, “see that Regor and Huon and the others are shown to their quarters, and that they are properly cared for. Graydon, wait here with me.”

They knelt to her once more, then followed Suarra through the opened portal.

Graydon stood with the Mother. She did not speak, was deep in thought. At last she looked at him.

“That was a boasting message I sent to Nimir,” she said.

“I am not so sure of the outcome, my Graydon, as I seemed to be. You have given me several new things to think about Still – it will also give that creeping Evil something to think on besides his deviltries – perhaps.”

She was silent until Suarra returned. Then she slipped out of her nest, thrust her body into the litter and slowly drew her shimmering coils after her. She lay for a moment, chin cupped in her tiny hands, looking at them.

“Kiss him good-night, daughter,” she said. “He shall rest well, and safely.”

Suarra raised her lips to his.

“Come, Graydon,” laughed the Serpent-woman, and when he was close, she put her hands on each side of his face, and kissed him, too.

“What abysses between us!” She shook her head, “and bridged by three blows to a man I hate – yes, daughter, I am woman, after all!”

The women picked up the litter, Suarra beside her, they moved away. From the entrance came two blue-kilted Emers, who with low bows, invited him to follow them. The Mother waved a hand toward him, Suarra blew a kiss. They were gone.

Graydon followed the Indians. As he passed the red throne he saw a figure within it – a shrunken figure all in tasseled robe of red and yellow.

The Lord of Folly! He had not seen him enter. How long had he been there? He paused. The Lord of Folly looked at him with twinkling, youthful eyes. He reached out a long white hand and touched him on the forehead. At the touch, Graydon felt all perplexities leave him; in their place was a careless gayety, a comfortable feeling that, despite appearances, things were perfectly all right in a world that seemed perfectly all wrong. He laughed back into the twinkling eyes.

“Welcome – son!” chuckled the Lord of Folly.

One of the Indians touched him upon the arm. When he looked back at the red throne, it was empty.

He followed the Indians through the portal. They led him to a room, dimly lighted, cobweb curtained, a wide couch in its center. There was a small ivory table on which were bread and fruit and a pale mild wine. As he ate, the Indians took from him his suit-of-mail, and stripped him to the skin. They brought in a basin of crystal, bathed him, and massaged him and rubbed him with oil. They drew a silken robe around him, and put him to bed.

“‘Welcome – son!’” muttered Graydon, sleepily. “Son? Now what did he mean by that?”

Still wondering, he went sound asleep.

— XX —

WISDOM
OF THE SERPENT MOTHER

It was mid-morning of the next day when an Emer came to Graydon with a summons from the Snake Mother. He had awakened to find Regor and Huon watching him from the doorway. Regor still wore his black, but Huon had traded the yellow of the Fellowship for the Serpent-woman’s blue. As he arose, he found on a settle beside his bed a similar costume. He put on the long, loose blouse, the hose and the heelless, half-length boots of soft leather. They fitted him so well that he wondered whether someone had come in during the night and had measured him.

There was a circlet of gold upon the settle, but he let it be. After a moment’s hesitation he thrust his automatic into the inner fold of his wide girdle. A blue silken cloak, fastened at the shoulders with loops of gold, completed his dress. He felt rather self-conscious in it, as though he were going to a costume party – something he had always loathed; but there was nothing else to wear, his suit-of-mail had vanished, and his other clothing was in the ravished lair.

He breakfasted with the pair. Huon, he saw, was taking matters badly, his beauty grown haggard, his eyes unhappy. Also, much of Regor’s buoyancy had fled, whether through sympathy for Huon or for some other reason he did not know. Neither of them made slightest reference to his fight with Lantlu, and that aroused in him a piqued curiosity. Once he had led the talk close to it; Huon had glanced at him with a flash of irritated distaste; Regor had given him an admonitory kick under the table.

He did not find it a pleasant meal, but he had been enlightened as to Huon’s manner. Regor and Huon had started; to go out. Graydon would have accompanied them, but the giant told him gruffly that he would better stay where he was, that the Mother was sure to send for him, that she had turned over all her soldiery to Huon and himself and that they would be busy drilling them. In a few moments he returned, alone.

“You did well, lad,” he grumbled, slapping Graydon’s shoulder. “Don’t mind Huon. You see, we don’t fight each other in just the way you did. It’s the way of the Urd. I tell Huon that you’re not supposed to know our customs but – well, he didn’t like it. Besides, he’s heartbroken about the Fellowship and Dorina.”

“You can tell Huon to go to hell with his customs,” Graydon was hurt and angry. “When it comes to a brute like Lantlu, I fight tooth and nail, and no hold barred. But I see why Lantlu beat him. He was on the job while Huon, probably, was considering how to say it to him with flowers!”

“Much of that was in your own tongue,” grinned Regor, “but I get your meaning. You may be right – but Huon is Huon. Don’t worry. He’ll be over it when you meet him again.”

“I don’t give a damn whether he is or not—” began Graydon, furiously. Regor gave him another friendly slap, and walked out.

Still hotly indignant, Graydon dropped upon a settle and prepared to await the expected summons. The walls of the room were covered with the filmy curtains, dropping from ceiling to floor. He got up and walked around them, feeling through the webs. At one spot, his hand encountered no resistance. He parted them and stepped into another room, flooded with clear daylight from a balconied window. He walked out on the balcony. Beneath him lay Yu-Atlanchi.

The Temple was high above the city, the ground falling away from it in a gentle slope. Between it and the lake the slope was like a meadow, free of all trees, and blue as though carpeted with harebells. And the opposite side of the lake was nearer then he had judged, less than a mile away.

He could see the spume of the cataract, torn into tattered banners by the wind. The caverns of the colossi were like immense eyes in the brown face of the precipice. The figure of the Frog-woman was plain, the green stone of which she was carved standing out in relief against the ochreous rock.

And there was the white, exquisite shape which guarded the cavern of the dead.

There was another colossus, cut, it seemed, from rose-quartz, shrouded to the feet, its face hidden behind an uplifted arm; and there was a Cyclopean statue of one of the gray and hairless ape-men. These stood out clearly, the outlines of the other he could not distinguish for their color merged into that of the cliffs.

At his left, the meadow changed to a level plain, sparsely wooded, running for miles into the first wave of the forest, and checkered by the little farms of the Indians. At his right was the ancient city and, now seen so closely, less like a city than a park.

Where the city halted at the edge of the Temple’s flowering mead, and half-way to the lake, was a singular structure. It was shaped like an enormous shell whose base had been buried to hold it upright; its sides curved gracefully, drawing closer in two broad, descending arcs, then flaring out to form an entrance. It faced the Temple, and from where he stood Graydon could see practically all of the interior.

This shell-like building was made of some opaline stone. Here and there within it glowed patches of peacock fires of the Mexican opal’s matrix, and here and there were starry points of blue like those which shine from the black opal. The reflected rays from them appeared to meet in the center of the structure, stretching across it like a nebulous curtain. And, like a shell, its surface was fluted. The grooves were cut across, two-thirds from the top, by tier upon tier of stone seats. Its top was all of three hundred feet high, its length perhaps thrice that. He wondered what could be its use.

He looked again over the city. If Lantlu were preparing an attack, there was no evidence of it. Along the broad avenue skirting the lake was tranquil movement, Indians going about their businesses, the glint of jeweled litters borne on the shoulders of others; a small fleet of boats with gayly colored sails and resembling feluccas skimmed over the water. There was no marching of armed men, no sign of excitement. He watched laden llamas swinging along, and smaller deer-like animals, grazing. The flowering trees and shrubs hid the lanes threading the grounds of the palaces. Then he had been summoned to the Serpent-woman. Graydon followed the messenger. They paused before a curtained recess; the Indian touched a golden bell set in the wall. The hangings parted.

He was on the threshold of a roomy chamber, through whose high, oval windows the sunlight streamed. Tapestries covered its walls, woven with scenes from the life of the serpent-people. Upon a low dais, her coils curled within a nest of cushions, was the Snake Mother. Behind her was Suarra, brushing her hair. The sun made round it a halo of silver. At her side squatted the Lord of Folly in his cloak of red and yellow. Suarra’s eyes brightened as he entered, dwelling upon him tenderly. He made obeisance to Adana, bowed low to the Lord in motley.

“You look well in my blue, Graydon,” lisped the Serpent-woman. “You haven’t the beauty of the Old Race, naturally. But Suarra doesn’t mind that,” she glanced slyly at the girl.

“I think him very beautiful,” said Suarra, quite shamelessly.

“Well, I myself find him interesting,” trilled Adana, “after all these centuries, the men of Yu-Atlanchi have become a bit monotonous. Come and sit beside me, child,” she motioned toward a long, low coffer close to her. “Take a pillow or two and be comfortable. Now tell me about your world. Don’t bother about your wars or gods – they’ve been the same for a hundred thousand years. Tell me how you live, how you amuse yourselves, what your cities are like, how you get about, what you have learned.”

Graydon felt this to be a rather large order, but he did his best. He ended almost an hour later, feeling that he had made a frightful jumble of skyscrapers and motion pictures, railroads and steamships, hospitals, radios, electricity and airplanes, newspapers and television, astronomy, art and telephones, germs, high-explosives and arc lights, he tripped on the electronic theory, bogged hopelessly on relativity, gulped and wiped a wet forehead. Also he had been unable to find Aymara words to describe many things, and had been forced to use the English terms.

But Adana had seemed to follow him easily, interrupting him seldom, and then only with extremely pointed questions.

Suarra, he was sure, had been left hopelessly behind; he was equally sure that the Lord of Folly had kept pace with him. The Serpent-woman had seemed a little startled by the airplanes and television, much interested in skyscrapers, telephones, high-explosives and electric lighting.

“A very clear picture,” she said. “And truly amazing progress for – a hundred years, I think you said, Graydon. Soon, I should think, you would do away with some of your crudities – learn to produce light from the stone, as we did, and by releasing it from air. I am truly concerned about your flying machines, much concerned. If Nimir wins, they may soar over Yu-Atlanchi and welcome! If he does not – then I shall have to devise means to discourage any such visits. Truly! I am not so enamored with your civilization, as you describe it, to wish it extended here. For one thing, I think you are building too rapidly outside yourselves, and too slowly inside. Thought, my child, is quite as powerful a force as any you have named, and better controlled, since you generate it within yourself. You seem never to have considered it objectively. Someday you will find yourselves so far buried within your machines that you will not be able to find a way out – or discover yourself being carried helplessly away by them. But then I suppose you believe you have within you an immortal something which, when the time comes, can float out of anything into a perfect other world?”

“Many do,” he answered. “I did not. But I find my disbelief shaken – once by something I saw in the Cavern of the Face, once by a certain dream while I slept beside a stream, and later found was no dream – and again by a whispering Shadow. If there is not something to man besides body – then what were they?”

“Did you think it was that immortal part of me which you saw in the Cavern? Did you think that, really?” she leaned forward, smiling. “But that is too childish, Graydon. Surely my ethereal essence, if I have it, is not a mere shadowy duplication! Such a wonderful thing should be at least twice as beautiful! And different – oh, surely different! I am a woman, Graydon, and would dearly like to try a few new fashions in appearance.”

It was not until after he had left her that he recalled how intently the Serpent-woman had looked at him when she said this. If she thought something was within his mind – some reservation, some doubt – she was satisfied with what she found, or did not find. She laughed; then grew grave.

“Nor did anything of you rush forth from your body at my call. It was my thought that touched you beside the brook; my thought that narrowed the space between us – precisely as your harnessed force penetrates all obstacles and carries to you a distant picture. I saw you there, but it pleased me to let you see me as well. So it was that I watched Lantlu march into the Temple. Once we of the Older Race could send the seeing thought around the world, even as you are on the verge of doing with your machines. But I have used the power so little, for so long and long and long again, that now I can barely send it to the frontiers of Yu-Atlanchi.

“And as for Nimir—” she hesitated. “Well, he was master of strange arts. A pioneer, in a fashion. What this Shadow is – I do not know. But I do not believe it is any immortal – what do you name it, Graydon – ah, yes, soul. Not his soul! And yet – there must be a beginning in everything… perhaps Nimir is pioneer in soul making… who knows! But if so – why is it so weak? For compared to that which was Nimir in body this Shadow is weak. No, no! It is some product of thought; an emanation from what once was Nimir whom we fettered in the Face… a disembodied intelligence, able to manipulate the particles that formed the body of Cadok – that far I will go… but an immortal soul? No!” She dropped into one of her silences; withdrawn – then – “But the seeing thought, I do know, I will show you, Graydon – will send my sight into that place where you saw the ship, and yours shall accompany it.”

She pressed her palm against his forehead, held it there. He had the sensation of whirling across the lake and through the cliffs, the same vertiginous feeling he had experienced when he had thought he stood, bodiless, within the Temple. And now he seemed to halt beside the hull of the ship in the dim cavern. He looked over its shrouded, enigmatic shapes. And as swiftly he was back in Adana’s chamber.

“You see!” she said, “nothing of you went forth. Your sight was lengthened – that was all.”

She picked up a silver mirror, gazed at herself complacently.

“That is fine, daughter,” she said. “Now coif it for me.” She preened herself before the mirror, set it down. “Graydon, you have aroused old thoughts. Often I have asked, ‘What is it that is I, Adana’ – and never found the answer. None of my ancestors has ever returned to tell me. Nor any of the Old Race. Now is it not strange, if there be another life beyond this one, that not love nor sorrow, wit nor strength nor compassion has ever bridged the gap between them? Think of the countless millions who have died since man became man, among them seekers of far horizons who had challenged unknown perils to bring back tidings of distant shores, great adventurers, ingenious in artifice; and men of wisdom who had sought truth not selfishly but to spread it among their kind; men and women who had loved so greatly that surely it seems they could break through any barrier, return and say – ‘Behold, I am! Now grieve no more!’ Fervent priests whose fires of faith had shone like beacons to their flocks – have they come back to say – ‘See! It was truth I told you! Doubt no more!’ Compassionate men, lighteners of burdens, prelates of pity – why have they not reappeared crying, ‘There is no death!’ There has come no word from them. Why are they silent?

“Yet that proves nothing. Would that it did – for then we would be rid of sometimes troublesome thoughts. But it does not, for look you, Graydon, we march beside our sun among an army of other stars, some it must be with their own circling worlds. Beyond this universe are other armies of suns, marching like ours through space. Earth cannot be the only place in all these universes upon which is life. And if time be – then it must stretch backward as well as forward into infinitude. Well, in all illimitable time, no ship from any other world has cast anchor upon ours, no argosy has sailed between the stars bearing tidings that life is elsewhere.

“Have we any more evidence that life exists among these visible universes than that it persists in some mysterious, invisible land whose only gateway is death? But your men of wisdom who deny the one because none has returned from it, will not deny the other though none has come to us from the star strands. They will say that they do not know – well, neither do they know the other!

“And yet – if there be what you name the soul, whence does it come, and when, how planted in these bodies of ours? Did the ape-like creatures from which you grew have them? Did the first of your ancestors who crawled on four pads out of the waters have them? When did the soul first appear? Is it man’s alone? Is it in the egg of the woman? Or in the seed of the man? Or incomplete in both? If not, when does it enter its shell within the mother’s womb? Is it summoned by the newborn child’s first cry? From whence?”

“Time streams like a mighty river, placid, unhurried,” said the Lord of Fools. “Across it is a rift where bubbles rise. It is life. Some bubbles float a little longer than the others. Some are large and some small. The bubbles rise and burst, rise and burst. Bursting, do they release some immortal essence? Who knows – who knows?”

The Serpent-woman looked at herself again in the silver mirror.

“I do not, for one,” she said, practically. “Suarra, child, you’ve done my hair splendidly. And enough of speculation. I am a practical person. What we are chiefly concerned about, Tyddo, is to keep Nimir and Lantlu from bursting those bubbles which are ourselves.

“There is one thing I fear – that Nimir will fasten his mind upon those things of power which are within that cavern of the ship; find some way of getting them. Therefore, Graydon and Suarra, you shall go there tonight, taking with you fifty of the Emer to carry back to me what I want from it. After that, there is another thing you must do there, and then return speedily. Graydon, arise from that coffer.”

He obeyed. She opened the coffer and drew out a thick, yard-long crystal bar, apparently hollow, its core filled with a slender pillar of pulsing violet fire.

“This, Graydon, I will give you when you start,” she said. “Carry it carefully, for the lives of all of us may rest upon it. After the Emers are laden and in the passage, you must do with it what I shall shortly show you. Suarra, within the ship is a small chest – I will show you where it lies – you must bring me that. And before you set this bar in place, take whatsoever pleases you from the ancient treasures. But do not loiter—” she frowned at the throbbing flame – “I am sorry. Truly! But now must great loss come, that far greater loss does not follow. Suarra, child – follow my sight!”

The girl came forward, stood waiting with a tranquility which indicated it was not the first time she had made such journey. The Serpent-woman pressed her palm upon her forehead as she had on Graydon’s. She kept it there for long minutes. She took away her hand; Suarra smiled at her and nodded.

“You have seen! You know precisely what I want! You will remember!” They were not questions, they were commands.

“I have seen, I know and I will remember,” answered Suarra.

“Now, Graydon, you too – so there may be no mistake, and that you work quickly together.”

She touched his forehead. With the speed of thought he was once more within the cavern. One by one those things she wanted flashed out of the vagueness – he knew precisely where each was, how to go to it. And unforgettably. Now he was in the ship, within a richly furnished cabin, and saw there the little chest Suarra was to take. And now he was beside a curious contrivance built of crystal and silver metal, the bulk of it shaped like an immense thick-bottomed bowl around whose rim were globes like that of the sistrum, ten times larger, and with none of its quicksilver quivering; quiescent. Within the crystal which formed the bulk of the bowl was a pool of the violet flame, quiescent too, not pulsing like that within the rod. Looking more closely, he saw that the top of the bowl was covered with some transparent substance, clear as air, and that the pool was prisoned within it. Set at the exact center, and vanishing in the flame, was a hollow cylinder of metal. Before him there appeared the misty shape of the rod. He saw it thrust sharply into the cylinder. He heard the voice of the Serpent-woman, whispering – “This must you do.”

He thought that even at the spectral touch, the globes began to quiver, the violet flame to pulse. The rod vanished.

He began the whirling flight back toward the Temple – was halted in mid-flight! He felt the horror he had known when bound to the bench before the jet throne!

Red light beat upon him, rusted black atoms drifted round him – he was in the cavern of the Shadow, and on its throne, featureless face intent upon him, sat the Shadow!

The dreadful gaze sifted him. He felt the grip relax; heard a whispering laugh—

He was back in the room of the Snake Mother, trembling, breathing like a man spent from running. Suarra was beside him, his hands clutched in hers, staring at him with frightened eyes. The Serpent-woman was erect, upon her face the first amazement he had ever seen. The Lord of Folly was on his feet, red staff stretched out to him.

“God!” sobbed Graydon, and caught at Suarra for support. “The Shadow! It caught me!”

And suddenly he realized what had happened – that in the brief instant the Shadow had gripped him, it had read his mind like an open page, knew exactly what it was that he had looked upon in the Cavern of the Lost Wisdom, knew precisely what the Mother wanted, knew what she planned to do there – and was now making swift preparation to checkmate her! He told the Serpent-woman this.

She listened to him, eyes glittering, head flattening like a snake’s; she hissed!

“If Nimir read his mind, as he thinks, then he must also have read that it was tonight he was to go,” said the Lord of Folly, quietly. “Therefore, they must go now, Adana.”

“You are right, Tyddo. Nimir cannot enter – at least not as he is. What he will do, I do not know. But he has some plan – he laughed, you say, Graydon? Well, whatever it is, it will take him time to put it into action. He must summon others to help him. We have good chance to out-race him. Suarra, Graydon – you go at once. You with them, Tyddo.”

The Lord of Folly nodded, eyes sparkling.

“I would like to test Nimir’s strength once again, Adana,” he said.

“And Kon – Kon must go with you. Suarra, child – summon Regor. Let him pick the soldiers.”

And when Suarra had gone for Regor, the Snake Mother handed the crystal bar to the Lord of Folly.

“Nimir is stronger than I had believed,” she said, gravely. “That whispering Shadow left its mark upon you, Graydon. You are too sensitive to it to risk the carrying of this key. Tyddo will use it. And take my bracelet from beneath your sleeve. Wear it openly, and should you feel the Shadow reach out to you – look quickly into the purple stones, and think of me. Give it to me—”

She took the bracelet from him, breathed upon its gems, pressed them to her forehead, and returned it to him.

In half an hour they were off. Regor had begged to go with them, argued and blustered and almost wept; but the Serpent-woman had forbade him. The Lord of Folly leading and bearing both crystal staff and his red rod, Suarra and Kon on each side of Graydon, half a hundred picked Emers of the Temple guard behind him, they were on their way to the Cavern of the Lost Wisdom.

— XXI —

THE CAVERN
OF THE LOST WISDOM

They went by another passage than that by which they had entered the Temple, high-roofed and wider. The Lord of Folly, for once, did not flitter. He walked purposefully, as though eager for some rendezvous. They entered the Cavern of the Lost Wisdom by a door which opened to the touch of Tyddo’s red rod. The new corridor had cut off all that empty space they had traversed before, and the sealed treasures of the Serpent-people and most ancient Yu-Atlanchi lay before them.

There was no sign of the Dark Master, nor of any of his followers, man nor lizard-people. The cavern seemed untouched, crystal shimmering palely, metals gleaming and jewels glinting fugitively, the puzzling shapes designed for uses unguessable, shadowy in the dim light.

They first took two of the crystal disks. At close range, Graydon saw details not perceptible in the painting of the primeval swamp. They were twenty feet high, lens-shaped, a yard in thickness at their centers. They were hollow. Within the center was a foot-wide disk milky as curdled moonlight. From its edges ran countless filaments, each fine as a hair on the Serpent-woman’s head, and as silvery. They were crossed by other filaments, making them resemble immense, finely spun cobwebs. Spaced regularly around the rim of the larger disk were a dozen little lenses of the moonray material. Where the radiating strands passed from the last encircling one, they were gathered into these lenses, like minute reins. The disks rested upon bases of gray metal fitted with runners, like a sled. Their bottom edges dropped into deep grooves. Whatever held them upright was hidden in their bases.

The Indians produced long thongs, tied them to the runners, the Lord of Folly directing; then still under his eye they drew them away and into the passage. When they were safely there, he drew what seemed to Graydon a breath of relief, clicked to Kon, and the spider-man followed on the trail of the Emers.

“Best to make sure of those,” said the Lord of Folly. “They are our strongest weapons. I bade Kon see they are taken straight to Adana. Now do you two gather those other things she wants. I go to mount guard.”

He walked away into the obscurity of the cavern.

They went quickly about their business, dividing the remaining Indians between them. Mainly the objects were coffers, some so small that one man could carry them, others under whose weight four strained. There were seven of the symboled silver globes in the Serpent-woman’s inventory, and he was amazed to find them light as bubbles, rolling over the floor before the push of a hand. They came at last to the end, and with the last of their men, remained only to get the chest from the ship.

The ship rested upon a metal cradle. A ladder dropped from its side, and as Graydon clambered up it Suarra at his heels, he wondered how the ancient people had managed to get this Ark of theirs over land and through the barrier of mountains into this place; remembered that Suarra had told him the mountains had not then arisen, and that in those far-gone days the ocean had been close.

Still – to carry this ship, and it was all of three hundred feet long, into the cavern implied engines of amazing power. And how had it been preserved during the ages preceding the upthrust of the barrier? It was hard wood, almost metallic; schooner rigged, its masts thick and squat, and, curiously enough, yardless. He caught at its stern a gleam of blue, saw there one of the great disks, deep cerulean, not transparent like the others. Wondered whether it had furnished the propulsive power for the craft, and if so, then why the masts? Except for disk and squat masts the deck was clear. He remembered now that the ships upon the wall of the Painted Cavern had shown tall masts, he had not seen among them any boat such as this. Well, it might have been among the pictures of the ruined walls. He looked out over the cavern. The Lord of Folly, a patch of red and yellow, was beside that strange contrivance in whose bowl lay the pool of violet flame. He stood, motionless, listening, the crystal rod poised over the hollow cylinder.

“Graydon!” called Suarra, beckoning from an open hatchway. “Make haste!”

A cleated ramp dropped down into dark depths, and Suarra was tripping down it with the sure feet of a fawn; he followed her. From a light-cone in her hand spurted one of the luminous clouds. Under his feet was a silken carpet, deep and lush as a June meadow; in front of him a row of low oval doors, tightly shut. Suarra counted them, sped to one and thrust it open. The sparkling light streamed through after them.

It was a wide cabin, tapestry-hung, and clearly a woman’s. What princess of most ancient Yu-Atlanchi, flying uncounted centuries ago through racked seas from the ice flood, had preened herself before that silver mirror? He glimpsed a nest of silken cushions, and knew. Suarra was beside it, lifting the little chest. He saw another coffer nearby, and opened it. Within was a long strand of gems blue as deepest sapphire, unknown radiant jewels gleaming with their own imprisoned light. He drew it out, wound it within Suarra’s midnight hair; it glittered there like captured stars. There was a book! A book whose pages of metal, thin and pliable as papyrus, were like those of some ancient missal, rich in pictures and margined with unknown symbols, letterings of the Serpent-people. He thrust it into his tunic, drew his girdle tighter to hold it.

The purple gems of the bracelet caught his gaze. They were shining – warning him! Suarra, admiring herself in the silver mirror, saw them.

“Quick!” she cried. “The deck, Graydon!”

They ran up the ramp. They were just in time to see the Lord of Folly thrust the crystal rod down into the pool of violet flame.

Instantly, a pillar of amethyst fire shot up from it, reaching toward the roof of the cavern. It was smoothly round as though carved by sculptor’s chisel, and as it drove up there came from it a sustained sighing like the first breath of a tempest. It lighted the cavern with a radiance stronger than sunlight; it destroyed all perspective, so that every object seemed to press forward, standing out in its own proportions as though rid of spacial trammels, freed from the diminishing effects of distance.

The Lord of Folly, far away as they knew him to be, seemed in that strange light to be close enough to touch. The quicksilver globes around the rim of the great bowl beside which he stood had begun to quiver like that in the sistrum of the Serpent-woman.

He looked at them, lifted his rod and pointed to the passage. They could not move, staring at that radiant column, fascinated.

A pulse shook the pillar; a ring of violet incandescence throbbed out of it, like the first ring in a still pool into which a stone has been thrown. It passed through the Lord of Folly, obscuring him in a mist of lavender. It swelled outward a score of feet – and vanished. Of all it had touched, except that figure, there remained – nothing! And from the Lord of Folly, the motley had vanished. He stood there, a withered old man, naked!

Around the pillar for a circle twice twenty feet wide was emptiness!

The sighing pillar pulsed again. A thicker ring widened slowly from it. Ahead of it hopped the Lord of Folly, shaking his staff at them, gesticulating, calling to them to go. They leaped for the ladder—

High over the sighing of the pillar sounded a hideous hissing. From the rear of the cavern poured the lizard-men. They vomited forth by hundreds, leaping down upon the withered figure standing there so quietly. And now the second ring of lambent violet touched the Lord of Folly, passed through him as had the other and went widening outward. It reached the first ranks of the onrushing Urd, lapped them up, and died away. And now within a circle twice twenty feet the cavern floor stood empty.

Into that circle swept more lizard-men, pressed onward by those behind them. The Lord of Folly stepped back, back into a third flaming ripple from the pillar. It widened on, tranquilly. And, like the others, it left behind it – nothing!

“Suarra! Down the ladder! Get to the passage!” gasped Graydon. “The rings are coming faster. They’ll reach us. Tyddo knows what he’s about. God – if that hell spawn sees you—”

He stopped, both speech and motion frozen. Above the hissing of the horde, the louder sighing of the pillar, arose a screaming like that of a maddened horse. The lizard-men scuttled back. Out through them, halting at the edge of emptiness left by the last ring of flame, came – Nimir!

And dreadful as he had been as the Shadow, dreadful when as Shadow he had poured himself into Cadok, they had been pleasant pictures to what he was now.

For the Dark Master had gotten himself a body! It had been a Yu-Atlanchan, one, no doubt of Lantlu’s enemies, provided hastily for his Dark Master’s needs. It was swollen. Its outlines wavered, as though the Shadow found it difficult to remain within, was holding its cloak of flesh together by sheer force of will. Its head lolled forward, and suddenly up from behind it shot the face of the Lord of Evil, pale eyes glaring. And Graydon’s heart beat chokingly in a throat as dry as dust as he looked upon that bloated, cloudy body, its corpse-face and the face of living evil over it.

Another ring of flame came circling. Whatever the Lord of Folly’s immunity from that noose of flame, it was clearly not shared. For Nimir retreated from it, stumbling back on dead feet.

And as he went, the Lord of Folly pointed his rod toward him and laughed.

“Fie upon you, Nimir!” he jeered, “to greet me after all these years in such ill-fitting garments! Draw your tattered cloak more tightly round you, Great One – or better still, go naked to the flame like me! But, I forgot, Master of the World, you cannot!”

Now it seemed to Graydon, mind swimming up through the wave of horror that had covered it, that the Lord of Folly was deliberately baiting Nimir, playing for time or for some other purpose. But the Dark Master took the bait, and rushed at him – and barely saw the hook in time; barely could stagger beyond the reach of the next obliterating ring before it had died, all that had been in its path eaten.

He stumbled back, into the halted horde. At once there was motion among it. Graydon, dropping down the ladder behind Suarra, saw the lizard-men scurrying beyond the widening circle of emptiness, tugging, pulling, hauling away at this and that while the Shadow, holding tight around him its borrowed body, urged them on.

Louder and ever louder grew the susurration of the naming pillar, faster and faster its pulse, and swifter and wider the flaming rings flung from it.

He ran, Suarra gripping his hand, head turned, unable to take his eyes from that incredible scene. A ring enveloped the ship – and the ship was gone! Another caught a line of the lizard-men laden with coffers, and they were gone! He heard the howling of Nimir—

Suarra drew him, the Lord of Folly pushed him, into the passage. Its opening dropped. He went with them, unseeing, unhearing, as powerless to tear his mind away from what he had just beheld as he had been to tear his gaze from it.

They found the Snake Mother in a room so cluttered with her salvaged treasures that there was little room to move. She had been opening the coffers, rummaging through them. Her hair was threaded with sparkling jewels, there was a wide belt of gems around her waist, and others fell between her little breasts. She was admiring herself in her mirror.

“I am rather beautiful in my way,” she said, airily. “At least I have this satisfaction – that there is no one more beautiful in my way! Suarra, child, I’m so glad you found those jewels. I always meant to get them for you. Tyddo” – she raised her hands in mock astonishment – “where are your clothes! To go thus – and at your age!”

“By your ancestors, Adana, I had quite forgotten!” the Lord of Folly hastily snatched up a piece of silk, wrapped it round his withered frame.

“Is it done?” the Serpent-woman’s face lost all laughter, was sorrowful.

“It is done, Adana,” answered the Lord of Folly. “And none too soon!”

She listened, with no lightening of sorrow, as he told her what had happened in the cavern.

“So much lost!” she whispered. “So much that never can be replaced, never – though the world last forever. My people – oh, my people! And the ship – Well,” she brightened, “we got the better of Nimir! But again I say it, he is stronger than I believed. Dearly would I like to know what he saved. I hope he found something that will give him a permanent costume! I wonder whose body he was wearing? Now go away, children – Tyddo and I have work to do.”

She dismissed them with a wave of her hand. But as Graydon turned to go, he saw the sorrow creep again over her face, her eyes fill with tears.

— XXII —

THE FEAST
OF THE DREAM MAKERS

For the next two days, Graydon saw nothing of the Snake Mother; little of Regor and Huon. He spent most of his time with Suarra, and glad enough were both to be left alone. He wandered with her through the vast place at will, beholding strange and often disquieting things, experiments of the serpent-people and the ancient Yu-Atlanchans in the reshaping of life, experiments of which the spider-folk and the lizard-folk had been results; grotesque and terrifying shapes; androgynous monstrosities; hybrid prodigies – some of them of bizarre beauty. There was a great library, filled with the metallic paged and pictured books; their glyphs understandable now only by Adana and the Lord of Folly.

He had looked into the Hall of the Weavers with Suarra, and had lingered long, fascinated by the scarlet people clicking at their immense looms along whose sides they ran, weaving patterns which through the ages had become as instinctive to them as the pattern of the spider-webs to their makers. They were not more than a hundred of them left, and in their immense workshop most of the looms swung empty.

Beneath the Temple, Suarra told him, were other chambers and crypts, and she herself did not know what was in them. There was that mysterious place whose two doors, one of Life and one of Death, were opened for those who desired children and were willing to pay the price – the canceling of their deathlessness.

Neither Nimir nor Lantlu had as yet made any open move. From Graydon’s eyrie the city seemed quiet, untroubled. But Regor said his spies had reported unrest and uneasiness; the story of Lantlu’s humiliation had been whispered about. It had shaken the confidence of some of his followers.

Regor’s emissaries had been at work among the Indians; they could count, he thought, upon about half of them. Graydon had asked how many that was, and had been told that those with soldierly training numbered some four thousand. Of the remainder, he thought that many would take to the forest and await the outcome of the conflict; in fact, were already filtering away. He did not believe those who remained with Lantlu would be formidable – for one thing, they were held to him mainly by fear; for another, they hated the lizard-men and would not relish fighting with them. Far more than the hordes of the Urd, Graydon dreaded the dinosaur pack and the charge of the riding monsters; felt that against them the whole four thousand of the Emer could put up feeble defense, would go down before them like stubble before fire. Regor seemed not to think so, hinted of other resources.

He had other news – some twenty of the Fellowship had survived the raid and probably a hundred of their Emer, all of them soldiers of the first class.

This night was the Feast of the Dream Makers, the Ladnophaxi. It would drain the city of the nobles. The Emers were rigidly excluded, forbidden even to watch from vantage points outside the shell-like structure which Graydon had learned was dedicated to this yearly fete; they held their own moon festival far away at the verge of the forest. Of all the nights, therefore, it was the best to smuggle in the remnants from the lair, since the city would be deserted, its guard negligible. Huon and Regor were to lead a little force which would meet his men at a certain point on the lake, and guide them to sanctuary.

Graydon’s curiosity about this Feast of the Dream Makers was avid. He was on fire to witness it. He determined that by hook or crook he would do so. He could say nothing to Suarra about it, fearing that she would either put her little foot inflexibly down, or that she would insist upon going with him – something clearly not to be thought of since Lantlu’s threats and the Snake Mother’s declaration of war. He wondered whether he could cajole Adana into devising a means of getting into the place, came to the speedy conclusion that Adana would even more speedily devise some means of keeping him under lock and key. The Lord of Folly? It was a foolhardy enough idea to appeal to him. But since the affair in the Cavern of the Lost Wisdom, Graydon had realized that whatever the kind of folly of which that able person was Lord, it was not this kind. Nevertheless, he was not going to miss the Ladnophaxi.

While he was turning the matter over, the Mother sent for him. He found her alone in her tapestried room. The great disks were gone, as were most of the other things they had brought her. Her eyes were bright, her neck undulated, her gleaming coils stirred restlessly.

“You are so different from anyone I have seen for so long,” she said, “that you take my mind out of its old ruts, freshen it. I know how unutterably strange Yu-Atlanchi must seem to you – myself, perhaps, strangest of all. Yet this which seems so strange to you is all too familiar to me. And what is everyday matter to you would be to these people quite as fantastic – yes, much of it even to me. I would draw away from my closeness which is both a strength and a weakness; look through your eyes a little, Graydon; think as you, the outlander, think. How do you sum up this situation into which you have been thrust? Speak freely, child, without thought of offending me.”

As freely as she had bade him, he spoke; of the stagnation of the Old Race, of its decline into cruelty and inhuman indifference, and what he believed the cause; of what he felt to be the monstrous wickedness in the creation of such creatures as the lizard-people, and the cynical perversion of scientific knowledge that had gone into the making of the spider-men; and that although the Urd, at least, should be exterminated, still the fault lay not with them; nor even with Lantlu and his kind, but with those who at the beginning had set working the relentless processes of evolution whose fruits they were. At last, of his fear of the fighting dinosaurs, and of the smashing comber of the Xinli steeds and in their wake the fanged and tearing waves of the Urd.

“But you have said nothing of Nimir – why?” she asked, when he had ended.

“Neither have I said anything of you, Mother,” he answered. “I have spoken only of the things I know – and I know nothing of what weapons or powers you two may command. But I think that in the end it will be only you and Nimir – that all other things, the Urd and the Xinli, Lantlu and Regor and Huon, and myself are pawns, negligible. The issue lies between you two.”

“That is true,” nodded the Serpent-woman. “And I do wish I knew what Nimir managed to take away with him from the cavern! There was one thing there I hope he found,” her eyes glinted maliciously, “and hope still more that, finding, he will use. It would give him that body he desires, Graydon. Yet he might not like the result. As for the others – do not fear too much the Xinli and the Urd. My winged Messengers will cope with them. Nor are the rest of you as negligible as you think. I may rest upon that quick eye and steady hand of yours at the last. But in essence you are right. It does lie between me and Nimir!”

She dropped into one of her silences, regarding him; then—

“As for the rest – does not Nature herself constantly experiment with the coverings of life? How many models has she made, more monstrous than anything you have seen here, and, as cynically, as you charge against us, stamped them out. What shapes, loathsome, ravening, has not Nature turned out of her laboratory? Why should not we, who are a part of her, have followed the example she set us? As for the Old Race and what they have become – if you save another man’s life, nurse him through sickness, are you thereafter responsible for what he does? If he slays, tortures – are you the slayer, the torturer? My ancestors released this people from Death, under certain necessary conditions; if we had not, at the rate men breed there would soon have been no place to stand on all the crowded globe. We ridded them not alone of death but of sickness. We placed in their hands great knowledge. Is it our fault that they have proved not worthy of it?”

“And built a barrier around them so they could not use their knowledge!” said Graydon. “Men develop through overcoming obstacles, not by being hot-housed.”

“Ah, but was not that an obstacle?” asked the Mother shrewdly. “If they had been worthy would they not have surmounted the barrier?”

He had no answer for that.

“But one matter you have clarified,” she said. “If I win from Nimir, I will destroy the Urd. And I will leave only a few of the Old Race. Those errors shall be wiped out – as Nature at times wipes out hers. The swamp shall be cleansed—”

She picked up her mirror, caressed her hair; put the mirror down.

“The crisis is close. Perhaps it comes tonight. Lantlu appeared in the city a few hours ago, swaggering, strangely confident, more arrogant than ever, boasting. Is it bravado? I do not think so. He knows something of a broth that Nimir is cooking. Well, let him! Yet I do wish I knew what Nimir took away – I have tried to see, but I cannot – he blocks me… he has found something… I wonder if I dare…”

She leaned forward, put her hand upon his forehead. He felt the swift vertigo, was swirled across the lake. He was in the red cavern of the Shadow! But what was the matter with it? The rusted light was thick, impenetrable. Go where he would, it closed around him like a mist of iron. He could not see—

He was back beside the Snake Mother. He shook his head.

“I know,” she said. “I sent your sight with mine on the chance that sensitivity to the Shadow would let your gaze penetrate where mine cannot. But you saw no more than I. Well—” she smiled at him with one of her abrupt changes of mood, “I’m sorry you can’t go to the Feast of the Dream Makers, child. I could send your sight there, with mine. But not long enough to let you see anything. It would be too great a strain for you. A little – and it does no harm; but for any length of time – no.”

Not long after that she dismissed him. He went from her with a bad conscience, but with his determination unchanged.

He was back in his own quarters when an idea came to him.

Kon!

There might be the solution. Since his fight with Lantlu, the spider-man had apparently tucked him under his heart as tightly as he had under his arm during the scramble across the precipice; never passed him without clicking affectionately and giving him a pat or two with his little paws. Could he persuade Kon to scale the walls of the great shell with him, find a place where he could see but not be seen? How the devil could he cajole Kon when he didn’t know how to talk to him? He turned the matter over and over, then laughed. Well, his idea might work. He could only try it.

The full moon arose over the barrier of peaks three hours after the sunset. That meant sunset in Yu-Atlanchi, which by reason of those same peaks was dark when it was still twilight outside. The Feast of the Dream Makers would not begin until the moon shone full upon the amphitheater. That much he had gathered from Suarra. And even now dusk was thickening in the bowl of the Hidden Land. He would have to work quickly.

He dined with Suarra, and the others. She told him that the Mother wanted her attendance that night, gathered that the Serpent-woman intended to miss nothing of what went on at the Feast, and that Suarra had certain duties of her own in that surveillance. To his relief, he found that he was not asked to accompany her. He told her he was tired, would take some of the pictured books to his room, read awhile and sleep. Her solicitude made him feel guiltier, but did not shake his determination. Casually, he asked her where Kon kept himself. She said he had taken a fancy to the chamber of the thrones, was usually there when not scuttling around after Huon.

After she had gone, he stole away to the throne chamber. There, sure enough, was Kon, and sitting, of all places, in the throne of the Lord of Folly. Graydon, taking it as a happy augury, grinned widely. He seated himself beside him, drew out a stick of red pigment and a piece of white silken stuff. Kon clicked, interestedly. Graydon drew on the silk the outline of the amphitheater. Kon nodded. Graydon pointed to the entrance and to himself. The spider-man shook his head, vigorously. Graydon drew a picture of the back of the shell as he thought it might be, and an outline of himself climbing up it. Kon looked at the picture scornfully, took the stick from him, and drew an excellent picture of what, clearly, was the actuality. He made it curved outward, instead of flat as in Graydon’s drawing, covered its face with scrolls which apparently were carvings upon it, and then with that extraordinary facial contortion meant for a grin, sketched on it an outline of himself with Graydon under his arm. He patted Graydon on the back, and broke into a weird burst of sounds plainly intended for a laugh.

Kon had told him as clearly as by words – “The only way you can get up there is to have me carry you, and I know damned well you won’t want that.”

Didn’t he? It was exactly what he did want!

He patted the spider-man on the shoulder approvingly, pointed to the sketch and nodded. The grin faded from Kon’s face. He seemed surprised; disconcerted. He clicked warningly, even angrily. Kon, reflected Graydon, was undoubtedly giving him hell – but he kept his finger on the drawing, nodding stubbornly. Kon seemed to have an idea; he caught up the stick and drew a recognizable picture of Lantlu, mainly so because it showed a face with a fist planted on its nose. Then he drew Graydon again with his rifle pointing at the face. Graydon shook his head. The spider-man looked puzzled.

His next picture showed him crawling down the Temple wall with Graydon apparently held by a foot, headfirst, in Kon’s hand. Graydon nodded cheerfully. If clicks could swear, Kon was swearing. He drew another picture of himself swinging through the branches of the trees with Graydon hanging on behind – still by his foot. Graydon clapped him on the shoulder, nodding complete acquiescence. Kon swore again, stood for a moment in thought, then rapidly sketched himself bringing down four bars on Lantlu’s head. Graydon shrugged, indifferently. Kon emitted one despairing click, and surrendered.

He stalked out of the throne chamber with a gesture to Graydon to follow. He led him to a balcony at the end of a corridor. He scuttled away. Graydon looked out. The bowl of Yu-Atlanchi was filled with darkness, the sun had set behind the barrier. He saw lights, like trains of fireflies, making their way to the amphitheater of the shell. There was a touch on his arm. Kon was beside him, carrying two of the mace-headed bars. Without a single click, the spider-man took him under his arm, swung over the edge of the balcony and seemed to scuttle down the sheer face of the Temple. Graydon noted with amusement that Kon did not hold him upside down as he had threatened.

They stood close to the edge of the great flight of steps leading down to the meadow. They passed cautiously along them, and reached the bordering fringe of trees. There Kon again lifted him, but not to swing him behind him through the branches. The spider-man kept to their cover, flitting from trunk to trunk.

There was a murmur of voices, rapidly growing louder. The fireflies became flambeaux – pale, motionless lights like frozen moonbeams. Faintly by them he saw Yu-Atlanchi’s nobles, men and women, streaming through the narrow entrance to the enormous shell. Here and there among them were the jeweled litters. The flambeaux were pallid ghostlights, gave out no glow, intensified the darkness beyond them.

Kon detoured, and scurried silently through the trees to the back of the amphitheater. He passed the two bars to Graydon, took a firmer grip on him, and began to climb it, making a ladder of those carvings he had sketched, but which Graydon could not see in the blackness. They were at the top.

Here was a broad parapet. Kon straddled it, set Graydon upon it with a bump, and disappeared. Soon he was back, picked him up and slid with him into the dark void beneath. Graydon gasped, then their flight was ended so abruptly that his teeth shook. Around him was the faintest of light, starshine reflected from the opaline wall towering behind and above him. Kon had slid down one of the furrows. He wondered how in the devil the spider-man was going to slide back up it with him under his arm.

He looked around him. They were in the topmost tier of the stone seats. In front of the seats was a three-foot parapet protecting it. Not far below him he heard rustlings, whisperings, soft laughter.

Kon took his shoulder, slid him off the seat, forced him down behind the parapet; crouched there beside him, peeping over it.

Above the western mountains a faint glow of silver appeared. It grew brighter. The whispering below him ceased. Between two of the towering peaks a shimmering argent point sprang out. It became a rill of silver fire.

A man’s voice, a vibrant baritone, began a chant. He was answered with strophe and anti-strophe by the unseen throng below.

Steadily as that chant arose, so arose the moon.

Behind him, at first in fugitive sparklings, then in steadily rising rhythms of opal radiance, the great shell began to glow – brighter and ever brighter, as steadily the moon swung out of the stone fingers of the peaks.

The Feast of the Dream Makers had begun.

The chanting ended. The light of the risen moon fell within the amphitheater and full upon the conchoidal walls. Their radiance quickened, the shell became a luminous opal. Rays streamed from the starry points of blue and peacock patches. They met and crossed at the center of the amphitheater, weaving a web that stretched from side to side. Steadily this ray-woven web grew denser; against it were silhouetted the heads of the nobles, many empty tiers below.

Another chant began. A point of silver light appeared within the opposite wall, high up and close to the opening of the shell-like valves which formed the structure’s entrance. It expanded into a little moon, a replica of the orb swimming across the sky. Three more shone softly into sight beside it. Their rays crept out, touched the luminous web, spread over it. The web held now the quality of a curtain, transparent but material.

And suddenly, through that curtain, high up on the other side of the shell, a larger moon swelled out of the semi-darkness, since there the moonlight did not fall full upon the walls. Within the glowing disk was a woman’s head. She was one of the Old Race, and aureoled by that silver nimbus, her face was transformed into truly unearthly beauty. Her eyes were closed, she seemed asleep—

A Maker of Dreams!

She was, he thought, within a wide niche or alcove, but whether she sat or stood he could not tell. Her body was indistinguishable. The orb behind that exquisite head throbbed, swelled, became still. The Dream Maker seemed to merge with its luminescence, become only a mist against it. The chant soared into a shouting chord, and died.

Something sped from the orb, something without shape or form, realized by another sense than sight. It struck the web. Under its impact the curtain trembled. And suddenly – there was no web, no ray-woven curtain! Graydon looked out into space, into the void beyond this universe. He saw the shapeless thing racing through it with a speed thousands of times that of light. Knew it for a thought from the Maker of Dreams. Following it, he felt probing into his brain something like a numbing finger, cold with the cold of outer space through which the thought moved. On and on, into unfathomable infinitude it went.

It stopped. It became a vast nebula, spiraling like Andromeda’s starry whirl. The nebula came rushing back at the same prodigious speed, a cosmic pinwheel of suns, threatening annihilation.

It resolved itself into its component stars, huge spinning spheres of incandescence, of every color. One sun came rolling out from its fellows, an immense orb of candent sapphire. Beside it appeared a world, fit child of that luminary in size. The sun drew away, the world drew nearer—

It was a world of flame. He looked into jungles of flame through which moved monstrous shapes of fire; at forests built of flames over which flew other shapes whose plumage was fire of emeralds, of rubies and of diamonds; at oceans which were seas of molten jewels and through whose iridescent spray swam leviathans of fire.

Back whirled fire world and sapphire sun among their fellows.

Striding through the void came gigantic men, god-like, laughing. They stooped and plucked the whirling suns. They tossed them to each other. They hurled them into the outer void, streaming like comets. They sent them crashing into each other with storms of coruscant meteors, cascades of sparkling star dust.

The laughing gods strode off, over where had lain the garden of suns they had uprooted. For an instant the void hung, empty.

Graydon, gasping, looked again upon the curtain of woven rays.

Had it been illusion? Had it been real? What he had seen had seemed no two-dimensional picture thrown upon that strange screen. No, it had been in three dimensions – and as actual as anything he had ever beheld. Had the thought of the Dream Maker created that wrecked universe? And the playful gods – were they, too, born of her thought? Or had they been other realities, happening upon that galaxy, stopping to destroy it, then carelessly passing on?

There was a murmuring among the nobles, a faint applause. The orb behind the head of the Dream Maker dimmed. When it pulsed out, it held within it the head of a man, eyes closed as had been the woman’s.

Again the thought of the Dream Maker sped. The ray curtain quivered under its impact. Graydon looked upon a desert. Its sands began to sparkle, to stir and grow. Up from the waste a city built itself – but no such city as Earth had ever borne. Vast structures of an architecture alien and unknown to man! And peopled with chimerae. Their hideousness struck his eyes like a blow. He closed them. When he opened them, the city was crumbling. In its place grew a broad landscape illumined by two suns, one saffron and one green, which swiftly circled each round the other. Under their mingled light were trees, shaped like hydras, like polyps, with fleshy, writhing reptilian limbs to which clung great pulpy flowers of a loathsome beauty. The flowers opened, and out of them sprang amorphous things which fought among the dreadful growths like obscene demons, torturing, mating—

He closed his eyes, sickened. A wave of applause told him the Dream Maker was finished. He felt a deeper hate for these people who could find delectable such horrors as he had beheld.

And now Dream Maker after Dream Maker followed one another, and dream upon dream unfolded in the web of rays. Some, Graydon watched fascinated, unable to draw his eyes from them; others sent him shuddering into the shelter of the spider-man’s arms, sick of soul. A few were of surpassing beauty, Djinn worlds straight out of the Arabian Nights. There was a world of pure colors, unpeopled, colors that built of themselves gigantic symphonies, vast vistas of harmonies. Such drew little applause from these men and women whose chant was interlude between the dreams. It was carnage and cruelty, diablerie, defiled, monstrous matings, Sabbats; hideous fantasies to which Dante’s blackest hell was Paradise itself which stirred them.

He heard a louder whispering, over it the voice of Lantlu; arrogant; vibrant with gloating anticipation.

Within the silver orb was a woman’s head. The beauty of her face was tainted, subtly debased, as though through her veins ran sweet corruption. As her head merged into misty outline on the disk, he thought he saw the closed lids open for an instant, disclose deep violet eyes that were wells of evil, and which sent some swift message toward where Lantlu boasted; they closed. For the first time, an absolute silence fell over the amphitheater; a waiting silence; a silence of suspense – of expectation.

The curtain shook with the speeding thought of the woman. But the web did not vanish as heretofore. Instead, a film crept over it; a crawling film of shifting hues, like oil spreading over the surface of a clear pool. Rapidly the film became more dense, the motion of its shifting colors swifter.

Dark shadows began to flit through the film, one on the skirts of the other, converging toward, settling at, the edge of the ray web. Faster they flitted, one by one, from all parts of it, gathering there, growing steadily denser – assuming shape.

Not only taking shape – taking substance!

Graydon clutched the stone balustrade with stiff fingers. There upon the web was the shape of a man, a giant all of ten feet tall, tenebrous, framed by the crawling colors – and no shadow. No – something material—

Over the rim of the amphitheater shot a wide and vivid ray of red. It came from the direction of the caverns. It struck the sombrous shape, spread fanwise over it, changing it to a rusty black.

The red ray began to feed it, to build it up. Through the beam streamed a storm of black atoms, the shape sucked them in, took substance from them – it was no longer tenebrous.

It was a body, featureless but still a body, caught high in the web, held there by the force of the red ray.

Borne in the wake of the black atoms came the Shadow!

It did not come swiftly. It floated through the beam cautiously, as though none too sure of its progress. It crept, its faceless head outstretched, its unseen eyes intent upon its goal. It covered the last few yards between it and the hanging shape with a lightning leap. There was a cloudy swirling where the black body had hung, a churning mist shot through with darting crimson corpuscles.

Something like a spark of dazzling white incandescence touched the churning mist, was swallowed by it. To Graydon it had seemed to come from outside, opposite the source of the red ray – from the Temple.

The mist condensed, vanished. The body hung for a breath, then slithered through the web down to the ground.

No longer the body of a man. A crouching thing, misshapen, deformed—

Something like a great frog – and on its shoulders—

The head of Nimir!

Graydon thought he heard the laughter of the Serpent-woman!

But Nimir’s pale blue eyes were alive with triumph. The imperious, Luciferean face was radiant with triumph. He shouted his triumph while a frozen silence held those who looked upon him. He capered, grotesquely, upon his sprawling legs, roaring in the lost tongue of the Lords his triumph and defiance!

The red ray blinked out. A flare of crimson light shot up into the skies from beyond the lake.

The hideous hopping figure became rigid; its face of a fallen angel staring at that flare. Its gaze dropped from it to its body, Graydon, every nerve at breaking point, watched incredulity change to truly demonic rage – the eyes glared like blue hell flames, the mouth became an open square from which slaver dripped, the face writhed into a Gorgon mask.

Slowly Nimir turned his gaze to that evil Maker of Dreams who had been his tool and Lantlu’s. She was standing, awake enough now, in the niche of the silver orb.

The monstrous arms of Nimir swung wide, he made a squattering leap toward her. The woman screamed, swayed, and fell forward from the niche. On the floor of the amphitheater, far below where she had stood, a white heap stirred feebly for an instant and was still.

Slowly the eyes of Nimir drew from her, searched the empty tiers, drew closer – closer – to Graydon!

— XXIII —

THE TAKING OF SUARRA

Graydon dropped flat behind the parapet; covered there, hiding his face, fear such as he had never known – no, not even in the red cavern – numbing him. He waited with dying heart for the sound of hopping pads… coming for him… coming to take him…

He raised his hand, fixed his eyes upon the purple stones of the Serpent-woman’s bracelet. Their glitter steadied him. Desperately he thrust from his mind everything but the image of the Mother – clung to that image as a falling climber clings to a projecting root that has stayed his drop into some abyss; filled his mind with that image; closed his ears, closed his mind to all but that.

How long he crouched there he never knew. He was aroused by the patting of Kon’s little hands. Trembling, sick, he raised his head, stared around him. He was in semi-darkness. The moon had traveled past its zenith, was descending. Its rays no longer shone upon the shell behind him. The opaline glow was dim, the web of rays gone.

The amphitheater was empty.

After a little time, Graydon mastered his weakness, crept with the spider-man, hugging the shadow, down the wide aisle that led to the pave; slipped without challenge through the valves of the entrance and into the shelter of the trees.

He reached the Temple. He was lifted by Kon up to that balcony from which they had set forth. He stared from it down upon the city.

The city was ablaze with lights; it was astir and roaring!

He hesitated, uncertain what to do; and while he hesitated, the curtains parted. Into the chamber marched Regor at the head of a score of Emers armed with bows and spears.

His face was haggard. Without a word to Graydon, he stationed the Indians at the opening. He clicked to Kon, and for a minute or two a rapid conversation went on between them. Regor gave some command; with more than his usual melancholy, the spider-man looked at Graydon, and sidled out.

“Come,” Regor touched him on the shoulder, “the Mother wants you.”

A chill of apprehension shot through Graydon. If his conscience had not been so troubled, he would have burst into immediate questions. As it was, he followed Regor without speaking. The outer corridor was filled with Indians, among them a sprinkling of the nobles. A few he recognized as of the Fellowship – some of Huon’s rescued remnant. These saluted him, with, he thought, pity in their gaze.

“Regor,” he said, “something’s wrong. What is it?”

Regor mumbled inarticulately, shook his head, and hurried on. Graydon, fighting an increasing dread, kept step with him. They were mounting toward the top of the Temple, not going to the room where always heretofore he had been summoned to the Mother.

And everywhere were companies of the Emers, threaded by the nobles. A number of the latter were clothed in Lantlu’s green… the defection from the dinosaur master must have been more considerable than Regor had reckoned… plenty of women among them, too – and armed like the men with the short swords and javelins and small round shields. Plenty here for defense… and all of them seemed to know exactly what they were doing… under perfect discipline…

He realized that in reality he didn’t care whether they were or not; that he was deliberately marking time, desperately taking note of exterior things to check a fear he had not dared put into words. He could do it no longer. He had to know.

“Regor,” he said, “is it – Suarra?”

The big man’s arm went round his shoulders.

“They’ve taken her! Lantlu has her!”

Graydon stopped short, the blood draining from his heart.

“Taken her? But she was with the Mother! How could they take her?”

“It happened in the confusion when the Ladnophaxi ended.” Regor hurried him onward. “Huon and I had gotten back an hour before that. The Indians were filtering in. There was much to do. And five-score and more of the Old Race upon whom we had not counted had come, swearing allegiance to the Mother, demanding entrance by their ancient right. Some say Suarra went seeking you. And, not finding you, sought Kon. And that while she was seeking, a message came to her – from you!”

Graydon halted abruptly.

“From me! Good God – no!” he cried. “How could I have sent her a message? I was at that cursed Feast – forced Kon to take me. I’d only gotten back when you appeared—”

“Ah, yes, lad,” Regor shrugged his broad shoulders, helplessly. “But it is now the hour after midnight. The Feast ended an hour before midnight. What of the two hours between?”

Now Graydon felt his head whirl. Could it be that he had crouched behind the parapet for two whole hours? Impossible! But even so—

He thrust out his hand, struck the giant such a blow on his breast that he reeled back.

“Damn you, Regor!” he cried, furiously. “Do you hint I had anything to do with it—”

“Don’t be foolish, lad,” Regor showed no resentment. “Of course I know you sent no message. But this much is certain – had you been here, Suarra would have fallen into no such trap. And it seems just as certain that those who decoyed her must have known you were not here. How did they know it? Why did they not try to intercept you on your return? Maybe the Mother knows all that by now… she was raging… the one she loved best snatched from under her eyes…”

He stopped where the corridor ended in a rounded buttress of wall. He touched it, and a door slid open, revealing a small circular vault or well, its sides sheathed with polished amber metal. Regor stepped into it, drawing Graydon beside him. As the door closed, he had the sensation of swift upward flight. The floor came to rest. He stood upon the roof of the Temple, under the stars; he caught the shimmer of the Serpent-woman’s coils, heard her voice, vibrant with anxiety but without reproach or anger.

“Come to me, Graydon. Go you back, Regor, and get for him the clothing of one of those who abandoned Lantlu. A green cloak with it – and an emerald fillet. Do not tarry!”

“You will not be hard on the lad, Mother?” muttered Regor.

“Nonsense! What blame may be is mine! On with you, and return quickly,” she answered; and when he had gone she beckoned Graydon to her side, cupped his face with her little hands, and kissed him.

“If I had it in my heart to scold you, child, I could not – seeing into your heart with its load of self-reproach and misery. The fault is mine! Had I not yielded to impulse, had let Nimir take the shape woven upon the web instead of malforming it, he would not have struck back at me through Suarra. I wanted to shake his will, weaken him at the outset – oh, why justify myself? It was my woman’s vanity – I wanted to show him my power. I invited reprisal in kind – and it was not long coming. The fault is mine – and so enough of that.”

A thought which had been knocking at Graydon’s mind, a thought so terrible that he had fought its shaping, found utterance.

“Mother,” he said, “you know that, disobeying you, I slipped away to the Feast. When the change came upon Nimir, and after the evil Maker of Dreams had fallen to her death, his gaze began searching the tiers as though for someone. And I think he suspected I was there. I set my thought on you, hiding from him in you. But Regor tells me almost two hours passed while time went by me, unknown. During that time, even though Kon was with me and knows I did not move, could Nimir have stolen my thought, used my mind by some infernal art, to lure Suarra from the Temple? A week ago, Mother, I would have held such a thought sheer madness. But now – after what I beheld at the Feast – it no longer seems madness.”

“No,” she shook her head, but her eyes narrowed and she studied him. “No, I do not believe he knew you were there.”

“I did not – but then it never occurred to me to look for you—”

“He did know I was there!” Conviction came to Graydon, and with it full vision of his dreadful thought. “Again he snared me, and he left me there, like a bird on a limed twig, until he had carried out his purpose… He did not molest me on my way back. And that was after Suarra had been taken. This is what I believe is in Nimir’s mind, Mother – that he will exchange Suarra for – me. He wanted my body. He knows I would not surrender to him to save myself from torment or death. But to save Suarra – ah, he believes I would. So he binds me helpless, takes her and will offer to return her – for what he wants from me.”

“And if he makes that offer – will you accept?” the Serpent-woman leaned forward, purple eyes deep in his.

“Yes,” he answered, and although the old horror of the Shadow rocked him, he knew that he spoke truth.

“But why did he let you return?” she asked. “Why, if you are right, did he not take you after Suarra had been trapped and while you were on your way back to the Temple?”

“That answer is easy,” Graydon smiled wryly. “He knew that I would fight, feared that this body he covets might be injured, marred, perhaps, even be destroyed. I heard Nimir express himself very clearly on that point. Why should he run that risk – if he could make me come to him of my own volition, entirely intact?”

One of the Mother’s childish arms went round his neck, drew his head to her shoulder.

“How far you have marched, you children of the gray ape-men!” she whispered. “And I can offer you little comfort, Graydon, if the truth be that. But this is also true – Nimir will think long before he shakes off the body he now has. The mechanism which sent the feeding ray is destroyed. I sent back on the ray the force which annihilated it. So not again may Nimir weave clothing for himself in that manner, even though he may be able to shed what he wears. It may be that he can become Shadow once more, an intelligence disembodied – and enter you. If you throw open your gates to him. But would he dare take the chance at this moment?

“Not now, when I am ready to strike. If he could but be sure he could enter you – ah, yes. But he cannot be sure. If such bargain is in his mind, he would hold you beside him until the issue between us is settled. And then, if he won, put on your strong clean body – if he could.”

“There’s a large flaw in his reasoning, if that’s his idea,” said Graydon, grimly. “If he destroys you, Mother, it is not likely Suarra would survive. And then I would very speedily put this body of mine in such condition he could not occupy it – as once before, when captive to him, I had planned to do.”

“But I don’t want to be destroyed, nor Suarra, nor you, child,” replied the Mother, practically. “And I don’t intend we shall be. Nevertheless, whether you are right or wrong as to Nimir’s motives, it amounts to the same thing. You are the only one who can save Suarra – if she can be saved. It may be that I play directly into Nimir’s hands by what I have decided. I cannot see, though, how we are any worse off by taking the aggressive. If you fail, you only anticipate by a few hours what you fear—”

She rose high upon her coils, all bird-trills gone from the lisping voice.

“Alone, as soon as may be, you must go to the house of Lantlu, face that spawn of evil and his Dark Master, take Suarra from them. If you fail, then this I promise you – you shall not become the habitation of Nimir. For I, Adana, will blast Yu-Atlanchi and every living thing within it from earth’s face – though in doing this I, too, must pass with them!”

She sank down, red tongue flickering.

“You would have it so, Graydon?”

“I would, Mother,” he answered, steadily, “if in that annihilation Nimir is surely included.”

“Ease your mind of any doubt on that score,” she answered, dryly.

“Then the sooner I go the better,” he said. “God – what’s keeping Regor!”

“He comes,” she answered. “Look around you, Graydon.”

For the first time, he took conscious note of the place. He was upon a circular platform raised high upon the roof of the Temple. Above him were the stars and in the west the sinking moon. At the right and far below was the city, its agitated lights like a panic among fireflies. Its clamor came faintly to him. Across the lake, the caverns of the colossi were black mouths in the moon-glow on the cliffs. At his left was the shadowy plain.

And now he saw that this platform was a circle some two hundred feet wide, rimmed with a high curb of the amber metal. At its edge, facing the caverns, was one of the great crystal disks; a second disk looked down upon the city. The metal bases in which they rested were open; within them were oblong coffers of crystal filled with the quicksilver of the Mother’s sistrum. From these coffers protruded rods of crystal filled with the purple flame of the destroying pillar in the Cavern of the Lost Wisdom.

Close by where the Serpent-woman lay was a curious contrivance resembling somewhat the bowl from which the pillar of violet light had ascended, but much smaller, and tipped as though it were a searchlight which could be swung upward or around in any direction. This, too, bristled with the crystal rods. There were other things whose uses he could not guess, the contents he supposed of those mysterious chests they had carried to her. And set here and there within the circle of the platform were the seven huge silver globes.

“Adana in her arsenal,” she smiled for the first time. “And if you only knew, my Graydon, what weapons these are! I wish that we could have destroyed all in the Cavern before Nimir came to it. Yes, and especially that feeding ray by which in ancient times my ancestors built up many strange beings for use – and for amusement – but always destroyed when their uses were done. Aye, much do I wish it now – who a little time ago hoped as earnestly that Nimir had found it. Ah, well – go to the curb and pass your hand over it.”

Wonderingly, he obeyed, stretched out his hand over the amber curb – felt nothing but air.

“And now—” she leaned over, touched a rod in the bowl beside her. From the curb flashed a ring of atomically tiny sparks of violet light. It rushed up, a hundred feet into the air, contracted there into a globe of violet fire, and vanished.

“Now stretch your hand—” she said. He reached out.

His fingers touched substance. He pressed his palm against it; it seemed slightly warm, glass-like and subtly conveyed a sense of impenetrability. The noise of the city was stilled – there was absolute silence about him. He pressed against the obstacle, beat his closed, fist on it – he could see nothing, yet there was a wall. The Serpent-woman touched the lever again. His hand went out into air so abruptly that he almost fell.

“Not even the strongest of your weapons could break that, Graydon,” she said. “Nor has Nimir anything that can penetrate it. If I could extend that wall around the Temple, as I can round myself here, there would be no need for guards. Yet there is no magic in it. Your wise men believe that what you call matter is nothing but force, energy, in another form. They are right. All this is energy somewhat more abruptly made matter – of a sort – and a most stubborn matter, child. Oh, most stubborn – Regor, you took your time!”

The opening in the platform through which they had risen had disgorged the giant, with a little pile of clothing over his arm.

“Not the easiest thing to find anything to fit him,” he rumbled.

“Take off your clothes,” the Mother nodded to Graydon, “put those on. Nay, child, don’t be disconcerted. Remember – I am a very old, old woman!” Her eyes had danced at his involuntary movement of embarrassment. “And while you dress, listen to me.”

He began to strip.

“Now this it is,” she said. “I could loose destruction upon the city, or loose it upon the palace of Lantlu alone. But such weapons as I handle make no distinction between friend or foe. Suarra would be slain with the others. Therefore, that is barred – at least—” she looked at Graydon, a message in her eyes – “at least for the moment. Nor can we send out any force to rescue her, since that would mean open fighting, and before they could reach her, she would be spirited away where we could not find her. It is a matter for stealth and cunning, courage and ready resource – and one man. One man can pass unnoticed where many could not. It cannot be you, Regor, for you bear too many distinctive marks for successful disguise. Nor Huon, since his strength is not in cunning nor resourcefulness. Nor would I trust any other Yu-Atlanchan.

“It must be you, Graydon – and you must be alone. Also it will be the last thing they will expect – or at least, I hope so. You shall carry your own weapons.”

Graydon, half-dressed, nodded approvingly at that.

“She is in the house of Lantlu. Whether Nimir is there or not I do not know. As he obscured my sight when I tried to find him in his den, so has he there. Where Suarra is, in what plight, I cannot see – always the veiling murk baulks me, Ah – I told you Nimir is more cunning than I had thought – but I can send your sight as far as that place, Graydon, so that you will know how to go to it. And another thing I can do to help you – but that later. Bend to me—”

She pressed her hand against his forehead as when she sent his sight to the cavern that time Nimir had noosed him. He seemed to float from the roof, pass as fast as a man could run away from the Temple, along this lane and that, pausing now here and now there to note a landmark, until he came to a palace of turquoise and opal set around with trees from which drooped long panicles of flowers all red and silver. There were immense windows, casemented, latticed with fretted metal delicate as lacework, set in walls and turrets, and behind them light and the movement of many people. Light and movement he sensed, rather than saw, for ever as he strove to look within, his sight was met by what seemed a fine dark mist through which it could not penetrate.

Back he returned, at the same pace, pausing again at the landmarks that were his clews in this labyrinth of lanes. He stood, swaying a little, beside the Serpent-woman.

“You know the way! You will remember!” As before, they were less questions than commands. And, as before, he answered:

“I know. I will remember.” And realized that every foot between the Temple and the palace of Lantlu was etched into his memory as though he had traversed the way ten thousand times.

She took the fillet of emerald and pressed it down upon his forehead; threw the cloak of green over his shoulders, drew a fold of it up over his mouth. She pushed him away – regarded him, doubtfully.

“For the first time, child, I’m sorry you haven’t the beauty of which I am so weary. You look somewhat like someone half between the Emers and the Old Race. By my ancestors, why weren’t you born with blue eyes instead of gray, and with your hair yellow? Well – it can’t be helped! The tide of things is with you – there is great confusion, and they will not expect attack; certainly, not attack from you, single-handed. And if you fail – I will avenge you as I have promised.”

He bowed over her hand, turned to go.

“Wait!” She drew up her body, sent out a soft call like a faint echo of the elfin bugles. And now he realized that if those winged serpents she called her Messengers were invisible to him, they were not so to her. Forth from the shadows came a beating of strong pinions. The air about him eddied with the sweep of unseen wings. She reached out her arms, seemed to gather something within each, drew them close, looking, with eyes that plainly saw, into eyes none else could see. She began a low, sweet trilling. Weird enough it was to hear those birdlike notes answered by others out of empty air close beside her lips. She dropped her arms.

Graydon heard the wings close over his own head. Something touched his shoulder, wrapped itself gently about his upper arm and sent a coil around his waist; something pressed his cheek, caressingly. Involuntarily, he thrust up a hand and gripped it. It was a serpent shape, yet contact with it brought no shrinking, nor repugnance. It was cool, but not cold; he drew tentative fingers around it. The coil, he thought, must be all of eight inches through. It puzzled him that the creature had so little weight. There was a rapid pulsation above him like the whirring of an enormous hummingbird; he knew that it was holding its weight off him – that it meant its embrace to be reassuring.

He patted it, as he would have a dog. The coils slipped away. The whirring continued. Listening, he thought that there were two there.

“Go now, Graydon,” said the Mother. “Go quickly. These two shall attend you. You cannot talk to them. Point to those you would have slain – and they will slay them. Trust them. They have intelligence, Graydon. You cannot understand, but they have it. Trust them – go—”

She pushed him away from her. Regor wheeled him round; marched him to the edge of the Temple’s roof. There he stooped and drew forth a stout rope at whose end was a grappling hook. He fastened the hook to the cornice, threw the rope over.

“There’s your path, lad,” he said, huskily; “The Mother wants none to see you leave. Over with you! And take this—”

He thrust his long poniard into Graydon’s girdle. Rifle slung over his shoulders, he caught the rope, slipped over the parapet. He slid down, the whirring of the winged serpents accompanying him. He reached the end of the rope, stood for an instant in the darkness, wondering which way to go.

He felt the touch of one of the Messengers, urging him on. And suddenly, in his brain, he saw the way to Lantlu’s palace sharply outlined as a map.

Graydon began to run along these lanes his sight had followed when the Serpent-woman had touched him. Over him, matching his pace, beat the unseen wings.

— XXIV —

BRIDE OF THE LIZARD-MAN

It was a luminously clear night. He found his way easily, as though his feet had been long trained to every turn and curve. After a little he stopped running; for one thing, to conserve his strength for what was to come, for another, lest it draw attention to him from those who might also be traveling his path.

He was close to the palace of Lantlu when he had his first encounter. It proved to him the deadly mettle of those animate rapier blades the Mother had assigned to him for servants. From a shrubbery-concealed lane emerged a couple of Emers carrying javelins and flambeaux in which, instead of flames, were globes gleaming with a golden light. Behind them came a litter carried by four Indians. In it was a noble clad in green. He was followed by another pair of guards.

Graydon had no chance to retreat, nor to slip into the shadow. The occupant of the litter waved his hand, greeted him. Graydon, holding his cloak to hide his face as much as possible, returned the greeting briefly, tried to pass on. Such brusque behavior was apparently not the custom, for the noble raised himself, gave a sharp command to his men, then leaped out and advanced toward him with drawn sword.

There was but one thing to do, and Graydon did it. He pointed at the Emers, and hurled himself upon the Yu-Atlanchan. He ducked beneath a vicious thrust of the sword, and the next instant had caught the noble’s right wrist in one hand while the other throttled him. It was no time for niceties. Up came his knee, and caught his opponent in the groin. Under the agony of that blow, the Yu-Atlanchan relaxed, his sword dropped. Graydon pinned him through the heart with Regor’s dagger.

He did not dare use his rifle, so bent swiftly, picked up the dead man’s sword, turned to face the Emers.

They, too, were dead.

They lay, the eight of them, pierced by the rapier bills of the winged serpents before they could make outcry or lift a single javelin, slain in that brief moment it had taken him to kill one man.

He looked down at their bodies. It seemed incredible that those eight lives could have been wiped out in such little time. He heard the wings of the creatures whirring close over his head, and stared up toward the sound. Above him, as though an unseen finger had traced them in the air, were two slender crimson lines. They shook, and a little shower of crimson drops fell from them—

The winged serpents cleansing their beaks!

He went on with a ruthless elation in his heart. All sense of aloneness had fled; he felt as though he had an army at his back. He sped on, boldly. The lane entered a dense coppice of flowering trees. He crept softly along through the copse. He halted in the deepest shadow. Not a hundred yards away was the palace of Lantlu. The structure covered, he estimated, a little more than an acre. It seemed to be octagonal, not lofty, the bulk of it composed of two high-vaulted floors. From its center arose a dome, shimmering sapphire and opal; and shaped like that which Tamerlane the Conqueror brought back from ravished Damascus to grace his beloved Samarkand. Up to its swelling base pushed clusters of small jeweled turrets, like little bowers built by gnomes for their women.

The octagonal walls were sheathed with tiles glimmering as though lacquered with molten pale rubies, sun-yellow topazes, water-green emeralds. They contained windows, both rectangular and oval, casemented and latticed by fretwork of stone and metal delicate as lace. Out from their base extended a tessellated pave, thirty feet wide, of black and white polished stone. Slender pillars of gold were ranged at its edge, bearing silken canopies. Soft light streamed from every window through webbed curtainings. There was no door.

Graydon crept forward to the edge of the copse. Between him and the pave was a smooth stretch of sward, open, and impossible to cross without being detected by anyone on watch. He saw no one, but from the whole palace came a confused murmur. A hundred feet or more to his right the flowering trees pressed closer to the walls. He flitted along the rim of the boskage until he reached this verdant tongue. Working cautious way to its tip, he found he was now within fifty feet of the pillars.

He faced another side of the palace. On the ground floor were a trio of wide oval windows, almost touching, through which came a brighter glow than from the others. And now voices came to him plainly, voices of the nobles, both men and women. They came from this chamber wherein shone the brighter lights. Here beside the pillars was a guard of a dozen Indians armed with javelins and bows.

As he stood hesitating, wondering what was best to do, he heard from the room a tumult of shouts and laughter, and the sound of pipes playing a curious jigging tune. Then above all, stilling both clamor and music, the jeering voice of Lantlu:

“Welcome Suarra! Welcome to the bride! Ho, there – bring forth the bridegroom!”

And then the beginning of another tumult of applause and laughter.

Graydon leaped out of the protecting shadow of the trees, and pointed to the Emer guard. He heard the swish of pinions. He ran toward the palace, unslinging his rifle as he went. Before he could take his second step he saw two of the Indians go down, then another pair, while the others stood frozen, paralyzed by this invisible death striking among them. And here was sword-play swifter than he had ever beheld in any salon of French or Italian master of fencing. He had not covered half the fifty-foot strip before all that guard lay stretched at the edge of the pave, hearts pierced, throats torn. Precise, unerring, with the speed of a spray of machine-gun bullets, the rapier beaks had reached their marks. Silently they had struck – and silently those Emers had died.

He strode over a body, and to the curtained windows. Whether there were other guards close by, he neither knew nor cared, gave indeed no thought to it. The oval windows were grilled like those he had first noted. He tried the first, but it was immovable. The second swung quietly under his hands. He snapped open the safety lock of his rifle, gripped the gun in his left hand, softly parted the curtain webs with his right, and looked into the chamber.

His gaze flew straight to Suarra – took her in, and for the moment nothing else.

She stood on a dais in the center of the great room beside a flower-decked couch. She was clad in a robe of green through which her white body gleamed. Around her head was a wreath of crimson flowers. Her feet were bare. Her hands were crossed over her breasts, and around their wrists he saw the glitter of golden manacles.

Her mouth had been painted, her cheeks rouged, and these spots of color stood out against the waxen pallor of her face like those upon a doll’s. Like a waxen doll she seemed, lifeless, eyes closed, scarcely breathing. And even as he gazed, she shuddered, swayed, and dropped upon the edge of the couch.

“The bride is becomingly disturbed at the approach of the bridegroom,” spoke Lantlu, suavely, sonorously, like a mocking showman. “It is fitting. It is the traditional attitude. Her virginity is alarmed. Shyness overcomes her. But soon – ah, soon – Ho, ho, ho!” laughed Lantlu. From all the room a chorus of malicious laughter answered him. Suarra’s head drooped lower.

There were red lights dancing before Graydon’s eyes. Rage so great it half strangled him beat through him. He mastered himself, vision clearing. He saw now that all around the dais was a circle of low couches, and upon these were a score of the Yu-Atlanchans. So far as their beauty went, they might have been angels, but through those masks of perfection peered devils of cruelty and cold lusts. There was no pity in the eyes that sparkled upon Suarra.

At the far end of the room, half-risen, one knee upon the couch, a hand caressing the hair of a woman lying there, was Lantlu. With a satisfaction that for a moment overrode his red wrath, Graydon noted the flattening of the once perfect nose, the still disfigured mouth, the signatures of his fist. He looked away from him quickly examining the chamber for its entrances and guards.

There was only one doorway, draped like the windows; and no guards, at least not within the room. Well, that was good… Lantlu was an easy target… the best plan would be to step in, put a bullet through his head, shoot a few more, get Suarra and escape with her before the others could recover from the surprise of the attack. He hated to let that mocking devil off as easily as that… what he would prefer was the use of a fully equipped medieval torture chamber for a day or two… however – one couldn’t have everything. After all, he was playing in luck that the Dark Master was absent. Yes – that was the best way. Hell! He was forgetting his best cards of all! The Mother’s two Messengers! With them and his rifle he could clean up this whole devil’s outfit! Where were they?

As though in answer to his thought, he felt the pressure of a coil on each side of him; knew that the two creatures were poised, waiting to enter the window with him.

He gave a swift glance at Suarra before he tensed himself for the leap within. He saw then what he had not noticed before – that between her and the doorway the circle of couches was broken, leaving a wide passage straight from it to the dais.

And as he looked, the webs were drawn aside, and through the opening walked two Emer women, naked, carrying great baskets filled with flowers from which, as they marched, they drew handfuls of blooms strewing them on the floor.

Close behind them came four Emers, armed with maces.

“Behold!” chanted Lantlu. “The bridegroom!”

Through the portal shambled a lizard-man!

He was clothed, like Suarra, in a robe of filmy green through which his leathery yellow skin glistened, as though it had been oiled. His red eyes darted right and left, viciously, challenging. Around his scaly head was a wreath of white blossoms out of which his red comb protruded, hideously. From some hidden place the jigging music sounded again, loudly. The crimson eyes of the lizard-man fell upon the crouching figure of the girl upon the dais. His lips drew back along his snout, showing the yellow fangs. He leaped forward.

“Mother!” groaned Graydon – and shot through the curtains.

The leap of the lizard-man was checked as though by a sledge blow. He spun in midair. He dropped with the top of his head blown off.

Graydon vaulted over the low sill of the oval window. He fired again, with half-raised rifle, at Lantlu. As the shot rang out, the master of the dinosaurs dropped behind the couch, but Graydon knew that he had missed him. All right, he’d get him later! Now for the Emers. He raised his gun – the Emers were down!

The winged serpents! Again he had forgotten them. This time they had not waited for his orders. The guards lay slain.

“Suarra!” he called. “Come to me!”

She stood, gazing at him incredulously. She took one tottering step.

Without a twinge of compunction he sent bullets through the heads of two nobles upon couches between them, breaking the circle. That would teach them a lesson… but better not kill any more now… better not turn the Messengers upon them until Suarra was under his arm… keep ’em quiet till then… then send ’em all to hell, where they belonged…

If he only knew how to talk to the Messengers! He’d send them after Lantlu. But you couldn’t just say, “Go get him, Bowser,” to things like those.

“Suarra!” he called again. She had slipped over the edge of the dais, was running to him… better watch that doorway… those shots must have been heard… how about that open window at his back… well, you couldn’t look two ways at once…

Suarra was beside him!

“Beloved! Oh, my beloved!” he heard her broken whisper, felt her lips press his shoulder.

“Buck up, darling! We’re going to get out all right!” he said. He kept eyes and rifle ready on the ring of silent nobles and the doorway.

He wondered whether they were going to get out. He’d better keep to that idea he had a moment ago… launch the winged serpents, get out the window and away with Suarra while the two Messengers were slaughtering, leave them to follow, catch up and cover their retreat…

Too late.

In the open doorway, appearing abruptly as though he had stepped out of the air, was Nimir!

Too late now. No use to loose the winged deaths, or try to flee. Graydon had clear conviction of that. He had walked into Nimir’s trap, and must make his bargain. He lowered his gun, drew Suarra close to him.

A doubt assailed him. Had it been Nimir’s trap? The Lord of Evil had moved a step into the great room, and was staring at him and Suarra, astonishment in his pale blue eyes. Up from beside him rose Lantlu, laughing – pointing derisively, gloating upon them.

Graydon threw up the rifle, covered him. Before he could press the trigger, one of Nimir’s long, misshapen arms had circled Lantlu, had thrust him behind the shelter of his own body. The rifle spat. It seemed to Graydon that the bullet went through Nimir’s breast.

Silent, unheeding, the Lord of Evil’s puzzled gaze traveled from man and girl to the body of the Urd, the wreath of white blooms yellowed with its blood, mockery of green wedding garment torn in its death agony. His eyes passed along the path of flowers, over the dead Emers, to the blossom-strewn couch on the dais, and rested again upon green-robed Suarra.

Then Graydon saw comprehension come to him.

The crouching, frog-like body seemed to expand; it drew erect. The beautiful, Luciferean face above it became white and hard as stone, the pale eyes like ice. He wheeled, gripped Lantlu, lifted him and held him high over his head as though he meant to dash him to the floor. The master of the dinosaurs writhed and fought vainly against that grip.

For an instant the Lord of Evil held him thus, then mastered his passion, lowered him, and thrust him down prone at his feet.

“You fool!” he said, and there was a dreadful tonelessness in his voice, “to set your lusts and your hatreds against my will! Did I not tell you that this girl was to be held safe, inviolate? And did I not tell you why? How did you dare to do this thing? Answer me, fool!”

“I promised her I would mate her with the Urd. I keep my promises. What difference would it have made? The outlander would have come at your summons. Nor never have known – until too late. And no harm has been done, since you have him now. And even somewhat sooner than you had planned, Dark Master!”

There was no fear in Lantlu’s voice, and there was more than a trace of his mocking arrogance in his salutation. The Lord of Evil did not reply, looking down upon him inscrutably. Stubborn lad, Lantlu, thought Graydon. Thoroughly rotten – but hard to break.

He studied the monstrous body, with its face of a fallen angel, the noble head, the imperial power and beauty of it – he felt a pang of pity for the Lord of Evil! After all, why not have let him have a body which would have gone with that head… damned if he could see what was gained by saddling Nimir with that monstrosity… Nimir had worked long enough for proper clothes… a woman’s trick… it wasn’t decent fighting…

Suddenly he was aware that Nimir’s eyes were upon him, that he had read his thoughts.

“You and I are not so far apart after all, Graydon!” said the Lord of Evil, with all that alluring sweetness which he had fought when battling against him as the Shadow on the jet throne.

It brought Graydon back with a jolt. After all, what business had he pitying Nimir! It was his business to get Suarra out of peril – save himself if he could!

The cold eyes of the Lord of Evil were bluer, there was friendliness in them – real or assumed.

“I must talk with you, Graydon.”

“I know it,” said Graydon, grimly. “And it will be right here, Nimir. And now.”

The Lord of Evil smiled, and the smile lightened the dark power throned upon his face, gave it something of that dangerous attraction which lived in the sweetness of his voice. Graydon felt the spell, and braced himself against it.

“Get up, Lantlu. Do not go from here until I permit you. See that you do nothing to interrupt us. I warn you – and for the last time!”

Lantlu arose leisurely, gave Graydon and Suarra an indifferent glance, sauntered over to his couch, dropped beside the woman there and drew her arm around his neck. It was rather well done, Graydon thought, grudgingly.

The Lord of Evil shambled toward him. He felt Suarra’s uncontrollable shudder. And when he was within a half-dozen paces, Graydon drew Regor’s poniard, set its point on the girl’s breast, over her heart.

“Stop there, Nimir,” he said. “That is close enough. And hear me first. I know what you want. I am willing to discuss it. If we cannot agree, and if I am convinced we cannot escape, I will kill Suarra. She would have it so. Is that not true, Suarra?”

“It is true, beloved,” she answered, tranquilly.

“I will then,” continued Graydon, “do my best against you with this—” he touched the rifle – “If I find I can’t stop you, I’ll use my last bullet to blow my own head off. And that, I think, you won’t like. But I’ll do it. I mean it, Nimir.”

The Lord of Evil smiled again.

“I believe you. And that is, as you surmise, the last thing I would like to see happen. Nor will it be necessary – if you are reasonable.”

“My mind is wide open,” said Graydon, “but only to your words. You understand me?”

The Lord of Evil bowed, then looked at him for a time without speaking. A feeling of unreality stole over Graydon. He felt as though he were in some play, a dream play in which he ran no real risks; that he could pick his own lines, mold his situations. He lost entirely the sense of grimmest reality that had held every nerve and muscle taut as drawn bow strings. And, oddly, that feeling of the unreal buoyed him, filled him with a heady recklessness – nor did it occur to him – then – that the Lord of Evil might be responsible for all that.

“Neither of you can escape – unless I let you,” said Nimir. “You cannot harm me, nor can those servants of Adana whom I see hovering. That is truth, Graydon. This shape of mine, built as it was, is not in any manner like yours. Material, yes – in a way. Send your missiles through it, plunge your poniard into it – they cannot harm me. If you do not believe me – try it, Graydon.”

He plucked open his cloak, revealing the distorted barrel of his chest, and stood waiting. Graydon raised the rifle, minded for the moment to accept the challenge. He dropped it – useless to waste the cartridge, Nimir spoke truth—

“But you,” the Lord of Evil covered his monstrous torso, “you and Suarra I can destroy. Oh, very easily. Yet here once more we are at stalemate – since I want you, Graydon – let us say, intact.”

“You made that quite clear once before,” said Graydon curtly. “Well – then what?”

“A better bargain for you than if that wilful fool had not spoiled my plan,” answered Nimir. “And not alone because by doing so he has put it in your immediate power to make yourself – uninhabitable. No – quite as much because of a certain thought you had of me and the Snake-woman not so long ago. It has been so long since anyone has thought kindly of me,” said Nimir, and laughed – “I find it oddly pleasant.”

“The bargain?” said Graydon, impatiently.

“Quite so,” went on the Lord of Evil, gently. “I never intended this shape of mine to be – permanent. Even if it had not been marred, it would still have been but – temporary. No, Graydon, I much prefer good human flesh and blood, which, adequately treated, can be made to last forever. And, as I have told you, as you remind me, rather often, I much prefer yours. Therefore, I will send Suarra and you safely back to the Temple – yes, even with a guard of honor – if—”

“I was waiting for the – if,” said Graydon.

“If you will promise me, should I win the coming battle, that you will come to me of your own free will and, after I have cast aside these present coverings, let me enter as permanent tenant of that body of yours – I mean, of course, as co-tenant, I renew, in short, my offer of sharing your habitation with you without crowding or other molestation,” smiled the Lord of Evil.

“Fair enough,” said Graydon, unhesitatingly. “I agree.”

“No, beloved, no!” cried Suarra, and clung to him. “Better death for both—”

“I don’t think he will win, darling,” said Graydon; the heady recklessness was stronger within him… it was a damned sight better dicker than he had expected… rather a sporting proposition… he didn’t believe Nimir could win… even if he did – well, he, Graydon, was strong… he could fight this companion once he was seated in his brain beside him… control him… make him sick of his bargain… and, at the worst, life would be interesting – to put it mildly… hell, where were those ideas coming from?… why was he thinking like that?… weakening… no matter, he had to save Suarra… he had to save Suarra… it was the only way!

“I know I will win,” said the Lord of Evil, softly. “You know it, too, don’t you, Graydon!”

“No!” said Graydon, and slipped away from that spell of helpless acquiescence which had stolen over him. He drew a deep breath, all recklessness and sense of the unreal gone, bitter anger and a fierce determination taking their place. “No, I don’t know it, Nimir. And don’t cast any more of that sorcery of yours around me – or I may decide to end things right here and now. Let it stand! I agree! Now let us go!”

“Good!” the Lord of Evil laughed, the sweetness that had laden the whisperings of the Shadow strong in that laughter, “now would you make me even more determined to win, Graydon, did I not know that my victory is certain. There is only one more detail. I will not demand that you remain within the Temple during my little debate with the Snakewoman. Indeed – I do not think you would be able to,” he looked at Graydon with a sparkle of amusement in the pale eyes – “But now that I have such a personal interest in you, it is surely within my rights to insist that every precaution be taken to keep – well, to employ a polite phrase – to keep my stake in the contract in usable condition! Therefore, you shall wear – this—” He took from his girdle a broad collar of faintly gleaming red metal, stepped forward with it in his hand. “What is it?” asked Graydon, suspiciously. “Something that will keep certain powerful servants of mine from killing you,” answered the Lord of Evil, “if and when you are shaken out of the Temple. I don’t mind your telling Adana that. She will be fully aware of what I mean when she sees it. Really, it gives you quite an advantage. I waive that, however – for broader considerations. Come,” into his voice crept implacable command – “it is necessary. It gives me no power over you, if that is what you fear. But until you wear it – the girl cannot go.”

Graydon bent his head, felt the touch of the misshapen fingers on his throat, heard the click as they fastened the collar around his neck – heard Suarra sobbing.

“And now,” said the Lord of Evil, “for your escort back to Adana – so anxiously trying to see what is happening to you! So furious because she cannot! Follow me.”

He shambled to the doorway. Hand in hand, they followed him, through the broken ring of the silent, staring nobles, past the hideous body of the lizard-man and the Emers whom the winged serpents had slain. As Graydon passed, he heard the pinions of those unseen guardians above their heads. He stifled an impulse to send them darting at Lantlu.

The Lord of Evil leading, they passed out of that chamber into a great hall filled with the Emer soldiers and with nobles who shrank back as Nimir squattered by – shrank back and let them pass and kept lips closed and faces expressionless. Only, he noted, they looked furtively at the dully gleaming collar that fettered his throat – and over some of their faces quick pallor spread.

They came at last to the entrance to the palace. The Lord of Evil beckoned a captain, and gave swift orders. A double litter was brought, borne by eight strong green-kilted bearers. Into it, courteously, Nimir waved them.

The bearers raised the litter, a score of the soldiers led by another Indian officer, surrounded it. The doors swung open, and through them marched their escort.

“Until we meet again,” smiled the Lord of Evil.

“May it be never!” answered Graydon, whole-heartedly.

“I look forward to many pleasant centuries together!” said the Lord of Evil – and laughed.

That laughter, still ringing in his ears, they entered the shadows of the trees. In the hands of the guards shone out flambeaux of clear white light. And suddenly Suarra thrust arms round his neck, drew his head down upon her soft breast.

“Graydon – Graydon, beloved – I am afraid! I am greatly afraid! It was too great a price, beloved! Better, far better, had I slain myself before you came! But I did not know… I hoped… until it was too late, and they fettered me… and then I could not kill myself…”

Well – so was he afraid! Bitterly afraid! He comforted her as best he could.

They came at last to the Temple. They halted while the officer and a squad of his men mounted the broad steps, signaling with their flambeaux as they went. Graydon heard a challenge, the rumbling of Regor’s voice. Then down the great stairway leaped the giant, to the side of their litter; lifted them out; embraced them as though they had been children returned from the dead.

The green-kilted guard saluted, stood at attention until they had come to the massive doors. Graydon heard the pinions of the winged serpents, darting upward to where the Mother waited; turning, saw the escort beginning their return.

He felt an immense weariness; he swayed, was caught by Regor’s strong arm, carried forward. The doors of the Temple clanged shut behind him.

— XXV —

THE COLLAR OF NIMIR

Suarra’s soft hands caressed him, she was murmuring broken words of pity, of endearment. He mastered his weakness, and broke away from Regor. The immense vestibule was filled with Indian soldiers in the Mother’s blue, and some score of the nobles. Now these latter strode toward them, eagerly, their customary poise banished by devouring curiosity. But Regor waved them aside.

“To the Mother – and at once. Suarra, you are not harmed?”

She shook her head, and he hurried them onward. His eyes fell upon the metal collar around Graydon’s neck, and he paused, staring at it perplexedly.

“The badge of Nimir!” laughed Graydon, mirthlessly. The giant reached out his hand, as though to tear it from him.

“No,” Graydon pushed him away, “it’s not so easy as all that, Regor.”

The giant glared at the collar, uneasily, his brows knitted.

“It is a matter for the Mother,” said Suarra. “Quickly, for the night wanes.”

She took Graydon’s hand, sped on with him, leaving Regor to follow. On they went through wide corridors filled with the Emers and little knots of the Old Race, stopping not even for greeting, until they came to that curving buttress up through which ran the shaft to the Serpent-woman’s sanctuary. They stepped from it out onto the roof of the Temple.

“Mother!” cried Suarra.

There was a gleam of rosy-pearl, flashing to her, the coils of Adana undulating over the platform. Her body arose be side the girl, her childish arms went round her neck, drawing her head down to her little tilted breasts. For the first time, Graydon heard something suspiciously like a human sob in the Serpent-woman’s voice.

“My daughter! Suarra! My daughter!”

And Suarra clung to her, weeping, while the Mother’s heart-shaped mouth caressed her misty hair.

The Mother raised her head, thrust out a hand to Graydon. Her gaze fell upon the collar of the Lord of Evil. She grew rigid, her eyes dilated, her neck thrust forward, her pointed red tongue flicked out – once, twice – like a snake’s.

She dipped from Suarra, reached out and touched Graydon upon the heart, the forehead; then cupped his face in her tiny hands and stared deep into his eyes. And gradually into the purple pools came pity, regret – and a certain apprehension, or so it seemed to him.

“So!” she whispered, and dropped her hands. “So – that is what he plans!” Her gaze drew inward, it was as though she were talking to herself, unseeing, unaware of them – “But he will be loath to use that weapon – until the last. I can meet it, yes. But I, too, am loath to use that power – as reluctant as he. By my ancestors – had I but one of my own people to stand beside me! Yes, had I but another of the Lords to stand with Tyddo – I would not fear. Well – there is no choice. And if between us Nimir and I unloose that which we cannot again leash, will not destruction spread like a swift pestilence over all this spinning globe… make of earth a desert indeed… bare of life? Ah – but then Nimir himself cannot escape destruction…”

Her gaze came back to Graydon.

“There, child,” she said, softly. “Don’t despair. So you pitied Nimir, did you? And made his bargain! While he dropped his poison into your mind so cunningly – oh, so cunningly! Well, it was written, I suppose – and had to be. Nor was it your fault. It was I who baited that trap, though unknowingly, when I gave way to my woman’s vanity and altered his clothing to my whim there at the Ladnophaxi. What has happened is but the pattern I made. You could have done nothing else – and it might be worse. We will let the dice lie as they have fallen. Oh, do not stare at me. It is no sorcery. I have read your thought, that is all. But I would hear the tale in words. Suarra—”

She turned to the girl. She saw, apparently for the first time, the bridal robe of green, the painted cheeks and lips. And at the sight, all her wrath against Nimir, all her hours of anxiety for Suarra, came to a focus and exploded. She threw out her hands, ripped the robe from the girl, leaving her revealed in all her white loveliness.

“Go over there and wash your face!” hissed the Snake Mother, as angrily as any old-fashioned woman might to a daughter she had caught surreptitiously dipping into the rouge pot.

The girl gasped, then fled, an ivory shadow, into the dimness around Adana’s cushioned nest. And Graydon, despite all his weariness and trouble, chuckled; it was one of the flashes of purely human character that took away from this entirely unhuman being any mind-clogging awe or sense of terrifying strangeness; that made him doubt the doubts which, significantly enough, never crossed his mind when he was with her.

The Mother looked at him angrily, raised her hand as though half inclined to slap him; then glided to Suarra. He heard her talking gently, even remorsefully, to the girl. Then she called him.

A globe of dim luminescence pulsed out beside her. By its light he saw that Suarra had thrown round herself a covering cloak, and that she had cleansed her face of paint. She glanced at him, and dropped her head. The Serpent-woman laughed, brought their faces together, cheek by cheek.

“Don’t mind, child,” she said. “He knows women have bodies, I’m sure. Or should, by this time. And Regor is old enough to be your great-grandfather, at least. Come over, Regor. Now tell us, daughter, just what happened. Here, drink this.”

She reached down into her coffer, took from it a small phial, filled a crystal goblet with water, and into it a drop from the phial. Suarra sipped, and handed it to Graydon. He drank, a tingling went through him, all weariness vanished; tenseness relaxed, his mind cleared, and he sank back beside Regor, listening to Suarra.

There was little of what she told, save how she had been trapped, that he did not know. An Emer officer had come to her after she had left the Mother and was watching the arrival of Huon’s refugees from the lair. He bore a message from the Lord Graydon, he told her, who was on the lower terrace of the Temple. The Lord Graydon had discovered something there he wanted her to see before they went to the Mother with news of it. The Lord Graydon had commanded the speaker to find her and guide her to where he waited.

The very boldness and simplicity of the ruse had snared her. She knew that the Temple terraces were guarded, and it never occurred to her to doubt the genuineness of the summons. She had gone along the lower terrace, passing several squads of guards and answering their challenges. She had just gone by one of these squads when a cloak was thrown over her head, and she was lifted up and borne away.

“They were Lantlu’s men,” said Regor. “They had killed our guards, and taken their places. They were clad in the Mother’s colors. We found the bodies of our men where they had been hurled over the terrace.”

When they had gotten into the shelter of the trees, Suarra continued, her wrists and ankles had been bound and she had been placed in a litter. She had been taken straight to Lantlu’s palace. There, Indian women had rouged and wreathed her and before she could suspect what was intended, had stripped her, clothed her in the green robe and snapped the golden manacles. Then she had been led to the room where Graydon had found her – to learn from Lantlu’s jeering lips what he had in store for her.

The Serpent-woman listened, head swaying back and forth menacingly, eyes glittering; she asked no questions, did not Interrupt. “Regor,” she said quietly, when Suarra was done, “go you now, and make sure there has been no chink left through which any other rat of Nimir can creep. Take what sleep you can – for at dawn all within the Temple must be awake and at their posts. By another dawn, either I or Nimir will have conquered. Suarra, Graydon – you two sleep here beside me for what remains of this night.”

And when Regor had gone, she took a hand of his in both of hers.

“Child,” she said, softly, “do not fear. You shall sleep deep, and without dream or fear of Nimir. There are still four hours before dawn. I will awaken you – and then we shall talk of what is to be done. About this, I mean—” she touched the sullenly glowing collar – “and other things. Now drink this – you, too, Suarra.”

She dipped again into her coffer, drew forth another phial, dropped one colorless globule into the goblet They drank of it. Suarra yawned, sank down upon the cushions, smiled at him sleepily; her eyes closed. He felt a delicious lethargy stealing over him, let his head fall upon his cushions. He looked again at the Serpent-woman. She had drawn forth her sistrum, was holding it on high. From it streamed a slender pencil of milky light. She pointed it to the zenith, began to trace within its depths an ever-widening spiral.

She was signaling. Signaling, he wondered drowsily, to whom – to what? He fell asleep.

The Mother’s touch awakened him; he looked up into her face bending over him. Her purple eyes were dilated, phosphorescent, enormous in the heart of her childish face. He sprang to his feet. At the edge of the platform was the Lord of Folly, peering over toward the lake; the scarlet figure of Kon, the spider-man, and the black bulk of Regor beside him. Suarra was still asleep, her cheek nestled in the crook of one white arm stretched from under a heap of silken coverings.

Graydon shivered, feeling suddenly chill. For the first time since he had entered the Hidden Land, the sky was obscured. The clouds hung low, not more than three hundred feet above the Temple. They were less like clouds than a solid steel-gray ceiling, motionless.

Above him, and all around him, was a continuous soughing and whispering like the circling flight of countless and immense birds. Rhythmically they pulsed, this beating of unseen pinions—

The winged serpents! The Messengers of the Snake Mother! It was they she had been summoning from beyond the barrier with her slender beam of light!

She took his hand, glided with him over to the platform’s edge, gave him a lens similar to that he had used in Huon’s lair, pointed a finger to the nearer shore of the lake. He looked through it.

The shore was encrusted with the lizard-men! They surged there by the hundreds, by the thousands, it seemed to him; their ranks moving slowly forward as others joined them, wading up from the waters. And now he saw that the Urd horde was streaming across the lake from the caverns, that the surface was streaked from side to side with the swimming horde. And that along the front of those who had landed rode a half dozen of Lantlu’s nobles upon the black dinosaurs, whipping them into order with huge lashes shaped like sjamboks. One of them leaned over the side of his monstrous steed. Graydon caught the dull glimmer of red metal around his throat, looked more closely. It was a collar such as that which the Lord of Evil had snapped around his own neck.

Another of the dinosaur riders bore this badge of Nimir – and another. He dropped the lens, turned to the Serpent-woman. She nodded, answering his unspoken question.

“Yes,” she said, “Nimir has linked you to him. Part of what he told you was truth, Graydon – but part of it was lies. When he said that it would protect you, he spoke truth. But when he said it gave him no power over you – there he lied, indeed.”

She was silent, while he stared at her, miserably. “And that is why you may not stay here with me to help us as I had hoped. For Nimir is cunning and desperate – and I hope will soon be much more desperate – and it might be that in one unguarded moment of yours he could wreck through you all that I plan.”

“Not through me!” groaned Graydon. “No, no!”

“We cannot afford to run the risk,” answered the Mother. “Now I could rid you of his mark – but something whispers to me to let it be. That in doing this to you, Nimir has made a mistake. That if he had been wise he would have let the cards fall as I had disposed them for him. That he should have bent his mind solely upon this issue, but that his eagerness to possess you may react upon him, even as my vanity has reacted upon me. How this advantage may come, I do not know – but it is there—”

“The last Urd has reached the shore, Adana,” muttered Regor. “We should go.”

“Go you then with Regor and Huon,” said the Mother. “They have use for you. And of this be sure – Nimir shall not have you. This I have promised you. And I, Adana, tell you that thus it shall be.”

And suddenly she leaned forward and set her lips to his forehead.

“Awaken Suarra,” she said. “Bid her good-by – then go swiftly. If we meet never again – I loved you, child.”

Again she kissed him, then pushed him away. He bent over the sleeping girl. She opened drowsy eyes, looked up at him, dropped an arm around his neck and drew his lips down to hers.

“Oh, but I have slept,” she murmured, but half-awake. “And is it already dawn?”

“It is well beyond dawn, heart of mine,” he told her. “And I must go with Regor and Huon down into the Temple—”

“Into the Temple!” she sat up, all awake. “But I thought you were to be here. With me. Mother—”

“Have no fear, darling,” he laughed, and only Adana knew what that laughter cost him, “I have the habit of coming back to you.”

Regor tapped his shoulder. Graydon gently withdrew the clinging arms, kissed her once more, strode swiftly away between the giant and Huon. His last glimpse of her as the three dropped down the shining shaft was her head against the breast of the Serpent-woman, her hand raised to her lips to throw him a parting kiss – and doubt beginning to darken her clear eyes.

— XXVI —

RAGNAROK
IN YU-ATLANCHI

Now of the freight of those dread hours following his parting with Suarra, Graydon saw with his own eyes only a part. The complete picture he had to arrange from the stories of others.

They passed on quickly, the three of them, stopping only to get his pouch of cartridges. They came to the entrance of the chamber of the thrones. Here Regor halted.

“We have destroyed the opening mechanism of every tunnel entrance to the Temple except one,” he began, abruptly. “That one cannot be forced. This was at command of the Mother. Unless she has miscalculated, we cannot therefore be taken by surprise from without. It will be Nimir’s and Lantlu’s object to get us out of the Temple, where they can overwhelm us with the Xinli and the Urd. Ours to prevent it.

“We threw up during the night, strong barricades across the great stairs. We have stationed regiments upon the three terraces all around the Temple. If the attack becomes too hot, they can swarm back into the Temple by means of scaling ladders from the windows and through the great doors. Every window and opening is manned by archers and javelins and mace-men. Huon commands the barricade. You, Graydon, are to fight beside him. If they charge with the riding Xinli, try to kill their riders with that weapon of yours. If you can sting the Xinli into turning back upon those who follow – it will be very good. At the worst, a Xinli with none to guide it is not of much use to Lantlu. We must beat them off – that is all. What Nimir has hidden in his girdle we don’t know. Above us all fights the Mother – who probably does know. And who has weapons as deadly as any possessed by the Lord of Evil, be sure of that! I do not think this is farewell, lad,” the giant’s voice grew husky – “but if farewell it be—” he threw his sound arm around Graydon, hugged him mightily, gripped the hand of Huon, and strode away.

“You and I, Graydon.” Huon’s voice was grim. “You remember what I told you that night you set out for the cavern of the Frog-woman. You and I together – under a red sky from which icy shadows dropped and battled with shapes of flame. It is the hour – and I am glad. Look.”

He pointed to a high window out of which a dozen bowmen peered. Through it could be seen a little square of sky. The ceiling of cloud was no longer steely gray. It was becoming lurid, tinged with a sinister red which slowly deepened as he looked.

“Come!” said Huon. Silently, they passed on into the vast vestibule into which the portals of the Temple opened. It was crowded with Emers armed with bows and the crushing clubs, swords and javelins. Captaining them were some twenty of the Old Race, armed only with swords and maces. They had been waiting for Huon, for as he approached the massive metal valves of the doors swung back. The soldiers marching behind them, they passed out upon the broad platform which met the colossal flight of stone steps.

The parapets of the three terraces were lined with soldiers, like the walls of some beleaguered city. A double barricade of stone blocks had been raised across the stairway. These barricades were about six feet high, the first beginning at the lowest terrace, the second some fifty feet behind it. At the base of each were blocks upon which the defenders could stand. He thought what an excellent trap that fifty-foot enclosure could be made into, wished heartily for just half a dozen machine guns to station on the top of the hither barricade. What a shambles they could make of it!

He checked himself – no use of thinking in terms of modern warfare in this game, where the opposing generals held powers of which neither their officers nor rank and file knew anything. He reached the further wall, unslung his rifle, drew the little bag of cartridges in front of him, and felt through its contents. Not more than a couple of hundred, he reflected ruefully. Well, with careful shooting, that many could do a lot of damage. He charged his magazine, while Huon disposed of his force.

Graydon peered down toward the lake edge. It was a damned nasty color – that reddish light from the cloud canopy made it mighty hard to see anything at any distance. Nimir was doing it, of course. Where was Nimir? Would he fight with his followers, or was he, like the Serpent-woman, in some secret place directing his mysterious forces?

Nimir had seemed very certain of winning. He might have lied to him about some things – but he hadn’t been lying about that. He meant it. Wouldn’t it be better after all to vault the barricade, get to the Lord of Evil, and – give himself to him? Force immediate trial of that infernal experiment? It would hold Nimir back, cause an armistice until the Dark Master was within him. After that, he could fight it out with Nimir. By God – why not? That would be worth the trying! If he won – he’d have saved Suarra – and the Mother – and Regor – fine old boy, Regor. Why have all this slaughter when he could stop it?

The thought was like a whisper in his mind.

A whisper!

Graydon pulled himself up, gasping. A whisper? Like the whisper of the Shadow!

The Serpent-woman had been right! It was Nimir – whispering to his mind, luring him, tempting him, lying to him. Playing him! Thank God she hadn’t let him stay up there on the roof! His hands flew up to the collar, tore at it – he seemed to hear the laughter of the Lord of Evil!

Huon gripped his arm. Graydon turned to him, trembling, the cold sweat pouring down his face.

“Huon,” he said, breathlessly, “if I start to run to the enemy, if I do one single thing that seems to you to be – not myself – knock me on the head with your sword. Or put the sword through me, if it seems necessary.”

“Do not fear,” Huon nodded, gravely. “I am watching, and you shall not be betrayed.”

From the Temple came the blare of warning bugles. Far away, on the fringe of the meadow, there was movement, the glinting of black scales, and the dull gleaming of yellow leathery skins.

“They come!” said Huon, and shouted to his men. The shout was echoed along the terraces. There was a whistling of bowstrings being tested. Then silence as the defenders watched the approach.

The attackers came slowly at first. In the van were the great dinosaurs spread out some fifty feet apart. With chagrin, Graydon saw that these riders were clad in coats-of-mail, their faces visored. He had never tried a bullet against that armor; wondered how pierceable it might be; took comfort in the thought that, at worst, the impact would probably knock them from their saddles.

Behind the dinosaurs padded the horde of the lizard-men. And it was a real horde six deep and shoulder to shoulder over a thousand foot line. If the Urd had leaders, then they were of their own kind and not to be distinguished from the mass. On they padded in the wake of the black saurians, their red eyes glittering, their heads thrust forward, talons outstretched.

A hundred yards behind the Urd marched ordered companies of green-kilted Indians led by Lantlu’s nobles.

Graydon thought he recognized the plan of attack. It was to be a sledge blow – no subtle strategy. The great dinosaurs, impervious to arrows and, except for a skilful and lucky thrust, to swords and javelins, were to crush like battering rams through the defense. Into the gaps would stream the Urd, hard to kill, fighting with poisonous fang and claw… The Emer would mop up after them, penetrating the Temple With Lantlu’s nobles.… But where were Lantlu and his scaled pack?

There was a tumult of trumpets in the oncoming ranks. The black dinosaurs stamped thunderously and broke into a run. Like a long yellow hissing comber the lizard-men rolled forward. They swept down upon the Temple.

A ray of milk light flashed up from the roof. Instantly all the air was filled with the buglings of the winged serpents!

And instantly the rush of the dinosaurs and the lizard-men was checked. From the saddles of a full third of the Xinli their riders were flung, as though torn off by lariats. Caught in the invisible coils of the winged serpents and dragged to earth.

Among the lizard-men began a maelstrom milling. Squalling and hissing they leaped and hopped, striking with their chisel-edged talons; bringing some of the Messengers down, tearing at them with fang and claw, as movements here and there plainly showed. But the Urd themselves were falling by the hundred, pierced through heart and brain by the rapier beaks.

From the backs of the dinosaurs half the riders were gone, And the monsters were faring badly. Graydon saw them whirling frantically upon their heavy hind legs, hissing in rage, hitting out with their absurdly small forelegs, striking viciously with their snake-like necks.

One pivoted, then another and another. They went crashing back through the lizard-men. The Indians had halted, and now as the saurians tore through the Urd they wavered, broke formation, fled out of their paths. Into those paths ran nobles who sprang up and snatched at dangling reins, struggled to bring the monsters into subjection. Many of them they did, but a score or more of the Yu-Atlanchans were trampled into the grass before it was done.

From the Temple came a summoning blare of the bugles. It was answered from the left by others. Over the meadow charged regiments of blue-kilted Emer led by mailed nobles from whose shoulders streamed blue cloaks, the livery of the Mother. They had lain hidden until now, and Graydon’s blood sang victory as he watched them charge. Their front line dropped upon their knees. A cloud of arrows whistled into the broken ranks of Lantlu’s soldiery. They arose, rushed on again, and struck against the green-clad Indians like a wave.

And now there were two battles upon the mead – winged serpents against Xinli and Urd, and behind them the locked lines of nobles and Emer.

From all the Temple rang out a wild shout of triumph. Out of the distance, from the direction of the caverns, came a vast humming, a drone rising to a shrieking wail which tortured the ears; then, falling below the range of hearing, became an unheard sound that shook the brain and every nerve to the verge of madness. Closer drew that droning, traveling with projectile speed. It paused overhead and came to rest directly above the Temple. Up rose the maddening note, then down – and up and down—

And suddenly all the space between earth and the lurid sky was shot through with rays of dull red light. They seemed rigid, those rays – striated. They tore at the eyes as the drone tore at the brain.

But not then did Graydon know that. He felt nothing; the drone of madness was to him only a humming as of some gigantic top, nothing more; the red rays spared him.

Uncomprehending, he watched Huon’s sword drop from his hands, saw him reel, hands clasped over eyes—

And saw appear in that inexplicable, rigid light – the winged serpents. The Messengers of the Mother – no longer protected by their cloak of invisibility!

They were black shapes, caught in the rays. And they, too, were blinded. Whirling and tumbling, striking against each other, they fell. Little and great, the winged serpents dropped, coils lashing, into the talons of the Urd, the lizard-men, immune like Graydon himself to that intolerable vibration of linked light and sound.

Within the Temple sound and light brought full madness, as though they were intensified. In tortured brains of one and all was but one thought – to get into the open; to run and run – away from drone and searing ray. The huge doors flung open. Out of them poured Emer and noble, men and women alike. They came dropping from the windows—

Shaken out of the Temple even as the Lord of Evil had promised!

Through the droning came a hideous susurration, a hellish hissing. He knew it for what it was before his eyes told him. The hunting packs of the dinosaurs. Emerald and sapphire scales glittering in the crimson light, crimson eyes flaming, they burst from the shelter of the trees that stretched between the Temple meadow and the city. Ahead of them rode Lantlu, alone, mounted upon his Xinli. Shouting, he raced to the stairway.

Graydon broke the bonds of his paralysis, raised his rifle; cursing, he sent bullet after bullet at the master of the pack. Untouched, unharmed, Lantlu drove on, the Xinli leaping at his heel.

Out from the Serpent-woman’s sanctuary upon the Temple roof shot one of the immense silver globes; swiftly in its wake soared the others. They halted, hovering in a thousand-foot circle high above the plain. They began to pulse with a brilliant white radiance; and as they pulsed they expanded, became a coronet of little incandescent suns which sprayed their rays of white incandescence through the striating rays of sullen red.

Abruptly the drone ceased. The turmoil of the winged serpents ended. They faded back into invisibility. And the torment of brains and nerves and eyes was lifted.

Now it was Graydon’s turn to feel agony. The white radiance seared his eyes, sent needles of torment through them into his brain. And in this torture again was he one with Urd and saurian and those of the Old Race who wore the collar of Nimir. From drone and red ray that collar had protected him – but to this weapon of the Serpent-woman it had betrayed him.

Before the agony mastered him, sent him writhing, face to ground, hands clasped tight over eyes, he saw Lantlu’s monstrous mount rear, twitch its head from reins, tear its jaws from cruel bit and stagger blindly back, screeching. Saw Lantlu pitch from its saddle, regain his feet with his panther quickness and stagger, face covered by his arms. Saw the lizard-men running this way and that, and falling under the thrusts of the winged serpents.

Down upon Xinli and Urd the soldiery of the Temple surged, striking the lizard-men to earth with their maces, hamstringing the monsters with their swords, thrusting up with their javelins at the vulnerable spot in their throats, slaughtering Lantlu’s crazed pack.

Intent upon his enemy, Huon had forgotten Graydon. He had leaped upon the barricade, was half over it, when he turned to look for him. Only for a breath did he hesitate between concern for him and hatred for Lantlu. He sprang back, lifted him in his arms, started to carry him up into the Temple—

A wind whose breath bore the cold of outer space sighed round them. And at its touch Graydon’s agony ended. He writhed from Huon’s grip. They stood, staring at the radiant globes. Their brilliancy had dimmed. A film of darkness was gathering round them. Steadily that film grew denser.

The globes went out!

Together the two leaped the barricade. Close to the base of the stairway, sword dripping blood, the body of a blue-cloaked noble at his feet, was Lantlu, glaring up at them, freed like Graydon from the torture.

And over all the meadow noble and Emer and Urd were locked together in death struggle. Of the hunting pack not one was left. And the giant Xinli had vanished.

Graydon raised his rifle, took deliberate aim. Before he could press the trigger, Huon struck the gun from his hands.

“Mine to kill! Not yours!” he cried, and ran down the steps sword in hand to where the master of the dinosaurs waited him, lips drawn back over his teeth, his own red sword ready.

The crimson sky pulsed – once, twice, thrice – as though it were a giant heart. Down from it like enormous bats dropped black shadows. And bitter and ever more bitter grew the cold.

For a moment Graydon watched that dread rain. The shadows appeared to form directly beneath the canopy of crimson mist. They were shapeless, formless, yet densely black as though torn from the cloak of deepest night. They swirled down, spinning as they dropped. They fell with the swift dart of the swallow. They were falling over all the plain, on lizard-men and Emer and noble alike.

He heard the clash of sword on sword, saw Huon and Lantlu thrusting, beating at each other with their blades.

Between him and the pair swirled a knot of fighting Urd and Indians. A shadow dropped upon them, enveloped them, hid them, swirled upward again. He looked upon the little group it had covered. They were no longer fighting. They stood there, motionless, immobile. They swayed. They fell. He ran down the steps, stopped beside them. The grass was black as though burned. He touched them. They were stiff and icy cold. He touched the ground. It, too, was frozen.

He looked toward Huon. His sword was sweeping down upon Lantlu’s right wrist. It struck and half severed it. The master of the dinosaurs howled, sprang back, catching his weapon in his left hand before it could fall. Heedless of his wound, he rushed upon Huon.

And Huon avoided the rush, stepped aside, and as Lantlu twisted toward him thrust him through the belly and with swift upward lift ripped him to the breast.

The master of the dinosaurs dropped his sword, glared at his killer, his hands at his navel, the blood spurting through his fingers. He sank to his knees. Fell forward—

A shadow came silently spinning down. It enveloped both quick and dead.

Graydon heard the shrieking of a voice he did not know; realized it was his own! raced forward.

The shadow lifted, recoiled from him as though he had thrust it away, swirled skyward. Huon stood rigid, glaring down upon his enemy.

“Huon!” cried Graydon, and touched him upon the shoulder. It was icy cold.

And at the touch, Huon toppled, fell prone over the body of Lantlu.

He stood up, staring around him stupidly.

What were those lights? Winged shapes of greenish flame with cores of incandescence… flitting out of the air, pulsing from it… grappling with the shadows. Shapes of flame that battled with slaying shadows… and Huon dead there at his feet beneath a crimson sky.

As Huon had foretold – when was it? Ages upon ages ago.

His brain was numb. And despair… black despair that slowed his heart and set him gasping for breath was overwhelming him. Whence came that black tide… he’d never felt anything like that before? Hatred, too… cold hatred, cold and implacable as those slaying shadows… it was woven with the despair. Who was it he hated so… and, why?… if he could shake that creeping numbness from his brain.

Those damned shapes of flame! They were everywhere. And look at them running… Emer and Urd and spawn of the Old Race. My men… running… conquered! My men… what did he mean… my men? What a hell of a light… what a hell of a night! Good rhyme that… it seemed to stop the spread of that cursed numbness. Try another – ashes to ashes and dust to dust, if the shadows don’t get you the winged flames must. No… that didn’t help any. What the hell was the matter with his head? Poor Huon… wonder if Suarra knew he was down here… wonder where Nimir was… ah, now he knew whom he hated so… the Snake-woman… damned monster… Yes, Dark Master, I am coming!

Hell – what had made him say that? Brace up Nick Graydon… Nick Graydon of Philadelphia, Harvard School of Mines, U.S.A.… brace up!… Yes, yes, Dark Master… I… am coming!

An arm encircled him. He drew back, snarling. Why – it was Regor.

Regor! Something of the creeping deadness lifted from his brain.

“Head – Regor! Something wrong!”

“Yes, lad. It’s all right. Come now – with Regor. To the – to Suarra.”

Suarra? Yes, sure he’d go with Regor to Suarra. Not to that Snake-woman though! No, no! Not to her… she wasn’t human… No, not to her. Dark Master…

Why, here he was back in the Temple! How the devil had he gotten there? Something was pulling at that collar. Pulling him by it. He wouldn’t go! That’s where that numbness came from – up from the collar. Ah – but he would have to go! But not before he had told Suarra about it all. Ah, there she was! Not the Snake-woman though… No, Dark Master, I’ll not… it was good to have Suarra’s arms around you… your head on her breast…

“Hold him tight, Suarra,” said the Mother, quietly. “Kiss him. Talk to him. Do anything – but keep him aware of you. Kon!”

The spider-man drew from the shadows, looked down upon the muttering Graydon sorrowfully.

“Watch him closely, Regor. Kon may have to help you hold him. When the full call comes to him, his strength will be out of all bounds. If you must – bind him. But I would rather not – for my own reasons. Yet Nimir shall not have him. Ah – I feared it! Stand ready, Tyddo!”

A green glare, bright as daylight, flooded all the Hidden Land. The slaying shadows had vanished, the crimson light had gone from the clouds. Up from the plain midway between Temple and lake arose an immense pillar of coruscant green flame. As it arose it roared. It pulsated with a slow, regular rhythm. Around its girth and above it and at its feet, lightnings flashed, and thunder crackled like torrents of shattering glass.

Beneath that terrifying glare the battling figures upon mead and plain stood motionless, then in shrieking panic raced for cover.

From every quarter the winged shapes of flame throbbed into being. They swept toward the pillar, merged with it, fed it.

“His last play, Tyddo,” whispered the Serpent-woman. “Yet it may be his best.”

The Lord of Folly nodded, and took his station at the mechanism of crystal rods. The two great disks of moonlight radiance and cobweb strands were whirling. The Serpent-woman glided first to one, then the other, manipulating levers at their bases. Slowly their speed decreased.

“Now my ancestors aid me!” murmured the Snake Mother.

More slowly spun the disks. Fewer and fewer became the shapes of flame that fed the column. And now no more appeared.

The pulsing column quivered, swayed, and with a bellowing of thunders leaped a hundred feet from the ground. It dropped upon the amphitheater of the Dream Makers. Bellowing, it leaped again – from where the amphitheater of the Dream Makers had been.

Higher it drove this time. It came down among the trees of the city. Again the thunderous bellow—

The disks were still. The pillar of flame came rushing toward the Temple.

“Now!” cried the Serpent-woman to the Lord of Folly. From the mechanism he was manipulating spread out a gigantic fan of violet radiance – straight toward the racing column. It met and held it. It mingled with it. The pillar bent, twisted,-struggled like a living thing to escape.

There was a vast screaming, a crash like mountains falling. Then darkness and an appalling silence.

“That was well done,” breathed the Mother. “And thanks be to all my ancestors that done it is!”

Graydon raised his head from Suarra’s breast. His face was white and drawn, the eyes turned upward so that the pupils were almost covered by the upper lids. He seemed to be listening.

The Serpent-woman drew to him, watched him closely. His lips moved.

“Yes, Dark Master – I hear!”

“It is close. Take him, Regor. No – let Kon hold him.” She glided to her coffer, took from it the sistrum of the quicksilver globe, and another larger one threaded with many beads of the same gleaming substance; took from it also a blunt crystal tube in which glowed an imprisoned purple flame like that of the rod the Lord of Folly had used in the Cavern of the Lost Wisdom. She handed the second sistrum to him.

The spider-man lifted Graydon in his arms. He lay there, inert, apparently still listening. The Mother undulated to him.

“Regor,” she whispered rapidly, “stay you here with Suarra. No, child, no use to plead nor weep. You cannot come. Be still!” she said sternly, as the girl lifted beseeching hands, “I go to save your lover. And to end Nimir. Regor – I take Kon with me. Quickly now—”

She clicked to the spider-man. Carrying Graydon, he stepped upon the movable platform which masked the shining shaft. She glided beside him, coiled herself, made room for the Lord of Folly. The platform dropped. They passed out into the corridor of the shaft.

Graydon’s body bent into a bow.

“I hear! I come. Dark Master!” he cried, and tore at the spider-man’s arms.

“Yes,” hissed the Serpent-woman. “But by my way – not Nimir’s. Set him down, Kon. Let him go.”

Graydon, eyes still strained sightlessly upward, was turning his head like a dog seeking scent. He began to run down the corridor, straight to the portals of the Temple.

Behind him, sistrum raised, in her other hand the tube of violet fire, swept the Serpent-woman, matching effortlessly his pace, and behind her, as effortlessly, the Lord of Folly with Kon. They came to the corridor that led to the chamber of the thrones. From the sistrum shot a tiny ray. It touched Graydon’s head. He swerved, turned. Again the ray flashed, over his head, striking against a wall. Up rolled one of the curtains of stone, unmasking the passage. Again the ray touched Graydon. He ran into that passage.

“Good!” breathed the Mother.

Twice more the ray of the sistrum opened a passage. Graydon sped on. He never turned his head, never looked back, seemingly was unaware of the three who followed. And weird enough must have been that sight – the running man, and behind him the gleaming undulating rosy-pearl length of the Serpent-woman bearing high her exquisite face and body, the scarlet, many-armed shape of the spider-man, the ancient wise face of the Lord of Folly with its sparkling youthful eyes.

On and on went Graydon, like a straw drawn to a whirlpool, a grain of iron to a lodestone.

“But, Adana, will not Nimir know we follow?” the Lord of Folly spoke with unhurried breath.

“No,” the Mother answered as tranquilly. “When Nimir hid himself from my seeing thought, he hid me from his as well. He can no more look through that veil at me than I can at him. He draws this man to him – but he does not know how he comes. Only that he is coming.”

“He goes more swiftly,” said the Lord of Folly.

“He nears Nimir,” said the Serpent-woman. “I do not guide this man, Tyddo, he guides me. All that I do is to open the shortest way for him to that which summons him – Ah, I thought so!”

Graydon had been running, blindly, straight toward a blank wall. At the touch of the sistrum ray, a stone had drawn up. Through the aperture streamed red rust of light.

They passed into the lair of the Shadow.

Faster sped Graydon, a racing shadow in the murk. Up loomed the black cliff. Along it he ran. It ended. He turned the edge. There was the carven screen, the dais, the throne of jet.

Stretched out on the cavern’s floor, prone upon their bellies, lay hundreds of the lizard-people, the females and young of the Urd, and those who, surviving the Ragnarok of the Temple, had scuttered back to the red cavern. Mingled with the reek of their bodies was the obscene fragrance of the Shadow’s garden.

And crouching upon the jet throne was Nimir!

“Dark Master – I am here!” Graydon’s voice was toneless; he halted as though awaiting command.

Nimir’s pale eyes lifted from the groveling remnants of the horde. His monstrous body expanded, lifted itself from the throne; his long, misshapen arms thrust out hungrily, his face was filled with triumph.

“Come!” he whispered, and as though his muscles had been taut steel strings, Graydon bounded up the side of the dais.

“No!” the cry of the Serpent-woman was shrill. From the sistrum in her hand the thin ray shot, touched Graydon’s head. He spun and dropped, almost at Nimir’s feet.

The gaze of the Lord of Evil fell upon the Serpent-woman, abruptly became aware of her – as though some veil between them had been rent apart, revealing her. His eyes flashed from her to the Lord of Folly and the spider-man, and then blazed out with the fires of hell itself.

His hands darted to his girdle, darted out with something that glittered like frozen green flame. Before he could raise the object, the Serpent-woman had leveled the crystal tube in her left hand. A ray of intense violet darted from it. It struck the hand of Nimir and that which was clenched within it. There was a tinkling explosion, and a cloud of sparkling purple atoms swirled round him, hiding both the Lord of Evil and his throne.

The Serpent-woman snatched the larger sistrum from the Lord of Folly. Out of its innumerable tiny globes shot moonlight radiance, and condensed into a three-inch sphere of dazzling brilliance. It darted into the swirling purple mist at the level of Nimir’s head – and passed on. It struck the carven screen of rock, and sprayed over its surface. From side to side and from top to bottom, the screen cracked and split, came crumbling down.

Where screen had been yawned the black opening of a tunnel.

At the touch of the sphere the purple mist had dissolved. Head bent low, squatting close to the floor of the dais, was Nimir, untouched by the Mother’s missile. Before she could hurl another, he had snatched up Graydon’s body, thrown it over his back like a cloak, arms over his shoulders, and had leaped into the darkness of the tunnel.

The Serpent-woman hissed, furiously. High reared the coil that held her body. Her gleaming length flowed over the edge of the dais and through the black opening. And in her wake sped the Lord of Folly, and Kon!

They needed no light to guide them, that three to whose eyes, like those of Nimir’s, darkness and light were as one. And suddenly against the end of the passage was silhouetted the monstrous shape of Nimir. It blackened into outline, and vanished—

The passage had opened into the Cavern of the Face. It ended close to the top of that Cyclopean stairway which was the pathway to the Face. Despairing, hunted, Nimir had doubled back to his dungeon.

The Serpent-woman halted there. Half down the steps Nimir was plunging, holding tight to his shield of living flesh and blood. Through the storms of luminous atoms streaming from the cavern’s walls the great Face brooded upon her. From the circlet around its brow the golden sweat still dropped; still from its eyes ran the tears of gold, and from the drooping corners of the mouth the golden slaver dribbled.

The Face’s eyes of wan blue gems were lifeless. They glittered – but they were empty. No prisoned thing peered through them. Gone was all imperious summonings, all subtle promises of domination. The Face stared indifferently, unseeingly, over the head of Nimir – Nimir who for so long – so long – had dwelt within it.

From the throat of the Serpent-woman came a bugle note. It was answered from beyond, where the cavern’s floor edged the immeasurable depths. Out of the space that overhung the abyss arrowed a pair of the winged serpents.

One dropped upon the shoulders of the Lord of Evil, buffeting him with its pinions. The second twisted its coils around his legs.

The Lord of Evil staggered, dropped Graydon, struck out at the beating wings.

The coils about his legs drew closer. The Lord of Evil toppled.

He went rolling down the steps. Graydon’s body lay, motionless, where it had fallen.

The Serpent-woman clicked. The spider-man scuttered down the steps, grasped Graydon, rushed back with him, and dropped him beside her.

Buffeting wings and clinging coil of the winged serpents withdrew from Nimir. He stumbled to his feet. He hopped to the Face.

He reached its chin. He turned, facing the Mother. Two faces of the Lord of Evil were there. The great face of stone, lifeless, indifferent – and its miniature of dream stuff and rusted atoms interwoven, instinct with life.

Against the cliffed chin pressed the Lord of Evil, arms outstretched, facing the Serpent-woman. In living eyes that matched the glittering ones far above them was neither fear nor appeal for mercy.

Only hate – and merciless threat. He spoke no word, nor did she.

The Lord of Evil turned. Like a great frog, he swarmed up the stone.

The Serpent-woman raised her sistrum. Out shot a radiant sphere. After it another – and another. The first struck the Face squarely upon the brow, the other two, almost simultaneously, upon eyes and mouth.

They burst and sprayed. Tongues of white lightning licked out. The Face seemed to grimace; contorted. Its stony mouth writhed.

Out sped a fourth sphere. It struck the climbing body of the Lord of Evil, and climbing figure and Face were hidden by the tongues of the white lightning. They vanished – those tongues.

There was no Face in the abyss! Only a smooth smoking surface of black stone.

There was no Lord of Evil! Only a smear of rusted atoms against the blasted rock. The smear quivered. It seemed to be feebly trying to cling.

Another of the brilliant spheres struck it. The white tongues licked it—

The rock was clean!

And now shining sphere upon sphere shot from the sistrum. They struck the walls of the cavern, and the tempests of shining atoms died. The gemmed flowers and fruits upon those walls dulled, and dropped.

Darker grew the cavern where the Face in the abyss had been – darker and darker.

Densest darkness filled it.

The Serpent-woman’s voice lifted into one long, wild, shrilling, clarion note of triumph.

She beckoned the spider-man and pointed to Graydon, She turned her back on the black tomb of the Lord of Evil. She glided into the portal of the passage.

Behind her followed the Lord of Folly, and Kon… holding Graydon’s body to his scarlet breast like a child – nuzzling him with his lips – crooning to his unhearing ears.

— XXVII —

FAREWELL
OF THE SNAKE MOTHER

It was five days before Graydon opened his eyes to consciousness. During all that time he had lain in the bower of the Snake Mother, Suarra attending him. Nor would the Mother take the collar of Nimir from his neck.

“I am not yet sure,” she told the girl and Regor when they begged her to open it, rid Graydon of it. “It will not hurt him. Or should it threaten him, then will I take it off quickly enough – I promise you. But it was a link, and a strong link, between him and Nimir, and may still be so. I am not yet sure that which we knew as Nimir has been wholly absorbed in what sent him forth. I do not yet know what was that Shadow. But if something of it still survives, it will be drawn by that symbol, try to enter him through it. Then I will see what measure of strength that something possesses. If nothing of Nimir survives, the collar can do no harm. But until I know – he wears it.”

That ended the matter. The first day Graydon was restless, muttering of the Dark Master, listening as though to spoken words, speaking now and then to one unseen. Whether to some beseeching wisp of Nimir or to some phantom of his sick mind only the Serpent-woman knew. His unease increased until the second night, and so did his mutterings. The Mother came now and then and coiled herself beside him, lifting his lids, examining closely his eyes. On that night when his restlessness reached its peak, she had Regor lay his naked body on her own nest of cushions. She took the smaller sistrum and held it over his head. A soft radiance began to stream from it. She moved the sistrum around him, bathing him from head to feet in its light. On the third day he was much quieter. That night she examined him intently, nodded as though satisfied, and sent a strong ray from the sistrum upon the collar. Graydon groaned feebly, began to raise trembling hands as though to protect it.

“Hold his hands, Regor,” said the Mother, impassively. A stronger ray sprang from the sistrum. The collar of the Lord of Evil lost its sullen gleaming; changed to a lifeless brown. She took it between her hands and broke it. It crumbled to a pinch of dust in her fingers. Immediately Graydon relaxed and passed into deep normal sleep.

On the morning of the fifth day he awakened. Suarra and Regor were beside him. He tried to rise, but his weakness was too great. He was drained of all strength. His mind, however, was crystal clear.

“I know everything you’re going to say against it,” he told them, grinning faintly and holding tight to Suarra. “But it’s no good. I feel as though I’ve been shot through a dozen windmills. In fact, I feel like hell. Nevertheless, I’m not going to close my eyes again until I’m brought up to date. First – what happened to Nimir?”

They told him of the pursuit of the Lord of Evil, and of his end in the cavern of the Face, as they themselves had been told it by the Mother.

“And then,” said Regor, “she blasted the tunnel through which Nimir had gone so that it is sealed forever. She blasted Nimir’s throne and the dais. The strange garden she destroyed utterly. It screamed and shrilled its agony as the tongues of the white lightnings licked it up.”

“Evil was that garden,” said Suarra. “Evil beyond all imaginings, the Mother told me. And that for its creation Nimir alone deserved annihilation. But what sorcery he wrought there, to what uses he had put it or what uses he intended it – she will not tell me.”

“The Urd had fled from the red cavern,” Regor took up the tale. “Ran, what was left of them, to hide in their deepest dens. And so the three came back to the Temple, bearing you. The next day the Mother took stock of what remained in ancient Yu-Atlanchi. Of the Old Race who defended the Temple, there was a scant hundred left. Of those who had fought for Lantlu, some four-score sent an ambassador to the Mother asking truce and pardon. She ordered them before her, slew a dozen of them, and forgave the others. There are, I suppose, as many more who, knowing they can expect no mercy, have taken to the caves and forest – become outlaws, as we were before you came, Graydon.

“She had the Dream Makers, over whom the battle had passed unheeded, awakened and brought to the chamber of the thrones. Or the most of them – for there were some she commanded slain out of hand. She gave them the choice of abandoning their dreams and opening upon themselves the Doors of Life and Death, or – well, just death. Some fifty preferred to live. The others could find no attraction in it. They were allowed to go back to their homes, enter their favorite world of phantoms – and shortly thereafter they and their worlds ceased altogether to be.

“Of the winged serpents, the Messengers of the Mother, not more than a quarter survived. Of the Emer there are about a thousand left – I mean men. Mostly, they are those who took no part in the battle. Our soldiers and those of Lantlu were rather thoroughly wiped out. Nimir’s shadows and the Mother’s flames made no distinction between friend and enemy. Two days ago, at the command of Adana, the bulk of these Emers were sent to the caverns to exterminate the remnants of the Urd. Oh, yes – about a half dozen of the hunting Xinli escaped, and an equal number of the riding Xinli The first are being tracked down and killed; the others we will keep.

“That seems to be about all. We start life in Yu-Atlanchi afresh with some three hundred of the Old Race, of whom considerably more than half are women. Each and all have, perforce, put off our deathlessness. The Mother herself saw that the Two Doors were flung wide open. Having more than half of us women is better, however,” said Regor, thoughtfully, “than having more than half of us men.”

Graydon closed his eyes; lay thinking over what he had heard. The Serpent-woman was certainly efficient once she waited! Ruthless! He visioned the Dream Makers blotted out in the midst of their mirages which were so real – so real. He hoped that the one who had created on the web of dream the miraculous world of color had chosen life. Drone and light of madness – how had Nimir created them? Some manipulation of the infrared rays, he supposed. Light waves of the lower spectrum linked in some way, transmuted somewhere in their range, to sound vibration. That the two had been so linked, were parts of the same phenomenon, he felt sure. And the Mother’s little diadem of suns? Manipulation of other radiant waves which had canceled Nimir’s. Why had the collar saved him from one – delivered him over to the other? Some sort of receiver, probably… tuned up to Nimir’s stuff… well, it was off him…

He sank into deep sleep.

He saw nothing of the Serpent-woman for several days. She had gone off to the caverns, Suarra said, with the Lord of Folly and Kon, borne by the Indian women in her litter, only her Messengers guarding her. His strength returned slowly. He was carried out in Suarra’s own litter one day, the girl beside him. The once flowering plain between the Temple and the lake was blackened and desolate, blasted by the icy shadows and the leaping pillar of flame. A thin covering of impalpable dust marked where the amphitheater of the Dream Makers had stood. Many trees along the mead were dead or dying. And where the pillar had leaped upon the city there was a roughly circular place two thousand feet in width from which habitations and vegetation had been turned into the same thin ash.

He asked Suarra what had been done with the dead. The Emer had gathered them together in great heaps, she told him; then they, too, had been blasted into dust by contrivances the Mother had ordered set up. Huon lay with his ancestors in the Cavern of the Dead.

He told her to turn the bearers of the litter back to the Temple; recovered in the silence of the chamber of the thrones his peace.

The next day the Mother returned; and thereafter for a week Graydon was with her many hours each day; answering her countless questions, telling her in detail of the life of men beyond the barrier, their habits and aspirations, and this time, too, of their wars and gods, and all the long history of the race since the fires of the Cro-Magnons were quenched in their caves twenty-five thousand years ago. Of the aims and conditions of the races, white and yellow, black and brown, he spoke; and of Russia’s drab experiment in communism, and the great unrest in Asia among the Chinese and Indians.

Then for another time she ceased her questionings, told him in turn of that forgotten civilization of which her strange race was the head, and of how it had come into being; of other lost civilizations and races, buried beyond trace under the dust of time; gave him blinding glimpses of attainments in science as advanced over those he knew as Einstein’s geometry over the Euclidean; conceptions of mind and matter and energy that dazed him.

“In nothing,” she told him, “that you have seen was there touch of sorcery or magic. All that you have beheld, each manifestation, was nothing but conscious manipulation of purely natural forces, my Grayden. The slaying shadows? – a definite energy made obedient by purely mechanical means to Nimir’s will. In words of your own to make it understandable – etheric vortices, power condensed from that universal ocean of energy about us from which all energy and mind and what you term matter comes. The shapes of flame I summoned to meet them? Another harnessed force which neutralized the shadows – and more. The pillar of flame? Nimir’s last play and one I truly feared. For by his swift shutting off of that which brought the shadows into being, he disturbed abruptly the interaction of the two forces, overbalanced me; hoped that before I could gain control of it, the tremendous freed energy which shaped itself into that pillar would overwhelm me. And he came within a hair of being right!”

She sat silently for a time; then seemed to have come to some decision; roused herself.

“Go you with Suarra, child,” she said. “Amuse yourselves. Get strong quickly. For two days I shall have no need for either of you.”

And when those days had passed, summons from the Snake Mother came to him by way of Regor. He found her coiled upon her cushions in her bower, complacently gazing at herself in her mirror while Suarra coiffed her hair. The bower seemed oddly empty; stripped. And Suarra’s eyes were misty with unshed tears. With her was the Lord of Folly. She laid down her mirror, gave Graydon her hand to kiss.

“I am going to leave you, child,” she began without preamble. “I am tired. I am going to sleep – oh, for a long, long time. Nay – do not look so startled and unhappy. I don’t intend to die. I know of no other world to which to go. But I don’t intend to grow old—” her eyes sparkled at Graydon’s uncontrollable expression of surprise at this remarkable statement, considering her thousands of years. “I mean I do not intend to let myself look old. Therefore, I shall sleep and renew myself – and my looks. It was the custom of my people.”

“Now thus have I decided. There are not many of you left in Yu-Atlanchi, it is true. But shortly there will be more. Trust your race for that – if for nothing else. Let you and Regor govern here – with Tyddo to aid you. Nimir is gone forever. Those of his who still lurk, outlaw – destroy as speedily as you can. Let nothing of him nor of Lantlu remain. If any of the Makers of Dream – relapse – kill them. Danger lurks in that – Suarra! Stop your crying! You’re pulling my hair!”

She frowned for a moment into the mirror.

“I have told you,” went on the Mother, briskly, “that I do not intend to die. And certainly I do not intend to be made uncomfortable while I sleep. I do not think so highly of those people you’ve told me so much about, Graydon. Oh, I have no doubt that they include any number of persons as estimable as yourself. But collectively, they irritate me, to put it mildly. I don’t propose to have them digging around where I am sleeping, nor blowing up things with their explosives, nor building – what is your quaint word – skyscrapers over me. Nor ransacking the caverns for their treasure, nor poking around trying to find out things they’re much better off not knowing – and wouldn’t know what to do with if they did find them. I will have no invasion of the Hidden Land.

“Therefore, during the last two days I have seen to it that there cannot be. I have destroyed much of what Nimir recovered from the Cavern of the Lost Wisdom, including that which evoked the shadows. I have destroyed my two disks which summoned the shapes of flame. You will not need them – nor shall I, again.

“And, Graydon, I have sent my Messengers on guard beyond the barrier, and especially against those flying boats of yours which have done so much to make barriers negligible. They will bring them down without mercy. They will as mercilessly destroy those who may survive the fall. No eyes shall peer down on Yu-Atlanchi to bring back strong companies who would – destroy my slumber. I put it that way, child, not to hurt your feelings.

“That is definite. That is irrevocable. And thus shall it be,” said the Serpent-woman, and Graydon had no doubt at all that quite as ruthlessly as she promised it, so would it be carried out. “And if by any newly discovered wisdom they overcome my Messengers, Tyddo will awaken me. And me, Graydon, they will not overcome. That, too, is certain.”

She glanced again at her hair—

“Suarra – that is really fine. Ah-h – but I am tired!” she yawned, her little pointed tongue flickering in the scarlet, heart-shaped mouth. “It has all been enjoyable – but rather fatiguing. And I think—” she looked again into the mirror – “yes, I am certain I have acquired a few wrinkles. Ah-h – it is time I slept!”

Her eyes dwelt lovingly upon the weeping girl, and they were misted, too. Whatever the urgency that prompted the Serpent-woman to go, Graydon had swift perception that in her heart she did not feel the lightness she affected.

“Children,” she twined her arm around Suarra’s neck. “Come with me. On my way I must seal that chamber on which open the Doors of Life and Death. You shall see it.”

She nodded to Suarra. Under the girl’s touch the wall opposite the doorway swung open. The scarlet body of Kon swayed through, behind him four of his kind, carrying the Mother’s litter. She gave one last look in her mirror, then drew her coils into the litter’s cushions. Kon leading, Graydon and Regor on each side, Suarra lying beside her with head hidden in the Mother’s breast, the Lord of Folly following, they passed into a great empty chamber, out through its farther wall, and down a wide ramp.

Down went the ramp, and down – far below the foundations of the Temple. They came to an alcove that curved shallowly into the wall of the passage. Here the Mother signaled her bearers. They halted close beside it. She stretched out a hand, within it the smaller sistrum. A faint ray touched the wall. An oval opening appeared, as though the ray had melted the stone away. She beckoned Graydon, drew Suarra over her body so the girl could look within.

They peered down into a place that was like the half of a gigantic pearl. Its circled floor was some twenty yards in diameter. It was filled with a limpid rosy light as though a sun were shining behind its curved walls. The floor was like black obsidian, and set within it were two pools, oval, some twenty feet in length and half that in width. Between them was a couch of the same black glassy substance and hollowed with the outlines of a human body – as though, indeed, some perfect body of woman or man had been pressed there while the material was still plastic and, hardening, had retained the stamp.

In one pool the water, if it was water, was like pale rose wine, shot through with sparklings and eddies of deeper rose. The liquid in the second pool was utterly colorless, translucent, still – awesome in its tranquility.

While they watched, this tranquility was disturbed. Something came floating up from its depths. And as it approached the surface, the liquid in the rosy pool too became disturbed, its sparklings and its eddies dancing jubilantly.

Out of each pool a bubble arose, slowly expanding until they had domed them from edge to edge.

Rosy bubble and crystal clear bubble broke. A rainbow mist filled the chamber, hiding pools and couch. It was shot through with tiny darting particles of irised light. It pulsed for no more than three heartbeats. It vanished.

The Serpent-woman raised the sistrum. She sent from it a ray straight into the still pool. The pool quivered as though it had been a living heart. Its translucency clouded. A cloud of little bubbles rushed up through it as if trying to escape the ray. They burst with a faint, mournful sighing. The pool again was still – but all awesome tranquility had gone.

The sistrum’s ray plunged into the rosy pool. There was a moment of frantic swirling in its depths. Again the bursting cloud of sighing bubbles. And it too lay still – and dead.

“It is done!” said the Serpent-woman, tonelessly. Her face was drawn, her lips pale, her eyes like stone.

She passed the sistrum over the aperture. The wall reappeared, seeming to form out of air as it came. She signaled the spider-men. They resumed their journey, in silence.

They came at last to another shallow niche. Here, under the sistrum, the wall drew away into a low and rounded portal. They entered. It was circular like that of the two pools but not more than half its size. A faint blue radiance streamed from its walls, centering upon a huge nest of cushions. Around its walls were several coffers. Save for these, it was empty. Graydon was aware of a slightly pungent, curiously fresh, fragrance.

The Serpent-woman flowed out of her litter, coiled herself upon the cushions. She looked at them, tears now frankly in the purple eyes and rolling down her cheeks. She gave the sistrum to the Lord of Folly, strained Suarra to her bosom. She beckoned Graydon, and gently brought the girl’s lips and his together.

And suddenly she held them a little away from her, bent and kissed each upon the mouth, twinkled on them mischievously, wholly tenderly, and laughed her bird-like trill.

“Waken me to see your firstborn!” said the Snake Mother.

She thrust them from her, settled down on her cushions, and yawned. Her eyes closed, her head nodded once or twice; sleepily moved to find a better place.

But as Graydon turned to go, he thought that a change had begun to creep over her face – that its unearthly beauty was beginning to fade… like a veil dropping…

Resolutely, he turned his head, forbade himself to look… let that doubt remain unresolved… as she had willed him to see her, so he would remember her…

They passed out of the low doorway, Suarra clasped close to Graydon, weeping. The Lord of Folly raised the sistrum. The stone of the portal thickened into place.

The hidden chamber where the Snake Mother slept was sealed.

— THE END —

First published in
Argosy All-Story Magazine, 8 Sep 1923

Sequel “The Snake Mother” serialized
Argosy, 25 Oct 1930

First book edition:
Horace Liveright, Inc., New York, 1931

Reprinted in
A. Merritt’s Fantasy Magazine, Jul 1950

DWELLERS
IN  THE  MIRAGE

BOOK OF KHALK’RU

— I —

SOUNDS IN THE NIGHT

I raised my head, listening – not only with my ears but with every square inch of my skin, waiting for recurrence of the sound that had awakened me. There was silence, utter silence. No soughing in the boughs of the spruces clustered around the little camp. No stirring of furtive life in the underbrush. Through the spires of the spruces the stars shone wanly in the short sunset to sunrise twilight of the early Alaskan summer.

A sudden wind bent the spruce tops, carrying again the sound – the clangor of a beaten anvil.

I slipped out of my blanket, and round the dim embers of the fire toward Jim. His voice halted me.

“All right, Leif. I hear it.”

The wind sighed and died, and with it died the humming aftertones of the anvil stroke. Before we could speak, the wind arose. It bore the after-hum of the anvil stroke – faint and far away. And again the wind died, and with it the sound.

“An anvil, Leif!”

“Listen!”

A stronger gust swayed the spruces. It carried a distant chanting; voices of many women and men singing a strange, minor theme. The chant ended on a wailing chord, archaic, dissonant.

There was a long roll of drums, rising in a swift crescendo, ending abruptly. After it a thin and clamorous confusion.

It was smothered by a low, sustained rumbling, like thunder, muted by miles. In it defiance, challenge.

We waited, listening. The spruces were motionless. The wind did not return.

“Queer sort of sounds, Jim.” I tried to speak casually. He sat up. A stick flared up in the dying fire. Its light etched his face against the darkness – thin, and brown and hawk-profiled. He did not look at me.

“Every feathered forefather for the last twenty centuries is awake and shouting! Better call me Tsantawu, Leif. Tsi’ Tsa’lagi – I am a Cherokee! Right now – all Indian.”

He smiled, but still he did not look at me, and I was glad of that.

“It was an anvil,” I said. “A hell of a big anvil. And hundreds of people singing… and how could that be in this wilderness… they didn’t sound like Indians…”

“The drums weren’t Indian.” He squatted by the fire, staring into it. “When they turned loose, something played a pizzicato with icicles up and down my back.”

“They got me, too – those drums!” I thought my voice was steady, but he looked up at me sharply; and now it was I who averted my eyes and stared at the embers. “They reminded me of something I heard… and thought I saw… in Mongolia. So did the singing. Damn it, Jim, why do you look at me like that?”

I threw a stick on the fire. For the life of me I couldn’t help searching the shadows as the stick flamed. Then I met his gaze squarely.

“Pretty bad place, was it, Leif?” he asked, quietly. I said nothing. Jim got up and walked over to the packs. He came back with some water and threw it over the fire. He kicked earth on the hissing coals. If he saw me wince as the shadows rushed in upon us, he did not show it.

“That wind came from the north,” he said. “So that’s the way the sounds came. Therefore, whatever made the sounds is north of us. That being so – which way do we travel tomorrow?”

“North,” I said.

My throat dried as I said it.

Jim laughed. He dropped upon his blanket, and rolled it around him. I propped myself against the bole of one of the spruces, and sat staring toward the north.

“The ancestors are vociferous, Leif. Promising a lodge of sorrow, I gather – if we go north… ‘Bad Medicine!’ say the ancestors… ‘Bad Medicine for you, Tsantawu! You go to Usunhi’yi, the Darkening-land, Tsantawu!… Into Tsusgina’i, the ghost country! Beware! Turn from the north, Tsantawu!’”

“Oh, go to sleep, you hag-ridden redskin!”

“All right, I’m just telling you.”

Then a little later:

“‘And heard ancestral voices prophesying war’ – it’s worse than war these ancestors of mine are prophesying, Leif.”

“Damn it, will you shut up!”

A chuckle from the darkness; thereafter silence.

I leaned against the tree trunk. The sounds, or rather the evil memory they had evoked, had shaken me more than I was willing to admit, even to myself. The thing I had carried for two years in the buckskin bag at the end of the chain around my neck had seemed to stir; turn cold. I wondered how much Jim had divined of what I had tried to cover…

Why had he put out the fire? Because he had known I was afraid? To force me to face my fear and conquer it?… Or had it been the Indian instinct to seek cover in darkness?… By his own admission, chant and drum-roll had played on his nerves as they had on mine…

Afraid! Of course it had been fear that had wet the palms of my hands, and had tightened my throat so my heart had beaten in my ears like drums.

Like drums… yes!

But… not like those drums whose beat had been borne to us by the north wind. They had been like the cadence of the feet of men and women, youths and maids and children, running ever more rapidly up the side of a hollow world to dive swiftly into the void… dissolving into the nothingness… fading as they fell… dissolving… eaten up by the nothingness…

Like that accursed drum-roll I had heard in the secret temple of the Gobi oasis two years ago!

Neither then nor now had it been fear alone. Fear it was, in truth, but fear shot through with defiance… defiance of life against its negation… upsurging, roaring, vital rage… frantic revolt of the drowning against the strangling water, rage of the candle-flame against the hovering extinguisher…

Was it as hopeless as that? If what I suspected to be true was true, to think so was to be beaten at the beginning!

But there was Jim! How to keep him out of it? In my heart, I had never laughed at those subconscious perceptions, whatever they were, that he called the voices of his ancestors. When he had spoken of Usunhi’yi, the Darkening-land, a chill had crept down my spine. For had not the old Uighur priest spoken of the Shadow-land? And it was as though I had heard the echo of his words.

I looked over to where he lay. He had been more akin to me than my own brothers. I smiled at that, for they had never been akin to me. To all but my soft-voiced, deep-bosomed, Norse mother I had been a stranger in that severely conventional old house where I had been born.

The youngest son, and an unwelcome intruder; a changeling. It had been no fault of mine that I had come into the world a throw-back to my mother’s yellow-haired, blue-eyed, strong-thewed Viking forefathers. Not at all a Langdon. The Langdon men were dark and slender, thin-lipped and saturnine, stamped out by the same die for generations. They looked down at me, the changeling, from the family portraits with faintly amused, supercilious hostility. Precisely as my father and my four brothers, true Langdons, each of them, looked at me when I awkwardly disposed of my bulk at their table.

It had brought me unhappiness, but it had made my mother wrap her heart around me. I wondered, as I had wondered many times, how she had come to give herself to that dark, self-centered man my father – with the blood of the sea-rovers singing in her veins. It was she who had named me Leif – as incongruous a name to tack on a Langdon as was my birth among them.

Jim and I had entered Dartmouth on the same day. I saw him as he was then – the tall, brown lad with his hawk face and inscrutable black eyes, pure blood of the Cherokees, of the clan from which had come the great Sequoiah, a clan which had produced through many centuries wisest councilors, warriors strong in cunning.

On the college roster his name was written James T. Eagles, but on the rolls of the Cherokee Nation it was written Two Eagles and his mother had called him Tsantawu. From the first we had recognized spiritual kinship. By the ancient rites of his people we had become blood-brothers, and he had given me my secret name, known only to the pair of us, Degataga – one who stands so close to another that the two are one.

My one gift, besides my strength, is an aptness at languages. Soon I spoke the Cherokee as though I had been born in the Nation. Those years in college were the happiest I had ever known. It was during the last of them that America entered the World War. Together we had left Dartmouth, gone into training camp, sailed for France on the same transport.

Sitting there, under the slow-growing Alaskan dawn, my mind leaped over the years between… my mother’s death on Armistice Day… my return to New York to a frankly hostile home… Jim’s recall to his clan… the finishing of my course in mining engineering… my wanderings in Asia… my second return to America and my search for Jim… this expedition of ours to Alaska, more for comradeship and the wilderness peace than for the gold we were supposed to be seeking—

A long trail since the War – the happiest for me these last two months of it. It had led us from Nome over the quaking tundras, and then to the Koyukuk, and at last to this little camp among the spruces, somewhere between the headwaters of the Koyukuk and the Chandalar in the foothills of the unexplored Endicott Range. A long trail… I had the feeling that it was here the real trail of my life began.

A ray of the rising sun struck through the trees. Jim sat up, looked over at me, and grinned.

“Didn’t get much sleep after the concert, did you?”

“What did you do to the ancestors? They didn’t seem to keep you awake long.”

He said, too carelessly: “Oh, they quieted down.” His face and eyes were expressionless. He was veiling his mind from me. The ancestors had not quieted down. He had lain awake while I had thought him sleeping. I made a swift decision. We would go south as we had planned. I would go with him as far as Circle. I would find some pretext to leave him there.

I said: “We’re not going north. I’ve changed my mind.”

“Yes, why?”

“I’ll tell you after we’ve had breakfast,” I said – I’m not so quick in thinking up lies. “Rustle up a fire, Jim. I’ll go down to the stream and get some water.”

“Degataga!”

I started. It was only in moments of rare sympathy or in time of peril that he used the secret name.

“Degataga, you go north! You go if I have to march ahead of you to make you follow…” he dropped into the Cherokee… “It is to save your spirit, Degataga. Do we march together – blood-brothers? Or do you creep after me – like a shivering dog at the heels of the hunter?”

The blood pounded in my temples, my hand went out toward him. He stepped back, and laughed.

“That’s better, Leif.”

The quick rage left me, my hand fell.

“All right, Tsantawu. We go – north. But it wasn’t – it wasn’t because of myself that I told you I’d changed my mind.”

“I know damned well it wasn’t!”

He busied himself with the fire. I went after the water. We drank the strong black tea, and ate what was left of the little brown storks they call Alaskan turkeys which we had shot the day before. When we were through I began to talk.

— II —

RING OF THE KRAKEN

Three years ago, so I began my story, I went into Mongolia with the Fairchild expedition. Part of its work was a mineral survey for certain British interests, part of it ethnographic and archeological research for the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania.

I never had a chance to prove my value as a mining engineer. At once I became good-will representative, camp entertainer, liaison agent between us and the tribes. My height, my yellow hair, blue eyes and freakish strength, and my facility in picking up languages were of never-ending interest to them. Tartars, Mongols, Buriats, Kirghiz – they would watch while I bent horseshoes, twisted iron bars over my knees and performed what my father used to call contemptuously my circus tricks.

Well, that’s exactly what I was to them – a one-man circus. And yet I was more than that – they liked me. Old Fairchild would laugh when I complained that I had no time for technical work. He would tell me that I was worth a dozen mining engineers, that I was the expedition’s insurance, and that as long as I could keep up my act they wouldn’t be bothered by any trouble makers. And it is a fact that they weren’t. It was the only expedition of its kind I ever knew where you could leave your stuff unwatched and return to find it still there. Also we were singularly free from graft and shake-downs.

In no time I had picked up half a dozen of the dialects and could chatter and chaff with the tribesmen in their own tongues. It made a prodigious bit with them. And now and then a Mongol delegation would arrive with a couple of their wrestlers, big fellows with chests like barrels, to pit against me. I learned their tricks, and taught them ours. We had pony lifting contests, and some of my Manchu friends taught me how to fight with the two broadswords – a sword in each hand.

Fairchild had planned on a year, but so smoothly did the days go by that he decided to prolong our stay. My act, he told me in his sardonic fashion, was undoubtedly of perennial vitality; never again would science have such an opportunity in this region – unless I made up my mind to remain and rule. He didn’t know how close he came to prophecy.

In the early summer of the following year we shifted our camp about a hundred miles north. This was Uighur country. They are a strange people, the Uighurs. They say of themselves that they are descendants of a great race which ruled the Gobi when it was no desert but an earthly Paradise, with flowing rivers and many lakes and teeming cities. It is a fact that they are apart from all the other tribes, and while those others cheerfully kill them when they can, still they go in fear of them. Or rather, of the sorcery of their priests.

Seldom had Uighurs appeared at the old camp. When they did, they kept at a distance. We had been at the new camp less than a week when a band of twenty rode in. I was sitting in the shade of my tent. They dismounted and came straight to me. They paid no attention to anyone else. They halted a dozen feet from me. Three walked close up and stood, studying me. The eyes of these three were a peculiar gray-blue; those of the one who seemed to be their captain singularly cold. They were bigger, taller men than the others.

I did not know the Uighur. I gave them polite salutations in the Kirghiz. They did not answer, maintaining their close scrutiny. Finally they spoke among themselves, nodding as though they had come to some decision.

The leader then addressed me. As I stood up, I saw that he was not many inches under my own six feet four. I told him, again in the Kirghiz, that I did not know his tongue. He gave an order to his men. They surrounded my tent, standing like guards, spears at rest beside them, their wicked long-swords drawn.

At this my temper began to rise, but before I could protest the leader began to speak to me in the Kirghiz. He assured me, with deference, that their visit was entirely peaceful, only they did not wish their contact with me to be disturbed by any of my companions. He asked if I would show him my hands. I held them out. He and his two comrades bent over the palms, examining them minutely, pointing to a mark or a crossing of lines. This inspection ended, the leader touched his forehead with my right hand.

And then to my complete astonishment, he launched without explanation into what was a highly intelligent lesson in the Uighur tongue. He took the Kirghiz for the comparative language. He did not seem to be surprized at the ease with which I assimilated the tuition; indeed, I had a puzzled idea that he regarded it as something to be expected. I mean that his manner was less that of teaching me a new language, than of recalling to me one I had forgotten. The lesson lasted for a full hour. He then touched his forehead again with my hand, and gave a command to the ring of guards. The whole party walked to their horses and galloped off.

There had been something disquieting about the whole experience. Most disquieting was my own vague feeling that my tutor, if I had read correctly his manner, had been right – that I was not learning a new tongue but one I had forgotten. Certainly I never picked up any language with such rapidity and ease as I did the Uighur.

The rest of my party had been perplexed and apprehensive, naturally. I went immediately to them, and talked the matter over. Our ethnologist was the famous Professor David Barr, of Oxford. Fairchild was inclined to take it as a joke, but Barr was greatly disturbed. He said that the Uighur tradition was that their forefathers had been a fair race, yellow-haired and blue-eyed, big men of great strength. In short, men like myself. A few ancient Uighur wall paintings had been found which had portrayed exactly this type, so there was evidence of the correctness of the tradition. However, if the Uighurs of the present were actually the descendants of this race, the ancient blood must have been mixed and diluted almost to the point of extinction.

I asked what this had to do with me, and he replied that quite conceivably my visitors might regard me as of the pure blood of the ancient race. In fact, he saw no other explanation of their conduct. He was of the opinion that their study of my palms, and their manifest approval of what they had discovered there, clinched the matter.

Old Fairchild asked him, satirically, if he was trying to convert us to palmistry. Barr said, coldly, that he was a scientist. As a scientist, he was aware that certain physical resemblances can be carried on by hereditary factors through many generations. Certain peculiarities in the arrangement of the lines of the palms might persist through centuries. They could reappear in cases of atavism, such as I clearly represented.

By this time, I was getting a bit dizzy. But Barr had a few shots left that made me more so. By now his temper was well up, and he went on to say that the Uighurs might even be entirely correct in what he deduced was their opinion of me. I was a throwback to the ancient Norse. Very well. It was quite certain that the Aesir, the old Norse gods and goddesses – Odin and Thor, Frigga and Freya, Frey and Loki of the Fire and all the others – had once been real people. Without question they had been leaders in some long and perilous migration. After they had died, they had been deified, as numerous other similar heroes and heroines had been by other tribes and races. Ethnologists were agreed that the original Norse stock had come into Northeastern Europe from Asia, like other Aryans. Their migration might have occurred anywhere from 1000 B.C. to 5000 B.C. And there was no scientific reason why they should not have come from the region now called the Gobi, nor why they should not have been the blond race these present-day Uighurs called their forefathers.

No one, he went on to say, knew exactly when the Gobi had become desert – nor what were the causes that had changed it into desert. Parts of the Gobi and all the Little Gobi might have been fertile as late as two thousand years ago. Whatever it had been, whatever its causes, and whether operating slowly or quickly, the change gave a perfect reason for the migration led by Odin and the other Aesir which had ended in the colonization of the Scandinavian Peninsula. Admittedly I was a throwback to my mother’s stock of a thousand years ago. There was no reason why I should not also be a throwback in other recognizable ways to the ancient Uighurs – if they actually were the original Norse.

But the practical consideration was that I was headed for trouble. So was every other member of our party. He urgently advised going back to the old camp where we would be among friendly tribes. In conclusion he pointed out that, since we had come to this site, not a single Mongol, Tartar or any other tribesman with whom I had established such pleasant relations had come near us. He sat down with a glare at Fairchild, observing that this was no palmist’s advice but that of a recognized scientist.

Well, Fairchild apologized, of course, but he overruled Barr on returning; we could safely wait a few days longer and see what developed. Barr remarked morosely that as a prophet Fairchild was probably a total loss, but it was also probable that we were being closely watched and would not be allowed to retreat, and therefore it did not matter.

That night we heard drums beating far away, drumming between varying intervals of silence almost until dawn, reporting and answering questions of drums still further off.

The next day, at the same hour, along came the same troop. Their leader made straight for me, ignoring, as before, the others in the camp. He saluted me almost with humility. We walked back together to my tent. Again the cordon was thrown round it, and my second lesson abruptly began. It continued for two hours or more. Thereafter, day after day, for three weeks, the same performance was repeated. There was no desultory conversation, no extraneous questioning, no explanations. These men were there for one definite purpose: to teach me their tongue. They stuck to that admirably. Filled with curiosity, eager to reach the end and learn what it all meant, I interposed no obstacles, stuck as rigorously as they to the matter in hand. This, too, they seemed to take as something expected of me. In three weeks I could carry on a conversation in the Uigher as well as I can in English.

Barr’s uneasiness kept growing. “They’re grooming you for something!” he would say. “I’d give five years of my life to be in your shoes. But I don’t like it. I’m afraid for you. I’m damned afraid!”

One night at the end of this third week, the signaling drums beat until dawn. The next day my instructors did not appear, nor the next day, nor the day after. But our men reported that there were Uighurs all around us, picketing the camp. They were in fear, and no work could be got out of them.

On the afternoon of the fourth day we saw a cloud of dust drifting rapidly down upon us from the north. Soon we heard the sound of the Uighur drums. Then out of the dust emerged a troop of horsemen. There were two or three hundred of them, spears glinting, many of them with good rifles. They drew up in a wide semicircle before the camp. The cold-eyed leader who had been my chief instructor dismounted and came forward leading a magnificent black stallion. A big horse, a strong horse, unlike the rangy horses that carried them; a horse that could bear my weight with ease.

The Uighur dropped on one knee, handing me the stallion’s reins, I took them, automatically. The horse looked me over, sniffed at me, and rested its nose on my shoulder. At once the troop raised their spears, shouting some word I could not catch, then dropped from their mounts and stood waiting.

The leader arose. He drew from his tunic a small cube of ancient jade. He sank again upon his knee, handed me the cube. It seemed solid, but as I pressed it flew open. Within, was a ring. It was of heavy gold, thick and wide. Set in it was a yellow, translucent stone about an inch and a half square. And within this stone was the shape of a black octopus.

Its tentacles spread out fan-wise from its body. They had the effect of reaching forward through the yellow stone. I could even see upon their nearer tips the sucking discs. The body was not so clearly defined. It was nebulous, seeming to reach into far distance. The black octopus had not been cut upon the jewel. It was within it.

I was aware of a curious mingling of feelings – repulsion and a peculiar sense of familiarity, like the trick of the mind that causes what we call double memory, the sensation of having experienced the same thing before. Without thinking. I slipped the ring over my thumb which it fitted perfectly, and held it up to the sun to catch the light through the stone. Instantly every man of the troop threw himself down upon his belly, prostrating himself before it.

The Uighur captain spoke to me. I had been subconsciously aware that from the moment of handing me the jade he had been watching me closely. I thought that now there was awe in his eyes.

“Your horse is ready—” again he used the unfamiliar word with which the troop had saluted me. “Show me what you wish to take with you, and your men shall carry it.”

“Where do we go – and for how long?” I asked.

“To a holy man of your people,” he answered. “For how long – he alone can answer.”

I felt a momentary irritation at the casualness with which I was being disposed of. Also I wondered why he spoke of his men and his people as mine.

“Why does he not come to me?” I asked.

“He is old,” he answered. “He could not make the journey.”

I looked at the troop, now standing up beside their horses. If I refused to go, it would undoubtedly mean the wiping out of the camp if my companions attempted, as they would, to resist my taking. Besides, I was on fire with curiosity.

“I must speak to my comrades before I go,” I said.

“If it please Dwayanu” – this time I caught the word – “to bid farewell to his dogs, let him.” There was a flicker of contempt in his eyes as he looked at old Fairchild and the others.

Definitely I did not like what he had said, nor his manner.

“Await me here,” I told him curtly, and walked over to Fairchild. I drew him into his tent, Barr and the others of the expedition at our heels. I told them what was happening. Barr took my hand, and scrutinized the ring. He whistled softly.

“Don’t you know what this is?” he asked me. “It’s the Kraken – that super-wise, malignant and mythical sea-monster of the old Norsemen. See, its tentacles are not eight but twelve. Never was it pictured with less than ten. It symbolized the principle that is inimical to Life – not Death precisely, more accurately annihilation. The Kraken – and here in Mongolia!”

“See here, Chief,” I spoke to Fairchild. “There’s only one way you can help me – if I need help. And that’s to get back quick as you can to the old camp. Get hold of the Mongols and send word to that chief who kept bringing in the big wrestlers – they’ll know whom I mean. Persuade or hire him to get as many able fighting men at the camp as you can. I’ll be back, but I’ll probably come back running. Outside of that, you’re all in danger. Not at the moment, maybe, but things may develop which will make these people think it better to wipe you out. I know what I’m talking about, Chief. I ask you to do this for my sake, if not for your own.”

“But they watch the camp—” he began to object.

“They won’t – after I’ve gone. Not for a little while at least. Everyone of them will be streaking away with me.” I spoke with complete certainty, and Barr nodded acquiescence.

“The King returns to his Kingdom,” he said. “All his loyal subjects with him. He’s in no danger – while he’s with them. But – God, if I could only go with you, Leif! The Kraken! And the ancient legend of the South Seas told of the Great Octopus, dozing on and biding his time till he felt like destroying the world and all its life. And three miles up in the air the Black Octopus is cut into the cliffs of the Andes! Norsemen – and the South Sea Islanders – and the Andeans! And the same symbol – here!”

“Please promise?” I asked Fairchild. “My life may depend on it.”

“It’s like abandoning you. I don’t like it!”

“Chief, this crowd could wipe you out in a minute. Go back, and get the Mongols. The Tartars will help. They hate the Uighurs. I’ll come back, don’t fear. But I’d bet everything that this whole crowd, and more, will be at my heels. When I come, I want a wall to duck behind.”

“We’ll go,” he said.

I went out of that tent, and over to my own. The odd-eyed Uighur followed me. I took my rifle and an automatic, stuffed a toothbrush and a shaving-kit in my pocket, and turned to go.

“Is there nothing else?” There was surprise in his question.

“If there is, I’ll come back for it,” I answered.

“Not after you have – remembered,” he said, enigmatically.

Side by side we walked to the black stallion. I lifted myself to his back.

The troop wheeled in behind us. Their spears a barrier between me and the camp, we galloped south.

— III —

RITUAL OF KHALK’RU

The stallion settled down to a steady, swinging lope. He carried my weight easily. About an hour from dusk we were over the edge of the desert. At our right loomed a low range of red sandstone hills. Close ahead was a defile. We rode into it, and picked our way through it. In about half an hour we emerged into a boulder-strewn region, upon what had once been a wide road. The road stretched straight ahead of us to the northeast, toward another and higher range of red sandstone, perhaps five miles away. This we reached just as night began, and here my guide halted, saying that we would encamp until dawn. Some twenty of the troop dismounted; the rest rode on.

Those who remained waited, looking at me, plainly expectant. I wondered what I was supposed to do; then, noticing that the stallion had been sweating, I called for something to rub him down, and for food and water for him. This, apparently, was what had been looked for. The captain himself brought me the cloths, grain and water while the men whispered. After the horse was cooled down, I fed him. I then asked for blankets to put on him, for the nights were cold. When I had finished I found that supper had been prepared. I sat beside a fire with the leader. I was hungry, and, as usual when it was possible, I ate voraciously. I asked few questions, and most of these were answered so evasively, with such obvious reluctance, that I soon asked none. When the supper was over, I was sleepy. I said so. I was given blankets, and walked over to the stallion. I spread my blankets beside him, dropped, and rolled myself up.

The stallion bent his head, nosed me gently, blew a long breath down my neck, and lay down carefully beside me. I shifted so that I could rest my head on his neck. I heard excited whispering among the Uighurs. I went to sleep.

At dawn I was awakened. Breakfast was ready. We set out again on the ancient road. It ran along the hills, skirting the bed of what had long ago been a large river. For some time the eastern hills protected us from the sun. When it began to strike directly down upon us, we rested under the shadow of some immense rocks. By mid-afternoon we were once more on our way. Shortly before sun-down, we crossed the dry river bed over what had once been a massive bridge. We passed into another defile through which the long-gone stream had flowed, and just at dusk reached its end.

Each side of the end of the shallow gorge was commanded by stone forts. They were manned by dozens of the Uighurs. They shouted as we drew near, and again I heard the word “Dwayanu” repeated again and again.

The heavy gates of the right-hand fort swung open. We went through, into a passage under the thick wall. We trotted across a wide enclosure. We passed out of it through similar gates.

I looked upon an oasis hemmed in by the bare mountains. It had once been the site of a fair-sized city, for ruins dotted it everywhere. What had possibly been the sources of the river had dwindled to a brook which sunk into the sands not far from where I stood. At the right of this brook there was vegetation and trees; to the left of it was a desolation. The road passed through the oasis and ran on across this barren. It stopped at, or entered, a huge square-cut opening in the rock wall more than a mile away, an opening that was like a door in that mountain, or like the entrance to some gigantic Egyptian tomb.

We rode straight down into the fertile side. There were hundreds of the ancient stone buildings here, and fair attempts had been made to keep some in repair. Even so, their ancientness struck against my nerves. There were tents among the trees also. And out of the buildings and tents were pouring Uighurs, men, women and children. There must have been a thousand of the warriors alone. Unlike the men at the guardhouses, these watched me in awed silence as I passed.

We halted in front of a time-bitten pile that might have been a palace – five thousand years or twice that ago. Or a temple. A colonnade of squat, square columns ran across its front. Heavier ones stood at its entrance. Here we dismounted. The stallion and my guide’s horse were taken by our escort. Bowing low at the threshold, my guide invited me to enter.

I stepped into a wide corridor, lined with spearsmen and lighted by torches of some resinous wood. The Uighur leader walked beside me. The corridor led into a huge room – high-ceilinged, so wide and long that the flambeaux on the walls made its center seem the darker. At the far end of this place was a low dais, and upon it a stone table, and seated at this table were a number of hooded men.

As I drew nearer, I felt the eyes of these hooded men intent upon me, and saw that they were thirteen – six upon each side and one seated in a larger chair at the table’s end. High cressets of metal stood about them in which burned some substance that gave out a steady, clear white light. I came close, and halted. My guide did not speak. Nor did these others.

Suddenly, the light glinted upon the ring on my thumb.

The hooded man at the table’s end stood up, gripping its edge with trembling hands that were like withered claws. I heard him whisper – “Dwayanu!”

The hood slipped back from his head. I saw an old, old face in which were eyes almost as blue as my own, and they were filled with stark wonder and avid hope. It touched me, for it was the look of a man long lost to despair who sees a savior appear.

Now the others arose, slipped back their hoods. They were old men, all of them, but not so old as he who had whispered. Their eyes of cold blue-gray weighed me. The high priest, for that I so guessed him and such he turned out to be, spoke again:

“They told me – but I could not believe! Will you come to me?”

I jumped on the dais and walked to him. He drew his old face close to mine, searching my eyes. He touched my hair. He thrust his hand within my shirt and laid it on my heart. He said:

“Let me see your hands.”

I placed them, palms upward, on the table. He gave them the same minute scrutiny as had the Uighur leader. The twelve others clustered round, following his fingers as he pointed to this marking and to that. He lifted from his neck a chain of golden links, drawing from beneath his robe a large, flat square of jade. He opened this. Within it was a yellow stone, larger than that in my ring, but otherwise precisely similar, the black octopus – or the Kraken – writhing from its depths. Beside it was a small phial of jade and a small, lancet-like jade knife. He took my right hand, and brought the wrist over the yellow stone. He looked at me and at the others with eyes in which was agony.

“The last test,” he whispered. “The blood!”

He nicked a vein of my wrist with the knife. Blood fell, slow drop by drop upon the stone; I saw then that it was slightly concave. As the blood dripped, it spread like a thin film from bottom to lip. The old priest lifted the phial of jade, unstoppered it, and by what was plainly violent exercise of his will, held it steadily over the yellow stone. One drop of colorless fluid fell and mingled with my blood.

The room was now utterly silent, high priest and his ministers seemed not to breathe, staring at the stone. I shot a glance at the Uighur leader, and he was glaring at me, fanatic fires in his eyes.

There was an exclamation from the high priest, echoed by the others. I looked down at the stone. The pinkish film was changing color. A curious sparkle ran through it; it changed into a film of clear, luminous green.

“Dwayanu!” gasped the high priest, and sank back into his chair, covering his face with shaking hands. The others stared at me and back at the stone and at me again as though they beheld some miracle. I looked at the Uighur leader. He lay flat upon his face at the base of the dais.

The high priest uncovered his face. It seemed to me that he had become incredibly younger, transformed; his eyes were no longer hopeless, agonized; they were filled with eagerness. He arose from his chair, and sat me in it.

“Dwayanu,” he said, “what do you remember?”

I shook my head, puzzled; it was an echo of the Uighur’s remark at the camp.

“What should I remember?” I asked.

His gaze withdrew from me, sought the faces of the others, questioningly; as though he had spoken to them, they looked at one another, then nodded. He shut the jade case and thrust it into his breast. He took my hand, twisted the bezel of the ring behind my thumb and closed my hand on it.

“Do you remember—” his voice sank to the faintest of whispers – “Khalk’ru?”

Again the stillness dropped upon the great chamber – this time like a tangible thing. I sat, considering. There was something familiar about that name. I had an irritated feeling that I ought to know it; that if I tried hard enough, I could remember it; that memory of it wasfirst over the border of consciousness. Also I had the feeling that it meant something rather dreadful. Something better forgotten. I felt vague stirrings of repulsion, coupled with sharp resentment.

“No,” I answered.

I heard the sound of sharply exhaled breaths. The old priest walked behind me and placed his hands over my eyes.

“Do you remember – this?”

My mind seemed to blur, and then I saw a picture as clearly as though I were looking at it with my open eyes. I was galloping through the oasis straight to the great doorway in the mountain. Only now it was no oasis. It was a city with gardens, and a river ran sparkling through it. The ranges were not barren red sandstone, but green with trees. There were others with me, galloping behind me – men and women like myself, fair and strong. Now I was close to the doorway. There were immense square stone columns flanking it… and now I had dismounted from my horse… a great black stallion… I was entering…

I would not enter! If I entered, I would remember – Khalk’ru! I thrust myself back… and out… I felt hands over my eyes… I reached and tore them away… the old priest’s hands. I jumped from the chair, quivering with anger. I faced him. His face was benign, his voice gentle.

“Soon,” he said, “you will remember more!”

I did not answer, struggling to control my inexplicable rage. Of course, the old priest had tried to hypnotize me; what I had seen was what he had willed me to see. Not without reason had the priests of the Uighurs gained their reputation as sorcerers. But it was not that which had stirred this wrath that took all my will to keep from turning berserk. No, it had been something about that name of Khalk’ru. Something that lay behind the doorway in the mountain through which I had almost been forced.

“Are you hungry?” The abrupt transition to the practical in the old priest’s question brought me back to normal. I laughed outright, and told him that I was, indeed. And getting sleepy. I had feared that such an important personage as I had apparently become would have to dine with the high priest. I was relieved when he gave me in charge of the Uighur captain. The Uighur followed me out like a dog, he kept his eyes upon me like a dog upon its master, and he waited on me like a servant while I ate. I told him I would rather sleep in a tent than in one of the stone houses. His eyes flashed at that, and for the first time he spoke other than in respectful monosyllables.

“Still a warrior!” he grunted approvingly. A tent was set up for me. Before I went to sleep I peered through the flap. The Uighur leader was squatting at the opening, and a double ring of spearsmen stood shoulder to shoulder on guard.

Early next morning, a delegation of the lesser priests called for me. We went into the same building, but to a much smaller room, bare of all furnishings. The high priest and the rest of the lesser priests were awaiting me. I had expected many questions. He asked me none; he had, apparently, no curiosity as to my origin, where I had come from, nor how I had happened to be in Mongolia. It seemed to be enough that they had proved me to be who they had hoped me to be – whoever that was. Furthermore, I had the strongest impression that they were anxious to hasten on to the consummation of a plan that had begun with my lessons. The high priest west straight to the point.

“Dwayanu,” he said, “we would recall to your memory a certain ritual. Listen carefully, watch carefully, repeat faithfully each inflection, each gesture.”

“To what purpose?” I asked.

“That you shall learn—” he began, then interrupted himself fiercely. “No! I will tell you now! So that this which is desert shall once more become fertile. That the Uighurs shall recover their greatness. That the ancient sacrilege against Khalk’ru, whose fruit was the desert, shall be expiated!”

“What have I, a stranger, to do with all this?” I asked.

“We to whom you have come,” he answered, “have not enough of the ancient blood to bring this about. You are no stranger. You are Dwayanu – the Releaser. You are of the pure blood. Because of that, only you – Dwayanu – can lift the doom.”

I thought how delighted Barr would be to hear that explanation; how he would crow over Fairchild. I bowed to the old priest, and told him I was ready. He took from my thumb the ring, lifted the chain and its pendent jade from his neck, and told me to strip. While I was doing so, he divested himself of his own robes, and the others followed suit. A priest carried the things away, quickly returning. I looked at the shrunken shapes of the old men standing mother-naked round me, and suddenly lost all desire to laugh. The proceedings were being touched by the sinister. The lesson began.

It was not a ritual; it was an invocation – rather, it was an evocation of a Being, Power, Force, named Khalk’ru. It was exceedingly curious, and so were the gestures that accompanied it. It was clearly couched in the archaic form of the Uighur. There were many words I did not understand. Obviously, it had been passed down from high priest to high priest from remote antiquity. Even an indifferent churchman would have considered it blasphemous to the point of damnation. I was too much interested to think much of that phase of it. I had the same odd sense of familiarity with it that I had felt at the first naming of Khalk’ru. I felt none of the repulsion, however. I felt strongly in earnest. How much this was due to the force of the united wills of the twelve priests who never took their eyes off me, I do not know.

I won’t repeat it, except to give the gist of it. Khalk’ru was the Beginning-without-Beginning, as he would be the End-without-End. He was the Lightless Timeless Void. The Destroyer. The Eater-up of Life. The Annihilator. The Dissolver. He was not Death – Death was only a part of him. He was alive, very much so, but his quality of living was the antithesis of Life as we know it. Life was an invader, troubling Khalk’ru’s ageless calm. Gods and man, animals and birds and all creatures, vegetation and water and air and fire, sun and stars and moon – all were his to dissolve into Himself, the Living Nothingness, if he so willed. But let them go on a little longer. Why should Khalk’ru care when in the end there would be only – Khalk’ru! Let him withdraw from the barren places so life could enter and cause them to blossom again; let him touch only those who were the enemies of his worshippers, so that his worshippers would be great and powerful, evidence that Khalk’ru was the All in All. It was only for a breath in the span of his eternity. Let Khalk’ru make himself manifest in the form of his symbol and take what was offered him as evidence he had listened and consented.

There was more, much more, but that was the gist of it. A dreadful prayer, but I felt no dread – then.

Three times, and I was letter-perfect. The high priest gave me one more rehearsal and nodded to the priest who had taken away the clothing. He went out and returned with the robes – but not my clothes. Instead, he produced a long white mantle and a pair of sandals. I asked for my own clothes and was told by the old priest that I no longer needed them, that hereafter I would be dressed as befitted me. I agreed that this was desirable, but said I would like to have them so I could look at them once in a while. To this he acquiesced.

They took me to another room. Faded, ragged tapestries hung on its walls. They were threaded with scenes of the hunt and of war. There were oddly shaped stools and chairs of some metal that might have been copper but also might have been gold, a wide and low divan, in one corner spears, a bow and two swords, a shield and a cap-shaped bronze helmet. Everything, except the rugs spread over the stone floor, had the appearance of great antiquity. Here I was washed and carefully shaved and my long hair trimmed – a ceremonial cleansing accompanied by rites of purification which, at times, were somewhat startling.

These ended, I was given a cotton undergarment which sheathed me from toes to neck. After this, a pair of long, loose, girdled trousers that seemed spun of threads of gold reduced by some process to the softness of silk. I noticed with amusement that they had been carefully repaired and patched. I wondered how many centuries the man who had first worn them had been dead. There was a long, blouse-like coat of the same material, and my feet were slipped into cothurms, or high buskins, whose elaborate embroidery was a bit ragged.

The old priest placed the ring on my thumb, and stood back, staring at me raptly. Quite evidently he saw nothing of the ravages of time upon my garments.

I was to him the splendid figure from the past that he thought me.

“So did you appear when our race was great,” he said. “And soon, when it has recovered a little of its greatness, we shall bring back those who still dwell in the Shadow-land.”

“The Shadow-land?” I asked.

“It is far to the East, over the Great Water,” he said. “But we know they dwell there, those of Khalk’ru who fled at the time of the great sacrilege which changed fecund Uighuriand into desert. They will be of the pure blood like yourself, Dwayanu, and you shall find mates among the women. And in time, we of the thinned blood shall pass away, and Uighuriand again be peopled by its ancient race.”

He walked abruptly away, the lesser priests following. At the door he turned.

“Wait here,” he said, “until the word comes from me.”

— IV —

TENTACLE OF KHALK’RU

I waited for an hour, examining the curious contents of the room, and amusing myself with shadow-fencing with the two swords. I swung round to find the Uighur captain watching me from the doorway, pale eyes glowing.

“By Zarda!” he said. “Whatever you have forgotten, it is not your sword play! A warrior you left us, a warrior you have returned!”

He dropped upon a knee, bent his head: “Pardon, Dwayanu! I have been sent for you. It is time to go.”

A heady exaltation began to take me. I dropped the swords, and clapped him on the shoulder. He took it like an accolade. We passed through the corridor of the spearsmen and over the threshold of the great doorway. There was a thunderous shout.

“Dwayanu!”

And then a blaring of trumpets, a mighty roll of drums and the clashing of cymbals.

Drawn up in front of the palace was a hollow square of Uighur horsemen, a full five hundred of them, spears glinting, pennons flying from their shafts. Within the square, in ordered ranks, were as many more. But now I saw that these were both men and women, clothed in garments as ancient as those I wore, and shimmering in the strong sunlight like a vast multi-colored rug of metal threads. Banners and bannerets, torn and tattered and bearing strange symbols, fluttered from them. At the far edge of the square I recognized the old priest, his lesser priests flanking him, mounted and clad in the yellow. Above them streamed a yellow banner, and as the wind whipped it straight, black upon it appeared the shape of the Kraken. Beyond the square of horsemen, hundreds of the Uighurs pressed for a glimpse of me. As I stood there, blinking, another shout mingled with the roll of the Uighur drums.

“The King returns to his people!” Barr had said. Well, it was like that.

A soft nose nudged me. Beside me was the black stallion. I mounted him. The Uighur captain at my heels, we trotted down the open way between the ordered ranks. I looked at them as I went by. All of them, men and women, had the pale blue-gray eyes; each of them was larger than the run of the race. I thought that these were the nobles, the pick of the ancient families, those in whom the ancient blood was strongest. Their tattered banners bore the markings of their clans. There was exultation in the eyes of the men. Before I had reached the priests. I had read terror in the eyes of many of the women.

I reached the old priest. The line of horsemen ahead of us parted. We two rode through the gap, side by side. The lesser priests fell in behind us. The nobles followed them. A long thin line upon each side of the cavalcade, the Uighur horsemen trotted – with the Uighur trumpets blaring, the Uighur kettle-drums and long-drums beating, the Uighur cymbals crashing, in wild triumphal rhythms.

“The King returns—”

I would to heaven that something had sent me then straight upon the Uighur spears!

We trotted through the green of the oasis. We crossed a wide bridge which had spanned the little stream when it had been a mighty river. We set our horses’ feet upon the ancient road that led straight to the mountain’s doorway a mile or more away. The heady exultation grew within me. I looked back at my company. And suddenly I remembered the repairs and patches on my breeches and my blouse. And my following was touched with the same shabbiness. It made me feel less a king, but it also made me pitiful. I saw them as men and women driven by hungry ghosts in their thinned blood, ghosts of strong ancestors growing weak as the ancient blood weakened, starving at it weakened, but still strong enough to clamor against extinction, still strong enough to command their brains and wills and drive them toward something the ghosts believed would feed their hunger, make them strong again.

Yes, I pitied them. It was nonsense to think I could appease the hunger of their ghosts, but there was one thing I could do for them. I could give them a damned good show! I went over in my mind the ritual the old priest had taught me, rehearsed each gesture.

I looked up to find we were at the threshold of the mountain door. It was wide enough for twenty horsemen to ride through abreast. The squat columns I had seen, under the touch of the old priest’s hands, lay shattered beside it. I felt no repulsion, no revolt against entering, as I then had. I was eager to be in and to be done with it.

The spearsmen trotted up, and formed a guard beside the opening. I dismounted, and handed one of them the stallion’s rein. The old priest beside me, the lesser ones behind us, we passed over the threshold of the mined doorway, and into the mountain. The passage, or vestibule, was lighted by wall cressets in which burned the clear, white flame. A hundred paces from the entrance, another passage opened, piercing inward at an angle of about fifteen degrees to the wider one. Into this the old priest turned. I glanced back. The nobles had not yet entered; I could see them dismounting at the entrance. We went along this passage in silence for perhaps a thousand feet. It opened into a small square chamber, cut in the red sandstone, at whose side was another door, covered with heavy tapestries. In this chamber was nothing except a number of stone coffers of various sizes ranged along its walls.

The old priest opened one of these. Within it was a wooden box, gray with age. He lifted its lid, and took from it two yellow garments. He slipped one of these garments over my head. It was like a smock, falling to my knees. I glanced down; woven within it, its tentacles encircling me, was the black octopus.

The other he drew over his own head. It, too, bore the octopus, but only on the breast, the tentacles did not embrace him. He bent and took from the coffer a golden staff, across the end of which ran bars. From these fell loops of small golden bells.

From the other coffers the lesser priests had taken drums, queerly shaped oval instruments some three feet long, with sides of sullen red metal. They sat, rolling the drumheads under their thumbs, tightening them here and there while the old priest gently shook his staff of bells, testing their chiming. They were for all the world like an orchestra tuning up. I again felt a desire to laugh;

I did not then know how the commonplace can intensify the terrible.

There were sounds outside the tapestried doorway, rustlings. There were three clangorous strokes like a hammer upon an anvil. Then silence. The twelve priests walked through the doorway with their drums in their arms. The high priest beckoned me to follow him, and we passed through after them.

I looked out upon an immense cavern, cut from the living rock by the hands of men dust now for thousands of years. It told its immemorial antiquity as clearly as though the rocks had tongue. It was more than ancient; it was primeval. It was dimly lighted, so dimly that hardly could I see the Uighur nobles. They were standing, the banners of their clans above them, their faces turned up to me, upon the stone floor, a hundred yards or so away, and ten feet below me. Beyond them and behind them the cavern extended, vanishing in darkness. I saw that in front of them was a curving trough, wide – like the trough between two long waves – and that like a wave it swept upward from the hither side of the trough, curving, its lip crested, as though that wave of sculptured stone were a gigantic comber rushing back upon them. This lip formed the edge of the raised place on which I stood.

The high priest touched my arm. I turned my head to him, and followed his eyes. A hundred feet away from me stood a girl. She was naked. She had not long entered womanhood and quite plainly was soon to be a mother. Her eyes were as blue as those of the old priest, her hair was reddish brown, touched with gold, her skin was palest olive. The blood of the old fair race was strong within her. For all she held herself so bravely, there was terror in her eyes, and the rapid rise and fall of her rounded breasts further revealed that terror.

She stood in a small hollow. Around her waist was a golden ring, and from that ring dropped three golden chains fastened to the rock floor. I recognized their purpose. She could not run, and if she dropped or fell, she could not writhe away, out of the cup. But run, or writhe away from what? Certainly not from me! I looked at her and smiled. Her eyes searched mine. The terror suddenly fled from them. She smiled back at me, trustingly.

God forgive me – I smiled at her and she trusted me! I looked beyond her, from whence had come a glitter of yellow like a flash from a huge topaz. Up from the rock a hundred yards behind the girl jutted an immense fragment of the same yellow translucent stone that formed the jewel in my ring. It was like the fragment of a gigantic shattered pane. Its shape was roughly triangular. Black within it was a tentacle of the Kraken. The tentacle swung down within the yellow stone, broken from the monstrous body when the stone had been broken. It was all of fifty feet long. Its inner side was turned toward me, and plain upon all its length clustered the hideous sucking discs.

Well, it was ugly enough – but nothing to be afraid of, I thought. I smiled again at the chained girl, and met once more her look of utter trust.

The old priest had been watching me closely. We walked forward until we were half-way between the edge and the girl. At the lip squatted the twelve lesser priests, their drums on their laps.

The old priest and I faced the girl and the broken tentacle. He raised his staff of golden bells and shook them. From the darkness of the cavern began a low chanting, a chant upon three minor themes, repeated and repeated, and intermingled.

It was as primeval as the cavern; it was the voice of the cavern itself.

The girl never took her eyes from me.

The chanting ended. I raised my hands and made the curious gestures of salutation I had been taught. I began the ritual to Khalk’ru…

With the first words, the odd feeling of recognition swept over me – with something added. The words, the gestures, were automatic. I did not have to exert any effort of memory; they remembered themselves. I no longer saw the chained girl. All I saw was the black tentacle in the shattered stone.

On swept the ritual and on… was the yellow stone dissolving from around the tentacle… was the tentacle swaying?

Desperately I tried to halt the words, the gesturing. I could not!

Something stronger than myself possessed me, moving my muscles, speaking from my throat. I had a sense of inhuman power. On to the climax of the evil evocation – and how I knew how utterly evil it was – the ritual rushed, while I seemed to stand apart, helpless to check it.

It ended.

And the tentacle quivered… it writhed… it reached outward to the chained girl…

There was a devil’s roll of drums, rushing up fast and ever faster to a thunderous crescendo…

The girl was still looking at me… but the trust was gone from her eyes… her face reflected the horror stamped upon my own.

The black tentacle swung up and out!

I had a swift vision of a vast cloudy body from which other cloudy tentacles writhed. A breath that had in it the cold of outer space touched me.

The black tentacle coiled round the girl…

She screamed – inhumanly… she faded… she dissolved… her screaming faded… her screaming became a small shrill agonized piping… a sigh.

I heard the dash of metal from where the girl had stood. The clashing of the golden chains and girdle that had held her, falling empty on the rock.

The girl was gone!

I stood, nightmare horror such as I had never known in worst of nightmares paralyzing me—

The child had trusted me… I had smiled at her, and she had trusted me… and I had summoned the Kraken to destroy her!

Searing remorse, white hot rage, broke the chains that held me. I saw the fragment of yellow stone in its place, the black tentacle inert within it. At my feet lay the old priest, flat on his face, his withered body shaking; his withered hands clawing at the rock. Beside their drums lay the lesser priests, and flat upon the floor of the cavern were the nobles – prostrate, abased, blind and deaf in stunned worship of that dread Thing I had summoned.

I ran to the tapestried doorway. I had but one desire – to get out of the temple of Khalk’ru. Out of the lair of the Kraken. To get far and far away from it. To get back… back to the camp – home. I ran through the little room, through the passages and, still running, reached the entrance to the temple. I stood there for an instant, dazzled by the sunlight.

There was a roaring shout from hundreds of throats – then silence. My sight cleared. They lay there, in the dust, prostrate before me – the troops of the Uighur spearsmen.

I looked for the black stallion. He was close beside me. I sprang upon his back, gave him the reins. He shot forward like a black thunderbolt through the prostrate ranks, and down the road to the oasis. We raced through the oasis. I had vague glimpses of running crowds, shouting. None tried to stop me. None could have stayed the rush of that great horse.

And now I was close to the inner gates of the stone fort through which we had passed on the yesterday. They were open. Their guards stood gaping at me. Drums began to beat, peremptorily, from the temple. I looked back. There was a confusion at its entrance, a chaotic milling. The Uighur spearsmen were streaming down the wide road.

The gates began to close. I shot the stallion forward, bowling over the guards, and was inside the fort. I reached the further gates. They were closed. Louder beat the drums, threatening, commanding.

Something of sanity returned to me. I ordered the guards to open. They stood, trembling, staring at me. But they did not obey. I leaped from the stallion and ran to them. I raised my hand. The ring of Khalk’ru glittered. They threw themselves on the ground before me – but they did not open the gates.

I saw upon the wall goatskins full of water. I snatched one of these and a sack of grain. Upon the floor was a huge slab of stone. I lifted it as though it had been a pebble, and hurled it at the gates where the two halves met. They burst asunder. I threw the skin of water and sack of grain over the high saddle, and rode through the broken gates.

The great horse skimmed through the ravine like a swallow. And now we were over the crumbling bridge and thundering down the ancient road.

We came to the end of the far ravine. I knew it by the fall of rock. I looked back. There was no sign of pursuit. But I could hear the faint throb of the drums.

It was now well past mid-afternoon. We picked our way through the ravine and came out at the edge of the sandstone range. It was cruel to force the stallion, but I could not afford to spare him. By nightfall we had readied semi-arid country. The stallion was reeking with sweat, and tired. Never once had he slackened or turned surly. He had a great heart, that horse. I made up my mind that he should rest, come what might.

I found a sheltered place behind some high boulders. Suddenly I realized that I was still wearing the yellow ceremonial smock. I tore it off with sick loathing. I rubbed the horse down with it. I watered him and gave him some of the grain. I realized, too, that I was ravenously hungry and had eaten nothing since morning. I chewed some of the grain and washed it down with the tepid water. As yet, there were no signs of pursuit, and the drums were silent. I wondered uneasily whether the Uighurs knew of a shorter road and were outflanking me. I threw the smock over the stallion and stretched myself on the ground. I did not intend to sleep. But I did go to sleep.

I awakened abruptly. Dawn was breaking. Looking down upon me were the old priest and the cold-eyed Uighur captain. My hiding place was ringed with spearsmen. The old priest spoke, gently.

“We mean you no harm, Dwayanu. If it is your will to leave us, we cannot stay you. He whose call Khalk’ru has answered has nothing to fear from us. His will is our will.”

I did not answer. Looking at him, I saw again – could only see – that which I had seen in the cavern. He sighed.

“It is your will to leave us! So shall it be!”

The Uighur captain did not speak.

“We have brought your clothing, Dwayanu, thinking that you might wish to go from us as you came,” said the old priest.

I stripped and dressed in my old clothes. The old priest took my faded finery. He lifted the octopus robe from the stallion. The captain spoke:

“Why do you leave us, Dwayanu? You have made our peace with Khalk’ru. You have unlocked the gates. Soon the desert will blossom as of old. Why will you not remain and lead us on our march to greatness?”

I shook my head. The old priest sighed again.

“It is his will! So shall it be! But remember, Dwayanu – he whose call Khalk’ru has answered must answer when Khalk’ru calls him. And soon or late – Khalk’ru will call him!”

He touched my hair with his trembling old hands, touched my heart, and turned. A troop of spearsmen wheeled round him. They rode away.

The Uighur captain said:

“We wait to guard Dwayanu on his journey.”

I mounted the stallion. We reached the expedition’s new camp. It was deserted. We rode on, toward the old camp. Late that afternoon we saw ahead of us a caravan. As we came nearer they halted, made hasty preparations for defence. It was the expedition – still on the march. I waved my hands to them and shouted.

I dropped off the black stallion, and handed the reins to the Uighur.

“Take him,” I said. His face lost its sombre sternness, brightened.

“He shall be ready for you when you return to us, Dwayanu. He or his sons,” he said. He touched my hand to his forehead, knelt. “So shall we all be, Dwayanu – ready for you, we or our sons. When you return.”

He mounted his horse. He faced me with his troop. They raised their spears. There was one crashing shout—

“Dwayanu!”

They raced away.

I walked to where Fairchild and the others awaited me.

As soon as I could arrange it, I was on my way back to America. I wanted only one thing – to put as many miles as possible between myself and Khalk’ru’s temple.

I stopped. Involuntarily my hand sought the buckskin bag on my breast.

“But now,” I said, “it appears that it is not so easy to escape him. By anvil stroke, by chant and drums – Khalk’ru calls me!”

— V —

THE MIRAGE

Jim had sat silent, watching me, but now and again I had seen the Indian stoicism drop from his face. He leaned over and put a hand on my shoulder.

“Leif,” he said quietly, “how could I have known? For the first time, I saw you afraid – it hurt me. I did not know…”

From Tsantawu, the Cherokee, this was much. “It’s all right, Indian. Snap back,” I said roughly. He sat for a while not speaking, throwing little twigs on the fire.

“What did you friend Barr say about it?” he asked abruptly.

“He gave me hell,” I said. “He gave me hell with the tears streaming down his cheeks. He said that never had anyone betrayed science as I had since Judas kissed Christ. He was keen on mixed metaphors that got under your skin. That went deep under mine, for it was precisely what I was thinking of myself – not as to science but as to the girl. I had given her the kiss of Judas all right. Barr said that I had been handed the finest opportunity man ever had given him. I could have solved the whole mystery of the Gobi and its lost civilization. I had run away like a child from a bugaboo. I was not only atavistic in body, I was atavistic in brain. I was a blond savage cowering before my mumbo-jumbos. He said that if he had been given my chance he would have let himself be crucified to have learned the truth. He would have, too. He was not lying.”

“Admirably scientific,” said Jim. “But what did he say about what you saw?”

“That is was nothing but hypnotic suggestion by the old priest. I had seen what he had willed me to see – just as before, under his will, I had seen myself riding to the temple. The girl hadn’t dissolved. She had probably been standing in the wings laughing at me. But if everything that my ignorant mind had accepted as true had been true then my conduct was even more unforgivable. I should have remained, studied the phenomena and brought back the results for science to examine. What I had told him of the ritual of Khalk’ru was nothing but the second law of thermodynamics expressed in terms of anthropomorphism. Life was an intrusion upon Chaos, using that word to describe the unformed, primal state of the universe. An invasion. An accident. In time all energy would be changed to static heat, impotent to give birth to any life whatsoever. The dead universes would float lifelessly in the illimitable void. The void was eternal, life was not. Therefore the void would absorb it. Suns, worlds, gods, men, an things animate, would return to the void. Go back to Chaos. Back to Nothingness. Back to Khalk’ru. Or if my atavistic brain preferred the term – back to the Kraken. He was bitter.”

“But the others saw the girl taken, you say. How did he explain that?”

“Oh, easily. That was mass hypnotism – like the Angels of Mons, the ghostly bowmen of Crecy and other collective hallucinations of the War. I had been a catalyzer. My likeness to the traditional ancient race, my completeness as a throwback, my mastery at Khalk’ru’s ritual, the faith the Uighurs had in me – all this had been the necessary element in bringing about the collective hallucination of the tentacle. Obviously the priests had long been trying to make work a drug in which an essential chemical was lacking. I, for some reason, was the missing chemical – the catalyzer. That was all.” Again he sat thinking, breaking the little twigs.

“It’s a reasonable explanation. But you weren’t convinced?”

“No, I wasn’t convinced – I saw the girl’s face when the tentacle touched her.” He arose, stood staring toward the north.

“Leif,” he asked suddenly, “what did you do with the ring?”

I drew out the little buckskin pouch, opened it and handed the ring to him. He examined it closely, returned it to me.

“Why did you keep it, Leif?”

“I don’t know.” I slipped the ring over my thumb. “I didn’t give it back to the old priest; he didn’t ask for it. Oh, hell – I’ll tell you why I kept it – for the same reason Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner had the albatross tied round his neck. So I couldn’t forget I’m a murderer.”

I put the ring back in the buckskin bag, and dropped it down my neck. Faintly from the north came a roll of drums. It did not seem to travel with the wind this time. It seemed to travel underground, and died out deep beneath us.

“Khalk’ru!” I said.

“Well, don’t let’s keep the old gentleman waiting,” said Jim cheerfully.

He busied himself with the packs, whistling. Suddenly he turned to me.

“Listen, Leif. Barr’s theories sound good to me. I’m not saying that if I’d been in your place I would have accepted them. Maybe you’re right. But I’m with Barr – until events, if-when-and-how they occur, prove him wrong.”

“Fine!” I said heartily, and entirely without sarcasm.

“May your optimism endure until we get back to New York – if-when-and-how.”

We shouldered the packs, and took up our rifles and started northward.

It was not hard going, but it was an almost constant climb. The country sloped upward, sometimes at a breathtaking pitch. The forest, unusually thick and high for the latitude, began to thin. It grew steadily cooler. After we had covered about fifteen miles we entered a region of sparse and stunted trees. Five miles ahead was a thousand-feet-high range of bare rocks. Beyond this range was a jumble of mountains four to five thousand feet higher, treeless, their peaks covered with snow and ice, and cut by numerous ravines which stood out glistening white like miniature glaciers. Between us and the nearer range stretched a plain, all grown over with dwarfed thickets of wild roses, blueberries and squawbemes, and dressed in the brilliant reds and blues and greens of the brief Alaskan summer.

“If we camp at the base of those hills, we’ll be out of that wind,” said Jim. “It’s five o’clock. We ought to make it in an hour.”

We set off. Bursts of willow ptarmigans shot up around us from the berry thickets like brown rockets; golden plovers and curlews were whistling on all sides; within rifle shot a small herd of caribou was feeding, and the little brown cranes were stalking everywhere. No one could starve in that country, and after we had set up camp we dined very well.

There were no sounds that night – or if there were we slept too deeply to hear them.

The next morning we debated our trail. The low range stood directly in our path north. It continued, increasing in height, both east and west. It presented no great difficulties from where we were, at least so far as we could see. We determined to climb it, taking it leisurely. It was more difficult than it had appeared; it took us two hours to wind our way to the top.

We tramped across the top toward a line of huge boulders that stretched like a wall before us. We squeezed between two of these, and drew hastily back. We were standing at the edge of a precipice that dropped hundreds of feet sheer to the floor of a singular valley. The jumble of snow-and-ice-mantled mountains clustered around it. At its far end, perhaps twenty miles away, was a pyramidal-shaped peak.

Down its center, from tip to the floor of the valley, ran a glittering white streak, without question a glacier filling a chasm which split the mountain as evenly as though it had been made by a single sword stroke. The valley was not wide, not more than five miles, I estimated, at its widest point. A long and narrow valley, its far end stoppered by the glacier-cleft giant, its sides the walls of the other mountains, dropping, except here and there where there had been falls of rock, as precipitously into it as the cliff under us.

But it was the floor of the valley itself that riveted our attention. It seemed nothing but a tremendous level field covered with rocky rubble. At the far end, the glacier ran through this rubble for half the length of the valley. There was no trace of vegetation among the littered rocks. There was no hint of green upon the surrounding mountains; only the bare black cliffs with their ice and snow-filled gashes. It was a valley of desolation.

“It’s cold here, Leif.” Jim shivered.

It was cold – a cold of a curious quality, a still and breathless cold. It seemed to press out upon us from the valley, as though to force us away.

“It’s going to be a job getting down there,” I said.

“And hard going when we do,” said Jim. “Where the hell did all those rocks come from, and what spread them out so flat?”

“Probably dropped by that glacier when it shrunk,” I said. “It looks like a terminal moraine. In fact this whole place looks as though it had been scooped out by the ice.”

“Hold on to my feet, Leif, I’ll take a look.” He lay on his belly and wriggled his body over the edge. In a minute or two I heard him call, and pulled him back.

“There’s a slide about a quarter of a mile over there to the left,” he said. “I couldn’t tell whether it goes all the way to the top. We’ll go see. Leif, how far down do you think that valley is?”

“Oh, a few hundred feet.”

“It’s all of a thousand if it’s an inch. The cliff goes down and down. I don’t understand what makes the bottom seem so much closer here. It’s a queer place, this.”

We picked up the packs and marched off behind the wall – like rim of boulders. In a little while we came across a big gouge in the top, running far back. Here frost and ice had bitten out the rock along some fault. The shattered debris ran down the middle of the gouge like giant stepping-stones clear to the floor of the valley.

“We’ll have to take the packs off to negotiate that,” said Jim. “What shall be do – leave them here while we explore, or drop them along with us as we go?”

“Take them with us. There must be an outlet off there at the base of the big mountain.”

We began the descent. I was scrambling over one of the rocks about a third of the way when I heard his sharp exclamation.

Gone was the glacier that had thrust its white tongue in among the rubble. Gone was the rubble. Toward its far end, the valley’s floor was covered with scores of pyramidal black stones, each marked down its center with a streak of glistening white. They stood in ranks, spaced regularly, like the dolmens of the Druids. They marched half-down the valley. Here and there between them arose wisps of white steam, like smokes of sacrifices.

Between them and us, lapping at the black cliffs, was a blue and rippling lake! It filled the lower valley from side to side. It rippled over the edges of the shattered rocks still far below us.

Then something about the marshaled ranks of black stones struck me.

“Jim! Those pyramid-shaped rocks. Each and every one of them is a tiny duplicate of the mountain behind them! Even to the white streak!”

As I spoke, the blue lake quivered. It flowed among the black pyramids, half-submerging them, quenching the sacrificial smokes. It covered the pyramids. Again it quivered. It was gone. Where the lake had been was once more the rubble-covered floor of the valley.

There had been an odd touch of legerdemain about the transformations, like the swift work of a master magician. And it had been magic – of a kind. But I had watched nature perform that magic before.

“Hell!” I said. “It’s a mirage!”

Jim did not answer. He was staring at the valley with a singular expression.

“What’s the matter with you, Tsantawu? Listening to the ancestors again? It’s only a mirage.”

“Yes?” he said. “But which one? The lake – or the rocks?”

I studied the valley’s floor. It looked real enough. The theory of a glacial moraine accounted for its oddly level appearance – that and our height above it. When we reached it we would find that distribution of boulders uncomfortably uneven enough, I would swear.

“Why, the lake of course.”

“No,” he said, “I think the stones are the mirage.”

“Nonsense. There’s a layer of warm air down there. The stones radiate the sun’s heat. This cold air presses on it. It’s one of the conditions that produces mirages, and it has just done it for us. That’s all.”

“No,” he said, “it isn’t all.”

He leaned against the rock.

“Leif, the ancestors had a few things more to say last night than I told you.”

“I know damned well they did.”

“They spoke of Ataga’hi. Does that mean anything to you.”

“Not a thing.”

“It didn’t to me – then. It does now. Ataga’hi was an enchanted lake, in the wildest part of the Great Smokies, westward from the headwaters of the Ocana-luftee. It was the medicine lake of the animals and birds. All the Cherokee knew it was there, though few had seen it. If a stray hunter came close, all he saw was a stony flat, without blade of grass, forbidding. But by prayer and fasting and an all-night vigil, he could sharpen his spiritual sight. He would then behold at daybreak a wide shallow sheet of purple water, fed by springs, spouting from the high cliffs around. And in the water all kinds of fish and reptiles, flocks of ducks and geese and other birds flying about, and around the lake the tracks of animals. They came to Ataga’hi to be cured of wounds or sickness. The Great Spirit had placed an island in the middle of the lake. The wounded, the sick animals and birds swam to it. When they had reached it – the waters of Ataga’hi had cured them. They came up on its shores – whole once more. Over Ataga’hi ruled the peace of God. All creatures were friends.”

“Listen, Indian, are you trying to tell me this is your medicine lake?”

“I didn’t say that at all. I said the name of Ataga’hi kept coming into my mind. It was a place that appeared to be a stony flat, without blade of grass, forbidding. So does this place. But under that illusion was – a lake. We saw a lake. It’s a queer coincidence, that’s all. Perhaps the stony flat of Ataga’hi was a mirage—” He hesitated: “Well, if some other things the ancestors mentioned turn up, I’ll shift sides and take your version of that Gobi affair.”

“That lake was the mirage. I’m telling you.”

He shook his head, stubbornly.

“Maybe. But maybe what we see down there now is mirage, too. Maybe both are mirage. And if so, then, how deep is the real floor, and can we make our way over it?”

He stood staring silently at the valley. He shivered, and again I was aware of the curiously intense quality of the cold. I stooped and caught hold of my pack. My hands were numb.

“Well, whatever it is – let’s find out.”

A quiver ran through the valley floor. Abruptly it became again the shimmering blue lake. And as abruptly turned again to nibbled rock.

But not before I had seemed to see within that lake of illusion – if illusion it were – a gigantic shadowy shape, huge black tentacles stretching out from a vast and nebulous body… a body which seemed to vanish back into immeasurable distances… vanishing into the void… as the Kraken of the Gobi cavern had seemed to vanish into the void… into that void which was – Khalk’ru!

We crept between, scrambled over and slid down the huge broken fragments. The further down we went, the more intense became the cold. It had a still and creeping quality that seeped into the marrow. Sometimes we dropped the packs ahead of us, sometimes dragged them after us. And ever more savagely the cold bit into our bones.

By the frequent glimpses of the valley floor, I was more and more assured of its reality. Every mirage I had ever beheld – and in Mongolia I had seen many – had retreated, changed form, or vanished as I drew near. The valley floor did none of these things. It was true that the stones seemed to be squatter as we came closer; but I attributed that to the different angle of vision.

We were about a hundred feet above the end of the slide when I began to be less sure. The traveling had become peculiarly difficult. The slide had narrowed. At our left the rock was clean swept, stretching down to the valley as smoothly as though it had been brushed by some titantic broom. Probably an immense fragment had broken loose at this point, shattering into the boulders that lay heaped at its termination. We veered to the right, where there was a ridge of rocks, pushed to the side by that same besom of stone. Down this ridge we picked our way.

Because of my greater strength, I was carrying both our rifles, swung by a thong over my left shoulder. Also I was handling the heavier pack. We came upon an extremely awkward place. The stone upon which I was standing suddenly tipped beneath my weight. It threw me sideways. The pack slipped from my hands, toppled, and fell over on the smooth rock. Automatically I threw myself forward, catching at it. The thong holding the two rifles broke. They went slithering after the escaping pack.

It was one of those combinations of circumstances that makes one believe in a God of Mischance. The thing might have happened anywhere else on our journey without any result whatever. And even at that moment I didn’t think it mattered.

“Well,” I said, cheerfully, “that saves me carrying them. We can pick them up when we get to the bottom.”

“That is,” said Jim, “if there is a bottom.”

I cocked my eye down the slide. The rifles had caught up with the pack and the three were now moving fast.

“There they stop,” I said. They were almost on the rubble at the end.

“The hell they do,” said Jim. “There they go!”

I rubbed my eyes, and looked and looked again. The pack and the pushing rifles should have been checked by that barrier at the slide’s end. But they had not been. They had vanished.

— VI —

THE SHADOWED LAND

There had been a queer quivering when rifles and pack had touched the upthrust of rock. Then they had seemed to melt into it.

“I’d say they dropped into the lake,” said Jim.

“There’s no lake. They dropped into some break in the rock. Come on—”

He gripped my shoulder.

“Wait, Leif. Go slow.”

I followed his pointing finger. The barrier of stones had vanished. Where they had been, the slide ran, a smooth tongue of stone, far out into the valley.

“Come on,” I said.

We went down, testing every step. With each halt, the nibbled plain became flatter and flatter, the boulders squatted lower and lower. A cloud drifted over the sun. There were no boulders. The valley floor stretched below us, a level slate-gray waste!

The slide ended abruptly at the edge of this waste. The rocks ended as abruptly, about fifty feet ahead. They stood at the edge with the queer effect of stones set in place when the edge had been viscous. Nor did the waste appear solid; it, too, gave the impression of viscosity; through it ran a slight but constant tremor, like waves of heat over a sun-baked road – yet with every step downward the bitter, still cold increased until it was scarcely to be borne.

There was a narrow passage between the shattered rocks and the cliff at our right. We crept through it. We stood upon an immense flat stone at the very edge of the strange plain. It was neither water nor rock; more than anything, it had the appearance of a thin opaque liquid glass, or a gas that had been turned semi-liquid.

I stretched myself out on the slab, and reached out to touch it. I did touch it – there was no resistance; I felt nothing. I let my hand sink slowly in. I saw my hand for a moment as though reflected in a distorting mirror, and then I could not see it at all. But it was pleasantly warm down there where my hand had disappeared. The chilled blood began to tingle in my numbed fingers. I leaned far over the stone and plunged both arms in almost to the shoulders. It felt damned good.

Jim dropped beside me and thrust in his arms.

“It’s air,” he said.

“Feels like it—” I began, and then a sudden realization came to me – “the rifles and the pack! If we don’t get them we’re out of luck!”

He said: “If Khalk’ru is – guns aren’t going to get us away from him.”

“You think this—” I stopped, memory of the shadowy shape in the lake of illusion coming back to me.

“Usunhi’yi, the Darkening-land. The Shadowed-land your old priest called it, didn’t he? I’d say this fits either description.”

I lay quiet; no matter what the certainty of a coming ordeal a man may carry in his soul, he can’t help a certain shrinking when he knows his foot is at the threshold of it. And now quite clearly and certainly I knew just that. All the long trail between Khalk’ru’s Gobi temple and this place of mirage was wiped out. I was stepping from that focus of Khalk’ru’s power into this one – where what had been begun in the Gobi must be ended. The old haunting horror began to creep over me. I fought it.

I would take up the challenge. Nothing on earth could stop me now from going on. And with that determination, I felt the horror sullenly retreat, leave me. For the first time in years I was wholly free of it.

“I’m going to see what’s down there.” Jim drew up his arms. “Hold on to my feet, Leif, and I’ll slip over the edge of the stone. I felt along its edge and it seems to go on a bit further.”

“I’ll go first.” I said. “After all, it’s my party.”

“And a fine chance I’d have to pull you up if you fell over, you human elephant. Here goes – catch hold.”

I had just time to grip his ankles as he wriggled over the stone, and his head and shoulders passed from sight. On he went, slowly writhing along the slanting rock until my hands and arms were hidden to the shoulders. He paused – and then from the mysterious opacity in which he had vanished came a roar of crazy laughter.

I felt him twist and try to jerk his feet away from me. I pulled him, fighting against me every inch of the way, out upon the stone. He came out roaring that same mad laughter. His face was red, and his eyes were shining drunkenly; he had in fact all the symptoms of a laughing drunk. But the rapidity of his respiration told me what had happened.

“Breathe slowly,” I shouted in his ear. “Breathe slowly, I tell you.”

And then, as his laughter continued and his struggles to tear loose did not abate, I held him down with one arm and closed his nose and mouth with my hand. In a moment or two he relaxed. I released him; and he sat up groggily.

“Funniest things,” he said, thickly. “Saw funniest faces…”

He shook his head, took a deep breath or two, and lay back on the stone.

“What the hell happened to me, Leif?”

“You had an oxygen burn, Indian,” I said. “A nice cheap jag on air loaded with carbon-dioxide. And that explains a lot of things about this place. You came up breathing three to the second, which is what carbon-dioxide does to you. Works on the respiratory centers of the brain and speeds up respiration. You took in more oxygen than you could use, and you got drunk on it. What did you see before the world became so funny?”

“I saw you,” he said. “And the sky. It was like looking up out of water. I looked down and around. A little below me was something like a floor of pale green mist. I couldn’t see through it. It’s warm in there, good and plenty warm, and it smells like trees and flowers. That’s all I managed to grasp before I went goofy. Oh, yes, this rock fall keeps right on going down. Maybe we can get to the bottom of it – if we don’t laugh ourselves off. I’m going right out and sit in that mirage up to my neck – my God, Leif, I’m freezing!”

I looked at him with concern. His lips were blue, his teeth chattering. The transition from the warmth to the bitter cold was having its effect, and a dangerous one.

“All right,” I said, rising. “I’ll go first. Breathe slowly, take deep, long breaths as slowly as you can, and breathe out just as slowly. You’ll soon get used to it. Come on.”

I slung the remaining pack over my back, craw-fished over the side of the stone, felt solid rock under my feet, and drew myself down within the mirage.

It was warm enough; almost as warm as the steam-room of a Turkish bath. I looked up and saw the sky above me like a circle of blue, misty at its edges. Then I saw Jim’s legs dropping down toward me, his body bent back from them at an impossible angle. I was seeing him, in fact, about as a fish does an angler wading in its pool. His body seemed to telescope and he was squatting beside me.

“God, but this feels good!”

“Don’t talk,” I told him. “Just sit here and practice that slow breathing. Watch me.”

We sat there, silently, for all of half an hour. No sound broke the stillness around us. It smelled of the jungle, of fast-growing vigorous green life, and green life falling as swiftly into decay; and there were elusive, alien fragrances. All I could see was the circle of blue sky above, and perhaps a hundred feet below us the pale green mist of which Jim had spoken. It was like a level floor of cloud, impenetrable to the vision. The rockfall entered it and was lost to sight. I felt no discomfort, but both of us were dripping with sweat. I watched with satisfaction Jim’s deep, unhurried breathing.

“Having any trouble?” I asked at last.

“Not much. Now and then I have to put the pedal down. But I think I’m getting the trick.”

“All right,” I said. “Soon we’ll be moving. I don’t believe it will get any worse as we go down.”

“You talk like an old-timer. What’s your idea of this place anyway, Leif?”

“Simple enough. Although the combination hasn’t a chance in millions to be duplicated. Here is a wide, deep valley entirely hemmed in by precipitous cliffs. It is, in effect, a pit. The mountains enclosing it are seamed with glaciers and ice streams and there is a constant flow of cold air into this pit, even in summer. There is probably volcanic activity close beneath the valley’s floor, boiling springs and the like. It may be a miniature of the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes over to the west. All this produces an excess of carbon-dioxide. There is most probably a lush vegetation which adds to the product. What we are going into is likely to be a little leftover fragment of the Carboniferous Age – about ten million years out of its time. The warm, heavy air fills the pit until it reaches the layer of cold air we’ve just come from. The mirage is produced where the two meet, by approximately the same causes which produce every mirage. How long it’s been this way, God alone knows. Parts of Alaska never had a Glacial Age – the ice for some reason or another didn’t cover them. When what is New York was under a thousand feet of ice, the Yukon Flats were an oasis filled with all sorts of animal and plant life. If this valley existed then, we’re due to see some strange survivals. If it’s comparatively recent, we’ll probably run across some equally interesting adaptations. That’s about all, except there must be an outlet of some kind somewhere at about this level, otherwise the warm air would fill the whole valley to the top, as gas does a tank. Let’s be going.”

“I begin to hope we find the guns,” said Jim, thoughtfully.

“As you pointed out, they’d be no good against Khalk’ru – what, who, if and where he is,” I said. “But they’d be handy against his attendant devils. Keep an eye out for them – I mean the guns.”

We started down the rockfall, toward the floor of green mist. The going was not very difficult. We reached the mist without having seen anything of rifles or packs. The mist looked like a heavy fog. We entered it, and that was precisely what it was. It closed around us, thick and warm. The rocks were reeking wet and slippery, and we had to feel for every foot of the way. Twice I thought our numbers were up. How deep that mist was, I could not tell, perhaps two or three hundred feet – a condensation brought about by the peculiar atmospheric conditions that produced the mirage.

The mist began to lighten. It maintained its curious green tint, but I had the idea that this was due to reflection from below. Suddenly it thinned to nothing. We came out of it upon a breast where the falling rocks had met some obstruction and had piled up into a barrier about thrice my height. We climbed that barrier.

We looked upon the valley beneath the mirage.

It lay a full thousand feet beneath us. It was filled with pale green light like that in a deep forest glade. That light was both lucent and vaporous, lucent where we stood, but hiding the distance with misty curtains of pallid emerald. To the north and on each side as far as I could see, and melting into the vaporous emerald curtains, was a vast carpet of trees. Their breath came pulsing up to me, jungle-strong, laden with the unfamiliar fragrances. At left and right, the black cliffs fell sheer to the forest edge.

“Listen!” Jim caught my arm.

At first only a faint tapping, then louder and louder, we heard from far away the beating of drums, scores of drums, in a strange staccato rhythm – shrill, mocking, jeering! But they were no drums of Khalk’ru! In them was nothing of that dreadful trampling of racing feet upon a hollow world.

They ceased. As though in answer, and from an entirely different direction, there was a fanfarade of trumpets, menacing, warlike. If brazen notes could curse, these did. Again the drums broke forth, still mocking, taunting, defiant.

“Little drums,” Jim was whispering. “Drums of—” He dropped down from the rocks, and I followed. The barrier led to the east, dipping steadily downward. We followed its base. It stood like a great wall between us and the valley, barring our vision. We heard the drums no more. We descended five hundred feet at least before the barrier ended. At its end was another rock slide like that down which the rifles and pack had fallen.

We stood studying it. It descended at an angle of about forty-five degrees, and while not so smooth as the other, it had few enough footholds.

The air had steadily grown warmer. It was not an uncomfortable heat; there was a queer tingling life about it, an exhalation of the crowding forest or of the valley itself, I thought. It gave me a feeling of rampant, reckless life, a heady exaltation. The pack had grown tiresome. If we were to negotiate the slide, and there seemed nothing else to do, I couldn’t very well carry it. I unslung it.

“Letter of introduction” I said, and sent it slithering down the rock.

“Breathe deep and slow, you poor ass,” said Jim, and laughed.

His eyes were bright; he looked happy, like a man from whom some burden of fear and doubt has fallen. He looked, in fact, as I had felt when I had taken up that challenge of the unknown not so long before. And I wondered.

The slithering pack gave a little leap, and dropped completely out of sight. Evidently the slide did not go all the way to the valley floor, or, if so, it continued at a sharper angle at the point of the pack’s disappearance.

I let myself over cautiously, and began to worm down the slide flat on my belly, Jim following. We had negotiated about three-quarters of it when I heard him shout. Then his falling body struck me. I caught him with one hand, but it broke my own precarious hold. We went rolling down the slide and dropped into space. I felt a jarring shock, and abruptly went completely out.

— VII —

THE LITTLE PEOPLE

I came to myself to find Jim pumping the breath back into me. I was lying on something soft. I moved my legs gingerly, and sat up. I looked around. We were on a bank of moss – in it, rather, for the tops of the moss were a foot or more above my head. It was an exceedingly overgrown moss, I thought, staring at it stupidly. I had never seen moss as big as this. Had I shrunk, or was it really so overgrown? Above me was a hundred feet of almost sheer cliff. Said Jim:

“Well, we’re here.”

“How did we get here?” I asked, dazed. He pointed to the cliff.

“We fell down that. We struck a ledge. You did, rather. I was on top. It bumped us right out on this nice big moss mattress. I was still on top. That’s why I’ve been pumping breath back into you for the last five minutes. Sorry, Leif, but if it had been the other way about, you’d certainly have had to proceed on your pilgrimage alone. I haven’t your resilience.”

He laughed. I stood up, and looked about us. The bed of giant moss on which we had landed formed a mound between us and the forest. At the base of the cliff was piled the debris of the fall that had made the slide. I looked at these rocks and shivered. If we had struck them we would have been a jumble of broken bones and mangled flesh. I felt myself over. I was intact.

“Everything, Indian,” I said piously, “is always for the best.”

“God, Leif! You had me worried for awhile!” He turned abruptly. “Look at the forest.”

The mound of moss was a huge and high oval, hemmed almost to the base of the cliffs by gigantic trees. They were somewhat like the sequoias of California, and quite as high. Their crowns towered; their enormous boles were columns carved by Titans. Beneath them grew graceful ferns, tall as palm trees, and curious conifers with trunks thin as bamboos, scaled red and yellow. Over them, hanging from the boles and branches of the trees, were vines and dusters of flowers of every shape and color; there were cressets of orchids, and chandeliers of lilies; strange symmetrical trees, the tips of whose leafless branches held up flower cups as though they were candelabra; chimes of flower bells swayed from boughs and there were long ropes and garlands of small starry flowers, white and crimson and in all the blues of the tropic seas. Bees dipped into them. There was a constant flashing of great dragon-flies all in lacquered mail of green and scarlet. And mysterious shadows drifted through the forest, like the shadows of the wings of hovering unseen guardians.

It was no forest of the Carboniferous Age, at least none such as I had ever seen reconstructed by science. It was a forest of enchantment. Out of it came heady fragrances. Nor was it, for all its strangeness, in the least sinister, or forbidding. It was very beautiful.

Jim said:

“The woods of the gods! Anything might live in a place like that. Anything that is lovely—”

Ah, Tsantawu, my brother – had that but been true!

All I said was:

“It’s going to be damned hard to get through.”

“I was thinking that,” he answered. “Maybe the best thing is to skirt the cliffs. We may run across easier going farther on. Which way – right or left?”

We tossed a coin. The coin spun right. I saw the pack not far away, and walked over to retrieve it. The moss was as unsteady as a double spring-mattress. I wondered how it came to be there; thought that probably a few of the giant trees had been felled by the rock fall and the moss had fed upon their decay. I slung the pack over my shoulders, and we tramped, waist-deep in the spongy growth, to the cliffs.

We skirted the cliffs for about a mile. Sometimes the forest pressed so closely that we had trouble clinging to the rock. Then it began to change. The giant trees retreated. We entered a brake of the immense ferns. Except for the bees and the lacquered dragon-flies, there was no sign of life amid the riotous vegetation. We passed out of the ferns and into a most singular small meadow. It was almost like a clearing. At each side were the ferns; the forest formed a palisade at one end; at the other was a sheer cliff whose black face was spangled with large cup-shaped white flowers which hung from short, reddish, rather repellently snake-like vines whose roots I supposed were fixed in crevices in the rock.

No trees or ferns of any kind grew in the meadow. It was carpeted by a lacy grass upon whose tips were minute blue flowerets. From the base of the cliff arose a thin veil of steam which streamed up softly high in the air, bathing the cup-shaped white blossoms.

A boiling spring, we decided. We drew closer to examine it.

We heard a wailing – despairing, agonized… Like the wail of a heartbroken, tortured child, yet neither quite human nor quite animal. It had come from the cliff, from somewhere behind the veils of steam. We stopped short, listening. The wailing began again, within it something that stirred the very depths of pity, and it did not cease. We ran toward the cliff. The steam curtain at its base was dense. We skirted it and reached its farther end.

At the base of the cliff was a long and narrow pool, like a small closed stream. Its water was black and bubbling, and from these bubbles came the steam. From end to end of the boiling pool, across the face of the black rock, ran a yard-wide ledge. Above it, spaced at regular intervals, were niches cut within the cliff, small as cradles.

In two of these niches, half-within them and half-upon the ledge, lay what at first glance seemed two children. They were outstretched upon their backs, their tiny hands and feet fastened to the stone by staples of bronze. Their hair streamed down their sides; their bodies were stark naked.

And now I saw that they were not children. They were mature – a little man and a little woman. The woman had twisted her head and was staring at the other pygmy. It was she who was wailing. She did not see us. Her eyes were intent upon him. He lay rigid, his eyes closed. Upon his breast, over his heart, was a black corrosion, as though acid had been dropped upon it.

There was a movement on the cliff above him. One of the cup-shaped white flowers was there. Could it have been that which had moved? It hung a foot above the little man’s breast, and on its scarlet pistils was a slowly gathering drop which I took for nectar.

It had been the flower whose movement had caught my eye! As I looked the reddish vine trembled. It writhed like a sluggish worm an inch down the rock. The flower shook its cup as though it were a mouth trying to shake loose the gathering drop. And the flower mouth was directly over the little man’s heart and the black corrosion on his breast.

I stepped out upon the narrow path, reached up and grasped the vine and tore it loose. It squirmed in my hand like a snake. Its roots dug to my fingers, and like a snake’s head the flower raised itself as though to strike. Its rim was thick and fleshy, like a round white mouth. The drop of nectar fell upon my hand and a fiery agony bit into it, running up my arm like a flame. I hurled the squirming thing into the boiling pool.

Close above the little woman was another of the crawling vines. I tore it loose as I had the other. It, too, strove to strike me with its head of flower, but either there was none of that dreadful nectar in its cup, or it missed me. I threw it after the other.

I bent over the little man. His eyes were open; he was glaring up at me. Like his skin, his eyes were yellow, tilted, Mongolian. They seemed to have no pupils, and they were not wholly human; no more than had been the wailing of his woman. There was agony in them, and there was bitter hatred. His gaze wandered to my hair, and I saw amazement banish the hatred.

The flaming torment of my hand and arm was almost intolerable. By it, I knew what the pygmy must be suffering. I tore away the staples that fettered him. I lifted the little man, and passed him over to Jim. He weighed no more than a baby.

I snapped the staples from the slab on which lay the little woman. There was no fear nor hatred in her eyes. They were filled with wonder and unmistakable gratitude. I carried her over and set her beside her man.

I looked back, up the face of the black cliff. There was movement all over it; the reddish ropes of the vines writhing, the white flowers swaying, raising and lowering their cups.

It was rather hideous…

The little man lay quietly, yellow eyes turning from me to Jim and back to me again. The woman spoke, in trilling, bird-like syllables. She darted away across the meadow, into the forest.

Jim was staring down upon the golden pygmy like a man in a dream. I heard him whisper:

“The Yunwi Tsundi! The Little People! It was all true then! All true!”

The little woman came running out of the fern brake. Her hands were full of thick, heavily veined leaves. She darted a look at me, as of apology. She bent over her man. She squeezed some of the leaves over his breast. A milky sap streamed through her fingers and dropped upon the black, corroded spot. It spread over the spot like a film. The little man stiffened and groaned, relaxed and lay still.

The little woman took my hand. Where the nectar had touched, the skin had turned black. She squeezed the juice of the leaves upon it. A pang, to which all the torment that had gone before was nothing, ran through hand and arm. Then, almost instantly, there was no pain.

I looked at the little man’s breast. The black corrosion had disappeared. There was a wound like an old burn, red and normal. I looked at my hand. It was inflamed, but the blackness was no longer there.

The little woman bowed before me. The little man arose. He looked at my eyes and ran his gaze along my bulk. I watched suspicion grow, and the return of bitter hate. He spoke to his woman. She answered at some length, pointing to the cliff, to my inflamed hand, and to the ankles and wrists of both of them. The little man beckoned to me; by gesture asked me to bend down to him. I did, and he touched my yellow hair; he ran it through his tiny fingers. He laid his hand on my heart… then laid his head on my heart, listening to its beat.

He struck me with his small hand across my mouth. It was no blow; I knew it for a caress.

The little man smiled at me, and trilled. I could not understand, and shook my head helplessly. He looked up at Jim and trilled another question. Jim tried him in the Cherokee. This time it was the little man who shook his head. He spoke again to his woman. Clearly I caught the word ev-ah-lee in the bird-like sounds. She nodded.

Motioning us to follow, they ran across the meadow, toward the further brake of fern. How little they were – hardly to my thighs. They were beautifully formed. Their long hair was chestnut brown, fine and silky. Their hair floated behind them like cobwebs.

They ran like small deer. We were hard put to keep up with them. They entered the fern brake toward which we had been heading, and here they slowed their pace. On and on we went through the giant ferns. I could see no path, but the golden pygmies knew their way.

We came out of the ferns. Before us was a wide sward covered with the flowerets whose blue carpet ran to the banks of a wide river, to the banks of a strange river, a river all milky white, over whose placid surface hovered swirls of opalescent mist. Through the swirls I caught glimpses of green, level plains upon the white river’s further side, and of green scarps.

The little man halted. He bent his ear to the ground. He leaped back into the brake, motioning us to follow. In a few minutes we came across a half-ruined watch tower. Its entrance gaped open. The pygmies slipped within it, beckoning.

Inside the tower was a crumbling flight of stones leading to its top. The little man and woman danced up them, with us close behind them. There was a small chamber at the tower’s top through the chinks of whose stones the green light streamed. I peered through one of the crevices, down upon the blue sward and the white river. I heard the faint trampling of horses’ feet and the low chanting of women; closer they drew, and closer.

A woman came riding down the blue sward. She was astride a great black mare. She wore, like a hood, the head of a white wolf. Its pelt covered her shoulders and back. Over that silvery pelt her hair fell in two thick braids of flaming red. Her high, round breasts were bare, and beneath them the paws of the white wolf were clasped like a girdle. Her eyes were blue as the cornflower and set wide apart under a broad, low forehead. Her skin was milky-white flushed with soft rose. Her mouth was full-lipped, crimson, and both amorous and cruel.

She was a strong woman, tall almost as I. She was like a Valkyrie, and like those messengers of Odin she carried on her saddle before her, held by one arm, a body. But it was no soul of a slain warrior snatched up for flight to Valhalla. It was a girl. A girl whose arms were bound to her sides by stout thongs, with head bent hopelessly on her breast. I could not see her face; it was hidden under the veil of her hair. But the hair was russet red and her skin as fair as that of the woman who held her.

Over the Wolf-woman’s head flew a snow-white falcon, dipping and circling and keeping pace with her as she rode.

Behind her rode a half-score other women, young and strong-thewed, pink-skinned and blue-eyed, their hair of copper-red, rust-red, bronzy-red, plaited around their heads or hanging in long braids down their shoulders. They were bare-breasted, kirtled and buskined. They carried long, slender spears and small round targes. And they, too, were like Valkyries, each of them a shield-maiden of the Aesir. As they rode, they sang, softly, muted, a strange chant.

The Wolf-woman and her captive passed around a bend of the sward and out of sight. The chanting women followed and were hidden.

There was a gleam of silver from the white falcon’s wing as it circled and dropped, circled and dropped. Then it, too, was gone.

— VIII —

EVALIE

The golden pygmies hissed; their yellow eyes were molten with hatred.

The little man touched my hand, talking in the rapid trilling syllables, and pointing over the white river. Clearly he was telling me we must cross it. He stopped, listening. The little woman ran down the broken stairs. The little man twittered angrily, darted to Jim, beat at his legs with his fists as though to arouse him, then shot after the woman.

“Snap out of it, Indian!” I said, impatiently. “They want us to hurry.”

He shook his head, like a man shaking away the last cobwebs of some dream.

We sped down the broken steps. The little man was waiting for us; or at least he had not run away, for, if waiting for us, he was doing so, in a most singular manner. He was dancing in a small circle, waving his arms and hands oddly, and trilling a weird melody upon four notes, repeated over and over in varying progressions. The woman was nowhere in sight.

A wolf howled. It was answered by other wolves farther away in the flowered forest – like a hunting pack whose leader has found the scent.

The little woman came racing through the fern brake; the little man stopped dancing. Her hands were filled with small purplish fruits resembling fox-grapes. The little man pointed toward the white river, and they set off through the screening brake of ferns. We followed.

We came out of the brake, crossed the blue sward and stood on the bank of the river.

The howl of the wolf sounded again, answered by the others, and closer.

The little man leaped upon me, twittering frantically; he twined his legs about my waist and strove to tear my shirt from me. The woman was trilling at Jim, waving in her hands the bunches of purple fruit.

“They want us to take off our clothes,” said Jim. “They want us to be quick about it.”

We stripped, hastily. There was a crevice in the bank into which I pushed the pack. Quickly we rolled up our clothes and boots, and threw a strap around them and slung them over our shoulders.

The little woman threw a handful of the purple fruit to her man. She motioned Jim to bend, and as he did so she squeezed the berries over his head and hands, his breasts and thighs and feet. The little man was doing the same for me. The fruit had an oddly pungent odor that made my eyes water.

I straightened up and looked out over the white river.

The head of a serpent broke through its milky surface; then another and another. Their heads were as large as those of the anaconda, and were scaled in vivid emerald. They were crested by brilliant green spines which continued along their backs and were revealed as they swirled and twisted in the white water. Quite definitely, I did not like plunging into that water, but now I thought I knew the purpose of our anointing, and that most certainly the golden pygmies intended us no harm. And just as certainly, I assumed, they knew what they were about.

The howling of the wolves came once more, not only much nearer, but from the direction along which had gone the troop of women.

The little man dived into the water, motioning me to follow. I obeyed, and heard the small splash of the woman and the louder one of Jim. The little man glanced back at me, nodded, and began to swim across like an eel, at a speed that I found difficult to emulate.

The crested serpents did not molest us. Once I felt the slither of scales across my loins; once I shook the water from my eyes to find one of them swimming beside me, matching in play my speed, or so it seemed; racing me.

The water was warm, as warm as the milk it resembled, and curiously buoyant. The river at this point was about a thousand feet wide. I had covered half of it when I heard a shrill shriek and felt the buffeting of wings about my head. I rolled over, beating up with my hands to drive off whatever it was that had attacked me.

It was the white falcon of the Wolf-woman, hovering, dropping, rising again, threshing me with its pinions!

I heard a cry from the bank, a bell-like contralto, vibrant, imperious – in archaic Uighur:

“Come back! Come back. Yellow-hair!”

I swung round to see. The falcon ceased its bufferings. Upon the farther bank was the Wolf-woman upon her great black mare, the captive girl still clasped in her arms. The Wolf-woman’s eyes were like sapphire stars, her free hand was raised in summons.

And all around her, heads lowered, glaring at me with eyes as green as hers were blue, was a pack of snow-white wolves!

“Come back!” she cried again.

She was very beautiful – the Wolf-woman. It would not have been hard to have obeyed. But no – she was not a Wolf-woman! What was she? Into my mind came a Uighur word, an ancient word that I had not blown I knew. She was the Salur’da – the Witch-woman. And with it came angry resentment of her summons. Who was she – the Salur’da – to command me! Me, Dwayanu, who in olden time long forgot would have had her whipped with scorpions for such insolence!

I raised myself high above the white water.

“Back to your den, Salur’da!” I shouted. “Does Dwayanu come to your call? When I summon you, then see that you obey!”

She stared at me, stark amazement in her eyes; the strong arm that held the girl relaxed so that the captive almost dropped from the mare’s high pommel. I struck out across the water to the farther shore.

I heard the Witch-woman whistle. The falcon circling round my head screamed, and flew. I heard the white wolves snarling; I heard the thud of the black mare’s hoofs racing over the blue sward. I reached the bank and climbed it. Only then did I turn. Witch-woman, falcon and white wolves – all of them were gone.

Across my wake the emerald-headed, emerald-crested serpents swam and swirled and dived.

The golden pygmies had climbed upon the bank.

Jim asked:

“What did you say to her?”

“The Witch-woman comes to my call – not I to hers,” I answered, and wondered as I did so what it was that compelled the words.

“Still very much – Dwayanu, aren’t you, Leif? What touched the trigger on you this time?”

“I don’t know.” The inexplicable resentment against the woman was still strong, and, because I could not understand it, irritating to a degree. “She ordered me to come back, and a little firecracker went off in my brain. Then I – I seemed to know her for what she is, and that her command was rank insolence. I told her so. She was no more surprised by what I said than I am. It was like someone else speaking. It was like—” I hesitated – “well, it was like when I started that cursed ritual and couldn’t stop.”

He nodded, then began to put on his clothes. I followed suit. They were soaking wet. The pygmies watched us wriggle into them with frank amazement. I noticed that the angry red around the wound on the little man’s breast had paled, and that while the wound itself was raw, it was not deep and had already begun to heal. I looked at my own hand; the red had almost disappeared, and only a slight tenderness betrayed where the nectar had touched it.

When we had laced our boots, the golden pygmies trotted off, away from the river toward a line of cliffs about a mile ahead. The vaporous green light half hid them, as it had wholly hidden our view to the north when we had first looked over the valley. For half the distance the ground was level and covered with the blue-flowered grass. Then ferns began, steadily growing higher. We came upon a trail little wider than a deer path which threaded into a greater brake. Into this we turned.

We had eaten nothing since early morning, and I thought regretfully of the pack I had left behind. However, it is my training to eat heartily when I can, and philosophically go without when I must. So I tightened my belt and glanced back at Jim, close upon my heels.

“Hungry?” I asked.

“No. Too busy thinking.”

“Indian – what brought the red-headed beauty back?”

“The wolves. Didn’t you hear them howling after her? They found our track and gave her the signal.”

“I thought so – but it’s incredible! Hell – then she is a Witch-woman.”

“Not because of that. You’re forgetting your Mowgli and the Grey Companions. Wolves aren’t hard to train. But she’s a Witch-woman, nevertheless. Don’t hold back Dwayanu when you deal with her, Leif.”

The little drums again began to beat. At first only a few, then steadily more and more until there were scores of them. This time the cadences were lilting, gay, tapping out a dancing rhythm that lifted all weariness. They did not seem far away. But now the ferns were high over our heads and impenetrable to the sight, and the narrow path wove in and out among them like a meandering stream

The pygmies hastened their pace. Suddenly the trail came out of the ferns, and the pair halted. In front of us the ground sloped sharply upward for three or four hundred feet. The slope, except where the path ran, was covered from bottom to top with a tangle of thick green vines studded along all their lengths with wicked three-inch thorns; a living chevaux-de-frise which no living creature would penetrate. At the end of the path was a squat tower of stone, and from this came the glint of spear-heads.

In the tower a shrill-voiced drum chattered an unmistakable alarm. Instantly the lilting drums were silent. The same shrill chatter was taken up and repeated from point to point, diminishing in the far distance; and now I saw that the slope was like an immense circular fortification, curving far out toward the unbroken palisade of the giant ferns, and retreating at our right toward the sheer wall of black cliff, far away. Everywhere upon it was the thicket of thorn.

The little man twittered to his woman, and walked up the trail toward the tower. He was met by other pygmies streaming out of it. The little woman stayed with us, nodding and smiling and patting our knees reassuringly.

Another drum, or a trio of them, began to beat from the tower. I thought there were three because their burden was on three different notes, soft, caressing, yet far-carrying. They sang a word, a name, those drums, as plainly as though they had lips, the name I had heard in the trilling of the pygmies…

Ev-ah-lee… Ev-ah-lee… Ev-ah-lee… Over and over and over. The drums in the other towers were silent.

The little man beckoned us. We went forward, avoiding with difficulty the thorns. We came to the top of the path beside the small tower. A score of the little men stepped out and barred our way. None was taller than the one I had saved from the white flowers. All had the same golden skin, the same half-animal yellow eyes; like his, their hair was long and silky, floating almost to their tiny feet, They wore twisted loincloths of what appeared to be cotton; around their waists were broad girdles of silver, pierced like lacework in intricate designs. Their spears were wicked weapons for all their apparent frailty, long-handled, hafted in some black wood, and with foot-deep points of red metal, and barbed like a muskalonge hook from tip to base. Swung on their backs were black bows with long arrows barbed in similar manner; and in their metal girdles were slender sickle-shaped knives of the red metal, like scimitars of gnomes.

They stood staring at us, like small children. They made me feel as Gulliver must have felt among the Lilliputians. Also, there was that about them which gave me no desire to tempt them to use their weapons. They looked at Jim with curiosity and interest and with no trace of unfriendliness. They looked at me with little faces that grew hard and fierce. Only when their eyes roved to my yellow hair did I see wonder and doubt lighten suspicion – but they never dropped the points of the spears turned toward me.

Ev-ah-lee… Ev-ah-lee… Ev-ah-lee… sang the drums.

There was an answering roll from beyond, and they were silent.

I heard a sweet, low-pitched voice at the other side of the tower trilling the bird-like syllables of the Little People – And then – I saw Evalie.

Have you watched a willow bough swaying in spring above some clear sylvan pool, or a slender birch dancing with the wind in a secret woodland and covert, or the flitting green shadows in a deep forest glade which are dryads half-tempted to reveal themselves? I thought of them as she came toward us.

She was a dark girl, and a tall girl. Her eyes were brown under long black lashes, the clear brown of the mountain brook in autumn; her hair was black, the jetty hair that in a certain light has a sheen of darkest blue. Her face was small, her features certainly neither classic nor regular – the brows almost meeting in two level lines above her small, straight nose; her mouth was large but finely cut, and sensitive. Over her broad, low forehead the blue-black hair was braided like a coronal. Her skin was clear amber. Like polished fine amber it shone under the loose, yet clinging, garment that clothed her, knee-long, silvery, cobweb fine and transparent. Around her hips was the white loincloth of the Little People. Unlike them, her feet were sandalled.

But it was the grace of her that made the breath catch in your throat as you looked at her, the long flowing line from ankle to shoulder, delicate and mobile as the curve of water flowing over some smooth breast of rock, a liquid grace of line that changed with every movement.

It was that – and the life that burned in her like the green flame of the virgin forest when the kisses of spring are being changed for the warmer caresses of summer. I knew now why the old Greeks had believed in the dryads, the naiads, the nereids – the woman souls of trees, of brooks and waterfalls and fountains, and of the waves.

I could not tell how old she was – hers was the pagan beauty which knows no age.

She examined me, my clothes and boots, in manifest perplexity; she glanced at Jim, nodded, as though to say there was nothing in him to be disturbed about; then turned back to me, studying me. The small soldiers ringed her, their spears ready.

The little man and his woman had stepped forward. They were both talking at once, pointing to his breast, to my hand, to my yellow hair. The girl laughed, drew the little woman to her and covered her lips with a hand. The little man went on trilling and twittering.

Jim had been listening with a puzzled intensity whenever the girl had done the talking. He caught my arm.

“It’s Cherokee they’re speaking! Or something like it – Listen… there was a word… it sounded like ‘Yun’-wini’giski’… it means ‘Man-eaters.’ Literally, ‘They eat people’… if that’s what it was… and look… he’s showing how the vines crawled down the cliffs…”

The girl began speaking again. I listened intently. The rapid enunciation and the trilling made understanding difficult, but I caught sounds that seemed familiar – and now I heard a combination that I certainly knew.

“It’s some kind of Mongolian tongue, Jim. I got a word just then that means ‘serpent-water’ in a dozen different dialects.”

“I know – she called the snake ‘aha’nada’ and the Cherokees say ‘inadu’ – but it’s Indian, not Mongolian.”

“It might be both. The Indian dialects are Mongolian. Maybe it’s the ancient mother-tongue. If we could only get her to speak slower, and tune down on the trills.”

“It might be that. The Cherokees called themselves ‘the oldest people’ and their language ‘the first speech’ – wait—”

He stepped forward, hand upraised; he spoke the word which in the Cherokee means, equally, friend or one who comes with good intentions. He said it several times. Wonder and comprehension crept into the girl’s eyes. She repeated it as he had spoken it, then turned to the pygmies, passing the word on to them – and I could distinguish it now plainly within the trills and pipings. The pygmies came closer, staring up at Jim.

He said, slowly: “We come from outside. We know nothing of this place. We know none within it.”

Several times he had to repeat this before she caught it. She looked gravely at him, and at me doubtfully – yet as one who would like to believe. She answered haltingly.

“But Sri” – she pointed to the little man – “has said that in the water he spoke the tongue of evil.”

“He speaks many tongues,” said Jim – then to me:

“Talk to her. Don’t stand there like a dummy, admiring her. This girl can think – and we’re in a jam. Your looks make no hit with the dwarfs, Leif, in spite of what you did.”

“Is it any stranger that I should have spoken that tongue than that I now speak yours, Evalie?” I said. And asked the same question in two of the oldest dialects of the Mongolian that I knew. She studied me, thoughtfully.

“No,” she said at last – “no; for I, too, know something of it, yet that does not make me evil.”

And suddenly she smiled, and trilled some command to the guards. They lowered their spears, regarding me with something of the friendly interest they had showed toward Jim. Within the tower, the drums began to roll a cheerful tattoo. As at a signal, the other unseen drums which the shrill alarm had silenced, resumed their lilting rhythm.

The girl beckoned us. We walked behind her, the little soldiers ringing us, between a portcullis of thorn and the tower.

We passed over the threshold of the Land of the Little People and of Evalie.

— IX —

IN THE SHADOWED-LAND

The green light that filled the Shadowed-land was darkening. As the green forest darkens at dusk. The sun must long since have dipped beneath the peaks circling that illusory floor which was the sky of the Shadowed-land. Yet here the glow faded slowly, as though it were not wholly dependent upon the sun, as though the place had some luminosity of its own.

We sat beside the tent of Evalie. It was pitched on a rounded knoll not far from the entrance of her lair within the cliff. All along the base of the cliff were the lairs of the Little People, tiny openings through which none larger than they could creep into the caves that were their homes, their laboratories, their workshops, their storehouses and granaries, their impregnable fortresses.

It had been hours since we had followed her over the plain between the watch-tower and her tent. The golden pygmies had swarmed from every side, curious as children, chattering and trilling, questioning Evalie, twittering her answers to those on the outskirts of the crowd. Even now there was a ring of them around the base of the knoll, dozens of little men and little women, staring up at us with their yellow eyes, chirping and laughing. In the arms of the women were babies like tiniest dolls, and like larger dolls were the older children who clustered at their knees.

Child-like, their curiosity was soon satisfied; they went back to their occupations and their play. Others, curiosity not yet quenched, took their places.

I watched them dancing upon the smooth grass. They danced in circling measures to the lilting rhythm of their drums. There were other knolls upon the plain, larger and smaller than that on which we were, and all of them as rounded and as symmetrical. Around and over them the golden pygmies danced to the throbbing of the little drums.

They had brought us little loaves of bread, and oddly sweet but palatable milk and cheese, and unfamiliar delicious fruits and melons. I was ashamed of the number of platters I had cleaned. The little people had only watched, and laughed, and urged the women to bring me more.

Jim said, laughingly: “It’s the food of the Yunwi Tsundi you’re eating. Fairy food, Leif! You can never eat mortal food again.”

I looked at Evalie, and at the wine and amber beauty of her. Well, I could believe Evalie had been brought up on something more than mortal food.

I studied the plain for the hundredth time. The slope on which stood the squat towers was an immense semicircle, the ends of whose arcs met the black cliffs. It must enclose, I thought, some twenty square miles. Beyond the thorned vines were the brakes of the giant fern; beyond them, on the other side of the river, I could glimpse the great trees. If there were forests on this side, I could not tell. Nor what else there might be of living things. There was something to be guarded against, certainly, else why the fortification, the defences?

Whatever else it might be, this guarded land of the golden pygmies was a small Paradise, with its stands of grain, its orchards, its vines and berries and its green fields.

I thought over what Evalie had told us of herself, carefully and slowly tuning down the trilling syllables of the little people into vocables we could understand. It was an ancient tongue she spoke – one whose roots struck far deeper down in the soil of Time than any I knew, unless it were the archaic Uighur itself. Minute by minute I found myself mastering it with ever greater ease, but not so rapidly as Jim. He had even essayed a few trills, to the pygmies’ delight. More than that, however, they had understood him. Each of us could follow Evalie’s thought better than she could ours.

Whence had the Little People come into the Shadowed-land? And where had they learned that ancient tongue? I asked myself that, and answered that as well ask how it came that the Sumerians, whose great city the Bible calls Ur of the Chaldees, spoke a Mongolian language. They, too, were a dwarfish race, masters of strange sorceries, students of the stars. And no man knows whence they came into Mesopotamia with their science full-blown. Asia is the Ancient Mother, and to how many races she has given birth and watched blown away in dust none can say.

The transformation of the tongue into the bird-like speech of the Little People, I thought I understood. Obviously, the smaller the throat, the higher are the sounds produced. Unless by some freak, one never hears a child with a bass voice. The tallest of the Little People was no bigger than a six-year-old child. They could not, perforce, sound the gutturals and deeper tones; so they had to substitute other sounds. The natural thing, when you cannot strike a note in a lower octave, is to strike that same note in a higher. And so they had, and in time this had developed into the overlying pattern of trills and pipings, beneath which, however, the essential structure persisted.

She remembered, Evalie had told us, a great stone house. She thought she remembered a great water. She remembered a land of trees which had become “white and cold”. There had been a man and a woman… then there was only the man… and it was all like mist. All she truly remembered was the Little People… she had forgotten there had ever been anything else… until we had come. She remembered when she had been no bigger than the Little People… and how frightened she was when she began to be bigger than they. The Little People, the Rrrllya – it is the closest I can come to the trill – loved her; they did as she told them to do. They had fed and clothed and taught her, especially the mother of Sri, whose life I had saved from the Death Flower. Taught her what? She looked at us oddly, and only repeated – “taught me.” Sometimes she danced with the Little People and sometimes she danced for them – again the oddly secretive, half-amused glance. That was all. How long ago had she been as small as the Little People? She did not know – long and long ago. Who had named her Evalie? She did not know.

I studied her, covertly. There was not one thing about her to give a clue to her race. Foundling, I knew, she must have been, the vague man and woman her father and mother. But what had they been – of what country? No more than could her lips, did her eyes or hair, coloring or body hint at answer.

She was more changeling than I. A changeling of the mirage! Nurtured on food from Goblin Market!

I wondered whether she would change back again into everyday woman if I carried her out of the Shadowed-land.

I felt the ring touch my breast with the touch of ice.

Carry her away! There was Khalk’ru to meet first – and the Witch-woman!

The green twilight deepened; great fire-flies began to flash lanterns of pale topaz through the flowering trees; a little breeze stole over the fern brakes, laden with the fragrances of the far forest. Evalie sighed.

“You will not leave me, Tsantawu?”

If he heard her, he did not answer. She turned to me.

“You will not leave me – Leif?”

“No!” I said… and seemed to hear the drums of Khalk’ru beating down the lilting tambours of the Little People like far-away mocking laughter.

The green twilight had deepened into darkness, a luminous darkness, as though a full moon were shining behind a cloud-veiled sky. The golden pygmies had stilled their lilting drums; they were passing into their cliff lairs. From the distant towers came the tap-tap-tap of the drums of the guards, whispering to each other across the thorn-covered slopes. The fire-flies’ lights were like the lanterns of a goblin watch; great moths floated by on luminous silvery wings, like elfin planes.

“Evalie,” Jim spoke. “The Yunwi Tsundi – the Little People – how long have they dwelt here?”

“Always, Tsantawu – or so they say.”

“And those others – the red-haired women?”

We had asked her of those women before, and she had not answered, had tranquilly ignored the matter, but now she replied without hesitation.

“They are of the Ayjir – it was Lur the Sorceress who wore the wolfskin. She rules the Ayjir with Yodin the High Priest and Tibur-Tibur the Laugher, Tibur the Smith. He is not so tall as you, Leif, but he is broader of shoulder and girth, and he is strong – strong! I will tell you of the Ayjir. Before it was as though a hand were clasped over my lips – or was it my heart? But now the hand is gone.

“The Little People say the Ayjir came riding here long and long and long ago. Then the Rrrllya held the land on each side of the river. There were many of the Ayjir – and many. Far more than now, many men and women where now are mainly women and few men. They came as though in haste from far away, or so the little people say their fathers told them. They were led by a – by a – I have no word! It has a name, but that name I will not speak – no, not even within me! Yet it has a shape… I have seen it on the banners that float from the towers of Karak… and it is on the breasts of Lur and Tibur when they…”

She shivered and was silent. A silver-winged moth dropped upon her hand, lifting and dropping its shining wings; gently she raised it to her lips, wafted it away.

“All this the Rrrllya – whom you call the Little People – did not then know. The Ayjir rested. They began to build Karak, and to cut within the cliff their temple to – to what had led them here. They built quickly at first, as though they feared pursuit; but when none came, they built more slowly. They would have made my little ones their servants, their slaves. The Rrrllya would not have it so. There was war. The Little Ones lay in wait around Karak, and when the Ayjir came forth, they killed them; for the Little Ones know all the – the life of the plants, and so they know how to make their spears and arrows slay at once those whom they only touch. And so, many of the Ayjir died.

“At last a truce was made, and not because the Little People were being beaten, for they were not. But for another reason. The Ayjir were cunning; they laid traps for the little ones, and caught a number. Then this they did – they carried them to the temple and sacrificed them to – to that which had led them here. By sevens they took them to the temple, and one out of each seven they made watch that sacrifice, then released him to carry to the Rrrllya the tale of what he had seen.

“The first they would not believe, so dreadful was the story of that sacrifice – but then came the second and third and fourth with the same story. And a great dread and loathing and horror fell upon the Little People. They made a covenant. They would dwell upon this side of the river; the Ayjir should have the other. In return the Ayjir swore by what had led them that never more should one of the Little People be given in sacrifice to it. If one were caught in Ayjirland, he would be killed – but not by the Sacrifice. And if any of the Ayjir should flee Karak, seek refuge among the Rrrllya, they must kill that fugitive. To all of this, because of that great horror, the Little People agreed. Nansur was broken, so none could cross – Nansur, that spanned Nanbu, the white river, was broken. All boats both of the Ayjir and the Rrrllya were destroyed, and it was agreed no more should be built. Then, as further guard, the Little People took the dalan’usa and set them in Nanbu, so none could cross by its waters. And so it has been – for long and long and long.”

“Dalan’usa, Evalie – you mean the serpents?”

“Tianu’se – the leech,” said Jim.

“The serpents – they are harmless. I think you would not have stopped to talk to Lur had you seen one of the dalan’usa, Leif,” said Evalie, half-maliciously.

I filed that enigma for further reference.

“Those two we found beneath the death flowers. They had broken the truce?”

“Not broken it. They knew what to expect if found, and were ready to pay. There are plants that grow on the farther side of white Nanbu – and other things the Little Ones need, and they are not to be found on this side. And so they swim Nanbu to get them – the dalan’usa are their friends – and not often are they caught there. But this day Lur was hunting a runaway who was trying to make her way to Sirk, and she crossed their trail and ran them down, and laid them beneath the Death Flowers.”

“But what had the girl done – she was one of them?”

“She had been set apart for the Sacrifice. Did you not see – she was taluli… with child… ripening for… for…”

Her voice trailed into silence. A chill touched me.

“But, of course, you know nothing of that,” she said. “Nor will I speak of it – now. If Sri and Sra had found the girl before they, themselves, had been discovered, they would have guided her past the dalan’usa – as they guided you; and here she would have dwelt until the time came that she must pass out of herself. She would have passed in sleep, in peace, without pain… and when she awakened it would have been far from here… perhaps with no memory of it… free. So it is that the Little People who love life send forth those who must be sent.”

She said it tranquilly, with clear eyes, untroubled.

“And are many sent forth so?”

“Not many, since few may pass the dalan’usa – yet many try.”

“Both men and women, Evalie?”

“Can men bear children?”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked, roughly enough; there had been something in the question that somehow touched me in the raw.

“Not now,” she answered. “Besides, men are few in Karak, as I told you. Of children born, not one in twenty is a man child. Do not ask me why, for I do not know.”

She arose, stood looking at us dreamily.

“Enough for tonight. You shall sleep in my tent. On the morrow you shall have one of your own, and the Little People will cut you a lair in the cliff next mine. And you shall look on Karak, standing on broken Nansur – and you shall see Tibur the Laugher, since he always comes to Nansur’s other side when I am there. You shall see it all… on the morrow… or the morrow after… or on another morrow. What does it matter, since every morrow shall be ours, together. Is it not so?”

And again Jim made no answer.

“It is so, Evalie,” I said.

She smiled at us, sleepily. She turned from us and floated toward the darker shadow on the cliff which was the door to her cave. She merged into the shadow, and was gone.

— X —

IF A MAN COULD
USE ALL HIS BRAIN

The drums of the sentinel dwarfs beat on softly, talking to one another along the miles of circling scarp. And suddenly I had a desperate longing for the Gobi. I don’t know why, but its barren and burning, wind-swept and sand-swept body was more desirable than any woman’s. It was like strong homesickness. I found it hard to shake it off. I spoke at last in sheer desperation. “You’ve been acting damned queer, Indian.” “Tsi Tsa’lagi – I told you – I’m all Cherokee.” “Tsantawu – It is I, Degata, who speaks to you now.” I had dropped into the Cherokee; he answered:

“What is it my brother desires to know?”

“What it was the voices of the dead whispered that night we slept beneath the spruces? What it was you knew to be truth by the three signs they gave you. I did not hear the voices, brother – yet by the blood rite they are my ancestors as they are yours; and I have the right to know their words.”

He said: “Is it not better to let the future unroll itself without giving heed to the thin voices of the dead? Who can tell whether the voices of ghosts speak truth?”

“Tsantawu points his arrow in one direction while his eyes look the other. Once he called me dog slinking behind the heels of the hunter. Since it is plain he still thinks me that…”

“No, no, Lief,” he broke in, dropping the tribal tongue. “I only mean I don’t know whether it’s truth. I know what Barr would call it – natural apprehensions put subconsciously in terms of racial superstitions. The voices – we’ll call them that, anyway – said great danger lay north. The Spirit that was north would destroy them forever and forever if I fell in its hands. They and I would be ‘as though we never had been.’ There was some enormous difference between ordinary death and this peculiar death that I couldn’t understand. But the voices did. I would know by three signs that they spoke truth, by Ataga’hi, by Usunhi’yi and by the Yunwi Tsundi. I could meet the first two and still go back. But if I went on to the third – it would be too late. They begged me not to – this was peculiarly interesting, Leif – not to let them be – dissolved.”

“Dissolved!” I exclaimed. “But – that’s the same word I used. And it was hours after!”

“Yes, that’s why I felt creepy when I heard you. You can’t blame me for being a little preoccupied when we came across the stony flat that was like Ataga’hi, and more so when we struck the coincidence of the Shadowed-land, which is pretty much the same as Usunhi’yi, the Darkening-land. It’s why I said if we ran across the third, the Yunwi Tsundi, I’d take your interpretation rather than Barr’s. We did strike it. And if you think all those things aren’t a good reason for acting damned queer, as you put it, well – what would you think a good one?”

Jim in the golden chains… Jim with the tentacle of that Dark Power creeping, creeping toward him… my lips were dry and stiff…

“Why didn’t you tell me all that! I’d never have let you go on!”

“I know it. But you’d have come back, wouldn’t you, old-timer?”

I did not answer; he laughed.

“How could I be sure until I saw all the signs?”

“But they didn’t say you would be – dissolved,” I clutched at the straw. “They only said there was the danger.”

“That’s all.”

“And what would I be doing? Jim – I’d kill you with my own hand before I’d let what I saw happen in the Gobi happen to you.”

“If you could,” he said, and I saw he was sorry he had said it.

“If I could? What did they say about me – those damned ancestors?”

“Not a damned thing,” he answered, cheerfully. “I never said they did. I simply reasoned that if we went on, and I was in danger, so would you be. That’s all.”

“Jim – it isn’t all. What are you keeping back?”

He arose, and stood over me.

“All right. They said that even if the Spirit didn’t get me, I’d never get out. Now you have the whole works.”

“Well,” I said, a burden rolling off me, “that’s not so bad. And, as for getting out – that may be as may be. One thing’s sure – if you stay, so do I.”

He nodded, absently. I went on to something else that had been puzzling me.

“The Yunwi Tsundi, Jim, what were they? You never told me anything about them that I remember. What’s the legend?”

“Oh – the Little People,” he squatted beside me, chuckling, wide awake from his abstraction. “They were in Cherokee-land when the Cherokees got there. They were a pygmy race, like those in Africa and Australia today. Only they weren’t blacks. These small folk fit their description. Of course, the tribes did some embroidering. They had them copper-colored and only two feet high. These are golden-skinned and average three feet. At that, they may have faded some here and put on height. Otherwise they square with the accounts – long hair, perfect shape, drums and all.”

He went on to tell of the Little People. They had lived in caves, mostly in the region now Tennessee and Kentucky. They were earth-folk, worshippers of life; and as such at times outrageously Rabelaisian. They were friendly toward the Cherokees, but kept rigorously to themselves and seldom were seen. They frequently aided those who had got lost in the mountains, especially children. If they helped anyone, and took him into their caves, they warned him he mustn’t tell where the caves were, or he would die. And, ran the legends, if he told, he did die. If anyone ate their food he had to be very careful when he returned to his tribe, and resume his old diet slowly, or he would also die.

The Little People were touchy. If anyone followed them in the woods, they cast a spell on him so that for days he had no sense of location. They were expert wood and metal workers, and if a hunter found in the forest a knife or arrow-head or any kind of trinket, before he picked it up he had to say: “Little People, I want to take this.” If he didn’t ask, he never killed any more game and another misfortune came upon him. One which distressed his wife.

They were gay, the Little People, and they spent half their time in dancing and drumming. They had every kind of drum – drums that would make trees fall, drums that brought sleep, drums that drove to madness, drums that talked and thunder drums. The thunder drums sounded just like thunder, and when the Little People beat on them soon there was a real thunderstorm, because they sounded so much like the actuality that it woke up the thunderstorms, and one or more storms was sure to come poking around to gossip with what it supposed a wandering member of the family…

I remembered the roll of thunder that followed the chanting; I wondered whether that had been the Little People’s defiance to Khalk’ru…

“I’ve a question or two for you, Leif.”

“Go right ahead, Indian.”

“Just how much do you remember of – Dwayanu?”

I didn’t answer at once; it was the question I had been dreading ever since I had cried out to the Witch-woman on the white river’s bank.

“If you’re thinking it over, all right. If you’re thinking of a way to stall, all wrong. I’m asking for a straight answer.”

“Is it your idea that I’m that ancient Uighur, re-born? If it is, maybe you have a theory as to where I’ve been during the thousands of years between this time and now.”

“Oh, so the same idea has been worrying you, has it? No, reincarnation isn’t what I had in mind. Although at that, we know so damned little I wouldn’t rule it out. But there may be a more reasonable explanation. That’s why I ask – what do you remember of Dwayanu?”

I determined to make a clean breast of it.

“All right, Jim,” I said. “That same question has been riding my mind right behind Khalk’ru for three years. And if I can’t find the answer here, I’ll go back to the Gobi for it – if I can get out. When I was in that room of the oasis waiting the old priest’s call, I remembered perfectly well it had been Dwayanu’s. I knew the bed, and I knew the armor and the weapons. I stood looking at one of the metal caps and I remembered that Dwayanu – or I – had got a terrific clout with a mace when wearing it. I took it down, and there was a dent in it precisely where I remembered it had been struck. I remembered the swords, and recalled that Dwayanu – or I – had the habit of using a heavier one in the left hand than in the right. Well, one of them was much heavier than the other. Also, in a fight I use my left hand better than I do my right. These memories, or whatever they were, came in flashes. For a moment I would be Dwayanu, plus myself, looking with amused interest on old familiar things – and the next moment I would be only myself and wondering, with no amusement, what it all meant.”

“Yes, what else?”

“Well, I wasn’t entirely frank about the ritual matter,” I said, miserably. “I told you it was as though another person had taken charge of my mind and gone on with it. That was true, in a way – but God help me, I knew all the time that other person was – myself! It was like being two people and one at the same time. It’s hard to make clear… you know how you can be saying one thing and thinking another. Suppose you could be saying one thing and thinking two things at once. It was like that. One part of me was in revolt, horror-stricken, terrified. The other part was none of those things; it knew it had power and was enjoying exercising that power – and it had control of my will. But both were – I. Unequivocally, unmistakably – I. Hell, man – if I’d really believed it was somebody, something, besides myself, do you suppose I’d feel the remorse I do? No, it’s because I knew it was I – the same part of me that knew the helm and the swords, that I’ve gone hag-ridden ever since.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes. Dreams.”

He leaned over, and spoke sharply.

“What dreams?”

“Dreams of battles – dreams of feasts… a dream of war against yellow men, and of a battlefield beside a river and of arrows flying overhead in clouds… of hand-to-hand fights in which I wield a weapon like a huge hammer against big yellow-haired men I know are like myself… dreams of towered cities through which I pass and where white, blue-eyed women toss garlands down for my horse to trample… When I wake the dreams are vague, soon lost. But always I know that while I dreamed them, they were clear, sharp-cut – real as life…”

“Is that how you knew the Witch-woman was Witch-woman – through those dreams?”

“If so, I don’t remember. I only knew that suddenly I recognized her for what she was – or that other self did.”

He sat for a while in silence.

“Leif,” he asked, “in those dreams do you ever take any part in the service of Khalk’ru? Have anything at all to do with his worship?”

“I’m sure I don’t. I’d remember that, by God! I don’t even dream of the temple in the Gobi!”

He nodded, as though I had confirmed some thought in his own mind; then was quiet for so long that I became jumpy.

“Well, Old Medicine Man of the Tsalagi’, what’s the diagnosis? Reincarnation, demonic possession, or just crazy?”

“Leif, you never had any of those dreams before the Gobi?”

“I did not.”

“Well – I’ve been trying to think as Barr would, and squaring it with my own gray matter. Here’s the result. I think that everything you’ve told me is the doing of your old priest. He had you under his control when you saw yourself riding to the Temple of Khalk’ru – and wouldn’t go in. You don’t know what else he might have suggested at that time, and have commanded you to forget consciously when you came to yourself. That’s a simple matter of hypnotism. But he had another chance at you. When you were asleep that night. How do you know he didn’t come in and do some more suggesting? Obviously, he wanted to believe you were Dwayanu. He wanted you to ‘remember’ – but having had one lesson, he didn’t want you to remember what went on with Khalk’ru. That would explain why you dreamed about the pomp and glory and the pleasant things, but not the unpleasant. He was a wise old gentleman – you say that yourself. He knew enough of your psychology to foresee you would baulk at a stage of the ritual. So you did – but he had tied you well up. Instantly the post-hypnotic command to the subconscious operated. You couldn’t help going on. Although your conscious self was wide-awake, fully aware, it had no control over your will. I think that’s what Barr would say. And I’d agree with him. Hell, there are drugs that do all that to you. You don’t have to go into migrations of the soul, or demons, or any medieval matter to account for it.”

“Yes,” I said, hopefully but doubtfully. “And how about the Witch-woman?”

“Somebody like her in your dreams, but forgotten. I think the explanation is what I’ve said. If it is, Leif, it worries me.”

“I don’t follow you there,” I said.

“No? Well, think this over. If all these things that puzzle you come from suggestions the old priest made – what else did he suggest? Clearly, he knew something of this place. Suppose he foresaw the possibility of your finding it. What would he want you to do when you did find it? Whatever it was, you can bet your chances of getting out that he planted it deep in your subconscious. All right – that being a reasonable deduction, what is it you will do when you come in closer contact with those red-headed ladies we saw, and with the happy few gentlemen who share their Paradise? I haven’t the slightest idea – nor have you. And if that isn’t something to worry about, tell me what is. Come on – let’s go to bed.”

We went into the tent. We had been in it before with Evalie. It had been empty then except for a pile of soft pelts and silken stuffs at one side. Now there were two such piles. We shed our clothes in the pale green darkness and turned in. I looked at my watch.

“Ten o’clock,” I said. “How many months since morning?”

“At least six. If you keep me awake I’ll murder you. I’m tired.”

So was I; but I lay long, thinking. I was not so convinced by Jim’s argument, plausible as it was. Not that I believed I had been lying dormant in some extra-spatial limbo for centuries. Nor that I had ever been this ancient Dwayanu. There was a third explanation, although I didn’t like it a bit better than that of reincarnation; and it had just as many unpleasant possibilities as that of Jim’s.

Not long ago an eminent American physician and psychologist had said he had discovered that the average man used only about one-tenth of his brain; and scientists generally agreed he was right. The ablest thinkers, all-round geniuses, such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were, might use a tenth more. Any man who could use all his brain could rule the world – but probably wouldn’t want to. In the human skull was a world only one-fifth explored at the most.

What was in the terra incognita of the brain – the unexplored eight-tenths?

Well, for one thing there might be a storehouse of ancestral memories, memories reaching back to those of the hairy, ape-like ancestors who preceded man, reaching beyond them even to those of the flippered creatures who crawled out of the ancient seas to begin their march to men – and further back to their ancestors who had battled and bred in the steaming oceans when the continents were being born.

Millions upon millions of years of memories! What a reservoir of knowledge if man’s consciousness could but tap it!

There was nothing more unbelievable in this than that the physical memory of the race could be contained in the two single cells which start the cycle of birth. In them are all the complexities of the human body – brain and nerves, muscles, bone and blood. In them, too, are those traits we call hereditary – family resemblances, resemblances not only of face and body but of thought, habits, emotions, reactions to environment: grandfather’s nose, great-grandmother’s eyes, great-great-grandfather’s irascibility, moodiness or what not. If all this can be carried in those seven and forty, and eight and forty, microscopic rods within the birth cells which biologists call the chromosomes, tiny mysterious gods of birth who determine from the beginning what blend of ancestors a boy or girl shall be, why could they not carry, too, the accumulated experiences, the memories of those ancestors?

Somewhere in the human brain might be a section of records, each neatly graven with lines of memories, waiting only for the needle of consciousness to run over them to make them articulate.

Maybe the consciousness did now and then touch and read them. Maybe there were a few people who by some freak had a limited power of tapping their contents.

If that were true, it would explain many mysteries. Jim’s ghostly voices, for example. My own uncanny ability of picking up languages.

Suppose that I had come straight down from this Dwayanu. And that in this unknown world of my brain, my consciousness, that which now was I, could and did reach in and touch those memories that had been Dwayanu. Or that those memories stirred and reached my consciousness? When that happened – Dwayanu would awaken and live. And I would be both Dwayanu and Leif Langdon!

Might it not be that the old priest had known something of this? By words and rites and by suggestion, even as Jim had said, had reached into that terra incognita and wakened these memories that were – Dwayanu?

They were strong – those memories. They had not been wholly asleep; else I would not have learned so quickly the Uighur… nor experienced those strange, reluctant flashes of recognition before ever I met the old priest…

Yes, Dwayanu was strong. And in some way I knew he was ruthless. I was afraid of Dwayanu – of those memories that once had been Dwayanu. I had no power to arouse them, and I had no power to control them. Twice they had seized my will, had pushed me aside.

What if they grew stronger?

What if they became – all of me?

— XI —

DRUMS OF
THE LITTLE PEOPLE

Six times the green light of the Shadowed-land had darkened into the pale dusk that was its night, and I had heard nothing, seen nothing of the Witch-woman or of any of those who dwelt on the far side of the white river. They had been six days and nights of curious interest. We had gone with Evalie among the golden pygmies over all their guarded plain; and we had gone at will among them, alone.

We had watched them at their work and at their play, listened to their drumming and looked on in wonder at their dances – dances so intricate, so extraordinary, that they were more like complex choral harmonies than steps and gestures. Sometimes the Little People danced in small groups of a dozen or so, and then it was like some simple song. But sometimes they were dancing by the hundreds, interlaced, over a score of the smooth-turfed dancing greens; and then it was like symphonies translated into choreographic measures.

They danced always to the music of their drums; they had no other music, nor did they need any. The drums of the Little People were of many shapes and sizes, in range covering all of ten octaves, and producing not only the semitones of our own familiar scale, but quarter and eighth-tones and even finer gradations that oddly affect the listener – at least, they did me. They ranged in pitch from the pipe organ’s deepest bass to a high staccato soprano. Some, the pygmies played with thumbs and fingers, and some with palms of their hands, and some with sticks. There were drums that whispered, drums that hummed, drums that laughed, and drums that sang.

Dances and drums, but especially the drums, were evocative of strange thoughts, strange pictures; the drums beat at the doors of another world – and now and then opened them wide enough to give a glimpse of fleeting, weirdly beautiful, weirdly disturbing, images.

There must have been between four and five thousand of the Little People in the approximately twenty square miles of cultivated, fertile plain enclosed by their wall; how many outside of it, I had no means of knowing. There were a score or more of small colonies, Evalie told us. These were like hunting or mining posts from which came the pelts, the metals and other things the horde fashioned to their uses. At Nansur Bridge was a strong warrior post. Some balance of nature, so far as I could learn from her, kept them at about the same constant; they grew quickly into maturity and their lives were not long.

She told us of Sirk, the city of those who had fled from the Sacrifice. From her description an impregnable place, built against the cliffs; walled; boiling springs welling up at the base of its battlements and forming an impassable moat. There was constant warfare between the people of Sirk and the white wolves of Lur, lurking in the encompassing forest, keeping watch to intercept those fleeing to it from Karak. I had the feeling that there was furtive intercourse between Sirk and the golden pygmies, that perhaps the horror of the Sacrifice which both shared, and the revolt of those in Sirk against the worshippers of Khalk’ru was a bond. And that when they could, the Little People helped them, and would even join hands with them, were it not for the deep ancient fear of what might follow should they break the compact their forefathers had made with the Ayjir.

It was a thing Evalie said that made me think that.

“If you had turned the other way, Leif – and if you had escaped the wolves of Lur – you would have come to Sirk. And a great change might have grown from that, for Sirk would have welcomed you, and who knows what might have followed, with you as their leader. Nor would my Little People then…”

She stopped there, nor would she complete the sentence, for all my urging. So I told her there were too many ifs about the matter, and I was content that the dice had fallen as they had. It pleased her.

I had one experience not shared by Jim. Its significance I did not then recognize. The Little People were as I have said – worshippers of life. That was their whole creed and faith. Here and there about the plain were small cairns, altars in fact, upon which, cut from wood or stone or fossil ivory, were the ancient symbols of fertility; sometimes singly, sometimes in pairs, and sometimes in a form curiously like that same symbol of the old Egyptians – the looped cross, the crux ansata which Osiris, God of the Resurrection, carried in his hand and touched, in the Hall of the Dead, those souls which had passed all tests and had earned immortality.

It happened on the third day. Evalie bade me go with her, and alone. We walked along the well-kept path that ran along the base of the cliffs in which the pygmies had their lairs. The tiny golden-eyed women peeped out at us and trilled to their dolls of children as we passed. Groups of elders, both men and women, came dancing toward us and fell in behind us as we went on. Each and all carried drums of a type I had not yet seen. They did not beat them, nor did they talk; group by group they dropped in behind us, silently.

After awhile I noticed that there were no more lairs. At the end of half an hour we turned a bastion of the dins. We were at the edge of a small meadow carpeted with moss, fine and soft as the pile of a silken carpet. The meadow was perhaps five hundred feet wide and about as many feet deep. Opposite me was another bastion. It was as though a rounded chisel had been thrust down, cutting out a semicircle in the precipice. At the far end of the meadow was what, at first glance, I thought a huge domed building, and then saw was an excrescence from the cliff itself.

In this rounded rock was an oval entrance, not much larger than an average door. As I stood, wondering, Evalie took my hand and led me toward it. We went through it.

The domed rock was hollow.

It was a temple of the Little People – I knew that, of course, as soon as I had crossed the threshold. Its walls of some cool, green stone curved smoothly up. It was not dark within the temple. The rocky dome had been pierced as though by the needle of a lace-maker, and through hundreds of the frets light streamed. The walls caught it, and dispersed it from thousands of crystalline angles within the stone. The floor was carpeted with the thick, soft moss, and this was faintly luminous, adding to the strange pellucid light; it must have covered at least two acres.

Evalie drew me forward. In the exact center of the floor was a depression, like an immense bowl. Between it and me stood one of the looped-cross symbols, thrice the height of a tall man. It was polished, and glimmered as though cut from some enormous amethystine crystal. I glanced behind me. The pygmies who had followed us were pouring through the oval doorway.

They crowded close behind us as Evalie again took my hand and led me toward the cross. She pointed, and I peered down into the bowl.

I looked upon the Kraken!

There it lay, sprawled out within the bowl, black tentacles spread fanwise from its bloated body, its huge black eyes staring inscrutably up into mine!

Resurgence of the old horror swept me. I jumped back with an oath.

The pygmies were crowding around my knees, staring up at me intently. I knew that my horror was written plain upon my face. They began an excited trilling, nodding to one another, gesticulating. Evalie watched them gravely, and then I saw her own face lighten as though with relief.

She smiled at me, and pointed again to the bowl. I forced myself to look. And now I saw that the shape within it had been cunningly carved. The dreadful, inscrutable eyes were of jet-like jewel. Through the end of each of the fifty-foot-long tentacles had been driven one of the crux ansatas, pinioning it like a spike; and through the monstrous body had been driven a larger one. I read the meaning: life fettering the enemy of life; rendering it impotent; prisoning it with the secret, ancient and holy symbol of that very thing it was bent upon destroying. And the great looped-cross above – watching and guarding like the god of life.

I heard a rippling and rustling and rushing from the drums. On and on it went in quickly increasing tempo. There was triumph in it – the triumph of onrushing conquering waves, the triumph of the free rushing wind; and there was peace and surety of peace in it – like the rippling song of little waterfalls chanting their faith that “they will go on and on forever,” the rippling of little waves among the sedges of the river-bank, and the rustling of the rain bringing life to all the green things of earth.

Round the amethystine cross Evalie began to dance, circling it slowly to the rippling, the rustling and the rushing music of the drums. And she was the spirit of that song they sang, and the spirit of all those things of which they sang.

Three times she circled it. She came dancing to me, took my hand once more and led me away, out through the portal. From behind us, as we passed through, there came a sustained rolling of the little drums, no longer rippling, rustling, rushing – defiant now, triumphal.

But of that ceremony, or of its reasons, or of the temple itself she would speak no word thereafter, question her as I might.

And we still had to stand upon Nansur Bridge and look on towered Karak.

“On the morrow,” she would say; and when the morrow came, again she would say – “on the morrow.” When she answered me, she would drop long lashes over the clear brown eyes and glance at me from beneath them, strangely; or touch my hair and say that there were many morrows and what did it matter on which of them we went, since Nansur would not run away. There was some reluctance I could not fathom. And day by day her sweetness and her beauty wound a web around my heart until I began to wonder whether it might become a shield against the touch of what I carried on my breast.

But the Little People still had their doubts about me, temple ceremony or none; that was plain enough. Jim, they had taken to their hearts; they twittered and trilled and laughed with him as though he were one of them. They were polite and friendly enough to me, but they watched me. Jim could take up the tiny doll-like children and play with them. The mothers didn’t like me to do that and showed it very clearly. I received direct confirmation of how they felt about me that morning.

“I’m going to leave you for two or three days, Leif,” he told me when we had finished breakfasting. Evalie had floated away on some call from her small folk.

“Going to leave me!” I gaped at him in astonishment. “What do you mean? Where are you going?”

He laughed.

“Going to look at the tianusi – what Evalie calls the dalanusa – the big leeches. The river guards she told us the pygmies put on the job when the bridge was broken.”

She had not spoken about them again, and I had forgotten all about them.

“What are they, Indian?”

“That’s what I’m going to find out. They sound like the great leech of Tianusi’yi. The tribes said it was red with white stripes and as big as a house. The Little People don’t go that far. They only say they’re as big as you are.”

“Listen, Indian – I’m going along.”

“Oh, no, you’re not.”

“I’d like to know why not.”

“Because the Little People won’t let you. Now listen to me, old-timer – the plain fact is that they’re not entirely satisfied about you. They’re polite, and they wouldn’t hurt Evalie’s feelings for the world, but – they’d much rather be without you.”

“You’re telling me nothing new,” I said.

“No, but here is something new. A party that’s been on a hunting trip down the other end of the valley came in yesterday. One of them remembered his grandfather had told him that when the Ayjir came riding into this place they all had yellow hair like yours. Not the red they have now. It’s upset them.”

“I thought they’d been watching me pretty damned close the last twenty-four hours,” I said. “So that’s the reason, is it?”

“That’s the reason, Leif. It’s upset them. It’s also the reason for this expedition to the tianusi. They’re going to increase the river guard. It involves some sort of ceremony, I gather. They want me to go along. I think it better that I do.”

“Does Evalie know all this?”

“Sure she does. And she wouldn’t let you go, even if the pygmies would.”

Jim left with a party of about a hundred of the pygmies about noon. I bade him a cheerful good-by. If it puzzled Evalie that I took his departure so calmly, and asked her no questions she did not show it. But she was very quiet that day, speaking mostly in monosyllables abstractedly. Once or twice I caught her looking at me with a curious wonder in her eyes. And once I had taken her hand, and she had quivered and leaned toward me, and then snatched it away, half-angrily. And once when she had forgotten her moodiness and had rested against my shoulder, I had fought hard against taking her in my arms.

The worst of it was that I could find no cogent argument why I shouldn’t take her. A voice within my mind was whispering that if I so desired, why should I not? And there were other things besides that whisper which sapped my resistance. It had been a queer day even for this queer place. The air was heavy, as though a storm brooded. The heady fragrances from the far forest were stronger, clinging amorously, confusing. The vaporous veils that hid the distances had thickened; at the north they were almost smoke color, and they marched slowly but steadily nearer.

We sat, Evalie and I, beside her tent. She broke a long silence.

“You are sorrowful, Leif – and why?”

“Not sorrowful, Evalie – just wondering.”

“I, too, am wondering. Is it what you wonder?”

“How do I know – who know nothing of your mind?”

She stood up, abruptly.

“You like to watch the smiths. Let us go to them.”

I looked at her, struck by the anger in her voice. She frowned down upon me, brows drawn to a straight line over bright, half-contemptuous eyes.

“Why are you angry, Evalie? What have I done?”

“I am not angry. And you have done nothing.” She stamped her foot. “I say you have done – nothing! Let us watch the smiths.”

She walked away. I sprang up, and followed her. What was the matter with her? I had done something to irritate her, that was certain. But what? Well, I’d know, sooner or later. And I did like to watch the smiths. They stood beside their small anvils beating out the sickled knives, the spear and arrowheads, shaping the earrings and bracelets of gold for their tiny women.

Tink-a-tink, tink-a-clink, cling-clang, clink-a-tink went their little hammers.

They stood beside their anvils like gnomes, except that there was no deformity about them. Miniature men they were, perfectly shaped, gleaming golden in the darkening light, long hair coiled about their heads, yellow eyes intent upon their forgings. I forgot Evalie and her wrath, watching them as ever, fascinated.

Tink-a-tink! Cling-clang! Clink—

The little hammers hung suspended in air; the little smiths stood frozen. Speeding from the north came the horn of a great gong, a brazen stroke that seemed to break overhead. It was followed by another and another and another. A wind wailed over the plain; the air grew darker, the vaporous smoky veils quivered and marched closer.

The clangor of the gongs gave way to a strong chanting, the singing of many people; the chanting advanced and retreated, rose and waned as the wind rose and fell, rose and fell in rhythmic pulse. From all the walls the drums of the guards roared warning.

The little smiths dropped their hammers and raced to the lairs. Over all the plain there was turmoil, movement of the golden pygmies racing to the cliffs and to the circling slope to swell the garrisons there.

Through the strong chanting came the beat of other drums. I knew them – the throb of the Uighur kettle-drums, the war drums. And I knew the chant – it was the war song, the battle song of the Uighurs. Not the Uighurs, no – not the patched and paltry people I had led from the oasis! War song of the ancient race! The great race – the Ayjir!

The old race! My people! I knew the song – well did I know it! Often and often had I heard it in the olden days… when I had gone forth to battle… By Zarda of the Thirsty Spears… by Zarda God of Warriors, but it was like drink to a parched throat to hear it again!

My blood drummed in my ears… I opened my throat to roar that song…

“Leif! Leif! What is the matter?” Evalie’s hands were on my shoulders, shaking me!

I glared at her, uncomprehending for a moment. I felt a strange, angry bafflement. Who was this dark girl that checked me on my way to war? And abruptly the obsession left me. It left me trembling, shaken at though by some brief wild tempest of the mind. I put my own hands upon those on my shoulders, drew reality from the touch. I saw that there was amazement in Evalie’s eyes, and something of fear. And around us was a ring of the Little People, staring up at me. I shook my head, gasping for breath.

“Leif! What is the matter?”

Before I could answer, chanting and drums were drowned in a bellow of thunder. Peal upon peal of thunder roared and echoed over the plain, beating back, beating down the sounds from the north – roaring over them, rolling over them, sweeping them back.

I stared stupidly around me. All along the cliffs were the golden pygmies, scores of them, beating upon great drums high as their waists. From those drums came the pealing of thunder, claps and shattering strokes of the bolt’s swift fall, and the shouting reverberations that follow it.

The Thunder Drums of the Little People!

On and on roared the drums, yet through their rolling diapason beat ever the battle chant and those other drums… like thrusts of lances… like trampling of horses and of marching men… by Zarda, but the old race still was strong…

A ring of the Little People was dancing around me. Another ring joined them. Beyond them I saw Evalie, watching me with wide, astonished eyes. And around her was another ring of the golden pygmies, arrows at readiness, sickled knives in hand.

Why was she watching me… why were the arms of the Little People turned against me… and why were they dancing? That was a strange dance… it made you sleepy to look at it… what was this lethargy creeping over me… God, but I was sleepy! So sleepy that my dull ears could hardly hear the Thunder Drums… so sleepy I could hear nothing else… so sleepy… I knew, dimly, that I had dropped to my knees, then had fallen prone upon the soft turf… then slept.

I awakened, every sense alert. The drums were throbbing all around me. Not the Thunder Drums, but drums that sang, drums that throbbed and sang to some strange lilting rhythm that set the blood racing through me in tune and in time with its joyousness. The throbbing, singing notes were like tiny, warm, vital blows that whipped my blood into ecstasy of life.

I leaped to my feet. I stood upon a high knoll, round as a woman’s breast. Over all the plain were lights, small fires burning, ringing the little altars of the pygmies. And around the fires the Little People were dancing to the throbbing drums. Around the fires and the altars they danced and leaped like little golden flames of life made animate.

Circling the knoll on which I stood was a triple ring of the dwarfs, women and men, weaving, twining, swaying.

They and the burden of the drums were one.

A soft and scented wind was blowing over the knoll. It hummed as it streamed by – and its humming was akin to dance and drum.

In and out, and round about and out and in and back again, the golden pygmies danced around the knoll. And round and round and back again they circled the fire-ringed altars.

I heard a sweet low voice singing – singing to the cadence, singing the song of the drums, singing the dancing of the Little People.

Close by was another knoll like that on which I was – like a pair of woman’s high breasts they stood above the plain. It, too, was circled by the dancing dwarfs.

On it sang and danced Evalie.

Her singing was the soul of drum song and dance – her dancing was the sublimation of both. She danced upon the knoll – cobweb veils and girdle gone, clothed only in the silken, rippling cloak of her blue-black hair.

She beckoned, and she called to me – a high-pitched, sweet call.

The fragrant, rushing wind pushed me toward her as I ran down the mound.

The dancing pygmies parted to let me through. The throbbing of the drums grew swifter; their song swept into a higher octave.

Evalie came dancing down to meet me… she was beside me, her arms round my neck, her lips pressed to mine… The drums beat faster. My pulses matched them.

The two rings of little yellow living flames of life joined. They became one swirling circle that drove us forward. Round and round and round us they swirled, driving us on and on to the pulse of the drums. I ceased to think – drum-throb, drum-song, dance-song were all of me.

Yet still I knew that the fragrant wind thrust us on and on, caressing, murmuring, laughing.

We were beside an oval doorway. The silken, scented tresses of Evalie streamed in the wind and kissed me. Beyond and behind us sang the drums. And ever the wind pressed us on…

Drums and wind drove us through the portal of the domed rock.

They drove us into the temple of the Little People…

The soft moss glimmered… the amethystine cross gleamed…

Evalie’s arms were around my neck… I held her close… the touch of her lips to mine was like the sweet, secret fire of life…

It was silent in the temple of the Little People. Their drums were silent. The glow of the looped cross above the pit of the Kraken was dim.

Evalie stirred, and cried out in her sleep. I touched her lips and she awoke.

“What is the matter, Evalie?”

“Leif, beloved – I dreamed a white falcon tried to dip its beak into my heart!”

“It was but a dream, Evalie.”

She shuddered; she raised her head and bent over me so that her hair covered our faces.

“You drove the falcon away – but then a white wolf came… and leaped upon me.”

“It was only a dream, Evalie – bright flame of my heart.”

She bent closer to me under the tent of her hair, lips close to mine.

“You drove the wolf away. And I would have kissed you… but a face came between ours…”

“A face, Evalie?”

She whispered:

“The face of Lur! She laughed at me… and then you were gone… with her… and I was alone…”

“It was a lying dream, that! Sleep, beloved.”

She sighed. There was a long silence; then drowsily:

“What is it you carry round your neck, Leif? Something from some woman that you treasure?”

“Nothing of woman, Evalie. That is truth.”

She kissed me – and slept.

Fool that I was not to have told her then, under the shadow of the ancient symbol… Fool that I was – I did not!

— XII —

ON NANSUR BRIDGE

When we went out of the temple into the morning there were half a hundred of the elders, men and women, patiently awaiting our appearance. I thought they were the same who had followed into the domed rock when I had first entered it.

The little women clustered around Evalie. They had brought wraps and swathed her from head to feet. She walked off among them with never a glance nor a word for me. There was something quite ceremonial about it all; she looked for all the world like a bride being led away by somewhat mature elfin bridesmaids.

The little men clustered around me. Sri was there. I was glad of that, for, whatever the doubts of the others about me, I knew he had none. They bade me go with them, and I obeyed without question.

It was raining, and it was both jungle-wet and jungle-warm. The wind was blowing in the regular, rhythmic gusts of the night before. The rain seemed less to fall than to condense in great drops from the air about, except when the wind blew and then the rain drove by in almost level lines. The air was like fragrant wine. I felt like singing and dancing. There was thunder all around – not the drums, but real thunder.

I had been wearing only my shirt and my trousers. I had discarded my knee-high boots for sandals. It was only a minute or two before I was soaking wet. We came to a steaming pool, and there we halted. Sri told me to strip and plunge in.

The pool was hot and invigorating and as I splashed around in it I kept feeling better and better. I reflected that whatever had been in the minds of the Little People when they had driven Evalie and me into the temple, their fear of me had been exorcised – for the time at any rate. But I thought I knew what had been in their minds. They suspected that Khalk’ru had some hold on me, as over the people I resembled. Not much of a hold maybe – but still it was not to be ignored. Very well – the remedy, since they couldn’t kill me without breaking Evalie’s heart, was to spike me down as they had the Kraken which was Khalk’ru’s symbol. So they had spiked me down with Evalie.

I climbed out of the pool, more thoughtful than I had gone into it. They wrapped a loin cloth around me, in curious folds and knots. Then they trilled and twittered and laughed, and danced.

Sri had my clothes and belt. I didn’t want to lose them, so when we started off I kept close behind him. Soon we stopped – in front of Evalie’s lair.

After a while there was a great commotion, singing and beating of drums, and along came Evalie with a crowd of the little women dancing around her. They led her to where I was waiting. Then all of them danced away.

That was all there was to it. The ceremony, if ceremony it was, was finished. But, somehow, I felt very much married.

I looked down at Evalie. She looked up at me, demurely. Her hair was no longer free, but braided cunningly around head and ears and neck. The swathings were gone. She wore the little apron of the pygmy matrons and the silvery cobweb veils. She laughed, and took my hand, and we went into the lair.

Next day, late in the afternoon, we heard a fanfare of trumpets that sounded rather close. They blew long and loudly, as though summoning someone. We stepped out into the rain, to listen better. I noted that the wind had changed from north to west, and was blowing steadily and strongly. By this time I knew that the acoustics of the land under the mirage were peculiar and that there was no way of telling just how close the trumpets were. They were on the far side of the river bank of course, but how far away the pygmies’ guarded slope was from the river, I did not know. There was some bustling on the wall, but no excitement.

There came a final trumpet blast, raucous and derisive. It was followed by a roar of laughter more irritatingly mocking because of its human quality. It brought me out of my indifference with a jump. It made me see red.

“That,” said Evalie, “was Tibur. I suppose he has been hunting with Lur. I think he was laughing at – you, Leif.”

Her delicate nose was turned up disdainfully, but there was a smile at the corner of her lips as she watched my quick anger flare up.

“See here, Evalie, just who is this Tibur?”

“I told you. He is Tibur the Smith, and he rules the Ayjir with Lur. Always does he come when I stand on Nansur. We have talked together – often. He is very strong – oh, strong.”

“Yes?” I said, still more irritated. “And why does Tibur come when you are there?”

“Why, because he desires me, of course,” she said tranquilly.

My dislike for Tilbur the Laugher increased.

“He’ll not laugh if I ever get an opening at him,” I muttered.

“What did you say?” she asked. I translated, as best t could. She nodded and began to speak – and then I saw her eyes open wide and stark terror fill them. I heard a whirring over my head.

Out of the mists had flown a great bird. It hovered fifty feet over us, glaring down with baleful yellow eyes. A great bird – a white bird…

The white falcon of the Witch-woman!

I thrust Evalie back into the lair, and watched it. Thrice it circled over me, and then, screaming, hurtled up into the mists and vanished.

I went in to Evalie. She was crouched on the couch of skins. She had undone her hair and it streamed over her head and shoulders, hiding her like a cloak. I bent over her, and parted it. She was crying. She put her arms around my neck, and held me close, close. I felt her heart beating like a drum against mine.

“Evalie, beloved – there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“The – white falcon, Leif!”

“It is only a bird.”

“No – Lur sent it.”

“Nonsense, dark sweetheart. A bird flies where it wills. It was hunting – or it had lost its way in the mists.”

She shook her head.

“But, Leif, I – dreamed of a white falcon…”

I held her tight, and after a while she pushed me away and smiled at me. But there was little of gaiety the remainder of that day. And that night her dreams were troubled, and she held me close to her, and cried and murmured in her sleep.

The next day Jim came back. I had been feeling a bit uncomfortable about his return. What would he think of me? I needn’t have worried. He showed no surprise at all when I laid the cards before him. And then I realized that of course the pygmies must have been talking to one another by their drums, and that they would have gone over matters with him.

“Good enough,” said Jim, when I had finished. “If you don’t get out, it’s the best thing for both of you. If you do get out, you’ll take Evalie with you – or won’t you?”

That stung me.

“Listen, Indian – I don’t like the way you’re talking! I love her.”

“All right. I’ll put it another way. Does Dwayanu love her?”

That question was like a slap on my mouth. While I struggled for an answer, Evalie ran out. She went over to Jim and kissed him. He patted her shoulder and hugged her like a big brother. She glanced at me, and came to me, and drew my head down to her and kissed me too, but not exactly the way she had kissed him.

I glanced over her head at Jim. Suddenly I noticed that he looked tired and haggard.

“You’re, feeling all right, Jim?”

“Sure. Only a bit weary. I’ve – seen things.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” he hesitated, “well – the tianusi – the big leeches – for one thing. I’d never have believed it if I hadn’t seen them, and if I had seen them before we dived into the river, I’d have picked the wolves as cooing doves in comparison.”

He told me they had camped at the far end of the plain that night.

“This place is bigger than we thought, Leif. It must be, because I’ve gone more miles than would be possible if it were only as large as it looked before we went through the mirage. Probably the mirage foreshortened it – confused us.”

The next day they had gone through forest and jungle and cane-brake and marsh. They had come at last to a steaming swamp. A raised path ran across it. They had taken that path, and eventually came to another transecting it. Where the two causeways met, there was a wide, circular and gently rounded mound rising from the swamp. Here the pygmies had halted. They had made fires of fagots and leaves. The fires sent up a dense and scented smoke which spread slowly out from the mound over the swamp. When the fires were going well, the pygmies began drumming – a queerly syncopated beat. In a few moments he had seen a movement in the swamp, close by the mound.

“There was a ring of pygmies between me and the edge,” he said, “and when I saw the thing that crawled out I was glad of it. First there was an upheaval of the mud, and then up came the back of what I thought was an enormous red slug. The slug raised itself, and crept out on land. It was a leech all right, and that was all it was – but it made me more than a bit sick. It was its size that did that. It must have been seven feet long, and it lay there, blind and palpitating, its mouth gaping, listening to the drums and luxuriating in that scented smoke. Then another and another came out. After a while there were a hundred of the things grouped around in a semicircle, eyeless heads all turned to us – sucking in the smoke, palpitating to the drums.

“Some of the pygmies got up, took burning sticks from the fire and started off on the intersecting causeway, drumming as they went. The others quenched the fires. The leeches writhed along after the torch-bearers. The other pygmies fell in behind, herding them. I stuck in the rear. We went along until we came to the bank of the river. Those in the lead stopped drumming. They threw their smoking, blazing sticks into the water, and they cast into it handfuls of crushed berries – not the ones Sri and Sra rubbed on us. Red berries. The big leeches went writhing over the bank and into the river, following, I suppose, the smoke and the scent of the berries. Anyway, they went in – each and all of them.

“We went back, and out of the marsh. We camped on its edge. All that night they talked with the drums.

“They had talked the night before, and were uneasy; but I took it that it was the same worry they had when we started. They must have known what was going on, but they didn’t tell me then. Yesterday morning, though, they were happy and carefree. I knew something must have happened – that they must have got good news in the night. They were so good-natured that they told me why they were. Not just as you have – but the sense was the same—”

He chuckled.

“That morning we herded up a couple of hundred more of the tianusi and put them where the Little People think they’ll do the most good. Then we started back – and here I am.”

“Yes,” I asked suspiciously. “And is that all?”

“All for tonight, anyway,” he said. “I’m sleepy. I’m going to turn in. You go with Evalie and leave me strictly alone till tomorrow.”

I left him to sleep, determined to find out in the morning what he was holding back; I didn’t think it was entirely the journey and the leeches that accounted for his haggardness.

But in the morning I forgot all about it.

In the first place, when I awoke, Evalie was missing. I went over to the tent, looking for Jim. He was not there. The Little People had long since poured out of the cliffs, and were at work; they always worked in the morning – afternoons and nights they played and drummed and danced. They said Evalie and Tsantawu had gone into council with the elders. I went back to the tent.

In a little while Evalie and Jim came up. Evalie’s face was white and her eyes were haunted. Also they were misty with tears. Also, she was madder than hell. Jim was doing his best to be cheerful.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“You’re due for a little trip,” said Jim. “You’ve been wanting to see Nansur Bridge, haven’t you?”

“Yes.” I said.

“Well,” said Jim. “That’s where we’re going. Better put on your traveling clothes and your boots. If the trail is anything like what I’ve just gone over, you’ll need them. The Little People can slip through things – but we’re built different.”

I studied them, puzzled. Of course I’d wanted to see Nansur Bridge – but why should the fact we were to go there make them behave so oddly? I went to Evalie, and turned her face up to mine.

“You’ve been crying, Evalie. What’s wrong?”

She shook her head, slipped out of my arms and into the lair. I followed her. She was bending over a coffer, taking yards and yards of veils out of it. I swung her away from it and lifted her until her eyes were level with mine.

“What’s wrong, Evalie?”

A thought struck me. I lowered her to her feet.

“Who suggested going to Nansur Bridge?”

“The Little People… the elders… I fought against it… I don’t want you to go… they say you must…”

“I must go?” The thought grew clearer. “Then you need not go – nor Tsantawu. Unless you choose?”

“Let them try to keep me from going with you.” She stamped a foot furiously.

The thought was crystal clear, and I began to feel a bit irritated by the Little People. They were thorough to the point of annoyance. I now understood perfectly why I was to go to Nansur Bridge. The pygmies were not certain that their magic – including Evalie – had thoroughly taken. Therefore I was to look upon the home of the enemy – and be watched for my reactions. Well, that was fair enough, at that. Maybe the Witch-woman would be there. Maybe Tibur – Tibur who desired Evalie – Tibur who had laughed at me. Suddenly I was keen for going to Nansur Bridge. I began to put on my old clothes. As I was tying the high shoes, I glanced over at Evalie. She had coiled her hair and covered it with a cap; she had swathed her body from neck to knees in the veils and she was lacing high sandals that covered her feet and legs as completely as my boots did mine. She smiled faintly at my look of wonder.

“I do not like Tibur to look on me – not now!” she said.

I bent over her and took her in my arms. She set her lips to mine in a kiss that bruised them… When we came out, Jim and about fifty of the pygmies were waiting.

We struck diagonally across the plain away from the cliffs, heading north toward the river. We went over the slope, past one of the towers, and put feet on a narrow path like that which we had trod when coming into the land of the Little People. It wound through a precisely similar fern-brake. We went along it single file, and, perforce, in silence. We came out of it into a forest of close-growing, coniferous trees, through which the trail wound tortuously. We went through this for an hour or more, without once resting, the pygmies trotting along tirelessly. I looked at my watch. We had been going for four hours and had covered, I calculated, about twelve miles. There was no sign of bird or animal life.

Evalie seemed deep in thought and Jim had fallen into one of his fits of Indian taciturnity. I didn’t feel much like talking. It was a silent journey; not even the golden pygmies chattered, as was their habit. We came to a sparkling spring, and drank. One of the dwarfs swung a small cylindrical drum in front of him and began to tap out some message. It was answered at length from far ahead by other tappings.

We swung into our way once more. The conifers began to thin. At our left and far below us I began to catch glimpses of the white river and of the dense forest on its opposite bank. The conifers ceased and we came out upon a rocky waste. Just ahead of us was an out-thrust of cliff along whose base streamed the white river. The out-thrust cut off our view of what lay beyond. Here the pygmies halted and sent another drum message. The answer was startlingly close. Then around the edge of the cliff, half-way up, spear tips glinted. A group of little warriors stood there, scrutinizing us. They signaled, and we marched forward, over the waste.

There was a broad road up the side of the cliff, wide enough for six horses abreast. We climbed it. We came to the top, and I looked on Nansur Bridge and towered Karak.

Once, thousands or hundreds of thousands of years ago, there had been a small mountain here, rising from the valley floor. Nanbu, the white river, had eaten it away – all except a vein of black adamantine rock.

Nanbu had fallen, fallen, steadily gnawing at the softer stone until at last it was spanned by a bridge that was like a rainbow of jet. That gigantic bow of black rock winged over the abyss with the curved flight of an arrow.

Its base, on each side, was a mesa – sculptured as Nansur had been from the original mount.

The mesa, at whose threshold I stood, was flat-topped. But on the opposite side of the river, thrusting up from the mesa-top, was a huge, quadrangular pile of the same black rock as the bow of Nansur. It looked less built from than cut out of that rock. It covered I judged about half a square mile. Towers and turrets both square and round sprang up from it. It was walled.

There was something about that immense ebon citadel that struck me with the same sense of foreknowledge that I had felt when I had ridden into the ruins of the Gobi oasis. Also I thought it looked like that city of Dis which Dante glimpsed in Hades. And its antiquity hung over it like a sable garment.

Then I saw that Nansur was broken. Between the arch that winged from the side on which we stood and the arch that swept up and out from the side of the black citadel, there was a gap. It was as though a gigantic hammer had been swung down on the soaring bow, shattering it at its center. I thought of Bifrost Bridge over which the Valkyries rode, bearing the souls of the warriors to Valhalla; and I thought it had been as great a blasphemy to have broken Nansur Bridge as it would have been to have broken Bifrost.

Around the citadel were other buildings, hundreds of them outside its walls – buildings of gray and brown stone, with gardens; they stretched over acres. And on each side of this city were fertile fields and flowering groves. There was a wide road stretching far, far away to cliffs shrouded in the green veils. I thought I saw the black mouth of a cavern at its end.

“Karak!” whispered Evalie. “And Nansur Bridge! And Oh, Leif, beloved… but my heart is heavy… so heavy!”

I hardly heard her, looking at Karak. Stealthy memories had begun to stir. I trod on them, and put my arm around Evalie. We went on, and now I saw why Karak had been built where it was, for on the far side the black citadel commanded both ends of the valley, and when Nansur had been unbroken, it had commanded this approach as well.

Suddenly I felt a feverish eagerness to run out upon Nansur and look down on Karak from the broken end. I was restive at the slowness of the pygmies. I started forward. The garrison came crowding around me, staring up at me, whispering to one another, studying me with their yellow eyes. Drums began to beat.

They were answered by trumpets from the citadel.

I walked ever more rapidly toward Nansur. The fever of eagerness had become consuming. I wanted to run. I pushed the golden pygmies aside impatiently. Jim’s voice came to me, warningly:

“Steady, Leif – steady!”

I paid no heed. I went out upon Nansur. Vaguely, I realized that it was wide and that low parapets guarded its edges, and that the stone was ramped for the tread of horses and the tread of marching men. And that if the white river had shaped it, the hands of men had finished its carving.

I reached the broken end. A hundred feet below me the white river raced smoothly. There were no serpents. A dull red body, slug-like, monstrous, lifted above the milky current; then another and another, round mouths gaping – the leeches of the Little People, on guard.

There was a broad plaza between the walls of the dark citadel and the end of the bridge. It was empty. Set in the walls were massive gates of bronze. I felt a curious quivering inside me, a choking in my throat. I forgot Evalie; I forgot Jim; I forgot everything in watching those gates.

There was a louder blaring of the trumpets, a clanging of bars, and the gates swung open. Through them galloped a company, led by two riders, one on a great black horse, the other upon a white. They raced across the plaza, dropped from their mounts and came walking over the bridge. They stood facing me across the fifty-foot gap.

The one who had ridden the black horse was the Witch-woman, and the other I knew for Tibur the Smith – Tibur the Laugher. I had no eyes just then for the Witch-woman or her followers. I had eyes only for Tibur.

He was a head shorter than I, but strength great or greater than mine spoke from the immense shoulders, the thick body. His red hair hung sleekly straight to his shoulders. He was red-bearded. His eyes were violet-blue and lines of laughter crinkled at their corners; and the wide, loose mouth was a laughing mouth. But the laughter which had graven those lines on Tibur’s face was not the kind to make the bearer merry.

He wore a coat of mail. At his left side hung a huge war hammer. He looked me over from head to foot and back again with narrowed, mocking eyes. If I had hated Tibur before I had seen him, it was nothing to what I felt now.

I looked from him to the Witch-woman. Her cornflower-blue eyes were drinking me in; absorbed, wondering – amused. She, too, wore a coat of mail, over which streamed her red braids. Those who were clustered behind Tibur and the Witch-woman were only a blur to me.

Tibur leaned forward.

“Welcome – Dwayanu!” he jeered. “What has brought you out of your skulking place? My challenge?”

“Was it you I heard baying yesterday?” I said. “Hai – you picked a safe distance ere you began to howl, red dog!”

There was a laugh from the group around the Witch-woman, and I saw that they were women, fair and red-haired like herself, and that there were two tall men with Tibur. But the Witch-woman said nothing, still drinking me in, a curious speculation in her eyes.

Tibur’s face grew dark. One of the men leaned, and whispered to him. Tibur nodded, and swaggered forward. He called out to me:

“Have you grown soft during your wanderings, Dwayanu? By the ancient custom, by the ancient test, we must learn that before we acknowledge you – great Dwayanu. Stand fast—”

His hand dropped to the battle-hammer at his side. He hurled it at me.

The hammer was hurtling through the air at me with the speed of a bullet – yet it seemed to come slowly. I could even see the thong that held it to Tibur’s arm slowly lengthening as it flew…

Little doors were opening in my brain… the ancient test… Hai! but I knew that play… I waited motionless as the ancient custom prescribed… but they should have given me a shield… no matter… how slowly the great sledge seemed to come… and it seemed to me that the hand I thrust out to catch it moved as slowly…

I caught it. Its weight was all of twenty pounds, yet I caught it squarely, effortlessly, by its metal shaft. Hai! but did I not know the trick of that?… The little doors were opening faster now… and I knew another. With my other hand I gripped the thong that held the battle-hammer to Tibur’s arm and jerked him toward me.

The laugh was frozen on Tibur’s face. He tottered on Nansur’s broken edge. I heard behind me the piping shout of the pygmies…

The Witch-woman sliced down a knife and severed the thong. She jerked Tibur back from the verge. Rage swept me… that was not in the play… by the ancient test it was challenger and challenged alone… I swung the great hammer around my head and around, and hurled it back at Tibur; it whistled as it flew and the severed thong streamed rigid in its wake. He threw himself aside, but not quickly enough. The sledge struck him on a shoulder. A glancing blow, but it dropped him.

And now I laughed across the gulf.

The Witch-woman leaned forward, incredulity flooding the speculation in her eyes. She was no longer amused. No! And Tibur jerked himself up on one knee, glaring at me, his laughter lines twisted into nothing like mirth of any kind.

Still other doors, tiny doors, opening in my brain… They wouldn’t believe I was Dwayanu… Hai! I would show them. I dipped into the pocket of my belt. Ripped open the buckskin pouch. Drew out the ring of Khalk’ru. I held it up. The green light glinted on it. The yellow stone seemed to expand. The black octopus to grow…

“Am I Dwayanu? Look on this! Am I Dwayanu?”

I heard a woman scream – I knew that voice. And I heard a man calling, shouting to me – and that voice I knew too. The little doors clicked shut, the memories that had slipped through them darted back before they closed…

Why, it was Evalie who was screaming! And Jim who was shouting at me! What was the matter with them? Evalie was facing me, arms outstretched. And there was stark unbelief and horror – and loathing – in the brown eyes fastened on me. And rank upon rank, the Little People were closing around the pair of them – barring me from them. Their spears and arrows were leveled at me. They were hissing like a horde of golden snakes, their faces distorted with hatred, their eyes fastened on the ring of Khalk’ru still held high above my head.

And now I saw that hatred reflected upon the face of Evalie – and the loathing deepen in her eyes.

“Evalie!” I cried, and would have leaped toward her… Back went the hands of the pygmies for the throwing cast; the arrows trembled in their bows.

“Don’t move, Leif! I’m coming!” Jim jumped forward. Instantly the pygmies swarmed round and upon him. He swayed and went down under them.

“Evalie!” I cried again.

I saw the loathing fade, and heartbreak come into her face. She called some command.

A score of pygmies shot by her, on each side, casting down their bows and spears as they raced toward me. Stupidly, I watched them come; among them I saw Sri.

They struck me like little living battering rams. I was thrust backward. My foot struck air—

The pygmies clinging to my legs, harrying me like terriers, I toppled over the edge of Nansur.

BOOK OF
THE WITCH-WOMAN

— XIII —

KARAK

I had sense enough to throw my hands up over my head, and so I went down feet first. The pygmies hanging to my legs helped that, too. When I struck the water I sank deep and deep. The old idea is that when a man drowns his whole past life runs through his mind in a few seconds, like a reversed cinema reel. I don’t know about that, but I do know that in my progress into Nanbu’s depths and up again I thought faster than ever before in my life.

In the first place I realized that Evalie had ordered me thrown off the bridge. That made me white-hot mad. Why hadn’t she waited and given me a chance to explain the ring! Then I thought of how many chances I’d had to explain – and hadn’t taken one of them. Also that the pygmies had been in no mood for waiting, and that Evalie had held back their spears and arrows and given me a run for my life, even though it might be a brief one. Then I thought of my utter folly in flashing the ring at that particular moment, and I couldn’t blame the Little People for thinking me an emissary of Khalk’ru. And I saw again the heartbreak in Evalie’s eyes, and my rage vanished in a touch of heartbreak of my own.

After that, quite academically, the idea came to me that Tibur’s hammer-play explained old God Thor of the Norse and his hammer Mjolnir, the Smasher, which always returned to his hand after he had thrown it – to make it more miraculous the skalds had left out that practical detail of the thong; here was still another link between the Uighur or Ayjir and the Aesir – I’d talk to

Jim about it. And then I knew I couldn’t get back to Jim to talk to him about that or anything else because the pygmies would certainly be waiting for me, and would quite as certainly drive me back among the leeches, even if I managed to get as far as their side of Nanbu. At that thought, if a man entirely immersed in water can break into a cold sweat I did it. I would much rather pass out by way of the Little People’s spears and darts or even Tibur’s smasher than be drained dry by those sucking mouths.

Just then I broke through the surface of Nanbu, trod water for a moment, clearing my eyes, and saw the red-slug back of a leech gliding toward me not twenty feet away. I cast a despairing glance around me. The current was swift and had borne me several hundred yards below the bridge. Also it had carried me toward the Karak side, which seemed about five hundred feet away. I turned to face the leech. It came slowly, as though sure of me. I planned to dive under it and try to make for the shore… if – only there were no others…

I heard a chattering shout. Sri shot past me. He raised an arm and pointed at Karak. Clearly he was telling me to get there as quickly as I could. I had forgotten all about him, except for a momentary flash of wrath that he had joined my assailants. Now I saw what an injustice I had done him. He swam straight to the big leech and slapped it alongside its mouth. The creature bent toward him, actually it nuzzled him. I waited to see no more, but struck out as fast as my boots would let me for the river bank.

That was no pleasant swim, no! The place was thick with the gliding red backs. Without question it was only Sri that saved me from them. He came scuttering back, and he circled round and round me as I ploughed on; he drove the leeches away. I touched bottom, and scrambled over rocks to the safety of the bank. The golden pygmy sent one last call to me. What he said I could not hear. I stood there, gasping for breath, and saw him shooting across the white water like a yellow flying fish, a half-dozen of the red slug-backs gliding in his wake.

I looked up at Nansur Bridge. The Little People’s end of it and the parapets were crowded with pygmies, watching me. The other side was empty. I looked around me. I was in the shadow of the walls of the black citadel. They arose, smooth, impregnable, for a hundred feet. Between me and them was a wide plaza, similar to that over which Tibur and the Witch-woman had ridden from the bronze gates. It was bordered with squat, one-storied houses of stone; there were many small flowering trees. Beyond the bordering houses were others, larger, more pretentious, set farther apart. Not so far away and covering part of the plaza was an everyday, open-air market.

From the bordering houses and from the market, scores of people were pouring down upon me. They came swiftly, but they came silently, not calling to one another, not signaling nor summoning – intent upon me. I felt for my automatic and swore, remembering that I had not worn it for days. Something flashed on my hand…

The ring of Khalk’ru! I must have slipped it on my thumb when the pygmies had rushed me. Well, the ring had brought me here. Surely its effect would not be less upon these people, than it had been upon those who had faced me from the far side of the broken bridge. At any rate, it was all I had. I turned it so that the stone was hidden in my hand.

They were close now, and mostly women and girls and girl children. They all wore much the same kind of garment, a smock that came down to their knees and which left the right breast bare. Without exception, they were red-haired and blue-eyed, their skins creamy-white and delicate rose, and they were tall and strong and beautifully formed. They might have been Viking maids and mothers come to welcome home some dragon-ship from its seafaring. The children were little blue-eyed angels. I took note of the men; there were not many of them, a dozen perhaps. They, too, had the red polls and blue eyes. The older wore short beards, the younger were clean-shaven. They were not so tall by several inches as the run of the women. None, men nor women, came within half a head of my height. They bore no weapons.

They halted a few yards from me, looking at me in silence. Their eyes ran over me and stopped at my yellow hair, and rested there.

There was a bustle at the edge of the crowd. A dozen women pushed through and walked toward me. They wore short kirtles; there were short swords in their girdles and they carried javelins in their hands; unlike the others, their breasts were covered. They ringed me, javelins raised, so close that the tips almost touched me.

The leader’s bright blue eyes were bold, more soldier’s than woman’s.

“The yellow-haired stranger! Luka has smiled on us this day!”

The woman beside her leaned and whispered, but I caught the words:

“Tibur would give us more for him than Lur.”

The leader shook her head.

“Too dangerous. We’ll enjoy Lur’s reward longer.”

She looked me over, quite frankly.

“It’s a shame to waste him,” she said.

“Lur won’t,” the other answered, cynically.

The leader gave me a prod of her javelin, and motioned toward the citadel wall.

“Onward, Yellow Hair,” she said. “It’s a pity you can’t understand me. Or I’d tell you something for your own good – at a price, of course.”

She smiled at me, and prodded me again. I felt like grinning back at her; she was so much like a hard-boiled sergeant I’d known in the War. I spoke, instead, sternly:

“Summon Lur to me with fitting escort, O! woman whose tongue rivals the drum stick.”

She gaped at me, her javelin dropping from her hand. Quite evidently, although an alarm had been sounded for me, the fact that I could speak the Uighur had not been told.

“Summon Lur at once,” I said. “Or, by Khalk’ru—”

I did not complete the sentence. I turned the ring and held up my hand.

There was a gasp of terror from the crowd. They went down on their knees, heads bent low. The soldier-woman’s face whitened, and she and the others dropped before me. And then there was a grating of bars. An immense block opened in the wall of the citadel not far away.

Out of the opening, as though my words had summoned them, rode the Witch-woman with Tibur beside her, and at their heels the little troop who had watched me from Nansur Bridge.

They waited, staring at the kneeling crowd. Then Tibur spurred his horse; the Witch-woman thrust out a hand and stayed him, and they spoke together. The soldier touched my foot.

“Let us rise,. Lord,” she said. I nodded, and she jumped up with a word to her women. Again they ringed me. I read the fear in the leader’s eyes, and appeal. I smiled at her.

“Don’t fear. I heard nothing,” I whispered.

“Then you have a friend in Dara,” she muttered. “By Luka – they would boil us for what we said!”

“I heard nothing,” I repeated.

“A gift for a gift,” she breathed. “Watch Tibur’s left hand should you fight him.”

The little troop was in motion; they came riding slowly toward me. As they drew near I could see that Tibur’s face was dark, and that he was holding in his temper with an effort. He halted his horse at the edge of the crowd. His rage fell upon them; for a moment I thought he was going to ride them down.

“Up, you swine!” he roared. “Since when has Karak knelt to any but its rulers?”

They arose, huddled together with frightened faces as the troop rode through them. I looked up at the Witch-woman and the Laugher.

Tibur glowered down on me, his hand fumbling at his hammer; the two big men who had flanked him on the bridge edged close to me, long swords in hand. The Witch-woman said nothing, studying me intently yet with a certain cynical impersonality I found disquieting; evidently she still had not made up her mind about me and was waiting for some word or move of mine to guide her. I didn’t like the situation very much. If it came to a dog fight I would have little chance with three mounted men, to say nothing of the women. I had the feeling that the Witch-woman did not want me killed out-of-hand, but then she might be a bit late in succoring me – and beyond that I had no slightest wish to be beaten up, trussed up, carried into Karak a prisoner.

Also I began to feel a hot and unreasoning resentment against these people who dared bar my way, dared hold me back from whatever way I chose to go, an awakening arrogance – a stirring of those mysterious memories that had cursed me ever since I had carried the ring of Khalk’ru…

Well, those memories had served me on Nansur Bridge when Tibur cast the hammer at me… and what was it Jim had said?… to let Dwayanu ride when I faced the Witch-woman… well, let him… it was the only way… the bold way… the olden way… It was as though I heard the words! I threw my mind wide open to the memories, or to – Dwayanu.

There was a tiny tingling shock in my brain, and then something like the surging up of a wave toward that consciousness which was Leif Langton. I managed to thrust it back before it had entirely submerged that consciousness. It retreated, but sullenly – nor did it retreat far. No matter, so long as it did not roll over me… I pushed the soldiers aside and walked to Tibur. Something of what had occurred must have stamped itself on my face, changed me. Doubt crept into the Witch-woman’s eyes. Tibur’s hand fell from his hammer, and he backed his horse away. I spoke, and my wrathful voice fell strangely on my own ears.

“Where is my horse? Where are my arms? Where are my standard and my spearsmen? Why are the drums and the trumpets silent? Is it thus Dwayanu is greeted when he comes to a city of the Ayjir! By Zarda, but this is not to be home!”

Now the Witch-woman spoke, mockery in the clear, deep bell-toned voice, and I felt that whatever hold I had gained over her had in some way slipped.

“Hold your hand, Tibur! I will speak to – Dwayanu. And you – if you are Dwayanu – scarcely can hold us to blame. It has been long and long since human eyes rested on you – and never in this land. So how could we know you? And when first we saw you, the little yellow dogs ran you away from us. And when next we saw you, the little yellow dogs ran you to us. If we have not received you as Dwayanu has a right to expect from a city of the Ayjir, equally is it true that no city of the Ayjir has ever before been so visited by Dwayanu.”

Well, that was true enough, admirable reasoning, lucid and all of that. The part of me that was Lief Langdon, and engaged in rather desperate struggle to retain control, recognized it. Yet the unreasoning anger grew. I held up the ring of Khalk’ru.

“You may not know Dwayanu – but you know this.”

“I know you have it,” she said, levelly. “But I do not know how you came by it. In itself it proves nothing.”

Tibur leaned forward, grinning.

“Tell us where you did come from. Are you by-blow of Sirk?”

There was a murmur from the crowd. The Witch-woman leaned forward, frowning. I heard her murmur, half-contemptuously:

“Your strength was never in your head, Tibur!”

Nevertheless, I answered him.

“I come,” I said bleakly, “from the Mother-land of the Ayjir. From the land that vomited your shivering forefathers, red toad!”

I shot a glance at the Witch-woman. That had jolted her all right. I saw her body stiffen, her cornflower eyes distend and darken, her red lips part; and her women bent to each other, whispering, while the murmur of the crowd swelled.

“You lie!” roared Tibur. “There is no life in the Mother-land. There is no life elsewhere than here. Khalk’ru has sucked earth dry of Life. Except here. You lie!”

His hand dropped to his hammer.

And suddenly I saw red; all the world dissolved in a mist of red. The horse of the man closest to me was a noble animal. I had been watching it – a roan stallion, strong as the black stallion that had carried me from the Gobi oasis. I reached up, caught at its jaw, and pulled it down to its knees. Taken unaware, its rider toppled forward, somersaulted over its head and fell at my feet. He was up again like a cat, sword a-thrust at me. I caught his arm before he could strike and swung up my left fist. It cracked on his jaw; his head snapped back, and he dropped. I snatched up the sword, and swung myself on the rising horse’s back. Before Tibur could move I had the point of the sword at his throat.

“Stop! I grant you Dwayanu! Hold your hand!” It was the Witch-woman’s voice, low, almost whispering.

I laughed. I pressed the point of the sword deeper into Tiber’s throat.

“Am I Dwayanu? Or by-blow of Sirk?”

“You are – Dwayanu!” he groaned.

I laughed again.

“I am Dwayanu! Then guide me into Karak to make amends for your insolence, Tibur!”

I drew the sword away from his throat.

Yes, I drew it back – and by all the mad mixed gods of that mad mixed mind of mine at that moment I would that I had thrust it through his throat!

But I did not, and so that chance passed. I spoke to the Witch-woman:

“Ride at my right hand. Let Tibur ride before.”

The man I had struck down was on his feet, swaying unsteadily. Lur spoke to one of her women. She slipped from her horse, and with Tibur’s other follower helped him upon it.

We rode across the plaza, and through the walls of the black citadel.

— XIV —

IN THE BLACK CITADEL

The bars that held the gate crashed down behind us. The passage through the walls was wide and long and lined with soldiers, most of them women. They stared at me; their discipline was good, for they were silent, saluting us with upraised swords.

We came out of the walls into an immense square, bounded by the towering black stone of the citadel. It was stone-paved and bare, and there must have been half a thousand soldiers in it, again mostly women and one and all of the strong-bodied, blue-eyed, red-haired type. It was a full quarter-mile to the side – the square. Opposite where we entered, there was a group of people on horses, of the same class as those who rode with us, or so I judged. They were clustered about a portal in the farther walls, and toward these we trotted.

About a third of the way over, we passed a circular pit a hundred feet wide in which water boiled and bubbled and from which steam arose. A hot spring, I supposed; I could feel its breath. Around it were slender stone pillars from each of which an arm jutted like that of a gallows, and from the ends of them dangled thin chains. It was, indefinably, an unpleasant and ominous place. I didn’t like the look of it at all. Something of this must have shown on my face, for Tibur spoke, blandly.

“Our cooking pot.”

“No easy one from which to ladle broth,” I said. I thought him jesting.

“Ah – but the meat we cook there is not the kind we eat,” he answered, still more blandly. And his laughter roared out.

I felt a little sick as his meaning reached me. It was tortured human flesh which those chains were designed to hold, lowering it slowly inch by inch into that devil’s cauldron. But I only nodded indifferently, and rode on.

The Witch-woman had paid no attention to us; her russet head bent, she went on deep in thought, though now and then I caught her oblique glance at me. We drew near the portal. She signaled those who awaited there, a score of the red-haired maids and women and a half-dozen men; they dismounted. The Witch-woman leaned to me and whispered:

“Turn the ring so its seal will be covered.”

I obeyed her, asking no question.

We arrived at the portal. I looked at the group there. The women wore the breast-revealing upper garment; their legs were covered with loose baggy trousers tied in at the ankles; they had wide girdles in which were two swords, one long and one short. The men were clothed in loose blouses, and the same baggy trousers; in their girdles beside the swords – or rather, hanging from their girdles – were hammers like that of the Smith, but smaller. The women who had gathered around me after I had climbed out of Nanbu had been fair enough, but these were far more attractive, finer, with a stamp of breeding the others had not had. They stared at me as frankly, as appraisingly, as had the soldier woman and her lieutenant; their eyes rested upon my yellow hair and stopped there, as though fascinated. On all their faces was that suggestion of cruelty latent in the amorous mouth of Lur.

“We dismount here,” said the Witch-woman, “to go where we may become – better acquainted.”

I nodded as before, indifferently. I had been thinking that it was a foolhardy thing I had done, thus to thrust myself alone among these people; but I had been thinking, too, that I could have done nothing else except have gone to Sirk, and where that was I did not know; and that if I had tried I would have been a hunted outlaw on this side of white Nanbu, as I would be on the other. The part of me that was Leif Langdon was thinking that – but the part of me that was Dwayanu was not thinking like that at all. It was fanning the fire of recklessness, the arrogance, that had carried me thus far in safety; whispering that none among the Ayjir had the right to question me or to bar my way, whispering with increasing insistence that I should have been met by dipping standards and roll of drums and fanfare of trumpets. The part that was Leif Langdon answered that there was nothing else to do but continue as I had been doing, that it was the game to play, the line to take, the only way. And that other part, ancient memories, awakening of Dwayanu, post-hypnotic suggestion of the old Gobi priest, impatiently asked why I should question even myself, urging that it was no game – but truth! And that it would brook little more insolence from these degenerate dogs of the Great Race – and little more cowardice from me!

So I flung myself from my horse, and stood looking arrogantly down upon the faces turned to me, literally looking down, for I was four inches or more taller than the tallest of them. Lur touched my arm. Between her and Tibur I strode through the portal and into the black citadel.

It was a vast vestibule through which we passed, and dimly lighted by slits far up in the polished rock. We went by groups of silently saluting soldier-women; we went by many transverse passages. We came at last to a great guarded door, and here Lur and Tibur dismissed their escorts. The door rolled slowly open; we entered and it rolled shut behind us.

The first thing I saw was the Kraken.

It sprawled over one wall of the chamber into which we had come. My heart leaped as I saw it, and for an instant I had an almost ungovernable impulse to turn and run. And now I saw that the figure of the Kraken was a mosaic set in the black stone. Or rather, that the yellow field in which it lay was a mosaic and that the Black Octopus had been cut from the stone of the wall itself. Its unfathomable eyes of jet regarded me with that suggestion of lurking malignity the yellow pygmies had managed to imitate so perfectly in their fettered symbol inside the hollow rock.

Something stirred beneath the Kraken. A face looked out on me from under a hood of black. At first I thought it the old priest of the Gobi himself, and then I saw that this man was not so old, and that his eyes were clear deep blue and that his face was unwrinkled, and cold and white and expressionless as though carved from marble. Then I remembered what Evalie had told me, and knew this must be Yodin the High Priest. He sat upon a throne-like chair behind a long low table on which were rolls like the papyrus rolls of the Egyptians, and cylinders of red metal which were, I supposed, their containers. On each side of him was another of the thrones.

He lifted a thin white hand and beckoned me.

“Come to me – you who call yourself Dwayanu.”

The voice was cold and passionless as the face, but courteous. I seemed to hear again the old priest when he had called me to him. I walked over, more as one who humors another a little less than equal than as though obeying a summons. And that was precisely the way I felt. He must have read my thought, for I saw a shadow of anger pass over his face. His eyes searched me.

“You have a certain ring, I am told.”

With the same feeling of humoring one slightly inferior, I turned the bevel of the Kraken ring and held my hand out toward him. He looked at the ring, and the white face lost its immobility. He thrust a hand into his girdle, and drew from it a box, and out of it another ring, and placed it beside mine. I saw that it was not so large, and that the setting was not precisely the same. He studied the two rings, and then with a hissing intake of breath he snatched my hands and turned them over, scanning the palms. He dropped them and leaned back in his chair.

“Why do you come to us?” he asked.

A surge of irritation swept me.

“Does Dwayanu stand like a common messenger to be questioned?” I said harshly.

I walked around the table and dropped into one of the chairs beside him.

“Let drink be brought, for I am thirsty. Until my thirst is quenched, I will not talk.”

A faint flush stained the white face; there was a growl from Tibur. He was glaring at me with reddened face; the Witch-woman stood, gaze intent upon me, no mockery in it now; the speculative interest was intensified. It came to me that the throne I had usurped was Tibur’s. I laughed.

“Beware, Tibur,” I said. “This may be an omen!”

The High Priest intervened, smoothly.

“If he be indeed Dwayanu, Tibur, then no honor is too great for him. See that wine is brought.”

The look that the Smith shot at Yodin seemed to me to hold a question. Perhaps the Witch-woman thought so too. She spoke quickly.

“I will see to it.”

She walked to the door, opened it and gave an order to a guard. She waited; there was silence among us while she waited. I thought many things. I thought, for example, that I did not like the look that had passed between Yodin and Tibur, and that while I might trust Lur for the present – still she would drink first when the wine came. And I thought that I would tell them little of how I came to the Shadowed-land. And I thought of Jim – and I thought of Evalie. It made my heart ache so that I felt the loneliness of nightmare; and then I felt the fierce contempt of that other part of me, and felt it strain against the fetters I had put on it. Then the wine came.

The Witch-woman carried ewer and goblet over to the table and set them before me. She poured yellow wine into the goblet and handed it to me. I smiled at her.

“The cup-bearer drinks first,” I said. “So it was in the olden days, Lur. And the olden customs are dear to me.”

Tibur gnawed his lip and tugged at his beard at that, but Lur took up the goblet and drained it. I refilled it, and raised it to Tibur. I had a malicious desire to bait the Smith.

“Would you have done that had you been the cup-bearer, Tibur?” I asked him and drank.

That was good wine! It tingled through me, and I felt the heady recklessness leap up under it as though lashed. I filled the goblet again and tossed it off.

“Come up, Lur, and sit with us,” I said. “Tibur, join us.”

The Witch-woman quietly took the third throne. Tibur was watching me, and I saw a new look in his eyes, something of that furtive speculation I had surprised in Lur’s. The white-faced priest’s gaze was far away. It occurred to me that the three of them were extremely busy with their own thoughts, and that Tibur at least, was becoming a bit uneasy. When he answered me his voice had lost all truculency.

“Well and good – Dwayanu!” he said, and, lifting a bench, carried it to the table, and set it where he could watch our faces.

“I answer your question,” I turned to Yodin. “I came here at the summons of Khalk’ru.”

“It is strange,” he said, “that I, who am High Priest of Khalk’ru, knew nothing of any summons.”

“The reasons for that I do not know,” I said, casually. “Ask them of him you serve.”

He pondered over that.

“Dwayanu lived long and long and long ago,” he said. “Before—”

“Before the Sacrilege. True.” I took another drink of the wine. “Yet – I am here.”

For the first time his voice lost its steadiness.

“You – you know of the Sacrilege!” His fingers clutched my wrist. “Man – whoever you are – from whence do you come?”

“I come,” I answered, “from the Mother-land.”

His fingers tightened around my wrist. He echoed Tibur.

“The Mother-land is a dead land. Khalk’ru in his anger destroyed its life. There is no life save here, where Khalk’ru hears his servants and lets life be.”

He did not believe that; I could tell it by the involuntary glance he had given the Witch-woman and the Smith. Nor did they.

“The Mother-land,” I said, “is bleached bones. Its cities lie covered in shrouds of sand. Its rivers are waterless, and all that runs within their banks is sand driven by the arid winds. Yet still is there life in the Mother-land, and although the ancient blood is thinned – still it runs. And still is Khalk’ru worshipped and feared in the place from whence I came – and still in other lands the earth spawns life as always she has done.”

I poured some more wine. It was good wine, that.

Under it I felt my recklessness increase… under it Dwayanu was stronger… well, this was a tight box I was in, so let him be…

“Show me the place from whence you came,” the High Priest spoke swiftly. He gave me a tablet of wax and a stylus. I traced the outline of Northern Asia upon it and of Alaska. I indicated the Gobi and approximately the location of the oasis, and also the position of the Shadowed-land.

Tibur got up to look at it; their three heads bent over it. The priest fumbled among the rolls, picked one, and they compared it with the tablet. It appeared like a map, but if so the northern coast line was all wrong. There was a line traced on it that seemed to be a route of some sort. It was over-scored and under-scored with symbols. I wondered whether it might not be the record of the trek those of the Old Race had made when they had fled from the Gobi.

They looked up at last; there was perturbation in the priest’s eyes, angry apprehension in Tibur’s, but the eyes of the Witch-woman were clear and untroubled – as though she had made up her mind about something and knew precisely what she was going to do.

“It is the Mother-land!” the priest said. “Tell me – did the black-haired stranger who fled with you across the river and who watched you hurled from Nansur come also from there?”

There was sheer malice in that question. I began to dislike Yodin.

“No,” I answered. “He comes from an old land of the Rrrllya.”

That brought the priest up standing; Tibur swore incredulously; and even the Witch-woman was shaken from her serenity.

“Another land – of the Rrrllya! But that cannot be!” whispered Yodin.

“Nevertheless it is so,” I said.

He sank back, and thought for a while.

“He is your friend?”

“My brother by the ancient blood rite of his people.”

“He would join you here?”

“He would if I sent for him. But that I will not do. Not yet. He is well off where he is.”

I was sorry I had said that the moment I had spoken. Why – I did not know. But I would have given much to have recalled the words.

Again the priest was silent.

“These are strange things you tell us,” he said at last. “And you have come to us strangely for – Dwayanu. You will not mind if for a little we take counsel?”

I looked in the ewer. It was still half-full. I liked that wine – most of all because it dulled my sorrow over Evalie.

“Speak as long as you please,” I answered, graciously. They went off to a comer of the room. I poured myself another drink, and another. I forgot about Evalie. I began to feel I was having a good time. I wished Jim was with me, but I wished I hadn’t said he would come if I sent for him. And then I took another drink and forgot about Jim. Yes, I was having a damned good time… well, wait till I let Dwayanu loose a bit more! I’d have a better one… I was sleepy… I wondered what old Barr would say if he could be here with me…

I came to myself with a start. The High Priest was standing at my side, talking. I had a vague idea he had been talking to me for some time but I couldn’t remember what about. I also had the idea that someone had been fumbling with my thumb. It was clenched stubbornly in my palm, so tightly that the stone had bruised the flesh. The effect of the wine had entirely worn off I looked around the room. Tibur and the Witch-woman were gone. Why hadn’t I seen them go? Had I been asleep? I studied Yodin’s face. There was a look of strain about it, of bafflement; and yet I sensed some deep satisfaction. It was a queer composite of expression. And I didn’t like it.

“The others have gone to prepare a fitting reception for you,” he said. “To make ready a place for you and fitting apparel.”

I arose and stood beside him.

“As Dwayanu?” I asked.

“Not as yet,” he answered urbanely. “But as an honored guest. The other is too serious a matter to decide without further proof.”

“And that proof?”

He looked at me a long moment before answering.

“That Khalk’ru will appear at your prayer!”

A little shudder went through me at that. He was watching me so closely that he must have seen it.

“Curb your impatience,” his voice was cold honey. “You will not have long to wait. Until then I probably shall not see you. In the meantime – I have a request to make.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“That you will not wear the ring of Khalk’ru openly – except, of course, at such times as may seem necessary to you.”

It was the same thing Lur had asked me. Yet scores had seen me with the ring – more must know I had it. He read my indecision.

“It is a holy thing,” he said. “I did not know another existed until word was brought me that you had shown it on Nansur. It is not well to cheapen holy things. I do not wear mine except when I think it – necessary.”

I wondered under what circumstances he considered it – necessary. And I wished fervently I knew under what circumstances it would be helpful to me. His eyes were searching me, and I hoped he had not read that thought.

“I see no reason to deny that request,” I said. I slipped the ring off my thumb and into my belt pocket.

“I was sure you would not,” he murmured.

A gong sounded lightly. He pressed the side of the table, and the door opened. Three youths clothed in the smocks of the people entered and stood humbly waiting.

“They are your servants. They will take you to your place,” Yodin said. He bent his head. I went out with the three young Ayjirs. At the door was a guard of a dozen women with a bold-eyed young captain. They saluted me smartly. We marched down the corridor and at length turned into another. I looked back.

I was just in time to see the Witch-woman slipping into the High Priest’s chamber.

We came to another guarded door. It was thrown open and into it I was ushered, followed by the three youths.

“We are also your servants. Lord,” the bold-eyed captain spoke. “If there is anything you wish, summon me by this. We shall be at the door.”

She handed me a small gong of jade, saluted again and marched out.

The room had an odd aspect of familiarity. Then I realized it was much like that to which I had been taken in the oasis. There were the same oddly shaped stools, and chairs of metal, the same wide, low divan bed, the tapestried walls, the rugs upon the floor. Only here there were no signs of decay. True, some of the tapestries were time-faded, but exquisitely so; there were no rags or tatters in them. The others were beautifully woven but fresh as though just from the loom. The ancient hangings were threaded with the same scenes of the hunt and war as the haggard drapings of the oasis; the newer ones bore scenes of the land under the mirage. Nansur Bridge sprang unbroken over one, on another was a battle with the pygmies, on another a scene of the fantastically lovely forest – with the white wolves of Lur slinking through the trees. Something struck me as wrong. I looked and looked before I knew what it was. The arms of its olden master had been in the chamber of the oasis, his swords and spears, helmet and shield; in this one there was not a weapon. I remembered that I had carried the sword of Tibur’s man into the chamber of the High Priest. I did not have it now.

A disquietude began to creep over me. I turned to the three young Ayjirs, and began to unbutton my shirt. They came forward silently, and started to strip me. And suddenly I felt a consuming thirst.

“Bring me water,” I said to one of the youths. He paid not the slightest attention to me.

“Bring me water,” I said again, thinking he had not heard. “I am thirsty.”

He continued tranquilly taking off a boot. I touched him on the shoulder.

“Bring me water to drink,” I said, emphatically.

He smiled up at me, opened his mouth and pointed. He had no tongue. He pointed to his ears. I understood that he was telling me he was both dumb and deaf. I pointed to his two comrades. He nodded.

My disquietude went up a point or two. Was this a general custom of the rulers of Karak; had this trio been especially adapted not only for silent service but unhearing service on special guests? Guests or – prisoners?

I tapped the gong with a finger. At once the door opened, and the young captain stood there, saluting.

“I am thirsty,” I said. “Bring water.”

For answer she crossed the room and pulled aside one of the hangings. Behind it was a wide, deep alcove.

Within the floor was a shallow pool through which clean water was flowing, and close beside it was a basin of porphyry from which sprang a jet like a tiny fountain, She took a goblet from a niche, filled it under the jet and handed it to me. It was cold and sparkling.

“Is there anything more, Lord?” she asked. I shook my head, and she marched out.

I went back to the ministrations of the three deaf-mutes. They took off the rest of my clothes and began to massage me, with some light, volatile oil. While they were doing it, my mind began to function rather actively. In the first place, the sore spot in my palm kept reminding me of that impression someone had been trying to get the ring off my thumb. In the second place, the harder I thought the more I was sure that before I awakened or had come out of my abstraction or drink or whatever it was, the white-faced priest had been talking, talking, talking to me, questioning me, probing into my dulled mind. And in the third place, I had lost almost entirely all the fine carelessness of consequences that had been so successful in putting me where I was – in fact, I was far too much Leif Langdon and too little Dwayanu. What had the priest been at with his talking, talking, questioning – and what had I said?

I jumped out of the hands of my masseurs, ran over to my trousers and dived into my belt. The ring was there right enough. I searched for my old pouch. It was gone. I rang the gong. The captain answered. I was mother-naked, but I hadn’t the slightest sense of her being a woman.

“Hear me,” I said. “Bring me wine. And bring with it a safe, strong case big enough to hold a ring. Bring with that a strong chain with which I can hang the case around my neck. Do you understand?”

“Done at once, Lord,” she said. She was not long in returning. She set down the ewer she was carrying and reached into her blouse. She brought out a locket suspended from a metal chain. She snapped it open.

“Will this do, Lord?”

I turned from her, and put the ring of Khalk’ru into the locket. It held it admirably.

“Most excellently,” I told her, “but I have nothing to give you in return.”

She laughed.

“Reward enough to have beheld you, Lord,” she said, not at all ambiguously, and marched away. I hung the locket round my neck. I poured a drink and then another. I went back to my masseurs and began to feel better. I drank while they were bathing me, and I drank while they were trimming my hair and shaving me. And the more I drank the more Dwayanu came up, coldly wrathful and resentful.

My dislike for Yodin grew. It did not lessen while the trio were dressing me. They put on me a silken under-vest. They covered it with a gorgeous tunic of yellow shot through with metallic threads of blue; they covered my long legs with the baggy trousers of the same stuff; they buckled around my waist a broad, gem-studded girdle, and they strapped upon my feet sandals of soft golden leather. They had shaved me, and now they brushed and dressed my hair which they had shorn to the nape of my neck.

By the time they were through with me, the wine was done. I was a little drunk, willing to be more so, and in no mood to be played with. I rang the gong for the captain. I wanted some more wine, and I wanted to know when, where and how I was going to eat. The door opened, but it was not the captain who came in.

It was the Witch-woman.

— XV —

THE LAKE OF THE GHOSTS

Lur paused, red lips parted, regarding me. Plainly she was startled by the difference the Ayjir trappings and the ministrations of the mutes had made in the dripping, bedraggled figure that had scrambled out of the river not long before. Her eyes glowed, and a deeper rose stained her cheeks. She came close.

“Dwayanu – you will go with me?”

I looked at her, and laughed.

“Why not, Lur – but also, why?”

She whispered:

“You are in danger – whether you are Dwayanu or whether you are not. I have persuaded Yodin to let you remain with me until you go to the temple. With me you shall be safe – until then.”

“And why did you do this for me, Lur?”

She made no answer – only set one hand upon my shoulder and looked at me with blue eyes grown soft; and though common sense told me there were other reasons for her solicitude than any quick passion for me, still at that touch and look the blood raced through my veins, and it was hard to master my voice and speak.

“I will go with you, Lur.”

She went to the door, opened it.

“Ouarda, the cloak and cap.” She came back to me with a black cloak which she threw over my shoulders and fastened round my neck; she pulled down over my yellow hair a close-fitting cap shaped like the Phyrgian and she tucked my hair into it. Except for my height it made me like any other Ayjir in Karak.

“There is need for haste, Dwayanu.”

“I am ready. Wait—”

I went over to where my old clothes lay, and rolled them up around my boots. After all – I might need them. The Witch-woman made no comment, opened the door and we went out. The captain and her guard were in the corridor, also a half-dozen of Lur’s women, and handsome creatures they were. Then I noticed that each of them wore the light coat of mail and, besides the two swords, carried throwing hammers. So did Lur. Evidently they were ready for trouble, whether with me or with someone else; and whichever way it was, I didn’t like it.

“Give me your sword,” I said abruptly to the captain. She hesitated.

“Give it to him,” said Lur.

I weighed the weapon in my hand; not so heavy as I would have liked, but still a sword. I thrust it into my girdle, and bunched the bundle of my old clothes beneath my left arm, under the cloak. We set off down the corridor, leaving the guard at the door.

We went only a hundred yards, and then into a small bare chamber. We had met no one. Lur drew a breath of relief, walked over to a side, and a slab of stone slid open, revealing a passage. We went into that and the slab closed, leaving us in pitch-darkness. There was a spark, produced I don’t know how, and the place sprang into light from torches in the hands of two of the women. They burned with a clear, steady and silvery flame. The torch-bearers marched ahead of us. After a while we came to the end of that passage, the torches were extinguished, another stone slid away and we stepped out. I heard whispering, and after the glare of the flambeaux had worn away, I saw that we were at the base of one of the walls of the black citadel, and that close by were half a dozen more of Lur’s women, with horses. One of them led forward a big gray stallion.

“Mount, and ride beside me,” said Lur.

I fixed my bundle on the pommel of the high saddle, and straddled the gray. We set off silently. It was never wholly dark at night in the land under the mirage; there was always a faint green luminescence, but tonight it was brighter than I had ever seen it. I wondered whether there was a full moon shining down over the peaks of the valley. I wondered if we had far to go. I was not as drunk as I had been when Lur had come in on me, but in a way I was drunker. I had a queer, light-headed feeling that was decidedly pleasant, a carefree irresponsibility. I wanted to keep on feeling that way. I hoped that Lur had plenty of wine wherever she was taking me. I wished I had a drink right now.

We were going through the city beyond the citadel, and we went fast. The broad street we were on was well paved. There were lights in the houses and in the gardens and people singing and drums and pipes playing. Sinister the black citadel might be, but it did not seem to cast any shadow on the people of Karak. Or so I thought then.

We passed out of the city into a smooth road running between thick vegetation. The luminous moths like fairy planes were flitting about, and for a moment I felt a pang of memory, and Evalie’s face floated up before me. It didn’t last a second. The gray went sweetly and I began to sing an old Kirghiz song about a lover who rode in the moonlight to his maid and what he found when he got there. Lur laughed, and put her hand over my mouth.

“Quiet, Dwayanu! There still is danger.” Then I realized that I hadn’t been singing the Kirghiz at all, but the Uighur, which was probably where the Kirghiz got it from. And then it occurred to me that I had never heard the song in the Uighur. It started the old problem going in my mind – and that lasted no longer than the memory of Evalie.

Now and then I caught a glimpse of the white river. And then we went over a long stretch where the road narrowed so that we rode single file between verdure-covered cliffs. When we came out of them, the road forked. One part of it ran right on, the other turned sharply to the left. We rode along this for three or four miles, apparently directly through the heart of the strange forest. The great trees spread their arms out far overhead; the candelabras and cressets and swaying ropes of blooms gleamed like ghosts of flowers in the pallid light; the scaled trees were like men-at-arms on watch. And the heady fragrances, the oddly stimulating exhalations were strong – strong. They throbbed from the forest, rhythmically, as though they were the pulse of its life-drunken heart.

And as we came to the end of that road and I looked down upon the Lake of the Ghosts.

Never, I think, in all the world was there such a place of breath-taking, soul-piercing, unearthly beauty as that lake beneath the mirage in which Lur the Witch-woman had her home. And had she not been Witch-woman before she dwelt there, it must have made her so.

It was shaped like an arrow-head, its longer shores not more than a mile in length. It was enclosed by low hills whose sides were covered with the tree-ferns; their feathery fronds clothed them as though they were the breasts of gigantic birds of Paradise; threw themselves up from them like fountains; soared over them like vast virescent wings. The color of its water was pale emerald, and like an emerald it gleamed, placid, untroubled. But beneath that untroubled surface there was movement – luminous circles of silvery green that spread swiftly and vanished, rays that laced and interlaced in fantastic yet ordered, geometric forms; luminous spiralings, none of which ever came quite to the surface to disturb its serenity. And here and there were clusters of soft lights, like vaporous rubies, misted sapphires and opals and glimmering pearls – witch-lights. The luminous lilies of the Lake of the Ghosts.

Where the point of the arrow-head touched, there were no ferns. A broad waterfall spread itself like a veil over the face of the cliff, whispering as it fell. Mists rose there, mingling with the falling water, dancing slowly with the falling water, swaying toward it and reaching up with ghostly hands as though to greet it. And from the shores of the lake, other wraiths of mist would rise, and glide swiftly over the emerald floor and join those other dancing, welcoming wraiths of the waterfall. Thus first I saw the Lake of the Ghosts under the night of the mirage, and it was no less beautiful in the mirage day.

The road ran out into the lake like the shaft of an arrow. At its end was what once, I supposed, had been a small island. It lay two-thirds of the way across. Over its trees were the turrets of a small castle.

We walked our horses down the steep to the narrowing of the road where it became the shaft of the arrow. Here there were no ferns to hide the approach; they had been cleared away and the breast of the hill was covered with the blue flowerets. As we reached the narrow part, I saw that it was a causeway, built of stone. The place to which we were going was still an island. We came to the end of the causeway, and there was a forty-foot gap between it and a pier on the opposite shore. Lur drew from her girdle a small horn and sounded it. A drawbridge began to creak, and to drop down over the gap. We rode across that and into a garrison of her women. We cantered up a winding road, and I heard the creak of the lifting bridge as we went. We drew up before the house of the Witch-woman.

I looked at it with interest, not because it was unfamiliar, for it was not, but I was thinking I had never seen a castle of its sort built of that peculiar green stone nor with so many turrets. Yes, I knew them well. “Lady castles,” we had called them; lana’rada, bowers for favorite women, a place to rest, a place to love after war or when weary of statecraft.

Women came and took the horses. Wide doors of polished wood swung open. Lur led me over the threshold.

Girls came forward with wine. I drank thirstily. The queer light-headedness, and the sense of detachment were growing. I seemed to have awakened from a long, long sleep, and was not thoroughly awake and troubled by memories of dreams. But I was sure that they had not all been dreams. That old priest who had awakened me in the desert which once had been fertile Ayjirland – he had been no dream. Yet the people among whom I had awakened had not been Ayjirs. This was not Ayjirland, yet the people were of the ancient breed! How had I gotten here? I must have fallen asleep again in the temple after – after – by Zarda, but I must feel my way a bit! Be cautious. Then would follow a surge of recklessness that swept away all thought of caution, a roaring relish of life, a wild freedom as of one who, long in prison, sees suddenly the bars broken and before him the table of life spread with all he has been denied, to take as he wills. And on its heels a flash of recognition that I was Leif Langdon and knew perfectly well how I came to be in this place and must some way, somehow, get back to Evalie and to Jim. Swift as the lightning were those latter flashes, and as brief.

I became aware that I was no longer in the castle’s hall but in a smaller chamber, octagonal, casemented, tapestried. There was a wide, low bed. There was a table glistening with gold and crystal; tall candles burned upon it. My blouse was gone, and in its place a light silken tunic. The casements were open and the fragrant air sighed through them. I leaned from one.

Below me were the lesser turrets and the roof of the castle. Far below was the lake. I looked through another. The waterfall with its beckoning wraiths whispered and murmured not a thousand feet away.

I felt the touch of a hand on my head; it slipped down to my shoulder; I swung round. The Witch-woman was beside me.

For the first time I seemed to be realizing her beauty, seemed for the first time to be seeing her clearly. Her russet hair was braided in a thick coronal; it shone like reddest gold, and within it was twisted a strand of sapphires. Her eyes outshone them. Her scanty robe of gossamer blue revealed every lovely, sensuous line of her. White shoulders and one of the exquisite breasts were bare. Her full red lips promised – anything, and even the subtle cruelty stamped upon them, lured.

There had been a dark girl… who had she been … Ev – Eval – the name eluded me… no matter… she was like a wraith beside this woman… like one of the mist wraiths swaying at the feet of the waterfall…

The Witch-woman read what was in my eyes. Her hand slipped from my shoulder and rested on my heart. She bent closer, blue eyes languorous – yet strangely intent.

“And are you truly Dwayanu?”

“I am he – none else, Lur.”

“Who was Dwayanu – long and long and long ago?”

“I cannot tell you that, Lur – I who have been long asleep and in sleep forgotten much. Yet – I am he.”

“Then look – and remember.”

Her hand left my heart and rested on my head; she pointed to the waterfall. Slowly its whispering changed. It became the beat of drums, the trample of horses, the tread of marching men. Louder and louder they grew. The waterfall quivered, and spread across the black cliff like a gigantic curtain. From every side the mist wraiths were hurrying, melting into it. Clearer and nearer sounded the drums. And suddenly the waterfall vanished. In its place was a great walled city. Two armies were fighting there and I knew that the forces which were attacking the city were being borne back. I heard the thunder of the hoofs of hundreds of horses. Down upon the defenders raced a river of mounted men. Their leader was clothed in shining mail. He was helmetless, and his yellow hair streamed behind him as he rode. He turned his face. And that face was my own! I heard a roaring shout of “Dwayanu!” The charge struck like a river in spate, rolled over the defenders, submerged them.

I saw an army in rout, and smashed by companies with the throwing hammers.

I rode with the yellow-haired leader into the conquered city. And I sat with him on a conquered throne while ruthlessly, mercilessly, he dealt death to men and women dragged before him, and smiled at the voices of rapine and pillage rising from without. I rode and sat with him, I say, for now it was no longer as though I were in the Witch-woman’s chamber but was with this yellow-haired man who was my twin, seeing as he did, hearing as he did – yes, and thinking as he thought.

Battle upon battle, tourneys and feasts and triumphs, hunts with the falcons and hunts with great dogs in fair Ayjirland, hammer-play and anvil-play – I saw them, standing always beside Dwayanu like an unseen shadow. I went with him to the temples when he served the gods. I went with him to the Temple of the Dissolver – Black Khalk’ru, the Greater-than-Gods – and he wore the ring which rested on my breast. But when he passed within Khalk’ru’s temple, I held back. The same deep, stubborn resistance which had halted me when I had visioned the portal of the oasis temple halted me now. I listened to two voices. One urged me to enter with Dwayanu.

The other whispered that I must not. And that voice I could not disobey.

And then, abruptly, Ayjirland was no more! I was staring out at the waterfall and gliding mist wraiths. But – I was Dwayanu!

I was all Dwayanu! Leif Langdon had ceased to exist!

Yet he had left memories – memories which were like half-remembered dreams, memories whose source I could not fathom but realized that, even if only dreams, were true ones. They told me the Ayjirland I had ruled had vanished as utterly as had the phantom Ayjirland of the waterfall, that dusty century upon century had passed since them, that other empires had risen and fallen, that here was an alien land with only a dying fragment of the ancient glory.

Warrior-king and warrior-priest I had been, holding in my hands empire and the lives and destinies of a race.

And now – no more!

— XVI —

KISSES OF LUR

Black sorrow and the bitter ashes were in my heart when I turned from the window. I looked at Lur. From long slim feet to shining head I looked at her, and the black sorrow lightened and the bitter ashes blew away.

I put my hands on her shoulders and laughed. Luka had spun her wheel and sent my empire flying off its rim like dust from the potter’s. But she had left me something. In all old Ayjirland there had been few women like this.

Praise Luka! A sacrifice to her next morning if this woman proves what I think her!

My vanished empire! What of it? I would build another. Enough that I was alive!

Again I laughed. I put my hand under Lur’s chin, raised her face to mine, set my lips against hers. She thrust me from her. There was anger in her eyes – but there was doubt under the anger.

“You bade me remember. Well, I have remembered. Why did you open the gates of memory. Witch-woman, unless you had made up your mind to abide by what came forth? Or did you know less of Dwayanu than you pretended?”

She took a step back; she said, furiously:

“I give my kisses. None takes them.”

I caught her in my arms, crushed her mouth to mine, then released her.

“I take them.”

I struck down at her right wrist. There was a dagger in her hand. I was amused, wondering where she had hidden it. I wrenched it from her grip and slipped it my girdle.

“And draw the stings from those I kiss. Thus did Dwayanu in the days of old and thus he does today.”

She stepped back and back, eyes dilated. Ai! but I could read her! She had thought me other than I was, thought me hare-brain, imposter, trickster. And it had been in her mind to trick me, to bend me to her will. To beguile me. Me – Dwayanu, who knew women as I knew war! And yet—

She was very beautiful… and she was all I had in this alien land to begin the building of my rule. I summed her up as she stood staring at me. I spoke, and my words were as cold as my thoughts.

“Play no more with daggers – nor with me. Call your servants. I am hungry and I thirst. When I have eaten and drunk we will talk.”

She hesitated, then clapped her hands. Women came in with steaming dishes, with ewers of wine, with fruits. I ate ravenously. I drank deeply. I ate and drank, thinking little of Lur – but thinking much of what her sorcery had made me see, drawing together what I remembered from desert oasis until now. It was little enough. I ate and drank silently. I felt her eyes upon me. I looked into them and smiled. “You thought to make me slave to your will, Lur. Never think it again!”

She dropped her head between her hands and gazed at me across the table.

“Dwayanu died long and long ago. Can the leaf that has withered grow green?”

“I am he, Lur.”

She did not answer.

“What was in your thought when you brought me here, Lur?”

“I am weary of Tibur, weary of his laughter, weary of his stupidity.”

“What else?”

“I tire of Yodin. You and I – alone – could rule Karak, if—”

“That ‘if’ is the heart of it. Witch-woman. What is it?”

She arose, leaned toward me.

“If you can summon Khalk’ru!”

“And if I cannot?”

She shrugged her white shoulders, dropped back into her chair. I laughed.

“In which case Tibur will not be so wearisome, and Yodin may be tolerated. Now listen to me, Lur. Was it your voice I heard urging me to enter Khalk’ru’s temples? Did you see as I was seeing? You need not answer. I read you, Lur. You would be rid of Tibur. Well, perhaps I can kill him. You would be rid of Yodin. Well, no matter who I am, if I can summon the Greater-than-Gods, there is no need of Yodin. Tibur and Yodin gone, there would be only you and me. You think you could rule me. You could not, Lur.”

She had listened quietly, and quietly now she answered.

“All that is true—”

She hesitated; her eyes glowed; a rosy flush swept over bosom and cheeks.

“Yet – there might be another reason why I took you—”

I did not ask her what that other reason might be; women had tried to snare me with that ruse before. Her gaze dropped from me, the cruelty on the red mouth stood out for an instant, naked.

“What did you promise Yodin, Witch-woman?”

She arose, held out her arms to me, her voice trembled—

“Are you less than man – that you can speak to me so! Have I not offered you power, to share with me? Am I not beautiful – am I not desirable?”

“Very beautiful, very desirable. But always I learned the traps my city concealed before I took it.”

Her eyes shot blue fires at that. She took a swift step toward the door. I was swifter. I held her, caught the hand she raised to strike me.

“What did you promise the High-priest, Lur?”

I put the point of the dagger at her throat. Her eyes blazed at me, unafraid. Luka – turn your wheel so I need not slay this woman!

Her straining body relaxed; she laughed.

“Put away the dagger, I will tell you.”

I released her, and walked back to my chair. She studied me from her place across the table; she said, half incredulously:

“You would have killed me!”

“Yes,” I told her.

“I believe you. Whoever you may be. Yellow-hair – there is no man like you here.”

“Whoever I may be – Witch?”

She stirred impatiently.

“No further need for pretense between us.” There was anger in her voice. “I am done with lies – better for both if you be done with them too. Whoever you are – you are not Dwayanu. I say again that the withered leaf cannot turn green nor the dead return.”

“If I am not he, then whence came those memories you watched with me not long ago? Did they pass from your mind to mine. Witch-woman – or from my mind to yours?”

She shook her head, and again I saw a furtive doubt cloud her eyes.

“I saw nothing. I meant you to see – something. You eluded me. Whatever it was you saw – I had no part in it. Nor could I bend you to my will. I saw nothing.”

“I saw the ancient land, Lur.”

She said, sullenly:

“I could go no farther than its portal.”

“What was it you sent me into Ayjirland to find for Yodin, Witch-woman?”

“Khalk’ru,” she answered evenly.

“And why?”

“Because then I would have known surely, beyond all doubt, whether you could summon him. That was what I promised Yodin to discover.”

“And if I could summon him?”

“Then you were to be slain before you had opportunity.”

“And if I could not?”

“Then you would be offered to him in the temple.”

“By Zarda!” I swore. “Dwayanu’s welcome is not like what he had of old when he went visiting – or, if you prefer it, the hospitality you offer a stranger is no thing to encourage travelers. Now do I see eye to eye with you in this matter of eliminating Tibur and the priest. But why should I not begin with you, Witch?”

She leaned back, smiling.

“First – because it would do you no good. Yellow-hair. Look.”

She beckoned me to one of the windows. From it I could see the causeway and the smooth hill upon which we had emerged from the forest. There were soldiers all along the causeway and the top of the hill held a company of them. I felt that she was quite right – even I could not get through them unscathed. The old cold rage began to rise within me. She watched me, with mockery in her eyes.

“And second—” she said. “And second – well, hear me. Yellow-hair.”

I poured wine, raised the goblet to her, and drank. She said:

“Life is pleasant in this land. Pleasant at least for those of us who rule it. I have no desire to change it – except in the matter of Tibur and Yodin. And another matter of which we can talk later. I know the world has altered since long and long ago our ancestors fled from Ayjirland. I know there is life outside this sheltered place to which Khalk’ru led those ancestors. Yodin and Tibur know it, and some few more. Others guess it. But none of us desires to leave this pleasant place – nor do we desire it invaded. Particularly have we no desire to have our people go from it. And this many would attempt if they knew there were green fields and woods and running water and a teeming world of men beyond us. For through the uncounted years they have been taught that in all the world there is no life save here. That Khalk’ru, angered by the Great Sacrilege when Ayjirland rose in revolt and destroyed his temples, then destroyed all life except here, and that only by Khalk’ru’s sufferance does it here exist – and shall persist only so long as he is offered the ancient Sacrifice. You follow me, Yellow-hair?”

I nodded.

“The prophecy of Dwayanu is an ancient one. He was the greatest of the Ayjir kings. He lived a hundred years or more before the Ayjirs began to turn their faces from Khalk’ru, to resist the Sacrifice – and the desert in punishment began to waste the land. And as the unrest grew, and the great war which was to destroy the Ayjirs brewed, the prophecy was born. That he would return to restore the ancient glory. No new story. Yellow-hair. Others have had their Dwayanus – the Redeemer, the Liberator, the Loosener of Fate – or so I have read in those rolls our ancestors carried with them when they fled. I do not believe these stories; new Dwayanus may arise, but the old ones do not return. Yet the people know the prophecy, and the people will believe anything that promises them freedom from something they do not like. And it is from the people that the sacrifices to Khalk’ru are taken – and they do not like the Sacrifice. But because they fear what might come if there were no more sacrifices – they endure them.

“And now. Yellow-hair – we come to you. When first I saw you, heard you shouting that you were Dwayanu, I took council with Yodin and Tibur. I thought you then from Sirk. Soon I knew that could not be. There was another with you—”

“Another?” I asked, in genuine surprise.

She looked at me, suspiciously.

“You have no memory of him?”

“No. I remember seeing you. You had a white falcon. There were other women with you. I saw you from the river.”

She leaned forward, gaze intent.

“You remember the Rrrllya – the Little People? A dark girl who calls herself Evalie?”

Little People – a dark girl – Evalie? Yes, I did remember something of them – but vaguely. They had been in those dreams I had forgotten, perhaps. No – they had been real… or had they?

“Faintly, I seem to remember something of them, Lur. Nothing clearly.”

She stared at me, a curious exultation in her eyes.

“No matter,” she said. “Do not try to think of them. You were not – awake. Later we will speak of them. They are enemies. No matter – follow me now. If you were from Sirk, posing as Dwayanu, you might be a rallying point for our discontented. Perhaps even the leader they needed. If you were from outside – you were still more dangerous, since you could prove us liars. Not only the people, but the soldiers might rally to you. And probably would. What was there for us to do but to kill you?”

“Nothing,” I answered. “I wonder now you did not when you had the chance.”

“You had complicated matters,” she said. “You had shown the ring. Many had seen it, many had heard you call yourself Dwayanu—”

Ah, yes! I remember now – I had come up from the river. How had I gotten into the river? The bridge – Nansur – something had happened there… it was all misty, nothing clear-cut… the Little People… yes, I remembered something of them… they were afraid of me… but I had nothing against them… vainly I tried to sort the vague visions into some pattern. Lur’s voice recalled my wandering thoughts.

“And so,” she was saying, “I made Yodin see that it was not well to slay you outright. It would have been known, and caused too much unrest – strengthened Sirk for one thing. Caused unrest among the soldiers. What – Dwayanu had come and we had slain him! ‘I will take him,’ I told Yodin. ‘I do not trust Tibur who, in his stupidity and arrogance, might easily destroy us all. There is a better way. Let Khalk’ru eat him and so prove us right and him the liar and braggart. Then not soon will another come shouting that he is Dwayanu’!”

“So the High-priest does not think me Dwayanu, either?”

“Less even than I do. Yellow-hair,” she said, smiling. “Nor Tibur. But who you are, and whence you came, and how and why – that puzzles them as it does me. You look like the Ayjir – it means nothing. You have the ancient marks upon your hands – well, granted you are of the ancient blood. So has Tibur – and he is no Redeemer,” again her laughter rang like little bells, “You have the ring. Where did you find it. Yellow-hair? For you know little of its use. Yodin found that out. When you were in sleep. And Yodin saw you turn color and half turn to flee when first you saw Khalk’ru in his chamber. Deny it not. Yellow-hair. I saw it myself. Ah, no – Yodin has little fear of a rival with the Dissolver. Yet-he is not wholly certain. There is the faintest shadow of doubt. I played on that. And so – you are here.”

I looked at her with frankest admiration, again raised the goblet and drank to her. I clapped my hands, and the serving girls entered.

“Clear the table. Bring wine.”

They came with fresh ewers and goblets. When they had gone out I went over to the door. There was a heavy bar that closed it. I thrust it down. I picked up one of the ewers and half emptied it.

“I can summon the Dissolver, Witch-woman.”

She drew in her breath, sharply; her body trembled; the blue fires of her eyes were bright – bright.

“Shall I show you?”

I took the ring from the locket, slipped it on my thumb, raised my hands in the beginning of the salutation—

A cold breath seemed to breathe through the room. The Witch-woman sprang to me, dragged down my hand. Her lips were white.

“No! – No! I believe – Dwayanu!”

I laughed. The strange cold withdrew, stealthily.

“And now. Witch, what will you tell the priest?”

The blood was slowly coming back into her lips and face. She lifted the ewer and drained it. Her hand was steady. An admirable woman – this Lur!

She said:

“I will tell him that you are powerless.”

I said:

“I will summon the Dissolver. I will kill Tibur. I will kill Yodin – what else is there?”

She came to me, stood with breast touching mine.

“Destroy Sirk. Sweep the dwarfs away. Then you and I shall rule – alone.”

I drank more wine.

“I will summon Khalk’ru; I will eliminate Tibur and the priest; I will sack Sirk and I will war against the dwarfs – if—”

She looked into my eyes, long and long; her arm stole round my shoulder… I thrust out a hand and swept away the candles. The green darkness of the mirage night seeped through the casements. The whispering of the waterfall was soft laughter.

“I take my pay in advance,” I said. “Such was Dwayanu’s way of old – and am I not Dwayanu?”

“Yes!” whispered the Witch-woman.

She took the strand of sapphires from her hair, she unbraided her coronal and shook loose its russet-gold. Her arms went round my neck. Her lips sought mine and clung to them.

There was the beat of horses’ hoofs on the causeway. A distant challenge. A knocking at the door. The Witch-woman awakened, sat sleepily up under the silken tent of her hair.

“Is it you, Ouarda?”

“Yes, mistress. A messenger from Tibur.”

I laughed.

“Tell him you are busy with your gods, Lur.”

She bent her head over mine so that the silken tent of it covered us both.

“Tell him I am busy with the gods, Ouarda. He may stay till morning – or return to Tibur with the message.”

She sank back, pressed her lips to mine—

By Zarda! But it was as it was of old – enemies to slay, a city to sack, a nation to war with and a woman’s soft arms around me.

I was well content!

BOOK OF DWAYANU

— XVII —

ORDEAL BY KHALK’RU

Twice the green night had filled the bowl of the land beneath the mirage while I feasted and drank with Lur and her women. Sword-play there had been, and the hammer-play and wrestling. They were warriors – these women! Tempered steel under silken skins, they pressed me hard now and again – strong as I was, quick as I might be. If Sirk were soldiered by such as these, it would be no easy conquest.

By the looks they gave me and by soft whispered words I knew I need not be lonely if Lur rode off to Karak. But she did not; she was ever at my side, and no more messengers came from Tibur; or if they did I did not know it. She had sent secret word to the High-priest that he had been right – I had no power to summon the Greater-than-Gods – that I was either imposter or mad. Or so she told me. Whether she had lied to him or, lied now to me I did not know and did not greatly care. I was too busy – living.

Yet no more did she call me Yellow-hair. Always it was Dwayanu. And every art of love of hers – and she was no novice, the Witch-woman – she used to bind me tighter to her.

It was early dawn of the third day; I was leaning from the casement, watching the misty jewel-fires of the luminous lilies fade, the mist wraiths that were the slaves of the waterfall rise slowly and more slowly. I thought Lur asleep. I heard her stir, and turned. She was sitting up, peering at me through the red veils of her hair. She looked all Witch-woman then…

“A messenger came to me last night from Yodin. Today you pray to Khalk’ru.”

A thrill went through me; the blood sang in my ears. Always had I felt so when I must evoke the Dissolver – a feeling of power that surpassed even that of victory. Different – a sense of inhuman power and pride. And with it a deep anger, revolt against this Being which was Life’s enemy. This demon that fed on Ayjirland’s flesh and blood – and soul. She was watching me. “Are you afraid, Dwayanu?” I sat beside her, parted the veils of her hair. “Was that why your kisses were doubled last night, Lur? Why they were so – tender? Tenderness, Witch-woman, becomes you – but it sits strangely on you. Were you afraid? For me? You soften me, Lur!” Her eyes flashed, her face flushed at my laughter.

“You do not believe I love you, Dwayanu?”

“Not so much as you love power. Witch-woman.”

“You love me?”

“Not so much as I love power. Witch-woman,” I answered, and laughed again.

She studied me with narrowed eyes. She said:

“There is much talk in Karak of you. It grows menacing. Yodin regrets that he did not kill you when he could have – but knows full well the case might be worse if he had. Tibur regrets he did not kill you when you came up from the river – urges that no more time be lost in doing so. Yodin has declared you a false prophet and has promised that the Greater-than-Gods will prove you so. He believes what I have told you – or perhaps he has a hidden sword. You” – faint mockery crept into her voice – “you, who can read me so easily, surely can read him and guard against it! The people murmur; there are nobles who demand you be brought forth; and the soldiers would follow Dwayanu eagerly – if they believed you truly he. They are restless. Tales spread. You have grown exceedingly – inconvenient. So you face Khalk’ru today.”

“If all that be true,” I said, “it occurs to me that I may not have to evoke the Dissolver to gain rule.”

She smiled.

“It was not your old cunning which sent that thought. You will be closely guarded. You would be slain before you could rally a dozen round you. Why not – since there would then be nothing to lose by killing you? And perhaps something to be gained. Besides – what of your promises to me?”

I thrust my arm around her shoulders, lifted and kissed her.

“As for being slain – well, I would have a thing to say to that. But I was jesting, Lur. I keep my promises.”

There was the galloping of horses on the causeway, the jangle of accoutrement, the rattle of kettle-drums. I went over to the window. Lur sprang from the bed and stood beside me. Over the causeway was coming a troop of a hundred or more horsemen. From their spears floated yellow pennons bearing the black symbol of Khalk’ru. They paused at the open drawbridge. At their head I recognized Tibur, his great shoulders covered by a yellow cloak, and on his breast the Kraken.

“They come to take you to the temple. I must let them pass.”

“Why not?” I asked, indifferently. “But I’ll go to no temple until I’ve broken my fast.”

I looked again toward Tibur.

“And if I ride beside the Smith, I would you had a coat of mail to fit me.”

“You ride beside me,” she said. “And as for weapons, you shall have your pick. Yet there is nothing to fear on the way to the temple – it is within it that danger dwells.”

“You speak too much of fear, Witch-woman,” I said, frowning. “Sound the horn. Tibur may think I am loath to meet him. And that I would not have him believe.”

She sounded the signal to the garrison at the bridge. I heard it creaking as I bathed. And soon the horses were trampling before the door of the castle. Lur’s tire-woman entered, and with her she slipped away.

I dressed leisurely. On my way to the great hall I stopped at the chamber of weapons. There was a sword there I had seen and liked. It was of the weight to which I was accustomed, and long and curved and of metal excellent as any I had ever known in Ayjirland. I weighed it in my left hand and took a lighter one for my right. I recalled that someone had told me to beware of Tibur’s left hand… ah, yes, the woman soldier. I laughed – well, let Tibur beware of mine. I took a hammer, not so heavy as the Smith’s… that was his vanity… there was more control to the lighter sledges… I fastened to my forearm the strong strap that held its thong. Then I went down to meet Tibur.

There were a dozen of the Ayjir nobles in the hall, mostly men. Lur was with them. I noticed she had posted her soldiers at various vantage points, and that they were fully armed. I took that for evidence of her good faith, although it somewhat belied her assurance to me that I need fear no danger until I had reached the temple. I had no fault to find in Tibur’s greeting. Nor with those of the others. Except one. There was a man beside the Smith almost as tall as myself. He had cold blue eyes and in them the singular expressionless stare that marks the born killer of men. There was a scar running from left temple to chin, and his nose had been broken. The kind of man, I reflected, whom in the olden days I would have set over some peculiarly rebellious tribe. There was an arrogance about him that irritated me, but I held it down. It was not in my thoughts to provoke any conflict at this moment. I desired to raise no suspicions in the mind of the Smith. My greetings to him and to the others might be said to have had almost a touch of apprehension, of conciliation.

I maintained that attitude while we broke fast and drank. Once it was difficult. Tibur leaned toward the scar-face, laughing.

“I told you he was taller than you, Rascha. The gray stallion is mine!”

The blue eyes ran over me, and my gorge rose.

“The stallion is yours.”

Tibur leaned toward me.

“Rascha the Back-breaker, he is named. Next to me, the strongest in Karak. Too bad you must meet the Greater-than-Gods so quickly. A match between you two would be worth the seeing.”

Now my rage swelled up at this, and my hand dropped to my sword, but I managed to check it, and answered with a touch of eagerness.

“True enough – perhaps that meeting may be deferred…”

Lur frowned and stared at me, but Tibur snapped at the bait, his eyes gleaming with malice.

“No – there is one that may not be kept waiting. But after – perhaps…”

His laughter shook the table. The others joined in it. The scar-face grinned. By Zarda, but this is not to be borne! Careful, Dwayanu, thus you tricked them in the olden days – and thus you shall trick them now. I drained my goblet, and another. I joined them in their laughter – as though I wondered why they laughed. But I sealed their faces in my memory. We rode over the causeway with Lur at my right and a close half-circle of her picked women covering us.

Ahead of us went Tibur and the Back-breaker with a dozen of Tibur’s strongest. Behind us came the troop with the yellow pennons, and behind them another troop of the Witch-woman’s guards.

I rode with just the proper touch of dejection. Now and then the Smith and his familiars looked back at me. And I would hear their laughter. The Witch-woman rode as silently as I. She glanced at me askance, and when that happened I dropped my head a little lower.

The black citadel loomed ahead of us. We entered the city. By that time the puzzlement in Lur’s eyes had changed almost to contempt, the laughter of the Smith become derisive.

The streets were crowded with the people of Karak. And now I sighed, and seemed to strive to arouse myself from my dejection, but still rode listlessly. And Lur bit her lip, and drew close to me, frowning.

“Have you tricked me, Yellow-hair? You go like a dog already beaten!”

I turned my head from her that she might not see my face. By Luka, but it was hard to stifle my own laughter!

There were whisperings, murmurings, among the crowd. There were no shouts, no greetings. Everywhere were the soldiers, sworded and armed with the hammers, spears and pikes ready. There were archers. The High-priest was taking no chances.

Nor was I.

It was no intention of mine to precipitate a massacre. None to give Tibur slightest excuse to do away with me, turn spears and arrow storm upon me. Lur had thought my danger not on my way to the temple, but when within it. I knew the truth was the exact opposite.

So it was no conquering hero, no redeemer, no splendid warrior from the past who rode through Karak that day. It was a man not sure of himself – or better, too sure of what was in store for him. The people who had waited and watched for Dwayanu felt that – and murmured, or were silent. That well pleased the Smith. And it well pleased me, who by now was as eager to meet Khalk’ru as any bridegroom his bride. And was taking no risks of being stopped by sword or hammer, spear or arrow before I could.

And ever the frown on the face of the Witch-woman grew darker, and stronger the contempt and fury in her eyes.

We skirted the citadel, and took a broad road leading back to the cliffs. We galloped along this, pennons flying, drums rolling. We came to a gigantic doorway in the cliff – many times had I gone through such a door as that! I dismounted, hesitatingly. Half-reluctantly, I let myself be led through it by Tibur and Lur and into a small rock-hewn chamber.

They left me, without a word. I glanced about. Here were the chests that held the sacrificial garments, the font of purification, the vessels for the anointing of the evoker of Khalk’ru.

The door opened. I looked into the face of Yodin.

There was vindictive triumph in it, and I knew he had met the Smith and Witch-woman, and that they had told him how I had ridden. As a victim to the Sacrifice! Well, Lur could tell him honestly what he hoped was the truth. If she had the thought to betray me – had betrayed me – she now believed me liar and braggart with quite as good reason as Tibur and the others. If she had not betrayed me, I had backed her lie to Yodin.

Twelve lesser priests filed in behind him, dressed in the sacred robes. The High-priest wore the yellow smock with the tentacles entwined round him. The ring of Khalk’ru shone on his thumb.

“The Greater-than-Gods awaits your prayer, Dwayanu,” he said. “But first you must undergo purification.”

I nodded. They busied themselves with the necessary rites. I submitted to them awkwardly, like one not familiar with them, but as one who plainly wished to be thought so. The malice in Yodin’s eyes increased.

The rites were finished. Yodin took a smock like his own from a chest and draped it on me. I waited.

“Your ring,” he reminded me, sardonically. “Have you forgotten you must wear the ring!”

I fumbled at the chain around my neck, opened the locket and slipped the ring over my thumb. The lesser priests passed from the chamber with their drums. I followed, the High-priest beside me. I heard the clang of a hammer striking a great anvil. And knew it for the voice of Tubalka, the oldest god, who had taught man to wed fire and metal. Tubalka’s recognition of, his salutation and his homage to – Khalk’ru!

The olden exaltation, the ecstasy of dark power, was pouring through me. Hard it was not to betray it. We came out of the passage and into the temple.

Hai! But they had done well by the Greater-than-Gods in this far shrine! Vaster temple I had never beheld in Ayjirland. Cut from the mountain’s heart, as all Khalk’ru’s abodes must be, the huge pillars which bordered the amphitheater struck up to a ceiling lost in darkness. There were cressets of twisted metal and out of them sprang smooth spirals of wan yellow flame. They burned steadily and soundlessly; by their wan light I could see the pillars marching, marching away as though into the void itself.

Faces were staring up at me from the amphitheater – hundreds of them. Women’s faces under pennons and bannerets broidered with devices of clans whose men had fought beside and behind me in many a bloody battle. Gods – how few the men were here! They stared up at me, these women faces… women-nobles, women-knights, women-soldiers… They stared up at me by the hundreds… blue eyes ruthless… nor was there pity nor any softness of woman in their faces… warriors they were… Good! Then not as women but as warriors would I treat them.

And now I saw that archers were posted on the borders of the amphitheater, bows in readiness, arrows at rest but poised, and the bow-strings lined toward me.

Tibur’s doings? Or the priest’s – watchful lest I should attempt escape? I had no liking for that, but there was no help for it. Luka, Lovely Goddess – turn your wheel so no arrow flies before I begin the ritual!

I turned and looked for the mystic screen which was Khalk’ru’s doorway from the Void. It was a full hundred paces away from me, so broad and deep was the platform of rock. Here the cavern had been shaped into a funnel. The mystic screen was a gigantic disk, a score of times the height of a tall man. Not the square of lucent yellow through which, in the temples of the Mother-land, Khalk’ru had become corporeal. For the first time I felt a doubt – was this Being the same? Was there other reason for the High-priest’s malignant confidence than his disbelief in me?

But there in the yellow field floated the symbol of the Greater-than-Gods; his vast black body lay as though suspended in a bubble-ocean of yellow space; his tentacles spread like monstrous rays of black stars and his dreadful eyes brooded on the temple as though, as always, they saw all and saw nothing. The symbol was unchanged. The tide of conscious, dark power in my mind, checked for that instant, resumed its upward flow.

And now I saw between me and the screen a semicircle of women. Young they were, scarce blossomed out of girlhood – but already in fruit. Twelve of them I counted, each standing in the shallow hollowed cup of sacrifice, the golden girdles of the sacrifice around their waists. Over white shoulders, over young breasts, fell the veils of their ruddy hair, and through those veils they looked at me with blue eyes in which horror lurked. Yet though they could not hide that horror in their eyes from me who was so close, they hid it from those who watched us from beyond. They stood within the cups, erect, proudly, defiant. Ai! but they were brave – those women of Karak! I felt the olden pity for them; stirring of the olden revolt.

In the center of the semicircle of women swung a thirteenth ring, held by strong golden chains dropping from the temple’s roof. It was empty, the clasps of the heavy girdle open—

The thirteenth ring! The ring of the Warrior’s Sacrifice! Open for – me!

I looked at the High-priest. He stood beside his priests squatting at their drums. His gaze was upon me. Tibur stood at the edge of the platform beside the anvil of Tubalka, in his hands the great sledge, on his face reflection of the gloating on that of the High-priest. The Witch-woman I could not see.

The High-priest stepped forward. He spoke into the dark vastness of the temple where was the congregation of the nobles.

“Here stands one who comes to us calling himself – Dwayanu. If he be Dwayanu, then will the Greater-than-Gods, mighty Khalk’ru, hear his prayer and accept the Sacrifices. But if Khalk’ru be deaf to him – he is proven cheat and liar. And Khalk’ru will not be deaf to me who have served him faithfully. Then this cheat and liar swings within the Warrior’s Ring for Khalk’ru to punish as he wills. Hear me! Is it just? Answer!”

From the depths of the temple came the voices of the witnesses.

“We hear! It is just!”

The High-priest turned to me as if to speak. But if that had been his mind, he changed it. Thrice he raised his staff of golden bells and shook them. Thrice Tibur raised the hammer and smote the anvil of Tubalka.

Out of the depths of the temple came the ancient chant, the ancient supplication which Khalk’ru had taught our forefathers when he chose us from all the peoples of earth, forgotten age upon forgotten age ago. I listened to it as to a nursery song. And Tibur’s eyes never left me, his hand on hammer in readiness to hurl and cripple if I tried to flee; nor did Yodin’s gaze leave me.

The chant ended.

Swiftly I raised my hands in the ancient sign, and I did with the ring what the ancient ritual ordered – and through the temple swept that first breath of cold that was presage of the coming of Khalk’ru!

Hai! The faces of Yodin and Tibur when they felt that breath! Would that I could look on them! Laugh now, Tibur! Hai! but they could not stop me now! Not even the Smith would dare hurl hammer nor raise hand to loose arrow storm upon me! Not even Yodin would dare halt me – I forgot all that. I forgot Yodin and Tibur. I forgot, as ever I forgot, the Sacrifices in the dark exultation of the ritual.

The yellow stone wavered, was shot through with tremblings. It became thin as air. It vanished.

Where it had been, black tentacles quivering, black body hovering, vanishing into immeasurable space, was Khalk’ru!

Faster, louder, beat the drums.

The black tentacles writhed forward. The women did not see them. Their eyes clung to me… as though… as though I held for them some hope that flamed through their despair! I… who had summoned their destroyer…

The tentacles touched them. I saw the hope fade and die. The tentacles coiled round their shoulders. They slid across their breasts. Embraced them. Slipped down their thighs and touched their feet. The drums began their swift upward flight into the crescendo of the Sacrifice’s culmination.

The wailing of the women was shrill above the drums. Their white bodies became gray mist. They became shadows. They were gone – gone before the sound of their wailing had died. The golden girdles fell clashing to the rock—

What was wrong? The ritual was ended. The Sacrifice accepted. Yet Khalk’ru still hovered!

And the lifeless cold was creeping round me, was rising round me…

A tentacle swayed and writhed forward. Slowly, slowly, it passed the Warrior’s Ring – came closer – closer—

It was reaching for me!

I heard a voice intoning. Intoning words more ancient than I had ever known. Words? They were not words! They were sounds whose roots struck back and back into a time before ever man drew breath.

It was Yodin – Yodin speaking in a tongue that might have been Khalk’ru’s own before ever life was!

Drawing Khalk’ru upon me by it! Sending me along the road the Sacrifices had traveled!

I leaped upon Yodin. I caught him in my arms and thrust him between me and the questing tentacle. I raised Yodin in my arms as though he had been a doll and flung him to Khalk’ru. He went through the tentacle as though it had been cloud. He struck the chains that held the Warrior’s Ring. He swung in them, entangled. He slithered down upon the golden girdle.

Hands upraised, I heard myself crying to Khalk’ru those same unhuman syllables. I did not know their meaning then, and do not know them now – nor from whence knowledge of them came to me…

I know they were sounds the throats and lips of men were never meant to utter!

But Khalk’ru heard – and heeded! He hesitated. His eyes stared at me, unfathomably – stared at and through me.

And then the tentacle curled back. It encircled Yodin. A thin screeching – and Yodin was gone!

The living Khalk’ru was gone. Lucent yellow, the bubble-ocean gleamed where he had been – the black shape floated inert within it.

I heard a tinkle upon the rock, the ring of Yodin rolling down the side of the cup. I leaped forward and picked it up.

Tibur, hammer half raised, stood glaring at me beside the anvil. I snatched the sledge from his hand, gave him a blow that sent him reeling.

I raised the hammer and crushed the ring of Yodin on the anvil!

From the temple came a thunderous shout—

“Dwayanu!”

— XVIII —

WOLVES OF LUR

I rode through the forest with the Witch-woman. The white falcon perched on her gauntleted wrist and cursed me with unwinking golden eyes. It did not like me – Lur’s falcon. A score of her women rode behind us. A picked dozen of my own were shield for my back. They rode close. So it was of old. I liked my back covered. It was my sensitive part, whether with friends or foes.

The armorers had fashioned me a jacket of the light chain-mail. I wore it; Lur and our little troop wore them; and each was as fully armed as I with the two swords, the long dagger and the thonged hammer. We were on our way to reconnoitre Sirk.

For five days I had sat on the throne of the High-priest, ruling Karak with the Witch-woman and Tibur. Lur had come to me – penitent in her own fierce fashion. Tibur, all arrogance and insolence evaporated, had bent the knee, proffering me allegiance, protesting, reasonably enough, that his doubts had been but natural. I accepted his allegiance, with reservations. Sooner or later I would have to kill Tibur – even if I had not promised Lur his death. But why kill him before he ceased to be useful? He was a sharp-edged tool? Well, if he cut me in my handling of him, it would be only my fault. Better a crooked sharp knife than a straight dull one.

As for Lur – she was sweet woman flesh, and subtle. But did she greatly matter? Not greatly – just then. There was a lethargy upon me, a lassitude, as I rode beside her through the fragrant forest.

Yet I had received from Karak homage and acclaim more than enough to soothe any wounded pride. I was the idol of the soldiers. I rode through the streets to the shouts of the people, and mothers held their babes up to look on me. But there were many who were silent when I passed, averting their heads, or glancing at me askance with eyes shadowed by furtive hatred and fear.

Dara, the bold-eyed captain who had warned me of Tibur, and Naral, the swaggering girl who had given me her locket, I had taken for my own and had made them officers of my personal guard. They were devoted and amusing. I had spoken to Dara only that morning of those who looked askance at me, asking why.

“You want straight answer, Lord?”

“Always that, Dara.”

She said bluntly:

“They are the ones who looked for a Deliverer. One who would break chains. Open doors. Bring freedom. They say Dwayanu is only another feeder of Khalk’ru. His butcher. Like Yodin. No worse, maybe. No better certainly.”

I thought of that strange hope I had seen strangled in the eyes of the sacrifices. They too had hoped me Deliverer, instead of…

“What do you think, Dara?”

“I think as you think, Lord,” she answered. “Only – it would not break my heart to see the golden girdles broken.”

And I was thinking of that as I rode along with Lur, her falcon hating me with its unwinking glare. What was – Khalk’ru? Often and often, long and long and long ago, I had wondered that. Could the illimitable cast itself into such a shape as that which came to the call of the wearer of the ring? Or rather – would it? My empire had been widespread – under sun and moon and stars. Yet it was a mote in the sun-ray compared to the empire of the Spirit of the Void. Would one so great be content to shrink himself within the mote?

Ai! but there was no doubt that the Enemy of Life was! But was that which came to the summons of the ring – the Enemy of Life? And if not – then was this dark worship worth its cost?

A wolf howled. The Witch-woman threw back her head and answered it. The falcon stretched its wings, screaming. We rode from the forest into an open glade, moss-carpeted. She halted, sent again from her throat the wolf cry.

Suddenly around us was a ring of wolves. White wolves whose glowing green eyes were fixed on Lur. They ringed us, red tongues lolling, fangs glistening. A patter of pads, and as suddenly the circle of wolves was doubled. And others slipped through the trees until the circle was three-fold, four-fold… until it was a wide belt of living white flecked by scarlet flames of wolf-tongues, studded with glinting emeralds of wolf-eyes…

My horse trembled; I smelled its sweat.

Lur drove her knees into the sides of her mount and rode forward. Slowly she paced it round the inner circle of the white wolves. She raised her hand; something she said. A great dog-wolf arose from its haunches and came toward her. Like a dog, it put its paws upon her saddle. She reached down, caught its jowls in her hands. She whispered to it. The wolf seemed to listen. It slipped back to the circle and squatted, watching her. I laughed.

“Are you woman – or wolf, Lur?”

She said:

“I, too, have my followers, Dwayanu. You could not easily win these from me.”

Something in her tone made me look at her sharply. It was the first time that she had shown resentment, or at least chagrin, at my popularity. She did not meet my gaze.

The big dog-wolf lifted its throat and howled. The circles broke. They spread out, padding swiftly ahead of us like scouts. They melted into the green shadows.

The forest thinned. Giant ferns took the place of the trees. I began to hear a curious hissing. Also it grew steadily warmer, and the air filled with moisture, and mist wreaths floated over the ferns. I could see no tracks, yet Lur rode steadily as though upon a well-marked road.

We came to a huge clump of ferns. Lur dropped from her horse.

“We go on foot here, Dwayanu. It is but a little way.”

I joined her. The troop drew up but did not alight. The Witch-woman and I slipped through the ferns for a score of paces. The dog-wolf stalked just ahead of her. She parted the fronds. Sirk lay before me.

At right arose a bastion of perpendicular cliff, dripping with moisture, little of green upon it except small ferns clinging to precarious root-holds. At left, perhaps four arrow flights away, was a similar bastion, soaring into the haze. Between these bastions was a level platform of black rock. Its smooth and glistening foundations dropped into a moat as wide as two strong throws of a javelin. The platform curved outward, and from cliff to cliff it was lipped with one unbroken line of fortress.

Hai! But that was a moat! Out from under the right-hand cliff gushed a torrent. It hissed and bubbled as it shot forth, and the steam from it wavered over the cliff face like a great veil and fell upon us in a fine warm spray. It raced boiling along the rock base of the fortress, and jets of steam broke through it and immense bubbles rose and burst, scattering showers of scalding spray.

The fortress itself was not high. It was squat and solidly built, its front unbroken except for arrow slits close to the top. There was a parapet across the top. Upon it I could see the glint of spears and the heads of the guards. In only one part was there anything like towers. These were close to the center where the boiling moat narrowed. Opposite them, on the farther bank, was a pier for a drawbridge. I could see the bridge, a narrow one, raised and protruding from between the two towers like a tongue.

Behind the fortress, the cliffs swept inward. They did not touch. Between them was a gap about a third as wide as the platform of the fortress. In front of us, on our side of the boiling stream, the sloping ground had been cleared both of trees and ferns. It gave no cover.

They had picked their spot well, these outlaws of Sirk. No besiegers could swim that moat with its hissing jets of live steam and bursting bubbles rising continually from the geysers at its bottom. No stones nor trees could dam it, making a causeway over which to march to batter at the fortress’s walls. There was no taking of Sirk from this side. That was clear. Yet there must be more of Sirk than this.

Lur had been following my eyes, reading my thoughts.

“Sirk itself lies beyond those gates,” she pointed to the gap between the cliffs. “It is a valley wherein is the city, the fields, the herds. And there is no way into it except through those gates.”

I nodded, absently. I was studying the cliffs behind the fortress. I saw that these, unlike the bastions in whose embrace the platform lay, were not smooth. There had been falls of rock, and these rocks had formed rough terraces. If one could get to those terraces – unseen…

“Can we get closer to the cliff from which the torrent comes, Lur?”

She caught my wrist, her eyes bright.

“What do you see, Dwayanu?”

“I do not know as yet, Witch-woman. Perhaps nothing. Can we get closer to the torrent?”

“Come.”

We slipped out of the ferns, skirted them, the dog-wolf walking stiff-legged in the lead, eyes and ears alert. The air grew hotter, vapor-filled, hard to breathe. The hissing became louder. We crept through the ferns, wet to the skins. Another step and I looked straight down upon the boiling torrent. I saw now that it did not come directly from the cliff. It shot up from beneath it, and its heat and its exhalations made me giddy. I tore a strip from my tunic and wrapped it around mouth and nose. I studied the cliff above it, foot by foot. Long I studied it and long – and then I turned.

“We can go back, Lur.”

“What have you seen, Dwayanu?”

What I had seen might be the end of Sirk – but I did not tell her so. The thought was not yet fully born. It had never been my way to admit others into half-formed plans. It is too dangerous. The bud is more delicate than the flower and should be left to develop free from prying hands or treacherous or even well-meant meddling. Mature your plan and test it; then you can weigh with clear judgment any changes. Nor was I ever strong for counsel; too many pebbles thrown into the spring muddy it. That was one reason I was – Dwayanu. I said to Lur:

“I do not know. I have a thought. But I must weigh it.”

She said, angrily:

“I am not stupid. I know war – as I know love. I could help you.”—

I said, impatiently:

“Not yet. When I have made my plan I will tell it to you.”

She did not speak again until we were within sight of the waiting women; then she turned to me. Her voice was low, and very sweet:

“Will you not tell me? Are we not equal, Dwayanu?”

“No,” I answered, and left her to decide whether that was answer to the first question or both.

She mounted her horse, and we rode back through the forest.

I was thinking, thinking over what I had seen, and what it might mean, when I heard again the howling of the wolves. It was a steady, insistent howling. Summoning. The Witch-woman raised her head, listened, then spurred her horse forward. I shot my own after her. The white falcon fluttered, and beat up into the air, screeching.

We raced out of the forest and upon a flower-covered meadow. In the meadow stood a little man. The wolves surrounded him, weaving around and around one another in a witch-ring. The instant they caught sight of Lur, they ceased their cry – squatted on their haunches. Lur checked her horse and rode slowly toward them. I caught a glimpse of her face, and it was hard and fierce.

I looked at the little man. Little enough he was, hardly above one of my knees, yet perfectly formed. A little golden man with hair streaming down almost to his feet. One of the Rrrllya – I had studied the woven pictures of them on the tapestries, but this was the first living one I had seen – or was it? I had a vague idea that once I had been in closer contact with them than the tapestries.

The white falcon was circling round his head, darting down upon him, striking at him with claws and beak. The little man held an arm before his eyes, while the other was trying to beat the bird away. The Witch-woman sent a shrill call to the falcon. It flew to her, and the little man dropped his arms. His eyes fell upon me.

He cried out to me, held his arms out to me, like a child.

There was appeal in cry and gesture. Hope, too, and confidence. It was like a frightened child calling to one whom it knew and trusted. In his eyes I saw again the hope that I had watched die in the eyes of the Sacrifices. Well, I would not watch it die in the eyes of the little man!

I thrust my horse past Lur’s, and lifted it over the barrier of the wolves. Leaning from the saddle, I caught the little man up in my arms. He clung to me, whispering in strange trilling sounds.

I looked back at Lur. She had halted her horse beyond the wolves.

She cried:

“Bring him to me!”

The little man clutched me tight, and broke into a rapid babble of the strange sounds. Quite evidently he had understood, and quite as evidently he was imploring me to do anything other than turn him over to the Witch-woman.

I laughed, and shook my head at her. I saw her eyes blaze with quick, uncontrollable fury. Let her rage! The little man should go safe! I put my heels to the horse and leaped the far ring of wolves. I saw not far away the gleam of the river, and turned my horse toward it.

The Witch-woman gave one wild, fierce cry. And then there was the whirr of wings around my head, and the buffeting of wings about my ears. I threw up a hand. I felt it strike the falcon, and I heard it shriek with rage and pain. The little man shrank closer to me.

A white body shot up and clung for a moment to the pommel of my saddle, green eyes glaring into mine, red mouth slavering. I took a quick glance back. The wolf pack was rushing down upon me, Lur at their heels. Again the wolf leaped. But by this time I had drawn my sword. I thrust it through the white wolf’s throat. Another leaped, tearing a strip from my tunic. I held the little man high up in one arm and thrust again.

Now the river was close. And now I was on its bank. I lifted the little man in both hands and hurled him far out into the water.

I turned, both swords in hand, to meet the charge of the wolves.

I heard another cry from Lur. The wolves stopped in their rush, so suddenly that the foremost of them slid and rolled. I looked over the river. Far out on it was the head of the little man, long hair floating behind him, streaking for the opposite shore.

Lur rode up to me. Her face was white, and her eyes were hard as blue jewels. She said in a strangled voice:

“Why did you save him?”

I considered that, gravely. I said:

“Because not twice would I see hope die in the eyes of one who trusts me.”

She watched me, steadily; and the white-hot anger did not abate.

“You have broken the wings of my falcon, Dwayanu.”

“Which do you love best. Witch-woman – its wing or my eyes?”

“You have killed two of my wolves.”

“Two wolves – or my throat, Lur?”

She did not answer. She rode slowly back to her women. But I had seen tears in her eyes before she turned. They might have been of rage – or they might not. But it was the first time I had ever seen Lur weep.

With never a word to each other we rode back to Karak – she nursing the wounded falcon, I thinking over what I had seen on the cliffs of Sirk.

We did not stop at Karak. I had a longing for the quiet and beauty of the Lake of the Ghosts. I told Lur that. She assented indifferently, so we went straight on and came to it just as the twilight was thickening. With the women, we dined together in the great hall. Lur had shaken off her moodiness. If she still felt wrath toward me, she hid it well. We were merry and I drank much wine. The more I drank the clearer became my plan for the taking of Sirk. It was a good plan. After awhile, I went up with Lur to her tower and watched the waterfall and the beckoning mist wraiths, and the plan became clearer still.

Then my mind turned back to that matter of Khalk’ru. And I thought over that a long while. I looked up and found Lur’s gaze intent upon me.

“What are you thinking, Dwayanu?”

“I am thinking that never again will I summon Khalk’ru.”

She said, slowly, incredulously:

“You cannot mean that, Dwayanu!”

“I do mean it.”

Her face whitened. She said:

“If Khalk’ru is not offered his Sacrifice, he will withdraw life from this land. It will become desert, as did the Mother-land when the Sacrifices were ended.”

I said:

“Will it? That is what I have ceased to believe. Nor do I think you believe it, Lur. In the olden days there was land upon land which did not acknowledge Khalk’ru, whose people did not sacrifice to Khalk’ru – yet they were not desert. And I know, even though I do not know how I know, that there is land upon land today where Khalk’ru is not worshipped – yet life teems in them. Even here – the Rrrllya, the Little People, do not worship him. They hate him – or so you have told me – yet the land over Nanbu is no less fertile than here.”

She said:

“That was the whisper that went through the Mother-land, long and long and long ago. It became louder – and the Mother-land became desert.”

“There might have been other reasons than Khalk’ru’s wrath for that, Lur.”

“What were they?”

“I do not know,” I said. “But you have never seen the sun and moon and stars. I have seen them. And a wise old man once told me that beyond sun and moon were other suns with other earths circling them, and upon them – life. The Spirit of the Void in which burn these suns should be too vast to shrink itself to such littleness as that which, in a little temple in this little comer of all earth, makes itself manifest to us.”

She answered:

“Khalk’ru is! Khalk’ru is everywhere. He is in the tree that withers, the spring that dries. Every heart is open to him. He touches it – and there comes weariness of life, hatred of life, desire for eternal death. He touches earth and there is sterile sand where meadows grew; the flocks grow barren. Khalk’ru is.”

I thought over that, and I thought it was true enough. But there was a flaw in her argument.

“Nor do I deny that, Lur,” I answered. “The Enemy of Life is. But is what comes to the ritual of the ring – Khalk’ru?”

“What else? So it has been taught from ancient days.”

“I do not know what else. And many things have been taught from ancient days which would not stand the test. But I do not believe that which comes is Khalk’ru, Soul of the Void, He-to-Whom-All-Life-Must-Return and all the rest of his titles. Nor do I believe that if we end the Sacrifices life will end here with them.”

She said, very quietly:

“Hear me, Dwayanu. Whether that which comes to the Sacrifices be Khalk’ru or another matters not at all to me. All that matters is this: I do not want to leave this land, and I would keep it unchanged. I have been happy here. I have seen the sun and moon and stars. I have seen the outer earth in my waterfall yonder. I would not go into it. Where would I find a place so lovely as this my Lake of the Ghosts? If the Sacrifices end, they whom only fear keeps here will go. They will be followed by more and more. The old life I love ends with the Sacrifices – surely. For if desolation comes, we shall be forced to go. And if it does not come, the people will know that they have been taught lies, and will go to see whether what is beyond be not fairer, happier, than here. So it has always been. I say to you, Dwayanu – it shall not be here!”

She waited for me to answer. I did not answer.

“If you do not wish to summon Khalk’ru, then why not choose another in your place?”

I looked at her sharply. I was not ready to go quite that far as yet. Give up the ring, with all its power!

“There is another reason, Dwayanu, than those you have given me. What is it?”

I said, bluntly:

“There are many who call me feeder of Khalk’ru. Butcher for him. I do not like that. Nor do I like to see – what I see – in the eyes of the women I feed him.”

“So that is it,” she said, contemptuously. “Sleep has made you soft, Dwayanu! Better tell me your plan to take Sirk and let me carry it out! You have grown too tender-hearted for war, I think!”

That stung me, swept all my compunctions away. I jumped up, knocking away the chair, half-raised my hand to strike her. She faced me, boldly, no trace of fear in her eyes. I dropped my hand.

“But not so soft that you can mold me to your will, Witch,” I said. “Nor do I go back on my bargains. I have given you Yodin. I shall give you Sirk, and all else I have promised. Till then – let this matter of the Sacrifices rest. When shall I give you Tibur?”

She put her hands on my shoulders and smiled into my angry eyes. She clasped her hands around my neck and brought my lips down to her warm red ones.

“Now,” she whispered, “you are Dwayanu! Now the one I love – ah, Dwayanu, if you but loved me as I love you!”

Well, as for that, I loved her as much as I could any woman… After all, there was none like her. I swung her up and held her tight, and the old recklessness, the old love of life poured through me.

“You shall have Sirk! And Tibur when you will.”

She seemed to consider.

“Not yet,” she said. “He is strong, and he has his followers. He will be useful at Sirk, Dwayanu. Not before then – surely.”

“It was precisely what I was thinking,” I said. “On one thing at least we agree.”

“Let us have wine upon our peace,” she said, and called to her serving-women.

“But there is another thing also upon which we agree.” She looked at me strangely.

“What is it?” I asked.

“You yourself have said it,” she answered – and more than that I could not get her to say. It was long before I knew what she had meant, and then it was too late…

It was good wine. I drank more than I should have. But clearer and clearer grew my plan for the taking of Sirk.

It was late next morning when I awoke. Lur was gone. I had slept as though drugged. I had the vaguest memory of what had occurred the night before, except that Lur and I had violently disagreed about something. I thought of Khalk’ru not at all. I asked Ouarda where Lur had gone. She said that word had been brought early that two women set apart for the next Sacrifice had managed to escape. Lur thought they were making their way to Sirk. She was hunting them with the wolves. I felt irritated that she had not roused me and taken me with her. I thought that I would like to see those white brutes of hers in action. They were like the great dogs we had used in Ayjirland to track similar fugitives.

I did not go into Karak. I spent the day at sword-play and wrestling, and swimming in the Lake of the Ghosts – after my headache had worn off.

Close toward nightfall Lur returned.

“Did you catch them?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “They got to Sirk safely. We were just in time to see them half-across the drawbridge.”

I thought she was rather indifferent about it, but gave the matter no further thought. And that night she was gay – and most tender toward me. Sometimes so tender that I seemed to detect another emotion in her kisses. It seemed to me that they were – regretful. And I gave that no thought then either.

— XIX —

THE TAKING OF SIRK

Again I rode through the forest toward Sirk, with Lur at my left hand and Tibur beside her. At my back were my two captains, Dara and Naral. Close at our heels came Ouarda, with twelve slim, strong girls, fair skins stained strangely green and black, and naked except for a narrow belt around their waists. Behind these rode four score of the nobles with Tibur’s friend Rascha at their head. And behind them marched silently a full thousand of Karak’s finest fighting women.

It was night. It was essential to reach the edge of the forest before the last third of the stretch between midnight and dawn. The hoofs of the horses were muffled so that no sharp ears might hear their distant tread, and the soldiers marched in open formation, noiselessly. Five days had passed since I had first looked on the fortress.

They had been five days of secret, careful preparation. Only the Witch-woman and the Smith knew what I had in mind. Secret as we had been, the rumor had spread that we were preparing for a sortie against the Rrrllya. I was well content with that. Not until we had gathered to start did even Rascha, or so I believed, know that we were headed toward Sirk. This so no word might be carried there to put them on guard, for I knew well that those we menaced had many friends in Karak – might have them among the ranks that slipped along behind us. Surprise was the essence of my plan. Therefore the muffling of the horses’ hoofs. Therefore the march by night. Therefore the silence as we passed through the forest. And therefore it was that when we heard the first howling of Lur’s wolves the Witch-woman slipped from her horse and disappeared in the luminous green darkness.

We halted, awaiting her return. None spoke; the howls were stilled; she came from the trees and remounted. Like well-trained dogs the white wolves spread ahead of us, nosing over the ground we still must travel, ruthless scouts which no spy nor chance wanderer, whether from or to Sirk, could escape.

I had desired to strike sooner than this, had chafed at the delay, had been reluctant to lay bare my plan to Tibur. But Lur had pointed out that if the Smith were to be useful at Sirk’s taking he would have to be trusted, and that he would be less dangerous if informed and eager than if uninformed and suspicious. Well, that was true. And Tibur was a first-class fighting man with strong friends.

So I had taken him into my confidence and told him what I had observed when first I had stood with Lur beside Sirk’s boiling moat – the vigorously growing clumps of ferns which extended in an almost unbroken, irregular line high up and across the black cliff, from the forest on the hither side and over the geyser-spring, and over the parapets. It betrayed, I believed, a slipping or cracking of the rock which had formed a ledge. Along that ledge, steady-nerved, sure-footed climbers might creep, and make their way unseen into the fortress – and there do for us what I had in mind.

Tibur’s eyes had sparkled, and he had laughed as I had not heard him laugh since my ordeal by Khalk’ru. He had made only one comment.

“The first link of your chain is the weakest, Dwayanu.”

“True enough. But it is forged where Sirk’s chain of defence is weakest.”

“Nevertheless – I would not care to be the first to test that link.”

For all my lack of trust, I had warmed to him for that touch of frankness.

“Thank the gods for your weight then, Anvil-smiter,” I had said. “I cannot see those feet of yours competing for toe-holds with ferns. Otherwise I might have picked you.”

I had looked down at the sketch I had drawn to make the matter clearer.

“We must strike quickly. How long before we can be in readiness, Lur?”

I had raised my eyes in time to see a swift glance pass between the two. Whatever suspicion I may have felt had been fleeting. Lur had answered, quickly.

“So far as the soldiers are concerned, we could start tonight. How long it will take to pick the climbers, I cannot tell. Then I must test them. All that will take time.”

“How long, Lur? We must be swift.”

“Three days – five days – I will be swift as may be. Beyond that I will not promise.”

With that I had been forced to be content. And now, five nights later, we marched on Sirk. It was neither dark nor light in the forest; a strange dimness floated over us; the glimmer of the flowers was our torch. All the fragrances were of life. But it was death whose errand we were on.

The weapons of the soldiers were covered so that there could be no betraying glints; spear-heads darkened – no shining of metal upon any of us. On the tunics of the soldiers was the Wheel of Luka, so that friend would not be mistaken for foe once we were behind the walls of Sirk. Lur had wanted the Black Symbol of Khalk’ru.

I would not have it. We reached the spot where we had decided to leave the horses. And here in silence our force separated. Under leadership of Tibur and Rascha, the others crept through wood and fern-brake to the edge of the clearing opposite the drawbridge.

With the Witch-woman and myself went a scant dozen of the nobles, Ouarda with the naked girls, a hundred of the soldiers. Each of these had bow and quiver in well-protected cases on their backs. They carried the short battleaxe, long sword and dagger. They bore the long, wide rope ladder I had caused to be made, like those I had used long and long ago to meet problems similar to this of Sirk – but none with its peculiarly forbidding aspects. They carried another ladder, long and flexible and of wood. I was armed only with battleaxe and long sword, Lur and the nobles with the throwing hammers and swords.

We stole toward the torrent whose hissing became louder with each step.

Suddenly I halted, drew Lur to me.

“Witch-woman, can you truly talk to your wolves?”

“Truly, Dwayanu.”

“I am thinking it would be no bad plan to draw eyes and ears from this end of the parapet. If some of your wolves would fight and howl and dance a bit there at the far bastion for the amusement of the guards, it might help us here.”

She sent a low call, like the whimper of a she-wolf. Almost instantly the head of the great dog-wolf which had greeted her on our first ride lifted beside her. Its hackles bristled as it glared at me. But it made no sound. The Witch-woman dropped to her knees beside it, took its head in her arms, whispering. They seemed to whisper together. And then as suddenly as it had appeared, it was gone. Lur arose, in her eyes something of the green fire of the wolf’s.

“The guards shall have their amusement.”

I felt a little shiver along my back, for this was true witchcraft. But I said nothing and we went on. We came to that place from which I had scanned the cliff. We parted the ferns and peered out upon the fortress.

Thus it was. At our right, a score of paces away, soared the sheer wall of the cliff which, continuing over the boiling torrent, formed this nearer bastion. The cover in which we lurked ran up to it, was thrown back like a green wave from its base. Between our cover and the moat was a space not more than a dozen paces across, made barren by the hot spray that fell on it. Here, the walls of the fortress were not more than a javelin cast distant. The wall and the parapet touched the cliff, but hardly could they be seen through the thick veils of steam. And this was what I had meant when I had said that our weakest link would be forged where Sirk’s defences were weakest. For no sentinels stood at this corner. With the heat and steam and exhalations from the geyser, there was no need – or so they thought. How, here at its hottest source, could the torrent be crossed? Who could scale that smooth and dripping cliff? Of all the defences, this spot was the impregnable one, unnecessary to guard – or so they thought. Therefore it was the exact point to attack – if it could be done.

I studied it. Not for full two hundred paces was there a single sentinel. From somewhere behind the fortress came the glare of a fire. It cast flickering shadows on the terraces of fallen rock beyond the bastioning cliffs; and that was good, since if we gained their shelter, we, too, would seem but flickering shadows. I beckoned Ouarda, and pointed to the rocks which were to be the goal of the naked girls. They were close to the cliff where it curved inward beyond the parapet, and they were about the height of twenty tall men above where we hid. She drew the girls to her and instructed them. They nodded, their eyes dropping swiftly to the cauldron of the moat, then turning to the glistening precipice. I saw some of them shudder. Well, I could not hold that against them, no!

We crept back and found the base of the cliff. Here were enough and to spare of rock holds for the grapnels of the ladder. We unwound the rope ladder. We set the wooden ladder against the cliff. I pointed out the ledge that might be the key to Sirk, counseled the climbers as best I could. I knew that the ledge could not be much wider than the span of a hand. Yet above it and below it were small crevices, pockets, where fingers and toes could grip, for clumps of ferns sprouted there.

Hai! But they had courage, those slim girls. We fastened to their belts long strong cords which would slip through our hands as they crept along. And they looked at one another’s stained faces and bodies and laughed. The first went up the ladder like a squirrel, got foothold and handhold and began to edge across. In an instant she had vanished, the green and black with which her body was stained merging into the dim green and black of the cliff. Slowly, slowly, the first cord slipped through my fingers.

Another followed her, and another, until I held six cords. And now the others climbed up and crept out on the perilous path, their leashes held in the strong hands of the Witch-woman.

Hai! But that was queer fishing! With will strained toward keeping these girl-fish out of water! Slowly – Gods, but how slowly – the cords crept through my fingers! Through the fingers of the Witch-woman… slowly… slowly… but ever on and on.

Now that first slim girl must be over the cauldron… I had swift vision of her clinging to the streaming rock, the steam of the cauldron clothing her…

That line slackened in my hand. It slackened, then ran out so swiftly that it cut the skin… slackened again… a tug upon it as of a great fish racing away… I felt the line snap. The girl had fallen! Was now dissolving flesh in the cauldron!

The second cord slackened and tugged and snapped… and the third… Three of them gone! I whispered to Lur:

“Three are gone!”

“And two!” she said. I saw that her eyes were tightly closed, but the hands that clutched the cords were steady.

Five of those slim girls! Only seven left! Luka – spin your wheel!

On and on, slowly, with many a halt, the remaining cords crept through my fingers. Now the fourth girl must be over the moat… must be over the parapet… must be well on her way to the rocks… my heart beat in my throat, half-strangling me… Gods – the sixth had fallen! “Another!” I groaned to Lur. “And another!” she whispered, and cast the end of a cord from her hand.

Five left… only five now… Luka, a temple to you in Karak – all your own, sweet goddess!

What was that? A pull upon a cord, and twice repeated! The signal! One had crossed! Honor and wealth to you, slim girl…

“All gone but one, Dwayanu!” whispered the Witch-woman.

I groaned again, and glared at her… Again the twitches – upon my fifth cord! Another safe! “My last is over!” whispered Lur. Three safe! Three hidden among the rocks. The fishing was done. Sirk had stolen three-fourths of my bait.

But Sirk was hooked!

Weakness like none I had known melted bones and muscles. Lur’s face was white as chalk, black shadows under staring eyes.

Well, now it was our turn. The slim maids who had fallen might soon have company!

I took the cord from Lur. Sent the signal. Felt it answered.

We cut the cords, and knotted their ends to heavier strands. And when they had run out we knotted to their ends a stronger, slender rope.

It crept away – and away – and away—

And now for the ladder – the bridge over which we must go.

It was light but strong, that ladder. Woven cunningly in a way thought out long and long ago. It had claws at each end which, once they had gripped, were not easily opened.

We fastened that ladder’s end to the slender rope. It slipped away from us… over the ferns… out into the hot breath of the cauldron… through it.

Invisible within that breath… invisible against the green dusk of the cliff… on and on it crept…

The three maids had it! They were making it fast. Under my hands it straightened and stiffened. We drew it taut from our end. We fastened our grapnels.

The road to Sirk was open!

I turned to the Witch-woman. She stood, her gaze far and far away. In her eyes was the green fire of her wolves. And suddenly over the hissing of the torrent, I heard the howling of her wolves – far and far away.

She relaxed; her head dropped; she smiled at me – “Yes – truly can I talk to my wolves, Dwayanu!”

I walked to the ladder, tested it. It was strong, secure.

“I go first, Lur. Let none follow me until I have crossed. Then do you, Dara and Naral, climb to guard my back.”

Lur’s eyes blazed.

“I follow you. Your captains come after me.”

I considered that. Well – let it be.

“As you say, Lur. But do not follow until I have crossed. Then let Ouarda send the soldiers. Ouarda – not more than ten may be on the ladder at a time. Bind cloths over their mouths and nostrils before they start. Count thirty – slowly, like this – before each sets forth behind the other. Fasten axe and sword between my shoulders, Lur. See to it that all bear their weapons so. Watch now, how I use my hands and feet.”

I swung upon the ladder, arms and legs opened wide. I began to climb it. Like a spider. Slowly, so they could learn. The ladder swayed but little; its angle was a good one.

And now I was above the fern-brake. And now I was at the edge of the torrent. Above it. The stream swirled round me. It hid me. The hot breath of the geyser shriveled me. Nor could I see anything of the ladder except the strands beneath me…

Thank Luka for that! If what was before me was hidden – so was I hidden from what was before me!

I was through the steam. I had passed the cliff. I was above the parapet. I dropped from the ladder, among the rocks – unseen. I shook the ladder. There was a quivering response. There was weight upon it… more weight… and more…

I unstrapped axe and sword—

“Dwayanu—”

I turned. There were the three maids. I began to praise them – holding back laughter. Green and black had run and combined under bath of steam into grotesque pattern.

“Nobles you are, maids! From this moment! Green and black your colors. What you have done this night will long be a tale in Karak.”

I looked toward the battlements. Between us and them was a smooth floor of rock and sand, less than half a bow-shot wide. A score of soldiers stood around the fire. There was a larger group on the parapet close to the towers of the bridge. There were more at the farther end of the parapet, looking at the wolves.

The towers of the drawbridge ran straight down to the rocky floor. The tower at the left was blank wall. The tower at the right had a wide gate. The gate was open, unguarded, unless the soldiers about the fire were its guards. Down from between the towers dropped a wide ramp, the approach to the bridge-head.

There was a touch on my arm. Lur was beside me. And close after her came my two captains. After them, one by one, the soldiers. I bade them string bows, set arrows. One by one they melted out of the green darkness, slipped by me. They made ready in the shadow of the rocks.

One score – two score… a shriek cut like an arrow through the hissing of the torrent! The ladder trembled. It shook – and twisted… Again the despairing cry… the ladder fell slack!

“Dwayanu – the ladder is broken? At – Ouarda—”

“Quiet, Lur! They may have heard that shrieking. The ladder could not break…”

“Draw it in, Dwayanu – draw it in!”

Together we pulled upon it. It was heavy. We drew it in like a net, and swiftly. And suddenly it was of no weight at all. It rushed into our hands—

Its ends were severed as though by knife slash or axe blow.

“Treachery!” I said.

“But treachery… how… with Ouarda on guard.”

I crept, crouching, behind the shadow of the rocks.

“Dara – spread out the soldiers. Tell Naral to slip to the farther end. On the signal, let them loose their arrows. Three flights only. The first at those around the fire. The second and the third at those on the walls closest to the towers. Then follow me. You understand me?”

“It is understood, Lord.”

The word went along the line; I heard the bowstrings whisper.

“We are fewer than I like, Lur – yet nothing for us but to go through with it. No way out of Sirk now but the way of the sword.”

“I know. It is of Ouarda I am thinking…” Her voice trembled.

“She is safe. If treachery had been wide-spread, we would have heard sounds of fighting. No more talking, Lur. We must move swiftly. After the third arrow flight, we rush the tower gate.”

I gave the signal. Up rose the archers. Straight upon those around the fire flew their shafts. They left few alive. Instantly upon those around the towers of the bridge whistled a second arrow storm.

Hai! But that was straight shooting! See them fall! Once more—

Whistle of feathered shaft! Song of the bow-string! Gods – but this is to live again!

I dropped down the rocks, Lur beside me. The soldier women poured after us. Straight to the tower door we sped. We were half-way there before those upon the long parapet awakened.

Shouts rang. Trumpets blared, and the air was filled with the brazen clangor of a great gong bellowing the alarm to Sirk asleep behind the gap. We sped on. Javelins dropped among us, arrows whistled. From other gates along the inner walls guards began to emerge, racing to intercept us.

We were at the door of the bridge towers – and through it!

But not all. A third had fallen under javelin and arrow. We swung the stout door shut. We dropped across it the massive bars that secured it. And not an instant too soon. Upon the door began to beat the sledges of the tricked guards.

The chamber was of stone, huge and bare. Except for the door through which we had come, there was no opening. I saw the reason for that – never had Sirk expected to be attacked from within. There were arrow slits high up, looking over the moat, and platforms for archers. At one side were cogs and levers which raised and lowered the bridge.

All this I took in at one swift glance. I leaped over to the levers, began to manipulate them. The cogs revolved.

The bridge was falling!

The Witch-woman ran up to the platform of the archers; she peered out; set horn to lips; she sent a long call through the arrow slit – summoning signal for Tibur and his host.

The hammering against the door had ceased. The blows against it were stronger, more regular-timed. The battering of a ram. The stout wood trembled under them; the bars groaned, Lur called to me:

“The bridge is down, Dwayanu! Tibur is rushing upon it. It grows lighter. Dawn is breaking. They have brought their horses!”

I cursed.

“Luka, sent him wit not to pound across that bridge on horse!”

“He is doing it… he and Rascha and a handful of others only… the rest are dismounting…”

“Hai – they are shooting at them from the arrow slits… the javelins rain among them… Sirk takes toll…”

There was a thunderous crash against the door. The wood split…

A roaring tumult. Shouts and battle cries. Ring of sword upon sword and the swish of arrows. And over it all the laughter of Tibur.

No longer was the ram battering at the door.

I threw up the bars, raised axe in readiness, opened the great gate a finger’s breadth and peered out.

The soldiers of Karak were pouring down the ramp from the bridge-head.

I opened the door wider. The dead of the fortress lay thick around tower base and bridge-head.

I stepped through the door. The soldiers saw me.

“Dwayanu!” rang their shout.

From the fortress still came the clamor of the great gong – warning Sirk.

Sirk – no longer sleeping!

— XX —

“TSANTAWU – FAREWELL!”

There was a humming as of a disturbed gigantic hive beyond Sirk’s gap. Trumpet blasts and the roll of drums. Clang of brazen gongs answering that lonely one which beat from the secret heart of the raped fortress. And ever Karak’s women-warriors poured over the bridge until the space behind the fortress filled with them.

The Smith wheeled his steed – faced me. “Gods – Tibur! But that was well done!”

“Never done but for you, Dwayanu! You saw, you knew – you did. Ours the least part.”

Well, that was true. But I was close to liking Tibur then. Life of my blood! It had been no play to lead that charge against the bridge end. The Smith was a soldier! Let him be only half loyal to me – and Khalk’ru take the Witch-woman!

“Sweep the fortress clean, Anvil-smiter. We want no arrows at our backs.”

“It is being swept, Dwayanu.”

By brooms of sword and spear, by javelin and arrow, the fortress was swept dean.

The clamor of the brazen gong died on a part stroke.

My stallion rested his nose on my shoulder, blew softly against my ear.

“You did not forget my horse! My hand to you, Tibur!”

“You lead the charge, Dwayanu!” I leaped upon the stallion. Battleaxe held high I wheeled and galloped toward the gap. Like the point of a spear I sped, Tibur at my left, the Witch-woman at my right, the nobles behind us, the soldiers sweeping after us.

We hurled ourselves through the cliffed portal of Sirk.

A living wave lifted itself to throw us back. Hammers flew, axes hewed, javelins and spears and feathered shafts sleeted us. My horse tottered and dropped, screaming, his hinder hocks cut through. I felt a hand upon my shoulder, dragging me to my feet. The Witch-woman smiled at me. She sliced with her sword the arm drawing me down among the dead. With axe and sword we cleared a ring around us. I threw myself on the back of a gray from which a noble had fallen, bristling with arrows.

We thrust forward against the living wave. It gave, curling round us.

On and on! Cut sword and hew axe! Cut and slash and batter through!

The curling wave that tore at us was beaten down. We were through the gap. Sirk lay before us.

I reined in my horse. Sirk lay before us – but too invitingly!

The city nestled in a hollow between sheer, unscalable black walls. The lip of the gap was higher than the roof of the houses. They began an arrow flight away. It was a fair city. There was no citadel nor forts; there were no temples nor palaces. Only houses of stone, perhaps a thousand of them, flat roofed, set wide apart, gardens around them, a wide street straying among them, tree-bordered. There were many lanes. Beyond the city fertile field upon field, and flowering orchards.

And no battle ranks arrayed against us. The way open.

Too open!

I caught the glint of arms on the housetops. There was the noise of axes above the blaring of trumpets and the roll of the kettle-drums.

Hai! They were barricading the wide street with their trees, preparing a hundred ambushes for us, expecting us to roll down in force.

Spreading the net in the sight of Dwayanu!

Yet they were good tactics. The best defence I had met with it in many a war against the barbarians. It meant we must fight for every step, with every house a fort, with arrows searching for us from every window and roof. They had a leader here in Sirk, to arrange such reception on such brief notice! I had respect for that leader, whoever he might be. He had picked the only possible way to victory – unless those against whom he fought knew the counter-move.

And that, hard earned, I did know.

How long could this leader keep Sirk within its thousand forts? There, always, lay the danger in this defence. The overpowering impulse of a pierced city is to swarm out upon its invaders as ants and bees do from their hills and nests. Not often is there a leader strong enough to hold them back. If each house of Sirk could remain linked to the other, each ever an active part of the whole – then Sirk might be unconquerable. But how, when they began to be cut off, one by one? Isolated? The leader’s will severed?

Hai! Then it is that despair creeps through every chink! They are drawn out by fury and despair as though by ropes. They pour out – to kill or to be killed. The cliff crumbles, stone by stone. The cake is eaten by the attackers, crumb by crumb.

I divided our soldiers, and sent the first part against Sirk in small squads, with orders to spread and to take advantage of all cover. They were to take the outer fringe of houses, at all costs, shooting their arrows up in the high curved flight against the defenders while others hammered their way into those houses. Still others were to attack farther on, but never getting too far from their comrades nor from the broad way running through the city.

I was casting a net over Sirk and did not want its meshes broken.

By now it was broad daylight.

The soldiers moved forward. I saw the arrows stream up and down, twisting among each other like serpents… I heard the axe-blows on the doors… By Luka! There floats a banner of Karak from one of the roofs! And another.

The hum of Sirk shot higher, became louder, in it a note of madness. Hai! I knew they could not long stand this nibbling! And I knew that sound! Soon it would rise to frenzy. Drone from that into despair!

Hai! Not long now before they came tumbling out…

Tibur was cursing at my elbow. I looked at Lur, and she was trembling. The soldiers were murmuring, straining at the leash, mad to join battle. I looked at their blue eyes, hard and cold; their faces beneath the helmet-caps were not those of women but of young warriors… those who sought in them for woman’s mercy would have rude awakening!

“By Zarda! But the fight will be done before we can dip blade!” I laughed.

“Patience, Tibur! Patience is our strong weapon. Sirk’s strongest – if they but knew it. Let them be first to lose that weapon.”

The turmoil grew louder. At the head of the street appeared half a hundred of Karak’s soldiers, struggling against more than equal number which steadily, swiftly, was swelled by others of Sirk pouring from side lanes and dropping from roofs and windows of the beleaguered houses.

It was the moment for which I had waited!

I gave the command. I raised the battle-cry. We drove down upon them. Our skirmishers opened to let us through, melting into the shouting ranks behind. We ripped into the defenders of Sirk. Down they went, but as they fell they fought, and many a saddle of the nobles was empty, and many were the steeds lost before we won to the first barricade.

Hai! But how they fought us there from behind the hastily felled trees – women and men and children hardly big enough to bend the bow or wield the knife!

Now the soldiers of Karak began to harry them from the sides; the soldiers of Karak shot into them from the tops of the houses they had abandoned; we fought Sirk as it had planned to fight us. And those who fought against us soon broke and fled, and we were over the barricade. Battling, we reached the heart of Sirk, a great and lovely square in which fountains played and flowers blossomed. The spray of the fountains was crimson and there were no flowers when we left that square.

We paid heavy toll there. Full half of the nobles were slain. A spear had struck my helmet and well-nigh dropped me. Bare-headed, blood-flecked I rode, shouting, sword dripping red. Naral and Dara both bore wounds, but still guarded my back. The Witch-woman, and the Smith and his scarred familiar fought on, untouched.

There was a thunder of hoofs. Down upon us swept a wave of horsemen. We raced toward them. We struck like two combers. Surged up. Mingled. Flash swords! Hammers smite! Axes cleave! Hai! But now it was hand-to-hand in the way I knew best and best loved!

We swirled in a mad whirlpool. I glanced at right and saw the Witch-woman had been separated from me. Tibur, too, was gone. Well, they were giving good account of themselves no doubt – wherever they were.

I swung to right and to left with my sword. In the front of those who fought us, over the caps of Karak which had swirled between us, was a dark face… a dark face whose black eyes looked steadily into mine – steadily… steadily. At the shoulder of that man was a slighter figure whose clear, brown eyes stared at me… steadily… steadily. In the black eyes was understanding and sorrow. The brown eyes were filled with hate.

Black eyes and brown eyes touched something deep and deep within me… They were rousing that something… calling to it… something that had been sleeping.

I heard my own voice shouting command to cease fighting, and at that shout abruptly all sound of battle close by was stilled. Sirk and Karak alike stood silent, amazed, staring at me. I thrust my horse through the press of bodies, looked deep into the black eyes.

And wondered why I had dropped my sword… why I stood thus… and why the sorrow in those eyes racked my heart… The dark-faced man spoke – two words—

“Leif!… Degataga!”

That something which had been asleep was wide awake, rushing up through me… rocking my brain… tearing at it… shaking every nerve…

I heard a cry – the voice of the Witch-woman.

A horse burst through the ring of the soldiers. Upon it was Rascha, lips drawn back over his teeth, cold eyes glaring into mine. His arm came up. His dagger gleamed, and was hidden in the back of the man who had called me – Degataga!

Had called me—

God – but I knew him!

Tsantawu! Jim!

The sleeping thing that had awakened was all awake… it had my brain… it was myself… Dwayanu forgotten!

I threw my horse forward.

Rascha’s arm was up for second stroke – the brown-eyed rider was swinging at him with sword, and Jim was falling, settling over his horse’s mane.

I caught Rascha’s arm before the dagger could descend again. I caught his arm, bent it back, and heard the bone snap. He howled – like a wolf.

A hammer hummed by my head, missing it by a hair. I saw Tibur drawing it back by its thong.

I leaned and lifted Rascha from his saddle. His sound arm swept up, hand clutching at my throat. I caught the wrist and twisted that arm back. I snapped it as I had the other.

My horse swerved. With one hand at Rascha’s throat, the other arm holding him, I toppled from the saddle bearing him down with me. I fell upon him. I twisted, and threw him over the bar of my knee. My hand slipped from his throat to his chest. My right leg locked over his.

A swift downward thrust – a sound like the breaking of a faggot. The Back-breaker would break no more backs. His own was broken.

I leaped to my feet. Looked up into the face of the brown-eyed rider… Evalie!…

I cried out to her – “Evalie!”

Abruptly, all about me the battle broke out afresh. Evalie turned to meet the charge. I saw Tibur’s great shoulders rise behind her… saw him snatch her from her horse… saw from his left hand a flash of light… It sped toward me… I was hurled aside. None too soon – not soon enough—

Something caught me a glancing blow upon the side of my head. I went down upon my knees and hands, blind and dizzy. I heard Tibur laughing; I strove to conquer blind dizziness and nausea, felt blood streaming down my face.

And crouching, swaying on knees and hands, heard the tide of battle sweep around and over and past me.

My head steadied. The blindness was passing. I was still on my hands and knees. Under me was the body of a man – a man whose black eyes were fixed on mine with understanding – with love!

I felt a touch on my shoulder; with difficulty I looked up. It was Dara.

“A hair between life and death. Lord. Drink this.”

She put a phial to my lips. The bitter, fiery liquid coursed through me, brought steadiness, brought strength. I could see there was a ring of soldier-women around me, guarding me – beyond them a ring of others, on horses.

“Can you hear me, Leif?… I haven’t much time.…”

I lurched aside and knelt.

“Jim! Jim! Oh, God – why did you come here? Take this sword and kill me!”

He reached for my hand, held it tight.

“Don’t be a damned fool, Leif! You couldn’t help it… but you’ve got to save Evalie!”

“I’ve got to save you, Tsantawu – get you out of here—”

“Shut up and listen. I’ve got mine, Leif, and I know it. That blade went through the mail right into the lungs… I’m trickling out – inside… hell, Leif – don’t take it so hard… It might have been in the war… It might have been any time… It’s not your fault…”

A sob shook me, tears mingled with the blood upon my face.

“But I killed him, Jim – I killed him!”

“I know, Leif… a neat job… I saw you… but there’s something I’ve got to tell you…” his voice faltered.

I put the phial to his lips – it brought him back.

“Just now… Evalie… hates you! You have to save her… Leif … whether she does or not. Listen. Word came to us from Sirk through the Little People that you wanted us to meet you there. You were pretending to be Dwayanu… pretending to remember nothing but Dwayanu… to allay suspicion and to gain power. You were going to slip away… come to Sirk, and lead it against Karak. You needed me to stand beside you… needed Evalie to persuade the pygmies…”

“I sent you no message, Jim!” I groaned.

“I know you didn’t – now… But we believed it… You saved Sri from the wolves and defied the Witch-woman—”

“Jim – how long was it after Sri’s escape that the lying message came?”

“Two days… What does it matter? I’d told Evalie what was – wrong – with you… gone over your story again and again. She didn’t understand… but she took me on faith… Some more of that stuff, Leif… I’m going…”

Again the fiery draught revived him.

“We reached Sirk… two days ago… across the river with Sri and twenty pygmies… it was easy… too easy… not a wolf howled, although I knew the beasts were watching us… stalking us… and the others did, too. We waited… then came the attack… and then I knew we had been trapped… How did you get over those geysers… Big Fellow… never mind… but… Evalie believes you sent the message… you… black treachery…”

His eyes closed. Cold, cold were his hands.

“Tsantawu – brother – you do not believe! Tsantawu – come back… speak to me…”

His eyes opened, but hardly could I hear him speak—

“You’re not Dwayanu – Leif? Not now – or ever again?”

“No, Tsantawu… don’t leave me!”

“Bend… your head… closer, Leif… keep fighting… save Evalie.”

Fainter grew his voice:

“Good-by… Degataga… not your fault…”

A ghost of the old sardonic smile passed over the white face.

“You didn’t pick your… damned… ancestors!… Worse luck… We’ve had… hell of good times… together… Save… Evalie…”

There was a gush of blood from his mouth.

Jim was dead… was dead.

Tsantawu – no more!

BOOK OF LEIF

— XXI —

RETURN TO KARAK

I leaned over Jim and kissed his forehead. I arose. I was numb with sorrow. But under that numbness seethed a tortured rage, a tortured horror. Deadly rage against the Witch-woman and the Smith – horror of myself, of what I had been… horror of – Dwayanu!

I must find Tibur and the Witch-woman – but first there was something else to be done. They and Evalie could wait.

“Dara – have them lift him. Carry him into one of the houses.”

I followed on foot as they bore Jim away. There was fighting still going on, but far from us. Here were only the dead. I guessed that Sirk was making its last stand at the end of the valley.

Dara, Naral and I and half-dozen more passed through the broken doors of what yesterday had been a pleasant home. In its center was a little columned hall. The other soldiers clustered round the broken doors, guarding entrance. I ordered chairs and beds and whatever else would burn brought into the little hall and heaped into a pyre. Dara said:

“Lord, let me bathe your wound.”

I dropped upon a stool, sat thinking while she washed the gash upon my head with stinging wine. Beyond the strange numbness, my mind was very clear. I was Leif Langdon. Dwayanu was no longer master of my mind – nor ever again would be. Yet he lived. He lived within as part of – myself. It was as though the shock of recognition of Jim had dissolved Dwayanu within Leif Langdon.

As though two opposing currents had merged into one; as though two drops had melted into each other; as though two antagonistic metals had fused.

Crystal clear was every memory of what I had heard and seen, said and done and thought from the time I had been hurled from Nansur Bridge. And crystal clear, agonizingly clear, was all that had gone before. Dwayanu was not dead, no! But part of me, and I was by far the stronger. I could use him, his strength, his wisdom – but he could not use mine. I was in control. I was the master.

And I thought, sitting there, that if I were to save Evalie – if I were to do another thing that now I knew, I would do or die in the doing, I must still outwardly be all Dwayanu. There lay my power. Not easily could such transmutation as I had undergone be explained to my soldiers. They believed in me and followed me as Dwayanu. If Evalie, who had known me as Leif, who had loved me as Leif, who had listened to Jim, could not understand – how much less could these? No, they must see no change.

I touched my head. The cut was deep and long; apparently only the toughness of my skull had saved it from being split.

“Dara – you saw who made this wound?”

“It was Tibur, Lord.”

“He tried to kill me… Why did he not finish?”

“Never yet has Tibur’s left hand failed to deal death. He thinks it cannot fail. He saw you fall – he thought you dead.”

“And death missed me by a hair’s-breadth. And would not, had not someone hurled me aside. Was that you, Dara?”

“It was I, Dwayanu. I saw his hand dip into his girdle, knew what was coming. I threw myself at your knees – so he could not see me.”

“Why, because you fear Tibur?”

“No – because I wanted him to believe he did not miss.”

“Why?”

“So that you would have better chance to kill Tibur, Lord. Your strength was ebbing with your friend’s life.”

I looked sharply at this bold-eyed captain of mine. How much did she know? Well, time later to find that out. I looked at the pyre. It was nearly complete.

“What was it he threw, Dara?”

She drew from her girdle a curious weapon, one whose like I had never seen. Its end was top-shaped, pointed like a dagger and with four razor-edged ribs on its sides. It had an eight-inch metal haft, round, like the haft of a diminutive javelin. It weighed about five pounds. It was of some metal I did not recognize – denser, harder than the finest of tempered steel. It was, in effect, a casting knife. But no mail could turn aside that adamantine point when hurled with the strength of one like the Smith. Dara took it from me, and pulled the short shaft. Instantly the edged ribs flew open, like flanges. The end of each was shaped like an inverted barb. A devilish tool, if I ever saw one. Once embedded, there was no way to get it out except cutting, and any pull would release the flanges, hooking them at the same time into the flesh. I took it back from Dara, and placed it in my own girdle. If I had had any doubts about what I was going to do to Tibur – I had none now.

The pyre was finished. I walked over to Jim, and laid him on it. I kissed him on the eyes, and put a sword in his dead hand. I stripped the room of its rich tapestries and draped them over him. I struck flint and set flame to the pyre. The wood was dry and resinous, and burned swiftly. I watched the flames creep up and up until smoke and fire made a canopy over him.

Then dry-eyed, but with death in my heart. I walked out of that house and among my soldiers.

Sirk had fallen and its sack was on. Smoke was rising everywhere from the looted homes. A detachment of soldiers marched by, herding along some two-score prisoners – women, all of them, and little children; some bore the marks of wounds. And then I saw that among those whom I had taken for children were a handful of the golden pygmies. At sight of me the soldiers halted, stood rigid, staring at me unbelievingly.

Suddenly one cried out, “Dwayanu! Dwayanu lives!” They raised their swords in salute, and from them came a shout: “Dwayanu!”

I beckoned their captain.

“Did you think Dwayanu dead then?”

“So ran the tale among us, Lord.”

“And did this tale also tell how I was slain?”

She hesitated.

“There were some who said it was by the Lord Tibur… by accident… that he had made cast at Sirk’s leader who was menacing you… and that you were struck instead… and that your body had been borne away by those of Sirk… I do not know…”

“Enough, soldier. Go on to Karak with the captives. Do not loiter, and do not speak of seeing me. It is a command. For a while I let the tale stand.”

They glanced at each other, oddly, saluted, and went on. The yellow eyes of the pygmies, filled with a venomous hatred, never left me until they had passed out of range. I waited, thinking. So that was to be the story! Hai! But they had fear at their elbows or they would not have troubled to spread that tale of accident! Suddenly I made decision. No use to wander over Sirk searching for Tibur. Folly to be seen, and have the counter-tale that Dwayanu lived be borne to the ears of Tibur and Lur! They should come to me – unknowing.

There was only one way out of Sirk, and that by the bridge. It was there I would await them. I turned to Dara.

“We go to the bridge, but not by this road. We take the lanes until we reach the cliffs.”

They wheeled their horses, and for the first time I realized that all this little troop of mine were mounted. And for the first time I realized that all were of my own guard, and that many of them had been foot-soldiers, yet these, too, were riding, and that upon a score of saddles were the colors of nobles who had followed me and the Witch-woman and Tibur through the gap of Sirk. It was Naral who, reading my perplexity, spoke, half-impudently as always:

“These are your most faithful, Dwayanu! The horses were idle – or a few we made so. For your better shield should Tibur – make mistake again.”

I said nothing to that until we had gone around the burning house and were under cover of one of the lanes. Then I spoke to them:

“Naral – Dara – let us talk apart for a moment.”

And when we had drawn a little away from the others, I said:

“To you two I owe my life – most of all to you, Dara. All that I can give you is yours for the asking. All I ask of you is – truth.”

“Dwayanu – you shall have it.”

“Why did Tibur want to kill me?”

Naral said, dryly:

“The Smith was not the only one who wanted you killed, Dwayanu.”

I knew that, but I wanted to hear it from them.

“Who else, Naral?”

“Lur – and most of the nobles.”

“But why? Had I not opened Sirk for them?”

“You were becoming too strong, Dwayanu. It is not in Lur or Tibur to take second place – or third… or maybe no place.”

“But they had opportunity before—”

“But you had not taken Sirk for them,” said Dara.

Naral said, resentfully:

“Dwayanu, you play with us. You know as well as we – better – what the reason was. You came here with that friend we have just left on his fire couch. All knew it. If you were to die – so must he die. He must not live, perhaps to escape and bring others into this place – for I know, as some others do, that there is life beyond here and that Khalk’ru does not reign supreme, as the nobles tell us. Well – here together are you and this friend of yours. And not only you two, but also the dark girl of the Rrrllya, whose death or capture might break the spirit of the little folk and put them under Karak’s yoke. The three of you – together! Why, Dwayanu – it was the one place and the one time to strike! And Lur and Tibur did – and killed your friend, and think they have killed you, and have taken the dark girl.”

“And if I kill Tibur, Naral?”

“Then there will be fighting. And you must guard yourself well, for the nobles hate you, Dwayanu. They have been told you are against the old customs – mean to debase them, and raise the people. Intend even to end the Sacrifices…”

She glanced at me, slyly.

“And if that were true?”

“You have most of the soldiers with you now, Dwayanu. If it were true you would also have most of the people. But Tibur has his friends – even among the soldiers. And Lur is no weakling.”

She twitched up her horse’s head, viciously.

“Better kill Lur, too, while you’re in the mood, Dwayanu!”

I made no answer to that. We trotted through the lanes, not speaking again. Everywhere were dead, and gutted houses. We came out of the city, and rode over the narrow plain to the gap between the cliffs. There happened to be none on the open road just then; so we entered the gap unnoticed. We passed through it out into the square behind the fortress. There were soldiers here, in plenty, and groups of captives. I rode in the center of my troop, bent over the neck of my horse. Dara had roughly bandaged my head. The bandages and cap-helmet I had picked up hid my yellow hair. There was much confusion, and I passed through unnoticed. I rode straight to the door of the tower behind which we had lurked when Karak stormed the bridge. I slipped in with my horse, half-closed the door. My women grouped themselves outside. They were not likely to be challenged. I settled down to wait for Tibur.

It was hard waiting, that! Jim’s face over the camp-fire. Jim’s face grinning at me in the trenches. Jim’s face above mine when I lay on the moss bank of the threshold of the mirage – Jim’s face under mine on the street of Sirk…

Tsantawu! Aie – Tsantawu! And you thought that only beauty could come from the forest I

Evalie? I cared nothing for Evalie then, caught in that limbo which at once was ice and candent core of rage.

“Save… Evalie!” Jim had bade. Well, I would save Evalie! Beyond that she mattered no more than did the Witch-woman… yes, a little more… I had a score to satisfy with the Witch-woman… I had none with Evalie…

The face of Jim… always the face of Jim… floating before me.…

I heard a whisper—

“Dwayanu – Tibur comes!”

“Is Lur with him, Dara?”

“No – a group of the nobles. He is laughing. He carries the dark girl on his saddle-bow.”

“How far away is he, Dara?”

“Perhaps a bow-shot. He rides slowly.”

“When I ride out, close in behind me. The fight will be between me and Tibur. I do not think those with him will dare attack me. If they do…”

Naral laughed.

“If they do, we shall be at their throats, Dwayanu. There are one or two of Tibur’s friends I would like to settle accounts with. We ask you only this: waste neither words nor time on Tibur. Kill him quickly. For by the gods, if he kills you, it will be the boiling pot and the knives of the flayers for all of us he captures.”

“I will kill him, Naral.”

Slowly I opened the great door. Now I could see Tibur, his horse pacing toward the bridge-end. Upon the pommel of his saddle was Evalie. Her body drooped; the hair of blue-black was loosened and covered her face like a veil. Her hands were tied behind her back, and gripped in one of Tibur’s. There were a score of his followers around and behind him, nobles – and the majority of them men. I had noticed that although the Witch-woman had few men among her guards and garrisons, the Smith showed a preference for them among his friends and personal escort. His head was turned toward them, his voice, roaring with triumph, and his laughter came plainly to me. By now the enclosure was almost empty of soldiers and captives. There was none between us. I wondered where the Witch-woman was.

Closer came Tibur, and closer.

“Ready Dara – Naral?”

“Ready, Lord!”

I flung open the gate. I raced toward Tibur, head bent low, my little troop behind me. I swung against him with head uplifted, thrust my face close to his.

Tibur’s whole body grew rigid, his eyes glared into mine, his jaw dropped. I knew that those who followed him were held in that same incredulous stupefaction. Before the Smith could recover from his paralysis, I had snatched Evalie up from his saddle, had passed her to Dara.

I lifted my sword to slash at Tibur’s throat. I gave him no warning. It was no time for chivalry. Twice he had tried treacherously to kill me. I would make quick end.

Swift as had been my stroke, the Smith was swifter. He threw himself back, slipped off his horse, and landed like a cat at its heels. I was down from mine before his great sledge was half-raised to hurl. I thrust my blade forward to pierce his throat. He parried it with the sledge. Then berserk rage claimed him. The hammer fell clanging on the rock. He threw himself on me, howling. His arms circled me, fettering mine to my sides, like living bands of steel. His legs felt for mine, striving to throw me. His lips were drawn back like a mad wolf’s, and he bored his head into the pit of my neck, trying to tear my throat with his teeth.

My ribs cracked under the tightening vice of Tibur’s arms. My lungs were laboring, sight dimming. I writhed and twisted in the effort to escape the muzzling of that hot mouth and the searching fangs.

I heard shouting around me, heard and dimly saw milling of the horses. The clutching fingers of my left hand touched my girdle – closed on something there – something like the shaft of a javelin—

Tibur’s hell-forged dart!

Suddenly I went limp in Tibur’s grip. His laughter bellowed, hoarse with triumph. And for a split-second his grip relaxed.

That split-second was enough. I summoned all my strength and broke his grip. Before he could clench me again, my hand had swept down into the girdle and clutched the dart.

I brought it up and drove it into Tibur’s throat just beneath his jaw. I jerked the haft. The opened, razor-edged flanges sliced through arteries and muscles. The bellowing laughter of Tibur changed to a hideous gurgling. His hands sought the haft, dragged at it – tore it out – And the blood spurted from Tibur’s mangled throat; Tibur’s knees buckled beneath him, and he lurched and fell at my feet… choking… his hands still feebly groping to clutch me…

I stood there, dazed, gasping for breath, the pulse roaring in my ears.

“Drink this, Lord!”

I looked up at Dara. She was holding a wine-skin to me. I took it with trembling hands, and drank deep. The good wine whipped through me. Suddenly I took it from my lips.

“The dark girl of the Rrrllya – Evalie. She is not with you.”

“There she is. I set her on another horse. There was fighting, Lord.”

I stared into Evalie’s face. She looked back at me, brown eyes cold, implacable.

“Better use the rest of the wine to wash your face, Lord. You are no sight for any tender maid.”

I passed my hand over my face, drew it away wet with blood.

“Tibur’s blood, Dwayanu, thank the gods!”

She brought my horse forward. I felt better when I was in its saddle. I glanced down at Tibur. His fingers were still faintly twitching. I looked about me. There was a shattered company of Karak’s archers at the bridge-end. They raised their bows in salute.

“Dwayanu! Live Dwayanu!”

My troop seemed strangely shrunken. I called – “Naral!”

“Dead, Dwayanu. I told you there had been fighting.”

“Who killed her?”

“Never mind. I slew him. And those left of Tibur’s escort have fled. And now what. Lord?”

“We wait for Lur.”

“Not long shall we have to linger then, for here she comes.”

There was the blast of a horn. I turned to see the Witch-woman come galloping over the square. Her red braids were loose, her sword was red, and she was nigh as battle-stained as I. With her rode a scant dozen of her women, half as many of her nobles.

I awaited her. She reined up before me, searching me with wild bright eyes.

I should have killed her as I had Tibur. I should have been hating her. But I found I was not hating her at all. All of hate I had held seemed to have poured out upon Tibur. No, I was not hating her.

She smiled faintly:

“You are hard to kill, Yellow-hair!”

“Dwayanu – Witch.”

She glanced at me, half-contemptuously.

“You are no longer Dwayanu!”

“Try to convince these soldiers of that, Lur.”

“Oh, I know,” she said, and stared down at Tibur. “So you killed the Smith. Well, at least you are still a man.”

“Killed him for you, Lur!” I jeered. “Did I not promise you?”

She did not answer, only asked, as Dara had before her:

“And now what?”

“We wait here until Sirk is emptied. Then we ride to Karak, you beside me. I do not like you at my back, Witch-woman.”

She spoke quietly to her women, then sat, head bent, thinking, with never another word for me.

I whispered to Dara:

“Can we trust the archers?”

She nodded.

“Bid them wait and march with us. Let them drag the body of Tibur into some corner.”

For half an hour the soldiers came by, with prisoners, with horses, with cattle and other booty. Small troops of the nobles and their supporters galloped up, halted, and spoke, but, at my word and Lur’s nod, passed on over the bridge. Most of the nobles showed dismayed astonishment at my resurrection; the soldiers gave me glad salute.

The last skeleton company came through the gap. I had been watching for Sri, but he was not with them, and I concluded that he had been taken to Karak with the earliest prisoners or had been killed.

“Come,” I said to the Witch-woman. “Let your women go before us.”

I rode over to Evalie, lifted her from her saddle and set her on my pommel. She made no resistance, but I felt her shrink from me. I knew she was thinking that she had but exchanged Tibur for another master, that to me she was only spoil of war. If my mind had not been so weary I suppose that would have hurt. But my mind was too weary to care.

We passed over the bridge, through the curling mists of steam. We were halfway to the forest when the Witch-woman threw back her head and sent forth a long, wailing call. The white wolves burst from the ferns. I gave command to the archers to set arrows. Lur shook her head.

“No need to harm them. They go to Sirk. They have earned their pay.”

The white wolves coursed over the barren to the bridge-end, streamed over it, vanished. I heard them howling among the dead.

“I, too, keep my promises,” said the Witch-woman.

We rode on, into the forest, back to Karak.

— XXII —

GATE OF KHALK’RU

We were close to Karak when the drums of the Little People began beating.

The leaden weariness pressed down upon me increasingly. I struggled to keep awake. Tibur’s stroke on my head had something to do with that, but I had taken other blows and eaten nothing since long before dawn. I could not think, much less plan what I was going to do after I had got back to Karak.

The drums of the Little People drove away my lethargy, brought me up wide-awake. They crashed out at first like a thunderburst across the white river. After that they settled down into a slow, measured rhythm filled with implacable menace. It was like Death standing on hollow graves and stamping on them before he marched.

At the first crash Evalie straightened, then sat listening with every nerve. I reined up my horse, and saw that the Witch-woman had also halted and was listening with all of Evalie’s intentness. There was something inexplicably disturbing in that monotonous drumming. Something that reached beyond and outside of human experience – or reached before it. It was like thousands of bared hearts beating in unison, in one unalterable rhythm, not to be still till the hearts themselves stopped… inexorable… and increasing in steadily widening area… spreading, spreading… until they beat from all the land across white Nanbu.

I spoke to Lur.

“I am thinking that here is the last of my promises, Witch-woman. I killed Yodin, gave you Sirk, I slew Tibur – and here is your war with the Rrrllya.”

I had not thought of how that might sound to Evalie! She turned and gave me one long level look of scorn; she said to the Witch-woman, coldly, in halting Uighur:

“It is war. Was that not what you expected when you dared to take me? It will be war until my people have me again. Best be careful how you use me.”

The Witch-woman’s control broke at that, all the long pent-up fires of her wrath bursting forth.

“Good! Now we shall wipe out your yellow dogs for once and all. And you shall be flayed, or bathed in the cauldron – or given to Khalk’ru. Win or lose – there will be little of you for your dogs to fight over. You shall be used as I choose.”

“No,” I said, “as I choose, Lur.”

The blue eyes flamed on me at that. And the brown eyes met mine as scornfully as before.

“Give me a horse to ride. I do not like the touch of you – Dwayanu.”

“Nevertheless, you ride with me, Evalie.”

We passed into Karak. The drums beat now loud, now low. But always with that unchanging, inexorable rhythm. They swelled and fell, swelled and fell. Like Death still stamping on the hollow graves – now fiercely – and now lightly.

There were many people in the streets. They stared at Evalie, and whispered. There were no shouts of welcome, no cheering. They seemed sullen, frightened. Then I knew they were listening so closely to the drums that they hardly knew we were passing. The drums were closer. I could hear them talking from point to point along the far bank of the river. The tongues of the talking drums rose plain above the others. And through their talking, repeated and repeated:

“Ev-ah-lee! Ev-ah-lee!”

We rode over the open square to the gate of the black citadel. There I stopped.

“A truce, Lur.”

She sent a mocking glance at Evalie.

“A truce! What need of a truce between you and me – Dwayanu?”

I said, quietly:

“I am tired of bloodshed. Among the captives are some of the Rrrllya. Let us bring them where they can talk with Evalie and with us two. We will then release a part of them, and send them across Nanbu with the message that no harm is intended Evalie. That we ask the Rrrllya to send us on the morrow an embassy empowered to arrange a lasting peace. And that when that peace is arranged they shall take Evalie back with them unharmed.”

She said, smiling:

“So – Dwayanu – fears the dwarfs!”

I repeated:

“I am tired of bloodshed.”

“Ah, me,” she sighed. “And did I not once hear Dwayanu boast that he kept his promises – and was thereby persuaded to give him payment for them in advance! Ah, me – but Dwayanu is changed!”

She stung me there, but I managed to master my anger; I said:

“If you will not agree to this, Lur, then I myself will give the orders. But then we shall be a beleaguered city which is at its own throat. And easy prey for the enemy.”

She considered this.

“So you want no war with the little yellow dogs? And it is your thought that if the girl is returned to them, there will be none? Then why wait? Why not send her back at once with the captives? Take them up to Nansur, parley with the dwarfs there. Drum talk would settle the matter in a little while – if you are right. Then we can sleep this night without the drums disturbing you.”

That was true enough, but I read the malice in it. The truth was that I did not want Evalie sent back just then. If she were, then never, I knew, might I have a chance to justify myself with her, break down her distrust – have her again accept me as the Leif whom she had loved. But given a little time – I might. And the Witch-woman knew this.

“Not so quickly should it be done, Lur,” I said, suavely. “That would be to make them think we fear them – as the proposal made you think I feared them. We need more than hasty drum talk to seal such treaty. No, we hold the girl as hostage until we make our terms.”

She bent her head, thinking, then looked at me with clear eyes, and smiled.

“You are right, Dwayanu. I will send for the captives after I have rid myself of these stains of Sirk. They will be brought to your chamber. And in the meantime I will do more. I will order that word be sent the Rrrllya on Nansur that soon their captured fellows will be among them with a message. At the least it will give us time. And we need time, Dwayanu – both of us.”

I looked at her sharply. She laughed, and gave her horse the spurs. I rode behind her through the gate and into the great enclosed square. It was crowded with soldiers and captives. Here the drumming was magnified. The drums seemed to be within the place itself, invisible and beaten by invisible drummers. The soldiers were plainly uneasy, the prisoners excited, and curiously defiant.

Passing into the citadel I called various officers who had not taken part in the attack on Sirk and gave orders that the garrison on the walls facing Nansur Bridge be increased. Also that an alarm should be sounded which would bring in the soldiers and people from the outer-lying posts and farms. I ordered the guard upon the river walls to be strengthened, and the people of the city be told that those who wished to seek shelter in the citadel could come, but must be in by dusk. It was a scant hour before nightfall. There would be little trouble in caring for them in that immense place. And all this I did in event of the message failing. If it failed, I had no desire to be part of a massacre in Karak, which would stand a siege until I could convince the Little People of my good faith. Or convince Evalie of it, and have her bring about a peace.

This done, I took Evalie to my own chambers, not those of the High-priest where the Black Octopus hovered over the three thrones, but a chain of comfortable rooms in another part of the citadel. The little troop, which had stood by me through the sack of Sirk and after, followed us. There I turned Evalie over to Dara. I was bathed, my wound dressed and bandaged, and clothed. Here the windows looked out over the river, and the drums beat through them maddeningly. I ordered food brought, and wine, and summoned Evalie. Dara brought her. She had been well cared for, but she would not eat with me. She said to me:

“I fear my people will have but scant faith in any messages you send, Dwayanu.”

“Later we will talk of that other message, Evalie. I did not send it. And Tsantawu, dying in my arms, believed me when I told him I had not.”

“I heard you say to Lur that you had promised her Sirk. You did not lie to her, Dwayanu – for Sirk is eaten. How can I believe you?”

I said: “You shall have proof that I speak truth, Evalie, Now, since you will not eat with me, go with Dara.”

She had no fault to find with Dara. Dara was no lying traitor, but a soldier, and fighting in Sirk or elsewhere was part of her trade. She went with her.

I ate sparingly and drank heavily. The wine put new life in me, drove away what was left of weariness. I put sorrow for Jim resolutely aside for the moment, thinking of what I intended to do, and how best to do it. And then there was a challenge at the door, and the Witch-woman entered.

Her red braids crowned her and in them shone the sapphires. She bore not the slightest mark of the struggles of the day, nor sign of fatigue. Her eyes were bright and clear, her red lips smiling. Her low, sweet voice, her touch upon my arm, brought back memories I had thought gone with Dwayanu.

She called, and through the door came a file of soldiers, and with them a score of the Little People, unbound, hatred in their yellow eyes as they saw me, curiosity too. I spoke to them, gently. I sent for Evalie. She came, and the golden pygmies ran to her, threw themselves upon her like a crowd of children, twittering and trilling, stroking her hair, touching her feet and hands.

She laughed, called them one by one by name, then spoke rapidly. I could get little of what she said; by the shadow on Lur’s face I knew she had understood nothing at all. I repeated to Evalie precisely what I had told Lur – and which, at least in part, she knew, for she had betrayed that she understood the Uighur, or the Ayjir, better than she had admitted. I translated from the tongue of the dwarfs for Lur.

The pact was speedily made. Half of the pygmies were to make their way at once over Nanbu to the garrison on the far side of the bridge. By the talking drums they would send our message to the stronghold of the Little People. If they accepted it, the beating of the war drums would cease. I said to Evalie:

“When they talk on their drums, let them say that nothing will be asked of them that was not contained in the old truce – and that death will no longer lie in wait for them when they cross the river.”

The Witch-woman said:

“Just what does that mean, Dwayanu?”

“Now Sirk is done, there is no longer much need for that penalty, Lur. Let them gather their herbs and metals as they will; that is all.”

“There is more in your mind than that—” Her eyes narrowed.

“They understood me, Evalie – but do you also tell them.”

The Little People trilled among themselves; then ten of them stepped forward, those chosen to take the message. As they were moving away, I stopped them.

“If Sri escaped, let him come with the embassy. Better still – let him come before them. Send word through the drums that he may come as soon as he can. He has my safe-conduct, and shall stay with Evalie until all is settled.”

They chattered over that, assented. The Witch-woman made no comment. For the first time I saw Evalie’s eyes soften as she looked at me.

When the pygmies were gone, Lur walked to the door, and beckoned. Ouarda entered.

“Ouarda!”

I liked Ouarda. It was good to know she was alive. I went to her with outstretched hands. She took them.

“It was two of the soldiers, Lord. They had sisters in Sirk. They cut the ladder before we could stop them. They were slain,” she said.

Would to God they had cut it before any could, have followed me!

Before I could speak, one of my captains knocked and entered.

“It is long after dusk and the gates are closed, Lord. All those who would come are behind them.”

“Were there many, soldier?”

“No, Lord – not more than a hundred or so. The others refused.”

“And did they say why they refused?”

“Is the question an order, Lord?”

“It is an order.”

“They said they were safer where they were. That the Rrrllya had no quarrel with them, who were but meat for Khalk’ru.”

“Enough, soldier!” The Witch-woman’s voice was harsh. “Go! Take the Rrrllya with you.”

The captain saluted, turned smartly and was gone with the dwarfs. I laughed.

“Soldiers cut our ladder for sympathy of those who fled Khalk’ru. The people fear the enemies of Khalk’ru less than they do their own kind who are his butchers! We do well to make peace with the Rrrllya, Lur.”

I watched her face pale, then redden and saw the knuckles of her hands whiten as she clenched them. She smiled, poured herself wine, lifted it with a steady hand.

“I drink to your wisdom – Dwayanu!”

A strong soul – the Witch-woman’s! A warrior’s heart. Somewhat lacking in feminine softness, it was true. But it was no wonder that Dwayanu had loved her – in his way and as much as he could love a woman.

A silence dropped upon the chamber, intensified in some odd fashion by the steady beating of the drums. How long we sat in that silence I do not know. But suddenly the beat of the drums became fainter.

And then all at once the drums ceased entirely. The quiet brought a sense of unreality. I could feel the tense nerves loosening like springs long held taut. The abrupt silence made ears ache, slowed heartbeat.

“They have the message. They have accepted it,” Evalie spoke.

The Witch-woman arose.

“You keep the girl beside you tonight, Dwayanu?”

“She sleeps in one of these rooms, Lur. She will be under guard. No one can reach her without passing through my room here,” I looked at her, significantly. “And I sleep lightly. You need have no fear of her escape.”

“I am glad the drums will not disturb your sleep – Dwayanu.”

She gave me a mocking salute, and, with Ouarda, left me.

And suddenly the weariness dropped upon me again. I turned to Evalie, watching me with eyes in which I thought doubt of her own deep doubt had crept. Certainly there was no scorn, nor loathing in them. Well, now I had her where all this maneuvering had been meant to bring her. Alone with me. And looking at her I felt that in the face of all she had seen of me, all she had undergone because of me – words were useless things. Nor could I muster them as I wanted. No, there would be plenty of time… in the morning, perhaps, when I had slept… or after I had done what I had to do… then she must believe…

“Sleep, Evalie. Sleep without fear… and believe that all that has been wrong is now becoming right. Go with Dara. You shall be well guarded. None can come to you except through this room, and here I will be. Sleep and fear nothing.”

I called Dara, gave her instructions, and Evalie went with her. At the curtains masking the entrance to the next room she hesitated, half turned as though to speak, but did not. And not long after Dara returned. She said:

“She is already asleep, Dwayanu.”

“As you should be, friend,” I told her. “And all those others who stood by me this day. I think there is nothing to fear tonight. Select those whom you can trust and have them guard the corridor and my door. Where have you put her?”

“In the chamber next this, Lord.”

“It would be better if you and the others slept here, Dara. There are half a dozen rooms for you. Have wine and food brought for you – plenty of it.”

She laughed.

“Do you expect a siege, Dwayanu?”

“One never knows.”

“You do not greatly trust Lur, Lord?”

“I trust her not at all, Dara.”

She nodded, turned to go. Upon the impulse I said:

“Dara, would it make you sleep better tonight and those with you, and would it help you in picking your guard if I told you this: there will be no more sacrifices to Khalk’ru while I live?”

She started; her face lightened, softened. She thrust out her hand to me:

“Dwayanu – I had a sister who was given to Khalk’ru. Do you mean this?”

“By the life of my blood! By all the living gods! I mean it!”

“Sleep well, Lord!” Her voice was choked. She walked away, through the curtain, but not before I had seen the tears on her cheeks.

Well, a woman had a right to weep – even if she was a soldier. I myself had wept today.

I poured myself wine, sat thinking as I drank. Mainly my thoughts revolved around the enigma of Khalk’ru. And there was a good reason for that.

What was Khalk’ru?

I slipped the chain from round my neck, opened the locket and studied the ring. I closed it, and threw it on the table. Somehow I felt that it was better there than over my heart while I was doing this thinking.

Dwayanu had had his doubts about that dread Thing being any Spirit of the Void, and I, who now was Leif Langdon and a passive Dwayanu, had no doubts whatever that it was not. Yet I could not accept Barr’s theory of mass hypnotism – and trickery was out of the question.

Whatever Khalk’ru might be, Khalk’ru – as the Witch-woman had said – was. Or at least that Shape which became material through ritual, ring and screen – was.

I thought that I might have put the experience in the temple of the oasis down as hallucination if it had not been repeated here in the Shadowed-land. But there could be no possible doubt about the reality of the sacrifice I had conducted; no possible doubt as to the destruction – absorption – dissolvement – of the twelve girls. And none of Yodin’s complete belief in the power of the tentacle to remove me, and none of his complete effacement. And I thought that if the sacrifices and Yodin were standing in the wings laughing at me, as Barr had put it – then it was in the wings of a theater in some other world than this. And there was the deep horror of the Little People, the horror of so many of the Ayjir – and there was the revolt in ancient Ayjirland born of this same horror, which had destroyed Ayjirland by civil war.

No, whatever the Thing was, no matter how repugnant to science its recognition as a reality might be – still it was Atavism, superstition – call it what Barr would – I knew the Thing was real! Not of this earth – no, most certainly not of this earth. Not even supernatural. Or rather, supernatural only insofar as it might come from another dimension or even another world which our five senses could not encompass.

And I reflected, now, that science and religion are really blood brothers, which is largely why they hate each other so, that scientists and religionists are quite alike in their dogmatism, their intolerance, and that every bitter battle of religion over some interpretation of creed or cult has its parallel in battles of science over a bone or rock.

Yet just as there are men in the churches whose minds have not become religiously fossilized, so there are men in the laboratories whose minds have not become scientifically fossilized… Einstein, who dared challenge all conceptions of space and time with his four dimensional space in which time itself was a dimension, and who followed that with proof of five dimensional space instead of the four which are all our senses can apprehend, and which apprehends one of them wrongly… the possibility of a dozen worlds spinning interlocked with this one… in the same space… the energy which we call matter of each of them keyed to the different vibration, and each utterly unaware of the other… and utterly overturning the old axiom that two bodies cannot occupy the same place at the same time.

And I thought – what if far and far back in time, a scientist of that day, one of the Ayjir people, had discovered all that! Had discovered the fifth dimension beyond length, breadth, thickness and time. Or had discovered one of those interlocking worlds whose matter streams through the interstices of the matter of ours. And discovering dimension or world, had found the way to make dwellers in that dimension or that other world both aware of and manifest to those of this. By sound and gesture, by ring and screen, had made a gateway through which such dwellers could come – or at least, appear! And then what a weapon this discoverer had – what a weapon the inevitable priests of that Thing would have! And did have ages gone, just as they had here in Karak.

If so, was it one dweller or many who lurked in those gateways for its drink of life? The memories bequeathed me by Dwayanu told me there had been other temples in Ayjirland besides that one of the oasis. Was it the same Being that appeared in each? Was the Shape that came from the shattered stone of the oasis the same that had fed in the temple of the mirage? Or were there many of them – dwellers in other dimension or other world – avidly answering the summons? Nor was it necessarily true that in their own place these Things had the form of the Kraken. That might be the shape, through purely natural laws, which entrance into this world forced upon them.

I thought over that for quite awhile. It seemed to me the best explanation of Khalk’ru. And if it was, then the way to be rid of Khalk’ru was to destroy his means of entrance. And that, I reflected, was precisely how the ancient Ayjirs had argued.

But it did not explain why only those of the old blood could summon—

I heard a low voice at the door. I walked softly over to it, listened. I opened the door and there was Lur, talking to the guards.

“What is it you are seeking, Lur?”

“To speak with you. I will keep you only a little time, Dwayanu.”

I studied the Witch-woman. She stood, very quietly, in her eyes nothing of defiance nor resentment nor subtle calculation – only appeal. Her red braids fell over her white shoulders; she was without weapon or ornament. She looked younger than ever I had seen her, and somewhat forlorn. I felt no desire to mock her nor to deny her. I felt instead the stirrings of a deep pity.

“Enter, Lur – and say all that is in your mind.”

I closed the door behind her. She walked over to the window, looked out into the dim greenly glimmering night. I went to her.

“Speak softly, Lur. The girl is asleep there in the next chamber. Let her rest.”

She said, tonelessly:

“I wish you had never come here, Yellow-hair.” I thought of Jim, and I answered:

“I wish that too, Witch-woman. But here I am.” She leaned towards me, put her hand over my heart. “Why do you hate me so greatly?”

“I do not hate you, Lur. I have no hate left in me – except for one thing.”

“And that—?”

Involuntarily I looked at the table. One candle shone there and its light fell on the locket that held the ring. Her glance followed mine. She said:

“What do you mean to do? Throw Karak open to the dwarfs? Mend Nansur? Rule here over Karak and the Rrrllya with their dark girl at your side? Is it that… and if it is that – what is to become of Lur? Answer me. I have the right to know. There is a bond between us… I loved you when you were Dwayanu… you know how well…”

“And would have killed me while I was still Dwayanu,” I said, sombrely.

“Because I saw Dwayanu dying as you looked into the eyes of the stranger,” she answered. “You whom Dwayanu had mastered was killing Dwayanu. I loved Dwayanu. Why should I not avenge him?”

“If you believe I am no longer Dwayanu, then I am the man whose friend you trapped and murdered – the man whose love you trapped and would have destroyed. And if that be so – what claim have you upon me, Lur?”

She did not answer for moments; then she said:

“I have some justice on my side. I tell you I loved Dwayanu. Something I knew of your case from the first, Yellow-hair. But I saw Dwayanu awaken within you. And I knew it was truly he! I knew, too, that as long as that friend of yours and the dark girl lived there was danger for Dwayanu. That was why I plotted to bring them into Sirk. I threw the dice upon the chance of killing them before you had seen them. Then, I thought, all would be well. There would be none left to rouse that in you which Dwayanu had mastered. I lost. I knew I had lost when by whim of Luka she threw you three together. And rage and sorrow caught me – and I did… what I did.”

“Lur,” I said, “answer me truly. That day you returned to the Lake of the Ghosts after pursuit of the two women – were they not your spies who bore that lying message into Sirk? And did you not wait until you learned my friend and Evalie were in the trap before you gave me word to march? And was it not in your thought that you would then – if I opened the way into Sirk – rid yourself not only of those two but of Dwayanu? For remember – you may have loved Dwayanu, but as he told you, you loved power better than he. And Dwayanu threatened your power. Answer me truly.”

For the second time I saw tears in the eyes of the Witch-woman. She said, brokenly:

“I sent the spies, yes. I waited until the two were in the trap. But I never meant harm to Dwayanu!”

I did not believe her. But still I felt no anger, no hate. The pity grew.

“Lur, now I will tell you truth. It is not in my mind to rule with Evalie over Karak and the Rrrllya. I have no more desire for power. That went with Dwayanu. In the peace I make with the dwarfs, you shall rule over Karak – if that be your desire. The dark girl shall go back with them. She will not desire to remain in Karak. Nor do I…”

“You cannot go with her,” she interrupted me. “Never would the yellow dogs trust you. Their arrows would be ever pointed at you.”

I nodded – that thought had occurred to me long before.

“All that must adjust itself,” I said. “But there shall be no more sacrifices. The gate of Khalk’ru shall be closed against him forever. And I will close it.”

Her eyes dilated.

“You mean—”

“I mean that I will shut Khalk’ru forever from Karak – unless Khalk’ru proves stronger than I.”

She wrung her hands, helplessly.

“What use rule over Karak to me then… how could I hold the people?”

“Nevertheless – I will destroy the gate of Khalk’ru.”

She whispered:

“Gods – if I had Yodin’s ring…”

I smiled at that.

“Witch-woman, you know as well as I that Khalk’ru comes to no woman’s call.”

The witch-lights flickered in her eyes; a flash of green shone through them.

“There is an ancient prophecy, Yellow-hair, that Dwayanu did not know – or had forgotten. It says that when Khalk’ru comes to a woman’s call, he – stays! That was the reason no woman in ancient Ayjirland might be priestess at the sacrifice.”

I laughed at that.

“A fine pet, Lur – to add to your wolves.”

She walked toward the door, paused.

“What if I could love you – as I loved Dwayanu? Could make you love me as Dwayanu loved me? And more! Send the dark girl to join her people and take the ban of death from them on this side of Nanbu. Would you let things be as they are – rule with me over Karak?”

I opened the door for her.

“I told you I no longer care for power, Lur.”

She walked away.

I went back to the window, drew a chair to it, and sat thinking. Suddenly from somewhere close to the citadel I heard a wolf cry. Thrice it howled, then thrice again.

“Leif!”

I jumped to my feet. Evalie was beside me. She peered at me through the veils of her hair; her clear eyes shone upon me – no longer doubting, hating, fearing. They were as they were of old.

“Evalie!”

My arms went round her; my lips found hers.

“I listened, Leif!”

“You believe, Evalie!”

She kissed me, held me tight.

“But she was right – Leif. You could not go with me again into the land of the Little People. Never, never would they understand. And I would not dwell in Karak.”

“Will you go with me, Evalie – to my own land? After I have done what I must do… and if I am not destroyed in its doing?”

“I will go with you, Leif!”

And she wept awhile, and after another while she fell asleep in my arms. And I lifted her, and carried her into her chamber and covered her with the sleep silks. Nor did she awaken.

I returned to my own room. As I passed the table I picked up the locket, started to put it round my neck. I threw it back. Never would I wear that chain again, I dropped upon the bed, sword at hand. I slept.

— XXIII —

IN KHALK’RU’S TEMPLE

Twice I awakened. The first time it was the howling of the wolves that aroused me. It was as though they were beneath my window. I listened drowsily, and sank back to sleep.

The second time I came wide awake from a troubled dream. Some sound in the chamber had roused me, of that I was sure. My hand dropped to my sword lying on the floor beside my bed. I had the feeling that there was someone in the room. I could see nothing in the green darkness that filled the chamber. I called, softly:

“Evalie! Is that you?”

There was no answer, no sound.

I sat up in the bed, even thrust a leg out to rise. And then I remembered the guards at my door, and Dara and her soldiers beyond, and I told myself that it had been only my troubled dream that had awakened me. Yet for a time I lay awake listening, sword in hand. And then the silence lulled me back to sleep.

There was a knocking upon my door, and I struggled out of that sleep. I saw that it was well after dawn. I went to the door softly so that I might not awaken Evalie. I opened it, and there with the guards was Sri. The little man had come well armed, with spear and sickle-sword and between his shoulders one of the small, surprisingly resonant talking drums. He looked at me in the friendliest fashion. I patted his hand and pointed to the curtains.

“Evalie is there, Sri. Go waken her.”

He trotted past me. I gave greeting to the guards, and turned to follow Sri. He stood at the curtains, looking at me with eyes in which was now no friendliness at all. He said:

“Evalie is not there.”

I stared at him, incredulously, brushed by him and into that chamber. It was empty. I crossed to the pile of silks and cushions on which Evalie had slept, touched them. There was no warmth. I went, Sri at my heels, into the next room. Dara and a half dozen of the women lay there, asleep. Evalie was not among them. I touched Dara on the shoulder. She sat up, yawning.

“Dara – the girl is gone!”

“Gone!” she stared at me as incredulously as I had at the golden pygmy. She leaped to her feet, ran to the empty room, then with me through the other chambers. There lay the soldier women, asleep, but not Evalie.

I ran back to my own room, and to its door. A bitter rage began to possess me. Swiftly, harshly, I questioned the guards. They had seen no one. None had entered; none had gone forth. The golden pygmy listened, his eyes never leaving me.

I turned toward Evalie’s room. I passed the table on which I had thrown the locket. My hand fell on it, lifted it; it was curiously light… I opened it… The ring of Khalk’ru was not there! I glared at the empty locket – and like a torturing flame realization of what its emptiness and the vanishment of Evalie might signify came to me. I groaned, leaned against the table to keep from falling.

“Drum, Sri! Call your people! Bid them come quickly! There may yet be time!”

The golden pygmy hissed; his eyes became little pools of yellow fire. He could not have known all the horror of my thoughts – but he read enough. He leaped to the window, swung his drum and sent forth call upon call – peremptory, raging, vicious. At once he was answered – answered from Nansur, and then from all the river and beyond it the drums of the Little People roared out.

Would Lur hear them? She could not help but hear them… but would she heed… would their threat stop her… it would tell her that I was awake and that the Little People knew of their betrayal… and Evalie’s.

God! If she did hear – was it in time to save Evalie?

“Quick, Lord!” Dara called from the curtains. The dwarf and I ran through. She pointed to the side of the wall. There, where one of the carved stones jointed another, hung a strip of silk.

“A door there, Dwayanu! That is how they took her. They went hurriedly. The cloth caught when the stone closed.”

I looked for something to batter at the stone. But Dara was pressing here and there. The stone swung open. Sri darted past and into the black passage it had masked. I stumbled after him, Dara at my heels, the others following. It was a narrow passage, and not long. Its end was a solid wall of stone. And here Dara pressed again until that wall opened.

We burst into the chamber of the High-priest. The eyes of the Kraken stared at me and through me with their inscrutable malignancy. Yet it seemed to me that in them now was challenge.

All my senseless fury, all blind threshing of my rage, fell from me. A cold deliberation, an ordered purpose that had in it nothing of haste took its place… Is it too late to save Evalie?… It is not too late to destroy you, my enemy…

“Dara – get horses for us. Gather quickly as many as you can trust. Take only the strongest. Have them ready at the gate of the road to the temple… We go to end Khalk’ru. Tell them that.”

I spoke to the golden pygmy.

“I do not know if I can help Evalie. But I go to put an end to Khalk’ru. Do you wait for your people – or do you go with me?”

“I go with you.”

I knew where the Witch-woman dwelt in the black citadel, and it was not far away. I knew I would not find her there, but I must be sure. And she might have taken Evalie to the Lake of the Ghosts, I was thinking as I went on, past groups of silent, uneasy, perplexed and saluting soldiers. But deep in me I knew she had not. Deep within me I knew that it had been Lur who had awakened me in the night. Lur, who had stolen through the curtains to take the ring of Khalk’ru. And there was only one reason why she should have done that. No, she would not be at the Lake of the Ghosts.

Yet, if she had come into my room – why had she not slain me? Or had she meant to do this, and had my awakening and calling out to Evalie stayed her? Had she feared to go further? Or had she deliberately spared me?

I reached her rooms. She was not there. None of her women was there. The place was empty, not even soldiers on guard.

I broke into a run. The golden pygmy followed me, shrilling, javelins in left hand, sickle-sword in right. We came to the gate to the temple road.

There were three or four hundred soldiers awaiting me. Mounted – and every one a woman. I threw myself on a horse Dara held for me, swung Sri up on the saddle. We raced toward the temple.

We were half-way there when out from the trees that bordered the temple road poured the white wolves. They sprang from the sides like a white torrent, threw themselves upon the riders. They checked our rush, our horses stumbled, falling over those the fangs of the wolves had dropped in that swift, unexpected ambuscade; soldiers falling with them, ripped and torn by the wolves before they could struggle to their feet. We milled among them – horses and men and wolves in a whirling, crimson-flecked ring.

Straight at my throat leaped the great dog-wolf, leader of Lur’s pack, green eyes naming. I had no time for sword thrust. I caught its throat in my left hand, lifted it and flung it over my back. Even so, its fangs had struck and gashed me.

We were through the wolves. What was left of them came coursing behind us. But they had taken toll of my troop.

I heard the clang of an anvil… thrice stricken… the anvil of Tubalka!

God! It was true… Lur in the temple… and Evalie… and Khalk’ru!

We swept up to the door of the temple. I heard voices raised in the ancient chant. The entrance swarmed… It bristled with swords of the nobles, women and men.

“Ride through them, Dara! Ride them down!”

We swept through them like a ram. Sword against sword, hammers and battleaxes beating at them, horses trampling them.

The shrill song of Sri never ceased. His javelin thrust, his sickle-sword slashed.

We burst into Khalk’ru’s temple. The chanting stopped. The chanters arose against us; they struck with sword and axe and hammer at us; they stabbed and hacked our horses; pulled us down. The amphitheater was a raging cauldron of death…

The lip of the platform was before me. I spurred my horse to it, stood upon its back and leaped upon the platform. Close to my right was the anvil of Tubalka; beside it, hammer raised to smite, was Ouarda. I heard the roll of drums, the drums of Khalk’ru’s evocation. The backs of the priests were bent over them.

In front of the priests, the ring of Khalk’ru raised high, stood Lur.

And between her and the bubble ocean of yellow stone that was the gate of Khalk’ru, fettered dwarfs swung two by two in the golden girdles…

Within the warrior’s ring – Evalie!

The Witch-woman never looked at me; she never looked behind her at the roaring cauldron of the amphitheater where the soldiers and nobles battled.

She launched into the ritual!

Shouting, I rushed on Ouarda. I wrested the great sledge from her hands. I hurled it straight at the yellow screen… straight at the head of Khalk’ru. With every ounce of my strength I hurled that great hammer.

The screen cracked! The hammer was thrown back from it… fell.

The Witch-woman’s voice went on… and on… never faltering.

There was a wavering in the cracked screen. The Kraken floating in the bubble ocean seemed to draw back… to thrust forward…

I ran toward it… to the hammer.

An instant I halted beside Evalie. I thrust my hands through the golden girdle, broke it as though it had been wood. I dropped my sword at her feet.

“Guard yourself, Evalie!”

I picked up the hammer. I raised it. The eyes of Khalk’ru moved… they glared at me, were aware of me… the tentacles stirred! And the paralyzing cold began to creep round me… I threw all my will against it.

I smashed the sledge of Tubalka against the yellow stone… again… and again—

The tentacles of Khalk’ru stretched toward me!

There was a crystalline crashing, like a lightning bolt striking close. The yellow stone of the screen shattered. It rained round me like sleet driven by an icy hurricane. There was an earthquake trembling. The temple rocked. My arms fell, paralysed. The hammer of Tubalka dropped from hands that could no longer feel it. The icy cold swirled about me … higher… higher… there was a shrill and dreadful shrieking…

For an instant the shape of the Kraken hovered where the screen had been. Then it shrank. It seemed to be sucked away into immeasurable distances. It vanished.

And life rushed back into me!

There were jagged streamers of the yellow stone upon the rocky floor… black of the Kraken within them… I beat them into dust…

“Leif!”

Evalie’s voice, shrill, agonized. I swung round. Lur was rushing upon me, sword raised. Before I could move Evalie had darted between us, flung herself in front of the Witch-woman, struck at her with my own sword.

The blade of Lur parried the stroke, swept in… bit deep… and Evalie fell… Lur leaped toward me… I watched her come, not moving, not caring… there was blood upon her sword… Evalie’s blood…

Something like a flash of light touched her breast. She halted as though a hand had thrust her back. Slowly, she dropped to her knees. She sank to the rock.

Over the rim of the platform leaped the dog-wolf, howling as it ran. It hurled itself straight at me. There was another flash of light. The dog-wolf somersaulted and fell – in mid-leap.

I saw Sri, crouching. One of his javelins was in Lur’s breast, the mate to it in the dog-wolf’s throat… I saw the golden pygmy running to Evalie… saw her rise, holding a hand to a shoulder from which streamed blood…

I walked toward Lur, stiffly, like an automaton. The white wolf tried to stagger to its feet, then crawled to the Witch-woman, dragging itself on its belly. It reached her before I did. It dropped its head upon her breast. It turned its head, and lay glaring at me, dying.

The Witch-woman looked up at me. Her eyes were soft and her mouth had lost all cruelty. It was tender. She smiled at me.

“I wish you had never come here, Yellow-hair!”

And then—

“Ai – and – Ai! My Lake of the Ghosts!”

Her hand crept up, and dropped on the head of the dying wolf, caressingly. She sighed—

The Witch-woman was dead.

I looked into the awed faces of Evalie and Dara. “Evalie – your wound—”

“Not deep, Leif… Soon it will heal… it does not matter…”

Dara said:

“Hail – Dwayanu! It is a great thing you have done this day!”

She dropped on her knees, kissed my hand. And now I saw that those of mine who had survived the battle in the temple had come up on the platform, and were kneeling – to me. And that Ouarda lay beside Tubalka’s anvil, and that Sri too was on his knees, staring at me, eyes filled with worship.

I heard the tumult of the drums of the Little People… no longer on Nanbu’s far side… in Karak… and closer.

Dara spoke again:

“Let us be going back to Karak, Lord. It is now all yours to rule.”

I said to Sri:

“Sound your drum, Sri. Tell them that Evalie lives. That Lur is dead. That the gate of Khalk’ru is closed forever. Let there be no more killing.”

Sri answered:

“What you have done has wiped out all war between my people and Karak. Evalie and you we will obey. I will tell them what you have done.”

He swung the little drum, raised his hands to beat it I stopped him.

“Wait, Sri, I shall not be here to obey.”

Dara cried: “Dwayanu – you will not leave us!”

“Yes, Dara… I go now to that place whence I came… I do not return to Karak. I am done with the Little People, Sri.”

Evalie spoke, breathlessly:

“What of me – Leif?”

I put my hands on her shoulders, looked into her eyes:

“Last night you whispered that you would go with me, Evalie. I release you from that promise… I am thinking you would be happier here with your small folk…”

She said, steadily:

“I know where happiness lies for me. I hold to my promise… unless you do not want me…”

“I do want you – dark girl!”

She turned to Sri: “Carry my love to my people, Sri. I shall not see them again.”

The little man clung to her, cast himself down before her, wailed and wept while she talked to him. At last he squatted on his haunches, and stared long at the shattered gate of the Kraken. I saw the secret knowledge touch him. He came to me, held up his arms for me to lift him. He raised my lids and looked deep into my eyes. He thrust his hand in my breast, and placed his head on my breast, and listened to the beating of my heart. He dropped, bent Evalie’s head to his, whispering.

Dara said: “Dwayanu’s will is our will. Yet it is hard to understand why he will not stay with us.”

“Sri knows… more than I do. I cannot, Dara.”

Evalie came to me. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears.

“Sri says we must go now, Leif… quickly. My people must – not see me. He will tell them a tale upon his drum… there will be no fighting… and henceforth there will be peace.”

The golden pygmy began to beat the talking drum. At the first strokes the hosts of other drums were silent. When he had ended they began again… jubilant, triumphant… until in them crept a note of questioning. Once more he beat a message… the answer came – angry, peremptory – in some queer fashion, incredulous.

Sri said to me: “Haste! Haste!”

Dara said: “We stay with you, Dwayanu, until the last.”

I nodded, and looked at Lur. Upon her hand the ring of Khalk’ru sent out a sudden gleam. I went to her, lifted the dead hand and took from it the ring. I smashed it on the anvil of Tubalka as I had the ring of Yodin.

Evalie said: “Sri knows a way that will lead us out into your world, Leif. It lies at the head of Nanbu. He will take us.”

“Is the way past the Lake of Ghosts, Evalie?”

“I will ask him… yes, it passes there.”

“That is good. We go into a country where the clothing I wear would be hardly fitting. And some provision must be made for you.”

We rode from the temple with Sri on my saddle, and Evalie and Dara on either side. The drums were very close. They were muted when we emerged from the forest upon the road. We went swiftly. It was mid-afternoon when we reached the Lake of the Ghosts. The drawbridge was down. There was no one in the garrison. The Witch-woman’s castle was empty. I searched, and found my roll of clothes; I stripped the finery of Dwayanu from me. I took a battle-axe, thrust a short sword in my belt, picked javelins for Evalie and myself. They would help us win through, would be all we had to depend upon to get us food later on. We took food with us from Lur’s castle, and skins to clothe Evalie when she passed from the Mirage.

I did not go up into the chamber of the Witch-woman. I heard the whispering of the waterfall – and did not dare to look upon it.

All the rest of that afternoon we galloped along the white river’s banks. The drums of the Little People followed us… searching… questioning… calling… “Ev-ah-lee… Ev-ah-lee… Ev-ah-lee…”

By nightfall we had come to the cliffs at the far end of the valley. Here Nanbu poured forth in a mighty torrent from some subterranean source. We picked our way across. Sri led us far into a ravine running steeply upward, and here we camped.

And that night I sat thinking long of what Evalie must meet in that new world awaiting her beyond the Mirage – the world of sun and stars and wind and cold. I thought long of what must be done to shield her until she could adjust herself to that world. And I listened to the drums of the Little People calling her, and I watched her while she slept, and wept and smiled in dream.

She must be taught to breathe. I knew that when she emerged from this atmosphere in which she had lived since babyhood, she would cease instantly to breathe – deprivation of the accustomed stimulus of the carbon-dioxide would bring that about at once. She must will herself to breathe until the reflexes again became automatic and she need give them no conscious thought. And at night, when she slept, this would be trebly difficult. I would have to remain awake, watch beside her.

And she must enter this new world with eyes bandaged, blind, until the nerves accustomed to the green luminosity of the Mirage could endure the stronger light. Warm clothing we could contrive from the skins and furs. But the food – what was it Jim had said in the long and long ago – that those who had eaten the food of the Little People would die if they ate other. Well, that was true in part. Yet, only in part – it could be managed.

With dawn came a sudden memory – the pack I had hidden on Nanbu’s bank when we had plunged into the white river with the wolves at our heels. If that could be found, it would help solve the problem of Evalie’s clothing at least. I told Dara about it. And she and Sri set out to find it. And while they were gone the soldier-women foraged for food and I instructed Evalie upon what she must do to cross in safety that bridge which lay, perilous, between her world and mine.

Two days they were gone – but they had found the pack. They brought word of peace between the Ayjir and the Little People. As for me—

Dwayanu the Deliverer had come even as the prophecy had promised… had come and freed them from the ancient doom… and had gone back as was his right to that place from which, answering the prophecy, he had come… and had taken with him Evalie as was also his right. Sri had spread the tale.

And next morning when the light showed that the sun had risen over the peaks that girdled the Valley of the Mirage, we set forth – Evalie like a slim boy beside me.

We climbed until we were within the green mists. And here we bade farewell, Sri clinging to Evalie, kissing her hands and feet, weeping. And Dara clasped my shoulders:

“You will come back to us, Dwayanu? We will be waiting!”

It was like the echo of the Uighur captain’s voice – long and long ago…

I turned and began to climb, Evalie following. I thought that so might Euridice have followed her lover up from the Land of Shades in another long and long ago.

The figures of Sri and the watching women became dim. They were hidden under the green mists…

I felt the bitter cold touch my face. I caught Evalie up in my arms – and climbed up and on – and staggered at last out into the sun-lit warmth of the slopes beyond the pit of the precipices.

The day dawned when we had won the long, hard fight for Evalie’s life. Not easily was the grip of the Mirage loosed. We turned our faces to the South and set our feet upon the Southward trail.

And yet…

Ai! Lur – Witch-woman! I see you lying there, smiling with lips grown tender – the white wolf’s head upon your breast! And Dwayanu still lives within me!

— THE END —

Serialized in
Argosy magazine, 23 Jan-27 Feb 1932

First book edition:
Horace Liveright, Inc., New York, 1932

BURN, WITCH, BURN!

FOREWORD

I am a medical man specializing in neurology and diseases of the brain. My peculiar field is abnormal psychology, and in it I am recognized as an expert. I am closely connected with two of the foremost hospitals in New York, and have received many honors in this country and abroad. I set this down, risking identification, not through egotism but because I desire to show that I was competent to observe, and competent to bring practiced scientific judgment upon, the singular events I am about to relate.

I say that I risk identification, because Lowell is not my name. It is a pseudonym, as are the names of all the other characters in this narrative. The reasons for this evasion will become increasingly apparent.

Yet I have the strongest feeling that the facts and observations which in my casebooks are grouped under the heading of “The Dolls of Mme. Mandilip” should be clarified, set down in orderly sequence and be made known. Obviously, I could do this in the form of a report to one of my medical societies, but I am too well aware of the way my colleagues would receive such a paper, and with what suspicion, pity or even abhorrence, they would henceforth regard me so counter to accepted notions of cause and effect do many of these facts and observations run.

But now, orthodox man of medicine that I am, I ask myself whether there may not be causes other than those we admit. Forces and energies which we stubbornly disavow because we can find no explanation for them within the narrow confines of our present knowledge. Energies whose reality is recognized in folklore, the ancient traditions, of all peoples, and which, to justify our ignorance, we label myth and superstition.

A wisdom, a science, immeasurably old. Born before history, but never dying nor ever wholly lost. A secret wisdom, but always with its priests and priestesses guarding its dark flame, passing it on from century to century. Dark flame of forbidden knowledge… burning in Egypt before even the Pyramids were raised; and in temples crumbling now beneath the Gobi’s sands; known to the sons of Ad whom Allah, so say the Arabs, turned to stone for their sorceries ten thousand years before Abraham trod the streets of Ur of the Chaldees; known in China – and known to the Tibetan lama, the Buryat shaman of the steppes and to the warlock of the South Seas alike.

Dark flame of evil wisdom… deepening the shadows of Stonehenge’s brooding menhirs; fed later by hands of Roman legionaries; gathering strength, none knows why, in medieval Europe… and still burning, still alive, still strong.

Enough of preamble. I begin where the dark wisdom, if that it were, first cast its shadow upon me.

— I —

THE UNKNOWN DEATH

I heard the clock strike one as I walked up the hospital steps. Ordinarily I would have been in bed and asleep, but there was a case in which I was much interested, and Braile, my assistant, had telephoned me of certain developments which I wished to observe. It was a night in early November. I paused for a moment at the top of the steps to look at the brilliancy of the stars. As I did so an automobile drew up at the entrance to the hospital.

As I stood, wondering what its arrival at that hour meant, a man slipped out of it. He looked sharply up and down the deserted street, then threw the door wide open. Another man emerged. The two of them stooped and seemed to be fumbling around inside. They straightened and then I saw that they had locked their arms around the shoulders of a third. They moved forward, not supporting but carrying this other man. His head hung upon his breast and his body swung limply.

A fourth man stepped from the automobile.

I recognized him. He was Julian Ricori, a notorious underworld chieftain, one of the finished products of the Prohibition Law. He had been pointed out to me several times. Even if he had not been, the newspapers would have made me familiar with his features and figure. Lean and long, with silvery white hair, always immaculately dressed, a leisured type from outward seeming, rather than leader of such activities as those of which he was accused.

I had been standing in the shadow, unnoticed. I stepped out of the shadow. Instantly the burdened pair halted, swiftly as hunting hounds. Their free hands dropped into the pockets of their coats. Menace was in that movement.

“I am Dr. Lowell,” I said, hastily. “Connected with the hospital. Come right along.”

They did not answer me. Nor did their gaze waver from me; nor did they move. Ricori stepped in front of them. His hands were also in his pockets. He looked me over, then nodded to the others; I felt the tension relax.

“I know you, Doctor,” he said pleasantly, in oddly precise English. “But that was quite a chance you took. If I might advise you, it is not well to move so quickly when those come whom you do not know, and at night – not in this town.”

“But,” I said, “I do know you, Mr. Ricori.”

“Then,” he smiled, faintly, “your judgment was doubly at fault. And my advice doubly pertinent.”

There was an awkward moment of silence. He broke it.

“And being who I am, I shall feel much better inside your doors than outside.”

I opened the doors. The two men passed through with their burden, and after them Ricori and I. Once within, I gave way to my professional instincts and stepped up to the man the two were carrying. They shot a quick glance at Ricori. He nodded. I raised the man’s head.

A little shock went through me. The man’s eyes were wide open. He was neither dead nor unconscious. But upon his face was the most extraordinary expression of terror I had ever seen in a long experience with sane, insane and borderland cases. It was not undiluted fear. It was mixed with an equally disturbing horror. The eyes, blue and with distended pupils, were like exclamation points to the emotions printed upon that face. They stared up at me, through me and beyond me. And still they seemed to be looking inward – as though whatever nightmare vision they were seeing was both behind and in front of them.

“Exactly!” Ricori had been watching me closely. “Exactly, Dr. Lowell, what could it be that my friend has seen – or has been given – that could make him appear so? I am most anxious to learn. I am willing to spend much money to learn. I wish him cured, yes – but I shall be frank with you, Dr. Lowell. I would give my last penny for the certainty that those who did this to him could not do the same thing to me – could not make me as he is, could not make me see what he is seeing, could not make feel what he is feeling.”

At my signal, orderlies had come up. They took the patient and laid him on a stretcher. By this time the resident physician had appeared. Ricori touched my elbow.

“I know a great deal about you, Dr. Lowell,” he said. “I would like you to take full charge of this case.”

I hesitated.

He continued, earnestly: “Could you drop everything else? Spend all your time upon it? Bring in any others you wish to consult – don’t think of expense—”

“A moment, Mr. Ricori,” I broke in. “I have patients who cannot be neglected. I will give all the time I can spare, and so will my assistant, Dr. Braile. Your friend will be constantly under observation here by people who have my complete confidence. Do you wish me to take the case under those conditions?”

He acquiesced, though I could see he was not entirely satisfied. I had the patient taken to an isolated private room, and went through the necessary hospital formalities. Ricori gave the man’s name as Thomas Peters, asserted that he knew of no close relations, had himself recorded at Peters’ nearest friend, assumed all responsibility, and taking out a roll of currency, skimmed a thousand dollar bill from it, passing it to the desk as “preliminary costs.”

I asked Ricori if he would like to be present at my examination. He said that he would. He spoke to his two men, and they took positions at each side of the hospital doors – on guard. Ricori and I went to the room assigned to the patient. The orderlies had stripped him, and he lay upon the adjustable cot, covered by a sheet. Braile, for whom I had sent, was bending over Peters, intent upon his face, and plainly puzzled. I saw with satisfaction that Nurse Walters, an unusually capable and conscientious young woman, had been assigned to the case. Braile looked up at me. He said: “Obviously some drug.”

“Maybe,” I answered. “But if so then a drug I have never encountered. Look at his eyes—”

I closed Peters’ lids. As soon as I had lifted my fingers they began to rise, slowly, until they were again wide open. Several times I tried to shut them. Always they opened: the terror, the horror in them, undiminished.

I began my examination. The entire body was limp, muscles and joints. It was as flaccid, the simile came to me, as a doll. It was as though every motor nerve had gone out of business. Yet there was none of the familiar symptoms of paralysis. Nor did the body respond to any sensory stimulus, although I struck down into the nerve trunks. The only reaction I could obtain was a slight contraction of the dilated pupils under strongest light.

Hoskins, the pathologist, came in to take his samples for blood tests. When he had drawn what he wanted, I went over the body minutely. I could find not a single puncture, wound, bruise or abrasion. Peters was hairy. With Ricori’s permission, I had him shaved clean – chest, shoulders, legs, even the head. I found nothing to indicate that a drug might have been given him by hypodermic. I had the stomach emptied and took specimens from the excretory organs, including the skin. I examined the membranes of nose and throat: they seemed healthy and normal; nevertheless, I had smears taken from them. The blood pressure was low, the temperature slightly subnormal; but that might mean nothing. I gave an injection of adrenaline. There was absolutely no reaction from it. That might mean much.

“Poor devil,” I said to myself. “I’m going to try to kill that nightmare for you, at any rate.”

I gave him a minimum hypo of morphine. It might have been water for all the good it did. Then I gave him all I dared. His eyes remained open, terror and horror undiminished. And pulse and respiration unchanged.

Ricori had watched all these operations with intense interest. I had done all I could for the time, and told him so.

“I can do no more,” I said, “until I receive the reports of the specimens. Frankly, I am all at sea. I know of no disease nor drug which would produce these conditions.”

“But Dr. Braile,” he said, “mentioned a drug—”

“A suggestion only,” interposed Braile hastily. “Like Dr. Lowell, I know of no drug which would cause such symptoms.”

Ricori glanced at Peters’ face and shivered.

“Now,” I said, “I must ask you some questions. Has this man been ill? If so, has he been under medical care? If he has not actually been ill, has he spoken of any discomfort? Or have you noticed anything unusual in his manner or behavior?”

“No, to all questions,” he answered. “Peters has been in closest touch with me for the past week. He has not been ailing in the least. Tonight we were talking in my apartments, eating a late and light dinner. He was in high spirits. In the middle of a word, he stopped, half-turned his head as though listening; then slipped from his chair to the floor. When I bent over him he was as you see him now. That was precisely half after midnight. I brought him here at once.”

“Well,” I said, “that at least gives us the exact time of the seizure. There is no use of your remaining, Mr. Ricori, unless you wish.”

He studied his hands a few moments, rubbing the carefully manicured nails.

“Dr. Lowell,” he said at last, “if this man dies without your discovering what killed him, I will pay you the customary fees and the hospital the customary charges and no more. If he dies and you make this discovery after his death, I will give a hundred thousand dollars to any charity you name. But if you make the discovery before he dies, and restore him to health – I will give you the same sum.”

We stared at him, and then as the significance of this remarkable offer sank in, I found it hard to curb my anger.

“Ricori,” I said, “you and I live in different worlds, therefore I answer you politely, although I find it difficult. I will do all in my power to find out what is the matter with your friend and to cure him. I would do that if he and you were paupers. I am interested in him only as a problem which challenges me as a physician. But I am not interested in you in the slightest. Nor in your money. Nor in your offer. Consider it definitely rejected. Do you thoroughly understand that?”

He betrayed no resentment.

“So much so that more than ever do I wish you to take full charge,” he said.

“Very well. Now where can I get you if I want to bring you here quickly?”

“With your permission,” he answered, “I should like to have – well, representatives – in this room at all times. There will be two of them. If you want me, tell them – and I will soon be here.”

I smiled at that, but he did not.

“You have reminded me,” he said, “that we live in different worlds. You take your precautions to go safely in your world – and I order my life to minimize the perils of mine. Not for a moment would I presume to advise you how to walk among the dangers of your laboratory, Dr. Lowell. I have the counterparts of those dangers. Bene – I guard against them as best I can.”

It was a most irregular request, of course. But I found myself close to liking Ricori just then, and saw clearly his point of view. He knew that and pressed the advantage.

“My men will be no bother,” he said. “They will not interfere in any way with you. If what I suspect to be true is true they will be a protection for you and your aids as well. But they, and those who relieve them, must stay in the room night and day. If Peters is taken from the room, they must accompany him – no matter where it is that he is taken.”

“I can arrange it,” I said. Then, at his request, I sent an orderly down to the doors. He returned with one of the men Ricori had left on guard. Ricori whispered to him, and he went out. In a little while two other men came up. In the meantime I had explained the peculiar situation to the resident and the superintendent and secured the necessary permission for their stay.

The two men were well-dressed, polite, of a singularly tight-lipped and cold-eyed alertness. One of them shot a glance at Peters.

“Christ!” he muttered.

The room was a corner one with two windows, one opening out on the Drive, the other on the side street. Besides these, there were no outer openings except the door to the hall; the private bathroom being enclosed and having no windows. Ricori and the two inspected the room minutely, keeping away, I noticed, from the windows. He asked me then if the room could be darkened. Much interested, I nodded. The lights were turned off, the three went to the windows, opened them and carefully scrutinized the six-story sheer drop to both streets. On the side of the Drive there is nothing but the open space above the park. Opposite the other side is a church.

“It is at this side you must watch,” I heard Ricori say; he pointed to the church. “You can turn the lights on now, Doctor.”

He started toward the door, then turned.

“I have many enemies, Dr. Lowell. Peters was my right hand. If it was one of these enemies who struck him, he did it to weaken me. Or, perhaps, because he had not the opportunity to strike at me. I look at Peters, and for the first time in my life I, Ricori – am afraid. I have no wish to be the next, I have no wish to look into hell!”

I grunted at that! He had put so aptly what I had felt and had not formulated into words.

He started to open the door. He hesitated.

“One thing more. If there should be any telephone calls inquiring as to Peters’ condition let one of these men, or their reliefs, answer. If any should come in person making inquiry, allow them to come up – but if they are more than one, let only one come at a time. If any should appear, asserting that they are relations, again let these men meet and question them.”

He gripped my hand, then opened the door of the room. Another pair of the efficient-appearing retainers were awaiting him at the threshold. They swung in before and behind him. As he walked away, I saw that he was crossing himself vigorously.

I closed the door and went back into the room. I looked down on Peters.

If I had been religious, I too would have been doing some crossing. The expression on Peters’ face had changed. The terror and horror were gone. He still seemed to be looking both beyond me and into himself, but it was a look of evil expectancy – so evil that involuntarily I shot a glance over my shoulder to see what ugly thing might be creeping upon me.

There was nothing. One of Ricori’s gunmen sat in the corner of the window, in the shadow, watching the parapet of the church roof opposite; the other sat stolidly at the door.

Braile and Nurse Walters were at the other side of the bed. Their eyes were fixed with horrified fascination on Peters’ face. And then I saw Braile turn his head and stare about the room as I had.

Suddenly Peters’ eyes seemed to focus, to become aware of the three of us, to become aware of the entire room. They flashed with an unholy glee. That glee was not maniacal – it was diabolical. It was the look of a devil long exiled from his well-beloved hell, and suddenly summoned to return.

Or was it like the glee of some devil sent hurtling out of his hell to work his will upon whom he might?

Very well do I know how fantastic, how utterly unscientific, are such comparisons. Yet not otherwise can I describe that strange change.

Then, abruptly as the closing of a camera shutter, that expression fled and the old terror and horror came back. I gave an involuntary gasp of relief, for it was precisely as though some evil presence had withdrawn. The nurse was trembling; Braile asked, in a strained voice: “How about another hypodermic?”

“No,” I said. “I want you to watch the progress of this – whatever it is – without drugs. I’m going down to the laboratory. Watch him closely until I return.”

I went down to the laboratory. Hoskins looked up at me.

“Nothing wrong, so far. Remarkable health, I’d say. Of course all I’ve results on are the simpler tests.”

I nodded. I had an uncomfortable feeling that the other tests also would show nothing. And I had been more shaken than I would have cared to confess by those alternations of hellish fear, hellish expectancy and hellish glee in Peters’ face and eyes. The whole case troubled me, gave me a nightmarish feeling of standing outside some door which it was vitally important to open, and to which not only did I have no key but couldn’t find the keyhole. I have found that concentration upon microscopic work often permits me to think more freely upon problems. So I took a few smears of Peters’ blood and began to study them, not with any expectation of finding anything, but to slip the brakes from another part of my brain.

I was on my fourth slide when I suddenly realized that I was looking at the incredible. As I had perfunctorily moved the slide, a white corpuscle had slid into the field of vision. Only a simple white corpuscle – but within it was a spark of phosphorescence, shining out like a tiny lamp!

I thought at first that it was some effect of the light, but no manipulation of the illumination changed that spark. I rubbed my eyes and looked again. I called Hoskins.

“Tell me if you see something peculiar in there.”

He peered into the microscope. He started, then shifted the light as I had.

“What do you see, Hoskins?”

He said, still staring through the lens:

“A leucocyte inside of which is a globe of phosphorescence. Its glow is neither dimmed when I turn on the full illumination, nor is it increased when I lessen it. In all except the ingested globe the corpuscle seems normal.”

“And all of which,” I said, “is quite impossible.”

“Quite,” he agreed, straightening. “Yet there it is!”

I transferred the slide to the micro-manipulator, hoping to isolate the corpuscle, and touched it with the tip of the manipulating needle. At the instant of contact the corpuscle seemed to burst. The globe of phosphorescence appeared to flatten, and something like a miniature flash of heat-lightning ran over the visible portion of the slide.

And that was all – the phosphorescence was gone.

We prepared and examined slide after slide. Twice more we found a tiny shining globe, and each time with the same result, the bursting corpuscle, the strange flicker of faint luminosity – then nothing.

The laboratory ’phone rang. Hoskins answered.

“It’s Braile. He wants you – quick.”

“Keep after it, Hoskins,” I said, and hastened to Peters’ room. Entering, I saw Nurse Walters, face chalk white, eyes closed, standing with her back turned to the bed. Braile was leaning over the patient, stethoscope to his heart. I looked at Peters; and stood stock still, something like a touch of unreasoning panic at my own heart. Upon his face was that look of devilish expectancy, but intensified. As I looked, it gave way to the diabolic joy, and that, too, was intensified. The face held it for not many seconds. Back came the expectancy then on its heels the unholy glee. The two expressions alternated, rapidly. They flickered over Peters’ face like – like the flickers of the tiny lights within the corpuscles of his blood. Braile spoke to me through stiff lips:

“His heart stopped three minutes ago! He ought to be dead – yet listen—”

The body of Peters stretched and stiffened. A sound came from his lips – a chuckling sound; low yet singularly penetrating, inhuman, the chattering laughter of a devil. The gunman at the window leaped to his feet, his chair going over with a crash. The laughter choked and died away, and the body of Peters lay limp.

I heard the door open, and Ricori’s voice: “How is he, Dr. Lowell? I could not sleep—” He saw Peters’ face.

“Mother of Christ!” I heard him whisper. He dropped to his knees.

I saw him dimly for I could not take my eyes from Peters’ face. It was the face of a grinning, triumphant fiend – all humanity wiped from it – the face of a demon straight out of some mad medieval painter’s hell. The blue eyes, now utterly malignant, glared at Ricori.

And as I looked, the dead hands moved; slowly the arms bent up from the elbows, the fingers contracting like claws; the dead body began to stir beneath the covers—

At that the spell of nightmare dropped from me; for the first time in hours I was on ground that I knew. It was the rigor mortis, the stiffening of death – but setting in more quickly and proceeding at a rate I had never known.

I stepped forward and drew the lids down over the glaring eyes. I covered the dreadful face.

I looked at Ricori. He was still on his knees, crossing himself and praying. And kneeling beside him, arm around his shoulders, was Nurse Walters, and she, too, was praying.

Somewhere a clock struck five.

— II —

THE QUESTIONNAIRE

I offered to go home with Ricori, and somewhat to my surprise he accepted with alacrity. The man was pitiably shaken. We rode silently, the tight-lipped gunmen alert. Peters’ face kept floating before me.

I gave Ricori a strong sedative, and left him sleeping, his men on guard. I had told him that I meant to make a complete autopsy.

Returning to the hospital in his car, I found the body of Peters had been taken to the mortuary. Rigor mortis, Braile told me, had been complete in less than an hour – an astonishingly short time. I made the necessary arrangements for the autopsy, and took Braile home with me to snatch a few hours’ sleep. It is difficult to convey by words the peculiarly unpleasant impression the whole occurrence had made upon me. I can only say that I was as grateful for Braile’s company as he seemed to be for mine.

When I awoke, the nightmarish oppression still lingered, though not so strongly. It was about two when we began the autopsy. I lifted the sheet from Peters’ body with noticeable hesitation. I stared at his face with amazement. All diabolism had been wiped away. It was serene, unlined – the face of a man who had died peacefully, with no agony either of body or mind. I lifted his hand, it was limp, the whole body flaccid, the rigor gone.

It was then, I think, that I first felt full conviction I was dealing with an entirely new, or at least unknown, agency of death, whether microbic or otherwise. As a rule, rigor does not set in for sixteen to twenty-four hours, depending upon the condition of the patient before death, temperature and a dozen other things. Normally, it does not disappear for forty-eight to seventy-two hours. Usually a rapid setting-in of the stiffening means as rapid a disappearance, and vice versa. Diabetics stiffen quicker than others. A sudden brain injury, like shooting, is even swifter. In this case, the rigor had begun instantaneously with death, and must have completed its cycle in the astonishingly short time of less than five hours – for the attendant told me that he had examined the body about ten o’clock and he had thought that stiffening had not yet set in. As a matter of fact, it had come and gone.

The results of the autopsy can be told in two sentences. There was no ascertainable reason why Peters should not be alive. And he was dead!

Later, when Hoskins made his reports, both of these utterly conflicting statements continued to be true. There was no reason why Peters should be dead. Yet dead he was. If the enigmatic lights we had observed had anything to do with his death, they left no traces. His organs were perfect, all else as it should have been; he was, indeed, an extraordinarily healthy specimen. Nor had Hoskins been able to capture any more of the light-carrying corpuscles after I had left him.

That night I framed a short letter describing briefly the symptoms observed in Peters’ case, not dwelling upon the changes in expression but referring cautiously to “unusual grimaces” and a “look of intense fear.” Braile and I had this manifold and mailed to every physician in Greater New York. I personally attended to a quiet inquiry to the same effect among the hospitals. The letters asked if the physicians had treated any patients with similar symptoms, and if so to give particulars, names, addresses, occupations and any characteristic interest under seal, of course, of professional confidence. I flattered myself that my reputation was such that none of those who received the questionnaires would think the request actuated either by idle curiosity or slightest unethical motive.

I received in response seven letters and a personal visit from the writer of one of them. Each letter, except one, gave me in various degrees of medical conservatism, the information I had asked. After reading them, there was no question that within six months seven persons of oddly dissimilar characteristics and stations in life had died as had Peters.

Chronologically, the cases were as follows:

May 25: Ruth Bailey, spinster; fifty years old; moderately wealthy; Social Registerite and best of reputation; charitable and devoted to children.

June 20: Patrick McIlraine; bricklayer; wife and two children. August 1: Anita Green; child of eleven; parents in moderate circumstances and well educated.

August 15: Steve Standish; acrobat; thirty; wife and three children. August 30: John J. Marshall; banker; sixty interested in child welfare.

September 10: Phineas Dimott; thirty-five; trapeze performer; wife and small child.

October 12: Hortense Darnley; about thirty; no occupation.

Their addresses, except two, were widely scattered throughout the city.

Each of the letters noted the sudden onset of rigor mortis and its rapid passing. Each of them gave the time of death following the initial seizure as approximately five hours. Five of them referred to the changing expressions which had so troubled me; in the guarded way they did it I read the bewilderment of the writers.

“Patient’s eyes remained open,” recorded the physician in charge of the spinster Bailey. “Staring, but gave no sign of recognition of surroundings and failed to focus upon or present any evidence of seeing objects held before them. Expression one of intense terror, giving away toward death to others peculiarly disquieting to observer. The latter intensified after death ensued. Rigor mortis complete and dissipated within five hours.”

The physician in charge of McIlraine, the bricklayer, had nothing to say about the ante-mortem phenomena, but wrote at some length about the expression of his patient’s face after death.

“It had,” he reported, “nothing in common with the muscular contraction of the so-called ‘Hippocratic countenance,’ nor was it in any way the staring eyes and contorted mouth familiarly known as the death grin. There was no suggestion of agony, after the death – rather the opposite. I would term the expression one of unusual malice.”

The report of the physician who had attended Standish, the acrobat, was perfunctory, but it mentioned that “after patient had apparently died, singularly disagreeable sounds emanated from his throat.” I wondered whether these had been the same demonic machinations that had come from Peters, and, if so, I could not wonder at all at my correspondent’s reticence concerning them.

I knew the physician who had attended the banker – opinionated, pompous, a perfect doctor of the very rich.

“There can be no mystery as to the cause of death,” he wrote. “It was certainly thrombosis, a clot somewhere in the brain. I attach no importance whatever to the facial grimaces, nor to the time element involved in the rigor. You know, my dear Lowell,” he added, patronizingly, “it is an axiom in forensic medicine that one can prove anything by rigor mortis.”

I would have liked to have replied that when in doubt thrombosis as a diagnosis is equally as useful in covering the ignorance of practitioners, but it would not have punctured his complacency.

The Dimott report was a simple record with no comment whatever upon grimaces or sounds.

But the doctor who had attended little Anita had not been so reticent.

“The child,” he wrote, “had been beautiful. She seemed to suffer no pain, but at the onset of the illness I was shocked by the intensity of terror in her fixed gaze. It was like a waking nightmare – for unquestionably she was conscious until death. Morphine in almost lethal dosage produced no change in this symptom, nor did it seem to have any effect upon heart or respiration. Later the terror disappeared, giving way to other emotions which I hesitate to describe in this report, but will do so in person if you so desire. The aspect of the child after death was peculiarly disturbing, but again I would rather speak than write of that.”

There was a hastily scrawled postscript; I could see him hesitating, then giving way at last to the necessity of unburdening his mind, dashing off that postscript and rushing the letter away before he could reconsider—

“I have written that the child was conscious until death. What haunts me is the conviction that she was conscious after physical death! Let me talk to you.”

I nodded with satisfaction. I had not dared to put that observation down in my questionnaire. And if it has been true of the other cases, as I now believed it must have been, all the doctors except Standish’s had shared my conservatism – or timidity. I called little Anita’s physician upon the ’phone at once. He was strongly perturbed. In every detail his case had paralleled that of Peters. He kept repeating over and over:

“The child was sweet and good as an angel, and she changed into a devil!”

I promised to keep him apprised of any discoveries I might make, and shortly after our conversation I was visited by the young physician who had attended Hortense Darnley. Doctor Y, as I shall call him, had nothing to add to the medical aspect other than what I already knew, but his talk suggested the first practical line of approach toward the problem.

His office, he said, was in the apartment house which had been Hortense Darnley’s home. He had been working late, and had been summoned to her apartment about ten o’clock by the woman’s maid, a colored girl. He had found the patient lying upon her bed, and had at once been struck by the expression of terror on her face and the extraordinary limpness of her body. He described her as blonde, blue-eyed – “the doll type.”

A man was in the apartment. He had at first evaded giving his name, saying that he was merely a friend. At first glance, Dr. Y had thought the woman had been subjected to some violence, but examination revealed no bruises or other injuries. The “friend” had told him they had been eating dinner when “Miss Darnley flopped right down on the floor as though all her bones had gone soft, and we couldn’t get anything out of her.” The maid confirmed this. There was a half-eaten dinner on the table, and both man and servant declared Hortense had been in the best of spirits. There had been no quarrel. Reluctantly, the “friend” had admitted that the seizure had occurred three hours before, and that they had tried to “bring her about” themselves, calling upon him only when the alternating expressions which I have referred to in the case of Peters began to appear.

As the seizure progressed, the maid had become hysterical with fright and fled. The man was of tougher timber and had remained until the end. He had been much shaken, as had Dr. Y, by the after-death phenomena. Upon the physician declaring that the case was one for the coroner, he had lost his reticence, volunteering his name as James Martin, and expressing himself as eager for a complete autopsy. He was quite frank as to his reasons. The Darnley woman had been his mistress, and he “had enough trouble without her death pinned to me.”

There had been a thorough autopsy. No trace of disease or poison had been found. Beyond a slight valvular trouble of the heart, Hortense Darnley had been perfectly healthy. The verdict had been death by heart disease. But Dr. Y was perfectly convinced the heart had nothing to do with it.

It was, of course, quite obvious that Hortense Darnley had died from the same cause or agency as had all the others. But to me the outstanding fact was that her apartment had been within a stone’s throw of the address Ricori had given me as that of Peters. Furthermore, Martin was of the same world, if Dr. Y’s impressions were correct. Here was conceivably a link between two of the cases – missing in the others. I determined to call in Ricori, to lay all the cards before him, and enlist his aid if possible.

My investigation had consumed about two weeks. During that time I had become well acquainted with Ricori. For one thing he interested me immensely as a product of present-day conditions; for another I liked him, despite his reputation. He was remarkably well read, of a high grade of totally unmoral intelligence, subtle and superstitious – in olden time he would probably have been a Captain of Condottieri, his wits and sword for hire. I wondered what were his antecedents. He had paid me several visits since the death of Peters, and quite plainly my liking was reciprocated. On these visits he was guarded by the tight-lipped man who had watched by the hospital window. This man’s name, I learned, was McCann. He was Ricori’s most trusted bodyguard, apparently wholly devoted to his white-haired chief. He was an interesting character too, and quite approved of me. He was a drawling Southerner who had been, as he put it, “a cow-nurse down Arizona way, and then got too popular on the Border.”

“I’m for you, Doc,” he told me. “You’re sure good for the boss. Sort of take his mind off business. An’ when I come here I can keep my hands outa my pockets. Any time anybody’s cutting in on your cattle, let me know. I’ll ask for a day off.”

Then he remarked casually that he “could ring a quarter with six holes at a hundred-foot range.”

I did not know whether this was meant humorously or seriously. At any rate, Ricori never went anywhere without him; and it showed me how much he had thought of Peters that he had left McCann to guard him.

I got in touch with Ricori and asked him to take dinner with Braile and me that night at my house. At seven he arrived, telling his chauffeur to return at ten. We sat at the table with McCann, as usual, on watch in my hall, thrilling, I knew, my two night nurses – I have a small private hospital adjunct – by playing the part of a gunman as conceived by the motion pictures.

Dinner over, I dismissed the butler and came to the point. I told Ricori of my questionnaire, remarking that by it I had unearthed seven cases similar to that of Peters.

“You can dismiss from your mind any idea that Peters’ death was due to his connection with you, including the tiny globes of radiance in the blood of Peters.”

At that his face grew white. He crossed himself.

“La strega!” he muttered. “The Witch! The Witch-fire!”

“Nonsense, man!” I said. “Forget your damned superstitions. I want help.”

“You are scientifically ignorant! There are some things, Dr. Lowell—” he began, hotly; then controlled himself.

“What is it you want me to do?”

“First,” I said, “let’s go over these eight cases, analyze them. Braile, have you come to any conclusions?”

“Yes,” Braile answered. “I think all eight were murdered!”

— III —

THE DEATH
AND NURSE WALTERS

That Braile had voiced the thought lurking behind my own mind – and without a shred of evidence so far as I could see to support it – irritated me.

“You’re a better man than I am, Sherlock Holmes,” I said sarcastically. He flushed, but repeated stubbornly:

“They were murdered.”

“La strega!” whispered Ricori. I glared at him.

“Quit beating around the bush, Braile. What’s your evidence?”

“You were away from Peters almost two hours; I was with him practically from start to finish. As I studied him, I had the feeling that the whole trouble was in the mind – that it was not his body, his nerves, his brain, that refused to function, but his will. Not quite that, either. Put it that his will had ceased to care about the functions of the body – and was centered upon killing it!”

“What you’re outlining now is not murder but suicide. Well, it has been done. I’ve watched a few die because they had lost the will to live—”

“I don’t mean that,” he interrupted. “That’s passive. This was active—”

“Good God, Braile!” I was honestly shocked. “Don’t tell me you’re suggesting all eight passed from the picture by willing themselves out of it – and one of them only an eleven-year-old child!”

“I didn’t say that,” he replied. “What I felt was that it was not primarily Peters’ own will doing it, but another’s will, which had gripped his, had wound itself around, threaded itself through his will. Another’s will which he could not, or did not want to resist – at least toward the end.”

“La maledetta strega!” muttered Ricori again.

I curbed my irritation and sat considering; after all, I had a wholesome respect for Braile. He was too good a man, too sound, for one to ride roughshod over any idea he might voice.

“Have you any idea as to how these murders, if murders they are, were carried out?” I asked politely.

“Not the slightest,” said Braile.

“Let’s consider the murder theory. Ricori, you have had more experience in this line than we, so listen carefully and forget your witch,” I said, brutally enough. “There are three essential factors to any murder – method, opportunity, motive. Take them in order. First – the method.

“There are three ways a person can be killed by poison or by infection: through the nose – and this includes by gases – through the mouth and through the skin. There are two or three other avenues. Hamlet’s father, for example, was poisoned, we read, through the ears, although I’ve always had my doubts about that. I think, pursuing the hypothesis of murder, we can bar out all approaches except mouth, nose, skin – and, by the last, entrance to the blood can be accomplished by absorption as well as by penetration. Was there any evidence whatever on the skin, in the membranes of the respiratory channels, in the throat, in the viscera, stomach, blood, nerves, brain – of anything of the sort?”

“You know there wasn’t,” he answered.

“Quite so. Then except for the problematical lighted corpuscle, there is absolutely no evidence of method. Therefore we have absolutely nothing in essential number one upon which to base a theory of murder. Let’s take number two – opportunity.

“We have a tarnished lady, a racketeer, a respectable spinster, a bricklayer, an eleven-year-old schoolgirl, a banker, an acrobat and a trapeze performer. There, I submit, is about as incongruous a congregation as is possible. So far as we can tell, none of them except conceivably the circus men – and Peters and the Darnley woman – had anything in common. How could anyone, who had opportunity to come in close enough contact to Peters the racketeer to kill him, have equal opportunity to come in similar close contact with Ruth Bailey, the Social Registerite maiden lady? How could one who had found a way to make contact with banker Marshall come equally close to acrobat Standish? And so on – you perceive the difficulty? To administer whatever it was that caused the deaths – if they were murder – could have been no casual matter. It implies a certain degree of intimacy. You agree?”

“Partly,” he conceded.

“Had all lived in the same neighborhood, we might assume that they might normally have come within range of the hypothetical killer. But they did not—”

“Pardon me, Dr. Lowell,” Ricori interrupted, “but suppose they had some common interest which brought them within that range.”

“What possible common interest could so divergent a group have had?”

“One common interest is very plainly indicated in these reports and in what McCann has told us.”

“What do you mean, Ricori?”

“Babies,” he answered. “Or at least – children.”

Braile nodded: “I noticed that.”

“Consider the reports,” Ricori went on. “Miss Bailey is described as charitable and devoted to children. Her charities, presumably, took the form of helping them. Marshall, the banker, was interested in child-welfare. The bricklayer, the acrobat and the trapeze performer had children. Anita was a child. Peters and the Darnley woman were, to use McCann’s expression, ‘daffy’ over a baby.”

“But,” I objected, “if they are murders, they are the work of one hand. It is beyond range of possibility that all of the eight were interested in one baby, one child, or one group of children.”

“Very true,” said Braile. “But all could have been interested in one especial, peculiar thing which they believed would be of benefit to or would delight the child or children to whom each was devoted. And that peculiar article might be obtainable in only one place. If we could find that this is the fact, then certainly that place would bear investigation.”

“It is,” I said, “undeniably worth looking into. Yet it seems to me that the common-interest idea works two ways. The homes of those who died might have had something of common interest to an individual. The murderer, for example, might be a radio adjuster. Or a plumber. Or a collector. An electrician, and so and so on.”

Braile shrugged a shoulder. Ricori did not answer; he sat deep in thought, as though he had not heard me.

“Please listen, Ricori,” I said. “We’ve gotten this far. Method of murder – if it is murder – unknown. Opportunity for killing – find some person whose business, profession or what not was a matter of interest to each of the eight, and whom they visited or who visited them; said business being concerned, possibly, in some way with babies or older children. Now for motive. Revenge, gain, love, hate, jealousy, self-protection? None of these seems to fit, for again we come to that barrier of dissimilar stations in life.”

“How about the satisfaction of an appetite for death – wouldn’t you call that a motive?” asked Braile, oddly. Ricori half rose from his chair, stared at him with a curious intentness; then sank back, but I noticed he was now all alert.

“I was about to discuss the possibility of a homicidal maniac,” I said, somewhat testily.

“That’s not exactly what I mean. You remember Longfellow’s lines:

‘I shot an arrow into the air.

It fell to earth I know not where.’

“I’ve never acquiesced in the idea that that was an inspired bit of verse meaning the sending of an argosy to some unknown port and getting it back with a surprise cargo of ivory and peacocks, apes and precious stones. There are some people who can’t stand at a window high above a busy street, or on top of a skyscraper, without wanting to throw something down. They get a thrill in wondering who or what will be hit. The feeling of power. It’s a bit like being God and unloosing the pestilence upon the just and the unjust alike. Longfellow must have been one of those people. In his heart, he wanted to shoot a real arrow and then mull over in his imagination whether it had dropped in somebody’s eye, hit a heart, or just missed someone and skewered a stray dog. Carry this on a little further. Give one of these people power and opportunity to loose death at random, death whose cause he is sure cannot be detected. He sits in his obscurity, in safety, a god of death. With no special malice against anyone, perhaps – impersonal, just shooting his arrows in the air, like Longfellow’s archer, for the fun of it.”

“And you wouldn’t call such a person a homicidal maniac?” I asked, dryly.

“Not necessarily. Merely free of inhibitions against killing. He might have no consciousness of wrongdoing whatever. Everybody comes into this world under sentence of death – time and method of execution unknown. Well, this killer might consider himself as natural as death itself. No one who believes that things on earth are run by an all-wise, all-powerful God thinks of Him as a homicidal maniac. Yet He looses wars, pestilences, misery, disease, floods, earthquakes – on believers and unbelievers alike. If you believe things are in the hands of what is vaguely termed Fate – would you call Fate a homicidal maniac?”

“Your hypothetical archer,” I said, “looses a singularly unpleasant arrow, Braile. Also, the discussion is growing far too metaphysical for a simple scientist like me. Ricori, I can’t lay this matter before the police. They would listen politely and laugh heartily after I had gone. If I told all that is in my mind to the medical authorities, they would deplore the decadence of a hitherto honored intellect. And I would rather not call in any private detective agency to pursue inquiries.”

“What do you want me to do?” he asked.

“You have unusual resources,” I answered. “I want you to sift every movement of Peters and Hortense Darnley for the past two months. I want you to do all that is possible in the same way with the others—”

I hesitated.

“I want you to find that one place to which, because of their love for children, each of these unfortunates was drawn. For though my reason tells me you and Braile have not the slightest real evidence upon which to base your suspicions, I grudgingly admit to you that I have a feeling you may be right.”

“You progress, Dr. Lowell,” Ricori said, formally. “I predict that it will not be long before you will as grudgingly admit the possibility of my witch.”

“I am sufficiently abased,” I replied, “by my present credulity not to deny even that.”

Ricori laughed, and busied himself copying the essential information from the reports. Ten o’clock struck. McCann came up to say that the car was waiting and we accompanied Ricori to the door. The gunman had stepped out and was on the steps when a thought came to me.

“Where do you begin, Ricori?”

“With Peters’ sister.”

“Does she know Peters is dead?”

“No,” he answered, reluctantly. “She thinks him away. He is often away for long, and for reasons which she understands he is not able to communicate with her directly. At such times I keep her informed. And the reason I have not told her of Peters’ death is because she dearly loved him and would be in much sorrow – and in a month, perhaps, there is to be another baby.”

“Does she know the Darnley woman is dead, I wonder?”

“I do not know. Probably. Although McCann evidently does not.”

“Well,” I said, “I don’t see how you’re going to keep Peters’ death from her now. But that’s your business.”

“Exactly,” he answered, and followed McCann to the car.

Braile and I had hardly gotten back to my library when the telephone rang. Braile answered it. I heard him curse, and saw that the hand that held the transmitter was shaking. He said: “We will come at once.”

He set the transmitter down slowly, then turned to me with twitching face.

“Nurse Walters has it!”

I felt a distinct shock. As I have written, Walters was a perfect nurse, and besides that a thoroughly good and attractive young person. A pure Gaelic type – blue black hair, blue eyes with astonishingly long lashes, milk-white skin – yes, singularly attractive. After a moment or two of silence I said:

“Well, Braile, there goes all your fine-spun reasoning. Also your murder theory. From the Darnley woman to Peters to Walters. No doubt now that we’re dealing with some infectious disease.”

“Isn’t there?” he asked, grimly. “I’m not prepared to admit it. I happen to know Walters spends most of her money on a little invalid niece who lives with her – a child of eight. Ricori’s thread of common interest moves into her case.”

“Nevertheless,” I said as grimly, “I intend to see that every precaution is taken against an infectious malady.”

By the time we had put on our hats and coats, my car was waiting. The hospital was only two blocks away, but I did not wish to waste a moment. I ordered Nurse Walters removed to an isolated ward used for observation of suspicious diseases. Examining her, I found the same flaccidity as I had noted in the case of Peters. But I observed that, unlike him, her eyes and face showed little of terror. Horror there was, and a great loathing. Nothing of panic. She gave me the same impression of seeing both within and without. As I studied her I distinctly saw a flash of recognition come into her eyes, and with it appeal. I looked at Braile – he nodded; he, too, had seen it.

I went over her body inch by inch. It was unmarked except for a pinkish patch upon her right instep. Closer examination made me think this had been some superficial injury, such as a chafing, or a light burn or scald. If so, it had completely healed; the skin was healthy.

In all other ways her case paralleled that of Peters – and the others. She had collapsed, the nurse told me, without warning while getting dressed to go home. My inquiry was interrupted by an exclamation from Braile. I turned to the bed and saw that Walters’ hand was slowly lifting, trembling as though its raising was by some terrific strain of will. The index finger was half-pointing. I followed its direction to the disclosed patch upon the foot. And then I saw her eyes, by that same tremendous effort, focus there.

The strain was too great; the hand dropped, the eyes again were pools of horror. Yet clearly she had tried to convey to us some message, something that had to do with that healed wound.

I questioned the nurse as to whether Walters had said anything to anyone about any injury to her foot. She replied that she had said nothing to her, nor had any of the other nurses spoken of it. Nurse Robbins, however, shared the apartment with Harriet and Diana. I asked who Diana was, and she told me that was the name of Walters’ little niece. This was Robbins’ night off, I found, and gave instructions to have her get in touch with me the moment she returned to the apartment.

By now Hoskins was taking his samples for the blood tests. I asked him to concentrate upon the microscopic smears and to notify me immediately if he discovered one of the luminous corpuscles. Bartano, an outstanding expert upon tropical diseases, happened to be in the hospital, as well as Somers, a brain specialist in whom I had strong confidence. I called them in for observation, saying nothing of the previous cases. While they were examining Walters, Hoskins called up to say he had isolated one of the shining corpuscles. I asked the pair to go to Hoskins and give me their opinion upon what he had to show them. In a little while they returned, somewhat annoyed and mystified. Hoskins, they said, had spoken of a “leucocyte containing a phosphorescent nucleus.” They had looked at the slide but had been unable to find it. Somers very seriously advised me to insist upon Hoskins having his eyes examined. Bartano said caustically that he would have been quite as surprised to have seen such a thing as he would have been to have observed a miniature mermaid swimming around in an artery. By these remarks, I realized afresh the wisdom in my silence.

Nor did the expected changes in expression occur. The horror and loathing persisted, and were commented upon by both Bartano and Somers as “unusual.” They agreed that the condition must be caused by a brain lesion of some kind. They did not think there was any evidence either of microbic infection or of drugs or poison. Agreeing that it was a most interesting case, and asking me to let them know its progress and outcome, they departed.

At the beginning of the fourth hour, there was a change of expression, but not what I had been expecting. In Walters’ eyes, on her face, was only loathing. Once I thought I saw a flicker of the devilish anticipation flash over her face. If so, it was quickly mastered. About the middle of the fourth hour, we saw recognition again return to her eyes. Also, there was a perceptible rally of the slowing heart. I sensed an intense gathering of nervous force.

And then her eyelids began to rise and fall, slowly, as though by tremendous effort, in measured time and purposefully. Four times they raised and lowered; there was a pause; then nine times they lifted and fell; again the pause, then they closed and opened once. Twice she did this—

“She’s trying to signal,” whispered Braile. “But what?”

Again the long-lashed lids dropped and rose – four times… pause… nine times… pause… once…

“She’s going,” whispered Braile.

I knelt, stethoscope at ears… slower… slower beat the heart… and slower… and stopped.

“She’s gone!” I said, and arose. We bent over her, waiting for that last hideous spasm, convulsion – whatever it might be.

It did not come. Stamped upon her dead face was the loathing, and that only. Nothing of the devilish glee. Nor was there sound from her dead lips. Beneath my hand I felt the flesh of her white arm begin to stiffen.

The unknown death had destroyed Nurse Walters – there was no doubt of that. Yet in some obscure, vague way I felt that it had not conquered her.

Her body, yes. But not her will!

— IV —

THE THING
IN RICORI’S CAR

I returned home with Braile, profoundly depressed. It is difficult to describe the effect the sequence of events I am relating had upon my mind from beginning to end – and beyond the end. It was as though I walked almost constantly under the shadow of an alien world, nerves prickling as if under surveillance of invisible things not of our life… the subconsciousness forcing itself to the threshold of the conscious battering at the door between and calling out to be on guard… every moment to be on guard. Strange phrases for an orthodox man of medicine? Let them stand.

Braile was pitiably shaken. So much so that I wondered whether there had been more than professional interest between him and the dead girl. If there had been, he did not confide in me.

It was close to four o’clock when we reached my house. I insisted that he remain with me. I called the hospital before retiring, but they had heard nothing of Nurse Robbins. I slept a few hours, very badly. Shortly after nine, Robbins called me on the telephone. She was half hysterical with grief. I bade her come to my office, and when she had done so Braile and I questioned her.

“About three weeks ago,” she said, “Harriet brought home to Diana a very pretty doll. The child was enraptured. I asked Harriet where she had gotten it, and she said in a queer little store way downtown.

“‘Job,’ she said – my name is Jobina – ‘There’s the queerest woman down there. I’m sort of afraid of her, Job.’

“I didn’t pay much attention. Besides, Harriet wasn’t ever very communicative. I had the idea she was a bit sorry she had said what she had.

“Now I think of it though, Harriet acted rather funny after that. She’d be gay and then she’d be – well, sort of thoughtful. About ten days ago she came home with a bandage around her foot. The right foot? Yes. She said she’d been having tea with the woman she’d gotten Diana’s doll from. The teapot upset and the hot tea had poured down on her foot. The woman had put some salve on it right away, and now it didn’t hurt a bit.

“‘But I think I’ll put something on it I know something about,’ she told me. Then she slipped off her stocking and began to strip the bandage. I’d gone into the kitchen and she called to me to come and look at her foot.

“‘It’s queer,’ she said. ‘That was a bad scald, Job. Yet it’s practically healed. And that salve hasn’t been on more than an hour.’

“I looked at her foot. There was a big red patch on the instep. But it wasn’t sore, and I told her the tea couldn’t have been very hot.

“‘But it was really scalded, Job,’ she said. ‘I mean it was blistered.’

“She sat looking at the bandage and at her foot for quite a while. The salve was bluish and had a queer shine to it. I never saw anything like it before. No, I couldn’t detect any odor to it. Harriet reached down and took the bandage and said:

“‘Job, throw it in the fire.’

“I threw the bandage in the fire. I remember that it gave a queer sort of flicker. It didn’t seem to burn. It just flickered and then it wasn’t there. Harriet watched it, and turned sort of white. Then she looked at her foot again.

“‘Job,’ she said. ‘I never saw anything heal as quick as that. She, must be a witch.’

“‘What on earth are you talking about, Harriet?’ I asked her.

“‘Oh, nothing,’ she said. ‘Only I wish I had the courage to rip that place on my foot wide open and rub in an antidote for snake-bite!’

“Then she laughed, and I thought she was fooling. But she painted it with iodine and bandaged it with an antiseptic besides. The next morning she woke me up and said:

“‘Look at that foot now. Yesterday a whole pot of scalding tea poured over it. And now it isn’t even tender. And the skin ought to be just smeared off. Job, I wish to the Lord it was!’

“That’s all, Dr. Lowell. She didn’t say any more about it and neither did I. And she just seemed to forget all about it. Yes. I did ask her where the shop was and who the woman was, but she wouldn’t tell me. I don’t know why.

“And after that I never knew her so gay and carefree. Happy, careless… Oh, I don’t know why she should have died… I don’t… I don’t!”

Braile asked:

“Do the numbers 491 mean anything to you, Robbins? Do you associate them with any address Harriet knew?”

She thought, then shook her head. I told her of the measured closing and opening of Walters’ eyes.

“She was clearly attempting to convey some message in which those numbers figured. Think again.”

Suddenly she straightened, and began counting upon her fingers. She nodded.

“Could she have been trying to spell out something? If they were letters they would read d, i and a. They’re the first three letters of Diana’s name.”

“Well, of course that seemed the simple explanation. She might have been trying to ask us to take care of the child.” I suggested this to Braile. He shook his head.

“She knew I’d do that,” he said. “No, it was something else.”

A little after Robbins had gone, Ricori called up. I told him of Walters’ death. He was greatly moved. And after that came the melancholy business of the autopsy. The results were precisely the same as in that of Peters. There was nothing whatever to show why the girl had died.

At about four o’clock the next day Ricori again called me on the telephone.

“Will you be at home between six and nine, Dr. Lowell?” There was suppressed eagerness in his voice.

“Certainly, if it is important,” I answered, after consulting my appointment book. “Have you found out anything, Ricori?”

He hesitated.

“I do not know. I think perhaps – yes.”

“You mean,” I did not even try to hide my own eagerness. “You mean – the hypothetical place we discussed?”

“Perhaps. I will know later. I go now, to where it may be.”

“Tell me this, Ricori – what do you expect to find?”

“Dolls!” he answered.

And as though to avoid further questions he hung up before I could speak.

Dolls!

I sat thinking. Walters had bought a doll. And in that same unknown place where she had bought it, she had sustained the injury which had so worried her – or rather, whose unorthodox behavior had so worried her. Nor was there doubt in my mind, after hearing Robbins’ story, that it was to that injury she had attributed her seizure, and had tried to tell us so. We had not been mistaken in our interpretation of that first desperate effort of will I have described. She might, of course, have been in error. The scald or, rather, the salve had had nothing whatever to do with her condition. Yet Walters had been strongly interested in a child. Children were the common interest of all who had died as she had. And certainly the one great common interest of children is dolls. What was it that Ricori had discovered?

I called Braile, but could not get him. I called up Robbins and told her to bring the doll to me immediately, which she did.

The doll was a peculiarly beautiful thing. It had been cut from wood, then covered with gesso. It was curiously lifelike. A baby doll, with an elfin little face. Its dress was exquisitely embroidered, a folk-dress of some country I could not place. It was, I thought, almost a museum piece, and one whose price Nurse Walters could hardly have afforded. It bore no mark by which either maker or seller could be identified. After I had examined it minutely, I laid it away in a drawer. I waited impatiently to hear from Ricori.

At seven o’clock there was a sustained, peremptory ringing of the doorbell. Opening my study door, I heard McCann’s voice in the hall, and called to him to come up. At first glance I knew something was very wrong. His tight-mouthed tanned face was a sallow yellow, his eyes held a dazed look. He spoke from stiff lips:

“Come down to the car. I think the boss is dead.”

“Dead!” I exclaimed, and was down the stairs and out beside the car in a breath. The chauffeur was standing beside the door. He opened it, and I saw Ricori huddled in a corner of the rear seat. I could feel no pulse, and when I raised the lids of his eyes they stared at me sightlessly. Yet he was not cold.

“Bring him in,” I ordered.

McCann and the chauffeur carried him into the house and placed him on the examination table in my office. I bared his breast and applied the stethoscope. I could detect no sign of the heart functioning. Nor was there, apparently, any respiration. I made a few other rapid tests. To all appearances, Ricori was quite dead. And yet I was not satisfied. I did the things customary in doubtful cases, but without result.

McCann and the chauffeur had been standing close beside me. They read my verdict in my face. I saw a strange glance pass between them; and obviously each of them had a touch of panic, the chauffeur more markedly than McCann. The latter asked in a level, monotonous voice:

“Could it have been poison?”

“Yes, it could—” I stopped.

Poison! And that mysterious errand about which he had telephoned me! And the possibility of poison in the other cases! But this death – and again I felt the doubt – had not been like those others.

“McCann,” I said, “when and where did you first notice anything wrong?”

He answered, still in that monotonous voice:

“About six blocks down the street. The boss was sitting close to me. All at once he says ‘Jesu!’ Like he’s scared. He shoves his hands up to his chest. He gives a kind of groan an’ stiffens out. I says to him: ‘What’s the matter, boss, you got a pain?’ He don’t answer me, an’ then he sort of falls against me an’ I see his eyes is wide open. He looks dead to me. So I yelps to Paul to stop the car and we both look him over. Then we beat it here like hell.”

I went to a cabinet and poured them stiff drinks of brandy. They needed it. I threw a sheet over Ricori.

“Sit down,” I said, “and you, McCann, tell me exactly what occurred from the time you started out with Mr. Ricori to wherever it was he went. Don’t skip a single detail.”

He said:

“About two o’clock the boss goes to Mollie’s – that’s Peters’ sister – stays an hour, comes out, goes home and tells Paul to be back at four-thirty. But he’s doing a lot of ’phoning so we don’t start till five. He tells Paul where he wants to go, a place over in a little street down off Battery Park. He says to Paul not to go through the street, just park the car over by the Battery. And he says to me, ‘McCann, I’m going in this place myself. I don’t want ’em to know I ain’t by myself.’ He says, ‘I got reasons. You hang around an’ look in now an’ then, but don’t come in unless I call you.’ I says, ‘Boss, do you think it’s wise?’ An’ he says, ‘I know what I’m doing an’ you do what I tell you.’ So there ain’t any argument to that.

“We get down to this place an’ Paul does like he’s told, an’ the boss walks up the street an’ he stops at a little joint that’s got a lot of dolls in the window. I looks in the place as I go past. There ain’t much light but I see a lot of other dolls inside an’ a thin gal at a counter. She looks white as a fish’s belly to me, an’ after the boss has stood at the window a minute or two he goes in, an’ I go by slow to look at the gal again because she sure looks whiter than I ever saw a gal look who’s on her two feet. The boss is talkin’ to the gal who’s showing him some dolls. The next time I go by there’s a woman in the place. She’s so big, I stand at the window a minute to look at her because I never seen anybody that looks like her. She’s got a brown face an’ it looks sort of like a horse, an’ a little mustache an’ moles, an’ she’s as funny a looking brand as the fish-white gal. Big an’ fat. But I get a peep at her eyes – Geeze, what eyes! Big an’ black an’ bright, an’ somehow I don’t like them any more than the rest of her. The next time I go by, the boss is over in a corner with the big dame. He’s got a wad of bills in his hand and I see the gal watching sort of frightened like. The next time I do my beat, I don’t see either the boss or the woman.

“So I stand looking through the window because I don’t like the boss out of my sight in this joint. An’ the next thing I see is the boss coming out of a door at the back of the shop. He’s madder than hell an’ carrying something an’ the woman is behind him an’ her eyes spitting fire. The boss is jabbering but I can’t hear what he’s saying, an’ the dame is jabbering too an’ making funny passes at him. Funny passes? Why, funny motions with her hands. But the boss heads for the door an’ when he gets to it I see him stick what he’s carrying inside his overcoat an’ button it up round it.

“It’s a doll. I see its legs dangling down before he gets it under his coat. A big one, too, for it makes quite a bulge—”

He paused, began mechanically to roll a cigarette, than glanced at the covered body and threw the cigarette away. He went on:

“I never see the boss so mad before. He’s muttering to himself in Italian an’ saying something over an’ over that sounds like ‘strayga.’ I see it ain’t no time to talk so I just walk along with him. Once he says to me, more as if he’s talking to himself than me, if you get what I mean – he says, ‘The Bible says you shall not suffer a witch to live.’ Then he goes on muttering an’ holding one arm fast over this doll inside his coat.

“We get to the car an’ he tells Paul to beat it straight to you an’ to hell with traffic – that’s right, ain’t it, Paul? Yes. When we get in the car he stops muttering an’ just sits there quiet, not saying anything to me until I hear him say Jesu!’ like I told you. And that’s all, ain’t it, Paul?”

The chauffeur did not answer. He sat staring at McCann with something of entreaty in his gaze. I distinctly saw McCann shake his head. The chauffeur said, in a strongly marked Italian accent, hesitatingly:

“I do not see the shop, but everything else McCann say is truth.”

I got up and walked over to Ricori’s body. I was about to lift the sheet when something caught my eye. A red spot about as big as a dime – a blood stain. Holding it in place with one finger, I carefully lifted the edge of the sheet. The blood spot was directly over Ricori’s heart.

I took one of my strongest glasses and one of my finest probes. Under the glass, I could see on Ricori’s breast a minute puncture, no larger than that made by a hypodermic needle. Carefully I inserted the probe. It slipped easily in and in until it touched the wall of the heart. I went no further.

Some needle-pointed, exceedingly fine instrument had been thrust through Ricori’s breast straight into his heart!

I looked at him, doubtfully; there was no reason why such a minute puncture should cause death. Unless, of course, the weapon which had made it had been poisoned; or there had been some other violent shock which had contributed to that of the wound itself. But such shock or shocks might very well bring about in a person of Ricori’s peculiar temperament some curious mental condition, producing an almost perfect counterfeit of death. I had heard of such cases.

No, despite my tests, I was not sure Ricori was dead. But I did not tell McCann that. Alive or dead, there was one sinister fact that McCann must explain. I turned to the pair, who had been watching me closely.

“You say there were only the three of you in the car?”

Again I saw a glance pass between them.

“There was the doll,” McCann answered, half-defiantly. I brushed the answer aside, impatiently.

“I repeat: there were only the three of you in the car?”

“Three men, yes.”

“Then,” I said grimly, “you two have a lot to explain. Ricori was stabbed. I’ll have to call the police.”

McCann arose and walked over to the body. He picked up the glass and peered through it at the tiny puncture. He looked at the chauffeur. He said:

“I told you the doll done it, Paul!”

— V —

THE THING
IN RICORI’S CAR
(CONT’D)

I said, incredulously, “McCann, you surely don’t expect me to believe that?”

He did not answer, rolling another cigarette which this time he did not throw away. The chauffeur staggered over to Ricori’s body; he threw himself on his knees and began mingled prayers and implorations. McCann, curiously enough, was now completely himself. It was as though the removal of uncertainty as to the cause of Ricori’s death had restored all his old cold confidence. He lighted the cigarette; he said, almost cheerfully:

“I’m aiming to make you believe.”

I walked over to the telephone. McCann jumped in front of me and stood with his back against the instrument.

“Wait a minute, Doc. If I’m the kind of a rat that’ll stick a knife in the heart of the man who hired me to protect him – ain’t it occurred to you the spot you’re on ain’t so healthy? What’s to keep me an’ Paul from giving you the works an’ making our getaway?”

Frankly, that had not occurred to me. Now I realized in what a truly dangerous position I was placed. I looked at the chauffeur. He had risen from his knees and was standing, regarding McCann intently.

“I see you get it.” McCann smiled, mirthlessly. He walked to the Italian. “Pass your rods, Paul.”

Without a word the chauffeur dipped into his pockets and handed him a pair of automatics. McCann laid them on my table. He reached under his left arm and placed another pistol beside them; reached into his pocket and added a second.

“Sit there, Doc,” he said, and indicated my chair at the table. “That’s all our artillery. Keep the guns right under your hands. If we make any breaks, shoot. All I ask is you don’t do any calling up till you’ve listened.”

I sat down, drawing the automatics to me, examining them to see that they were loaded. They were.

“Doc,” McCann said, “there’s three things I want you to consider. First, if I’d had anything to do with smearing the boss, would I be giving you a break like this? Second, I was sitting at his right side. He had on a thick overcoat. How could I reach over an’ run anything as thin as whatever killed him must have been all through his coat, an’ through the doll, through his clothes, an’ through him without him putting up some kind of a fight. Hell, Ricori was a strong man. Paul would have seen us—”

“What difference would that have made,” I interrupted, “if Paul were an accomplice?”

“Right,” he acquiesced, “that’s so. Paul’s as deep in the mud as I am. Ain’t that so, Paul?” He looked sharply at the chauffeur, who nodded. “All right, we’ll leave that with a question mark after it. Take the third point – if I’d killed the boss that way, an’ Paul was in it with me, would we have took him to the one man who’d be expected to know how he was killed? An’ then when you’d found out as expected, hand you an alibi like this? Christ, Doc, I ain’t loco enough for that!”

His face twitched.

“Why would I want to kill him? I’d a-gone through hell an’ back for him an’ he knew it. So would’ve Paul.”

I felt the force of all this. Deep within me I was conscious of a stubborn conviction that McCann was telling the truth – or at least the truth as he saw it. He had not stabbed Ricori. Yet to attribute the act, to a doll was too fantastic. And there had been only the three men in the car. McCann had been reading my thoughts with an uncanny precision.

“It might’ve been one of them mechanical dolls,” he said. “Geared up to stick.”

“McCann, go down and bring it up to me,” I said sharply – he had voiced a rational explanation.

“It ain’t there,” he said, and grinned at me again mirthlessly. “It out!”

“Preposterous—” I began. The chauffeur broke in:

“It’s true. Something out. When I open the door. I think it cat, dog, maybe. I say, ‘What the hell—’ Then I see it. It run like hell. It stoop. It duck in shadow. I see it just as flash an’ then no more. I say to McCann – ‘What the hell!’ McCann, he’s feeling around bottom of car. He say – ‘It’s the doll. It done for the boss!’ I say: ‘Doll! What you mean doll?’ He tell me. I know nothing of any doll before. I see the boss carry something in his coat, si. But I don’t know what. But I see one goddam thing that don’t look like cat, dog. It jump out of car, through my legs, si!”

I said ironically: “Is it your idea, McCann, that this mechanical doll was geared to run away as well as to stab?”

He flushed, but answered quietly:

“I ain’t saying it was a mechanical doll. But anything else would be – well, pretty crazy, wouldn’t it?”

“McCann,” I asked abruptly, “what do you want me to do?”

“Doc, when I was down Arizona way, there was a ranchero died. Died sudden. There was a feller looked as if he had a lot to do with it. The marshal said: ‘Hombre, I don’t think you done it – but I’m the lone one on the jury. What say?’ The hombre say, ‘Marshal, give me two weeks, an’ if I don’t bring in the feller that done it, you hang me.’ The marshal says, ‘Fair enough. The temporary verdict is deceased died by shock.’ It was shock all right. Bullet shock. All right, before the two weeks was up, along comes this feller with the murderer hogtied to his saddle.”

“I get your point, McCann. But this isn’t Arizona.”

“I know it ain’t. But couldn’t you certify it was heart disease? Temporarily? An’ give me a week? Then if I don’t come through, shoot the works. I won’t run away. It’s this way, Doc. If you tell the bulls, you might just as well pick up one of them guns an’ shoot me an’ Paul dead right now. If we tell the bulls about the doll, they’ll laugh themselves sick an’ fry us at Sing Sing. If we don’t, we fry anyway. If by a miracle the bulls drop us – there’s them in the boss’s crowd that’ll soon remedy that. I’m telling you, Doc, you’ll be killing two innocent men. An’ worse, you’ll never find out who did kill the boss, because they’ll never look any further than us. Why should they?”

A cloud of suspicion gathered around my conviction of the pair’s innocence. The proposal, naive as it seemed, was subtle. If I assented, the gunman and the chauffeur would have a whole week to get away, if that was the plan. If McCann did not come back, and I told the truth of the matter, I would be an accessory after the fact – in effect, co-murderer. If I pretended that my suspicions had only just been aroused, I stood, at the best, convicted of ignorance. If they were captured, and recited the agreement, again I could be charged as an accessory. It occurred to me that McCann’s surrender of the pistols was extraordinarily clever. I could not say that my assent had been constrained by threats. Also, it might have been only a cunningly conceived gesture to enlist my confidence, weaken my resistance to his appeal. How did I know that the pair did not have still other weapons, ready to use if I refused?

Striving to find a way out of the trap, I walked over to Ricori. I took the precaution of dropping the automatics into my pockets as I went. I bent over Ricori. His flesh was cold, but not with the peculiar chill of death. I examined him once more, minutely. And now I could detect the faintest of pulsation in the heart a bubble began to form at the corner of his lips – Ricori lived!

I continued to bend over him, thinking faster than ever I had before. Ricori lived, yes. But it did not lift my peril. Rather it increased it. For if McCann had stabbed him, if the pair had been in collusion, and learned that they had been unsuccessful, would they not finish what they had thought ended? With Ricori alive, Ricori able to speak and to accuse them – a death more certain than the processes of law confronted them. Death at Ricori’s command at the hands of his henchmen. And in finishing Ricori they would at the same time be compelled to kill me.

Still bending, I slipped a hand into my pocket, clenched an automatic, and then whirled upon them with the gun leveled.

“Hands up! Both of you!” I said.

Amazement flashed over McCann’s face, consternation over the chauffeur’s. But their hands went up.

I said, “There’s no need of that clever little agreement, McCann. Ricori is not dead. When he’s able to talk he’ll tell what happened to him.”

I was not prepared for the effect of this announcement. If McCann was not sincere, he was an extraordinary actor. His lanky body stiffened, I had seldom seen such glad relief as was stamped upon his face. Tears rolled down his tanned cheeks. The chauffeur dropped to his knees, sobbing and praying. My suspicions were swept away. I did not believe this could be acting. In some measure I was ashamed of myself.

“You can drop your hands, McCann,” I said, and slipped the automatic back in my pocket.

He said, hoarsely: “Will he live?”

I answered: “I think he has every chance. If there’s no infection, I’m sure of it.”

“Thank God!” whispered McCann, and over and over, “Thank God!”

And just then Braile entered, and stood staring in amazement at us.

“Ricori has been stabbed. I’ll explain the whole matter later,” I told him. “Small puncture over the heart and probably penetrating it. He’s suffering mainly from shock. He’s coming out of it. Get him up to the Annex and take care of him until I come.”

Briefly I reviewed what I had done and suggested the immediate further treatment. And when Ricori had been removed, I turned to the gunmen.

“McCann,” I said, “I’m not going to explain. Not now. But here are your pistols, and Paul’s. I’m giving you your chance.”

He took the automatics, looking at me with a curious gleam in his eyes.

“I ain’t saying I wouldn’t like to know what touched you off, Doc,” he said. “But whatever you do is all right by me – if only you can bring the boss around.”

“Undoubtedly there are some who will have to be notified of his condition,” I replied. “I’ll leave that all to you. All I know is that he was on his way to me. He had a heart attack in the car. You brought him to me. I am now treating him – for heart attack. If he should die, McCann – well, that will be another matter.”

“I’ll do the notifying,” he answered. “There’s only a couple that you’ll have to see. Then I’m going down to that doll joint an’ get the truth outa that hag.”

His eyes were slits, his mouth a slit, too.

“No,” I said, firmly. “Not yet. Put a watch on the place. If the woman goes out, discover where she goes. Watch the girl as closely. If it appears as though either of them or both of them are moving away – running off – let them. But follow them. I don’t want them molested or even alarmed until Ricori can tell what happened there.”

“All right,” he said, but reluctantly.

“Your doll story,” I reminded him, sardonically, “would not be so convincing to the police as to my somewhat credulous mind. Take no chance of them being injected into the matter. As long as Ricori is alive, there is no need of them being so injected.”

I took him aside.

“Can you trust the chauffeur to do no talking?”

“Paul’s all right,” he said.

“Well, for both your sakes, he would better be,” I warned.

They took their departure. I went up to Ricori’s room. His heart was stronger, his respiration weak but encouraging. His temperature, although still dangerously subnormal, had improved. If, as I had told McCann, there was no infection, and if there had been no poison nor drug upon the weapon with which he had been stabbed, Ricori should live.

Later that night two thoroughly polite gentlemen called upon me, heard my explanation of Ricori’s condition, asked if they might see him, did see him, and departed. They assured me that “win or lose” I need have no fear about my fees, nor have any hesitancy in bringing in the most expensive consultants. In exchange, I assured them that I believed Ricori had an excellent chance to recover. They asked me to allow no one to see him except themselves, and McCann. They thought it might save me trouble to have a couple of men whom they would send to me, to sit at the door of the room – outside, of course, in the hall. I answered that I would be delighted.

In an exceedingly short time two quietly watchful men were on guard at Ricori’s door, just as they had been over Peters’.

In my dreams that night dolls danced around me, pursued me, threatened me. My sleep was not pleasant.

— VI —

STRANGE EXPERIENCE
OF OFFICER SHEVLIN

Morning brought a marked improvement in Ricori’s condition. The deep coma was unchanged, but his temperature was nearly normal; respiration and heart action quite satisfactory. Braile and I divided duties so that one of us could be constantly within call of the nurses. The guards were relieved after breakfast by two others. One of my quiet visitors of the night before made his appearance, looked at Ricori and received with unfeigned gratification my reassuring reports.

After I had gone to bed the obvious idea had occurred to me that Ricori might have made some memorandum concerning his quest; I had felt reluctance about going through his pockets, however. Now seemed to be the opportunity to ascertain whether he had or had not. I suggested to my visitor that he might wish to examine any papers Ricori had been carrying, adding that we had been interested together in a certain matter, that he had been on his way to discuss this with me when he had undergone his seizure; and that he might have carried some notes of interest to me. My visitor agreed; I sent for Ricori’s overcoat and suit and we went through them. There were a few papers, but nothing relating to our investigation.

In the breast pocket of his overcoat, however, was a curious object – a piece of thin cord about eight inches long in which had been tied nine knots, spaced at irregular intervals. They were curious knots too, not quite like any I could recollect having observed. I studied the cord with an unaccountable but distinct feeling of uneasiness. I glanced at my visitor and saw a puzzled look in his eyes. And then I remembered Ricori’s superstition, and reflected that the knotted cord was probably a talisman or charm of some sort. I put it back in the pocket.

When again alone, I took it out and examined it more minutely. The cord was of human hair, tightly braided – the hair a peculiarly pale ash and unquestionably a woman’s. Each knot, I now saw, was tied differently. Their structure was complex. The difference between them, and their irregular spacing, gave a vague impression of forming a word or sentence. And, studying the knots, I had the same sensation of standing before a blank door, vitally important for me to open, that I had felt while watching Peters die. Obeying some obscure impulse, I did not return the cord to the pocket but threw it into the drawer with the doll which Nurse Robbins had brought me.

Shortly after three, McCann telephoned me. I was more than glad to hear from him. In the broad light of day his story of the occurrence in Ricori’s car had become incredibly fantastic, all my doubts returning.

I had even begun again to review my unenviable position if he disappeared. Some of this must have shown in the cordiality of my greeting, for he laughed.

“Thought I’d rode off the range, did you, Doc? You couldn’t drive me away. Wait till you see what I got.”

I awaited his arrival with impatience. When he appeared he had with him a sturdy, red-faced man who carried a large paper clothing-bag. I recognized him as a policeman I had encountered now and then on the Drive, although I had never before seen him out of uniform. I bade the two be seated, and the officer sat on the edge of a chair, holding the clothes-bag gingerly across his knees. I looked at McCann inquiringly.

“Shevlin,” he waved his hand at the officer, “said he knew you, Doc. But I’d have brought him along, anyway.”

“If I didn’t know Dr. Lowell, it’s not me that’d be here, McCann me lad,” said Shevlin, glumly. “But it’s brains the Doc has got in his head, an’ not a cold boiled potato like that damned lootenant.”

“Well,” said McCann, maliciously, “the Doc’ll prescribe for you anyway, Tim.”

“’Tis no prescribin’ I want, I tell you,” Shevlin bellowed, “I seen it wit’ me own eyes, I’m tellin’ you! An’ if Dr. Lowell tells me I was drunk or crazy I’ll tell him t’hell wit’ him, like I told the lootenant. An’ I’m tellin’ you, too, McCann.”

I listened to this with growing amazement.

“Now, Tim, now, Tim,” soothed McCann, “I believe you. You don’t know how much I want to believe you – or why, either.”

He gave me a quick glance, and I gathered that whatever the reason he had brought the policeman to see me, he had not spoken to him of Ricori.

“You see, Doc, when I told you about that doll getting up an’ jumping out of the car you thought I was loco. All right, I says to me, maybe it didn’t get far. Maybe it was one of them improved mechanical dolls, but even if it was it has to run down sometime. So I goes hunting for somebody else that might have seen it. An’ this morning I runs into Shevlin here. An’ he tells me. Go on, Tim, give the Doc what you gave me.”

Shevlin blinked, shifted the bag cautiously and began. He had the dogged air of repeating a story that he had told over and over. And to unsympathetic audiences; for as he went on he would look at me defiantly, or raise his voice belligerently.

“It was one o’clock this mornin’. I am on me beat when I hear somebody yellin’ desperate like. ‘Help!’ he yells. ‘Murder! Take it away!’ he yells. I go runnin’, an’ there standin’ on a bench is a guy in his soup-an’-nuts an’ high hat jammed over his ears, an’ a-hittin’ this way an’ that wit’ his cane, an’ a-dancin’ up an’ down an’ it’s him that’s doin’ the yellin’.

“I reach over an’ tap him on the shins wit’ me night-club, an’ he looks down an’ then flops right in me arms. I get a whiff of his breath an’ I think I see what’s the matter wit’ him all right. I get him on his feet, an’ I says: ‘Come on now, the pink’ll soon run off the elephants,’ I says. ‘It’s this Prohibition hooch that makes it look so thick,’ I says. ‘Tell me where you live an’ I’ll put you in a taxi, or do you want t’go to a hospital?’ I says.

“He stands there a-holdin’ unto me an’ a-shakin’, an’ he says: ‘D’ye think I’m drunk?’ An’ I begins t’tell him. ‘An’ how—’ when I looks at him, an’ he ain’t drunk. He might’ve been drunk, but he ain’t drunk now. An’ all t’once he flops down on the bench an’ pulls up his pants an’ down his socks, an’ I sees blood runnin’ from a dozen little holes, an’ he says, ‘Maybe you’ll be tellin’ me it’s pink elephants done that?’

“I looks at ’em an’ feels ’em, an’ it’s blood all right, as if somebody’s been jabbin’ a hat-pin in him—”

Involuntarily I stared at McCann. He did not meet my eyes. Imperturbably he was rolling a cigarette.

“An’ I says: ‘What the hell done it?’ An’ he says ‘The doll done it!’”

A little shiver ran down my back, and I looked again at the gunman. This time he gave me a warning glance. Shevlin glared up at me.

“‘The doll done it!’ he tells me,” Shevlin shouted. “He tells me the doll done it!”

McCann chuckled and Shevlin turned his glare from me to him. I said hastily:

“I understand, Officer. He told you it was the doll made the wounds. An astonishing assertion, certainly.”

“Y’don’t believe it, y’mean?” demanded Shevlin, furiously.

“I believe he told you that, yes,” I answered. “But go on.”

“All right, would y’be sayin’ I was drunk too, t’believe it? Fer it’s what that potato-brained lootenant did.”

“No, no,” I assured him hastily. Shevlin settled back, and went on:

“I asks the drunk, ‘What’s her name?’ ‘What’s whose name?’ says he. ‘The doll’s,’ I says. ‘I’ll bet you she was a blonde doll,’ I says, ‘an’ wants her picture in the tabloids. The brunettes don’t use hat-pins,’ I says. ‘They’re all fer the knife.’

“‘Officer,’ he says, solemn, ‘it was a doll. A little man doll. An’ when I say doll I mean a doll. I was walkin along,’ he says, ‘gettin’ the air. I won’t deny I’d had some drinks,’ he says, ‘but nothin’ I couldn’t carry. I’m swishin’ along wit’ me cane, when I drops it by that bush there,’ he says, pointin’. ‘I reach down to pick it up,’ he says, ‘an’ there I see a doll. It’s a big doll an’ it’s all huddled up crouchin’, as if somebody dropped it that way. I reaches over t’ pick it up. As I touch it, the doll jumps as if I hit a spring. It jumps right over me head,’ he says. ‘I’m surprised,’ he says, ‘an’ considerably startled, an’ I’m crouchin’ there lookin’ where the doll was when I feel a hell of a pain in the calf of me leg,’ he says, ‘like I been stabbed. I jump up, an’ there’s this doll wit’ a big pin in its hand just ready t’ jab me again.’

“‘Maybe,’ says I to the drunk, ‘maybe ’twas a midget you seen?’ ‘Midget hell!’ says he, ‘it was a doll! An’ it was jabbin’ me wit’ a hat-pin. It was about two feet high,’ he says, ‘wit’ blue eyes. It was grinnin’ at me in a way that made me blood run cold. An’ while I stood there paralyzed, it jabbed me again. I jumped on the bench,’ he says, ‘an’ it danced around an’ around, an’ it jumped up an’ jabbed me. An’ it jumped down an’ up again an’ jabbed me. I thought it meant to kill me, an’ I yelled like hell,’ says the drunk. ‘An’ who wouldn’t?’ he asks me. ‘An’ then you come,’ he says, ‘an’ the doll ducked into the bushes there. Fer God’s sake, officer, come wit’ me till I can get a taxi an’ go home,’ he says, ‘fer I make no bones tellin’ you I’m scared right down to me gizzard!’ says he.

“So I take the drunk by the arm,” went on Shevlin, “thinkin’, poor lad, what this bootleg booze’ll make you see, but still puzzled about how he got them holes in his legs. We come out to the Drive. The drunk is still a-shakin’ an’ I’m a-waitin’ to hail a taxi, when all of a sudden he lets out a squeal. ‘There it goes! Look, there it goes!’

“I follow his finger, an’ sure enough I see somethin’ scuttlin’ over the sidewalk an’ out on the Drive. The light’s none too good, an’ I think it’s a cat or maybe a dog. Then I see there’s a little coupe drawn up opposite at the curb. The cat or dog, whatever it is, seems to be makin’ fer it. The drunk’s still yellin’ an’ I’m tryin’ to see what it is, when down the Drive hell-fer-leather comes a big car. It hits this thing kersmack an’ never stops. He’s out of sight before I can raise me whistle. I think I see the thing wriggle an’ I think, still thinkin’ it’s a cat or dog, ‘I’ll put you out of your misery,’ an’ I run over to it wit’ me gun. As I do so the coupe that’s been waitin’ shoots off hell-fer-leather too. I get over to what the other car hit, an’ I look at it—”

He slipped the bag off his knees, set it down beside him and untied the top.

“An’ this is what it was.”

Out of the bag he drew a doll, or what remained of it. The automobile had gone across its middle, crushing it. One leg was missing; the other hung by a thread. Its clothing was torn and begrimed with the dirt of the roadway. It was a doll – but uncannily did it give the impression of a mutilated pygmy. Its neck hung limply over its breast.

McCann stepped over and lifted the doll’s head, I stared, and stared… with a prickling of the scalp… with a slowing of the heart beat…

For the face that looked up at me, blue eyes glaring, was the face of Peters!

And on it, like the thinnest of veils, was the shadow of that demonic exultance I had watched spread over the face of Peters after death had stilled the pulse of his heart!

— VII —

THE PETERS DOLL

Shevlin watched me as I stared at the doll. He was satisfied by its effect upon me.

“A hell of a lookin’ thing, ain’t it?” he asked. “The doctor sees it, McCann. I told you he had brains!” He jounced the doll down upon his knee, and sat there like a red-faced ventriloquist with a peculiarly malevolent dummy – certainly it would not have surprised me to have heard the diabolic laughter issue from its faintly grinning mouth.

“Now, I’ll tell you, Dr. Lowell,” Shevlin went on. “I stands there lookin’ at this doll, an’ I picks it up. ‘There’s more in this than meets the eye, Tim Shevlin,’ I says to myself. An’ I looks to see what’s become of the drunk. He’s standin’ where I left him, an’ I walk over to him an’ he says: ‘Was it a doll like I told you? Hah! I told you it was a doll! Hah! That’s him!’ he says, gettin’ a peck at what I’m carryin’. So I says to him, ‘Young fellow, me lad, there’s somethin’ wrong here. You’re goin’ to the station wit’ me an’ tell the lootenant what you told me an’ show him your legs an’ all,’ I says. An’ the drunk says, ‘Fair enough, but keep that thing on the other side of me.’ So we go to the station.

“The lootenant’s there an’ the sergeant an’ a coupla flatties. I marches up an’ sticks the doll on the top of the desk in front of the lootenant.

“‘What’s this?’ he says, grinnin’. ‘Another kidnappin’?’

“Show him your legs,” I tells the drunk. ‘Not unless they’re better than the Follies,’ grins this potato-brained ape. But the drunk’s rolled up his pants an’ down his socks an’ shows ’em.

“‘What t’hell done that?’ says the lootenant, standin’ up.

“‘The doll,’ says the drunk. The lootenant looks at him, and sits back blinkin’. An’ I tells him about answerin’ the drunk’s yells, an’ what he tells me, an’ what I see. The sergeant laughs an’ the flatties laugh but the lootenant gets red in the face an’ says, ‘Are you tryin’ to kid me, Shevlin?’ An’ I says, ‘I’m tellin’ you what he tells me an’ what I seen, an’ there’s the doll.’ An’ he says, ‘This bootleg is fierce but I never knew it was catchin’.’ An’ he crooks his finger at me an’ says, ‘Come up here, I want t’ smell your breath.’ An’ then I knows it’s all up, because t’ tell the truth the drunk had a flask an’ I’d took one wit’ him. Only one an’ the only one I’d had. But there it was on me breath. An’ the lootenant says, ‘I thought so. Get down.’

“An’ then he starts bellerin’ an’ hollerin’ at the drunk, ‘You wit’ your soup-an’-nuts an’ your silk hat, you ought to be a credit to your city an’ what t’ hell you think you can do, corrupt a good officer an’ kid me? You done the first but you ain’t doin’ the second,’ he yelps. ‘Put him in the cooler,’ he yelps. ‘An’ throw his damned doll in wit’ him t’ keep him company!’ An’ at that the drunk lets out a screech an’ drops t’ the floor. He’ out good an’ plenty. An’ the lootenant says, ‘The poor damned fool by God he believes his own lie! Bring him around an’ let him go.’ An’ he says t’ me, ‘If you weren’t such a good man, Tim, I’d have you up for this. Take your degen’ret doll an’ go home,’ he says, ‘I’ll send a relief t’ your beat. An’ take tomorrow off an’ sober up,’ says he. An’ I says t’ him, ‘All right, but I seen what I seen. An’ t’ hell wit’ you all,’ I says t’ the flatties. An’ everybody’s laughin’ fit t’ split. An’ I says t’ the lootenant, ‘If you break me for it or not, t’ hell wit’ you too.’ But they keep on laughin’, so I take the doll an’ walk out.”

He paused.

“I take the doll home,” he resumed. “I tell it all t’ Maggie, me wife. An’ what does she tell me? ‘T’ think you’ve been off the hard stuff or near off so long,’ she says, ‘an’ now look at you!’ she says, ‘wit’ this talk of stabbin’ dolls, an’ insultin’ the lootenant, an’ maybe gettin’ sent t’ Staten Island,’ she says. ‘An’ Jenny just gettin’ in high school! Go t’ bed,’ she says, ‘an’ sleep it off, an’ throw the doll in the garbage,’ she says. But by now I am gettin’ good an’ mad, an’ I do not throw it in the garbage but I take it with me. An’ awhile ago I meet McCann, an’ somehow he knows somethin’, I tell him an’ he brings me here. An’ just fer what, I don’t know.”

“Do you want me to speak to the lieutenant?” I asked.

“What could you say?” he replied, reasonably enough. “If you tell him the drunk was right, an’ that I’m right an’ I did see the doll run, what’ll he think? He’ll think you’re as crazy as I must be. An’ if you explain maybe I was a little off me nut just for the minute, it’s to the hospital they’ll be sendin’ me. No, Doctor. I’m much obliged, but all I can do is say nothin’ more an’ be dignified an’ maybe hand out a shiner or two if they get too rough. It’s grateful I am fer the kindly way you’ve listened. It makes me feel better.”

Shevlin got to his feet, sighing heavily.

“An’ what do you think? I mean about what the drunk said he seen, an’ what I seen?” he asked somewhat nervously.

“I cannot speak for the inebriate,” I answered cautiously. “As for yourself – well, it might be that the doll had been lying out there in the street, and that a cat or dog ran across just as the automobile went by. Dog or cat escaped, but the action directed your attention to the doll and you thought—”

He interrupted me with a wave of his hand.

“All right. All right. ’Tis enough. I’ll just leave the doll wit’ you to pay for the diagnoses, sir.”

With considerable dignity and perceptibly heightened color Shevlin stalked from the room. McCann was shaking with silent laughter. I picked up the doll and laid it on my table. I looked at the subtly malignant little face and I did not feel much like laughing.

For some obscure reason I took the Walters doll out of the drawer and placed it beside the other, took out the strangely knotted cord and set it between them. McCann was standing at my side, watching. I heard him give a low whistle.

“Where did you get that, Doc?” he pointed to the cord. I told him. He whistled again.

“The boss never knew he had it, that’s sure,” he said. “Wonder who slipped it over on him? The hag, of course. But how?”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Why, the witch’s ladder,” he pointed again to the cord. “That’s what they call it down Mexico way. It’s bad medicine. The witch slips it to you and then she has power over you.” He bent over the cord… “Yep, it’s the witch’s ladder – the nine knots an’ woman’s hair… an’ in the boss’s pocket!”

He stood staring at the cord. I noticed he made no attempt to pick it up.

“Take it up and look at it closer, McCann,” I said.

“Not me!” He stepped back. “I’m telling you it’s bad medicine, Doc.”

I had been steadily growing more and more irritated against the fog of superstition gathering ever heavier around me, and now I lost my patience.

“See here, McCann,” I said, hotly, “are you, to use Shevlin’s expression, trying to kid me? Every time I see you I am brought face to face with some fresh outrage against credibility. First it is your doll in the car. Then Shevlin. And now your witch’s ladder. What’s your idea?”

He looked at me with narrowed eyes, a faint flush reddening the high cheekbones.

“The only idea I got,” he drawled more slowly than usual, “is to see the boss on his feet. An’ to get whoever got him. As for Shevlin – you don’t think he was faking, do you?”

“I do not,” I answered. “But I am reminded that you were beside Ricori in the car when he was stabbed. And I cannot help wondering how it was that you discovered Shevlin so quickly today.”

“Meaning by that?” he asked.

“Meaning,” I answered, “that your drunken man has disappeared. Meaning that it would be entirely possible for him to have been your confederate. Meaning that the episode which so impressed the worthy Shevlin could very well have been merely a clever bit of acting, and the doll in the street and the opportunely speeding automobile a carefully planned maneuver to bring about the exact result it had accomplished. After all, I have only your word and the chauffeur’s word that the doll was not down in the car the whole time you were here last night. Meaning that—”

I stopped, realizing that, essentially, I was only venting upon him the bad temper aroused by my perplexity.

“I’ll finish for you,” he said. “Meaning that I’m the one behind the whole thing.”

His face was white, and his muscles tense.

“It’s a good thing for you that I like you, Doc,” he continued. “It’s a better thing for you that I know you’re on the level with the boss. Best of all, maybe that you’re the only one who can help him, if he can be helped. That’s all.”

“McCann,” I said, “I’m sorry, deeply sorry. Not for what I said, but for having to say it. After all, the doubt is there. And it is a reasonable doubt. You must admit that. Better to spread it before you than keep it hidden.”

“What might be my motive?”

“Ricori has powerful enemies. He also has powerful friends. How convenient to his enemies if he could be wiped out without suspicion, and a physician of highest repute and unquestionable integrity be inveigled into giving the death a clean bill of health. It is my professional pride, not personal egotism, that I am that kind of a physician, McCann.”

He nodded. His face softened and I saw the dangerous tenseness relax.

“I’ve no argument, Doc. Not on that or nothing else you’ve said. But I’m thanking you for your high opinion of my brains. It’d certainly take a pretty clever man to work all this out this-a-way. Sort of like one of them cartoons that shows seventy-five gimcracks set up to drop a brick on a man’s head at exactly twenty minutes, sixteen seconds after two in the afternoon. Yeah, I must be clever!”

I winced at this broad sarcasm, but did not answer. McCann took up the Peters doll and began to examine it. I went to the ’phone to ask Ricori’s condition. I was halted by an exclamation from the gunman. He beckoned me, and handing me the doll, pointed to the collar of its coat. I felt about it. My fingers touched what seemed to be the round head of a large pin. I pulled out as though from a dagger sheath a slender piece of metal nine inches long. It was thinner than an average hat-pin, rigid and needle-pointed.

Instantly I knew that I was looking upon the instrument that had pierced Ricori’s heart!

“Another outrage!” McCann drawled. “Maybe I put it there, Doc!”

“You could have, McCann.”

He laughed. I studied the queer blade – for blade it surely was. It appeared to be of finest steel, although I was not sure it was that metal. Its rigidity was like none I knew. The little knob at the head was half an inch in diameter and less like a pinhead than the haft of a poniard. Under the magnifying glass it showed small grooves upon it… as though to make sure the grip of a hand… a doll’s hand a doll’s dagger! There were stains upon it.

I shook my head impatiently, and put the thing aside, determining to test those stains later. They were bloodstains, I knew that, but I must make sure. And yet, if they were, it would not be certain proof of the incredible – that a doll’s hand had used this deadly thing.

I picked up the Peters doll and began to study it minutely. I could not determine of what it was made. It was not of wood, like the other doll. More than anything else, the material resembled a fusion of gum and wax. I knew of no such composition. I stripped it of the clothing. The undamaged part of the doll was anatomically perfect. The hair was human hair, carefully planted in the scalp. The eyes were blue crystals of some kind. The clothing showed the same extraordinary skill in the making as the clothes of Diana’s doll.

I saw now that the dangling leg was not held by a thread. It was held by a wire. Evidently the doll had been molded upon a wire framework. I walked over to my instrument cabinet, and selected a surgical saw and knives.

“Wait a minute, Doc.” McCann had been following my movements. “You going to cut this thing apart?”

I nodded. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a heavy hunting knife. Before I could stop him, he had brought its blade down like an ax across the neck of the Peters doll. It cut through it cleanly. He took the head and twisted it. A wire snapped. He dropped the head on the table, and tossed the body to me. The head rolled. It came to rest against the cord he had called the witch’s ladder.

The head seemed to twist and to look up at us. I thought for an instant the eyes flared redly, the features to contort, the malignancy intensify – as I had seen it intensify upon Peters’ living face… I caught myself up, angrily a trick of the light, of course.

I turned to McCann and swore.

“Why did you do that?”

“You’re worth more to the boss than I am,” he said, cryptically.

I did not answer. I cut open the decapitated body of the doll. As I had suspected, it had been built upon a wire framework. As I cut away the encasing material, I found this framework was a single wire, or a single metal strand, and that as cunningly as the doll’s body had been shaped, just as cunningly had this wire been twisted into an outline of the human skeleton!

Not, of course, with minute fidelity, but still with amazing accuracy… there were no joints nor articulations… the substance of which the doll was made was astonishingly pliant… the little hands flexible… it was more like dissecting some living mannikin than a doll… And it was rather dreadful…

I glanced toward the severed head.

McCann was bending over it, staring down into its eyes, his own not more than a few inches away from the glinting blue crystals. His hands clutched the table edge and I saw that they were strained and tense as though he were making a violent effort to push himself away. When he had tossed the head upon the table it had come to rest against the knotted cord – but now that cord was twisted around the doll’s severed neck and around its forehead as though it were a small serpent!

And distinctly I saw that McCann’s face was moving closer… slowly closer… to that tiny one… as though it were being drawn to it… and that in the little face a living evil was concentrated and that McCann’s face was a mask of horror.

“McCann!” I cried, and thrust an arm under his chin, jerking back his head. And as I did this I could have sworn the doll’s eyes turned to me, and that its lips writhed.

McCann staggered back. He stared at me for a moment, and then leaped to the table. He picked up the doll’s head, dashed it to the floor and brought his heel down upon it again and again, like one stamping out the life of a venomous spider. Before he ceased, the head was a shapeless blotch, all semblance of humanity or anything else crushed out of it – but within it the two blue crystals that had been its eyes still glinted, and the knotted cord of the witch’s ladder still wound through it.

“God! It was… was drawing me down to it…”

McCann lighted a cigarette with shaking hand, tossed the match away. The match fell upon what had been the doll’s head.

There followed, simultaneously, a brilliant flash, a disconcerting sobbing sound and a wave of intense heat. Where the crushed head had been there was now only an irregularly charred spot upon the polished wood. Within it lay the blue crystals that had been the eyes of the doll – lusterless and blackened. The knotted cord had vanished.

And the body of the doll had disappeared. Upon the table was a nauseous puddle of black waxy liquid out of which lifted the ribs of the wire skeleton!

The Annex ’phone rang; mechanically I answered it.

“Yes,” I said. “What is it?”

“Mr. Ricori, sir. He’s out of the coma. He’s awake!”

I turned to McCann.

“Ricori’s come through!”

He gripped my shoulders – then drew a step away, a touch of awe on his face.

“Yeah?” whispered McCann. “Yeah – he came through when the knots burned! It freed him! It’s you an’ me that’s got to watch our step now!”

— VIII —

NURSE WALTERS’ DIARY

I took McCann up with me to Ricori’s bedside. Confrontation with his chief would be the supreme test, I felt, resolving one way or another all my doubts as to his sincerity. For I realized, almost immediately, that bizarre as had been the occurrences I have just narrated, each and all of them could have been a part of the elaborate hocus-pocus with which I had tentatively charged the gunman. The cutting off of the doll’s head could have been a dramatic gesture designed to impress my imagination. It was he who had called my attention to the sinister reputation of the knotted cord. It was McCann who had found the pin. His fascination by the severed head might have been assumed. And the tossing of the match a calculated action designed to destroy evidence. I did not feel that I could trust my own peculiar reactions as valid.

And yet it was difficult to credit McCann with being so consummate an actor, so subtle a plotter. Ah, but he could be following the instructions of another mind capable of such subtleties. I wanted to trust McCann. I hoped that he would pass the test. Very earnestly I hoped it.

The test was ordained to failure. Ricori was fully conscious, wide awake, his mind probably as alert and sane as ever. But the lines of communication were still down. His mind had been freed, but not his body. The paralysis persisted, forbidding any muscular movements except the deep-seated unconscious reflexes essential to the continuance of life. He could not speak. His eyes looked up at me, bright and intelligent, but from an expressionless face… looked up at McCann with the same unchanging stare.

McCann whispered: “Can he hear?”

“I think so, but he has no way of telling us.”

The gunman knelt beside the bed and took Ricori’s hands in his. He said, clearly: “Everything’s all right, boss. We’re all on the job.”

Not the utterance nor the behavior of a guilty man – but then I had told him Ricori could not answer. I said to Ricori:

“You’re coming through splendidly. You’ve had a severe shock, and I know the cause. I’d rather you were this way for a day or so than able to move about. I have a perfectly good medical reason for this. Don’t worry, don’t fret, try not to think of anything unpleasant. Let your mind relax. I’m going to give you a mild hypo. Don’t fight it. Let yourself sleep.”

I gave him the hypodermic, and watched with satisfaction its quick effect. It convinced me that he had heard.

I returned to my study with McCann. I was doing some hard thinking. There was no knowing how long Ricori would remain in the grip of the paralysis. He might awaken in an hour fully restored, or it might hold him for days. In the meantime there were three things I felt it necessary to ascertain. The first that a thorough watch was being kept upon the place where Ricori had gotten the doll; second, that everything possible be found out about the two women McCann had described; third, what it was that had made Ricori go there. I had determined to take the gunman’s story of the happenings at the store at their face value – for the moment at least. At the same time, I did not want to admit him into my confidence any more than was necessary.

“McCann,” I began, “have you arranged to keep the doll store under constant surveillance, as we agreed last night?”

“You bet. A flea couldn’t hop in or out without being spotted.”

“Any reports?”

“The boys ringed the joint close to midnight. The front’s all dark. There’s a building in the back an’ a space between it an’ the rear of the joint. There’s a window with a heavy shutter, but a line of light shows under it. About two o’clock this fish-white gal comes slipping up the street and lets in. The boys at the back hear a hell of a squalling, an’ then the light goes out. This morning the gal opens the shop. After a while the hag shows up, too. They’re covered, all right.”

“What have you found out about them?”

“The hag calls herself Madame Mandilip. The gal’s her niece. Or so she says. They rode in about eight months since. Nobody knows where from. Pay their bills regular. Seem to have plenty of money. Niece does all the marketing. The old woman never goes out. Keep to themselves like a pair of clams. Have strictly nothing to do with the neighbors. The hag has a bunch of special customers – rich-looking people many of them. Does two kinds of trade, it looks – regular dolls, an’ what goes with ’em, an’ special dolls which they say the old woman’s a wonder at. Neighbors ain’t a bit fond of ’em. Some of ’em think she’s handling dope. That’s all yet.”

Special dolls? Rich people?

Rich people like the spinster Bailey, the banker Marshall?

Regular dolls – for people like the acrobat, the bricklayer? But these might have been “special” too, in ways McCann could not know.

“There’s the store,” he continued. “Back of it two or three rooms. Upstairs a big room like a storeroom. They rent the whole place. The hag an’ the wench, they live in the rooms behind the store.”

“Good work!” I applauded, and hesitated – “McCann, did the doll remind you of somebody?”

He studied me with narrowed eyes.

“You tell me,” he said at last, dryly.

“Well – I thought it resembled Peters.”

“Thought it resembled!” he exploded. “Resembled – hell! It was the lick-an’-spit of Peters!”

“Yet you said nothing to me of that. Why?” I asked, suspiciously.

“Well I’m damned—” he began, then caught himself. “I knowed you seen it. I thought you kept quiet account of Shevlin, an’ followed your lead. Afterwards you were so busy putting me through the jumps there wasn’t a chance.”

“Whoever made that doll must have known Peters quite well.” I passed over this dig. “Peters must have sat for the doll as one sits for an artist or a sculptor. Why did he do it? When did he do it? Why did anyone desire to make a doll like him?”

“Let me work on the hag for an hour an’ I’ll tell you,” he answered, grimly.

“No,” I shook my head. “Nothing of that sort until Ricori can talk. But maybe we can get some light in another way. Ricori had a purpose in going to that store. I know what it was. But I do not know what directed his attention to the store. I have reason to believe it was information he gained from Peters’ sister. Do you know her well enough to visit her and to draw from her what it was she told Ricori yesterday? Casually – tactfully – without telling her of Ricori’s illness?”

He said, bluntly: “Not without you give me more of a lead – Mollie’s no fool.”

“Very well. I am not aware whether Ricori told you, but the Darnley woman is dead. We think there is a connection between her death and Peters’ death. We think that it has something to do with the love of both of them for Mollie’s baby. The Darnley woman died precisely as Peters did—”

He whispered – “You mean with the same – trimmings?”

“Yes. We had reason to think that both might have picked up the – the disease – in the same place. Ricori thought that perhaps Mollie might know something which would identify that place. A place where both of them might have gone, not necessarily at the same time, and have been exposed to – the infection. Maybe even a deliberate infection by some ill-disposed person. Quite evidently what Ricori learned from Mollie sent him to the Mandilips. There is one awkward thing, however – unless Ricori told her yesterday, she does not know her brother is dead.”

“That’s right,” he nodded. “He gave orders about that.”

“If he did not tell her, you must not.”

“You’re holding back quite a lot, ain’t you, Doc?” He drew himself up to go.

“Yes,” I said, frankly. “But I’ve told you enough.”

“Yeah? Well, maybe.” He regarded me, somberly. “Anyway, I’ll soon know if the boss broke the news to Mollie. If he did, it opens up the talk natural. If he didn’t – well, I’ll call you up after I’ve talked to her. Hasta luego.”

With this half-mocking adieu he took his departure. I went over to the remains of the doll upon the table. The nauseous puddle had hardened. In hardening it had roughly assumed the aspect of a flattened human body. It had a peculiarly unpleasant appearance, with the miniature ribs and the snapped wire of the spine glinting above it. I was overcoming my reluctance to collect the mess for analysis when Braile came in. I was so full of Ricori’s awakening, and of what had occurred, that it was some time before I noticed his pallor and gravity. I stopped short in the recital of my doubts regarding McCann to ask him what was the matter.

“I woke up this morning thinking of Harriet,” he said. “I knew the 4-9-1 code, if it was a code, could not have meant Diana. Suddenly it struck me that it might mean Diary. The idea kept haunting me. When I had a chance I took Robbins and went to the apartment. We searched, and found Harriet’s diary. Here it is.”

He handed me a little red-bound book. He said: “I’ve gone through it.”

I opened the book. I set down the parts of it pertinent to the matter under review.

Nov. 3. Had a queer sort of experience today. Dropped down to Battery Park to look at the new fishes in the Aquarium. Had an hour or so afterwards and went poking around some of the old streets, looking for something to take home to Diana. Found the oddest little shop. Quaint and old looking with some of the loveliest dolls and dolls’ clothes in the window I’ve ever seen. I stood looking at them and peeping into the shop through the window. There was a girl in the shop. Her back was turned to me. She turned suddenly and looked at me. She gave me the queerest kind of shock. Her face was white, without any color whatever and her eyes were wide and sort of staring and frightened. She had a lot of hair, all ashen blonde and piled up on her head. She was the strangest looking girl I think I’ve ever seen. She stared at me for a full minute and I at her. Then she shook her head violently and made motions with her hands for me to go away. I was so astonished I could hardly believe my eyes. I was about to go in and ask her what on earth was the matter with her when I looked at my watch and found I had just time to get back to the hospital. I looked into the shop again and saw a door at the back beginning slowly to open. The girl made one last and it seemed almost despairing gesture. There was something about it that suddenly made me want to run. But I didn’t. I did walk away though. I’ve puzzled about the thing all day. Also, besides being curious I’m a bit angry. The dolls and clothes are beautiful. What’s wrong with me as a customer? I’m going to find out.

Nov. 5. I went back to the doll shop this afternoon. The mystery deepens. Only I don’t think it’s much of a mystery. I think the poor thing is a bit crazy. I didn’t stop to look in the window but went right in the door. The white girl was at a little counter at the back. When she saw me her eyes looked more frightened than ever and I could see her tremble. I went up to her and she whispered, “Oh, why did you come back? I told you to go away!” I laughed, I couldn’t help it, and I said: “You’re the queerest shopkeeper I ever met. Don’t you want people to buy your things?” She said low and very quickly: “It’s too late! You can’t go now! But don’t touch anything. Don’t touch anything she gives you. Don’t touch anything she points out to you.” And then in the most everyday way she said quite clearly: “Is there anything I can show you? We have everything for dolls.” The transition was so abrupt that it was startling. Then I saw that a door had opened in the back of the shop, the same door I had seen opening before, and that a woman was standing in it looking at me.

I gaped at her I don’t know how long. She was so truly extraordinary. She must be almost six feet and heavy, with enormous breasts. Not fat. Powerful. She has a long face and her skin is brown. She has a distinct mustache and a mop of iron-gray hair.

It was her eyes that held me spellbound. They are simply enormous black and so full of life! She must have a tremendous vitality. Or maybe it is the contrast with the white girl who seems to be drained of life. No, I’m sure she has a most unusual vitality. I had the queerest thrill when she was looking at me. I thought, nonsensically – “What big eyes you have, grandma!” “The better to see you with, my dear!” “What big teeth you have, grandma!” “The better to eat you with, my dear!” (I’m not so sure though that it was all nonsense.) And she really has big teeth, strong and yellow. I said, quite stupidly: “How do you do?” She smiled and touched me with her hand and I felt another queer thrill. Her hands are the most beautiful I ever saw. So beautiful, they are uncanny. Long with tapering fingers and so white. Like the hands El Greco or Botticelli put on their women. I suppose that is what gave me the odd shock. They don’t seem to belong to her immense coarse body at all. But neither do the eyes. The hands and the eyes go together. Yes, that’s it.

She smiled and said: “You love beautiful things.” Her voice belongs to hands and eyes. A deep rich glowing contralto. I could feel it go through me like an organ chord. I nodded. She said: “Then you shall see them, my dear. Come.” She paid no attention to the girl. She turned to the door and I followed her. As I went through the door I looked back at the girl. She appeared more frightened than ever and distinctly I saw her lips form the word – “Remember.”

The room she led me into was – well, I can’t describe it. It was like her eyes and hands and voice.

When I went into it I had the strange feeling that I was no longer in New York. Nor in America. Nor anywhere on earth, for that matter. I had the feeling that the only real place that existed was the room. It was frightening. The room was larger than it seemed possible it could be, judging from the size of the store. Perhaps it was the light that made it seem so. A soft mellow, dusky light. It is exquisitely paneled, even the ceiling. On one side there is nothing but these beautiful old dark panelings with carvings in very low relief covering them. There is a fireplace and a fire was burning in it. It was unusually warm but the warmth was not oppressive. There was a faint fragrant odor, probably from the burning wood. The furniture is old and exquisite too, but unfamiliar. There are some tapestries, clearly ancient. It is curious, but I find it difficult to recall clearly just what is in that room. All that is clear is its unfamiliar beauty. I do remember clearly an immense table, and I recall thinking of it as a “baronial board.” And I remember intensely the round mirror, and I don’t like to think of that.

I found myself telling her all about myself and about Diana, and how she loved beautiful things. She listened, and said in that deep, sweet voice, “She shall have one beautiful thing, my dear.” She went to a cabinet and came to me with the loveliest doll I have ever seen. It made me gasp when I thought how Di would love it. A little baby doll, and so lifelike and exquisite. “Would she like that?” she asked. I said: “But I could never afford such a treasure. I’m poor.” And she laughed, and said: “But I am not poor. This shall be yours when I have finished dressing it.”

It was rude, but I could not help saying: “You must be very, very rich to have all these lovely things. I wonder why you keep a doll store.” And she laughed again and said, “Just to meet nice people like you, my dear.”

It was then I had the peculiar experience, with the mirror. It was round and I had looked and looked at it because it was like, I thought, the half of an immense globule of clearest water. Its frame was brown wood elaborately carved, and now and then the reflection of the carvings seemed to dance in the mirror like vegetation on the edge of a woodland pool when a breeze ruffles it. I had been wanting to look into it, and all at once the desire became irresistible. I walked to the mirror. I could see the whole room reflected in it. Just as though I were looking not at its image or my own image but into another similar room with a similar me peering out. And then there was a wavering and the reflection of the room became misty, although the reflection of myself was perfectly clear. Then I could see only myself, and I seemed to be getting smaller and smaller until I was no bigger than a large doll. I brought my face closer and the little face thrust itself forward. I shook my head and smiled, and it did the same. It was my reflection – but so small! And suddenly I felt frightened and shut my eyes tight. And when I looked in the mirror again everything was as it had been before.

I looked at my watch and was appalled at the time I had spent. I arose to go, still with the panicky feeling at my heart. She said: “Visit me again tomorrow, my dear. I will have the doll ready for you.” I thanked her and said I would. She went with me to the door of the shop. The girl did not look at me as I passed through.

Her name is Madame Mandilip. I am not going to her tomorrow nor ever again. She fascinates me but she makes me afraid. I don’t like the way I felt before the round mirror. And when I first looked into it and saw the whole room reflected, why didn’t I see her image in it? I did not! And although the room was lighted, I can’t remember seeing any windows or lamps. And that girl! And yet – Di would love the doll so!

Nov. 7. Queer how difficult it is to keep to my resolution not to return to Madame Mandilip. It makes me so restless! Last night I had a terrifying dream. I thought I was back in that room. I could see it distinctly. And suddenly I realized I was looking out into it. And that I was inside the mirror. I knew I was little. Like a doll. I was frightened and I beat against it, and fluttered against it like a moth against a windowpane. Then I saw two beautiful long white hands stretching out to me. They opened the mirror and caught me and I struggled and fought and tried to get away. I woke with my heart beating so hard it nigh smothered me. Di says I was crying out: “No! No! I won’t! No, I won’t!” over and over. She threw a pillow at me and I suppose that’s what awakened me.

Today I left the hospital at four, intending to go right home. I don’t know what I could have been thinking about, but whatever it was I must have been mighty preoccupied. I woke up to find myself in the Subway Station just getting on a Bowling Green train. That would have taken me to the Battery. I suppose absentmindedly I had set out for Madame Mandilip’s. It gave me such a start that I almost ran out of the station and up to the street. I think I’m acting very stupidly. I always have prided myself on my common sense. I think I must consult Dr. Braile and see whether I’m becoming neurotic. There’s no earthly reason why I shouldn’t go to see Madame Mandilip. She is most interesting and certainly showed she liked me. It was so gracious of her to offer me that lovely doll. She must think me ungrateful and rude. And it would please Di so. When I think of how I’ve been feeling about the mirror it makes me feel as childish as Alice in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass, rather. Mirrors or any other reflecting surfaces make you see queer things sometimes. Probably the heat and the fragrance had a lot to do with it. I really don’t know that Madame Mandilip wasn’t reflected. I was too intent upon looking at myself. It’s too absurd to run away and hide like a child from a witch. Yet that’s precisely what I’m doing. If it weren’t for that girl – but she certainly is a neurotic! I want to go, and I just don’t see why I’m behaving so.

Nov. 10. Well, I’m glad I didn’t persist in that ridiculous idea. Madame Mandilip is wonderful. Of course, there are some queer things I don’t understand, but that’s because she is so different from anyone I’ve ever met and because when I get inside her room life becomes so different. When I leave, it’s like going out of some enchanted castle into the prosiest kind of world. Yesterday afternoon I determined I’d go to see her straight from the hospital. The moment I made up my mind I felt as though a cloud had lifted from it. Gayer and happier than I’ve been for a week. When I went in the store the white girl – her name is Laschna – stared at me as though she was going to cry. She said, in the oddest choked voice, “Remember that I tried to save you!”

It seemed so funny that I laughed and laughed. Then Madame Mandilip opened the door, and when I looked at her eyes and heard her voice I knew why I was so light-hearted – it was like coming home after the most awful siege of homesickness. The lovely room welcomed me. It really did. It’s the only way I can describe it. I have the queer feeling that the room is as alive as Madame Mandilip. That it is a part of her – or rather, a part of the part of her that are her eyes and hands and voice. She didn’t ask me why I had stayed away. She brought out the doll. It is more wonderful than ever. She has still some work to do on it. We sat and talked, and then she said: “I’d like to make a doll of you, my dear.” Those were her exact words, and for just an instant I had a frightened feeling because I remembered my dream and saw myself fluttering inside the mirror and trying to get out. And then I realized it was just her way of speaking, and that she meant she would like to make a doll that looked like me. So I laughed and said, “Of course you can make a doll of me, Madame Mandilip.” I wonder what nationality she is.

She laughed with me, her big eyes bigger than ever and very bright. She brought out some wax and began to model my head. Those beautiful long fingers worked rapidly as though each of them was a little artist in itself. I watched them, fascinated. I began to get sleepy, and sleepier and sleepier. She said, “My dear, I do wish you’d take off your clothes and let me model your whole body. Don’t be shocked. I’m just an old woman.” I didn’t mind at all, and I said sleepily, “Why, of course you can.” And I stood on a little stool and watched the wax taking shape under those white fingers until it had become a small and most perfect copy of me. I knew it was perfect, although I was so sleepy I could hardly see it. I was so sleepy Madame Mandilip had to help me dress, and then I must have gone sound asleep, because I woke up with quite a start to find her patting my hands and saying, “I’m sorry I tired you, child. Stay if you wish. But if you must go, it is growing late.” I looked at my watch and I was still so sleepy I could hardly see it, but I knew it was dreadfully late. Then Madame Mandilip pressed her hands over my eyes and suddenly I was wide awake. She said, “Come tomorrow and take the doll.” I said, “I must pay you what I can afford.” She said, “You’ve paid me in full, my dear, by letting me make a doll of you.” Then we both laughed and I hurried out. The white girl was busy with someone, but I called “au ’voir” to her. Probably she didn’t hear me, for she didn’t answer.

Nov. 11. I have the doll and Diana is crazy about it! How glad I am I didn’t surrender to that silly morbid feeling. Di has never had anything that has given her such happiness. She adores it! Sat again for Madame Mandilip this afternoon for the finishing touches on my own doll. She is a genius. Truly a genius! I wonder more than ever why she is content to run a little shop. She surely could take her place among the greatest of artists. The doll literally is me. She asked if she could cut some of my hair for its head and of course I let her. She tells me this doll is not the real doll she is going to make of me. That will be much larger. This is just the model from which she will work. I told her I thought this was perfect but she said the other would be of less perishable material. Maybe she will give me this one after she is finished with it. I was so anxious to take the baby doll home to Di that I didn’t stay long. I smiled and spoke to Laschna as I went out, and she nodded to me although not very cordially. I wonder if she can be jealous.

Nov. 13. This is the first time I have felt like writing since that dreadful case of Mr. Peters on the morning of the 10th. I had just finished writing about Di’s doll when the hospital called to say they wanted me on duty that night. Of course, I said I would come. Oh, but I wish I hadn’t. I’ll never forget that dreadful death. Never! I don’t want to write or think about it. When I came home that morning I could not sleep, and I tossed and tossed trying to get his face out of my mind. I thought I had schooled myself too well to be affected by any patient. But there was something – Then I thought that if there was anyone who could help me to forget, it would be Madame Mandilip. So about two o’clock I went down to see her. Madame was in the store with Laschna and seemed surprised to see me so early. And not so pleased as usual, or so I thought but perhaps it was my nervousness. The moment I entered the lovely room I began to feel better. Madame had been doing something with wire on the table but I couldn’t see what because she made me sit in a big comfortable chair, saying, “You look tired, child. Sit here and rest until I’m finished and here’s an old picture book that will keep you interested.” She gave me a queer old book, long and narrow and it must have been very old because it was on vellum or something and the pictures and their colorings were like some of those books that have come down from the Middle Ages, the kind the old monks used to paint. They were all scenes in forests or gardens and the flowers and trees were the queerest! There were no people or anything in them but you had the strangest feeling that if you had just a little better eyes you could see people or something behind them. I mean it was as though they were hiding behind the trees and flowers or among them and looking out at you. I don’t know how long I studied the pictures, trying and trying to see those hidden folk, but at last Madame called me. I went to the table with the book still in my hand. She said, “That’s for the doll I am making of you. Take it up and see how cleverly it is done.” And she pointed to something made of wire on the table. I reached out to pick it up and then suddenly I saw that it was a skeleton. It was little, like a child’s skeleton and all at once the face of Mr. Peters flashed in my mind and I screamed in a moment of perfectly crazy panic and threw out my hands. The book flew out of my hand and dropped on the little wire skeleton and there was a sharp twang and the skeleton seemed to jump. I recovered myself immediately and I saw that the end of the wire had come loose and had cut the binding of the book and was still stuck in it. For a moment Madame was dreadfully angry. She caught my arm and squeezed it so it hurt and her eyes were furious and she said in the strangest voice, “Why did you do that? Answer me. Why?” And she actually shook me. I don’t blame her now, although then she really did frighten me, because she must have thought I did it deliberately. Then she saw how I was trembling and her eyes and voice became gentle and she said, “Something is troubling you, my dear. Tell me and perhaps I can help you.” She made me lie down upon a divan and sat beside me and stroked my hair and forehead and though I never discuss our cases to others I found myself pouring out the whole story of the Peters case. She asked who was the man who had brought him to the hospital and I said Dr. Lowell called him Ricori and I supposed he was the notorious gangster. Her hands made me feel quiet and nice and sleepy and I told her about Dr. Lowell and how great a doctor he is and how terrible I am in love in secret with Dr. B-. I’m sorry I told her about the case. Never have I done such a thing. But I was so shaken and once I had begun I seemed to have to tell her everything. Everything in my mind was so distorted that once when I had lifted my head to look at her I actually thought she was gloating. That shows how little I was like myself! After I had finished she told me to lie there and sleep and she would waken me when I wished. So I said I must go at four. I went right to sleep and woke up feeling rested and fine. When I went out the little skeleton and book were still on the table, and I said I was so sorry about the book. She said, “Better the book than your hand, my dear. The wire might have snapped loose while you were handling it and given you a nasty cut.” She wants me to bring down my nurse’s dress so she can make a little one like it for the new doll.

Nov. 14. I wish I’d never gone to Madame Mandilip’s. I wouldn’t have had my foot scalded. But that’s not the real reason I’m sorry. I couldn’t put it in words if I tried. But I do wish I hadn’t. I took the nurse’s costume down to her this afternoon. She made a little model of it very quickly. She was gay and sang me some of the most haunting little songs. I couldn’t understand the words. She laughed when I asked her what the language was and said, “The language of the people who peeped at you from the pictures of the book, my dear.” That was a strange thing to say. How did she know I thought there were people hidden in the pictures? I do wish I’d never gone there. She brewed some tea and poured cups for us. And then just as she was handing me mine her elbow struck the teapot and overturned it and the scalding tea poured right down over my right foot. It pained atrociously. She took off the shoe and stripped off the stocking and spread salve of some sort over the scald. She said it would take out the pain and heal it immediately. It did stop the pain, and when I came home I could hardly believe my eyes. Job wouldn’t believe it had really been scalded. Madame Mandilip was terribly distressed about it. At least she seemed to be. I wonder why she didn’t go to the door with me as usual. She didn’t. She stayed in the room. The white girl, Laschna, was close to the door when I went out into the store. She looked at the bandage on my foot and I told her it had been scalded but Madame had dressed it. She didn’t even say she was sorry. As I went out I looked at her and said a bit angrily, “Goodbye.” Her eyes filled with tears and she looked at me in the strangest way and shook her head and said “Au ’voir!” I looked at her again as I shut the door and the tears were rolling down her cheeks. I wonder – why? (I wish I had never gone to Madame Mandilip!!!!)

Nov. 15. Foot all healed. I haven’t the slightest desire to return to Madame Mandilip’s. I shall never go there again. I wish I could destroy that doll she gave me for Di. But it would break the child’s heart.

Nov. 20. Still no desire to see her. I find I’m forgetting all about her. The only time I think of her is when I see Di’s doll. I’m glad! So glad I want to dance and sing. I’ll never see her again.

But dear God how I wish I never had seen her! And still I don’t know why.

•   •   •

This was the last reference to Madame Mandilip in Nurse Walters’ diary. She died on the morning of November 25.

— IX —

END OF
THE PETERS DOLL

Braile had been watching me closely. I met his questioning gaze, and tried to conceal the perturbation which the diary had aroused. I said:

“I never knew Walters had so imaginative a mind.”

He flushed and asked angrily: “You think she was fictionizing?”

“Not fictionizing, exactly. Observing a series of ordinary occurrences through the glamour of an active imagination would be a better way of putting it.”

He said, incredulously, “You don’t realize that what she has written is an authentic, even though unconscious, description of an amazing piece of hypnotism?”

“The possibility did occur to me,” I answered tartly. “But I find no actual evidence to support it. I do perceive, however, that Walters was not so well balanced as I had supposed her. I do find evidence that she was surprisingly emotional; that in at least one of her visits to this Madame Mandilip she was plainly overwrought and in an extreme state of nervous instability. I refer to her most indiscreet discussion of the Peters case, after she had been warned by me, you will remember, to say nothing of it to anyone whatsoever.”

“I remember it so well,” he said, “that when I came to that part of the diary I had no further doubt of the hypnotism. Nevertheless, go on.”

“In considering two possible causes for any action, it is desirable to accept the more reasonable,” I said, dryly. “Consider the actual facts, Braile. Walters lays stress upon the odd conduct and warnings of the girl. She admits the girl is a neurotic. Well, the conduct she describes is exactly what we would expect from a neurotic. Walters is attracted by the dolls and goes in to price them, as anyone would. She is acting under no compulsion. She meets a woman whose physical characteristics stimulate her imagination – and arouse her emotionalism. She confides in her. This woman, evidently also of the emotional type, likes her and makes her a present of a doll. The woman is an artist; she sees in Walters a desirable model. She asks her to pose – still no compulsion and a natural request – and Walters does pose for her. The woman has her technique, like all artists, and part of it is to make skeletons for the framework of her dolls. A natural and intelligent procedure. The sight of the skeleton suggests death to Walters, and the suggestion of death brings up the image of Peters which has been powerfully impressed upon her imagination. She becomes momentarily hysterical – again evidence of her overwrought condition. She takes tea with the doll-maker and is accidentally scalded. Naturally this arouses the solicitude of her hostess and she dresses the scald with some unguent in whose efficacy she believes. And that is all. Where in this entirely commonplace sequence of events is there evidence that Walters was hypnotized? Finally, assuming that she was hypnotized, what evidence is there of motive?”

“She herself gave it,” he said, “‘to make a doll of you, my dear!’”

I had almost convinced myself by my argument, and this remark exasperated me.

“I suppose,” I said, “you want me to believe that once lured into the shop, Walters was impelled by occult arts to return until this Madame Mandilip’s devilish purpose was accomplished. That the compassionate shop-girl tried to save her from what the old melodramas called a fate worse than death – although not precisely the fate they meant. That the doll she was to be given for her niece was the bait on the hook of a sorceress. That it was necessary she be wounded so the witch’s salve could be applied. That it was the salve which carried the unknown death. That the first trap failing, the accident of the tea-kettle was contrived and was successful. And that now Walters’ soul is fluttering inside the witch’s mirror, just as she had dreamed. And all this, my dear Braile, is the most outrageous superstition!”

“Ah!” he said obliquely. “So those possibilities did occur to you after all? Your mind is not so fossilized as a few moments ago I supposed.”

I became still more exasperated.

“It is your theory that from the moment Walters entered the store, every occurrence she has narrated was designed to give this Madame Mandilip possession of her soul, a design that was consummated by Walters’ death?”

He hesitated, and then said: “In essence – yes.”

“A soul!” I mused, sardonically. “But I have never seen a soul. I know of no one whose evidence I would credit who has seen a soul. What is a soul – if it exists? It is ponderable? Material? If your theory is correct it must be. How could one gain possession of something which is both imponderables and nonmaterial? How would one know one had it if it could not be seen nor weighed, felt nor measured, nor heard? If not material, how could it be constrained, directed, confined? As you suggest has been done with Walters’ soul by this doll-maker. If material, then where does it reside in the body? Within the brain? I have operated upon hundreds and never yet have I opened any secret chamber housing this mysterious occupant. Little cells, far more complicated in their workings than any machinery ever devised, changing their possessor’s mentality, moods, reason, emotion, personality – according to whether the little cells are functioning well or ill. These I have found, Braile – but never a soul. Surgeons have thoroughly explored the balance of the body. They, too, have found no secret temple within it. Show me a soul, Braile, and I’ll believe in Madame Mandilip.”

He studied me in silence for a little, then nodded.

“Now I understand. It’s hit you pretty hard, too, hasn’t it? You’re doing a little beating of your own against the mirror, aren’t you? Well, I’ve had a struggle to thrust aside what I’ve been taught is reality and to admit there may be something else just as real. This matter, Lowell, is extra-medical, outside the science we know. Until we admit that, we’ll get nowhere. There are still two points I’d like to take up. Peters and the Darnley woman died the same kind of death. Ricori finds that they both had dealings with a Madame Mandilip – or so we can assume. He visits her and narrowly escapes death. Harriet visits her, and dies as Darnley and Peters did. Reasonably, therefore, doesn’t all this point to Madame Mandilip as a possible source of the evil that overtook all four?”

“Certainly,” I answered.

“Then it must follow that there could have been real cause for the fear and forebodings of Harriet. That there could exist a cause other than emotionalism and too much imagination – even though Harriet were unaware of these circumstances.”

Too late I realized the dilemma into which my admission had put me, but I could answer only in the affirmative.

“The second point is her loss of all desire to return to the doll-maker after the teapot incident. Did that strike you as curious?”

“No. If she were emotionally unstable, the shock would automatically set itself up as an inhibition, a subconscious barrier. Unless they are masochists, such types do not like to return to the scene of an unpleasant experience.”

“Did you notice her remark that after the scalding, the woman did not accompany her to the door of the store? And that it was the first time she had neglected to do so?”

“Not particularly. Why?”

“This. If the application of the salve constituted the final act, and thereafter death became inevitable, it might be highly embarrassing to Madame Mandilip to have her victim going in and out of her shop during the time it took the poison to kill. The seizure might even take place there, and lead to dangerous questions. The clever thing, therefore, would be to cause the unsuspecting sacrifice to lose all interest in her; indeed, feel a repulsion against her, or even perhaps forget her. This could be easily accomplished by post-hypnotic suggestion. And Madame Mandilip had every opportunity for it. Would this not explain Harriet’s distaste as logically as imagination – or emotionalism?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“And so,” he said, “we have the woman’s failure to go to the door with Harriet that day explained. Her plot has succeeded. It is all over. And she has planted her suggestion. No need now for any further contact with Harriet. She lets her go, unaccompanied. Significant symbolism of finality!”

He sat thinking.

“No need to meet Harriet again,” he half-whispered, “till after death!”

I said, startled: “What do you mean by that?”

“Never mind,” he answered.

He crossed to the charred spot upon the floor and picked up the heat-blasted crystals. They were about twice the size of olive pits and apparently of some composite. He walked to the table and looked down upon the grotesque figure with its skeleton ribs.

“Suppose the heat melted it?” he asked, and reached over to lift the skeleton. It held fast, and he gave it a sharp tug. There was a shrill twanging sound, and he dropped it with a startled oath. The thing fell to the floor. It writhed, the single wire of which it was made uncoiling.

Uncoiling, it glided over the floor like a serpent and came to rest, quivering.

We looked from it to the table.

The substance that had resembled a sprawling, flattened, headless body was gone. In its place was a film of fine gray dust which swirled and eddied for a moment in some unfelt draft – and then, too, was gone.

— X —

NURSE’S CAP
AND WITCH’S LADDER

“She knows how to get rid of the evidence!”

Braile laughed – but there was no mirth in his laughter. I said nothing. It was the same thought I had held of McCann when the doll’s head had vanished. But McCann could not be suspected of this. Evading any further discussion of the matter, we went to the Annex to see Ricori.

There were two new guards on watch at his door. They arose politely and spoke to us pleasantly. We entered softly. Ricori had slipped out of the drug into a natural sleep. He was breathing easily, peacefully, in deep and healing slumber.

His room was a quiet one at the rear, overlooking a little enclosed garden. Both my houses are old-fashioned, dating back to a more peaceful New York; sturdy vines of Virginia creepers climb up them both at front and back. I cautioned the nurse to maintain utmost quiet, arranging her light so that it would cast only the slightest gleam upon Ricori. Going out, I similarly cautioned the guards, telling them that their chief’s speedy recovery might depend upon silence.

It was now after six. I asked Braile to stay for dinner, and afterward to drop in on my patients at the hospital and to call me up if he thought it worthwhile. I wanted to stay at home and await Ricori’s awakening, should it occur.

We had almost finished dinner when the telephone rang. Braile answered.

“McCann,” he said. I went to the instrument.

“Hello, McCann. This is Dr. Lowell.”

“How’s the boss?”

“Better, I’m expecting him to awaken any moment and to be able to talk,” I answered, and listened intently to catch whatever reaction he might betray to this news.

“That’s great, Doc!” I could detect nothing but deepest satisfaction in his tones. “Listen, Doc, I seen Mollie an’ I got some news. Dropped round on her right after I left you. Found Gilmore – that’s her husband – home, an’ that gave me a break. Said I’d come in to ask her how she’d like a little ride. She was tickled an’ we left Gil home with the kid—”

“Does she know of Peters’ death?” I interrupted.

“Nope. An’ I didn’t tell her. Now listen. I told you Horty – What? Why Missus Darnley, Jim Wilson’s gal. Yeah. Let me talk, will you? I told you Horty was nuts on Mollie’s kid. Early last month Horty comes in with a swell doll for the kid. Also she’s nursing a sore hand she says she gets at the same place she got the doll. The woman she gets the doll from gave it to her, she tells Mollie – What? No, gave her the doll, not the hand. Say, Doc, ain’t I speaking clear? Yeah, she gets her hand hurt where she got the doll. That’s what I said. The woman fixes it up for her. She gives her the doll for nothing, Horty tells Mollie, because she thought Horty was so pretty an’ for posing for her. Yeah, posing for her, making a statue of her or something. That makes a hit with Horty because she don’t hate herself an’ she thinks this doll woman a lallapaloozer. Yeah, a lallapaloozer, a corker! Yeah.

“About a week later Tom – that’s Peters – shows up while Horty’s there an’ sees the doll. Tom’s a mite jealous of Horty with the kid an’ asks her where she got it. She tells him a Madame Mandilip, an’ where, an’ Tom he says as this is a gal-doll she needs company, so he’ll go an’ get a boy-doll. About a week after this Tom turns up with a boy-doll the lick-an’-spit of Horty’s. Mollie asks him if he pays as much for it as Horty. They ain’t told him about Horty not paying nothing for it or posing. Mollie says Tom looks sort of sheepish but all he says is, well, he ain’t gone broke on it. She’s going to kid him by asking if the doll woman thinks he’s so pretty she wants him to pose, but the kid sets up a whoop about the boy-doll an’ she forgets it. Tom don’t show up again till about the first of this month. He’s got a bandage on his hand an’ Mollie, kidding, asks him if he got it where he got the doll. He looks surprised an’ says ‘yes, but how the hell did you know that?’ Yeah-yeah, that’s what she says he told her. What’s that? Did the Mandilip woman bandage it for him? How the hell – I don’t know. I guess so, maybe. Mollie didn’t say an’ I didn’t ask. Listen, Doc, I told you Mollie’s no dummy. What I’m telling you took me two hours to get. Talking ’bout this, talking ’bout that an’ coming back casual like to what I’m trying to find out. I’m afraid to ask too many questions. What? Oh, that’s all right, Doc. No offense. Yeah, I think it pretty funny myself. But like I’m telling you I’m afraid to go too far. Mollie’s too wise.

“Well, when Ricori comes up yesterday he uses the same tactics as me, I guess. Anyway, he admires the dolls an’ asks her where she gets ’em an’ how much they cost an’ so on. Remember, I told you I stay out in the car while he’s there. It’s after that he goes home an’ does the telephoning an’ then beats it to the Mandilip hag. Yeah, that’s all. Does it mean anything? Yeah? All right then.”

He was silent for a moment or two, but I had not heard the click of the receiver. I asked:

“Are you there, McCann?”

“Yeah. I was just thinking.” His voice held a wistful note. “I’d sure like to be with you when the boss comes to. But I’d best go down an’ see how the hands are getting along with them two Mandilip cows. Maybe I’ll call you up if it ain’t too late. G’by.”

I walked slowly back to Braile, trying to marshal my disjointed thoughts. I repeated McCann’s end of the conversation to him exactly. He did not interrupt me. When I had finished he said quietly:

“Hortense Darnley goes to the Mandilip woman, is given a doll, is asked to pose, is wounded there, is treated there. And dies. Peters goes to the Mandilip woman, gets a doll, is wounded there, is presumably treated there. And dies like Hortense. You see a doll for which, apparently, he has posed. Harriet goes through the same routine. And dies like Hortense and Peters. Now what?”

Suddenly I felt rather old and tired. It is not precisely stimulating to see crumbling what one has long believed to be a fairly well ordered world of recognized cause and effect. I said wearily:

“I don’t know.”

He arose, and patted my shoulder.

“Get some sleep. The nurse will call you if Ricori wakes. We’ll get to the bottom of this thing.”

“Even if we fall to it,” I said, and smiled.

“Even if we have to fall to it,” he repeated, and did not smile.

After Braile had gone I sat for long, thinking. Then, determined to dismiss my thoughts, I tried to read. I was too restless, and soon gave it up. Like the room in which Ricori lay, my study is at the rear, looking down upon the little garden. I walked to the window and stared out, unseeingly. More vivid than ever was that feeling of standing before a blank door which it was vitally important to open. I turned back into the study and was surprised to find it was close to ten o’clock. I dimmed my light and lay down upon the comfortable couch. Almost immediately I fell asleep.

I awoke from that sleep with a start, as though someone had spoken in my ear. I sat up, listening. There was utter silence around me. And suddenly I was aware that it was a strange silence, unfamiliar and oppressive. A thick, dead silence that filled the study and through which no sound from outside could penetrate. I jumped to my feet and turned on the lights, full. The silence retreated, seemed to pour out of the room like something tangible. But slowly. Now I could hear the ticking of my clock – ticking out abruptly, as though a silencing cover had been whisked from it. I shook my head impatiently, and walked to the window. I leaned out to breathe the cool night air. I leaned out still more, so that I could see the window of Ricori’s room, resting my hand on the trunk of the vine. I felt a tremor along it as though someone were gently shaking it – or as though some small animal were climbing it—

The window of Ricori’s room broke into a square of light. Behind me I heard the shrilling of the Annex alarm bell which meant the urgent need of haste. I raced out of the study, and up the stairs and over.

As I ran into the corridor I saw that the guards were not at the door. The door was open. I stood stock-still on its threshold, incredulous—

One guard crouched beside the window, automatic in hand. The other knelt beside a body on the floor, his pistol pointed toward me. At her table sat the nurse, head bent upon her breast – unconscious or asleep. The bed was empty. The body on the floor was Ricori!

The guard lowered his gun. I dropped at Ricori’s side. He was lying face down, stretched out a few feet from the bed. I turned him over. His face had the pallor of death, but his heart was beating.

“Help me lift him to the bed,” I said to the guard. “Then shut that door.”

He did so, silently. The man at the window asked from the side of his mouth, never relaxing his watch outward:

“Boss dead?”

“Not quite,” I answered, then swore as I seldom do – “What the hell kind of guards are you?”

The man who had shut the door gave a mirthless chuckle.

“There’s more’n you goin’ to ask that, Doc.”

I gave a glance at the nurse. She still sat huddled in the limp attitude of unconsciousness or deep sleep. I stripped Ricori of his pajamas and went over his body. There was no mark upon him. I sent for adrenalin, gave him an injection and went over to the nurse, and shook her. She did not awaken. I raised her eyelids. The pupils of her eyes were contracted. I flashed a light in them, without response. Her pulse and respiration were slow, but not dangerously so. I let her be for a moment and turned to the guards.

“What happened?”

They looked at each other uneasily. The guard at the window waved his hand as though bidding the other do the talking. This guard said:

“We’re sitting out there. All at once the house gets damned still. I says to Jack there, ‘Sounds like they put a silencer on the dump.’ He says, ‘Yeah.’ We sit listening. Then all at once we hear a thump inside here. Like somebody falling out of bed. We crash the door. There’s the boss like you seen him on the floor. There’s the nurse asleep like you see her. We glim the alarm and pull it. Then we wait for somebody to come. That’s all, ain’t it, Jack?”

“Yeah,” answered the guard at the window, tonelessly. “Yeah, I guess that’s all.”

I looked at him, suspiciously.

“You guess that’s all? What do you mean – you guess?”

Again they looked at each other.

“Better come clean, Bill,” said the guard at the window.

“Hell, he won’t believe it,” said the other.

“And nobody else. Anyway, tell him.”

The guard Bill said:

“When we crash the door we seen something like a couple of cats fighting there beside the window. The boss is lying on the floor. We had our guns out but was afraid to shoot for what you told us. Then we heard a funny noise outside like somebody blowing a flute. The two things broke loose and jumped up on the window sill, and out. We jumped to the window. And we didn’t see nothing.”

“You saw the things at the window. What did they look like then?” I asked.

“You tell him, Jack.”

“Dolls!”

A shiver went down my back. It was the answer I had expected – and dreaded. Out the window! I recalled the tremor of the vine when I gripped it! The guard who had closed the door looked at me, and I saw his jaw drop.

“Jesus, Jack!” he gasped. “He believes it!”

I forced myself to speak.

“What kind of dolls?”

The guard at the window answered, more confidently.

“One we couldn’t see well. The other looked like one of your nurses if she’d shrunk to about two feet!”

One of my nurses… Walters… I felt a wave of weakness and sank down on the edge of Ricori’s bed.

Something white on the floor at the head of it caught my eye. I stared at it stupidly, then leaned and picked it up.

It was a nurse’s cap, a little copy of those my nurses wear. It was about large enough to fit the head of a two-foot doll…

There was something else where it had been. I picked that up.

It was a knotted cord of hair pale ashen hair with nine curious knots spaced at irregular intervals along it…

The guard named Bill stood looking down at me anxiously. He asked:

“Want me to call any of your people, Doc?”

“Try to get hold of McCann,” I bade him; then spoke to the other guard: “Close the windows and fasten them and pull down the curtains. Then lock the door.”

Bill began to telephone. Stuffing the cap and knotted cord in my pocket, I walked over to the nurse. She was rapidly recovering and in a minute or two I had her awake. At first her eyes dwelt on me, puzzled; took in the lighted room and the two men, and the puzzlement changed to alarm. She sprang to her feet.

“I didn’t see you come in! Did I fall asleep… what’s happened?…” Her hand went to her throat.

“I’m hoping you can tell us,” I said, gently.

She stared at me uncomprehendingly. She said, confusedly:

“I don’t know… it became terribly still… I… thought I saw something moving at the window… then there was a queer fragrance and then I looked up to see you bending over me.”

I asked: “Can you remember anything of what you saw at the window? The least detail – the least impression. Please try.”

She answered, hesitantly: “There was something white… I thought someone… something… was watching me… then came the fragrance, like flowers… that’s all.”

Bill hung up the telephone: “All right, Doc. They’re after McCann. Now what?”

“Miss Butler,” I turned to the nurse. “I’m going to relieve you for the balance of the night. Go to bed. And I want you to sleep. I prescribe—” I told her what.

“You’re not angry – you don’t think I’ve been careless—”

“No, to both.” I smiled and patted her shoulder. “The case has taken an unexpected turn, that’s all. Now don’t ask any more questions.”

I walked with her to the door, opened it.

“Do exactly as I say.”

I closed and locked the door behind her.

I sat beside Ricori. The shock that he had experienced – whatever it might have been – should either cure or kill, I thought grimly. As I watched him, a tremor went through his body. Slowly an arm began to lift, fist clenched. His lips moved. He spoke, in Italian and so swiftly that I could get no word. His arm fell back. I stood up from the bed. The paralysis had gone. He could move and speak. But would he be able to do so when consciousness assumed sway? I left this for the next few hours to decide I could do nothing else.

“Now listen to me carefully,” I said to the two guards. “No matter how strange what I am going to say will seem, you must obey me in every detail! Ricori’s life depends upon your doing so. I want one of you to sit close beside me at the table here. I want the other to sit beside Ricori, at the head or the bed and between him and me. If I am asleep and he should awaken, arouse me. If you see any change in his condition, immediately awaken me. Is that clear?”

They said: “Okay.”

“Very well. Now here is the most important thing of all. You must watch me even more closely. Whichever of you sits beside me must not take his eyes off me. If I should go to your chief it would be to do one of three things only – listen to his heart and breathing – lift his eyelids – take his temperature. I mean, of course, if he should be as he now is. If I seem to awaken and attempt to do anything other than these three – stop me. If I resist, make me helpless – tie me up and gag me – no, don’t gag me – listen to me and remember what I say. Then telephone to Dr. Braile – here is his number.”

I wrote, and passed it to them.

“Don’t damage me any more than you can help,” I said, and laughed.

They stared at each other, plainly disconcerted. “If you say so, Doc—” began the guard Bill, doubtfully.

“I do say so. Do not hesitate. If you should be wrong, I’ll not hold it against you.”

“The Doc knows what he’s about, Bill,” said the guard Jack.

“Okay then,” said Bill.

I turned out all the lights except that beside the nurse’s table. I stretched myself in her chair and adjusted the lamp so my face could be plainly seen. That little white cap I had picked from the floor had shaken me – damnably! I drew it out and placed it in a drawer. The guard Jack took his station beside Ricori. Bill drew up a chair, and sat facing me. I thrust my hand into my pocket and clutched the knotted cord, closed my eyes, emptied my mind of all thought, and relaxed. In abandoning, at least temporarily, my conception of a sane universe I had determined to give that of Madame Mandilip’s every chance to operate.

Faintly, I heard a clock strike one. I slept.

Somewhere a vast wind was roaring. It circled and swept down upon me. It bore me away. I knew that I had no body, that indeed I had no form. Yet I was. A formless sentience whirling in that vast wind. It carried me into infinite distance. Bodiless, intangible as I knew myself to be, yet it poured into me an unearthly vitality. I roared with the wind in unhuman jubilance. The vast wind circled and raced me back from immeasurable space…

I seemed to awaken, that pulse of strange jubilance still surging through me… Ah! There was what I must destroy… there on the bed… must kill so that this pulse of jubilance would not cease… must kill so that the vast wind would sweep me up again and away and feed me with its life… but careful… careful… there – there in the throat just under the ear… there is where I must plunge it… then off with the wind again… there where the pulse beats… what is holding me back?… caution… caution, “I am going to take his temperature”… that’s it, careful, “I am going to take his temperature.” … Now – one quick spring, then into his throat where the pulse beats… “Not with that you don’t!” … Who said that?… still holding me… rage, consuming and ruthless blackness and the sound of a vast wind roaring away and away…

I heard a voice: “Slap him again, Bill, but not so hard. He’s coming around.” I felt a stinging blow on my face. The dancing mists cleared from before my eyes. I was standing halfway between the nurse’s table and Ricori’s bed. The guard Jack held my arms pinioned to my sides. The guard Bill’s hand was still raised. There was something clenched tightly in my own hand. I looked down. It was a strong scalpel, razor-edged!

I dropped the scalpel. I said, quietly: “It’s all right now, you can release me.”

The guard Bill said nothing. His comrade did not loose his grip. I twisted my head and I saw that both their faces were sallow white. I said:

“It was what I had expected. It was why I instructed you. It is over. You can keep your guns on me if you like.”

The guard who held me freed my arms. I touched my cheek gingerly. I said mildly:

“You must have hit me rather hard, Bill.”

He said: “If you could a seen your face, Doc, you’d wonder I didn’t smash it.”

I nodded, clearly sensible now of the demonic quality of that rage, I asked:

“What did I do?”

The guard Bill said: “You wake up and set there for a minute staring at the chief. Then you take something out of that drawer and get up. You say you’re going to take his temperature. You’re half to him before we see what you got. I shout, ‘Not with that you don’t!’ Jack grabs you. Then you went crazy. And I had to slam you. That’s all.”

I nodded again. I took out of my pocket the knotcord of woman’s pale hair, held it over a dish and touched a match to it. It began to burn, writhing like a tiny snake as it did so, the complex knots untying as the flame touched them. I dropped the last inch of it upon the plate and watched it turn to ash.

“I think there’ll be no more trouble tonight,” I said. “But keep up your watch just as before.”

I dropped back into the chair and closed my eyes…

Well, Braile had not shown me a soul, but – I believed in Madame Mandilip.

— XI —

A DOLL KILLS

The balance of the night I slept soundly and dreamlessly. I awakened at my usual hour of seven. The guards were alert. I asked if anything had been heard from McCann, and they answered no. I wondered a little at that, but they did not seem to think it out of the ordinary. Their reliefs were soon due, and I cautioned them to speak to no one but McCann about the occurrences of the night, reminding them that no one would be likely to believe them if they did. They assured me, earnestly, that they would be silent. I told them that I wanted the guards to remain within the room thereafter, as long as they were necessary.

Examining Ricori, I found him sleeping deeply and naturally. In all ways his condition was most satisfactory. I concluded that the second shock, as sometimes happens, had counteracted the lingering effects of the initial one. When he awakened, he would be able to speak and move. I gave this reassuring news to the guards. I could see that they were bursting with questions. I gave them no encouragement to ask them.

At eight, my day nurse for Ricori appeared, plainly much surprised to have found Butler sleeping and to find me taking her place. I made no explanation, simply telling her that the guards would now be stationed within the room instead of outside the door.

At eight-thirty, Braile dropped in on me for breakfast, and to report. I let him finish before I apprised him of what had happened. I said nothing, however, of the nurse’s little cap, nor of my own experience.

I assumed this reticence for well-considered reasons. One, Braile would accept in its entirety the appalling deduction from the cap’s presence. I strongly suspected that he had been in love with Walters, and that I would be unable to restrain him from visiting the doll-maker. Usually hard-headed, he was in this matter far too suggestible. It would be dangerous for him, and his observations would be worthless to me. Second, if he knew of my own experience, he would without doubt refuse to let me out of his sight. Third, either of these contingencies would defeat my own purpose, which was to interview Madame Mandilip entirely alone – with the exception of McCann to keep watch outside the shop.

What would come of that meeting I could not forecast. But, obviously, it was the only way to retain my self-respect. To admit that what had occurred was witchcraft, sorcery, supernatural – was to surrender to superstition. Nothing can be supernatural. If anything exists, it must exist in obedience to natural laws. Material bodies must obey material laws. We may not know those laws – but they exist nevertheless. If Madame Mandilip possessed knowledge of an unknown science, it behooved me as an exemplar of known science, to find out what I could about the other. Especially as I had recently responded so thoroughly to it. That I had been able to outguess her in her technique – if it had been that, and not a self-induced illusion – gave me a pleasant feeling of confidence. At any rate, meet her I must.

It happened to be one of my days for consultation, so I could not get away until after two. I asked Braile to take charge of matters after that, for a few hours.

Close to ten the nurse telephoned that Ricori was awake, that he was able to speak and had been asking for me.

He smiled at me as I entered the room. As I leaned over and took his wrist he said:

“I think you have saved more than my life, Dr. Lowell! Ricori thanks you. He will never forget!”

A bit florid, but thoroughly in character. It showed that his mind was functioning normally. I was relieved.

“We’ll have you up in a jiffy.” I patted his hand.

He whispered: “Have there been any more deaths?”

I had been wondering whether he had retained any recollection of the affair of the night. I answered:

“No. But you have lost much strength since McCann brought you here. I don’t want you to do much talking today.” I added, casually: “No, nothing has happened. Oh, yes – you fell out of bed this morning. Do you remember?”

He glanced at the guards and then back at me. He said:

“I am weak. Very weak. You must make me strong quickly.”

“We’ll have you sitting up in two days, Ricori.”

“In less than two days I must be up and out. There is a thing I must do. It cannot wait.”

I did not want him to become excited. I abandoned any intention of asking what had happened in the car. I said, incisively:

“That will depend entirely upon you. You must not excite yourself. You must do as I tell you. I am going to leave you now, to give orders for your nutrition. Also, I want your guards to remain in this room.”

He said: “And still you tell me – nothing has happened.”

“I don’t intend to have anything happen.” I leaned over him and whispered: “McCann has guards around the Mandilip woman. She cannot run away.”

He said: “But her servitors are more efficient than mine, Dr. Lowell!”

I looked at him sharply. His eyes were inscrutable. I went back to my office, deep in thought. What did Ricori know?

At eleven o’clock McCann called me on the telephone. I was so glad to hear from him that I was angry.

“Where on earth have you been—” I began.

“Listen, Doc. I’m at Mollie’s – Peters’ sister,” he interrupted. “Come here quick.”

The peremptory demand added to my irritation. “Not now,” I answered. “These are my office hours. I will not be free until two.”

“Can’t you break away? Something’s happened. I don’t know what to do!” There was desperation in his voice.

“What has happened?” I asked.

“I can’t tell you over—” His voice steadied, grew gentle; I heard him say, “Be quiet, Mollie. It can’t do no good!” Then to me – “Well, come as soon as you can, Doc. I’ll wait. Take the address.” Then when he had given it to me, I heard him again speaking to another – “Quit it, Mollie! I ain’t going to leave you.”

He hung up, abruptly. I went back to my chair, troubled. He had not asked me about Ricori. That in itself was disquieting. Mollie? Peters’ sister, of course! Was it that she had learned of her brother’s death, and suffered collapse? I recalled that Ricori had said she was soon to be a mother. No, I felt that McCann’s panic had been due to something more than that. I became more and more uneasy. I looked over my appointments. There were no important ones. Coming to sudden determination, I told my secretary to call up and postpone them. I ordered my car, and set out for the address McCann had given me.

McCann met me at the door of the apartment. His face was drawn and his eyes haunted. He drew me within without a word, and led me through the hall. I passed an open door and glimpsed a woman with a sobbing child in her arms. He took me into a bedroom and pointed to the bed.

There was a man lying on it, covers pulled up to his chin. I went over to him, looked down upon him, touched him. The man was dead. He had been dead for hours. McCann said:

“Mollie’s husband. Look him over like you done the boss.”

I had a curiously unpleasant sense of being turned on a potter’s wheel by some inexorable hand – from Peters, to Walters, to Ricori, to the body before me. Would the wheel stop there?

I stripped the dead man. I took from my bag a magnifying glass and probes. I went over the body inch by inch, beginning at the region of the heart. Nothing there nothing anywhere… I turned the body over…

At once, at the base of the skull, I saw a minute puncture.

I took a fine probe and inserted it. The probe – and again I had that feeling of infinite repetition – slipped into the puncture. I manipulated it, gently.

Something like a long thin needle had been thrust into that vital spot just where the spinal cord connects with the brain. By accident, or perhaps because the needle had been twisted savagely to tear the nerve paths, there had been paralysis of respiration and almost instant death.

I withdrew the probe and turned to McCann.

“This man has been murdered,” I said. “Killed by the same kind of weapon with which Ricori was attacked. But whoever did it made a better job. He’ll never come to life again as Ricori did.”

“Yeah?” said McCann, quietly. “An’ me an’ Paul was the only ones with Ricori when it happened. An’ the only ones here with this man, Doc, was his wife an’ baby! Now what’re you going to do about that? Say those two put him on the spot – like you thought we done the boss?”

I said: “What do you know about this, McCann? And how did you come to be here so – opportunely?”

He answered, patiently: “I wasn’t here when he was killed – if that’s what you’re getting at. If you want to know the time, it was two o’clock. Mollie got me on the ’phone about an hour ago an’ I come straight up.”

“She had better luck than I had,” I said, dryly. “Ricori’s people have been trying to get hold of you since one o’clock last night.”

“I know. But I didn’t know it till just before Mollie called me. I was on my way to see you. An’ if you want to know what I was doing all night, I’ll tell you. I was out on the boss’s business, an’ yours. For one thing trying to find out where that hell-cat niece keeps her coupe. I found out – too late.”

“But the men who were supposed to be watching—”

“Listen, Doc, won’t you talk to Mollie now?” he interrupted me, “I’m afraid for her. It’s only what I told her about you an’ that you was coming that’s kept her up.”

“Take me to her,” I said, abruptly.

We went into the room where I had seen the woman and the sobbing child. The woman was not more than twenty-seven or -eight, I judged, and in ordinary circumstances would have been unusually attractive. Now her face was drawn and bloodless, in her eyes horror, and a fear on the very borderline of madness. She stared at me, vacantly; she kept rubbing her lips with the tips of her forefingers, staring at me with those eyes out of which looked a mind emptied of everything but fear and grief. The child, a girl of no more than four, kept up her incessant sobbing. McCann shook the woman by the shoulder.

“Snap out of it, Mollie,” he said, roughly, but pityingly, too. “Here’s the Doc.”

The woman became aware of me, abruptly. She looked at me steadily for slow moments, then asked, less like one questioning than one relinquishing a last thin thread of hope:

“He is dead?”

She read the answer in my face. She cried:

“Oh, Johnnie – Johnnie Boy! Dead!”

She took the child up in her arms. She said to it, almost tranquilly: “Johnnie Boy has gone away, darling. Daddy has had to go away. Don’t cry, darling, we’ll soon see him!”

I wished she would break down, weep; but that deep fear which never left her eyes was too strong; it blocked all normal outlets of sorrow. Not much longer, I realized, could her mind stand up under that tension.

“McCann,” I whispered, “say something, do something to her that will arouse her. Make her violently angry, or make her cry. I don’t care which.”

He nodded. He snatched the child from her arms and thrust it behind him. He leaned, his face close to the woman’s. He said, brutally:

“Come clean, Mollie! Why did you kill John?”

For a moment the woman stood, uncomprehending. Then a tremor shook her. The fear vanished from her eyes and fury took its place. She threw herself upon McCann, fists beating at his face. He caught her, pinioned her arms. The child screamed.

The woman’s body relaxed, her arms fell to her sides. She crumpled to the floor, her head bent over her knees. And tears came. McCann would have lifted, comforted her. I stopped him.

“Let her cry. It’s the best thing for her.”

And after a little while she looked up at McCann and said, shakily:

“You didn’t mean that, Dan?”

He said: “No, I know you didn’t do it, Mollie. But now you’ve got to talk to the Doc. There’s a lot to be done.”

She asked, normally enough now: “Do you want to question me, Doctor? Or shall I just go on and tell you what happened?”

McCann said: “Tell him the way you told me. Begin with the doll.”

I said: “That’s right. You tell me your story. If I’ve any questions, I’ll ask them when you are done.”

She began:

“Yesterday afternoon Dan, here, came and took me out for a ride. Usually John does not… did not get home until about six. But yesterday he was worried about me and came home early, around three. He likes… he liked… Dan, and urged me to go. It was a little after six when I returned.

“‘A present came for the kid while you were out, Mollie,’ he said. ‘It’s another doll. I’ll bet Tom sent it.’ Tom is my brother.

“There was a big box on the table, and I lifted the lid. In it was the most lifelike doll imaginable. A perfect thing. A little girl-doll. Not a baby-doll, but a doll like a child about ten or twelve years old. Dressed like a schoolgirl, with her books strapped, and over her shoulder – only about a foot high, but perfect. The sweetest face – a face like a little angel. John said: ‘It was addressed to you, Mollie, but I thought it was flowers and opened it. Looks as though it could talk, doesn’t it? I’ll bet it’s what they call a portrait-doll. Some kid posed for that, all right.’ At that, I was sure Tom had sent it, because he had given little Mollie one doll before, and a friend of mine who’s… whose dead… gave her one from the same place, and she told me the woman who made the dolls had gotten her to pose for one. So putting this together, I knew Tom had gone and gotten little Mollie another. But I asked John: ‘Wasn’t there a note or a card or anything in it?’ He said, ‘No – oh, yes, there was one funny thing. Where is it? I must have stuck it in my pocket.’

“He hunted around in his pockets and brought out a cord. It had knots in it, and it looked as if it was made of hair. I said, ‘Wonder what Tom’s idea was in that?’ John put it back in his pocket, and I thought nothing more about it.

“Little Mollie was asleep. We put the doll beside her where she could see it when she woke up. When she did, she was in raptures over it. We had dinner, and Mollie played with the doll. After we put her to bed I wanted to take it away from her, but she cried so we let her go to sleep with it. We played cards until eleven, and then made ready for bed.

“Mollie is apt to be restless, and she still sleeps in a low crib so she can’t fall out. The crib is in our bedroom, in the corner beside one of the two windows. Between the two windows is my dressing table, and our bed is set with its head against the wall opposite the windows. We both stopped and looked at Mollie, as we always do… did. She was sound asleep with the doll clasped in one arm, its head on her shoulder.

“John said: ‘Lord, Mollie – that doll looks as alive as the baby! You wouldn’t be surprised to see it get up and walk. Whoever posed for it was some sweet kid.’

“And that was true. It had the sweetest, gentlest little face… and oh, Dr. Lowell… that’s what helps make it so dreadful… so utterly dreadful…”

I saw the fear begin to creep back into her eyes.

McCann said: “Buck up, Mollie!”

“I tried to take the doll. It was so lovely I was afraid the baby might roll on it or damage it some way,” she went on again quietly, “but she held it fast, and I did not want to awaken her. So I let it be. While we were undressing, John took the knotted cord out of his pocket.

“‘That’s a funny looking bunch of knots,’ he said. ‘When you hear from Tom ask him what it’s for.’ He tossed the cord on the little table at his side of the bed. It wasn’t long before he was asleep. And then I went asleep too.

“And then I woke up… or thought I did… for if I was awake or dreaming I don’t know. I must have been a dream – and yet… Oh, God, John is dead… I heard him die…”

Again, for a little time, the tears flowed. Then:

“If I was awake, it must have been the stillness that awakened me. And yet – it is what makes me feel I must have been dreaming. There couldn’t such silence… except in a dream. We are on the second floor, and always there is some sound from the street. There wasn’t the least sound now… it was as though… as though the whole world had suddenly been stricken dumb. I thought I sat up, listening… listening thirstily for the tiniest of noises. I could not even hear John breathing. I was frightened, for there was something dreadful in that stillness. Something living! Something wicked! I tried to lean over to John, tried to touch him, to awaken him.

“I could not move! I could not stir a finger! I tried to speak, to cry out. I could not!

“The window curtains were partly drawn. A faint light showed beneath and around them from the street. Suddenly this was blotted out. The room was dark – utterly dark.

“And then the green glow began—

“At first it was the dimmest gleam. It did not come from outside. It was in the room itself. It would flicker and dim, flicker and dim. But always after each dimming it was brighter. It was green like the light of the firefly. Or like looking at moonlight through clear green water. At last the green glow became steady. It was like light, and still it wasn’t light. It wasn’t brilliant. It was just glowing. And it was everywhere – under the dressing table, under the chairs… I mean it cast no shadows. I could see everything in the bedroom. I could see the baby asleep in her crib, the doll’s head on her shoulder…

“The doll moved!

“It turned its head, and seemed to listen to the baby’s breathing. It put its little hands upon the baby’s arm. The arm dropped away from it.

“The doll sat up!

“And now I was sure that I must be dreaming the strange silence the strange green glow… and this…

“The doll clambered over the side of the crib, and dropped to the floor. It came skipping over the floor toward the bed like a child, swinging its school books by their strap. It turned its head from side to side as it came, looking around the room like a curious child. It caught sight of the dressing table, and stopped, looking up at the mirror. It climbed up the chair in front of the dressing table. It jumped from the chair seat to the table, tossed its books aside and began to admire itself in the mirror.

“It preened itself. It turned and looked at itself, first over this shoulder and then over that. I thought: ‘What a queer fantastic dream!’ It thrust its face close to the mirror and rearranged and patted its hair. I thought: ‘What a vain little doll!’ And then I thought: ‘I’m dreaming all this because John said the doll was so lifelike he wouldn’t be surprised to see it walk.’ And then I thought: ‘But I can’t be dreaming, or I wouldn’t be trying to account for what I’m dreaming!’ And then it all seemed so absurd that I laughed. I knew I had made no sound. I knew I couldn’t… that the laugh was inside me. But it was as though the doll had heard me. It turned and looked straight at me—

“My heart seemed to die within me. I’ve had nightmares, Dr. Lowell – but never in the worst of them did I feel as I did when the doll’s eyes met mine…

“They were the eyes of a devil! They shone red. I mean they were – were – luminous… like some animal’s eyes in the dark. But it was the – the – hellishness in them that made me feel as though a hand had gripped my heart! Those eyes from hell in that face like one of God’s own angels…

“I don’t know how long it stood there, glaring at me. But at last it swung itself down and sat on the edge of the dressing table, legs swinging like a child’s and still with its eyes on mine. Then slowly, deliberately, it lifted its little arm and reached behind its neck. Just as slowly it brought its arm back. In its hand was a long pin… like a dagger…

“It dropped from the dressing table to the floor. It skipped toward me and was hidden by the bottom of the bed. An instant and it had clambered up the bed and stood, still looking at me with those red eyes, at John’s feet.

“I tried to cry out, tried to move, tried to arouse John. I prayed – ‘Oh, God, wake him up! Dear God – wake him!’

“The doll looked away from me. It stood there, looking at John. It began to creep along his body, up toward his head. I tried to move my hand, to follow it. I could not. The doll passed out of my sight…

“I heard a dreadful, sobbing groan. I felt John shudder, then stretch and twist… I heard him sigh…

“Deep deep down… I knew John was dying… and I could do nothing… in the silence in the green glow…

“I heard something like the note of a flute, from the street, beyond the windows. There was a tiny scurrying. I saw the doll skip across the floor and spring up to the windowsill. It knelt there for a moment, looking out into the street. It held something in its hand. And then I saw that what it held was the knotted cord John had thrown on his table.

“I heard the flute note again… the doll swung itself out of the window… I had a glimpse of its red eyes… I saw its little hands clutching the sill… and it was gone…

“The green glow… blinked and… went out. The light from the street returned around the curtains. The silence seemed… seemed… to be sucked away.

“And then something like a wave of darkness swept over me. I went down under it. Before it swept over me I heard the clock strike two.

“When I awakened again… or came out of my faint… or, if it was just a dream, when I awakened… I turned to John. He lay there… so still! I touched him… he was cold… so cold! I knew he was dead!

“Dr. Lowell… tell me what was dream and what was real? I know that no doll could have killed John!

“Did he reach out to me when he was dying, and did the dream come from that? Or did I… dreaming… kill him?”

— XII —

TECHNIQUE
OF MADAME MANDILIP

There was an agony in her eyes that forbade the truth, so I lied to her.

“I can comfort you as to that, at least. Your husband died of entirely natural causes – from a blood clot in the brain. My examination satisfied me thoroughly as to that. You had nothing to do with it. As for the doll – you had an unusually vivid dream, that is all.”

She looked at me as one who would give her soul to believe. She said:

“But I heard him die!”

“It is quite possible—” I plunged into a somewhat technical explanation which I knew she would not quite understand, but would, perhaps, be therefore convincing – “You may have been half-awake – on what we term the borderline of waking consciousness. In all probability the entire dream was suggested by what you heard. Your subconsciousness tried to explain the sounds, and conceived the whole fantastic drama you have recited to me. What seemed, in your dream, to take up many minutes actually passed through your mind in a split second – the subconsciousness makes its own time. It is a common experience. A door slams, or there is some other abrupt and violent sound. It awakens the sleeper. When he is fully awake he has recollection of some singularly vivid dream which ended with a loud noise. In reality, his dream began with the noise. The dream may have seemed to him to have taken hours. It was, in fact, almost instantaneous, taking place in the brief moment between noise and awakening.”

She drew a deep breath; her eyes lost some of their agony. I pressed my advantage.

“And there is another thing you must remember – your condition. It makes many women peculiarly subject to realistic dreams, usually of an unpleasant character. Sometimes even to hallucinations.”

She whispered: “That is true. When little Mollie was coming I had the most dreadful dreams—”

She hesitated; I saw doubt again cloud her face.

“But the doll – the doll is gone!” she said.

I cursed to myself at that, caught unawares and with no ready answer. But McCann had one. He said, easily:

“Sure it’s gone, Mollie. I dropped it down the chute into the waste. After what you told me I thought you’d better not see it any more.”

She asked, sharply:

“Where did you find it? I looked for it.”

“Guess you weren’t in shape to do much looking,” he answered. “I found it down at the foot of the kid’s crib, all messed up in the covers. It was busted. Looked like the kid had been dancing on it in her sleep.”

She said hesitantly: “It might have slipped down. I don’t think I looked there—”

I said, severely, so she might not suspect collusion between McCann and myself:

“You ought not to have done that, McCann. If you had shown the doll to her, Mrs. Gilmore would have known at once that she had been dreaming and she would have been spared much pain.”

“Well, I ain’t a doctor.” His voice was sullen. “I done what I thought best.”

“Go down and see if you can find it,” I ordered, tartly. He glanced at me sharply. I nodded – and hoped he understood. In a few minutes he returned.

“They cleaned out the waste only fifteen minutes ago,” he reported, lugubriously. “The doll went with it. I found this, though.”

He held up a little strap from which dangled a half-dozen miniature books. He asked:

“Was them what you dreamed the doll dropped on the dressing table, Mollie?”

She stared, and shrank away.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Please put it away, Dan. I don’t want to see it.”

He looked at me, triumphantly.

“I guess maybe I was right at that when I threw the doll away, Doc.”

I said: “At any rate, now that Mrs. Gilmore is satisfied it was all a dream, there’s no harm done.”

“And now,” I took her cold hands in mine. “I’m going to prescribe for you. I don’t want you to stay in this place a moment longer than you can help. I want you to pack a bag with whatever you and little Mollie may need for a week or so, and leave at once. I am thinking of your condition – and a little life that is on its way. I will attend to all the necessary formalities. You can instruct McCann as to the other details. But I want you to go. Will you do this?”

To my relief, she assented readily. There was a somewhat harrowing moment when she and the child bade farewell to the body. But before many minutes she was on her way with McCann to relations. The child had wanted to take “the boy and girl dolls.” I had refused to allow this, even at the risk of again arousing the mother’s suspicions. I wanted nothing of Madame Mandilip to accompany them to their refuge. McCann supported me, and the dolls were left behind.

I called an undertaker whom I knew. I made a last examination of the body. The minute puncture would not be noticed, I was sure. There was no danger of an autopsy, since my certification of the cause of death would not be questioned. When the undertaker arrived I explained the absence of the wife – imminent maternity and departure at my order. I set down the cause of death as thrombosis – rather grimly as I recalled the similar diagnosis of the banker’s physician, and what I had thought of it.

After the body had been taken away, and as I sat waiting for McCann to return, I tried to orient myself to this phantasmagoria through which, it seemed to me, I had been moving for endless time. I tried to divest my mind of all prejudice, all preconceived ideas of what could and could not be. I began by conceding that this Madame Mandilip might possess some wisdom of which modern science is ignorant. I refused to call it witchcraft or sorcery. The words mean nothing, since they have been applied through the ages to entirely natural phenomena whose causes were not understood by the laity. Not so long ago, for example, the lighting of a match was “witchcraft” to many savage tribes.

No, Madame Mandilip was no “witch,” as Ricori thought her. She was mistress of some unknown science – that was all.

And being a science, it must be governed by fixed laws – unknown though those laws might be to me. If the doll-maker’s activities defied cause and effect, as I conceived them, still they must conform to laws of cause and effect of their own. There was nothing supernatural about them – it was only that, like the savages, I did not know what made the match burn. Something of these laws, something of the woman’s technique – using the word as signifying the details, collectively considered, of mechanical performance in any art – I thought I perceived. The knotted cord, “the witch’s ladder,” apparently was an essential in the animation of the dolls. One had been slipped into Ricori’s pocket before the first attack upon him. I had found another beside his bed after the disturbing occurrences of the night. I had gone to sleep holding one of the cords – and had tried to murder my patient! A third cord had accompanied the doll that had killed John Gilmore.

Clearly, then, the cord was a part of the formula for the direction of control of the dolls.

Against this was the fact that the intoxicated stroller could not have been carrying one of the “ladders” when attacked by the Peters doll.

It might be, however, that the cord had only to do with the initial activity of the puppets; that once activated, their action might continue for an indefinite period.

There was evidence of a fixed formula in the making of the dolls. First, it seemed, the prospective victim’s free consent to serve as model must be obtained; second, a wound which gave the opportunity to apply the salve which caused the unknown death; third, the doll must be a faithful replica of the victim. That the agency of death was the same in each case was proven by the similar symptoms.

But did those deaths actually have anything to do with the motility of the dolls? Were they actually a necessary part of the operation?

The doll-maker might believe so; indeed, undoubtedly did believe so.

I did not.

That the doll which had stabbed Ricori had been made in the semblance of Peters; that the “nurse doll” which the guards had seen poised on my window-ledge might have been the one for which Walters had posed; that the doll which had thrust the pin into Gilmore’s brain was, perhaps, the replica of little Anita, the eleven-year-old schoolgirl – all this I admitted.

But that anything of Peters, anything of Walters, anything of Anita had animated these dolls… that dying, something of their vitality, their minds, their “souls” had been drawn from them, had been transmuted into an essence of evil, and imprisoned in these wire-skeletoned puppets… against this all my reason revolted. I could not force my mind to accept even the possibility.

My analysis was interrupted by the return of McCann.

He said, laconically: “Well, we put it over.”

I asked. “McCann – you weren’t by any chance telling the truth when you said you found the doll?”

“No, Doc. The doll was gone all right.”

“But where did you get the little books?”

“Just where Mollie said the doll tossed ’em – on her dressing table. I snaked ’em after she’d told me her story. She hadn’t noticed ’em. I had a hunch. It was a good one, wasn’t it?”

“You had me wondering,” I replied. “I don’t know what we could have said if she had asked for the knotted cord.”

“The cord didn’t seem to make much of a dent on her—” He hesitated. “But I think it means a hell of a lot, Doc. I think if I hadn’t took her out, and John hadn’t happened home, and Mollie had opened the box instead of him – I think it’s Mollie he’d have found lying dead beside him.”

“You mean—”

“I mean the dolls go for whichever gets the cords,” he said somberly.

Well, it was much the same thought I had in my own mind.

I asked: “But why should anybody want to kill Mollie?”

“Maybe somebody thinks she knows too much. And that brings me to what I’ve been wanting to tell you. The Mandilip hag knows she’s being watched!”

“Well, her watchers are better than ours.” I echoed Ricori; and I told McCann then of the second attack in the night; and why I had sought him.

“An’ that,” he said when I had ended, “Proves the Mandilip hag knows who’s who behind the watch on her. She tried to wipe out both the boss and Mollie. She’s on to us, Doc.”

“The dolls are accompanied,” I said. “The musical note is a summons. They do not disappear into thin air. They answer the note and make their way… somehow to whoever sounds the note. The dolls must be taken from the shop. Therefore one of the two women must take them. How did they evade your watchers?”

“I don’t know.” The lean face was worried. “The fish-white gal does it. Let me tell you what I found out, Doc. After I left you last night I go down to see what the boys have to say. I hear plenty. They say about four o’clock the gal goes in the back an’ the old woman takes a chair in the store. They don’t think nothing of that. But about seven who do they see walking down the street and into the doll joint but the gal. They give the boys in the back hell. But they ain’t seen her go, an’ they pass the buck to the boys in front.

“Then about eleven o’clock one of the relief lads comes in with worse news. He says he’s down at the foot of Broadway when a coupe turns the corner an’ driving it is the gal. He can’t be mistaken because he’s seen her in the doll joint. She goes up Broadway at a clip. He sees there ain’t nobody trailing her, an’ he looks around for a taxi. Course there’s nothing in sight – not even a parked car he can lift. So he comes down to the gang to ask what the hell they mean by it. An’ again nobody’s seen the gal go.”

“I take a couple of the boys an’ we start out to comb the neighborhood to find out where she stables the coupe. We don’t have no luck at all until about four o’clock when one of the tails – one of the lads who’s been looking – meets up with me. He says that about three he sees the gal – at least he thinks it’s the gal – walking along the street around the corner from the joint. She’s got a coupla big suitcases but they don’t seem to trouble her none. She’s walking quick. But away from the doll joint. He eases over to get a better look, when all of a sudden she ain’t there. He sniffs around the place he’s seen her. There ain’t hide nor hair of her. It’s pretty dark, an’ he tries the doors an’ the areaways, but the doors are locked an’ there ain’t nobody in the areaways. So he gives it up an’ hunts me.

“I look over the place. It’s about a third down the block around the corner from the doll joint. The doll joint is eight numbers from the corner. They’re mostly shops an’ I guess storage up above. Not many people living there. The houses all old ones. Still, I don’t see how the gal can get to the doll joint. I think maybe the tail’s mistaken. He’s seen somebody else, or just thinks he’s seen somebody. But we scout close around, an’ after a while we see a place that looks like it might stable a car. It don’t take us long to open the doors. An’ sure enough, there’s a coupe with its engine still hot. It ain’t been in long. Also it’s the same kind of coupe the lad who’s seen the gal says she was driving.

“I lock the place up again, an’ go back to the boys. I watch with ’em the rest of the night. Not a light in the doll joint. But nigh eight o’clock, the gal shows up inside the shop and opens up!”

“Still,” I said at this point, “you have no real evidence she had been out. The girl your man thought he saw might not have been she at all.”

He looked at me pityingly.

“She got out in the afternoon without ’em seeing her, didn’t she? What’s to keep her from doing the same thing at night? The lad saw her driving a coupe, didn’t he? An’ we find a coupe like it close where the wench dropped out of sight.”

I sat thinking. There was no reason to disbelieve McCann. And there was a sinister coincidence in the hours the girl had been seen. I said, half-aloud:

“The time she was out in the afternoon coincides with the time the doll was left at the Gilmores’. The time she was out at night coincides with the time of the attack upon Ricori, and the death of John Gilmore.”

“You hit it plumb in the eye!” said McCann. “She goes an’ leaves the doll at Mollie’s, an’ comes back. She goes an’ sets the dolls on the boss. She waits for ’em to pop out. Then she goes an’ collects the one she’s left at Mollie’s. Then she beats it back home. They’re in the suitcases she’s carrying.”

I could not hold back the irritation of helpless mystification that swept me.

“And I suppose you think she got out of the house by riding a broomstick up the chimney,” I said, sarcastically.

“No,” he answered, seriously. “No, I don’t, Doc. But them houses are old, and I think maybe there’s a rat hole of a passage or something she gets through. Anyway, the hands are watching the street an’ the coupe stable now, an’ she can’t pull that again.”

He added, morosely:

“At that, I ain’t saying she couldn’t bridle a broomstick if she had to.”

I said, abruptly: “McCann, I’m going down to talk to this Madame Mandilip. I want you to come with me.”

He said: “I’ll be right beside you, Doc. With my fingers on my guns.”

I said: “No, I’m going to see her alone. But I want you to keep close watch outside.”

He did not like that; argued; at last reluctantly assented.

I called up my office. I talked to Braile and learned that Ricori was recovering with astonishing rapidity. I asked Braile to look after things the balance of the day, inventing a consultation to account for the request. I had myself switched to Ricori’s room. I had the nurse tell him that McCann was with me, that we were making an investigation along a certain line, the results of which I would inform him on my return, and that, unless Ricori objected, I wanted McCann to stay with me the balance of the afternoon.

Ricori sent back word that McCann should follow my orders as though they were his own. He wanted to speak to me, but that I did not want. Pleading urgent haste, I rang off.

I ate an excellent and hearty lunch. I felt that it would help me hold tighter to the realities – or what I thought were the realities – when I met this apparent mistress of illusions. McCann was oddly silent and preoccupied.

The clock was striking three when I set off to meet Madame Mandilip.

— XIII —

MADAME MANDILIP

I stood at the window of the doll-maker’s shop, mastering a stubborn revulsion against entering. I knew McCann was on guard. I knew that Ricori’s men were watching from the houses opposite, that others moved among the passersby. Despite the roaring clatter of the elevated trains, the bustle of traffic along the Battery, the outwardly normal life of the street, the doll-maker’s shop was a beleaguered fortress. I stood, shivering on its threshold, as though at the door of an unknown world.

There were only a few dolls displayed in the window, but they were unusual enough to catch the eyes of a child or a grown-up. Not so beautiful as that which had been given Walters, nor those two I had seen at the Gilmores’, but admirable lures, nevertheless. The light inside the shop was subdued. I could see a slender girl moving at a counter. The niece of Madame Mandilip, no doubt. Certainly the size of the shop did not promise any such noble chamber behind it as Walters had painted in her diary. Still, the houses were old, and the back might extend beyond the limits of the shop itself.

Abruptly and impatiently I ceased to temporize.

I opened the door and walked in.

The girl turned as I entered. She watched me as I came toward the counter. She did not speak. I studied her, swiftly. An hysterical type, obviously; one of the most perfect I had ever seen. I took note of the prominent pale blue eyes with their vague gaze and distended pupils; the long and slender neck and slightly rounded features; the pallor and the long thin fingers. Her hands were clasped, and I could see that these were unusually flexible – thus carrying out to the last jot the Laignel-Lavastine syndrome of the hysteric. In another time and other circumstances she would have been a priestess, voicing oracles, or a saint.

Fear was her handmaiden. There could be no doubt of that. And yet I was sure it was not of me she was frightened. Rather was it some deep and alien fear which lay coiled at the roots of her being, sapping her vitality – a spiritual fear. I looked at her hair. It was a silvery ash… the color… the color of the hair that formed the knotted cords!

As she saw me staring at her hair, the vagueness in her pale eyes diminished, was replaced by alertness. For the first time she seemed to be aware of me. I said, with the utmost casualness:

“I was attracted by the dolls in your window. I have a little granddaughter who would like one I think.”

“The dolls are for sale. If there is one you fancy, you may buy it. At its price.”

Her voice was low-pitched, almost whispering, indifferent. But I thought the intentness in her eyes sharpened.

“I suppose,” I answered, feigning something of irritation, “that is what any chance customer may do. But it happens that this child is a favorite of mine and for her I want the best. Would it be too much trouble to show me what other, and perhaps better, dolls you may have?”

Her eyes wavered for a moment. I had the thought that she was listening to some sound I could not hear. Abruptly her manner lost its indifference, became gracious. And at that exact moment I felt other eyes upon me, studying me, searching me. So strong was the impression that, involuntarily, I turned and peered about the shop. There was no one except the girl and me. A door was at the counter’s end, but it was lightly closed. I shot a glance at the window to see whether McCann was staring in. No one was there.

Then, like the clicking of a camera shutter, the unseen gaze was gone. I turned back to the girl. She had spread a half-dozen boxes on the counter and was opening them. She looked up at me, candidly, almost sweetly. She said:

“Why, of course you may see all that we have. I am sorry if you thought me indifferent to your desires. My aunt, who makes the dolls, loves children. She would not willingly allow one who also loves them to go from here disappointed.”

It was a curious little speech, oddly stilted, enunciated half as though she were reciting from dictation. Yet it was not that which aroused my interest so much as the subtle change that had taken place in the girl herself. Her voice was no longer languid. It held a vital vibrancy. Nor was she the lifeless, listless person she had been. She was animated, even a touch of vivaciousness about her; color had crept into her face and all vagueness gone from her eyes; in them was a sparkle, faintly mocking, more than faintly malicious.

I examined the dolls.

“They are lovely,” I said at last. “But are these the best you have? Frankly, this is rather an especial occasion – my granddaughter’s seventh birthday. The price doesn’t really matter as long, of course, as it is in reason—”

I heard her sigh. I looked at her. The pale eyes held their olden fear-touched stare, all sparkling mockery gone. The color had fled her face. And again, abruptly, I felt the unseen gaze upon me, more powerfully than before. And again I felt it shuttered off.

The door beside the counter opened.

Prepared though I had been for the extraordinary by Walters’ description of the doll-maker, her appearance gave me a distinct shock. Her height, her massiveness, were amplified by the proximity of the dolls and the slender figure of the girl. It was a giantess who regarded me from the doorway – a giantess whose heavy face with its broad, high cheek bones, mustached upper lip and thick mouth produced a suggestion of masculinity grotesquely in contrast with the immense bosom.

I looked into her eyes and forgot all grotesqueness of face and figure. The eyes were enormous, a luminous black, clear, disconcertingly alive. As though they were twin spirits of life, and independent of the body. And from them poured a flood of vitality that sent along my nerves a warm tingle in which there was nothing sinister – or was not then.

With difficulty I forced my own eyes from hers. I looked for her hands. She was swathed all in black, and her hands were hidden in the folds of her ample dress. My gaze went back to her eyes, and within them was a sparkle of the mocking contempt I had seen in those of the girl. She spoke, and I knew that the vital vibrancy I had heard in the girl’s voice had been an echo of those sonorously sweet, deep tones.

“What my niece has shown does not please you?”

I gathered my wits. I said: “They are all beautiful, Madame – Madame—”

“Mandilip,” she said, serenely. “Madame Mandilip. You do not know the name, eh?”

“It is my ill fortune,” I answered, ambiguously. “I have a grandchild – a little girl. I want something peculiarly fine for her seventh birthday. All that I have been shown are beautiful – but I was wondering whether there was not something—”

“Something – peculiarly—” her voice lingered on the word – “more beautiful. Well, perhaps there is. But when I favor customers peculiarly—” I now was sure she emphasized the word – “I must know with whom I am dealing. You think me a strange shopkeeper, do you not?”

She laughed, and I marveled at the freshness, the youthfulness, the curious tingling sweetness of that laughter.

It was by a distinct effort that I brought myself back to reality, put myself again on guard. I drew a card from my case. I did not wish her to recognize me, as she would have had I given her my own card. Nor did I desire to direct her attention to anyone she could harm. I had, therefore, prepared myself by carrying the card of a doctor friend long dead. She glanced at it.

“Ah,” she said. “You are a professional – a physician. Well, now that we know each other, come with me and I will show you of my best.”

She led me through the door and into a wide, dim corridor. She touched my arm and again I felt that strange, vital tingling. She paused at another door, and faced me.

“It is here,” she said, “that I keep my best. My – peculiarly best!”

Once more she laughed, then flung the door open.

I crossed the threshold and paused, looking about the room with swift disquietude. For here was no spacious chamber of enchantment such as Walters had described. True enough, it was somewhat larger than one would have expected. But where were the exquisite old panelings, the ancient tapestries, that magic mirror which was like a great “half-globe of purest water,” and all those other things that had made it seem to her a Paradise?

The light came through the half-drawn curtains of a window opening upon a small, enclosed and barren yard. The walls and ceiling were of plain, stained wood. One end was entirely taken up by small, built-in cabinets with wooden doors. There was a mirror on the wall, and it was round – but there any similarity to Walters’ description ended.

There was a fireplace, the kind one can find in any ordinary old New York house. On the walls were a few prints. The great table, the “baronial board,” was an entirely commonplace one, littered with dolls’ clothing in various stages of completion.

My disquietude grew. If Walters had been romancing about this room, then what else in her diary was invention – or, at least, as I had surmised when I had read it, the product of a too active imagination?

Yet – she had not been romancing about the doll-maker’s eyes, nor her voice; and she had not exaggerated the doll-maker’s appearance nor the peculiarities of the niece. The woman spoke, recalling me to myself, breaking my thoughts.

“My room interests you?”

She spoke softly, and with, I thought, a certain secret amusement.

I said: “Any room where any true artist creates is of interest. And you are a true artist, Madame Mandilip.”

“Now, how do you know that?” she mused.

It had been a slip. I said, quickly:

“I am a lover of art. I have seen a few of your dolls. It does not take a gallery of his pictures to make one realize that Raphael, for example, was a master. One picture is enough.”

She smiled, in the friendliest fashion. She closed the door behind me, and pointed to a chair beside the table.

“You will not mind waiting a few minutes before I show you my dolls? There is a dress I must finish. It is promised, and soon the little one to whom I have promised it will come. It will not take me long.”

“Why, no,” I answered, and dropped into the chair.

She said, softly: “It is quiet here. And you seem weary. You have been working hard, eh? And you are weary.”

I sank back into the chair. Suddenly I realized how weary I really was. For a moment my guard relaxed and I closed my eyes. I opened them to find that the doll-maker had taken her seat at the table.

And now I saw her hands. They were long and delicate and white and I knew that they were the most beautiful I had ever beheld. Just as her eyes seemed to have life of their own, so did those hands seem living things, having a being independent of the body to which they belonged. She rested them on the table. She spoke again, caressingly.

“It is well to come now and then to a quiet place. To a place where peace is. One grows so weary – so weary. So tired – so very tired.”

She picked a little dress from the table and began to sew. Long white fingers plied the needle while the other hand turned and moved the small garment. How wonderful was the motion of those long white hands… like a rhythm… like a song… restful!

She said, in low sweet tones:

“Ah, yes – here nothing of the outer world comes. All is peace – and rest – rest—”

I drew my eyes reluctantly from the slow dance of those hands, the weaving of those long and delicate fingers which moved so rhythmically. So restfully. The doll-maker’s eyes were on me, soft and gentle… full of that peace of which she had been telling.

It would do no harm to relax a little, gain strength for the struggle which must come. And I was tired. I had not realized how tired! My gaze went back to her hands. Strange hands – no more belonging to that huge body than did the eyes and voice.

Perhaps they did not! Perhaps that gross body was but a cloak, a covering, of the real body to which eyes and hands and voice belonged. I thought over that, watching the slow rhythms of the hands. What could the body be like to which they belonged? As beautiful as hands and eyes and voice?

She was humming some strange air. It was a slumberous, lulling melody. It crept along my tired nerves, into my weary mind – distilling sleep… sleep. As the hands were weaving sleep. As the eyes were pouring sleep upon me—

Sleep!

Something within me was raging, furiously. Bidding me rouse myself! Shake off this lethargy! By the tearing effort that brought me gasping to the surface of consciousness, I knew that I must have passed far along the path of that strange sleep. And for an instant, on the threshold of complete awakening, I saw the room as Walters had seen it.

Vast, filled with mellow light, the ancient tapestries, the panelings, the carved screens behind which hidden shapes lurked laughing – laughing at me. Upon the wall the mirror – and it was like a great half-globe of purest water within which the images of the carvings round its frame swayed like the reflections of verdure round a clear woodland pool!

The immense chamber seemed to waver – and it was gone.

I stood beside an overturned chair in that room to which the doll-maker had led me. And the doll-maker was beside me, close. She was regarding me with a curious puzzlement and, I thought, a shadow of chagrin. It flashed upon me that she was like one who had been unexpectedly interrupted—

Interrupted! When had she left her chair? How long had I slept? What had she done to me while I had been sleeping? What had that terrific effort of will by which I had broken from her web prevented her from completing?

I tried to speak – and could not. I stood tongue-tied, furious, humiliated. I realized that I had been trapped like the veriest tyro – I who should have been all alert, suspicious of every move. Trapped by voice and eyes and weaving hands by the reiterated suggestion that I was weary so weary… that here was peace… and sleep… sleep… What had she done to me while I slept? Why could I not move? It was as though all my energy had been dissipated in that one tremendous thrust out of her web of sleep! I stood motionless, silent, spent. Not a muscle moved at command of my will. The enfeebled hands of my will reached out to them – and fell.

The doll-maker laughed. She walked to the cabinets on the far wall. My eyes followed her, helplessly. There was no slightest loosening of the paralysis that gripped me. She pressed a spring, and the door of a cabinet slipped down.

Within the cabinet was a child-doll. A little girl, sweet-faced and smiling. I looked at it and felt a numbness at my heart. In its small, clasped hands was one of the dagger-pins, and I knew that this was the doll which had stirred in the arms of the Gilmore baby… had climbed from the baby’s crib… had danced to the bed and thrust…

“This is one of my peculiarly best!” The doll-maker’s eyes were on me and filled with cruel mockery. “A good doll! A bit careless at times, perhaps. Forgetting to bring back her school-books when she goes visiting. But so obedient! Would you like her for your granddaughter?”

Again she laughed – youthful, tingling, evil laughter. And suddenly I knew Ricori had been right and that this woman must be killed. I summoned all my will to leap upon her. I could not move a finger.

The long white hands groped over the next cabinet and touched its hidden spring. The numbness at my heart became the pressure of a hand of ice. Staring out at me from that cabinet was Walters! And she was crucified!

So perfect, so – alive was the doll that it was like seeing the girl herself through a diminishing glass. I could not think of it as a doll, but as the girl. She was dressed in her nurse’s uniform. She had no cap, and her black hair hung disheveled about her face. Her arms were outstretched, and through each palm a small nail had been thrust, pinning the hands to the back of the cabinet. The feet were bare, resting one on the other, and through the insteps had been thrust another nail. Completing the dreadful, the blasphemous, suggestion, above her head was a small placard. I read it:

“The Burnt Martyr.”

The doll-maker murmured in a voice like honey garnered from flowers in hell:

“This doll has not behaved well. She has been disobedient. I punish my dolls when they do not behave well. But I see that you are distressed. Well, she has been punished enough – for the moment.”

The long white hands crept into the cabinet, drew out the nails from hands and feet. She set the doll upright, leaning against the back. She turned to me.

“You would like her for your granddaughter, perhaps? Alas! She is not for sale. She has lessons to learn before she goes again from me.”

Her voice changed, lost its diabolic sweetness, became charged with menace.

“Now listen to me – Dr. Lowell! What – you did not think I knew you? I knew you from the first. You too need a lesson!” Her eyes blazed upon me. “You shall have your lesson – you fool! You who pretend to heal the mind – and know nothing, nothing I say, of what the mind is. You, who conceive the mind as but a part of a machine of flesh and blood, nerve and bone and know nothing of what it houses. You – who admit existence of nothing unless you can measure it in your test tubes or see it under your microscope. You – who define life as a chemical ferment, and consciousness as the product of cells. You fool! Yet you and this savage, Ricori, have dared to try to hamper me, to interfere with me, to hem me round with spies! Dared to threaten me – Me – possessor of the ancient wisdom beside which your science is as crackling of thorns under an empty pot! You fools! I know who are the dwellers in the mind – and the powers that manifest themselves through it – and those who dwell beyond it! They come at my call. And you think to pit your paltry knowledge against mine? You fool! Have you understood me? Speak!”

She pointed a finger at me. I felt my throat relax, knew I could speak once more.

“You hell bag!” I croaked. “You damned murderess! You’ll go to the electric chair before I’m through with you!”

She came toward me, laughing.

“You would give me to the law? But who would believe you? None! The ignorance that your science has fostered is my shield. The darkness of your unbelief is my impregnable fortress. Go play with your machines, fool! Play with your machines! But meddle with me no more!”

Her voice grew quiet, deadly.

“Now this I tell you. If you would live, if you would have live those who are dear to you – take your spies away. Ricori you cannot save. He is mine. But you – think never of me again. Pry no more into my affairs. I do not fear your spies – but they offend me. Take them away. At once. If by nightfall they are still on watch—”

She caught me by the shoulder with a grip that bruised. She pushed me toward the door.

“Go!”

I fought to muster my will, to raise my arms. Could I have done so I would have struck her down as I would a ravening beast. I could not move them. Like an automaton I walked across the room to the door. The doll-maker opened it.

There was an odd rustling noise from the cabinets. Stiffly, I turned my head.

The doll of Walters had fallen forward. It lay half over the edge. Its arms swung, as though imploring me to take it away. I could see in its palms the marks of the crucifying nails. Its eyes were fixed on mine—

“Go!” said the doll-maker. “And remember!”

With the same stiff motion I walked through the corridor and into the shop. The girl watched me, with vague, fear-filled eyes. As though a hand were behind me, pressing me inexorably on, I passed through the shop and out of its door into the street.

I seemed to hear, did hear, the mocking evil-sweet laughter of the doll-maker!

— XIV —

THE DOLL-MAKER STRIKES

The moment I was out in the street, volition, power of movement, returned to me. In an abrupt rush of rage, I turned to re-enter the shop. A foot from it, I was brought up as against an invisible wall. I could not advance a step, could not even raise my hands to touch the door. It was as though at that point my will refused to function, or rather that my legs and arms refused to obey my will. I realized what it was – post-hypnotic suggestion of an extraordinary kind, part of the same phenomena which had held me motionless before the doll-maker, and had sent me like a robot out of her lair. I saw McCann coming toward me, and for an instant had the mad idea of ordering him to enter and end Madame Mandilip with a bullet. Common sense swiftly told me that we could give no rational reason for such killing, and that we would probably expiate it within the same apparatus of execution with which I had threatened her.

McCann said: “I was getting worried, Doc. Just about to break in on you.”

I said: “Come on, McCann. I want to get home as quickly as possible.”

He looked at my face, and whistled.

“You look like you been through a battle, Doc.”

I answered: “I have. And the honors are all with Madame Mandilip – so far.”

“You came out quiet enough. Not like the boss, with the hag spitting hell in your face. What happened?”

“I’ll tell you later. Just let me be quiet for awhile. I want to think.”

What I actually wanted was to get back my self-possession. My mind seemed half-blind, groping for the tangible. It was as if it had been enmeshed in cobwebs of a peculiarly unpleasant character, and although I had torn loose, fragments of the web were still clinging to it. We got into the car and rolled on for some minutes in silence. Then McCann’s curiosity got the better of him.

“Anyway,” he asked, “what did you think of her?”

By this time I had come to a determination. Never had I felt anything to approach the loathing, the cold hatred, the implacable urge to kill, which this woman had aroused in me. It was not that my pride had suffered, although that was sore enough. No, it was the conviction that in the room behind the doll-shop dwelt blackest evil. Evil as inhuman and alien as though the doll-maker had in truth come straight from that hell in which Ricori believed. There could be no compromise with that evil. Nor with the woman in whom it was centered.

I said: “McCann, in all the world there is nothing so evil as that woman. Do not let the girl slip through your fingers again. Do you think she knew last night that she had been seen?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Increase the guards in front and back of the place at once. Do it openly, so that the women cannot help noticing it. They will think, unless the girl is aware that she was observed, that we are still in ignorance of the other exit. They will think we believe she managed to slip out unseen either at front or back. Have a car in readiness at each end of the street where she keeps the coupe. Be careful not to arouse their suspicions. If the girl appears, follow her—” I hesitated.

McCann asked: “And then what?”

“I want her taken – abducted, kidnapped – whatever you choose to call it. It must be done with the utmost quietness. I leave that to you. You know how such things are done better than I. Do it quickly and do it quietly. But not too near the doll-shop – as far away from it as you can. Gag the girl, tie her up if necessary. But get her. Then search the car thoroughly. Bring the girl to me at my house – with whatever you find. Do you understand?”

He said: “If she shows, we’ll get her. You going to put her through the third degree?”

“That – and something more. I want to see what the doll-maker will do. It may goad her into some action which will enable us to lay hands on her legitimately. Bring her within reach of the law. She may or may not have other and invisible servants, but my intention is to deprive her of the visible one. It may make the others visible. At the least, it will cripple her.”

He looked at me, curiously; “She musta hit you pretty hard, Doc.”

“She did,” I answered curtly. He hesitated.

“You going to tell the boss about this?” he asked at last.

“I may or I may not – tonight. It depends upon his condition. Why?”

“Well, if we’re going to pull off anything like a kidnapping, I think he ought to know.”

I said, sharply: “McCann, I told you Ricori’s message was that you were to obey orders from me as though they were from him. I have given you your orders. I accept all the responsibility.”

“Okay,” he answered, but I could see that his doubt still lingered.

Now, assuming Ricori had sufficiently recovered, there was no real reason why I should not tell him what had happened during my encounter with Madame Mandilip. It was different with Braile. More than suspecting, as I did, the attachment between him and Walters, I could not tell him of the crucified doll – and even now I thought of it not as a doll crucified, but as Walters crucified. If I told him, I knew well that there would be no holding him back from instant attack upon the doll-maker. I did not want that.

But I was aware of a most stubborn reluctance to tell Ricori the details of my visit. The same held good for Braile in other matters besides the Walters doll. And why did I feel the same way about McCann? I set it down to wounded vanity.

We stopped in front of my house. It was then close to six. Before getting out of the car I repeated my instructions. McCann nodded.

“Okay, Doc. If she comes out, we get her.”

I went into the house, and found a note from Braile saying that he would not be in to see me until after dinner. I was glad of that. I dreaded the ordeal of his questions. I learned that Ricori was asleep, and that he had been regaining strength with astonishing rapidity. I instructed the nurse to tell him, should he awaken, that I would visit him after I had dined. I lay down, endeavoring to snatch a little sleep before eating.

I could not sleep – constantly the face of the doll-maker came before me whenever I began to relax into a doze, throwing me into intense wakefulness.

At seven I arose and ate a full and excellent dinner, deliberately drinking at least twice the amount of wine I ordinarily permit myself, finishing with strong coffee. When I arose from the table I felt distinctly better, mentally alert and master of myself once more – or so I believed. I had decided to apprise Ricori of my instructions to McCann concerning the abduction of the girl. I realized that this was certain to bring down upon me a minute catechism concerning my visit to the doll-shop, but I had formulated the story I intended to tell—

It was with a distinct shock that I realized that this story was all that I could tell! Realized that I could not communicate to the others the portions I had deleted, even if I desired. And that this was by command of the doll-maker – post-hypnotic suggestion which was a part of those other inhibitions she had laid upon my will; those same inhibitions which had held me powerless before her, had marched me out of her shop like a robot and thrust me back from her door, when I would have re-entered!

During that brief tranced sleep she had said to me: “This and this you must not tell. This and this you may.”

I could not speak of the child-doll with the angelic face and the dagger-pin which had pricked the bubble of Gilmore’s life. I could not speak of the Walters doll and its crucifixion. I could not speak of the doll-maker’s tacit admission that she had been responsible for the deaths that had first led us to her.

However, this realization made me feel even better. Here at last was something understandable – the tangibility for which I had been groping; something that had in it nothing of sorcery – nor of dark power; something entirely in the realm of my own science. I had done the same thing to patients, many times, bringing their minds back to normality by these same post-hypnotic suggestions.

Also, there was a way by which I could wash my own mind clean of the doll-maker’s suggestions, if I chose. Should I do this? Stubbornly, I decided I would not. It would be an admission that I was afraid of Madame Mandilip. I hated her, yes – but I did not fear her. Knowing now her technique, it would be folly not to observe its results with myself as the laboratory experiment. I told myself that I had run the gamut of those suggestions – that whatever else it had been her intention to implant within my mind had been held back by my unexpected awakening—

Ah, but the doll-maker had spoken truth when she called me fool!

When Braile appeared, I was able to meet him calmly. Hardly had I greeted him when Ricori’s nurse called up to say her patient was wide-awake and anxious to see me.

I said to Braile: “This is fortunate. Come along. It will save me from telling the same story twice over.”

He asked: “What story?”

“My interview with Madame Mandilip.”

He said, incredulously: “You’ve seen her!”

“I spent the afternoon with her. She is most interesting. Come and hear about it.”

I led the way rapidly to the Annex, deaf to his questions. Ricori was sitting up. I made a brief examination. Although still somewhat weak, he could be discharged as a patient. I congratulated him on what was truly a remarkable recovery. I whispered to him:

“I’ve seen your witch and talked to her. I have much to tell you. Bid your guards take their stations outside the door. I will dismiss the nurse for a time.”

When guards and nurse were gone, I launched into an account of the day’s happenings, beginning with my summons to the Gilmore apartment by McCann. Ricori listened, face grim, as I repeated Mollie’s story. He said:

“Her brother and now her husband! Poor, poor Mollie! But she shall be avenged! Si! – greatly so! Yes!”

I gave my grossly incomplete version of my encounter with Madame Mandilip. I told Ricori what I had bidden McCann to do. I said:

“And so tonight, at least, we can sleep in peace. For if the girl comes out with the dolls, McCann gets her. If she does not, then nothing can happen. I am quite certain that without her the doll-maker cannot strike. I hope you approve, Ricori.”

He studied me for a moment, intently.

“I do approve, Dr. Lowell. Most greatly do I approve. You have done as I would have done. But – I do not think you have told us all that happened between you and the witch.”

“Nor do I,” said Braile.

I arose.

“At any rate, I’ve told you the essentials. And I’m dead tired. I’m going to take a bath and go to bed. It’s now nine-thirty. If the girl does come out it won’t be before eleven, probably later. I’m going to sleep until McCann fetches her. If he doesn’t, I’m going to sleep all night. That’s final. Save your questions for the morning.”

Ricori’s searching gaze had never left me. He said:

“Why not sleep here? Would it not be safer for you?”

I succumbed to a wave of intense irritation. My pride had been hurt enough by my behavior with the doll-maker and the manner she had outwitted me. And the suggestion that I hide from her behind the guns of his men opened the wound afresh.

“I am no child,” I answered angrily. “I am quite able to take care of myself. I do not have to live behind a screen of gunmen—”

I stopped, sorry that I had said that. But Ricori betrayed no anger. He nodded, and dropped back on his pillows.

“You have told me what I wanted to know. You fared very badly with the witch, Dr. Lowell. And you have not told us all the essentials.”

I said: “I am sorry, Ricori!”

“Don’t be.” For the first time he smiled. “I understand, perfectly. I also am somewhat of a psychologist. But I say this to you – it matters little whether McCann does or does not bring the girl to us tonight. Tomorrow the witch dies – and the girl with her.”

I made no answer. I recalled the nurse, and re-stationed the guards within the room. Whatever confidence I might feel, I was taking no chances with Ricori’s safety. I had not told him of the doll-maker’s direct threat against him, but I had not forgotten it.

Braile accompanied me to my study. He said, apologetically:

“I know you must be damned tired, Lowell, and I don’t want to pester you. But will you let me stay in your room with you while you are sleeping?”

I said with the same stubborn irritability:

“For God’s sake, Braile, didn’t you hear what I told Ricori? I’m much obliged and all of that, but it applies to you as well.”

He said quietly: “I am going to stay right here in the study, wide-awake, until McCann comes or dawn comes. If I hear any sounds in your room, I’m coming in. Whenever I want to take a look at you to see whether you are all right, I’m coming in. Don’t lock your door, because if you do I’ll break it down. Is that all quite clear?”

I grew angrier still. He said:

“I mean it.”

I said: “All right. Do as you damned please.”

I went into my bedroom, slamming the door behind me. But I did not lock it.

I was tired, there was no doubt about that. Even an hour’s sleep would be something. I decided not to bother with the bath, and began to undress. I was removing my shirt when I noticed a tiny pin upon its left side over my heart. I opened the shirt and looked at the under side. Fastened there was one of the knotted cords!

I took a step toward the door, mouth open to call Braile. Then I stopped short. I would not show it to Braile. That would mean endless questioning. And I wanted to sleep.

God! But I wanted to sleep!

Better to burn the cord. I searched for a match to touch fire to it – I heard Braile’s step at the door and thrust it hastily in my trousers’ pocket.

“What do you want?” I called.

“Just want to see you get into bed all right.”

He opened the door a trifle. What he wanted to discover, of course, was whether I had locked it. I said nothing, and went on undressing.

My bedroom is a large, high-ceilinged room on the second floor of my home. It is at the back of the house, adjoining my study. There are two windows which look out on the little garden. They are framed by the creeper. The room has a chandelier, a massive, old-fashioned thing covered with prisms – lusters I think they are called, long pendants of cut-glass in six circles from which rise the candle-holders. It is a small replica of one of the lovely Colonial chandeliers in Independence Hall at Philadelphia, and when I bought the house I would not allow it to be taken down, nor even be wired for electric bulbs. My bed is at the end of the room, and when I turn upon my left side I can see the windows outlined by faint reflections. The same reflections are caught by the prisms so that the chandelier becomes a nebulously glimmering tiny cloud. It is restful, sleep-inducing. There is an ancient pear tree in the garden, the last survivor of an orchard which in spring, in New York’s halcyon days, lifted to the sun its flowered arms. The chandelier is just beyond the foot of the bed. The switch which controls my lights is at the head of my bed. At the side of the room is an old fireplace, its sides of carved marble and with a wide mantel at the top. To visualize fully what follows, it is necessary to keep this arrangement in mind.

By the time I had undressed, Braile, evidently assured of my docility, had closed the door and gone back into the study. I took the knotted cord, the witch’s ladder, and threw it contemptuously on the table. I suppose there was something of bravado in the action; perhaps, if I had not felt so sure of McCann, I would have pursued my original intention of burning it. I mixed myself a sedative, turned off the lights and lay down to sleep. The sedative took quick effect.

I sank deep and deeper into a sea of sleep deeper… and deeper…

I awoke.

I looked around me… how had I come to this strange place? I was standing within a shallow circular pit, grass lined. The rim of the pit came only to my knees. The pit was in the center of a circular, level meadow, perhaps a quarter of a mile in diameter. This, too, was covered with grass; strange grass, purple flowered. Around the grassy circle drooped unfamiliar trees… trees scaled with emeralds green and scarlet… trees with pendulous branches covered with fern-like leaves and threaded with slender vines that were like serpents. The trees circled the meadow, watchful, alert… watching me… waiting for me to move…

No, it was not the trees that were watching! There were things hidden among the trees, lurking… malignant things… evil things… and it was they who were watching me, waiting for me to move!

But how had I gotten here? I looked down at my legs, stretched my arms… I was clad in the blue pajamas in which I had gone to bed… gone to my bed in my New York house… in my house in New York… how had I come here? I did not seem to be dreaming…

Now I saw that three paths led out of the shallow pit. They passed over the edge, and stretched, each in a different direction, toward the woods. And suddenly I knew that I must take one of these paths, and that it was vitally important that I pick the right one… that only one could be traversed safely… that the other two would lead me into the power of those lurking things.

The pit began to contract. I felt its bottom lifting beneath my feet. The pit was thrusting me out! I leaped upon the path at my right, and began to walk slowly along it. Then involuntarily I began to run, faster and faster along it, toward the woods. As I drew nearer I saw that the path pierced the woods straight as an arrow flight, and that it was about three feet wide and bordered closely by the trees, and that it vanished in the dim green distance. Faster and faster I ran. Now I had entered the woods, and the unseen things were gathering among the trees that bordered the path, thronging the borders, rushing silently from all the wood. What those things were, what they would do to me if they caught me I did not know… I only knew that nothing that I could imagine of agony could equal what I would experience if they did catch me.

On and on I raced through the wood, each step a nightmare. I felt hands stretching out to clutch me… heard shrill whisperings… Sweating, trembling, I broke out of the wood and raced over a vast plain that stretched, treeless, to the distant horizon. The plain was trackless, pathless, and covered with brown and withered grass. It was like, it came to me, the blasted heath of Macbeth’s three witches. No matter… it was better than the haunted wood. I paused and looked back at the trees. I felt from them the gaze of myriads of the evil eyes.

I turned my back, and began to walk over the withered plain. I looked up at the sky. The sky was misty green. High up in it two cloudy orbs began to glow… black suns… no, they were not suns… they were eyes… The eyes of the doll-maker! They stared down at me from the misty green sky… Over the horizon of that strange world two gigantic hands began to lift… began to creep toward me… to catch me and hurl me back into the wood… white hands with long fingers… and each of the long white fingers a living thing. The hands of the doll-maker!

Closer came the eyes, and closer writhed the hands. From the sky came peal upon peal of laughter… The laughter of the doll-maker!

That laughter still ringing in my ears, I awakened – or seemed to awaken. I was in my room sitting bolt upright in my bed. I was dripping with sweat, and my heart was pumping with a pulse that shook my body. I could see the chandelier glimmering in the light from the windows like a small nebulous cloud. I could see the windows faintly outlined. It was very still…

There was a movement at one of the windows. I would get up from the bed and see what it was – I could not move!

A faint greenish glow began within the room. At first it was like the flickering phosphorescence one sees upon a decaying log. It waxed and waned, waxed and waned, but grew ever stronger. My room became plain. The chandelier gleamed like a decaying emerald—

There was a little face at the window! A doll’s face! My heart leaped, then curdled with despair. I thought: “McCann has failed! It is the end!”

The doll looked at me, grinning. Its face was smooth shaven, that of a man about forty. The nose was long, the mouth wide and thin-lipped. The eyes were close-set under bushy brows. They glittered, red as rubies.

The doll crept over the sill. It slid, headfirst, into the room. It stood for a moment on its head, legs waving. It somersaulted twice. It came to its feet, one little hand at its lips, red eyes upon mine – waiting. As though expecting applause! It was dressed in the tights and jacket of a circus acrobat. It bowed to me. Then with a flourish, it pointed to the window.

Another little face was peering there. It was austere, cold, the face of a man of sixty. It had small side whiskers. It stared at me with the expression I supposed a banker might wear when someone he hates applies to him for a loan – I found the thought oddly amusing. Then abruptly I ceased to feel amused.

A banker-doll! An acrobat-doll!

The dolls of two of those who had suffered the unknown death!

The banker-doll stepped with dignity down from the window. It was in full evening dress, swallowtails, stiff shirt – all perfect. It turned and with the same dignity raised a hand to the windowsill. Another doll stood there – the doll of a woman about the same age as the banker-doll, and garbed like it in correct evening dress.

The spinster!

Mincingly, the spinster-doll took the proffered hand. She jumped lightly to the floor.

Through the window came a fourth doll, all in spangled tights from neck to feet. It took a flying leap, landing beside the acrobat-doll. It looked up at me with grinning face, then bowed.

The four dolls began to march toward me, the acrobats leading, and behind them with slow and stately step, the spinster-doll and banker-doll-arm in arm.

Grotesque, fantastic, these they were – but not humorous, God – no! Or if there were anything of humor about them, it was that at which only devils laugh.

I thought, desperately: “Braile is just on the other side of the door! If I could only make some sound!”

The four dolls halted and seemed to consult. The acrobats pirouetted, and reached to their backs. They drew from the hidden sheaths their dagger-pins. In the hands of banker-doll and spinster-doll appeared similar weapons. They presented the points toward me, like swords.

The four resumed their march to my bed…

The red eyes of the second acrobat-doll – the trapeze performer, I knew him now to be – had rested on the chandelier. He paused, studying it. He pointed to it, thrust the dagger-pin back into its sheath, and bent his knees, hands cupped in front of them. The first doll nodded, then stood, plainly measuring the height of the chandelier from the floor and considering the best approach to it. The second doll pointed to the mantel, and the pair of them swarmed up its sides to the broad ledge. The elderly pair watched them, seemingly much interested. They did not sheath their dagger-pins.

The acrobat-doll bent, and the trapeze-doll put a little foot in its cupped hands. The first doll straightened, and the second flew across the gap between mantel and chandelier, caught one of the prismed circles, and swung. Immediately the other doll leaped outward, caught the chandelier and swung beside its spangled mate.

I saw the heavy old fixture tremble and sway. Down upon the floor came crashing a dozen of the prisms. In the dead stillness, it was like an explosion.

I heard Braile running to the door. He threw it open. He stood on the threshold. I could see him plainly in the green glow, but I knew that he could not see – that to him the room was in darkness. He cried:

“Lowell! Are you all right? Turn on the lights!”

I tried to call out. To warn him. Useless! He groped forward, around the foot of the bed, to the switch. I think that then he saw the dolls. He stopped short, directly beneath the chandelier, looking up.

And as he did so the doll above him swung by one hand, drew its dagger-pin from its sheath and dropped upon Braile’s shoulders, stabbing viciously at his throat!

Braile shrieked – once. The shriek changed into a dreadful bubbling sigh…

And then I saw the chandelier sway and lurch. It broke from its ancient fastenings. It fell with a crash that shook the house, down upon Braile and the doll-devil ripping at his throat.

Abruptly the green glow disappeared. There was a scurrying in the room like the running of great rats.

The paralysis dropped from me. I threw my hand round to the switch and turned on the lights; leaped from the bed.

Little figures were scrambling up and out of the window. There were four muffled reports like popguns. I saw Ricori at the door, on each side of him a guard with silenced automatic, shooting at the window.

I bent over Braile. He was quite dead. The falling chandelier had dropped upon his head, crushing the skull. But Braile had been dying before the chandelier had fallen… his throat ripped… the carotid artery severed.

The doll that had murdered him was gone!

— XV —

THE WITCH GIRL

I stood up. I said bitterly:

“You were right, Ricori – her servants are better than yours.”

He did not answer, looking down at Braile with pity-filled face.

I said: “If all your men fulfill their promises like McCann, that you are still alive I count as one of the major miracles.”

“As for McCann,” he turned his gaze to me somberly, “he is both intelligent and loyal. I will not condemn him unheard. And I say to you, Dr. Lowell, that if you had shown more frankness to me this night – Dr. Braile would not be dead.”

I winced at that – there was too much truth in it. I was racked by regret and grief and helpless rage. If I had not let my cursed pride control me, if I had told them all that I could of my encounter with the doll-maker, explained why there were details I was unable to tell, given myself over to Braile for a cleansing counter-hypnotization – no, if I had but accepted Ricori’s offer of protection, or Braile’s to watch over me while asleep – then this could not have happened.

I looked into the study and saw there Ricori’s nurse. I could hear whispering outside the study doors – servants, and others from the Annex who had been attracted by the noise of the falling chandelier. I said to the nurse, quite calmly:

“The chandelier fell while Dr. Braile was standing at the foot of my bed talking to me. It has killed him. But do not tell the others that. Only say that the chandelier fell, injuring Dr. Braile. Send them back to their beds – say that we are taking Dr. Braile to the hospital. Then return with Porter and clean up what you can of the blood. Leave the chandelier as it is.”

When she had gone I turned to Ricori’s gunmen.

“What did you see when you shot?”

One answered: “They looked like monkeys to me.”

The other said: “Or midgets.”

I looked at Ricori, and read in his face what he had seen. I stripped the light blanket from the bed.

“Ricori,” I said, “let your men lift Braile and wrap him in this. Then have them carry him into the small room next to the study and place him on the cot.”

He nodded to them, and they lifted Braile from the debris of shattered glass and bent metal. His face and neck had been cut by the broken prisms and by some chance one of these wounds was close to the spot where the dagger-pin of the doll had been thrust. It was deep, and had probably caused a second severance of the carotid artery. I followed with Ricori into the small room. They placed the body on the cot and Ricori ordered them to go back to the bedroom and watch while the nurses were there. He closed the door of the small room behind them, then turned to me.

“What are you going to do, Dr. Lowell?”

What I felt like doing was weeping, but I answered: “It is a coroner’s case, of course. I must notify the police at once.”

“What are you going to tell them?”

“What did you see at the window, Ricori?”

“I saw the dolls!”

“And I. Can I tell the police what did kill Braile before the chandelier fell? You know I cannot. No, I shall tell them that we were talking when, without warning, the fixture dropped upon him. Splintered glass from the pendants pierced his throat. What else can I say? And they will believe that readily enough when they would not believe the truth—”

I hesitated, then my reserve broke; for the first time in many years, I wept.

“Ricori – you were right. Not McCann but I am to blame for this – the vanity of an old man – had I spoken freely, fully – he would be alive… but I did not… I did not… I am his murderer.”

He comforted me – gently as a woman…

“It was not your fault. You could not have done otherwise… being what you are… thinking as you have so long thought. If in your unbelief, your entirely natural unbelief, the witch found her opportunity… still, it was not your fault. But now she shall find no more opportunities. Her cup is full and overflowing…”

He put his hands on my shoulders.

“Do not notify the police for a time – not until we hear from McCann. It is now close to twelve and he will telephone even if he does not come. I will go to my room and dress. For when I have heard from McCann I must leave you.”

“What do you mean to do, Ricori?”

“Kill the witch,” he answered quietly. “Kill her and the girl. Before the day comes. I have waited too long. I will wait no longer. She shall kill no more.”

I felt a wave of weakness. I dropped into a chair. My sight dimmed. Ricori gave me water, and I drank thirstily. Through the roaring in my ears I heard a knocking at the door and the voice of one of Ricori’s men:

“McCann is here.”

Ricori said: “Tell him to come in.”

The door opened. McCann strode into the room.

“I got her—”

He stopped short, staring at us. His eyes fell upon the covered body upon the cot and his face grew grim:

“What’s happened?”

Ricori answered: “The dolls killed Dr. Braile. You captured the girl too late, McCann. Why?”

“Killed Braile? The dolls! God!” McCann’s voice was as though a hand had gripped his throat.

Ricori asked: “Where is the girl, McCann?”

He answered, dully: “Down in the car, gagged and tied.”

Ricori asked: “When did you get her? And where?”

Looking at McCann, I suddenly felt a great pity and sympathy for him. It sprang from my own remorse and shame. I said:

“Sit down, McCann. I am far more to blame for what has happened than you can possibly be.”

Ricori said, coldly: “Leave me to be judge of that. McCann, did you place cars at each end of the street, as Dr. Lowell instructed?”

“Yes.”

“Then begin your story at that point.”

McCann said: “She comes into the street. It’s close to eleven. I’m at the east end an’ Paul at the west. I say to Tony: ‘We got the wench pocketed!’ She carries two suitcases. She looks around an’ trots where we located her car. She opens the door. When she comes out she rides west where Paul is. I’ve told Paul what the Doc tells me, not to grab her too close to the doll-shop. I see Paul tail her. I shoot down the street an’ tail Paul.

“The coupe turn into West Broadway. There she gets the break, a Staten Island boat is just in an’ the street’s lousy with a herd of cars. A Ford shoots over to the left, trying to pass another. Paul hits the Ford and wraps himself round one of the El’s pillars. There’s a mess. I’m a minute or two getting out the jam. When I do, the coupe’s outa sight.

“I hop down an’ telephone Rod. I tell him to get the wench when she shows up, even if they have to rope her off the steps of the doll-shop. An’ when they get her, bring her right here.

“I come up here. I figure maybe she’s headed this way. I coast along by here an’ then take a look in the Park, I figure the doll-hag’s been getting all the breaks an’ now one’s due me. I get it. I see the coupe parked under some trees. We get the gal. She don’t put up no fight at all. But we gag her an’ put her in the car. Tony rolls the coupe away an’ searches it. There ain’t a thing in it but the two suitcases an’ they’re empty. We bring the gal here.”

I asked: “How long between when you caught the girl and your arrival?”

“Ten-fifteen minutes, maybe. Tony nigh took the coupe to pieces. An’ that took time.”

I looked at Ricori. McCann must have come upon the girl just about the moment Braile had died. He nodded:

“She was waiting for the dolls, of course.”

McCann asked: “What do you want me to do with her?”

He looked at Ricori, not at me. Ricori said nothing, staring at McCann with a curious intentness. But I saw him clench his left hand, then open it, fingers wide. McCann said:

“Okay, boss.”

He started toward the door. It did not take unusual acumen to know that he had been given orders, nor could their significance be mistaken.

“Stop!” I intercepted him and stood with my back against the door. “Listen to me, Ricori. I have something to say about this. Dr. Braile was as close to me as Peters to you. Whatever the guilt of Madame Mandilip, this girl is helpless to do other than what she orders her. Her will is absolutely controlled by the doll-maker. I strongly suspect that a good part of the time she is under complete hypnotic control. I cannot forget that she tried to save Walters. I will not see her murdered.”

Ricori said: “If you are right, all the more reason she should be destroyed quickly. Then the witch cannot make use of her before she herself is destroyed.”

“I will not have it, Ricori. And there is another reason. I want to question her. I may discover how Madame Mandilip does these things – the mystery of the dolls – the ingredients of the salve – whether there are others who share her knowledge. All this and more, the girl may know. And if she does know, I can make her tell.”

McCann said, cynically: “Yeah?”

Ricori asked: “How?”

I answered grimly: “By using the same trap in which the doll-maker caught me.”

For a full minute Ricori considered me, gravely.

“Dr. Lowell,” he said, “for the last time I yield my judgment to yours in this matter. I think you are wrong. I know that I was wrong when I did not kill the witch that day I met her. I believe that every moment this girl is permitted to remain alive is a moment laden with danger for us all. Nevertheless, I yield – for this last time.”

“McCann,” I said, “bring the girl into my office. Wait until I get rid of anyone who may be downstairs.”

I went downstairs, McCann and Ricori following. No one was there. I placed on my desk a development of the Luys mirror, a device used first at the Salpetriere in Paris to induce hypnotic sleep. It consists of two parallel rows of small reflectors revolving in opposite directions. A ray of light plays upon them in such a manner as to cause their surfaces alternately to gleam and darken. A most useful device, and one to which I believed the girl, long sensitized to hypnotic suggestion, must speedily succumb. I placed a comfortable chair at the proper angle, and subdued the lights so that they could not compete with the hypnotic mirror.

I had hardly completed these arrangements when McCann and another of Ricori’s henchmen brought in the girl. They placed her in the easy chair, and I took from her lips the cloth with which she had been silenced.

Ricori said: “Tony, go out to the car. McCann, you stay here.”

— XVI —

END OF THE WITCH GIRL

The girl made no resistance whatever. She seemed entirely withdrawn into herself, looking up at me with the same vague stare I had noted on my visit to the doll-shop. I took her hands. She let them rest passively in mine. They were very cold. I said to her, gently, reassuringly:

“My child, no one is going to hurt you. Rest and relax. Sink back in the chair. I only want to help you. Sleep if you wish. Sleep.”

She did not seem to hear, still regarding me with that vague gaze. I released her hands. I took my own chair, facing her, and set the little mirrors revolving. Her eyes turned to them at once, rested upon them, fascinated. I watched her body relax; she sank back in her chair. Her eyelids began to droop.

“Sleep,” I said softly. “Here none can harm you. While you sleep none can harm you. Sleep… sleep…”

Her eyes closed; she sighed.

I said: “You are asleep. You will not awaken until I bid you. You cannot awaken until I bid you.”

She repeated in a murmuring, childish voice: “I am asleep; I cannot awaken until you bid me.”

I stopped the whirling mirrors. I said to her: “There are some questions I am going to ask you. You will listen, and you will answer me truthfully. You cannot answer them except truthfully. You know that.”

She echoed, still in that faint childish voice: “I must answer you truthfully. I know that.”

I could not refrain from darting a glance of triumph at Ricori and McCann. Ricori was crossing himself, staring at me with wide eyes in which were both doubt and awe. I knew he was thinking that I, too, knew witchcraft. McCann sat chewing nervously. And staring at the girl.

I began my questions, choosing at first those least likely to disturb. I asked:

“Are you truly Madame Mandilip’s niece?”

“No.”

“Who are you, then?”

“I do not know.”

“When did you join her, and why?”

“Twenty years ago. I was in a creche, a foundling asylum at Vienna. She took me from it. She taught me to call her my aunt. But she is not.”

“Where have you lived since then?”

“In Berlin, in Paris, then London, Prague, Warsaw.”

“Did Madame Mandilip make her dolls in each of these places?”

She did not answer; she shuddered; her eyelids began to tremble.

“Sleep! Remember, you cannot awaken until I bid you! Sleep! Answer me.”

She whispered: “Yes.”

“And they killed in each city?”

“Yes.”

“Sleep. Be at ease. Nothing is going to harm you—” Her disquietude had again become marked, and I veered for a moment from the subject of the dolls. “Where was Madame Mandilip born?”

“I do not know.”

“How old is she?”

“I do not know. I have asked her, and she has laughed and said that time is nothing to her. I was five years old when she took me. She looked then just as she does now.”

“Has she any accomplices – I mean are there others who make the dolls?”

“One. She taught him. He was her lover in Prague.”

“Her lover!” I exclaimed, incredulously – the image of the immense gross body, the great breasts, the heavy horse-like face of the doll-maker rising before my eyes. She said:

“I know what you are thinking. But she has another body. She wears it when she pleases. It is a beautiful body. It belongs to her eyes, her hands, her voice. When she wears that body she is beautiful. She is terrifyingly beautiful. I have seen her wear it many times.”

Another body! An illusion, of course… like the enchanted room Walters had described… and which I had glimpsed when breaking from the hypnotic web in which she had enmeshed me… a picture drawn by the doll-maker’s mind in the mind of the girl. I dismissed that, and drove to the heart of the matter.

“She kills by two methods, does she not – by the salve and by the dolls?”

“Yes, by the unguent and the dolls.”

“How many has she killed by the unguent in New York?”

She answered, indirectly: “She has made fourteen dolls since we came here.”

So there were other cases that had not been reported to me! I asked:

“‘And how many have the dolls killed?”

“Twenty.”

I heard Ricori curse, and shot him a warning look. He was leaning forward, white and tense; McCann had stopped his chewing.

“How does she make the dolls?”

“I do not know.”

“Do you know how she prepares the unguent?”

“No. She does that secretly.”

“What is it that activates the dolls?”

“You mean makes them – alive?”

“Yes.”

“Something from the dead!”

Again I heard Ricori cursing softly. I said: “If you do not know how the dolls are made, you must know what is necessary to make them alive. What is it?”

She did not answer.

“You must answer me. You must obey me. Speak!”

She said: “Your question is not clear. I have told you that something of the dead makes them alive. What else is it you would know?”

“Begin from where one who poses for a doll first meets Madame Mandilip to the last step when the doll – as you put it – becomes alive.”

She spoke, dreamily:

“She has said one must come to her of his own will. He must consent of his own volition, without coercion, to let her make the doll. That he does not know to what he is consenting matters nothing. She must begin the first model immediately. Before she completes the second – the doll that is to live – she must find opportunity to apply the unguent. She has said of this unguent that it liberates one of those who dwell within the mind, and that this one must come to her and enter the doll. She has said that this one is not the sole tenant of the mind, but with the others she has no concern. Nor does she select all of those who come before her. How she knows those with whom she can deal, or what there is about them which makes her select them, I do not know. She makes the second doll. At the instant of its completion he who has posed for it begins to die. When he is dead – the doll lives. It obeys her – as they all obey her…”

She paused, then said, musingly “All except one—”

“And that one?”

“She who was your nurse. She will not obey. My aunt torments her, punishes her… still she cannot control her. I brought the little nurse here last night with another doll to kill the man my – aunt – cursed. The nurse came, but she fought the other doll and saved the man. It is something my aunt cannot understand… it perplexes her… and it gives me… hope!”

Her voice trailed away. Then suddenly, with energy, she said:

“You must make haste. I should be back with the dolls. Soon she will be searching for me. I must go… or she will come for me… and then… if she finds me here… she will kill me…”

I said: “You brought the dolls to kill me?”

“Of course.”

“Where are the dolls now?”

She answered: “They were coming back to me. Your men caught me before they could reach me. They will go… home. The dolls travel quickly when they must. It is more difficult without me that is all… but they will return to her.”

“Why do the dolls kill?”

“To… please… her.”

I said: “The knotted cord, what part does it play?”

She answered: “I do not know – but she says—” Then suddenly, desperately, like a frightened child, she whispered: “She is searching for me! Her eyes are looking for me… her hands are groping – she sees me! Hide me! Oh, hide me from her quick…”

I said: “Sleep more deeply! Go down – down deep – deeper still into sleep. Now she cannot find you! Now you are hidden from her!”

She whispered: “I am deep in sleep. She has lost me. I am hidden. But she is hovering over me she is still searching…”

Ricori and McCann had left their chairs and were beside me.

Ricori asked:

“You believe the witch is after her?”

“No,” I answered. “But this is not an unexpected development. The girl has been under the woman’s control so long, and so completely, that the reaction is natural. It may be the result of suggestion, or it may be the reasoning of her own subconsciousness… she has been breaking commands… she has been threatened with punishment if she should—”

The girl screamed, agonized:

“She sees me! She has found me! Her hands are reaching out to me!”

“Sleep! Sleep deeper still! She cannot hurt you. Again she has lost you!”

The girl did not answer, but a faint moaning was audible, deep in her throat.

McCann swore, huskily: “Christ! Can’t you help her?”

Ricori, eyes unnaturally bright in a chalky face, said: “Let her die! It will save us trouble!”

I said to the girl, sternly:

“Listen to me and obey. I am going to count five. When I come to five – awaken! Awaken at once! You will come up from sleep so swiftly that she cannot catch you! Obey!”

I counted, slowly, since to have awakened her at once would, in all likelihood, have brought her to the death which her distorted mind told her was threatened by the doll-maker.

“One – two – three—”

An appalling scream came from the girl. And then—

“She’s caught me! Her hands are around my heart… Uh-h-h…”

Her body bent; a spasm ran through her. Her body relaxed and sank limply in the chair. Her eyes opened, stared blankly; her jaw dropped.

I ripped open her bodice, set my stethoscope to her heart. It was still.

And then from the dead throat issued a voice organ-toned, sweet, laden with menace and contempt…

“You fools!”

The voice of Madame Mandilip!

— XVII —

BURN, WITCH, BURN!

Curiously enough, Ricori was the least affected of the three of us. My own flesh had crept. McCann, although he had never heard the doll-maker’s voice, was greatly shaken. And it was Ricori who broke the silence.

“You are sure the girl is dead?”

“There is no possible doubt of it, Ricori.”

He nodded to McCann: “Carry her down to the car.”

I asked: “What are you going to do?”

He answered: “Kill the witch.” He quoted with satiric unctuousness: “In death they shall not be divided.” He said, passionately: “As in hell they shall burn together forever!”

He looked at me, sharply.

“You do not approve of this, Dr. Lowell?”

“Ricori, I don’t know – I honestly do not know. Today I would have killed her with my own hands, but now the rage is spent. What you have threatened is against all my instincts, all my habits of thought, all my convictions of how justice should be administered. It seems to me – murder!”

He said: “You heard the girl. Twenty in this city alone killed by the dolls. And fourteen dolls. Fourteen who died as Peters did!”

“But, Ricori, no court could consider allegations under hypnosis as evidence. It may be true, it may not be. The girl was abnormal. What she told might be only her imaginings – without supporting evidence, no court on earth could accept it as a basis for action.”

He said: “No – no earthly court—” He gripped my shoulders. He asked: “Do you believe it was truth?”

I could not answer, for deep within me I felt it was truth. He said:

“Precisely, Dr. Lowell! You have answered me. You know, as I know, that the girl did speak the truth. You know, as I know, that our law cannot punish the witch. That is why I must kill her. In doing that, I, Ricori, am no murderer. No, I am God’s executioner!”

He waited for me to speak. Again I could not answer.

“McCann” – he pointed to the girl – “do as I told you. Then return.”

And when McCann had gone out with the frail body in his arms, Ricori said:

“Dr. Lowell – you must go with me to witness this execution.”

I recoiled at that. I said:

“Ricori, I can’t. I am utterly weary – in body and mind. I have gone through too much today. I am broken with grief—”

“You must go,” he interrupted, “if we have to carry you, gagged as the girl was, and bound. I will tell you why. You are at war with yourself. Alone, it is possible your scientific doubts might conquer, that you would attempt to halt me before I have done what I swear by Christ, His Holy Mother, and the Saints, I shall do. You might yield to weariness and place the whole matter before the police. I will not take that risk. I have affection for you, Dr. Lowell, deep affection. But I tell you that if my own mother tried to stop me in this I would sweep her aside as ruthlessly as I shall you.”

I said: “I will go with you.”

“Then tell the nurse to bring me my clothing. Until all is over, we remain together. I am taking no more chances.”

I took up the telephone and gave the necessary order. McCann returned, and Ricori said to him:

“When I am clothed, we go to the doll-shop. Who is in the car with Tony?”

“Larson and Cartello.”

“Good. It may be that the witch knows we are coming. It may be that she has listened through the girl’s dead ears as she spoke from her dead throat. No matter. We shall assume that she did not. Are there bars on the door?”

McCann said: “Boss, I ain’t been in the shop. I don’t know. There’s a glass panel. If there’s bars we can work ’em. Tony’ll get the tools while you put on your clothes.”

“Dr. Lowell,” Ricori turned on me. “Will you give me your word that you will not change your mind about going with me? Nor attempt to interfere in what I am going to do?”

“I give you my word, Ricori.”

“McCann, you need not come back. Wait for us in the car.”

Ricori was soon dressed. As I walked with him out of my house, a clock struck one. I remembered that this strange adventure had begun, weeks ago, at that very hour…

I rode in the back of the car with Ricori, the dead girl between us. On the middle seats were Larson and Cartello, the former a stolid Swede, the latter a wiry little Italian. The man named Tony drove, McCann beside him. We swung down the avenue and in about half an hour were on lower Broadway. As we drew near the street of the doll-maker, we went less quickly. The sky was overcast, a cold wind blowing off the bay. I shivered, but not with cold.

We came to the corner of the doll-maker’s street.

For several blocks we had met no one, seen no one. It was as though we were passing through a city of the dead. Equally deserted was the street of the doll-maker.

Ricori said to Tony:

“Draw up opposite the doll-shop. We’ll get out. Then go down to the corner. Wait for us there.”

My heart was beating uncomfortably. There was a quality of blackness in the night that seemed to swallow up the glow from the street lamps. There was no light in the doll-maker’s shop, and in the old-fashioned doorway, set level with the street, the shadows clustered. The wind whined, and I could hear the beating of waves on the Battery wall. I wondered whether I would be able to go through that doorway, or whether the inhibition the doll-maker had put upon me still held me.

McCann slipped out of the car, carrying the girl’s body. He propped her, sitting in the doorway’s shadows. Ricori and I, Larson and Cartello, followed. The car rolled off. And again I felt the sense of nightmare unreality which had clung to me so often since I had first set my feet on this strange path to the doll-maker…

The little Italian was smearing the glass of the door with some gummy material. In the center of it he fixed a small vacuum cup of rubber. He took a tool from his pocket and drew with it a foot-wide circle on the glass. The point of the tool cut into the glass as though it had been wax. Holding the vacuum cup in one hand, he tapped the glass lightly with a rubber-tipped hammer. The circle of glass came away in his hand. All had been done without the least sound. He reached through the hole, and fumbled about noiselessly for a few moments. There was a faint click. The door swung open.

McCann picked up the dead girl. We went, silent as phantoms, into the doll-shop. The little Italian set the circle of glass back in its place. I could see dimly the door that opened into the corridor leading to that evil room at the rear. The little Italian tried the knob. The door was locked. He worked for a few seconds, and the door swung open. Ricori leading, McCann behind him with the girl, we passed like shadows through the corridor and paused at the further door.

The door swung open before the little Italian could touch it.

We heard the voice of the doll-maker!

“Enter, gentlemen. It was thoughtful of you to bring me back my dear niece! I would have met you at my outer door – but I am an old, old woman and timid!”

McCann whispered: “One side, boss!”

He shifted the body of the girl to his left arm, and holding her like a shield, pistol drawn, began to edge by Ricori. Ricori thrust him away. His own automatic leveled, he stepped over the threshold. I followed McCann, the two gunmen at my back.

I took a swift glance around the room. The doll-maker sat at her table, sewing. She was serene, apparently untroubled. Her long white fingers danced to the rhythm of her stitches. She did not look up at us. There were coals burning in the fireplace. The room was very warm, and there was a strong aromatic odor, unfamiliar to me. I looked toward the cabinets of the dolls.

Every cabinet was open. Dolls stood within them, row upon row, staring down at us with eyes green and blue, gray and black, lifelike as though they were midgets on exhibition in some grotesque peepshow. There must have been hundreds of them. Some were dressed as we in America dress; some as the Germans do; some as the Spanish, the French, the English; others were in costumes I did not recognize. A ballerina, and a blacksmith with his hammer raised… a French chevalier, and a German student, broadsword in hand, livid scars upon his face… an Apache with knife in hand, drug-madness on his yellow face and next to him a vicious-mouthed woman of the streets and next to her a jockey…

The loot of the doll-maker from a dozen lands!

The dolls seemed to be poised to leap. To flow down upon us. Overwhelm us.

I steadied my thoughts. I forced myself to meet that battery of living dolls’ eyes as though they were but lifeless dolls. There was an empty cabinet… another and another… five cabinets without dolls. The four dolls I had watched march upon me in the paralysis of the green glow were not there nor was Walters.

I wrenched my gaze away from the tiers of the watching dolls. I looked again at the doll-maker, still placidly sewing… as though she were alone… as though she were unaware of us… as though Ricori’s pistol were not pointed at her heart… sewing… singing softly…

The Walters doll was on the table before her!

It lay prone on its back. Its tiny hands were fettered at the wrists with twisted cords of the ashen hair. They were bound round and round, and the fettered hands clutched the hilt of a dagger-pin!

Long in the telling, but brief in the seeing – a few seconds in time as we measure it.

The doll-maker’s absorption in her sewing, her utter indifference to us, the silence, made a screen between us and her, an ever-thickening though invisible barrier. The pungent aromatic fragrance grew stronger.

McCann dropped the body of the girl on the floor.

He tried to speak – once, twice; at the third attempt he succeeded. He said to Ricori hoarsely, in strangled voice:

“Kill her… or I will—” Ricori did not move. He stood rigid, automatic pointed at the doll-maker’s heart, eyes fixed on her dancing hands. He did not seem to hear McCann, or if he heard, he did not heed. The doll-maker’s song went on… it was like the hum of bees… it was a sweet droning… it garnered sleep as the bees garner honey… sleep…

Ricori shifted his grip upon his gun. He sprang forward. He swung the butt of the pistol down upon a wrist of the doll-maker.

The hand dropped, the fingers of that hand writhed… hideously the long white fingers writhed and twisted… like serpents whose backs have been broken…

Ricori raised the gun for a second blow. Before it could fall the doll-maker had leaped to her feet, overturning her chair. A whispering ran over the cabinets like a thin veil of sound. The dolls seemed to bend, to lean forward…

The doll-maker’s eyes were on us now. They seemed to take in each and all of us at once. And they were like flaming black suns in which danced tiny crimson flames.

Her will swept out and overwhelmed us. It was like a wave, tangible. I felt it strike me as though it were a material thing. A numbness began to creep through me. I saw the hand of Ricori that clutched the pistol twitch and whiten. I knew that same numbness was gripping him as it gripped McCann and the others…

Once more the doll-maker had trapped us!

I whispered: “Don’t look at her, Ricori… don’t look in her eyes…”

With a tearing effort I wrested my own away from those flaming black ones. They fell upon the Walters doll. Stiffly, I reached to take it up – why, I did not know. The doll-maker was quicker than I. She snatched up the doll with her uninjured hand, and held it to her breast. She cried, in a voice whose vibrant sweetness ran through every nerve, augmenting the creeping lethargy:

“You will not look at me? You will not look at me! Fools – you can do nothing else!”

Then began that strange, that utterly strange episode that was the beginning of the end.

The aromatic fragrance seemed to pulse, to throb, grow stronger. Something like a sparkling mist whirled out of nothingness and covered the doll-maker, veiling the horse-like face, the ponderous body. Only her eyes shone through that mist…

The mist cleared away. Before us stood a woman of breath-taking beauty – tall and slender and exquisite. Naked, her hair, black and silken fine, half-clothed her to her knees. Through it the pale golden flesh gleamed. Only the eyes, the hands, the doll still clasped to one of the round, high breasts told who she was.

Ricori’s automatic dropped from his hand. I heard the weapons of the others fall to the floor. I knew they stood rigid as I, stunned by that incredible transformation, and helpless in the grip of the power streaming from the doll-maker.

She pointed to Ricori and laughed: “You would kill me – me! Pick up your weapon, Ricori – and try!”

Ricori’s body bent slowly, slowly… I could see him only indirectly, for my eyes could not leave the woman’s… and I knew that his could not… that, fastened to them, his eyes were turning upward, upward as he bent. I sensed rather than saw that his groping hand had touched his pistol – that he was trying to lift it. I heard him groan. The doll-maker laughed again.

“Enough, Ricori – you cannot!”

Ricori’s body straightened with a snap, as though a hand had clutched his chin and thrust him up…

There was a rustling behind me, the patter of little feet, the scurrying of small bodies past me.

At the feet of the woman were four mannikins… the four who had marched upon me in the green glow… banker-doll, spinster-doll, the acrobat, the trapeze performer.

They stood, the four of them, ranged in front of her, glaring at us. In the hand of each was a dagger-pin, points thrust at us like tiny swords. And once more the laughter of the woman filled the room. She spoke, caressingly:

“No, no, my little ones. I do not need you!”

She pointed to me.

“You know this body of mine is but illusion, do you not? Speak.”

“Yes.”

“And these at my feet – and all my little ones – are but illusions?”

I said: “I do not know that.”

“You know too much – and you know too little. Therefore you must die, my too wise and too foolish doctor—” The great eyes dwelt upon me with mocking pity, the lovely face became maliciously pitiful. “And Ricori too must die – because he knows too much. And you others – you too must die. But not at the hands of my little people. Not here. No! At your home, my good doctor. You shall go there silently – speaking neither among yourselves nor to any others on your way. And when there you will turn upon yourselves… each slaying the other… rending yourselves like wolves… like—”

She staggered back a step, reeling.

I saw – or thought I saw – the doll of Walters writhe. Then swift as a striking snake it raised its bound hands and thrust the dagger-pin through the doll-maker’s throat… twisted it savagely… and thrust and thrust again… stabbing the golden throat of the woman precisely where that other doll had stabbed Braile!

And as Braile had screamed – so now screamed the doll-maker… dreadfully, agonizedly…

She tore the doll from her breast. She hurled it from her. The doll hurtled toward the fireplace, rolled, and touched the glowing coals.

There was a flash of brilliant flame, a wave of that same intense heat I had felt when the match of McCann had struck the Peters doll. And instantly, at the touch of that heat, the dolls at the woman’s feet vanished. From them arose swiftly a pillar of that same brilliant flame. It coiled and wrapped itself around the doll-maker, from feet to head.

I saw the shape of beauty melt away. In its place was the horse-like face, the immense body of Madame Mandilip… eyes seared and blind… the long white hands clutching at her torn throat, and no longer white but crimson with her blood.

Thus for an instant she stood, then toppled to the floor.

And at that instant of her fall, the spell that held us broke.

Ricori leaned toward the huddled hulk that had been the doll-maker. He spat upon it. He shouted, exultantly:

“Burn witch burn!”

He pushed me to the door, pointing toward the tiers of the watching dolls that strangely now seemed lifeless! Only dolls!

Fire was leaping to them from draperies and curtains. The fire was leaping at them as though it were some vengeful spirit of cleansing flame!

We rushed through the door, the corridor, out into the shop. Through the corridor and into the shop the flames poured after us. We ran into the street.

Ricori cried: “Quick! To the car!”

Suddenly the street was red with the light of the flames. I heard windows opening, and shouts of warning and alarm.

We swung into the waiting car, and it leaped away.

— XVIII —

THE DARK WISDOM

“They have made effigies comparable with my image, similar to my form, who have taken away my breath, pulled out my hair, torn my garments, prevented my feet from moving by means of dust; with an ointment of harmful herbs they rubbed me; to my death they have led me – O God of Fire destroy them!” (—Egyptian Prayer)

Three weeks had passed since the death of the doll-maker. Ricori and I sat at dinner in my home. A silence had fallen between us. I had broken it with the curious invocation that begins this, the concluding chapter of my narrative, scarcely aware that I had spoken aloud. But Ricori looked up, sharply.

“You quote someone? Whom?”

I answered: “A tablet of clay, inscribed by some Chaldean in the days of Assur-nizir-pal, three thousand years ago.”

He said: “And in those few words he has told all our story!”

“Even so, Ricori. It is all there – the dolls – the unguent – the torture – death – and the cleansing flame.”

He mused: “It is strange, that. Three thousand years ago – and even then they knew the evil and its remedy… ‘effigies similar to my form… who have taken away my breath… an ointment of harmful herbs… to my death they have led me… O God of Fire – destroy them!’ It is all our story, Dr. Lowell.”

I said: “The death-dolls are far, far older than Ur of the Chaldees. Older than history. I have followed their trail down the ages since the night Braile was killed. And it is a long, long trail, Ricori. They have been found buried deep in the hearths of the Cro-Magnons, hearths whose fires died twenty thousand years ago. And they have been found under still colder hearths of still more ancient peoples. Dolls of flint, dolls of stone, dolls carved from the mammoth’s tusks, from the bones of the cave bear, from the saber-toothed tiger’s fangs. They had the dark wisdom even then, Ricori.”

He nodded: “Once I had a man about me whom I liked well. A Transylvanian. One day I asked him why he had come to America. He told me a strange tale. He said that there had been a girl in his village whose mother, so it was whispered, knew things no Christian should know. He put it thus, cautiously, crossing himself. The girl was comely, desirable – yet he could not love her. She, it seemed, loved him – or perhaps it was his indifference that drew her. One afternoon, coming home from the hunt, he passed her hut. She called to him. He was thirsty, and drank the wine she offered him. It was good wine. It made him gay – but it did not make him love her.

“Nevertheless, he went with her into the hut, and drank more wine. Laughing, he let her cut hair from his head, pare his fingernails, take drops of blood from his wrist, and spittle from his mouth. Laughing, he left her, and went home, and slept. When he awakened, it was early evening, and all that he remembered was that he had drunk wine with the girl, but that was all.

“Something told him to go to church. He went to church. And as he knelt, praying, suddenly he did remember more – remembered that the girl had taken his hair, his nail parings, his spittle and his blood. And he felt a great necessity to go to this girl and to see what she was doing with his hair, his nail parings, his spittle, his blood. It was as though he said, the Saint before whom he knelt was commanding him to do this.

“So he stole to the hut of the girl, slipping through the wood, creeping up to her window. He looked in. She sat at the hearth, kneading dough as though for bread. He was ashamed that he had crept so with such thoughts – but then he saw that into the dough she was dropping the hair she had cut from him, the nail parings, the blood, the spittle. She was kneading them within the dough. Then, as he watched, he saw her take the dough and model it into the shape of a little man. And she sprinkled water upon its head, baptizing it in his name with strange words he could not understand.

“He was frightened, this man. But also he was greatly enraged. Also he had courage. He watched until she had finished. He saw her wrap the doll in her apron, and come to the door. She went out of the door, and away. He followed her – he had been a woodsman and knew how to go softly, and she did not know he was following her. She came to a crossroads. There was a new moon shining, and some prayer she made to this new moon. Then she dug a hole, and placed the doll of dough in that hole. And then she defiled it. After this she said:

“‘Zaru (it was this man’s name)! Zaru! Zaru! I love you. When this image is rotted away you must run after me as the dog after the bitch. You are mine, Zaru, soul and body. As the image rots, you become mine. When the image is rotted, you are all mine. Forever and forever and forever!’

“She covered the image with earth. He leaped upon her, and strangled her. He would have dug up the image, but he heard voices and was more afraid and ran. He did not go back to the village. He made his way to America.

“He told me that when he was out a day on that journey, he felt hands clutching at his loins – dragging him to the rail, to the sea. Back to the village, to the girl. By that, he knew he had not killed her. He fought the hands. Night after night he fought them. He dared not sleep, for when he slept he dreamed he was there at the cross-roads, the girl beside him – and three times he awakened just in time to check himself from throwing himself into the sea.

“Then the strength of the hands began to weaken. And at last, but not for many months, he felt them no more. But still he went, always afraid, until word came to him from the village. He had been right – he had not killed her. But later someone else did. That girl had what you have named the dark wisdom. Si! Perhaps it turned against her at the end – as in the end it turned against the witch we knew.”

I said: “It is curious that you should say that, Ricori… strange that you should speak of the dark wisdom turning against the one who commands it… but of that I will speak later. Love and hate and power – three lusts – always these seem to have been the three legs of the tripod on which burns the dark flame; the supports of the stage from which the death-dolls leap…

“Do you know who is the first recorded Maker of Dolls? No? Well, he was a God, Ricori. His name was Khnum. He was a God long and long before Yawvah of the Jews, who was also a maker of dolls, you will recall, shaping two of them in the Garden of Eden; animating them; but giving them only two inalienable rights – first, the right to suffer; second, the right to die. Khnum was a far more merciful God. He did not deny the right to die – but he did not think the dolls should suffer; he liked to see them enjoy themselves in their brief breathing space. Khnum was so old that he had ruled in Egypt ages before the Pyramids or the Sphinx were thought of. He had a brother God whose name was Kepher, and who had the head of a Beetle. It was Kepher who sent a thought rippling like a little wind over the surface of Chaos. That, thought fertilized Chaos, and from it the world was born…

“Only a ripple over the surface, Ricori! If it had pierced the skin of Chaos… or thrust even deeper… into its heart… what might not mankind now be? Nevertheless, rippling, the thought achieved the superficiality that is man. The work of Khnum thereafter was to reach into the wombs of women and shape the body of the child who lay within. They called him the Potter-God. He it was who, at the command of Amen, greatest of the younger Gods, shaped the body of the great Queen Hat-shep-sut whom Amen begot, lying beside her mother in the likeness of the Pharaoh, her husband. At least, so wrote the priests of her day.

“But a thousand years before this there was a Prince whom Osiris and Isis loved greatly – for his beauty, his courage and his strength. Nowhere on earth, they thought, was there a woman fit for him. So they called Khnum, the Potter-God, to make one. He came, with long hands like those of… Madame Mandilip… like hers, each finger alive. He shaped the clay into a woman so beautiful that even the Goddess Isis felt a touch of envy. They were severely practical Gods, those of old Egypt, so they threw the Prince into a sleep, placed the woman beside him, and compared – the word in the ancient papyrus is ‘fitted’ – them. Alas! She was not harmonious. She was too small. So Khnum made another doll. But this was too large. And not until six were shaped and destroyed was true harmony attained, the Gods satisfied, the fortunate Prince given his perfect wife – who had been a doll.

“Ages after, in the time of Rameses III, it happened that there was a man who sought for and who found this secret of Khnum, the Potter-God. He had spent his whole life in seeking it. He was old and bent and withered; but the desire for women was still strong within him. All that he knew to do with that secret of Khnum was to satisfy that desire. But he felt the necessity of a model. Who were the fairest of women whom he could use as models? The wives of the Pharaoh, of course. So this man made certain dolls in the shape and semblance of those who accompanied the Pharaoh when he visited his wives. Also, he made a doll in the likeness of the Pharaoh himself; and into this he entered, animating it. His dolls then carried him into the royal harem, past the guards, who believed even as did the wives of Pharaoh, that he was the true Pharaoh. And entertained him accordingly.

“But, as he was leaving, the true Pharaoh entered. That must have been quite a situation, Ricori – suddenly, miraculously, in his harem, the Pharaoh doubled! But Khnum, seeing what had happened, reached down from Heaven and touched the dolls, withdrawing their life. And they dropped to the floor, and were seen to be only dolls.

“While where one Pharaoh had stood lay another doll and crouched beside it a shivering and wrinkled old man!

“You can find the story, and a fairly detailed account of the trial that followed, in a papyrus of the time; now, I think, in the Turin Museum. Also a catalogue of the tortures the magician underwent before he was burned. Now, there is no manner of doubt that there were such accusations, nor that there was such a trial; the papyrus is authentic. But what, actually, was at the back of it? Something happened – but what was it? Is the story only another record of superstition – or does it deal with the fruit of the dark wisdom?”

Ricori said: “You, yourself, watched that dark wisdom fruit. Are you still unconvinced of its reality?”

I did not answer; I continued: “The knotted cord – the Witch’s Ladder. That, too, is most ancient. The oldest document of Frankish legislation, the Salic Law, reduced to written form about fifteen hundred years ago, provided the severest penalties for those who tied what it named the Witch’s Knot—”

“La Ghana della strega,” he said. “Well, do we know that cursed thing in my land – and to our black sorrow!”

I took startled note of his pallid face, his twitching fingers; I said, hastily: “But of course, Ricori, you realize that all I have been quoting is legend? Folklore. With no proven basis of scientific fact.”

He thrust his chair back, violently, arose, stared at me, incredulously. He spoke, with effort: “You still hold that the devil-work we witnessed can be explained in terms of the science you know?”

I stirred, uncomfortably: “I did not say that, Ricori. I do say that Madame Mandilip was as extraordinary a hypnotist as she was a murderess – a mistress of illusion—”

He interrupted me, hands clenching the table’s edge: “You think her dolls were illusions?”

I answered, obliquely: “You know how real was that illusion of a beautiful body. Yet we saw it dissolve in the true reality of the flames. It had seemed as veritable as the dolls, Ricori—”

Again he interrupted me: “The stab in my heart… the doll that killed Gilmore… the doll that murdered Braile… the blessed doll that slew the witch! You call them illusions?”

I answered, a little sullenly, the old incredulity suddenly strong within me: “It is entirely possible that, obeying a post-hypnotic command of the doll-maker, you, yourself, thrust the dagger-pin into your own heart! It is possible that obeying a similar command, given when and where and how I do not know, Peters’ sister, herself, killed her husband. The chandelier fell on Braile when I was, admittedly, under the influence of those same post-hypnotic influences – and it is possible that it was a sliver of glass that cut his carotid. As for the doll-maker’s own death, apparently at the hands of the Walters doll, well, it is also possible that the abnormal mind of Madame Mandilip was, at times, the victim of the same illusions she induced in the minds of others. The doll-maker was a mad genius, governed by a morbid compulsion to surround herself with the effigies of those she had killed by the unguent. Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre, carried constantly with her the embalmed hearts of a dozen or more lovers who had died for her. She had not slain those men – but she knew she had been the cause of their deaths as surely as though she had strangled them with her own hands. The psychological principle involved in Queen Marguerite’s collection of hearts and Madame Mandilip’s collection of dolls is one and the same.”

He had not sat down; still in that strained voice he repeated: “I asked you if you called the killing of the witch an illusion.”

I said: “You make it very uncomfortable for me, Ricori – staring at me like that… and I am answering your question. I repeat it is possible that in her own mind she was at times the victim of the same illusions she induced in the minds of others. That at times she, herself, thought the dolls were alive. That in this strange mind was conceived a hatred for the doll of Walters. And, at the last, under the irritation of our attack, this belief reacted upon her. That thought was in my mind when, a while ago, I said it was curious that you should speak of the dark wisdom turning against those who possessed it. She tormented the doll; she expected the doll to avenge itself if it had the opportunity. So strong was this belief, or expectation, that when the favorable moment arrived, she dramatized it. Her thought became action! The doll-maker, like you, may well have plunged the dagger-pin into her own throat—”

“You fool!”

The words came from Ricori’s mouth – and yet it was so like Madame Mandilip speaking in her haunted room and speaking through the dead lips of Laschna that I dropped back into my chair, shuddering.

Ricori was leaning over the table. His black eyes were blank, expressionless. I cried out, sharply, a panic shaking me: “Ricori – wake—”

The dreadful blankness in his eyes flicked away; their gaze sharpened, was intent upon me. He said, again in his own voice:

“I am awake, I am so awake – that I will listen to you no more! Instead – listen, you to me, Dr. Lowell. I say to you – to hell with your science! I tell you this – that beyond the curtain of the material at which your vision halts, there are forces and energies that hate us, yet which God in his inscrutable wisdom permits to be. I tell you that these powers can reach through the veil of matter and become manifest in creatures like the doll-maker. It is so! Witches and sorcerers hand in hand with evil! It is so! And there are powers friendly to us which make themselves manifest in their chosen ones.

“I say to you – Madame Mandilip was an accursed witch! An instrument of the evil powers! Whore of Satan! She burned as a witch should burn in hell – forever! I say to you that the little nurse was an instrument of the good powers. And she is happy today in Paradise – as she shall be forever!”

He was silent, trembling with his own fervor. He touched my shoulder:

“Tell me, Dr. Lowell – tell me as truthfully as though you stood before the seat of God, believing in Him as I believe – do those scientific explanations of yours truly satisfy you?”

I answered, very quietly:

“No, Ricori.”

Nor do they.

— THE END —

Serialized in 6 parts
Argosy Weekly, 22 Oct-26 Nov 1932

Reprinted in
Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Jun 1942

First US book edition:
Liveright Inc., New York, 1933

First UK book edition:
Methuen & Co., Ltd., London, 1934

CREEP,  SHADOW!

— I —

FOUR SUICIDES

I unpacked my bags at the Explorers’ Club gloomily enough. The singularly unpleasant depression with which I had awakened in my berth the night before had refused to be shaken off. It was like the echo of some nightmare whose details I had forgotten but which still lurked just over the threshold of consciousness.

Joined to it was another irritation.

Of course I had not expected any Mayor’s Committee to welcome me home. But that neither Bennett nor Ralston had met me began to assume the aspect of a major tragedy of neglect. I had written to both before sailing, and I had looked for one of them, at least, to be on the dock to meet me.

They were the closest friends I had, and the queer current of hostility between them had often amused me. They thoroughly liked, yet as thoroughly disapproved of, each other. I had the idea that away down under they were closer each to the other than to me; that they might have been Damon and Pythias if each hadn’t so disliked the other’s attitude toward life; and maybe were Damon and Pythias despite it.

Old Aesop formulated their discordance centuries ago in his fable of the Ant and the Cricket. Bill Bennett was the Ant. The serious-minded, hard-working son of Dr. Lionel Bennett, until recently one of the modern, civilized world’s five outstanding experts upon brain pathology. I make the distinction of modern and civilized because I have had proof that what we are pleased to call the uncivilized world has many more such experts, and I have good reason to believe that the ancient world had others much further advanced than those of the modern world, civilized or uncivilized.

Bennett, the elder, had been one of the few specialists whose mind turned upon his work rather than his bank account. Distinguished but poor. Bennett, the younger, was about thirty-five, my own age. I knew that his father had rested heavily upon him. I suspected that along some lines, and especially in the realm of the subconscious, the son had outstripped the sire; his mind more flexible, more open. Bill had written me a year ago that his father had died, and that he had associated himself with Dr. Austin Lowell, taking the place of Dr. David Braile who had been killed by a falling chandelier in Dr. Lowell’s private hospital. (See Burn, Witch, Burn.)

Dick Ralston was the Cricket. He was heir to a fortune so solid that even the teeth of the depression could only scratch it. Very much the traditional rich man’s son of the better sort, but seeing no honor, use, nor any joy or other virtue in labor. Happy-go-lucky, clever, generous – but decidedly a first-class idler.

I was the compromise – the bridge on which they could meet. I had my medical degree, but also I had enough money to save me from the grind of practice. Enough to allow me to do as I pleased – which was drifting around the world on ethnological research. Especially in those fields which my medical and allied scientific brethren call superstition – native sorceries, witchcraft, voodoo, and the like. In that research I was as earnest as Bill in his. And he knew it.

Dick, on the other hand, attributed my wanderings to an itching foot inherited from one of my old Breton forebears, a pirate who had sailed out of St. Malo and carved himself a gory reputation in the New World. And ultimately was hanged for it. The peculiar bent of my mind he likewise attributed to the fact that two of my ancestors had been burned as witches in Brittany.

I was perfectly understandable to him.

Bill’s industry was not so understandable.

I reflected, morosely, that even if I had been away for three years it was too short a time to be forgotten. And then I managed to shake off my gloom and to laugh at myself. After all, they might not have gotten my letters; or they might have had engagements they couldn’t break; and each might have thought the other would be on hand.

There was an afternoon newspaper on the bed. I noticed that it was of the day before. My eye fell upon some headlines. I stopped laughing. The headlines ran:

$5,000,000 COPPER HEIR KILLS HIMSELF

RICHARD J. RALSTON, JR.
PUTS BULLET THROUGH HEAD

No Reason Known for Act – Fourth New York Man of Wealth to Take His Life Without Apparent Cause in Last Three Months – Police Hint Suicide Club.

I read the story:

Richard J. Ralston, Jr., who inherited some $5,000,000 when his father, rich mine owner, died two years ago, was found dead in his bed this morning in a bedroom of his house on 78th Street. He had shot himself through the head, dying instantly. The pistol with which he had killed himself was lying on the floor where it had fallen from his hand. The Detective Bureau identified the finger marks on it as his own.

Discovery was made by his butler, John Simpson, who said that he had gone into the room about 8 o’clock, following his usual custom. From the condition of the body Dr. Peabody, of the coroner’s office, estimated that Ralston must have shot himself about three o’clock, or approximately five hours before Simpson found him.

Three o’clock? I felt a little prickling along my spine. Allowing for the difference between ship time and New York time, that was precisely when I had awakened with that strange depression. I read on:

If Simpson’s story is true, and the police see no reason to doubt it, the suicide could not have been premeditated and must have been the result of some sudden overmastering impulse. This seems to be further indicated by the discovery of a letter Ralston had started to write, and torn up without finishing. The scraps of it were found under a desk in the bedroom where he had tossed them. The letter read:

“Dear Bill.

“Sorry I couldn’t stay any longer. I wish you would think of the matter as objective and not subjective, no matter how incredible such a thing may seem. If Alan were only here. He knows more—”

At this point Ralston had evidently changed his mind and torn up the letter. The police would like to know who ‘Alan’ is and have him explain what it is that he ‘knows more’ about. They also hope that the ‘Bill’ to whom it was to have been sent will identify himself. There is not the slightest doubt as to the case being one of suicide, but it is possible that whatever it was that was ‘objective and not subjective, no matter how incredible’ may throw some light on the motive.

At present absolutely no reason appears to exist to explain why Mr. Ralston should have taken his life. His attorneys, the well-known firm of Winston, Smith & White, have assured the police that his estate is in perfect order, and that there were no ‘complications’ in their client’s life. It is a fact that unlike so many sons of rich men, no scandal has ever been attached to Ralston’s name.

This is the fourth suicide within three months of men of wealth of approximately Ralston’s age, and of comparatively the same habits of life. Indeed, in each of the four cases the circumstances are so similar that the police are seriously contemplating the possibility of a suicide pact.

The first of the four deaths occurred on July 15, when John Marston, internationally known polo player, shot himself through the head in his bedroom in his country house at Locust Valley, Long Island. No cause for his suicide has ever come to light. Like Ralston, he was unmarried. On August 6, the body of Walter St. Clair Calhoun was found in his roadster near Riverhead, Long Island. Calhoun had driven his car off the main road, here heavily shaded by trees, into the middle of an open field. There he had put a bullet through his brains. No one ever discovered why. He had been divorced for three years. On August 21, Richard Stanton, millionaire yachtsman and globe-trotter, shot himself through the head while on the deck of his ocean-going yacht Trinculo. This happened the night before he was about to set out on a cruise to South America.

I read on and on… the speculations as to the suicide pact, supposedly entered into because of boredom and morbid thrill-hunger… the histories of Marston, Calhoun, and Stanton… Dick’s obituary…

I read, only half understanding what it was I read. I kept thinking that it couldn’t be true.

There was no reason why Dick should kill himself. In all the world there was no man less likely to kill himself. The theory of the suicide pact was absurdly fantastic, at least so far as he was concerned. I was the ‘Alan’ of the letter, of course. And Bennett was the ‘Bill.’ But what was it I knew that had made Dick wish for me?

The telephone buzzed, and the operator said: “Dr. Bennett to see you.”

I said: “Send him up.” And to myself: “Thank God!”

Bill came in. He was white and drawn, and more like a man still in the midst of a stiff ordeal than one who has passed through it. His eyes held a puzzled horror, as though he were looking less at me than within his mind at whatever was the source of that horror. He held a hand out, absently, and all he said was: “I’m glad you’re back, Alan.”

I had the newspaper in my other hand. He took it and looked at the date. He said: “Yesterday’s. Well, it’s all there. All that the police know, anyway.”

He had said that rather oddly; I asked: “Do you mean you know something that the police don’t?”

He answered, evasively I thought: “Oh, they’ve got their facts all straight. Dick put the bullet through his brain. They’re right in linking up those other three deaths—”

I repeated: “What do you know that the police don’t know, Bill?”

He said: “That Dick was murdered!”

I looked at him, bewildered. “But if he put the bullet through his own brain—”

He said: “I don’t blame you for being puzzled. Nevertheless – I know Dick Ralston killed himself, and yet I know just as certainly that he was murdered.”

He sat down upon the bed; he said: “I need a drink.”

I brought out the bottle of Scotch the club steward had thoughtfully placed in my room for homecoming welcome. He poured himself a stiff one. He repeated:

“I’m glad you’re back! We’ve got a tough job ahead of us, Alan.”

I poured myself a drink; I asked: “What is it? To find Dick’s murderer?”

He answered: “That, yes. But more than that. To stop more murders.”

I poured him and myself another drink; I said: “Quit beating about the bush and tell me what it’s all about.”

He looked at me, thoughtfully; he answered, quietly: “No, Alan. Not yet.” He put down his glass. “Suppose you had discovered a new bug, an unknown germ – or thought you had. And had studied it and noted its peculiarities. And suppose you wanted someone to check up. What would you do – give him all your supposed observations first, and then ask him to look into the microscope to verify them? Or simply give him an outline and ask him to look into the microscope and find out for himself?”

“Outline and find out for himself, of course.”

“Exactly. Well, I think I have such a new bug – or a very old one, although it has nothing whatever to do with germs. But I’m not going to tell you any more about it until I put your eye to the microscope. I want your opinion uncolored by mine. Send out for a paper, will you?”

I called the office and told them to get me one of the latest editions. When it came, Bill took it. He glanced over the first page, then turned the sheets until he came to what he was looking for. He read it, and nodded, and passed the paper to me.

“Dick’s reduced from page one to page five,” he said. “But I’ve gotten it over. Read the first few paragraphs – all the rest is rehash and idle conjecture. Very idle.”

I read:

Dr. William Bennett, the eminent brain specialist and associate of Dr. Austin Lowell, the distinguished psychiatrist, visited Police Headquarters this morning and identified himself as the ‘Bill’ of the unfinished letter found in the bedroom of Richard J. Ralston, Jr., after the latter’s suicide yesterday morning.

Dr. Bennett said that undoubtedly the letter had been meant for him, that Mr. Ralston had been one of his oldest friends and had recently consulted him for what he might describe roughly as insomnia and bad dreams. Mr. Ralston had, in fact, been his guest at dinner the night before. He had wanted Mr. Ralston to spend the night with him, but after consenting, he had changed his mind and gone home to sleep. That was what he had referred to in the opening sentence of his letter. Professional confidence prevented Dr. Bennett from going into further description of Mr. Ralston’s symptoms. Asked whether the mental condition of Mr. Ralston might explain why he had killed himself, Dr. Bennett guardedly replied that suicide was always the result of some mental condition.

In spite of my perplexity and sorrow, I couldn’t help smiling at that.

The “Alan” referred to in the letter, Dr. Bennett said, is Dr. Alan Caranac, who was also an old friend of Mr. Ralston, and who is due in New York today on the Augustus after three years in Northern Africa. Dr. Caranac is well-known in scientific circles for his ethnological researches. Dr. Bennett said that Mr. Ralston had thought that some of his symptoms might be explained by Dr. Caranac because of the latter’s study of certain obscure mental aberrations among primitive peoples.

“Now for the kicker,” said Bill, and pointed to the next paragraph:

Dr. Bennett talked freely with the reporters after his statement to the police, but could add no essential facts beyond those he had given them. He did say that Mr. Ralston had withdrawn large sums in cash from his accounts during the two weeks before his death, and that there was no evidence of what had become of them. He seemed immediately to regret that he had given this information, saying that the circumstance could have no bearing upon Mr. Ralston’s suicide. He reluctantly admitted, however, that the sum might be well over $100,000, and that the police were investigating.

I said: “That looks like blackmail – if it’s true.”

He said: “I haven’t the slightest proof that it is true. But it’s what I told the police and the reporters.”

He read the paragraph over again and arose.

“The reporters will soon be here, Alan,” he said. “And the police. I’m going. You haven’t seen me. You haven’t the slightest idea of what it’s all about. You haven’t heard from Ralston for a year. Tell them that when you get in touch with me, you may have something more to say. But now – you don’t know anything. And that’s true – you don’t. That’s your story, and you stick to it.”

He walked to the door. I said:

“Wait a minute, Bill. What’s the idea behind that bunch of words I’ve just read?”

He said: “It’s a nicely baited hook.”

I said: “What do you expect to hook?”

He said: “Dick’s murderer.”

He turned at the door: “And something else that’s right down your alley. A witch.”

He shut the door behind him.

— II —

THE DEMOISELLE DAHUT

Not long after Bill had gone, a man from the Detective Bureau visited me. It was evident that he regarded the call as waste motion; just a part of the routine. His questions were perfunctory, nor did he ask me if I had seen Bennett. I produced the Scotch and he mellowed. He said:

“Hell, if it ain’t one thing it’s another. If you ain’t got money you wear yourself out tryin’ to get it. If you got it, then somebody’s tryin’ all the time to rob you. Or else you go nuts like this poor guy and then what good is your money? This Ralston wasn’t a bad guy at that, I hear.”

I agreed. He took another drink and left.

Three reporters came; one from the City News and the others from afternoon papers. They asked few questions about Dick, but showed flattering interest in my travels. I was so relieved that I sent for a second bottle of Scotch and told them a few stories about the mirror-magic of the Riff women, who believe that at certain times and under certain conditions they can catch the reflections of those they love or hate in their mirrors, and so have power thereafter over their souls.

The City News man said that if he could get the Riff women to teach him that trick, he could lift all the mirror-makers in America out of the depression and get rich doing it. The other two morosely agreed that they knew some editors whose reflections they’d like to catch. I laughed and said it would be easier to bring over a good old-fashioned Bulgarian mason or two. Then all they need do was to get the mason a job, decoy the editor to the place and have the mason measure his shadow with a string. After that, the mason would put the string in a box and build the box in the wall. In forty days the editor would be dead and his soul be sitting in the box beside the string.

One of the afternoon men glumly said that forty days would be too long to wait for the ones he had in mind. But the other asked, with disarming naivete, whether I believed such a thing possible. I answered that if a man were strongly enough convinced he would die on a certain day, he would die on that day. Not because his shadow had been measured and the string buried, but because he believed that this was going to kill him. It was purely a matter of suggestion – of auto-hypnosis. Like the praying to death practiced by the kahunas, the warlocks of the South Seas, of the results of which there was no doubt whatever. Always providing, of course, that the victim knew the kahuna was praying his death – and the exact time his death was to occur.

I ought to have known better. The morning papers carried only a few lines to the effect that I had talked to the police and had been unable to throw any light on the Ralston suicide. But the early editions of the naive reporter’s paper featured a special article.

WANT TO GET RID OF YOUR ENEMIES?

GET A RIFF GAL’S MAGIC MIRROR—
OR BRING IN A BULGARIAN MASON.

Dr. Alan Caranac, Noted Explorer, Tells How to Separate Yourself Safely from Those You Don’t Want Around – But the Catch Is That First You Have to Make ’Em Believe You Can Do It.

It was a good story, even if it did make me swear in spots. I read it over again and laughed. After all, I’d brought it on myself. The ’phone rang, and Bill was on the line. He asked abruptly:

“What put it in your head to talk to that reporter about shadows?”

He sounded jumpy. I said, surprised:

“Nothing. Why shouldn’t I have talked to him about shadows?”

He didn’t answer for a moment. Then he asked:

“Nothing happened to direct your mind to that subject? Nobody suggested it?”

“You’re getting curiouser and curiouser, as Alice puts it. But no, Bill, I brought the matter up all by myself. And no shadow fell upon me whispering in my ear—”

He interrupted, harshly: “Don’t talk like that!”

And now I was truly surprised, for there was panic in Bill’s voice, and that wasn’t like him at all.

“There really wasn’t any reason. It just happened,” I repeated. “What’s it all about, Bill?”

“Never mind now.” I wondered even more at the relief in his voice. He swiftly changed the subject: “Dick’s funeral is tomorrow. I’ll see you there.”

Now the one thing I won’t be coerced or persuaded into doing is to go to the funeral of a friend. Unless there are interesting and unfamiliar rites connected with it, it’s senseless. There lies a piece of cold meat for the worms, grotesquely embellished by the undertaker’s cosmetic arts. Sunken eyes that never more will dwell upon the beauty of the clouds, the sea, the forest. Ears shut forever, and all the memories of life rotting away within the decaying brain. Painted and powdered symbol of life’s futility. I want to remember friends as they were alive, alert, capable, eager. The coffin picture superimposes itself, and I lose my friends. The animals order things much better, to my way of thinking. They hide themselves and die. Bill knew how I felt, so I said:

“You’ll not see me there.” To shut off any discussion, I asked:

“Had any nibble at your witch bait?”

“Yes and no. Not the real strike I’m hoping for, but attention from unexpected quarters. Dick’s lawyers called me up after I’d left you and asked what he had told me about those cash withdrawals. They said they’d been trying to find out what he had done with the money, but couldn’t. They wouldn’t believe me, of course, when I said I knew absolutely nothing; that I had only vague suspicions and had tried a shot in the dark. I don’t blame them. Stanton’s executor called me up this morning to ask the same thing. Said Stanton had drawn substantial amounts of cash just before he died, and they hadn’t been able to trace it.”

I whistled:

“That’s queer. How about Calhoun and Marston? If they did the same, it’ll begin to smell damned fishy.”

“I’m trying to find out,” he said. “Good-by—”

“Wait a minute, Bill,” I said. “I’m a good waiter, and all of that. But I’m getting mighty curious. When do I see you, and what do you want me to do in the meantime?”

When he answered his voice was as grave as I’d ever heard it.

“Alan, sit tight until I can lay the cards before you. I don’t want to say more now, but trust me, there’s a good reason. I’ll tell you one thing, though. That interview of yours is another hook – and I’m not sure it isn’t baited even better than mine.”

That was on Tuesday. Obviously, I was puzzled and curious to a degree. So much so that if it had been anybody but Bill who had sat me down in my little corner chair and told me to be quiet, I would have been exceedingly angry. But Bill knew what he was about – I was sure of that. So I stayed put.

On Wednesday, Dick was buried. I went over my notes and started the first chapter of my book on Moroccan sorceries. Thursday night, Bill called up.

“There’s a small dinner party at Dr. Lowell’s tomorrow night,” he said. “A Dr. de Keradel and his daughter. I want you to come. I’ll promise you’ll be interested.”

De Keradel? The name had a familiar sound. “Who is he?” I asked.

“Rene de Keradel, the French psychiatrist. You must have read some of his—”

“Yes, of course,” I interrupted. “He took up some of Charcot’s hypnotic experiments at the Salpetriere, didn’t he? Carried them on from the point where Charcot had stopped. Left the Salpetriere under a cloud some years ago. Subjects died, or he was too unorthodox in his conclusions, or something?”

“That’s the chap.”

I said: “I’ll be there. I’d like to meet him.”

“Good,” said Bill. “Dinner’s at 7:30. Wear your dinner jacket. And come an hour ahead of time. There’s a girl who wants to talk to you before the company comes, as we used to say.”

“A girl?” I asked, astonished.

“Helen,” said Bill with a chuckle. “And don’t you disappoint her. You’re her hero.” He hung up.

Helen was Bill’s sister. About ten years younger than I. I hadn’t seen her for fifteen years. An impish sort of kid, I recalled. Eyes sort of slanting and yellow brown. Hair a red torch. Gawky when I saw her last and inclined to be fat. Used to follow me around when I was visiting Bill during college vacations, and sit and stare at me without speaking until it made me so nervous I stuttered. Never could tell whether it was silent adoration or sheer deviltry. That was when she was about twelve. Nor could I forget how she had led me, apparently innocently, to sit on a subterranean nest of hornets; nor the time when, going to bed, I had found it shared by a family of garter snakes. The first might have been an accident, although I had my doubts, but the second wasn’t. I had dumped the snakes out the window and never by word, look, or gesture referred to it, having my reward in the child’s bafflement at my reticence and her avid but necessarily mute curiosity. I knew she had gone through Smith and had been studying art in Florence. I wondered what she had grown to be.

I read over some of de Keradel’s papers at the Academy of Medicine Library next day. He was a queer bird without doubt, with some extraordinarily arresting theories. I didn’t wonder that the Salpetriere had eased him out. Stripped of their scientific verbiage, the framework of his main idea was startlingly like that expounded to me by the Many-Times-Born Abbot of the Lamasery at Gyang-tse, in Tibet. A holy man and an accomplished wonder-worker, a seeker of knowledge along strange paths, what would be loosely called by the superstitious – a sorcerer. Also by a Greek priest near Delphi whose Christian cloak covered a pure case of pagan atavism. He offered to demonstrate his hypothesis, and did. He nearly convinced me. Indeed, visualizing again what he had made me see, I was not sure that he hadn’t convinced me.

I began to feel a strong interest in this Dr. de Keradel. The name was Breton, like my own, and as unusual. Another recollection flitted through my mind. There was a reference to the de Keradels in the chronicles of the de Carnacs, as we were once named. I looked it up. There had been no love lost between the two families, to put it mildly. Altogether, what I read blew my desire to meet Dr. de Keradel up to fever point.

I was half an hour late getting to Dr. Lowell’s. The butler showed me into the library. A girl got up from a big chair and came toward me with hand outstretched.

“Hello, Alan,” she said.

I blinked at her. She wasn’t so tall, but her body had all the lovely contours the sculptors of Athens’ Golden Age gave their dancing girls. The provocative dress of filmy black she wore hid none of them. Her hair was burnished copper and helmeted her small head. The heavy chignon at the nape of her neck showed she had resisted the bob. Her eyes were golden amber, and tilted delicately. Her nose was small and straight and her chin rounded. Her skin was not the creamy white that so often goes with red heads, but a delicate golden. It was a head and face that might have served as the model for one of Alexander’s finest golden coins. Faintly archaic, touched with the antique beauty. I blinked again. I blurted:

“You’re never – Helen!”

Her eyes sparkled, the impishness that my experience with the hornets had set indelibly in my memory danced over her face. She took my hands, and swayed close to me; she sighed:

“The same, Alan! The same! And you – oh, let me look at you! Yes, still the hero of my girlhood! The same keen, dark face – like – like – I used to call you Lancelot of the Lake, Alan – to myself of course. The same lithe, tall, and slender body – I used to call you the Black Panther, too, Alan. And do you remember how like a panther you leaped when the hornets stung you?” She bent her head, her rounded shoulders shaking. I said: “You little devil! I always knew you did that deliberately.”

She said, muffled:

“I’m not laughing, Alan. I’m sobbing.”

She looked up at me, and her eyes were indeed wet, but I was sure not with any tears of regret. She said:

“Alan, for long, long years I’ve waited to know something. Waited to hear you tell me something. Not to tell me that you love me, darling – No, No! I always knew that you were going to do that, sooner or later. This is something else!”

I was laughing, but I had a queer mixed feeling, too.

I said:

“I’ll tell you anything. Even that I love you – and maybe mean it.”

She said:

“Did you find those snakes in your bed? Or did they crawl out before you got in?”

I said again: “You little devil!”

She said:

“But were they there?”

“Yes, they were.”

She sighed contentedly:

“Well, there’s one complex gone forever. Now I know. You were so damned superior at times I just couldn’t help it.”

She held her face up to me:

“Since you’re going to love me, Alan, you might as well kiss me.”

I kissed her, properly. She might have been fooling with me about having been her girlhood hero, but there was no fooling about my kiss – nor the way she responded to it. She shivered and laid her head on my shoulder. She said, dreamily: “And there’s another complex gone. Where am I going to stop?”

Somebody coughed at the doorway. Somebody else murmured, apologetically: “Ah, but we intrude.”

Helen dropped her arms from around my neck, and we turned. In a way, I realized that the butler and another man were standing at the door. But all I could focus my eyes upon was the girl – or woman.

You know how it is when you’re riding in the subway, or at the theater, or at a race track and suddenly one face, for some reason or no reason, thrusts itself out from the crowd, and it’s as though your mental spotlight were turned on it and every other face gets misty and recedes into the background. That often happens to me. Something in the face that stirs some old forgotten memory, no doubt. Or stirs the memory of our ancestors whose ghosts are always peering through our eyes. Seeing this girl was like that, only far more so. I couldn’t see anything else – not even Helen.

She had the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen, or rather eyes of a curious deep violet. They were big and unusually wide apart, with long curling black lashes and slimly penciled black eyebrows that almost met above her high-arched but delicately modeled nose. You felt, rather than saw, their color. Her forehead was broad, but whether it was low I could not tell, for it was coiffed with braids of palest gold, and there were little ends of hair that curled up all over her head, and they were so fine and silken that the light in the hall shining through them made a queer silver-gilt aureole around her head. Her mouth was a bit large, but beautifully formed and daintily sensuous. Her skin was a miracle, white, but vital – as though moon fires shone behind it.

She was tall almost as I, exquisitely curved, deep bosomed. Her breasts echoed the betrayal of her lips. Her head and face and shoulders came like a lily out of the calyx of a shimmering sea-green gown.

She was exquisite – but I had swift understanding that there was nothing heavenly about the blue of her eyes. And nothing saintly about the aureole about her head.

She was perfection – and I felt a swift hatred against her, understanding, as the pulse of it passed, how one could slash a painting that was a masterpiece of beauty, or take a hammer and destroy a statue that was another such masterpiece if it evoked such hatred as that which I, for that fleeting moment, felt.

Then I thought:

Do I hate you – or do I fear you?

It was all, mind you, in a breath.

Helen was moving by me, hand outstretched. There was no confusion about Helen. Our embrace that had been interrupted might have been a simple handshake. She said, smiling and gracious:

“I am Helen Bennett. Dr. Lowell asked me to receive you. You are Dr. de Keradel, aren’t you?”

I looked at the man who was bending over her hand, kissing it. He straightened, and I felt a queer shock of bewilderment. Bill had said I was to meet Dr. de Keradel and his daughter. But this man looked no I older than the girl – if she was his daughter. True, the silver in the gold of his hair was a little paler; true, the blue of his eyes had not the violet-purple of hers…

I thought: But neither of them has any age! And on top of that I thought, rather savagely: What the hell’s the matter with me anyway?

The man said:

“I am Dr. de Keradel. And this is my daughter.”

The girl – or woman – seemed now to be regarding both Helen and me with faint amusement. Dr. de Keradel said with, I thought, curious precision:

“The Demoiselle Dahut d’Ys,” he hesitated, then finished – “de Keradel.”

Helen said:

“And this is Dr. Alan Caranac.”

I was looking at the girl – or woman. The name of Dahut d’Ys fingered half-forgotten chords of memory. And as Helen named me, I saw the violet eyes dilate, become enormous, the straight brows contract until they met above the nose in a slender bar. I felt the glance of her eyes strike and encompass me. She seemed to be seeing me for the first time. And in her eyes was something threatening – possessive. Her body tensed. She said, as though to herself: “Alain de Carnac…?”

She glanced from me to Helen. There was calculation in that glance, appraisal. Contemptuous indifference, too – if I read it aright. A queen might so have looked upon some serving wench who had dared to lift eyes to her lover.

Whether I read the glance aright or not, Helen evidently got something of the same thought. She turned to me and said sweetly:

“Darling, I’m ashamed of you. Wake up!”

With the side of her little high-heeled slipper she gave me a surreptitious and vigorous kick on the shin.

Just then Bill came in, and with him a dignified, white-haired gentleman I knew must be Dr. Lowell.

I don’t know when I had ever been so glad to see Bill.

— III —

THEORIES
OF DR. DE KERADEL

I gave Bill the old fraternity high-sign of distress, and after introductions he bore me away, leaving the Demoiselle Dahut to Helen and Dr. de Keradel with Dr. Lowell. I felt an urgent need for a drink, and said so. Bill passed me the brandy and soda without comment. I drank a stiff brandy neat.

Helen had bowled me off my feet, but that had been a pleasant upset, nothing that called for any alcoholic lever to right me. The Demoiselle Dahut had been an entirely different matter. She was damned disconcerting. It occurred to me that if you compared yourself to a ship bowling along under full sail, with your mind as a capable navigator and through charted seas, Helen was a squall that fitted normally into the picture – but the Demoiselle was a blow from a new quarter entirely, heading the ship into totally strange waters. What you knew of navigation wouldn’t help you a bit.

I said:

“Helen could blow you into Port o’ Paradise but the other could blow you into Port o’ Hell.”

Bill didn’t say anything, only watched me. I poured a second brandy. Bill said, mildly:

“There’ll be cocktails and wine at dinner.”

I said: “Fine,” and drank the brandy.

I thought:

It’s not her infernal beauty that’s got me going. But why the hell did I hate her so when I first saw her?

I didn’t hate her now. All I felt was a burning curiosity. But why did I have that vague sense of having long known her? And that not so vague idea that she knew me better than I did her? I muttered:

“She makes you think of the sea, at that.”

Bill said: “Who?”

I said: “The Demoiselle d’Ys.”

He stepped back; he said, as though something was strangling him:

“Who’s the Demoiselle d’Ys?”

I looked at him, suspiciously; I said: “Don’t you know the names of your guests? That girl down there – the Demoiselle Dahut d’Ys de Keradel.”

Bill said, rather dumbly:

“No, I didn’t know that. All Lowell introduced her by was the de Keradel part of it.”

After a minute, he said: “Probably another drink won’t hurt you. I’ll join you.”

We drank; he said, casually:

“Never met them till tonight. De Keradel called on Lowell yesterday morning – as one eminent psychiatrist upon another. Lowell was interested, and invited him and his daughter to dinner. The old boy is fond of Helen, and ever since she came back to town she’s been hostess at his parties. She’s very fond of him, too.”

He drank his brandy and set down the glass. He said, still casually:

“I understand de Keradel has been here for a year or more. Apparently, though, he never got around to visiting us until those interviews of mine and yours appeared.”

I jumped up as the implication of that struck me. I said:

“You mean—”

“I don’t mean anything. I simply point out the coincidence.”

“But if they had anything to do with Dick’s death, why would they risk coming here?”

“To find out how much we know – if anything.” He hesitated. “It may mean nothing. But – it’s precisely the sort of thing I thought might happen when I baited my hook. And de Keradel and his daughter don’t exactly disqualify as the sort of fish I expected to catch – and especially now I know about the d’Ys part. Yes – especially.”

He came round the table and put his hands on my shoulders:

“Alan, what I’m thinking wouldn’t seem as insane to you, maybe, as it does to me. It’s not Alice in Wonderland, but Alice in Devil-land. I want you tonight to say anything that comes into your head. Just that. Don’t be held back by politeness, or courtesy, or conventions or anything else. If what you want to say is insulting – let it be so. Don’t bother about what Helen may think. Forget Lowell. Say whatever comes into your mind. If de Keradel makes any assertions with which you don’t agree, don’t listen politely – challenge him. If it makes him lose his temper, all the better. Be just alcoholic enough to slip out of any inhibitions of courtesy. You talk, I listen. Do you get it?”

I laughed and said:

“In vino veritas. But your idea is to make my vino bring out the veritas in the other party. Sound psychology. All right, Bill, I’ll take another small one.”

He said: “You know your limit. But watch your step.”

We went down to dinner. I was feeling interested, amused, and devil-may-care. The image I had of the Demoiselle was simplified to a mist of silver-gold hair over two splotches of purple-blue in a white face. On the other hand, Helen’s was still the sharp-cut antique coin. We sat down at table. Dr. Lowell was at the head, at his left de Keradel, and at his right the Demoiselle Dahut. Helen sat beside de Keradel and I beside the Demoiselle. Bill sat between me and Helen. It was a nicely arranged table, with tall candles instead of electrics. The butler brought cocktails and they were excellent. I lifted mine to Helen and said:

“You are a lovely antique coin, Helen. Alexander the Great minted you. Someday I will put you in my pocket.”

Dr. Lowell looked a bit startled. But Helen clinked glasses and murmured:

“You will never lose me, will you, darling?”

I said:

“No, sweetheart, nor will I give you away, nor let anybody steal you, my lovely antique coin.”

There was the pressure of a soft shoulder against me. I looked away from Helen and straight into the eyes of the Demoiselle. They weren’t just purple-blue splotches now. They were the damnedest eyes – big, and clear as a tropic shoal and little orchid sparks darted through them like the play of the sun through a tropic shoal when you turn over and look up through the clear water.

I said:

“Demoiselle Dahut – why do you make me think of the sea? I have seen the Mediterranean the exact color of your eyes. And the crests of the waves were as white as your skin. And there was seaweed like your hair. Your fragrance is the fragrance of the sea, and you walk like a wave—”

Helen drawled:

“How poetic you are, darling. Perhaps you’d better eat your soup before you take another cocktail.”

I said:

“Sweetheart, you are my antique coin. But you are not yet in my pocket. Nor am I in yours. I will have another cocktail before I eat my soup.”

She flushed at that. I felt bad about saying it. But I caught a glance from Bill that heartened me. And the Demoiselle’s eyes would have repaid me for any remorse – if I hadn’t just then felt stir that inexplicable hot hatred, and knew quite definitely now that fear did lurk within it. She laid her hand lightly on mine. It had a curious tingling warmth. At the touch, the strange repulsion vanished. I realized her beauty with an almost painful acuteness. She said:

“You love the old things. It is because you are of the ancient blood – the blood of Armorica. Do you remember—”

My cocktail went splashing to the floor. Bill said:

“Oh, I beg your pardon, Alan. That was awkward of me. Briggs, bring Dr. Caranac another.”

I said:

“That’s all right, Bill.”

I hoped I said it easily, because deep in me was anger, wondering how long it had been between that “remember” of the Demoiselle’s and the overturning of my glass. When she had said it, the tingling warmth of her had seemed to concentrate itself into a point of fire, a spark that shot up my arm into my brain. And instead of the pleasant candle-lighted room, I saw a vast plain covered with huge stones arranged in ordered aisles all marching to a central circle of monoliths within which was a gigantic cairn. I knew it to be Carnac, that place of mystery of the Druids and before them of a forgotten people, from which my family had derived its name, changed only by the addition of a syllable during the centuries. But it was not the Carnac I had known when in Brittany. This place was younger; its standing stones upright, in place; not yet gnawed by the teeth of untold centuries. There were people, hundreds of them, marching along the avenues to the monolithed circle. And although I knew that it was daylight, a blackness seemed to hover over the crypt that was the circle’s heart. Nor could I see the ocean. Where it should have been, and far away, were tall towers of gray and red stone, misty outlines of walls as of a great city. And as I stood there, long and long it seemed to me, slowly the fear crept up my heart like a rising tide. With it crept, side by side, cold, implacable hatred and rage.

I had heard Bill speaking – and was back in the room. The fear was gone. The wrath had remained.

I looked into the face of the Demoiselle Dahut. I thought I read triumph there, and a subtle amusement. I was quite sure of what had happened, and that there was no need of answering her interrupted question – if it had been interrupted. She knew. It was hypnotism of sorts, suggestion raised to the nth degree. I thought that if Bill were right in his suspicions, the Demoiselle Dahut had not been very wise to play a card like this so soon – either that, or damned sure of herself. I closed my mind quickly to that thought.

Bill, Lowell, and de Keradel were talking, Helen listening and watching me out of the corner of her eye. I whispered to the Demoiselle:

“I knew a witch-doctor down in Zululand who could do that same thing, Demoiselle de Keradel. He called the trick ‘sending out the soul.’ He was not so beautiful as you are; perhaps that is why he had to take so much more time to do it.”

I was about to add that she had been as swift as the striking of a deadly snake, but held that back.

She did not trouble to deny. She asked:

“Is that all you think – Alain de Carnac?”

I laughed:

“No, I think that your voice is also of the sea.”

And so it was; the softest, sweetest contralto I’d ever heard – low and murmurous and lulling, like the whisper of waves on a long smooth beach.

She said:

“But is that a compliment then? Many times you have compared me to the sea tonight. Is not the sea treacherous?”

“Yes,” I said, and let her make what she would of that answer. She did not seem offended.

The dinner went on with talk of this and that. It was a good dinner, and so was the wine. The butler kept my glass filled so faithfully that I wondered whether Bill had given him orders. The Demoiselle was cosmopolitan in her points of view, witty, undeniably charming – to use that much misused word. She had the gift of being able to be what her conversation implied she was. There was nothing exotic, nothing mysterious about her now. She was only a modern, well-informed, cultivated young woman of extraordinary beauty. Helen was delightful. There wasn’t a single thing for me to grow unpleasantly argumentative about, nor discourteous, nor insulting. I thought Bill was looking a bit puzzled; disconcerted – like a prophet who has foretold some happening which shows not the slightest sign of materializing. If de Keradel was interested in Dick’s death, there was nothing to show it. For some time Lowell and he had been absorbed in low-toned discussion to the exclusion of the rest of us. Suddenly I heard Lowell say:

“But surely you do not believe in the objective reality of such beings?”

The question brought me sharply to attention. I remembered Dick’s torn note – he had wanted Bill to consider something as objective instead of subjective; I saw that Bill was listening intently. The Demoiselle’s eyes were upon Lowell, faint amusement in them.

De Keradel answered:

“I know they are objective.”

Dr. Lowell asked, incredulously:

“You believe that these creatures, these demons – actually existed?”

“And still exist,” said de Keradel. “Reproduce the exact conditions under which those who had the ancient wisdom evoked these beings – forces, presences, powers, call them what you will – and the doors shall open and They come through. That Bright One the Egyptians named Isis will stand before us as of old, challenging us to lift Her veil. And that Dark Power stronger than She, whom the Egyptians named Set and Typhon, but who had another name in the shrines of an older and wiser race – It will make Itself manifest. Yes, Dr. Lowell, and still others will come through the opened doors to teach us, to counsel us, to aid and obey us—”

“Or to command us, my father,” said the Demoiselle, almost tenderly.

“Or to command us,” echoed de Keradel, mechanically; some of the color had drained from his face, and I thought there was fear in the glance he gave his daughter.

I touched Bill’s foot with mine, and felt an encouraging pressure. I raised my wine and squinted through it at de Keradel. I said, irritatingly explanatory:

“Dr. de Keradel is a true showman. If one provides the right theater, the right scenery, the right supporting cast, the right music and script and cues – the right demons or whatnot bounce out from the wings as the stars of the show. Well, I have seen some rather creditable illusions produced under such conditions. Real enough to deceive most amateurs—”

De Keradel’s eyes dilated; he half rose from his chair; he whispered:

“Amateur! Do you imply that I am an amateur?”

I said, urbanely, still looking at my glass:

“Not at all. I said you were a showman.”

He mastered his anger with difficulty; he said to Lowell:

“They are not illusions, Dr. Lowell. There is a pattern, a formula, to be observed. Is there anything more rigid than that formula by which the Catholic Church establishes communion with its God? The chanting, the prayers, the gestures – even the intonation of the prayers – all are fixed. Is not every ritual – Mohammedan, Buddhist, Shintoist, every act of worship throughout the world, in all religions – as rigidly prescribed? The mind of man recognizes that only by exact formula can it touch the minds that are not human. It is memory of an ancient wisdom, Dr. Caranac – but of that no more now. I tell you again that what comes upon my stage is not illusion.”

I asked: “How do you know?”

He answered, quietly: “I do know.”

Dr. Lowell said, placatingly: “Extremely strange, extremely realistic visions can be induced by combinations of sounds, odors, movements, and colors. There even seem to be combinations which can create in different subjects approximately the same visions – establish similar emotional rhythms. But I have never had evidence that these visions were anything but subjective.”

He paused, and I saw his hands clench, the knuckles whiten; he said, slowly:

“Except – once.”

De Keradel was watching him, the clenched hands could not have escaped his notice. He asked: “And that once?”

Lowell answered, with a curious harshness: “I have no evidence.”

De Keradel went on: “But there is another element in this evocation which is not of the stage – nor of the showman, Dr. Caranac. It is, to use a chemical term, a catalyst. The necessary element to bring about a required result – itself remaining untouched and unchanged. It is a human element – a woman or man or child – who is en rapport with the Being evoked. Of such was the Pythoness at Delphi, who upon her tripod threw herself open to the God and spoke with his voice. Of such were the Priestesses of Isis of the Egyptians, and of Ishtar of the Babylonians – themselves the one and the same. Of such was the Priestess of Hecate, Goddess of Hell, whose secret rites were lost until I rediscovered them. Of such was the warrior-king who was Priest of tentacled Khalk-ru, the Kraken God of the Uighurs, and of such was that strange priest at whose summoning came the Black God of the Scyths, in the form of a monstrous frog—”

Bill broke in:

“But these worships are of the far-distant past. Surely, none has believed in them for many a century. Therefore this peculiar line of priests and priestesses must long ago have died out. How today could one be found?”

I thought the Demoiselle shot de Keradel a warning look, and was about to speak. He ignored her, swept away by this idea that ruled him, forced to expound, to justify, it. He said:

“But you are wrong. They do live. They live in the brains of those who sprang from them. They sleep in the brains of their descendants. They sleep until one comes who knows how to awaken them. And to that awakener – what reward! Not the golden and glittering trash in the tomb of some Tut-ankh-Amen, not the sterile loot of some Genghis Khan, or of Attila… shining pebbles and worthless metal… playthings. But storehouses of memories, hives of knowledge – knowledge that sets its possessor so high above all other men that he is as a god.”

I said, politely:

“I’d like to be a god for a time. Where can I find such storehouse? Or open such hive? It would be worth a few stings to become a god.”

The veins throbbed in his temples; he said:

“You mock! Nevertheless, I will give you a hint. Once Dr. Charcot hypnotized a girl who had long been a subject of his experiments. He sent her deeper into the hypnotic sleep than ever he had dared before with any subject. Suddenly he heard another voice than hers coming from her throat. It was a man’s voice, the rough voice of a French peasant. He questioned that voice. It told him many things – things the girl could not possibly have known. The voice spoke of incidents of the Jacquerie. And the Jacquerie was six hundred years before. Dr. Charcot took down what that voice told him. Later, he investigated, minutely. He verified. He traced the girl’s parentage. She had come straight down from a leader of that peasant uprising. He tried again. He pushed past that voice to another. And this voice, a woman’s, told him of things that had happened a thousand years ago. Told them in intimate detail, as one who had been a spectator of these happenings. And again he investigated. And again he found that what the voice had told him was true.”

I asked, even more politely:

“And have we now arrived at transmigration of souls?”

He answered, violently:

“You dare to mock! What Charcot did was to pierce through veil upon veil of memory for a thousand years. I have gone further than that. I have gone back through the veils of memory not one thousand years. I have gone back ten thousand. I, de Keradel, tell you so.”

Lowell said:

“But Dr. de Keradel – memory is not carried by the germ plasm. Physical characteristics, weaknesses, predilections, coloration, shape, and so on – yes. The son of a violinist can inherit his father’s hands, his talent, his ear – but not the memory of the notes that his father played. Not his father’s memories.”

De Keradel said:

“You are wrong. Those memories can be carried. In the brain. Or rather, in that which uses the brain as its instrument. I do not say that everyone inherits these memories of their ancestors. Brains are not standardized. Nature is not a uniform workman. In some, the cells that carry these memories seem to be lacking. In others they are incomplete, blurred, having many hiatuses. But in others, a few, they are complete, the records clear, to be read like a printed book if the needle of consciousness, the eye of consciousness, can be turned upon them.”

He ignored me; to Dr. Lowell he said with intense earnestness:

“I tell you, Dr. Lowell, that this is so – in spite of all that has been written of the germ plasm, the chromosomes, the genes – the little carriers of heredity. I tell you that I have proved it to be so. And I tell you that there are minds in which are memories that go back and back to a time when man was not yet man. Back to the memories of his ape-like forefathers. Back further even than that – to the first amphibians who crawled out of the sea and began the long climb up the ladder of evolution to become what we are today.”

I had no desire now to interrupt, no desire to anger – the man’s intensity of belief was too strong. He said:

“Dr. Caranac has spoken, contemptuously, of the transmigration of souls. I say that man can imagine nothing that cannot be, and that he who speaks contemptuously of any belief is therefore an ignorant man. I say that it is this inheritance of memories which is at the bottom of the belief in reincarnation – perhaps the belief in immortality. Let me take an illustration from one of your modern toys – the phonograph. What we call consciousness is a needle that, running along the dimension of time, records upon certain cells its experiences. Quite as the recording needle of a phonograph does upon the master disks. It can run this needle back over these cells after they have been stored away, turning the graphs upon them into memories. Hearing again, seeing again, living again, the experiences recorded on them. Not always can the consciousness find one of these disks it seeks. Then we say that we have forgotten. Sometimes the graphs are not deep cut enough, the disks blurred – and then we say memory is hazy, incomplete.

“The ancestral memories, the ancient disks, are stored in another part of the brain, away from those that carry the memories of this life. Obviously this must be so, else there would be confusion, and the human animal would be hampered by intrusion of memories having no relation to his present environment. In the ancient days, when life was simpler and the environment not so complex, the two sets of memories were closer. That is why we say that ancient man relied more upon his ‘intuitions’ and less upon reason. That is why primitive men today do the same. But as time went on, and life grew more complex, those who depended less upon the ancestral memories than those which dealt with the problems of their own time – those were the ones with the better chance to survive. Once the cleavage had begun, it must perforce have continued rapidly – like all such evolutionary processes.

“Nature does not like to lose entirely anything it has once created. Therefore it is that at a certain stage of its development the human embryo has the gills of the fish, and at a later stage the hair of the ape. And, therefore, it is that in certain men and women today, these storehouses of ancient memories are fully stocked – to be opened, Dr. Caranac, and having been opened, to be read.”

I smiled and drank another glass of wine.

Lowell said:

“That is all strongly suggestive, Dr. de Keradel. If your theory is correct, then these inherited memories would without doubt appear as former lives to those who could recall them. They could be a basis of the doctrine of transmigration of souls, of reincarnation. How else could the primitive mind account for them?”

De Keradel said:

“They explain many things – the thought of the Chinese that unless a man has a son, he dies indeed. The folk saying – ‘A man lives in his children—’”

Lowell said:

“The new born bee knows precisely the law and duties of the hive. It does not have to be taught to fan, to clean, to mix the pollen and the nectar into the jellies that produce the queen and the drone, the different jelly that is placed in the cell of the worker. None teaches it the complex duties of the hive. The knowledge, the memory, is in the egg, the wriggler, the nymph. It is true, too, of the ants, and of many insects. But it is not true of man, nor of any other mammal.”

De Keradel said:

“It is true also of man.”

— IV —

THE LOST CITY OF YS

There was a devil of a lot of truth in what de Keradel had said. I had come across manifestations of that same ancestral memory in odd corners of the earth. I had been burning to corroborate him, despite that excusable dig of his at my ignorance. I would have liked to talk to him as one investigator to another.

Instead I drained my glass and said severely: “Briggs – I have not had a drink for five minutes,” and then to the table in general: “Just a moment. Let us be logical. Anything so important as the soul and its travels deserves the fullest consideration. Dr. de Keradel began this discussion by asserting the objective existence of what the showman produced. That is correct, Dr. de Keradel?”

He answered, stiffly: “Yes.”

I said: “Dr. de Keradel then adduced certain experiments of Dr. Charcot in hypnotism. Those cases are not convincing to me. In the South Seas, in Africa, in Kamchatka, I have heard the most arrant fakirs speak not in two or three but in half a dozen voices. It is a well-known fact that a hypnotized subject will sometimes speak in different voices. It is quite as well known that a schizoid, a case of multiple personality, will speak in voices ranging from high soprano to bass. And all this without ancestral memories being involved.

“It is a symptom of their condition. Nothing more. Am I right, Dr. Lowell?”

Lowell said: “You are.”

I said: “As for what Charcot’s subjects told him – who knows what they had heard their grandmothers say? Stories passed down by the family – heard when children, treasured by the sub-consciousness. Built up, improvements suggested, by Charcot himself. Charcot finds two or three points true, naturally. There is none so credulous as he who seeks evidence to support his idee fixe, his pet theory. So these few points become all. Well, I am not so credulous as Charcot, Dr. de Keradel.”

He said: “I read your interviews in the newspaper. I seemed to detect a certain amount of credulity there, Dr. Caranac.”

So he had read the interviews. I felt Bill press my foot again. I said:

“I tried to make plain to the reporters that belief in the hokum was necessary to make the hokum effective. I admit that to the victim of his belief it doesn’t make much difference whether it was hokum or reality. But that doesn’t mean that the hokum is real or can affect anybody else. And I tried to make plain that the defense against the hokum is very simple. It is – don’t believe it.”

The veins on his forehead began to twitch again. He said: “By hokum you mean, I assume, nonsense.”

“More than that,” I said, cheerfully. “Bunk!”

Dr. Lowell looked pained. I drank my wine, and grinned at the Demoiselle.

Helen said: “Your manners aren’t so good tonight, darling.”

I said: “Manners – hell! What’re manners in a discussion of goblins, incarnation, ancestral memories and Isis, Set and the Black God of the Scyths who looked like a frog? Now I’m going to tell you something, Dr. de Keradel. I’ve been in a lot of out of the way corners of this globe. I went there hunting for goblins and demons. And in all my travels I’ve never seen one thing that couldn’t be explained on the basis of hypnotism, mass suggestion, or trickery. Get that. Not one thing. And I’ve seen a lot.”

That was a lie – but I wanted to see the effect on him. I saw it. The veins in his temples were twitching more than ever, his lips were white. I said:

“Years ago I had a brilliant idea which puts the whole problem in its simplest form. The brilliant idea was based on the fact that the hearing is probably the last sense to die; that after the heart stops the brain continues to function as long as it has enough oxygen; and that while the brain does function, although every sense is dead – it can have experiences that seem to last for days and weeks, although the actual dream lasts but a fraction of a second.

“‘Heaven and Hell, Inc.’ That was my idea. ‘Insure yourself an immortality of joy!’ ‘Give your enemy an immortality of torment!’ To be done by expert hypnotists, masters of suggestion, sitting at the bedside of the dying and whispering into his ear that which the brain was to dramatize, after hearing and every other sense was dead—”

The Demoiselle drew a sharp breath. De Keradel was staring at me with a strange intentness.

“Well, there it was,” I went on. “For a sufficient sum you could promise, and actually give, your client the immortality he desired. Any kind he wanted – from the houri-haunted Paradise of Mahomet to the angel choirs of Paradise. And if the sum were sufficient, and you could gain access, you could whisper into the ear of your employer’s enemy the Hell he was going into for aeon after aeon. And I’ll bet he’d go into it. That was my ‘Heaven and Hell, Inc.’”

“A sweet idea, darling,” murmured Helen.

“A sweet idea, yes,” I said, bitterly. “Let me tell you what it did for me. It happens that it’s entirely feasible. Very well – consider me, the inventor. If there is a delectable life after death, will I enjoy it? Not at all. I’ll be thinking – this is just a vision in the dying cells of my brain. It has no objective reality. Nothing that could happen to me in that future existence, assuming it to be real, could be real to me. I would think – Oh, yes, very ingenious of me to create such ideas, but after all, they’re only in the dying cells of my brain. Of course,” I said, grimly, “there is a compensation. If I happened to land in one of the traditional hells, I wouldn’t take it any more seriously. And all the miracles of magic, or sorcery, I’ve ever beheld were no more real than those dying visions would be.”

The Demoiselle whispered, so faintly that none but I could hear: “I could make them real to you, Alan de Caranac – either Heaven or Hell.”

I said: “In life or in death, your theories cannot be proven, Dr. de Keradel. At least, not to me.”

He did not answer, staring at me, fingers tapping the table.

I went on: “Suppose, for example, you desired to know what it was that they worshiped among the stones of Carnac. You might reproduce every rite. Might have your descendant of priestess with the ancient ghost wide-awake in her brain. But how could you know that what came to the great cairn within the circle of monoliths – the Gatherer within the Cairn, the Visitor to the Alkar-Az – was real?”

De Keradel asked, incredulously, in a curiously still voice, as though exercising some strong restraint: “What can you know of the Alkar-Az – or of the Gatherer within the Cairn?”

I was wondering about that, too. I couldn’t remember ever having heard those names. Yet they had sprung to my lips as though long known. I looked at the Demoiselle. She dropped her eyes, but not before I had seen in them that same half-amused triumph as when, under the touch of her hand, I had beheld ancient Carnac. I answered de Keradel:

“Ask your daughter.”

His eyes were no longer blue, they had no color at all. They were like little spheres of pale fire. He did not speak – but his eyes demanded answer from her. The Demoiselle met them indifferently. She shrugged a white shoulder. She said: “I did not tell him.” She added, with a distinct touch of malice: “Perhaps, my father – he remembered.”

I leaned to her, and touched her glass with mine; I was feeling pretty good again. I said: “I remember – I remember—”

Helen said, tartly: “If you drink much more of that wine, you’re going to remember a swell headache, darling.”

The Demoiselle Dahut murmured: “What do you remember, Alain de Carnac?”

I sang the old Breton song – to the English words:

Fisher! Fisher! Have you seen

White Dahut the Shadows’ Queen?

Riding on her stallion black.

At her heels her shadow pack—

Have you seen Dahut ride by.

Swift as cloudy shadows fly

O’er the moon in stormy sky.

On her stallion black as night—

Shadows’ Queen – Dahut the White?

There was a queer silence. Then I noticed that de Keradel was sitting up oddly rigid and looking at me with that same expression he had worn when I had spoken of the Alkar-Az – and the Gatherer in the Cairn. Also that Bill’s face had bleached. I looked at the Demoiselle and there were little dancing orchid sparks in her eyes. I hadn’t the slightest idea why the old song should have had such an effect.

Helen said: “That’s a weird melody, Alan. Who was Dahut the White?”

“A witch, angel,” I told her. “A wicked, beautiful witch. Not a torch-tressed witch like you, but a blonde one. She lived twenty centuries or more ago in a city named Ys. Nobody knows quite where Ys was, but probably its towers rose where now the sea flows between Quiberon and Belle Isle. Certainly, it was once land there. Ys was a wicked city, filled with witches and sorcerers, but wickedest of all was Dahut the White, the daughter of the King. She picked her lovers where she would. They pleased her for a night, two nights – seldom three. Then she cast them from her… into the sea, some say. Or, say others, she gave them to her shadows—”

Bill interrupted: “What do you mean by that?”

His face was whiter than before. De Keradel was looking sharply at him. I said:

“I mean – shadows. Didn’t I sing to you that she was Queen of Shadows? She was a witch – and could make shadows do her bidding. All sorts of shadows – shadows of the lovers she’d killed, demon shadows, Incubi and Succubi nightmares – a specialist in shadows was the White Dahut, according to the legend.

“At last the Gods determined to take a hand. Don’t ask me what Gods. Pagan, if all this was before the introduction of Christianity – Christian if after. Whichever they were, they must have believed that who lives by the sword must die by the sword and all of that, because they sent to Ys a youthful hero with whom Dahut fell instantly, completely, and madly in love.

“He was the first man she had ever loved, despite her former affairs. But he was coy – aloof. He could forgive her previous philandering, but before he would accept her favors he must be convinced she truly loved him. How could she convince him? Quite easily. Ys, it appears was below sea-level and protected by walls which kept out the tides. There was one gate which would let in the sea. Why was there such a gate? I don’t know. Probably for use in case of invasion, revolution, or something of the sort. At any rate, the legend says, there was such a gate. The key to it hung always about the neck of the King of Ys, Dahut’s father.

“‘Bring me that key – and I’ll know you love me,’ said the hero. Dahut stole down to her sleeping father, and stole the key from his neck. She gave it to her lover. He opened the sea-gates. The sea poured in. Finish – for wicked Ys. Finish – for wicked Dahut the White.”

“She was drowned?” asked Helen.

“That’s the curious detail of the legend. The story is that Dahut had a rush of filial devotion to the heart, rushed away, awakened the father she had betrayed, took her big black stallion, mounted it, drew the King up behind her and tried to beat the waves to higher ground. There must have been something good in her after all. But – another extraordinary detail – her shadows rebelled, got behind the waves and pushed them on higher and faster. So the waves overtook the stallion and Dahut and her papa – and that was indeed their finish. But still they ride along the shores of Quiberon ‘on her stallion black, at her heels her shadow pack—’” I stopped, abruptly.

My left arm had been raised, the glass of wine within it. By a freak of the light, the candles threw its shadow sharply upon the white tablecloth, directly in front of the Demoiselle.

And the Demoiselle’s white hands were busy with the shadow of my wrist, as though measuring it, as though passing something under and around it.

I dropped my hand and caught hers. Swiftly she slipped them under the edge of the table. As swiftly I dropped my right hand and took from her fingers what they held. It was a long hair, and as I raised it, I saw that it was one of her own.

I thrust it into the candle flame and held it there while it writhed and shriveled.

The Demoiselle laughed – sweet, mocking laughter. I heard de Keradel’s chuckle echo hers. The disconcerting thing was that his amusement seemed not only frank but friendly. The Demoiselle said:

“First he compares me to the sea – the treacherous sea. Then darkly, by inference, to wicked Dahut, the Shadow Queen. And then he thinks me a witch – and burns my hair. And yet – he says he is not credulous – that he does not believe!”

Again she laughed – and again De Keradel echoed her.

I felt foolish, damned foolish. It was touche for the Demoiselle, beyond any doubt. I glared at Bill. Why the devil had he led me into such a trap. But Bill was not laughing. He was looking at the Demoiselle with a face peculiarly stony. Nor was Helen smiling. She was looking at the Demoiselle too. With that expression which women wear when they desire to call another by one of those beautifully descriptive Old English words which the Oxford Dictionary says are “not now in decent use.”

I grinned, and said to her: “It appears that another lady has put me on a hornet’s nest.”

Helen gave me a long comforting look. It said: “I can do that, but God help any other woman who tries it.”

There was a short and awkward silence. De Keradel broke it.

“I do not quite know why, but I am reminded of a question I wished to ask you, Dr. Bennett. I was much interested in the account of the suicide of Mr. Ralston, who, I gathered from your interview in the newspapers, was not only a patient of yours but a close friend.”

I saw Bill blink in the old way when he had come to some unshakeable conviction. He answered, smoothly, in his best professional manner.

“Yes, indeed, Dr. de Keradel, as friend and patient I probably knew him as well as anyone.”

De Keradel said: “It is not so much his death that interests me. It is that in the account of it three other men were mentioned. His death linked to theirs, in fact, as though the same cause were behind all.”

Bill said: “Quite so.”

I had the idea that the Demoiselle was watching Bill intently from the corners of her lovely eyes. De Keradel took up his glass, twirled it slowly, and said:

“I am really much interested, Dr. Bennett. We are all of us physicians, here. Your sister… my daughter… are of course in our confidence. They will not talk. Do you think that these four deaths had anything in common?”

“Without doubt,” answered Bill.

“What?” asked de Keradel.

“Shadows!” said Bill.

— V —

THE WHISPERING SHADOW

I stared at Bill, incredulously. I remembered his anxiety over my mention of shadows to the reporters, and his tenseness when I had told of the Shadows of Dahut the White. And here we were, back to shadows again. There must be some link, but what was it?

De Keradel exclaimed: “Shadows! Do you mean all suffered from identical hallucinations?”

“Shadows – yes,” said Bill. “Hallucinations – I’m not sure.”

De Keradel repeated, thoughtfully: “You are not sure.” Then asked: “Were these shadows – what your friend and patient desired you to regard as objective rather than subjective? I read the newspaper reports with great interest, Dr. Bennett.”

“I’m sure you did, Dr. de Keradel,” said Bill, and there was an edge of irony to his voice. “Yes – it was the shadow which he desired me to regard as real, not imaginary. The shadow – not shadows. There was only one—” He paused, then added with a faint but plainly deliberate emphasis – “only one shadow for each… you know.”

I thought I understood Bill’s plan of battle. He was playing a hunch; bluffing; pretending to have knowledge of this shadowy decoy of death, whatever the thing might be, exactly as he had pretended to have knowledge of a common cause for the four suicides. He had used that bait to lure his fish within range of the hook. Now that he thought he had them there, he was using the same bait to make them take it. I didn’t believe he knew any more than when he had talked to me at the Club. And I thought he was dangerously underestimating the de Keradels. That last thrust had been a bit obvious.

De Keradel was saying, placidly: “One shadow or many, what difference, Dr. Bennett? Hallucinatory shapes may appear singly – as tradition says the shade of Julius Caesar appeared to the remorseful Brutus. Or be multiplied by the thousands which the dying brain of Tiberius pictured thronging about his death bed, menacing him who had slain them. There are organic disturbances which create such hallucinations. Ocular irregularities produce them. Drugs and alcohol spawn them. They are born of abnormalities of brain and nerves. They are children of auto-intoxication. Progeny of fever, and of high blood pressure. They are also born of conscience. Am I to understand that you reject all these rational explanations?”

Bill said, stolidly: “No. Say, rather, that I do not yet accept any of them.”

Dr. Lowell said, abruptly: “There is still another explanation. Suggestion. Post-hypnotic suggestion. If Ralston and the others had come under the influence of someone who knew how to control minds by such methods… then I can well understand how they might have been driven to kill themselves. I, myself—”

His fingers clenched around the stem of the wine glass. The stem snapped, cutting him. He wrapped a napkin around the bleeding hand. He said: “It is no matter. I wish the memory that caused it went no deeper.”

The Demoiselle’s eyes were on him, and there was a tiny smile at the corners of her mouth. I was sure de Keradel had missed nothing. He asked:

“Do you accept Dr. Lowell’s explanation?”

Bill answered, hesitantly: “No – not entirely – I don’t know.”

The Breton paused, studying him with a curious intentness. He said, “Orthodox science tells us that a shadow is only a diminution of light within a certain area caused by the interposition of a material body between a source of light and some surface. It is insubstantial, an airy nothing. So orthodox science tells us. What and where was the material body that cast this shadow upon the four – if it was no hallucination?”

Dr. Lowell said: “A thought placed cunningly in a man’s mind might cast such shadow.”

De Keradel replied, blandly: “But Dr. Bennett does not accept that theory.”

Bill said nothing. De Keradel went on: “If Dr. Bennett believes that a shadow caused the deaths, and if he will not admit it hallucination, nor that it was cast and directed by a material body – then inevitably the conclusion must be that he admits a shadow may have the attributes of a material body. This shadow came necessarily from somewhere; it attaches itself to someone, follows, and finally compels that someone to kill himself. All this implies volition, cognition, purpose and emotion. These shadows? They are attributes of material things only – phenomena of the consciousness housed in the brain. The brain is material and lives in an indubitably material skull. But a shadow is not material, and therefore can have no skull to house a brain; and therefore can have no brain, and therefore no consciousness. And, still again, therefore, can have no volition, cognition, will, or emotion. And, lastly therefore, could not possibly urge, lure, drive, frighten, or coerce a material living being to self-destruction. And if you do not agree with that, my dear Dr. Bennett, what you are admitting is – witchcraft.”

Bill answered, quietly: “If so, why do you laugh at me? What are those theories of ritual you have been expounding to us but witchcraft? Perhaps you have converted me, Dr. de Keradel.”

The Breton stopped laughing, abruptly, he said: “So?” and again, slowly: “So! But they are not theories, Dr. Bennett. They are discoveries. Or, rather, rediscoveries of, let us say, unorthodox science.” The veins in his forehead were twitching; he added, with an indefinable menace: “If it is truly I who have opened your eyes – I hope to make your conversion complete.”

I saw that Lowell was looking at de Keradel with a strange intentness. The Demoiselle was looking at Bill, the little devilish lights flickering in her eyes; and I thought that there were both malice and calculation in her faint smile. There was an odd tension about the table – as of something unseen, crouching and ready to strike.

Helen broke it, quoting dreamily:

Some there be that shadows kiss.

Such have but a shadow’s bliss—

The Demoiselle was laughing; laughter that was more like the laughter of little waves than anything else. But there were undertones to it that I liked even less than the subtle menace in her smile – something inhuman, as though the little waves were laughing at the dead men who lay under them.

De Keradel spoke rapidly, in a tongue that I felt I ought to recognize, but did not. The Demoiselle became demure. She said, sweetly: “Your pardon, Mademoiselle Helen. It was not at you that I laughed. It was that suddenly I am reminded of something infinitely amusing. Someday I shall tell you and you too will laugh—”

De Keradel interrupted her, urbane as before: “And I ask your pardon, Dr. Bennett. You must excuse the rudeness of an enthusiast. And also his persistency. Because I now ask if you could, without too great violation of confidence between physician and patient, inform me as to the symptoms of Mr. Ralston. The behavior of this – this shadow, if you will call it so. I am greatly curious – professionally.”

Bill said: “There’s nothing I’d like better. You, with your unique experience may recognize some point of significance that I have missed. To satisfy professional ethics, let us call it a consultation, even though it is a postmortem one.”

I had the fleeting thought that Bill was pleased; that he had scored some point toward which he had been maneuvering. I pushed my chair back a little so that I could see both the Demoiselle and her father. Bill said:

“I’ll start from the beginning. If there is anything you want me to amplify, don’t hesitate to interrupt. Ralston called me up and said he wanted me to look him over. I had neither seen nor heard from him for a couple of months; had thought, indeed, that he was on one of his trips abroad. He began, abruptly: ‘Something’s wrong with me, Bill. I see a shadow.’ I laughed, but he didn’t. He repeated: ‘I see a shadow, Bill. And I’m afraid!’ I said, still laughing: ‘If you couldn’t see a shadow you certainly would have something wrong with you.’ He answered like a frightened child.

“‘But, Bill – there’s nothing to make this shadow!’

“He leaned toward me, and now I realized that he was holding himself together by truly extraordinary effort. He asked: ‘Does that mean I’m going crazy? Is seeing a shadow a common symptom when you are going insane? Tell me, Bill – is it?’

“I told him that the notion was nonsense; that in all probability some little thing was wrong with his eyes or his liver. He said: ‘But this shadow – whispers!’

“I said: ‘You need a drink,’ and I gave him a stiff one. I said: ‘Tell me exactly what it is you think you see, and, if you can, precisely when you first thought you saw it.’ He answered: ‘Four nights ago. I was in the library, writing—’ Let me explain, Dr. de Keradel, that he lived in the old Ralston house on 78th Street; alone except for Simpson, the butler, who was a heritage from his father, and half a dozen servants. He went on: ‘I thought I saw someone or something slip along the wall into the curtains that cover the window. The window was at my back and I was intent upon my letter, but the impression was so vivid that I jumped up and went over to the curtains. There was nothing there. I returned to my desk – but I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that someone or something was in the room.’

“He said: ‘I was so disturbed that I made a note of the time.’”

“A mental echo of the visual hallucination,” said De Keradel. “An obvious concomitant.”

“Perhaps,” said Bill. “At any rate, a little later he had the same experience, only this time the movement was from right to left, the reverse of the first. In the next half hour it was repeated six times, always in the opposite direction – I mean, from left to right, then right to left and so on. He laid emphasis upon this, as though he thought it in some way significant. He said: ‘It was, as though it were weaving.’ I asked what ‘It’ was like. He said: ‘It had no shape. It was just movement – No, it had no shape then.’ The feeling of not being alone in the room increased to such an uncomfortable pitch that shortly after midnight he left the library, leaving the lights burning, and turned in. There was no recurrence of the symptoms, in his bedroom. He slept soundly. Nor was he troubled the next night. By the day following he had almost forgotten the matter.

“That night he dined out and came home about eleven o’clock. He went into the library to go over his mail. He told me: ‘Suddenly I had the strongest feeling that someone was watching me from the curtains. I turned my head, slowly. I distinctly saw a shadow upon the curtains. Or, rather, as though it were intermingled with them – like a shadow cast by something behind. It was about the size and shape of a man.’ He jumped to the curtains and tore them away. Nothing was behind them nor was there anything beyond the window to cast a shadow. He sat down again at the table, but still he felt eyes upon him. ‘Unwinding eyes,’ he said. ‘Eyes that never left me. Eyes of someone or something that kept always just past the edge of my field of vision. If I turned quickly, it slipped behind me, was watching me from my other side. If I moved slowly, just as slowly did it move.’

“Sometimes he caught a flickering movement, a shadowy flitting, as he pursued the eyes. Sometimes he thought he had caught the shadow. But always it faded, was gone, before he could focus it. And instantly he felt its gaze upon him from another quarter.

“‘From right to left it went,’ he said. ‘From left to right… and back again… and back again and again… weaving… weaving…’

“‘Weaving what?’ I asked, impatiently.

“He answered, quite simply: ‘My shroud.’

“He sat there, fighting until he could fight no more. Then he sought refuge in his bedroom. He did not sleep well, for he thought the shadow was lurking on the threshold; had pressed itself against the other side of the door, listening. If so, it did not enter.

“Dawn came, and after that he slept soundly. He arose late, spent the afternoon at golf, dined out, went with a party to the theater and then to a night club. For hours he had given no thought to the experience of the night before. He said: ‘If I thought of it at all, it was to laugh at it as childish foolishness.’ He reached home about three o’clock. He let himself in. As he closed the door he heard a whisper – ‘You are late!’ It was quite plain, and as though the whisperer stood close beside him—”

De Keradel interrupted: “Progressive hallucination. First the idea of movement; then the sharpening into shape; then sound. Hallucination progressing from the visual field to the auditory.”

Bill went on, as though he had not heard: “He said the voice had some quality which – I quote him – ‘made you feel the loathing you do when you put your hand on a slimy slug in a garden at night, and at the same time an unholy desire to have it go on whispering forever.’ He said: ‘It was unnamable horror and perverted ecstasy in one.’

“Simpson had left the lights burning. The hall was well lighted. He could see no one. But the voice had been reality. He stood for a few moments fighting for control. Then he walked in, took off hat and top-coat, and started for the stairs. He said: ‘I happened to look down, and over the top of my eyes I saw a shadow gliding along about six feet ahead of me. I raised my eyes – and it vanished. I went slowly up the stairs. If I looked down at the steps I could see the shadow flitting ahead of me. Always at the same distance. When I looked up – there was nothing. The shadow was sharper than it had been the night before. I thought it was the shadow of a woman. A naked woman. And suddenly I realized that the whispering voice had been that of a woman.’

“He went straight to his room. He passed the door. He looked down and saw the shadow still those two paces before him. He stepped swiftly back and into the room, closing the door and locking it. He switched on the lights and stood with his ear against the door. He said: ‘I heard someone, something, laughing. The same voice that had whispered.’ And then he heard it whisper – ‘I will watch outside your door tonight… tonight… tonight…’ He listened with that same alien mixture of horror and desire. He lusted to throw open the door, but the loathing held back his hand. He said: ‘I kept the lights on. But the thing did what it had promised. It watched all night at my door. It wasn’t quiet though. It danced… I couldn’t see it… but I know it danced… out there in the hall. It danced and weaved… right to left… left to right and back again and again… danced and weaved till dawn outside my door… weaving… my shroud, Bill…’

“I reasoned with him, much along your lines, Dr. de Keradel. I went over him thoroughly. I could find, superficially, nothing wrong. I took specimens for the various tests. He said: ‘I hope to God you do find something wrong, Bill. If you don’t – it means the shadow is real. I think I’d rather know I was going crazy than that. After all, craziness can be cured.’

“I said: ‘You’re not going back to your house. You’re going to stay at the Club until I’ve gotten my reports. Then, no matter what they show, you’re going to hop on a boat and take a long trip.’

“He shook his head: ‘I’ve got to go back to the house, Bill.’

“I asked: ‘Why, for God’s sake?’

“He hesitated, puzzled distress on his face; he said: ‘I don’t know. But I’ve got to.’

“I said, firmly: ‘You stay here with me tonight, and tomorrow you hop on a boat. To anywhere. I’ll let you know about the tests and do my prescribing by radio.’ He replied, still with that same puzzled look: ‘I can’t go away now. The fact…’ he hesitated…’the fact is, Bill… I’ve met a girl… a woman. I can’t leave her.’

“I gaped at him. I said: ‘You’re going to marry her? Who is she?’

“He looked at me, helplessly: ‘I can’t tell you, Bill. I can’t tell you anything about her.’

“I asked: ‘Why not?’

“He answered with the same puzzled hesitation. ‘I don’t know why I can’t. But I can’t. It seems to be a part of – of the other in some way. But I can’t tell you.’ And to every question that touched upon this girl he had the same answer.”

Dr. Lowell said, sharply: “You told me nothing of that, Dr. Bennett. He said nothing more to you than that? That he could not tell you anything more about this woman? That he did not know why – but he could not?”

Bill said: “That – and no more.”

Helen said, coldly: “What amuses you so, Demoiselle? I do not find anything in all this that is humorous.”

I looked at the Demoiselle. The little orchid sparks were alive in her eyes, her red lips smiling – and cruel.

— VI —

KISS OF THE SHADOW

I said: “The Demoiselle is a true artist.”

There was a small, tense silence around the table. De Keradel broke it, harshly:

“Exactly what do you mean by that, Dr. Caranac?

I smiled: “All true artists are pleased when art attains excellence. Story telling is an art. Dr. Bennett was telling his perfectly. Therefore, your daughter, a true artist, was pleased. A perfect syllogism. Is it not true, Demoiselle?”

She answered, quietly:

“You have said it.” But she was no longer smiling, and her eyes said something else. So did de Keradel’s. Before he could speak, I said:

“Only tribute from one artist to another, Helen. Go on, Bill.”

Bill went on, quickly:

“I sat and reasoned with him. Betimes, I gave him several stiff drinks. I related some famous cases of hallucination – Paganini, the great violinist, who at times thought he saw a shadowy woman in white stand beside him playing her violin while he played his. Leonardo da Vinci who thought he saw and spoke with the shade of Chiron, wisest of all the Centaurs, who tutored the youthful Aesculapius – dozens of similar instances. I told him he had become a companion of men of genius and that it was probably a sign of something like that breaking out on him. After awhile he was laughing. He said: ‘All right, Bill. I’m convinced. But the thing for me to do is not to run away from it. The thing for me to do is meet it and knock out.’ I said:

“‘If you feel you can, that’s the one thing to do. It’s only an obsession, sheer imagination. Try it tonight, anyway. If it gets a bit too thick, call me up on the ’phone. I’ll be right here. And take plenty of good liquor.’ When he left me he was quite his old self.

“He didn’t call me up until next afternoon, and then asked what I had heard about the specimens. I replied that what reports I had received showed him perfectly healthy. He said, quietly: ‘I thought they would.’ I asked what kind of a night he had had. He laughed, and said: ‘A very interesting one, Bill. Oh, very. I followed your advice and drank plenty of liquor.’ His voice was quite normal, even cheerful. I was relieved, yet felt a vague uneasiness. I asked: ‘How about your shadow?’ ‘And plenty of shadow,’ he said. ‘I told you, didn’t I, that I thought it a woman’s shadow? Well, it is.’ I said: ‘You are better. Was your woman shadow nice to you?’ He said: ‘Scandalously so, and promises to be even scandalouser. That’s what made the night so interesting.’ He laughed again. And abruptly hung up.

“I thought: ‘Well, if Dick can joke like that about something that had him terrorized to the liver a day ago, he’s getting over it.’ That, I said to myself, was good advice I gave him.

“Still, I felt that vague uneasiness. It grew. A little later I rang him up, but Simpson said he had gone out to play golf. That seemed normal enough. Yes – the whole trouble had been only a queer evanescent quirk that was righting itself. Yes – my advice had been good. What—” Bill broke out suddenly – “What Goddamned fools we doctors can be.”

I stole a look at the Demoiselle. Her great eyes were wide and tender, but deep within them something mocked. Bill said:

“The next day I had more reports, all equally good. I called Dick up and told him so. I forgot to say I had also instructed him to go to Buchanan. Buchanan,” Bill turned to de Keradel, “is the best eye man in New York. He had found nothing wrong, and that eliminated many possibilities of cause for the hallucination – if it was that. I told Dick. He said, cheerfully: ‘Medicine is a grand science of elimination, isn’t it, Bill? But if after all the elimination you get down to something you don’t know anything about – then what do you do about it, Bill?’

“That was a queer remark. I said: ‘What do you mean?’ He said: ‘I am only a thirsty seeker of knowledge.’ I asked, suspiciously: ‘Did you drink much last night?’ He said: ‘Not too much.’ I asked: ‘How about the shadow?’ He said: ‘Even more interesting.’ I said: ‘Dick, I want you to come right down and let me see you.’ He promised, but he didn’t come. I had a case you see that kept me late at the hospital. I got in about midnight and called him up. Simpson answered, saying he had gone to bed early and had given orders not to be disturbed. I asked Simpson how he seemed. He answered that Mr. Dick had seemed quite all right, unusually cheerful, in fact. Nevertheless, I could not rid myself of the inexplicable uneasiness. I told Simpson to tell Mr. Ralston that if he didn’t come in to see me by five o’clock next day I would come after him.

“At exactly five o’clock he arrived. I felt a sharp increase of my doubt. His face had thinned, his eyes were curiously bright. Not feverish – more as though he had been taking some drug. There was a lurking amusement in them, and a subtle terror. I did not betray the shock his appearance gave me. I told him that I had gotten the last of the reports, and that they were negative. He said: ‘So I have a clean bill of health? Nothing wrong with me anywhere?’ I answered: ‘So far as these tests show. But I want you to go to the hospital for a few days’ observation.’ He laughed, and said: ‘No. I’m perfectly healthy, Bill.’

“He sat looking at me for a few moments silently, the subtle amusement competing with the terror in his over-bright eyes – as though he felt himself ages beyond me in knowledge of some sort and at the same time bitterly in fear of it. He said: ‘My shadow’s name is Brittis. She told me so last night.’

“That made me jump. I said: ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

“He answered with malicious patience: ‘My shadow. Her name is Brittis. She told me so last night while she lay in my bed beside me, whispering. A woman shadow. Naked.’

“I stared at him, and he laughed: ‘What do you know about the Succubi, Bill? Nothing, I at once perceive. I wish Alan were back – he’d know. Balzac had a great story about one, I remember – but Brittis says she really wasn’t one. I went up to the library this morning and looked them up. Plowed through the Malleus Maleficarum—’

“I asked: ‘What the hell is that?’

“‘The Hammer Against Witches. The old book of the Inquisition that tells what Succubi and Incubi are, and what they can do, and how to tell witches and what to do against them and all of that. Very interesting. It says that a demon can become a shadow, and becoming one may fasten itself upon a living person and become corporeal – or corporeal enough to beget, as the Bible quaintly puts it. The lady demons are the Succubi. When one of them lusts for a man she beguiles him in this fashion or another until – well, until she succeeds. Whereupon he gives her his vital spark and, quite naturally, dies. But Brittis says that wouldn’t be the end of me, and that she never was a demon. She says she was—’

“‘Dick,’ I interrupted him, ‘what’s all this nonsense?’ He repeated, irritably: ‘I wish to God you wouldn’t keep on thinking this thing is hallucination. If I’m as healthy as you say, it can’t be—’ He hesitated. ‘—But even if you did believe it real, what could you do? You don’t know what those who sent the shadow to me know. That’s why I wish Alan were here. He’d know what to do.’ He hesitated again, then said slowly: ‘But whether I’d take his advice… I’m not sure… now!’

“I asked: ‘What do you mean?’

“He said: ‘I’ll begin from the time we agreed I’d better go home and fight. I went to the theater. I purposely stayed out late. There was no unseen whisperer at the door when I let myself in. I saw nothing as I went upstairs to the library. I mixed a stiff highball, sat down and began to read. I had turned on every light in the room. It was two o’clock.

“‘The clock struck the half hour. It roused me from the book. I smelled a curious fragrance, unfamiliar, evocative of strange images – it made me think of an unknown lily, opening in the night, under moon rays, in a secret pool, among age-old ruins encircled by a desert. I looked up and around seeking its source.

“‘I saw the shadow.

“‘It was no longer as though cast against curtains or walls. It stood plain, a dozen feet from me. Sharp cut, in the room. It was in profile. It stood motionless. Its face was a girl’s, delicate, exquisite. I could see its hair, coiled around the little head and two braids of deeper shadow falling between the round, tip-tilted breasts. It was the shadow of a tall girl, a lithe girl, small-hipped, slender-footed. It moved. It began to dance. It was neither black nor gray as I had thought when first I saw it. It was faintly rosy – a rose-pearl shadow. Beautiful, seductive – in a sense no living woman could be. It danced, and trembled – and vanished. I heard a whisper: ‘I am here.’ It was behind me dancing – dancing… dimly I could see the room through it.

“‘Dancing,’ he said, ‘weaving – weaving my shroud—’ he laughed. ‘But a highly embroidered one, Bill.’

“He said he felt a stirring of desire such as he had never felt for any woman. And with it a fear, a horror such as he had never known. He said it was as though a door had opened over whose threshold he might pass into some undreamed of Hell. The desire won. He leaped for that dancing, rosy shadow. And shadow and fragrance were gone snuffed out. He sat again with his book, waiting. Nothing happened. The clock struck three – the half-hour – four. He went to his room. He undressed, and lay upon the bed.

“He said: ‘Slowly, like a rhythm, the fragrance began. It pulsed – quicker and quicker. I sat up. The rosy shadow was sitting at the foot of my bed. I strained toward it. I could not move. I thought I heard it whisper – ‘Not yet… not yet…’”

“Progressive hallucination,” de Keradel said. “From sight to hearing, from hearing to smell. And then the color centers of the brain become involved. All this is obvious. Yes?”

Bill paid no attention; continued: “He went to sleep, abruptly. He awakened next morning with a curious exaltation of spirit and an equally curious determination to evade me. He had but one desire – that the day should end so that he could meet the shadow. I asked, somewhat sarcastically: ‘But how about the other girl, Dick?’

“He answered, plainly puzzled: ‘What other girl, Bill?’ I said: ‘That other girl you were so much in love with. The one whose name you couldn’t tell me.’

“He said, wonderingly: ‘I don’t remember any other girl.’”

I stole a swift glance at the Demoiselle. She was looking demurely down at her plate. Dr. Lowell asked:

“First, he could not tell you her name because of some compulsion? Second, he told you he remembered nothing of her?”

Bill said: “That’s what he told me, sir.”

I saw the color drain from Lowell’s face once more, and saw again a lightning swift glance pass between the Demoiselle and her father.

De Keradel said:

“A previous hallucination negatived by a stronger one.”

Bill said:

“Maybe. At any rate, he passed the day in a mood of mingled expectancy and dread. ‘As though,’ he told me, ‘I waited for the prelude of some exquisite event, and at the same time as though for the opening of a door to a cell of the condemned.’ And he was even more resolved not to see me, yet he could not be easy until he knew whether I had or had not found something that might account for his experiences. After he had talked to me he had gone out, not for golf as he had told Simpson, but to a place where I could not reach him.

“He went home to dinner. He thought that during dinner he detected fugitive flittings from side to side, furtive stirrings of the shadow. He felt that his every movement was being watched. He had almost panic impulse to run out of the house ‘while there was still time,’ as he put it. Against that impulse was a stronger urge to stay, something that kept whispering of strange delights, unknown joys. He said – ‘As though I had two souls, one filled with loathing and hatred for the shadow and crying out against slavery to it. And the other not caring – if only first it might taste of those joys it promised.’

“He went to the library – and the shadow came as it had come the night before. It came close to him, but not so close that he could touch it. The shadow began to sing, and he had no desire to touch it; no desire except to sit listening forever to that singing. He told me, ‘It was the shadow of song, as the singer was the shadow of woman. It was as though it came through some unseen curtain… out of some other space. It was sweet as the fragrance. It was one with the fragrance, honey sweet… and each shadowy note dripped evil.’ He said: ‘If there were words to the song, I did not know them, did not hear them. I heard only the melody… promising… promising…’

“I asked: ‘Promising what?’

“He said: ‘I don’t know… delights that no living man had ever known… that would be mine – if…”

“I asked: ‘If what?’

“He answered: ‘I did not know… not then. But there was something I must do to attain them… but what it was I did not know… not then.’

“Singing died and shadow and fragrance were gone. He waited awhile, and then went to his bedroom. The shadow did not reappear, although he thought it there, watching him. He sank again into that quick, deep and dreamless sleep. He awakened with a numbness of mind, an unaccustomed lethargy. Fragments of the shadow’s song kept whispering through his mind. He said: ‘They seemed to make a web between reality and unreality. I had only one clear normal thought, and that was keen impatience to get the last of your reports. When you gave me them, that which hated and feared the shadow wept, but that which desired its embrace rejoiced.’

“Night came the third night. At dinner, he had no perception of lurking watcher. Nor in the library. He felt a vast disappointment and as vast a relief. He went to his bedroom. Nothing there. An hour or so later he turned in. It was a warm night, so he covered himself only with the sheet.

“He told me: ‘I do not think I had been asleep. I am sure I was not asleep. But suddenly I felt the fragrance creep over me and I heard a whisper, close to my ear. I sat up—

“‘The shadow lay beside me.

“‘It was sharply outlined, pale rose upon the sheet. It was leaning toward me, one arm upon the pillow, cupped hand supporting its head. I could see the pointed nails of that hand, thought I could see the gleam of shadowy eyes. I summoned all my strength and laid my hand on it. I felt only the cool sheet.

“‘The shadow leaned closer… whispering… whispering… and now I understood it… and then it was she told me her name… and other things… and what I must do to win those delights she had been promising me. But I must not do this thing until she had done thus and so, and I must do it at the moment she kissed me and I could feel her lips on mine—’

“I asked, sharply: ‘What were you to do?’

“He answered: ‘Kill myself.’”

Dr. Lowell pushed back his chair, stood trembling: “Good God! And he did kill himself! Dr. Bennett, I do not see why you did not consult me in this case. Knowing what I told you of—”

Bill interrupted: “Precisely because of that, sir. I had my reasons for wishing to handle it alone. Reasons which I am prepared to defend before you.”

Before Lowell could answer, he went on swiftly: “I told him: ‘It’s nothing but hallucination, Dick; a phantom of the imagination. Nevertheless, it has reached a stage I don’t like. You must take dinner with me, and stay here for the night at least. If you won’t consent, frankly I’m going to use force to make you.’

“He looked at me for a moment with the subtle amusement in his eyes intensified. He said, quietly: ‘But if it’s only hallucination, Bill, what good will that do? I’ll still have my imagination with me, won’t I? What’s to keep it from conjuring up Brittis here just as well as at home?’

“I said: ‘All that be damned. Here you stay.’

“He said: ‘It goes. I’d like to try the experiment.’

“We had dinner. I wouldn’t let him speak again of the shadow. I slipped a strong sleepmaker into a drink. In fact, I doped him. In a little while he began to get heavy-eyed. I put him to bed. I said to myself: ‘Fellow, if you come out of that in less than ten hours then I’m a horse doctor.’

“I had to go out. It was a little after midnight when I returned. I listened at Dick’s door, debating whether to run the risk of disturbing him by going in. I decided I wouldn’t. At nine o’clock the next morning, I went up to look at him. The room was empty. I asked the servants when Mr. Ralston had gone. None knew. When I called up his house, the body had already been taken away. There was nothing I could do, and I wanted time to think. Time, unhampered by the police, to make some investigations of my own, in the light of certain other things which Ralston had told me and which I have not related since they are not directly related to the symptoms exhibited. The symptoms,” Bill turned to de Keradel, “were the only matters in which you were interested – professionally?”

De Keradel said: “Yes. But I still see nothing in your recital to warrant any diagnosis than hallucination. Perhaps in these details you have withheld I might—”

I had been thinking, and interrupted him rudely enough: “Just a moment. A little while back, Bill, you said this Brittis, shadow or illusion, or what not, told him that she was no demon – no Succubus. You started to quote him – ‘She said she was—’ then stopped. What did she say she was?”

Bill seemed to hesitate, then said, slowly: “She said she had been a girl, a Bretonne until she had been changed into – a shadow of Ys.”

The Demoiselle threw back her head, laughing unrestrainedly. She put a hand on my arm: “A shadow of that wicked Dahut the White! Alain de Carnac – one of my shadows!”

De Keradel’s face was imperturbable. He said: “So. Now do I see. Well, Dr. Bennett, if I accept your theory of witchcraft, what was the purpose behind it?”

Bill answered: “Money, I think. I’m hoping to be sure soon.”

De Keradel leaned back, regarding Lowell almost benevolently. He said: “Not necessarily money. To quote Dr. Caranac, it could perhaps be only art for art’s sake. Self-expression of a true artist. Pride. I once knew well – what without doubt the superstitious would have called her a witch – who had that pride of workmanship. This will interest you, Dr. Lowell. It was in Prague—”

I saw Lowell start, violently; de Keradel went blandly on: “A true artist, who practiced her art, or used her wisdom – or, if you prefer, Dr. Bennett, practiced her witchcraft – solely for the satisfaction it gave her as an artist. Among other things, so it was whispered, she could imprison something of one she had killed within little dolls made in that one’s image, animating them; and then make them do her will—” He leaned toward Lowell, solicitously – “Are you ill, Dr. Lowell?”

Lowell was paper white; his eyes fixed on de Keradel and filled with incredulous recognition. He recovered himself; said in a firm voice: “A pang I sometimes suffer. It is nothing. Go on.”

De Keradel said: “A truly great – ah, witch, Dr. Bennett. Although I would not call her witch but mistress of ancient secrets, lost wisdom. She went from Prague to this city. Arriving, I tried to find her. I learned where she had lived, but, alas! She and her niece had been burned to death – with her dolls, their home destroyed. A most mysterious fire. I was rather relieved. Frankly, I was glad, for I had been a little afraid of the doll-maker. I hold no grudge against those who encompassed her destruction – if it were deliberate. In fact – this may sound callous but you, my dear Dr. Lowell, will understand I am sure – in fact, I feel a certain gratitude to them – if they are.”

He glanced at his watch, then spoke to the Demoiselle: “My daughter, we must be going. We are already late. The time has passed so pleasantly, so quickly—” He paused, then said with emphasis, slowly: “Had I the powers she had at her command – for powers she did have else I, de Keradel, would have felt no fear of her – I say, had I those powers, none who threatened me, none even who hampered me in what I had determined to do, would live long enough to become a serious menace. I am sure—” he looked sharply at Lowell, at Helen and Bill, let his pale eyes dwell for a moment on mine – “I am sure that even gratitude could not save them – nor those dear to them.”

There was an odd silence. Bill broke it. He said, somberly: “Fair enough, de Keradel.”

The Demoiselle arose, smiling. Helen led her to the hall. No one would have thought they hated each other. While de Keradel bade courteous farewell to Lowell, the Demoiselle drew close to me. She whispered:

“I will be awaiting you tomorrow, Alain de Carnac. At eight. We have much to say to each other. Do not fail me.”

She slipped something in my hand. De Keradel said: “Soon I shall be ready for my greatest experiment. I look for you to witness it, Dr. Lowell. You too, Dr. Caranac… you… it will especially interest. Till then – adieu.”

He kissed Helen’s hand; bowed to Bill. I wondered with vague misgivings why he had not included them in the invitation.

At the door the Demoiselle turned, touched Helen lightly on the cheek. She said: “Some there be that shadows kiss…”

Her laughter rippled like little waves as she swept down the steps after her father and into the waiting automobile.

— VII —

THE DOLL-MAKER’S LOVER

Briggs closed the door and walked away. We four stood in the hall, silent. Suddenly Helen stamped a foot. She said, furiously:

“Damn her! She tried to make me feel like a slave girl. As if I were one of your lesser concubines, Alan, whom it amused your Queen to notice.”

I grinned, for it was almost exactly what I had thought. She said, viciously:

“I saw her whispering to you. I suppose she was asking you to come up’n see her sometime.” She gave a Mae West wriggle.

I opened my hand and looked at what the Demoiselle had slipped into it. It was an extremely thin silver bracelet’s half-inch band almost as flexible as heavy silk. Set in it was a polished, roughly oval black pebble. Incised upon its smoothed outer face, then filled in with some red material, was the symbol of the power of the ancient god of Ocean, who had many names long centuries before the Greeks named him Poseidon; the three-tined fork; his trident with which he governed his billows. It was one of those mysterious talismans of the swarthy little Azilian-Tardenois people who some seventeen thousand years ago wiped out the tall, big-brained, fair-haired and blue-eyed Cro-Magnons, who, like them, came from none knows where into Western Europe. Along the silver band, its jaws holding the pebble, was crudely cut a winged serpent. Yes, I knew what that pebble was, right enough. But what puzzled me was the conviction that I also knew this particular stone and bracelet. That I had seen them many times before… could even read the symbol… if only I could force remembrance…

Perhaps if I put it around my wrist I would remember—

Helen struck the bracelet from my hand. She put her heel on it and ground it into the rug. She said:

“That’s the second time tonight that she-devil has tried to snap her manacles on you.”

I bent down to pick up the bracelet, and she kicked it away.

Bill stooped and retrieved it. He handed it to me and I dropped it in my pocket. Bill said, sharply:

“Pipe down, Helen! He has to go through with it. He’s probably safer than you and I are, at that.”

Helen said, passionately:

“Let her try to get him!”

She looked at me, grimly: “But I don’t exactly trust you with the Demoiselle, Alan. Something rotten in Denmark there… something queer between you. I wouldn’t hunger after that white fleshpot of Egypt if I were you. There’ve been a lot of misguided moths sipping at that flower.”

I flushed: “Your frankness, darling, is of your generation, and your metaphors as mixed as its morals. Nevertheless, you need not be jealous of the Demoiselle.”

That was a lie, of course. I felt the vague, inexplicable fear of her, suspicion, and a lurking, inexorable hatred – yet there was something else. She was very beautiful. Never could I love her in the way I could Helen. Still, she had something that Helen had not; something which without doubt was evil… but an evil I had drunk of long and long and long ago… and must drink of… again – and I knew a deep thirst that could be quenched only by that evil…

Helen said, quietly:

“I could not be jealous of her. I am afraid of her – not for myself but for you.”

Dr. Lowell seemed to awaken. It was plain that he was sunk in his thoughts, he had heard none of our talk. He said:

“Let us go back to the table. I have something to say.”

He walked to the stairs, and he walked like a man grown suddenly old. As we followed, Bill said to me:

“Well, de Keradel was fair enough. He gave us warning.”

I asked: “Warning of what?”

Bill answered: “Didn’t you get it? Warning not to pursue the matter of Dick’s death any further. They didn’t find out all they hoped to. But they found out enough. I wanted them to. And I did find out what I wanted.”

I asked: “What was that?”

“That they’re Dick’s murderers,” he answered.

Before I could ask any more questions we were seated at the table. Dr. Lowell rang for coffee, then dismissed the butler. He tipped a full glass of brandy into his coffee, and drank it. He said:

“I am shaken. Undeniably I am shaken. An experience, a dreadful experience, which I had thought ended forever, has been reopened. I have told Helen of that experience. She has a strong soul, a clear brain; she is a bright spirit. Am I to understand—” he addressed Bill – “that Helen was also in your confidence this evening; that she knew in advance the facts that so strongly surprised me?”

Bill answered: “Partly, sir. She knew about the shadow, but she didn’t know that the Demoiselle de Keradel had an Ys pinned on her name. No more did I. Nor had I any cogent reason to suspect the de Keradels when they accepted your invitation. Before that, I did not go into the details of the Ralston case with you because, from the very first, I had the feeling that they would revive painful memories. And obviously, until de Keradel himself revealed it, I could have had no suspicion that he was so closely connected with the dark center of those memories.”

Lowell asked: “Did Dr. Caranac know?”

“No. I had determined, whether or not my suspicions seemed to be warranted, to spread Dick’s story before de Keradel. I had persuaded Dr. Caranac to anger him. I wanted to watch the reactions of himself and his daughter. I wanted to watch the reactions of Dr. Caranac and yourself. I hold myself entirely justified. I wanted de Keradel to show his hand. If I had laid my own hand before you, never would he have done so. You would have been on your guard, and de Keradel would have known it. He, also, would have been on guard. It was your palpable ignorance of my investigation, your involuntary betrayal of the horror you felt over some similar experience, that prompted him, contemptuous now of you, to reveal his association with the doll-maker and to deliver his threat and challenge. Of course, there is no doubt that some way, somehow, he had discovered the part you took in the matter of the doll-maker. He believes you are terrified to the core… that through fear of what may happen to Helen and me, you will force me to drop the Ralston matter. Unless he believed that, never would he have risked forearming us by forewarning.”

Lowell nodded: “He is right. I am frightened. We are, the three of us, in unique peril. But, also, he is wrong. We must go on—”

Helen said, sharply: “The three of us? I think Alan is in worse danger than any of us. The Demoiselle has her brand all ready to add him to her herd.”

I said:

“Try not to be so vulgar, darling.” I spoke to Lowell: “I am still in the dark, sir. Bill’s exposition of the Ralston case was luminously clear. But I know nothing of this doll-maker, and therefore cannot grasp the significance of de Keradel’s references to her. If I am to enlist in this cause, manifestly I should be in possession of all the facts to be truly effective, also, for my own protection.”

Bill said, grimly:

“You’re not only enlisted, you’re conscripted.”

Dr. Lowell said:

“I will sketch them for you, briefly. Later, William, you will put Dr. Caranac in possession of every detail, and answer all his questions. I encountered the doll-maker, a Mme. Mandilip, through a puzzling hospital case; the strange illness and subsequent stranger death of a lieutenant of a then notorious underworld leader, named Ricori. Whether this woman was what is popularly known as a witch, or whether she had knowledge of natural laws which to us, solely because of ignorance, seem supernatural, or whether she was simply a most extraordinary hypnotist – I am still not certain. She was, however, a murderess. Among the many deaths for which she was responsible were those of Dr. Braile, my associate, and a nurse with whom he was in love. This Mme. Mandilip was an extraordinary artist – whatever else she might be. She made dolls of astonishing beauty and naturalness. She kept a doll-shop where she selected her victims from those who came to buy. She killed by means of a poisonous salve which she found means to use after winning the confidence of her victims. She made effigies – dolls – of these, in their faithful image, in faithful likeness to them. These dolls – she then sent out on her errands of murder – animated, or at least so she implied, by something of the vital or, if you will, spiritual essence of those whose bodies they counterfeited; something that was wholly evil… little demons with slender stilettos… who went forth under care of a white-faced, terror-stricken girl whom she called her niece, subject so long to her hypnotic control that she had become, literally, another self of the doll-maker. But whether illusion or reality, of one thing there was no doubt – the dolls killed.

“Ricori was one of her victims, but recovered under my care in this house. He was superstitious, believed Mme. Mandilip a witch, and vowed her execution. He kidnapped the niece, and in this house I placed her under my own hypnotic control to draw from her the secrets of the doll-maker. She died in this hypnosis, crying out that the doll-maker’s hands were round her heart – strangling it…”

He paused, eyes haunted as though seeing again some dreadful picture, then went steadily on:

“But before she died, she told us that Mme. Mandilip had possessed a lover in Prague to whom she had taught the secret of the living dolls. And that same night Ricori and some of his men went forth to – execute – the doll-maker. She was executed – by fire. I, though against my will, was a witness of that incredible scene – incredible still to me although I saw it…”

He paused, then lifted his glass with steady hand:

“Well, it seems that de Keradel was that lover. It seems that beside the secret of the dolls, he knows the secret of the shadows – or is it the Demoiselle who knows that, I wonder? And what else of the dark wisdom – who knows? Well, that is that – and now all is to be done again. But this will be more difficult—”

He said, musingly: “I wish Ricori were here to help us. But he is in Italy. Nor could I reach him in time. But his ablest man, one who passed through the whole experience with us, who was there at the execution, he is here. McCann! I’ll get McCann!”

He arose:

“Dr. Caranac, you will excuse me? William – I leave things in your hands. I’m going to my study and then to bed – I am shaken. Helen, my dear, take care of Dr. Caranac.”

He bowed and withdrew. Bill began: “Now, about the doll-maker—”

It was close to midnight when he had finished that story, and I had found no more questions to ask. As I was going out, he said:

“You bowled de Keradel almost clean out when you spoke of – what was it – the Alkar-Az and the Gatherer within the Cairn, Alan. What the hell were they?”

I answered:

“Bill, I don’t know. The words seemed to come to my lips without volition. Maybe they did come from the Demoiselle – as I told her father.”

But deep within me I knew that wasn’t true – that I did know, had known, the Alkar-Az and its dread Gatherer – and that someday I would… remember.

Helen said: “Bill, turn your head.”

She threw her arms around my neck, and pressed her lips to mine, savagely; she whispered: “It makes my heart sing that you are here – and it breaks my heart that you are here. I’m afraid – I’m so afraid for you, Alan.”

She leaned back, laughing a little: “I suppose you’re thinking this is the precipitancy of my generation, and its morals – and maybe vulgar, too. But it really isn’t as sudden as it seems, darling. Remember – I’ve loved you since the hornets and snakes.”

I gave her back her kiss. The revelation that had begun when I had met her, had come to complete and affirmative conclusion.

As I made my way to the club, all that was in my mind was the face of Helen, the burnished copper helmet of her hair and her eyes of golden amber. The face of the Demoiselle, if I saw it at all, was nothing but a mist of silver-gilt over two purple splotches in a featureless white mask. I was happy.

I started to undress, whistling, Helen’s face still clear cut before me. I put my hand in my pocket and drew out the silver bracelet with the black stone. The face of Helen faded abruptly. In its place, as clearly cut, even more alive, was the face of the Demoiselle with her great eyes tender, her lips smiling—

I threw the bracelet from me, as though it had been a snake.

But when I went to sleep it was still the face of the Demoiselle and not the face of Helen that was back of my eyes.

— VIII —

IN DAHUT’S TOWER —
NEW YORK

I woke up next morning with a headache. Also, out of a dream which began with dolls holding foot-long needles in one hand dancing with pink shadows around circles of enormous standing stones, and with Helen and the Demoiselle alternately and rapidly embracing and kissing me. I mean that Helen would embrace and kiss me, and then she would fade into the Demoiselle; and then the Demoiselle would do the same and as quickly fade into Helen, and so on and so on.

I remember thinking in that dream that this was quite like what occurred at a very unusual place of entertainment in Algiers named the “House of the Heart’s Desire.” It’s run by a Frenchman, a hashish eater and also a truly astonishing philosopher. He and I were great friends. I won his regard, I think, by unfolding to him that same scheme for “Heaven and Hell, Inc.” which had so interested the Demoiselle and de Keradel. He had quoted Omar:

I sent my Soul out through the Invisible.

Some letter of that after-life to spell:

And after many days my Soul returned.

And said, “Behold, Myself am Heav’n and Hell.”

Then he had said my idea wasn’t so original; it was really a combination of that quatrain and what made his place so profitable. He had a couple of renegade Senussi in his house. The Senussi are truly astonishing magicians, masters of illusion. He had a dozen girls, physically the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, and they were white and yellow and black and brown and intermediate shades. When one wanted to embrace “the Heart’s Desire,” and that was a most expensive undertaking, these twelve girls would stand in a circle, naked; a big, wide circle in a big room, hands clasped in each other’s with their arms out at full length. The Senussi squatted in the center of the circle with their drums, while the aspirant for the “Heart’s Desire” stood beside them. The Senussi drummed and chanted and did this and that. The girls danced, intertwining. Ever faster and faster. Until at last white, brown, black and yellow and intermediate seemed to coalesce into one supernal damsel – the girl of his dreams, as the old sentimental songs so quaintly put it, with trimmings of Aphrodite, Cleopatra, Phryne, and what not – at any rate, the girl he had always wanted whether he had realized it or not. So he took her.

“Was she what he thought her? How do I know?” shrugged this Frenchman. “To me – looking on – there were always eleven girls left. But if he thought so. Then, yes.”

Helen and the Demoiselle melting so rapidly into each other made me wish that they would coalesce. Then I’d have no bother. The Demoiselle seemed to stay a moment or two longer. She kept her lips on mine… and suddenly I felt as though I had both water and fire in my brain, and the fire was a stake upon which a man was bound, and the flames rushed up and covered him like a garment before I could see his face.

And the water was a surging sea… and out upon it, pale gold hair adrift, wave washed, was Dahut… eyes staring up to a sky less blue than they… and dead.

It was then I woke up.

After a cold shower I felt a lot better. While I ate breakfast, I marshaled the events of the night before into coherent order. First, Lowell’s experience with the doll-maker. I knew much about the magic of the animate doll, which is far ahead of the simple idea of the effigy into which one sticks pins, or roasts at a fire or what not. Nor was I so sure that the hypothesis of hypnotism could account for a belief of such ancient and wide-spread popularity. But more ancient still, and much more sinister, was the shadow magic that had slain Dick. The Germans might give it the more or less humorous twist of Peter Schliemel who sold his shadow to the Devil, and Barrie give it his own labored whimsicality of Peter Pan whose shadow was caught in a drawer and got torn – yet the fact remained that of all beliefs this of the sharing of his shadow with a man’s life, personality, soul – whatever one may term it – was, perhaps, the most ancient of all. And the sacrifices and rites connected with propitiation or safety from shadows could parallel any for downright devilishness. I determined to go up to the library and look up shadow lore. I went to my room and called up Helen.

I said: “Darling, do you know that I love you desperately?”

She said: “I know that if you don’t you’re going to.”

I said: “I’m going to be tied up this afternoon – but there is tonight.”

Helen said: “I’ll be waiting for you, darling. But you’re not going to see that white devil today are you?”

I answered: “I am not. I’ve even forgotten what she looks like.”

Helen laughed. My foot touched something and I looked down. It was the bracelet I had thrown away. Helen said: “Tonight then.”

I picked up the bracelet and dropped it in my pocket. I answered, mechanically: “Tonight.”

Instead of looking up shadow lore, I spent the afternoon at two unusual private libraries to which I have access, delving into old books and manuscripts upon ancient Brittany – or Armorica as it was called before the coming of the Romans and for five centuries thereafter. What I was looking for were references to Ys, and what I hoped for was to find some mention of the Alkar-Az and the Gatherer in the Cairn. Obviously, I must have read or heard those names somewhere, sometime. The only other reasonable explanation was that the Demoiselle had suggested them to me, and recalling the vividness of that vision of Carnac under the touch of her hand, I was not inclined to reject that. On the other hand she had denied it and I was as strongly disinclined to reject her denial. It had sounded like truth to me. Of the Alkar-Az I found no mention whatsoever. In a palimpsest of the 7th Century, one torn leaf, there were a few sentences that might or might not refer to the Gatherer. It read, translating freely the monkish Latin:

“… is said that it was not because this people of Armorica took part in the Gaulish insurrection that the Romans treated them with such severity but because of certain cruel and wicked rites unparalleled in their evil by any tribe or people with whom the Romans had come in contact. There was one [several words illegible] the place of the standing stones called [two whole lines illegible] beating in their breasts first slowly [another lapse] until breast and even the heart were crushed and then when within the crypt of the center temple the Blackness began—”

Here the fragment ended. Could this “place of the standing stones” have been Carnac, and the “Blackness” that began “within the crypt of the center temple” have been the Gatherer within the Cairn? It well might be. I knew, of course, that the Romans had practically exterminated the primitive population of Armorica after that insurrection of 52 A.D., and that the survivors had fled from their wrath, leaving the country unpopulated until the 5th Century, when numbers of Celtic inhabitants of Britain, driven out by the Anglos and Saxons, emigrated to Armorica and repopulated a great part of the peninsula. The Romans, taken all in all, were a broad-minded lot with the widest tolerance for the gods of those they conquered. Nor was it their custom to deal thus savagely with the conquered. What could have been these “cruel and wicked rites unparalleled in their evil” which had so shocked them that they had so ruthlessly stamped out those who practiced them?

Of references to a great city which had sunk beneath the sea, I found many. In some it was named Ys, in others nameless. The accounts which placed its destruction within Christian times were clearly apocryphal. The city, whatever it was, belonged to prehistoric times. In almost all the references accent was put upon its wickedness; its prostitution to evil spirits; to sorcery. Largely, the legend clung closely to the resume I had given the night before. But there was one variant which interested me mightily. This said it was a Lord of Carnac who had brought about the fall of Ys. That he had “beguiled Dahut the White, Daughter of the King, even as she had beguiled many men to their destruction.” It went on to say that “so great was the beauty of this sorceress that not for long could the Lord of Carnac summon resolution to destroy her and evil Ys; and she had borne a child, a daughter; and when he had opened the sea gates he had fled with this child, while the shadows of Ys thrust him on to safety even as they thrust on the waves to overwhelm Dahut and her father who pursued him.”

That, in the light of de Keradel’s theory of ancestral memories, rather startled me. For one thing, it gave me a clearer angle upon the Demoiselle’s remarks about my “remembering.” And it gave another explanation, though seemingly a preposterous one, why I had spoken those two names. If this Dahut came straight down from that Dahut, maybe I came straight down from the Lord of Carnac who had so “beguiled” her. In that event, contact might have started one of the de Keradel disks in my brain to action. I thought that the Alkar-Az and the Gatherer must have made a very strong impression upon the ancient Lord of Carnac, my ancestor, to cause the particular disk which registered them to be the first to become articulate. I grinned at the idea, and thought of Helen. Whatever the other memories, I remembered I had a date with Helen that night, and I was damned glad. I had a date with Dahut, too, but what of it?

I looked at my watch. It was five o’clock. I pulled out my handkerchief and something fell tinkling to the floor. It was the bracelet, and it lay with the black talisman staring up at me like an eye. I stared back at it with that uncanny feeling of recognition of its symbol growing stronger and stronger.

I went to the Club to dress. I had ascertained where the de Keradels were stopping. I sent Helen a telegram:

Sorry. Unexpectedly called out of town. No time to telephone. Call you up tomorrow. Love and kisses.

Alan.

At eight I was sending my card in to the Demoiselle.

It was one of those towering apartment houses overlooking the East River; sybaritic; their eastward and most desirable windows looking down upon Blackwell’s Island where the outcasts, the lesser fry of criminals, those not worthy of Sing Sing’s social life, Dannemora’s austerity, or the honor of occupancy in similar fortresses of civilization, are penned; a catch basin for the dregs.

The apartment houses were the Zenith complacently contemplating the Nadir.

The elevator went up and up. When it stopped, its operator signaled, and after a second or two a massive door in the shaft slid aside. I stepped out into a hall that was like the ante-room of a medieval chamber. I heard the door whisper its closing, and turned. Tapestries which had been held aside by the women were dropping into place, hiding it. I took swift note of the tapestry’s design, solely through force of habit – an adventurer’s habit of studying landmarks along the path in event of forced retreat. It portrayed the sea – woman, the fay Melusine, being surprised by Raymond of Poitiers, her husband, during her weekly bath of purification. It was very ancient.

The men were Bretons, swarthy, stocky, but clothed as I had never seen men in Brittany. They wore loose tunics of green, tight belted and on their right breasts, in black, the red symbol of the bracelet’s pebble. Their leg coverings were fawn-color, baggy, tapering below the knee and tied tightly at the ankle; like those of the Scythians and the old Celts. Their feet were sandaled. As they took my coat and hat I gave them pleasant greeting in the Breton – a noble’s customary greeting to a peasant. They responded humbly, and in kind, and I saw a furtive, puzzled glance pass between them.

They drew aside another tapestry, one pressing his hand against the wall as he did so. A door slid open. I passed through into a surprisingly large, high-ceilinged room paneled with ancient dark oak. It was dimly lit, but I glimpsed carven chests here and there, an astrolabe, and a great table strewn with leathern and vellum-covered books. I turned just in time to see the door slip back in place, leaving the paneling apparently unbroken. Nevertheless, I thought I could find it again in case of need.

The two men led me across the room, toward its right hand corner. Again they drew a tapestry aside, and a mellow golden glow bathed me. They bowed, and I passed into the glow.

I stood in an octagonal room not more than twenty feet across. Its eight sides were covered with silken hangings of exquisite texture. They were sea-green and woven in each was an undersea picture – fishes strangely shaped and colored swimming through a forest of feathery kelp… anemones waving deadly tentacles over mouths that were like fantastic flowers… a gold and silver school of winged snakes guarding their castles of royal coral. In the center of the room a table was set with antique crystal, translucent porcelain and archaic silver gleaming under the light of tall candles.

I thrust my hand into the hanging by which I had entered, drew it aside. There was no sign of a door… I heard laughter, like the laughter of little ruthless waves, the laughter of Dahut…

She was at the far side of the octagonal chamber, holding one of the hangings half aside. There was another room there, for light streamed through and formed a faint rosy aureole around her head. And the beauty of her made me for a dozen heartbeats forget everything else in the world – even forget that there was a world. From white shoulders to white feet she was draped in a web-like gown of filmy green in flowing folds like the stola of the women of ancient Rome. Her feet were sandaled. Two thick braids of her pale gold hair dropped between her breasts, and through her drapings every lovely line and contour were plain. She wore no jewels – nor needed any. Her eyes both caressed and menaced me – and there was both tenderness and menace in her laughter.

She came toward me and put her hands on my shoulders. Her fragrance was like that of some strange flower of the sea, and touch and fragrance rocked me.

She said, and in the Breton tongue:

“So, Alain – you still are cautious. But tonight you go only when it is my will that you go. You taught me my lesson well, Alain de Carnac.”

I asked, stupidly, still under that numbing spell of her beauty:

“When did I teach you anything, Demoiselle?”

She answered:

“Long… and long… and long ago.” And now I thought that the menace nigh banished the tenderness in her eyes. The straight brows drew together in unbroken line. She said, absently:

“I had thought that it would be easy to say that which I have to say when I met you tonight, Alain. I thought the words would pour from me… as the waters poured over Ys. But I am confused… I find it difficult… the memories struggle against each other… hate and love battle…”

By now I had gotten myself a little in hand. I said: “I, too, am confused, Demoiselle. I do not speak the Breton as you and that, perhaps, is why I am dull to your meaning. Could we not speak French or English?”

The truth was that the Breton was a little too intimate; brought me too close to her mind. The other languages would be a barrier. And then I thought: a barrier against what?

She said, fiercely:

“No. And no longer call me Demoiselle, nor de Keradel. You know me!”

I laughed and answered:

“If you are not the Demoiselle de Keradel, then you are the sea – fay Melusine… or Gulnar the Sea-born… and I am safe in your—” I looked at the hangings “-aquarium.”

She said, somberly: “I am Dahut… Dahut the White, Dahut of the Shadows… Dahut of ancient Ys. Reborn. Reborn here—” she tapped her forehead. “And you are Alain de Carnac, my ancient love… my great love… my treacherous love. So – beware.”

Suddenly she leaned toward me; she pressed her lips to mine, savagely; so savagely that her small teeth bruised them. It was not a kiss one could be indifferent to. My arms held her, and it was as though I held flame sheathed in fair flesh. She thrust me from her with what was almost a blow, and so strongly that I stumbled back a step.

She walked to the table and filled from an ewer two slender glasses with pale yellow wine. She said, with mockery:

“To our last parting, Alain. And to our reunion.”

And as I hesitated at the toast: “Don’t be afraid – it is no witch’s potion.”

I touched her glass and drank. We sat, and at some signal I neither saw nor heard, two other of the oddly dressed servants came in and served. They did it in the olden way, kneeling. The wines were excellent, the dinner was superb. The Demoiselle ate and drank daintily. She spoke little, at times deep in thought, at times regarding me with that blend of tenderness and malice. I have never dined tête-à-tête with a pretty girl and had so little to say – nor with one who was so silent. We were, in fact, like two opponents in some game upon which vital issues hung, studying our moves, studying each other, before beginning it. Whatever the game, I had the uncomfortable feeling that the Demoiselle knew much more about it than I – had, in all probability, made the rules.

From the great room beyond the hidden door came muted music and singing. They were queer melodies, vaguely familiar. It was as though the singers were in that room, and yet far, far away. They were shadows of song and music. Shadows of song? Suddenly I thought of Dick’s description of the singing of the shadow. A creep went down my spine. I looked up from my plate to find Dahut’s gaze upon me, amused, mockery in it. I felt wholesome anger begin to stir in me. The lurking fear of her vanished. She was a beautiful woman, and dangerous. That was all. But how dangerous rested with me. I had no doubt she knew what I was thinking. She summoned the servants and they cleared the table, leaving the wine. She said, matter-of-factly: “We’ll go out on the terrace. Bring the wine with you, Alain. You may need it.” I laughed at that, but picked up a bottle and glasses and followed her through the hangings into the room of rosy light.

It was her bedroom.

Like the other it was octagonal, but, unlike it, the top was that of a true turret – that is, the ceiling did not run straight across. It lifted in a graceful cone. In fact, the two rooms made a double tower, and I surmised that the walls were false, having been built into what had been one large chamber. In this, they were hung with the same sea-green tapestries but with no figures upon them. As I walked slowly on, their hues seemed to change and shift, darkening here into ocean depths, lightening there into the pale emerald of shallows, while constantly within them moved shadows; shadowy shapes that floated up from the depths, then loitered, then languidly sank beneath the range of sight.

There was a low, wide bed, an ancient armoire, a table, two or three low stools, a curiously carven and painted chest, a couch. The rosy light streamed down from some cunningly hidden fixture in the turret’s roof. I felt again the uncomfortable sense of familiarity that had come to me when I had looked upon the black pebble of the bracelet.

A casement opened upon the terrace. I set the wine upon the table and walked out upon the terrace, Dahut beside me. The tower was at the top of the building as I had thought, and at its southeast corner. At my right was the magical night panorama of New York. Far below, the East River was a belt of tarnished silver studded with the diamonded bands of bridges. About twenty feet beneath was another terrace, plain to the view since the building was of the step-back kind.

I said to the Demoiselle, jestingly:

“Is this like your tower in ancient Ys, Dahut? And was it from a balcony such as this that your servants hurled the lovers of whom you had tired?”

This was in questionable taste, but she had invited it; and, beside, the inexplicable anger was growing within me. She answered:

“It was not so high. Nor were the nights in Ys like these. You looked up into the skies to see the stars, instead of down upon the city. And my tower looked down upon the sea. Nor did I cast my lovers from it, since in – death – they served me better than in life. And not by casting them from any tower could I have brought that to be.”

She had spoken tranquilly; with evident sincerity. Whether she had spoken truth or not, I had then no slightest doubt that what she had spoken she believed to be truth. I caught her by the wrists. I said:

“Did you kill Ralston?”

She answered with that same tranquility:

“Why, yes.”

She pressed a sandaled foot on mine and leaned close to me, looking up into my eyes. Hot jealousy mingled with my wrath. I asked:

“Had he been your lover?”

She said:

“He would not have been had I met you before I met him.”

“And those others? You killed them?”

“Why, yes.”

“And were they too—”

“Not if I had met you—”

My hands ached to go round her throat. I tried to drop her wrists, and could not. It was as though she held them, clamped. I could not move a finger. I said:

“You are a flower of evil, Dahut, and your roots feed on hell.” I said: “It was his money then that bought you, like any harlot?”

She leaned back and laughed; and her eyes laughed and in the laughter of eyes and mouth was triumph. She said:

“In the old days you cared nothing about lovers who had gone before. Why do you care now, Alain? But no – it was not his money. Nor did he die because he had given it to me. I was tired of him, Alain… yet I liked him… and Brittis had had no amusement for a long, long time, poor child… if I had not liked him I would not have given him to Brittis…”

I came back to sanity. Undoubtedly, the Demoiselle was scoring me off for those suggestions of mine about her the night before. Her method might be a bit elaborate, but certainly it had been effective. I was more than a little ashamed of myself. I dropped her hands and laughed with her… but why and whence that anger and the devastating jealousy?

I thrust that doubt aside. I said, ruefully:

“Dahut, that wine of yours must have been more potent than I knew. I’ve been acting like a damned fool, and I ask forgiveness.”

She looked at me, enigmatically:

“Forgiveness? Now – I wonder! I am cold. Let us go in.”

I followed her into the turreted room. Suddenly I, too, felt cold, and a strange weakness. I poured some wine and drank it down. I sat upon the couch. There was a haziness about my thoughts, as though a cold fog had gathered round my brain. I poured another glass of wine. I saw that Dahut had brought one of the stools and was sitting at my feet. In her hands was an old and many-stringed lute. She laughed again, and whispered:

“You ask forgiveness – and you do not know what it is that you ask.”

She touched the strings and began to sing. There was something archaic about that song – all weird, sighing minors. I thought that I ought to know that song; that I did know it; had heard it often and often – in just such a turret as this. I looked at the walls. The hues in the hangings were shifting more rapidly… changing from malachite depths to pallid shoals. And the shadows were rising more and more rapidly; were coming closer and closer to the surface before they sank again…

Dahut said:

“You brought the bracelet I gave you?”

Passively, I thrust my hand into my pocket, drew out the bracelet and gave it to her. She fastened it around my wrist. The red symbol on the pebble gleamed as though traced in lines of fire. She said:

“You have forgotten I gave you that… long and long and long ago… lover I loved above all men… lover I have hated above all men. And you have forgotten the name it bears. Well, hear that name once more, Alain de Carnac… and remember what you ask me to forgive.”

She spoke a name. Hearing it, a million sparks seemed to burst in my brain – fireflies dissipating the cold fog that gripped it.

She spoke it again, and the shadows within the green tapestries rushed to the surface of the waves, twined arms, locked hands…

Round and round and round the walls they danced… faster and ever faster… shadows of women and of men. Hazily, I thought of the dancing girls in the “House of the Heart’s Desire,” dancing in a circle to the drums of the Senussi sorcerers… as these shadows were dancing to the luting of Dahut.

Faster and faster the shadows spun, and then they, too, began to sing; in faint whispering voices, shadows of voices… and in the green tapestries the shifting colors became the surge and withdrawal of great waves, and the shadow singing became the murmuring of waves, and then their song, and then a clamorous shouting.

Again Dahut spoke the name. The shadows sprang out of the tapestries and ringed me… closer and closer. The shouting of the waves became the roaring of a tempest, beating me down and down – out and out.

— IX —

IN DAHUT’S TOWER —
YS

Hurricane roaring and clamor of the sea dwindled into the ordered beat of great waves breaking against some barrier. I was standing at a window in some high place looking out over a white-capped, stormy sea. The sunset was red and sullen. It made a wide path of blood across the waters. I leaned out the window, eyes straining to the right to find something that ought still to be visible in the gathering dusk. I found it. A vast plain covered with immense upright stones, hundreds of them, marching from every side to a squat, rock-built temple like the hub of a gigantic wheel of which the monoliths were the spokes. They were so far away that they looked like boulders, then suddenly by some trick of mirage they quivered and swam close. The rays of the dying sun painted them and they seemed splashed with blood and the squat temple to drip blood.

I knew that this was Carnac, of which I was the Lord. And that the squat temple was the Alkar-Az where the Gatherer in the Cairn came at the evocation of Dahut the White and the evil priests.

And that I was in ancient Ys.

Then the mirage quivered again and was gone. The dusk blotted out Carnac. I looked down upon Cyclopean walls against which long combers broke, shouting. They were enormously thick and high here, these walls; jutting into the ocean like the prow of some ship of stone; they lessened as they fell back toward the mainland through shallows which were bare sands when the tides ebbed.

I knew the city well. A fair city. Temples and palaces of sculptured stone with tiled and painted roofs red and orange and blue and green adorned it, and dwellings of lacquered wood utterly unlike the rude homes of my clan. It was filled with hidden gardens where fountains whispered and strange flowers bloomed. It was clustered, this city, between the wave-beaten walls as though the land upon which it stood was a deck of a ship and the walls the bulwarks. They had built it on a peninsula that stretched far out into the sea. The sea menaced it always, and always was held at bay by the walls, and by the sorcery of Ys. Out of the city ran a wide road, straight over the sands to the mainland, and straight to the evil heart of the circling monoliths – where my people were sacrificed.

They who had built Ys were not my people. But it was not they who had raised the stones of Carnac. Our grandmothers had said their grandmothers had told that long and long ago the people who built Ys had come sailing in strangely shaped ships, fortified the neck of the peninsula and settled there; and now we were in thrall to them; and they had taken Carnac and on the trunk of its dark ritual had grafted branches that bore the fruit of unnameable evil. I had come to Ys to lop those branches. And if I lived thereafter to put ax to trunk.

Bitterly did I hate these people of Ys, sorcerers and sorceresses all, and I had a plan to destroy them, one and all; to end the dreadful rites of the Alkar-Az and rid the temple forever of That which came in the wake of torment and death to my own people at the summoning of Dahut and the priests of Ys. I thought all that while knowing at one and the same time I was the Lord of Carnac and also Alan Caranac who had allowed himself to be caught by the wiles of the Demoiselle de Keradel, and was seeing only what she was willing him to see. At least, Alan Caranac knew that, but the Lord of Carnac did not.

I heard the sweetness of a lute touched lightly; heard laughter like little heartless waves, and a voice – the voice of Dahut!

“Lord of Carnac, the dusk hides your lands. And have you not looked long enough on the sea, beloved? Her arms are cold – mine are warm.”

I turned from the window, and for a moment ancient Carnac and ancient Ys seemed fantastic dream. For I was still in that tower from which I had thought the dancing shadows had thrust me. It was the same room; rose-lighted, octagonal, hung with the same tapestries in which green shadows waxed and waned; and upon a low stool sat Dahut, lute in hand, draped in the same sea-green web, her braids falling between her breasts.

I said:

“You are true a witch, Dahut – to trap me like that again.” And turned to the window to look upon the familiar lights of New York.

But that was not what I said, nor did I turn. I found myself walking straight toward her, and instead of the words I had thought to speak, I heard myself saying:

“You are of the sea, Dahut… and if your arms are warmer, your heart is as merciless.”

And suddenly I knew that whether dream or illusion, this was Ys, and while the part of me that was Alan Caranac could see through the eyes, hear with the ears, and read the thought of this other part of me which was Lord of Carnac, I was powerless to control him and he was unaware of me. Yet I must abide by what he did. Something like an actor watching himself go through a play – but with the quite important difference that I knew neither the lines nor the situations. A most disturbing condition. I had a swift thought that Dahut ought either to have laced me under better hypnotic control or passed me up entirely. I felt a faint disappointment in her. That idea shot out of my mind like a rocket.

She looked up at me, and her eyes were wet. She loosed her braids and covered her face with her hair and she wept behind its curtain. I said, coldly:

“Many women have wept as you do… for men you have slain, Dahut.”

She said:

“Since you rode into Ys from Carnac a month ago, I have had no peace. There is a flame in my heart that eats it. What to me or to you are the lovers who have gone before, since until you came never did I know love? I kill no more – I have banished my shadows.”

I asked, grimly:

“What if they do not accept their banishment?”

She threw back her hair; looked at me, sharply:

“What do you mean by that?”

I answered:

“I make serfs. I train them to serve me well and to acknowledge no other master. I feed and house them. Suppose, then, I feed them no longer, deny them shelter. Banish them. What will my hungry, homeless serfs do, Dahut?”

She said, incredulously:

“You mean my shadows may rebel against me?” She laughed, then her eyes narrowed, calculatingly: “Still there is something in what you say. And what I have made, I can unmake.”

I thought that a sighing went round the room, and that for an instant the hues in the tapestries shifted more rapidly. If so, Dahut paid no heed, sat pensive. She said, musingly:

“After all, they do not love me – my shadows. They do my bidding – but they do not love me… who made them. No!”

I who was Alan Caranac smiled at this, but then I reflected that the I who was Lord of Carnac, quite evidently took these shadows seriously, disconcertingly, as matter-of-fact… as Dick had!

She stood up, threw white arms around my neck, and the fragrance of her that was like some secret flower of the sea rocked me, and at her touch desire flamed through me. She said, languorously:

“Beloved who have swept my heart clean of all other loves… who have awakened me to love… why will you not love me?”

I said, thickly:

“I do love you, Dahut – but I do not trust you. How can I know your love will last… or that the time may not come when I, too, become a shadow… as did those others who loved you?”

She answered, lips close to mine:

“I have told you. I loved none of them.”

I said: “There was one you loved.”

She swayed back, looked deep into my eyes, her own sparkling:

“You mean the child; you are jealous, Alain – and therefore I know you love me! I will send away the child. Nay – if you desire, she shall be slain.”

And now I felt cold fury stifle all desire for this woman who held life so lightly against passion that she would turn her hand even against the daughter she had borne. Ah, but that was no secret, even in Carnac. I had seen the little Dahut, violet-eyed, milk-white with the moonfire in her veins – no mistaking who had given her birth, even had her mother denied her. But I mastered the fury – after all, it was but what I had expected, and it steeled me in my determination.

“No,” I shook my head. “What would that mean but that you had tired of her – as you tired of her father – as you tired of all your lovers?”

She whispered, desperately, and if I ever saw true madness of love in a woman’s face it was there in hers: “What can I do! Alain – what can I do to gain your trust!”

I said: “When the moon wanes, then is the feast of the Alkar-Az. Then you will summon the Gatherer in the Cairn – and then will many of my people die under the mauls of the priests and many more be swallowed by the Blackness. Promise me you will not summon It. Then I will trust you.”

She shrank away, lips white; she whispered: “I cannot do that. It would mean the end of Ys. It would mean the end of me. The Gatherer would summon me… Ask anything else, beloved… but that I cannot do.”

Well, I had expected her refusal; had hoped for it. I said:

“Then give me the keys to the sea-gates.”

She stiffened; I read doubt, suspicion, in her eyes; and when she spoke, softness had gone from her voice. She said, slowly:

“Now why do you ask for them, Lord of Carnac? They are the very sign and symbol of Ys. They are Ys. They were forged by the sea-god who led my forefathers here long and long and long ago. Never have they been in any hands except those of the Kings of Ys. Never may they be in any hands except those of a King of Ys. Why do you ask for them?”

Ah – but this was the crisis. This was the moment toward which for long I had been working. I caught her up in my arms, tall woman that she was, and held her cupped in them. I pressed my lips to hers, and I felt her quiver and her arms lock round my neck and her teeth bruise my mouth. I threw back my head. I roared laughter. I said:

“You yourself have said it, Dahut. I ask because they are the symbol of Ys. Because they are – you. Perhaps because I would hold them against any change of heart of yours, White Witch. Perhaps as a shield against your shadows. Double your guards at the sea-gates, if you will, Dahut. But—” again I held her close and set my mouth against hers “ – I kiss you never again until those keys are in my hands.”

She said, falteringly:

“Hold me so another moment, Alain… and you shall have the keys… Hold me… it is as though my soul were loosed from bondage… You shall have the keys…”

She bent her head and I felt her lips upon my breast, over my heart. And black hate of her and red lust for her fought within me.

She said: “Put me down.”

And when I had done this she looked at me long with soft and misty eyes; and she said again:

“You shall have the keys, beloved. But I must wait until my father is asleep. I shall see to it that he goes early to sleep. And the keys of Ys shall be in the hands of a King of Ys – for King of Ys you shall be, my own dear Lord. Now wait here for me—”

She was gone.

I walked to the window and looked out upon the sea. The storm had broken, was rising to tempest strength and the long combers were battering, battering at the stone prow of Ys, and I could feel the tower tremble in the blast. Blast and sea matched the exultation in my heart.

I knew that hours had passed, and that I had eaten and had drunk. There was confused memory of a great hall where I had sat among gay people close to a dais where was the old King of Ys, and at his right Dahut, and at his left a white-robed, yellow-eyed priest around whose forehead was a narrow band of gold and at whose girdle the sacred maul with which the breasts of my own people were beaten in before the Alkar-Az. He had watched me, malevolently. And the King had grown sleepy, nodding… nodding…

But now I was in Dahut’s tower. The storm was stronger and so were the surge and beat of waves on the stone prow of Ys. The rosy light was dim, and the shadows in the green hangings were motionless. Yet I thought that they were closer to the surface; were watching me.

In my hands were three slender bars of sea-green metal, strangely notched and serrated; upon each the symbol of the trident. The longest was three times the space between my index finger and wrist, the shortest the length of my hand.

They hung from a bracelet, a thin band of silver in which was set a black stone bearing in crimson the trident symbol that was the summoning name of the sea-god. They were the keys of Ys, given by the sea-god to those who had built Ys.

The keys to the sea-gates!

And Dahut stood before me. She was like a girl in her robe of white, her slender feet bare, hair of silvery gold flowing over exquisite shoulders and the rosy light weaving a little aureole around her head. I who was Alan Caranac thought: She looks like a saint. But I who was Lord of Carnac knew nothing of saints, and only thought: How can I kill this woman, evil as I know her to be!

She said, simply: “Now can you trust, Lord of me?”

I dropped the keys and set my hands on her shoulders: “Yes.”

She raised her lips to me, like a child. I felt pity, against all my knowledge of what she truly was and I against my will I felt pity for her. So I lied. I said: “Let the keys stay where they are, white flower. In the morning, before your father awakens, you shall take them back to him. It was but a test, sweet white flame.”

She looked at me, gravely:

“If you wish it, so shall it be done. But there is no need. Tomorrow you shall be King of Ys.”

I felt a little shock go through me, and pity fled. If that promise meant anything it meant that she was going to kill her father as remorselessly as she had offered to kill her child. She said, dreamily:

“He grows old. And he is weary. He will be glad to go. And with these keys – I give you all of myself. With them – I lock behind me all life that I have lived. I come to you – virgin. Those I have slain I forget, as you will forget. And their shadows shall – cease to be.”

Again I heard that sighing whisper go round the room, but she did not – or if she did, she gave it no heed.

And suddenly she clasped me in her arms, and her lips clung to mine… nor were they virginal… and the desire of her swept like wild-fire through me…

I had not been asleep. Knowing what I must do, I had not dared to sleep though sleep pressed heavy on my eyes. I had lain, listening to the breathing of Dahut, waiting for her to sink into deepest slumber. Yet I must have dozed, for suddenly I became conscious of a whispering close to my ear, and I knew that the whisper had not just begun.

I lifted my head. The rosy light was dim. Beside me was Dahut, one white arm and breast uncovered, hair a silken net upon her pillow.

The whispering continued; grew more urgent. I looked about the room. It was thronged with shadowy shapes that swayed and shifted like shadows in the waves. Upon the floor where I had thrown them lay the keys of Ys, the black pebble glimmering.

I looked again at Dahut – and looked and looked again. For over her eyes was a shadow as though of a hand, and over her lips another such shadow, and upon her breast was a shadow like a hand upon her heart, and around knees and ankles were other shadowy hands, clasping them like fetters.

I slipped from the bed; dressed swiftly and threw my cloak over my shoulders. I picked up the keys.

One last look I took at Dahut – and almost my resolution broke. Witch or not – she was too fair to kill…

The whispering grew fiercer; it threatened; it urged me on, implacably. I looked at Dahut no more – I could not. I passed out of her chamber – and I felt the shadows go with me, wavering before and around and after me.

I knew the way to the sea-gates. It led through the palace, thence underground to the vault at the end of the prow of stone against which the waves were thundering.

I could not think clearly – my thoughts were shadows – I was a shadow walking with shadows…

The shadows were hurrying me, whispering… what were they whispering? That nothing could harm me… nothing stop me… but I must hurry… hurry.

The shadows were like a cloak, covering me.

I came upon a guard. He stood beside the passage I must take from the palace into the underground way. He stood there, as in dream, staring vacantly, staring through me, as though I, too, were but a shadow. The shadows whispered – “Kill.” I thrust dagger through him, and went on.

I came out of that passage into the ante-room of the vault of the gates. There was a man there, coming out of the vault. It was the white-robed priest with the yellow eyes. To him, at least, I was no shadow.

He stared at me and at the keys I held as though I were a demon. Then he rushed toward me, maul upraised, lifting a golden whistle to his lips to summon aid. The shadows swept me forward, and before it could touch his lips I had thrust my dagger through his heart.

And now the gate of the vault was before me. I took the smallest key, and at its touch in the slot that gate drew open. And again the shadows crowded before and around, and pushed me on.

There were two guards there. One I killed before he could draw weapon. I threw myself on the other, throttling him before he could cry alarm.

I thought that as we writhed the shadows wound themselves around him, smotheringly. At any rate, he soon lay dead.

I went on to the sea-gates. They were of the same metal as the keys; immense; ten times my height at the least, twice again as wide; so massive that it did not seem they could have been forged by the hands of men – that they were indeed the gift of the sea-god as the people of Ys had told us.

I found the slits. The shadows were whispering… first I must thrust in the larger key and turn… now the smaller and turn… and now I must cry out the name upon the pebble… once and twice and thrice… I cried that name…

The massive valves shuddered. They began to open inward. A thin sheet of water hissed through the opening striking the opposite side of the vault like a sword.

And now the shadows were whispering to me to flee… quickly… quickly…

Before I could reach the doorway of the vault the split between the opening valves was a roaring cataract. Before I could reach the passage a wave struck me. On its crest was the body of the priest, arms stretched out to me as though in death he was trying to drag me down… down under the smother…

And now I was on a horse, racing over the wide road to Carnac through the howling tempest. In my arms was a child, a girl whose violet eyes were open wide, and blank with terror. And on and on I raced, with the waves reaching out for me, clamoring behind me.

Above the tumult of wind and waves, another tumult from Ys – the crashing of its temples and palaces, the rape of its sea-walls and the death-cry of its people blended into one sustained note of despair…

— X —

AND OUT
OF DAHUT’S TOWER

I lay, eyes shut, but wide awake. I had battled back into this awakening, wrestling for mastery over another self that had stubbornly asserted its right to be. I had won, and the other self had retreated into my memories of Ys. But the memories were vivid and he was as strong as they; he was entrenched among them and he would live as long as they lived; waiting his chance. I was as spent as though that fight had been physical; and in my mind the Lord of Carnac and Alan Caranac and Dahut of ancient Ys and the Demoiselle de Keradel danced a witches’ dance, passing in and out of each other, shifting from one to another – like the girls in the “House of the Heart’s Desire.”

Time had passed between the moment of awakening and the moment when the death cry of Ys had smitten me in my flight over the sands. I knew that. But whether it had been minutes or millenniums I did not know. And other things had happened which I did not like remembering.

I opened my eyes. I had thought that I had been lying on a soft bed. I was not. I was standing fully dressed beside a window in a room of dim rosy light; a room like a turret… with octagonal walls covered by sea-green tapestries in which furtive shadows moved. And suddenly that other self became alert, and I heard a far off clamor of waves racing toward me…

I turned my head quickly and looked out of the window. There was no stormy sea, no spurning combers beating upon great walls. I looked down upon bridge-bound East River and the lights of New York; looked and fed upon them, drawing strength and sanity from them.

Slowly I turned from the window. Upon the bed was Dahut. She was asleep, one white arm and breast uncovered and her hair a silken net upon her pillow. She lay there, straight as a sword, and in her sleep she smiled.

No shadowy hands held her. Around her wrist was the bracelet, and the black stone was like an unwinking eye, watching me. I wondered whether her eyes under the long curling lashes were also watching me. Her breasts rose and fell, like the slow lift and fall of waves in a slumbering sea. Her mouth, with the kiss of the archaic upon her lips, was peaceful. She was like a soul of the sea over which tempest had passed, leaving it sleeping. She was very lovely… and there was desire for her in my heart, and there was fear of her. I took a step toward her… to kill her now while she lay asleep and helpless… to set my hands around her throat and choke the black life out of the white witch… to kill her, ruthlessly, as she had killed…

I could not do that. Nor could I awaken her. The fear of her stood like a barrier against awakening. The desire for her stood like another barrier against the urge to slay her. I drew back, through the window and out upon the terrace.

I waited there for a moment, considering, watching Dahut’s chamber for any movement. Witchcraft might be superstition – but what Dahut had twice done to me measured up fully to any definition of it. And I thought of what had happened to Dick – and of her calm confession about that. She had told the truth there, whether she had brought his death about by suggestion or by actual shadow. My own experiences had been too similar to doubt that. She had killed Dick Ralston, and those other three. And how many more only she knew.

I gave up any idea of slinking through her turret and trying to find the hidden door to the great room from whence had come the shadowy singing. Maybe the shadows wouldn’t be as helpful as they had been back in ancient Ys. Also, there was the ante-chamber of the elevators.

The truth was that the cold fear I felt of the Demoiselle seemed to paralyze all trust in myself. I was too vulnerable to her on her own picked field. And if I killed her, what possible reason could I offer? Ralston’s death, shadows, witchcraft? The best I could expect was the madhouse. How could I prove such absurdities? And if I awakened her and demanded release – well, I couldn’t see that working either. New York and ancient Ys were still too close together in my mind – and something whispered that the way I had taken in Ys was still the best way. And that was to go while she slept. I walked to the edge of the terrace and looked over its coping. The next terrace was twenty feet below. I didn’t dare risk the drop. I examined the wall. It had bricks jutting out here and there that I thought I could manage. I took off my shoes and hung them around my neck by the laces. I slid over the coping and with an occasional slip or two I landed on the lower terrace. Its windows were open and there was the sound of heavy sleeping from within. A clock rang two and the breathing stopped. A singularly formidable woman came to the casements, looked out, and slammed them shut. It occurred to me that this was no place for a hatless, coatless, shoeless fugitive to ask sanctuary. So I did the same crawl down to the next terrace, and that was all boarded up.

I climbed to the next, and that too was boarded. By this time my shirt was a wreck, my trousers ripped here and there, and my feet bare. I realized that I was rapidly getting in such shape that it would take all my eloquence to get away no matter what lucky break might come. I hastily slipped over the coping and half-slid, half-fell upon the next terrace.

There was a brilliantly lighted room. Four men were playing poker at a table liberally loaded with bottles. I had overturned a big potted bush. I saw the men stare, at the window. There was nothing to do but walk in and take a chance. I did so.

The man at the head of the table was fat, with twinkling little blue eyes and a cigar sticking up out of the corner of his mouth; next to him was one who might have been an old-time banker; a lank and sprawling chap with a humorous mouth, and a melancholy little man with an aspect of indestructible indigestion.

The fat man said: “Do you all see what I do? All voting yes will take a drink.”

They all took a drink and the fat man said: “The ayes have it.”

The banker said: “If he didn’t drop out of an airplane, then he’s a human fly.”

The fat man asked: “Which was it, stranger?”

I said: “I climbed.”

The melancholy man said: “I knew it. I always said this house had no morals.”

The lanky man stood up and pointed a warning finger at me: “Which way did you climb? Up or down?”

“Down,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “if you came down it’s all right so far with us.”

I asked, puzzled: “What difference does it make?”

He said: “A hell of a lot of difference. We all live underneath here except the fat man, and we’re all married.”

The melancholy man said: “Let this be a lesson to you, stranger. Put not your trust in the presence of woman nor in the absence of man.”

The lanky man said: “A sentiment, James, that deserves another round. Pass the rye, Bill.”

The fat man passed it. I suddenly realized what a ridiculous figure I must make. I said: “Gentlemen, I can give you my name and credentials, which you can verify by ’phone if necessary. I admit, I prefer not to. But if you will let me get out of this place you will be compounding neither misdemeanor nor felony nor any other crime. And it would be useless to tell you the truth, for you wouldn’t believe me.”

The lanky man mused: “How often have I heard that plea of not guilty before, and in precisely those phrases. Stand right where you are, stranger, till the jury decides. Let us view the scene of the crime, gentlemen.”

They walked out to the terrace, poked at the overturned plant, scanned the front of the building, and returned. They looked at me curiously.

The lanky man said: “Either he has a hell of a nerve to take a climb like that to save the lady’s reputation – or Daddy just naturally scared him worse than death.”

The melancholy man, James, said bitterly: “There’s a way to tell if it’s nerve. Let him stack a couple of hands against that God-damned fat pirate.”

The fat man, Bill, said, indignantly: “I’ll play with no man who wears his shoes around his neck.”

The lanky man said: “A worthy sentiment, Bill. Another round on it.” They drank.

I slipped on my shoes. This was doing me good. It was about as far as possible from ancient Ys and the Demoiselle. I said:

“Even under a torn shirt, ripped pants and footless socks a fearless heart may beat. Count me in.”

The lanky man said: “A peerless sentiment. Gentlemen, a round in which the stranger joins.” We drank, and I needed it.

I said: “What I’m playing for is a pair of socks, a clean shirt, a pair of pants, an overcoat, a hat and a free and unquestioned exit.”

The melancholy man said: “What we’re playing for is your money. And if you lose you get out of here how you can in the clothes you’ve got on.”

I said: “Fair enough.”

I opened, and the lanky man wrote something on a blue chip and showed it to me before he tossed it into the pot. I read: “Half a sock.” The others solemnly marked their chips and the game was on. I won and lost. There were many worthy sentiments and many rounds. At four o’clock I had won my outfit and release. Bill’s clothes were too big for me, but the others went out and came back with what was needful.

They took me down stairs. They put me in a taxi and held their hands over their ears as I told the taxi man where to go. That was a quartette of good scouts if ever there was one. When I was unsteadily undressing at the Club a lot of chips fell out of my pockets. They were marked: “Half a shirt”: “One seat of pants”: “A pant leg”: “One hat brim”: and so on and so on.

I steered a wavering nor’-nor’-east course to the bed. I’d forgotten all about Ys and Dahut. Nor did I dream of them.

— XI —

DAHUT SENDS A SOUVENIR

It was different when I woke up about noon. I was stiff and sore and it took about three pick-me-ups to steady the floor. The memories of the Demoiselle Dahut and of Ys were all too acute, and they had a nightmarish edge to them. That flight from her tower for example. Why hadn’t I stayed and fought it out? I hadn’t even the excuse of Joseph fleeing from Potiphar’s wife. I knew I had been no Joseph. Not that this troubled my conscience particularly, but the facts remained that I had made a most undignified exit and that each time I had met Dahut – with the problematical exception of Ys – she had worsted me. Both facts outraged my pride.

Hell, the plain truth was that I had run away in terror and had let down Bill and let down Helen. At that moment I hated Dahut as much as ever had the Lord of Carnac.

I managed a breakfast and called up Bill. Helen answered. She said with poisonous solicitude: “Why, darling, you must have traveled all night to get back so early. Where did you go?”

I was still pretty edgy and I answered, curtly: “Three thousand miles and five thousand years away.”

She said: “How interesting. Not all by yourself, surely.”

I thought: Damn all women! and asked: “Where’s Bill?”

She said: “Darling, you have a guilty sound. You weren’t alone, were you?”

I said: “No. And I didn’t like the trip. And if you’re thinking what I’m thinking – yes, I’m guilty. And I don’t like that either.”

When she spoke again, her voice had changed, filled with real concern and a little frightened: “You mean that – about three thousand miles and centuries away?”

I said: “Yes.”

Again she was silent; then: “With the Demoiselle?”

“Yes.”

She said, furiously: “The damned witch! Oh, if you’d only been with me… I could have saved you that.”

I said: “Maybe. But not on some other night. Sooner or later it had to come, Helen. Why that is true I don’t know – yet. But it is true.” For suddenly I had remembered that strange thought which had come to me – that I had drunk of the Demoiselle’s evil long and long ago – and must drink again, and I knew that it had been a true thought.

I repeated: “It had to be. And it is done.”

That I knew was a lie, and so did Helen. She said, a bit piteously:

“It’s just begun, Alan.”

I had no answer to that. She said: “I’d give my life to help you, Alan—” Her voice broke; then, hurriedly: “Bill said to wait at the Club for him. He’ll be there about four.” She rang off.

Hardly had she done so than a boy brought me a letter. On the envelope was a tiny imprint of the trident.

I opened it. It was in the Breton:

My elusive friend! Whatever I may be – I am still a woman and therefore curious. Are you as insubstantial as shadows? That doors and walls are nothing to you? You did not seem so – last night. I await you with all eagerness tonight – to learn.

Dahut

There was subtle threat in every line of that. Especially the part about the shadows. My anger rose. I wrote:

Ask your shadows. Perhaps they are no more faithful to you now than they were in Ys. As for tonight – I am otherwise engaged.

I signed it Alan Caranac and sent it off by messenger. Then I waited for Bill. I drew some comfort from the thought that the Demoiselle evidently knew nothing of how I had escaped from her turret. That, at least, meant that her powers, whatever they might be, were limited. Also, if those damned shadows had any reality except in the minds of those who strayed into her web of suggestion, the idea I had planted might bring about some helpful confusion in her menage.

Promptly at four, Bill came in. He looked worried. I laid the whole thing before him from start to finish, not even passing up the poker party. He read the Demoiselle’s letter and my reply. He looked up:

“I don’t blame you for last night, Alan. But I rather wish you had answered this differently.”

“You mean accepted it?”

He nodded: “Yes, you’re pretty well forewarned now. You might temporize. Play her along a bit… make her believe you love her… pretend you would like to join her and de Keradel…”

“Sit in on their game?”

He hesitated, then said: “For a little while.”

I laughed: “Bill, as for being forewarned, if that dream of Ys she conjured up means anything, it means Dahut is a damned sight better forewarned than I am. Also, much better forearmed. As for temporizing with or playing her – she’d see through me in no time, or her father would. There’s nothing to do but fight.”

He asked: “How can you fight shadows?”

I said: “It would take me days to tell you all the charms, counter-charms, exorcisms and what not that man has devised for that sole purpose. Cro-Magnons and without doubt the men before them and perhaps even the half-men before them. Sumerians, Egyptians, Phoenicians, the Greeks and the Romans, the Celts, the Gauls and every race under the sun, known and forgotten, put their minds to it. But there is only one way to defeat the shadow sorcery – and that is not to believe in it.”

He said: “Once I would have agreed with you – and not so long ago. Now the idea seems to me to resemble that of getting rid of a cancer by denying you have it.”

I said impatiently: “If you had tried a good dose of hypnotism on Dick, counter-suggestion, he’d probably be alive today.”

He replied, quietly: “I did. There were reasons I didn’t want de Keradel to know it. Nor you. I tried it to the limit, and it did no good.”

And as I digested this, he asked, slyly: “You don’t believe in them, do you, Alan – in the shadows? I mean in their reality?”

“No,” I answered – and wished it were the truth.

“Well,” he said, “your incredulity doesn’t seem to have helped you much last night!”

I went to the window and looked out. I wanted to tell him that there was another way to stop the shadow sorcery. The only sure way. Kill the witch who did it. But what was the use? I’d had my chance to do that and lost it. And I knew that if I could relive the night, I would not kill her. I said:

“That’s true, Bill. But it was because my disbelief was not strong enough. Dahut weakens it. It’s why I want to keep away from her.”

He laughed: “I’m still reminded of the cancer patient – if he could only have believed strongly enough that he had none, it couldn’t have killed him. Well, if you won’t go you won’t. Now I’ve some news for you. De Keradel has a big place on Rhode Island. I found out about it yesterday. It’s an isolated spot, hell gone from nowhere and right on the ocean. He keeps a yacht – seagoing. He must be almighty rich. De Keradel is up there now, which is why you had it all to yourself with the Demoiselle. Lowell sent yesterday for McCann and McCann is coming in tonight to talk things over. It’s Lowell’s idea, and mine, too, to have him go up and scout around de Keradel’s place. Find out what he can from the people about. Lowell, by the way, has gotten over his panic. He’s rather deadly in his hatred for de Keradel and that includes the Demoiselle. I told you he is all wrapped up in Helen. Thinks of her as a daughter. Well, he seems to think that she’s in danger.”

I said: “But that’s a damned good idea, Bill. De Keradel spoke of some experiment he is carrying out. That’s undoubtedly where he’s working. His laboratory. McCann might find out a lot.”

Bill nodded: “Why not come up and sit in?”

I was about to accept when suddenly I had the strongest feeling that I must not. A tingling warning of danger, like some deep hidden alarm going off. I shook my head: “Can’t do it, Bill. I’ve got work to do. You can tell me about it tomorrow.”

He got up. “Thinking you might change your mind about that rendezvous with the Demoiselle?”

“No chance,” I answered. “Give my love to Helen. And tell her I don’t mean maybe. Tell her I’m taking no more journeys. She’ll understand.”

I did spend that afternoon working; and that night. Now and then I had an uncomfortable feeling that someone was watching me. Bill called up next day to say that McCann had gone to Rhode Island. Helen got on the ’phone and said she had received my message and would I come up that night. Her voice was warm and sweet and somehow – cleansing. I wanted to go, but that deep hidden alarm was shrilling, peremptorily. I apologized – rather awkwardly. She asked:

“You haven’t it in your stubborn head that you’d carry some witch taint with you, have you?”

I said: “No. But I might carry danger to you.”

She said: “I’m not afraid of the Demoiselle. I know how to fight her, Alan.”

I asked: “What do you mean by that?”

She said, furiously: “Damn your stupidity!” And hung up before I could speak.

I was puzzled, and I was troubled. The inexplicable warning to keep away from Dr. Lowell’s and from Helen was insistent, not to be disregarded. At last I threw my notes into a bag with some clothes and sought shelter in a little hideaway hotel I knew, after having sent Bill a note telling him where he could find me but warning him not to tell Helen. I said I had the strongest reasons for this temporary obscuration. So I had, even though I didn’t know what they were. That was Tuesday. On Friday I went back to the Club.

I found two notes from the Demoiselle. One must have come just after I had left for the hideout. It read:

There was a debt from you to me. In part, you have paid it. There is not nor ever was a debt from me to you. Beloved – come to me tonight.

The other had been delivered the day after. It read:

I go to join my father in his work. When next I call you, see to it that you come. I have sent a souvenir that you may not forget this.

I read and re-read those notes, wondering. In the first there was appeal, longing; the kind of letter any woman might write to some reluctant lover. In the other was menace. Uneasily, I paced the floor; then called up Bill. He said:

“So you’re back. I’ll be right down.”

He was there in half an hour. He seemed a little on edge. I asked:

“Anything new?”

He sat down and said casually, a bit too casually: “Well, yes. She’s pinned one on me.”

I said, dumbly: “Who’s done what?”

He answered: “Dahut. She’s pinned one of her shadows on me.”

My feet and hands were suddenly cold and I felt a thin cord draw tight around my throat. The letter in which Dahut had spoken of the souvenir she was sending lay open before me, and I folded it. I said:

“Tell me about it, Bill.”

He said: “Don’t look so panicky, Alan. I’m not like Dick and the others. It won’t handle me so easily. But I’m not saying it’s exactly – companionable. By the way, do you see something at my right? Something like a bit of dark curtain – fluttering?”

He was keeping his eyes upon mine, but the effort of will he was making to do it was plain. They were a bit bloodshot. I looked, intently, and said: “No, Bill. I don’t see a thing.”

He said: “I’ll just shut my eyes, if you don’t mind. Last night I came out of the hospital about eleven. There was a taxi at the curb. The driver was half asleep, hunched over the wheel. I opened the door and was about to get in when I saw someone – something – move in the far corner of the seat. The cab was fairly dark and I could not determine whether it was a man or a woman.

“I said: ‘Oh! I beg your pardon. I thought the taxi idle.’ And I stepped back.

“The taxi man had awakened. He touched my shoulder. He said: ‘Okay boss, get in. I ain’t got anybody.’ I said: ‘Sure you have.’ He flashed on the inside light. The cab was empty. He said: ‘I been waitin’ here an hour, boss, on a chance. Just dozin’. Nobody got in. You seen a shadow.’

“I stepped into the cab and told him where to take me. We had gone a couple of blocks when I thought someone was sitting beside me. Close to me. I had been looking straight ahead and turned quickly. I caught a glimpse of something dark between me and the window. Then there was nothing, but I distinctly heard a faint rustling. Like a dry leaf being blown along a window in the night. Deliberately, I moved over to that side. We had gone another few blocks when I once more saw the movement at my left, and again there was a thin veil of deeper darkness between me and that window.

“The outline was that of a human body. And again as it flicked out I heard the rustling. And in that instant, Alan, I knew.

“I confess that I had a moment of pure panic. I called to the driver, about to tell him to take me back to the hospital. Then my nerve came back, and I told him to go ahead. I went into the house. I felt the shadow flitting with me as I entered. There was no one up. It companioned me, impalpable, incorporeal, glimpsed only by its movement, until I went to bed. It was with me through the night. I didn’t steep much—”

He opened his eyes, and quickly shut them again.

“I thought that like Dick’s shadow it would go with the dawn. This one didn’t. It was still there when I woke up. I waited until they’d all had breakfast – after all, Alan, a little playmate like that was nothing to introduce to the family, you know.” He squinted at me sardonically. “Also – it has other points of difference with Dick’s. I gather that Dahut rather favored him in that matter. I wouldn’t call my pal – cozy.”

I asked: “It’s pretty bad then, Bill?”

He said: “I can get along with it – unless it gets worse.”

I looked at my watch. It was five o’clock. I said: “Bill, have you got de Keradel’s address?”

Bill said: “Yes,” and gave it to me. I said: “Bill, don’t worry any more. I have an idea. Forget about the shadow as much as you can. If you haven’t anything important, go home and go to sleep. Or would you rather sleep here a bit?”

He said: “I’d rather lie down here for a bit. The damned thing doesn’t seem to bother me so much here.”

Bill lay down on the bed. I unfolded the Demoiselle’s last letter and read it again. I called up the telegraph company and found the nearest village to the de Keradel place. I got the telegraph office there on the ’phone and asked them if there was telephone communication with Dr. de Keradel. They said there was, but that it was a private wire. I said that was all right, I only wanted to dictate a telegram to the Demoiselle de Keradel. They asked – “the what?” I answered “Miss de Keradel.” I felt ironic amusement at that innocent “Miss.” They said they could take it.

I dictated:

Your souvenir most convincing, but embarrassing. Take it back and I surrender unconditionally. I’m at your command at any moment when assured this is done.

I sat down and looked at Bill. He was asleep, but not very happily. I was wide awake but not very happy either. I loved Helen, and I wanted Helen. And I felt that what I had just done had lost Helen to me forever.

The clock struck six. There was a ring on the telephone. It was long distance. The man to whom I had dictated the telegram spoke: “Miss de Keradel got the message okay Here’s one from her. It reads: ‘Souvenir withdrawn but returnable.’ You know what it means?”

I answered: “Sure.” If he had expected me to go into details, he was disappointed. I hung up the ’phone.

I went over to Bill. He was sleeping more quietly. I sat watching him. In half an hour he was breathing peacefully, his face untroubled. I gave him another hour and then awakened him.

“Time to get up, Bill.”

He sat up and looked at me blankly. He looked around the room, and went over to the window. He stood there a minute or two, then turned to me.

“God, Alan! The shadow’s gone!”

He said it like a man reprieved from death by torment.

— XII —

THE VANISHING PAUPERS

Well, I’d expected results, but not quite so soon nor so complete. It gave me a fresh and disconcerting realization of Dahut’s powers – whether of remote control by suggestion, as the Christian Scientists term it, or witchcraft. Such control would in itself savor of witchcraft. But certainly something had happened as the result of my message; and by the relief Bill was showing I knew how much he had understated the burden of the shadow upon him.

He looked at me, suspiciously. He asked: “What did you do to me while I was asleep?”

“Not a thing,” I said.

“What did you want with de Keradel’s address?”

“Oh, just curiosity.”

He said: “You’re a liar, Alan. If I’d been myself, I’d have asked that before I gave it to you. You’ve been up to something. Now what was it?”

“Bill,” I said, “you’re goofy. We’ve both been goofy over this shadow stuff. You don’t even know you had one.”

He said, grimly: “Oh, I don’t?” And I saw his hands clench.

I said, glibly: “No, you don’t. You’ve been thinking too much about Dick and de Keradel’s ravings, and of what I told you of the Demoiselle’s pretty little hypnotic experiment on me. Your imagination has gotten infected. Me – I’ve gone back to hard-headed, safe-and-sane, scientific incredulity. There ain’t no shadow. The Demoiselle is one top-notch expert hypnotist and we’ve been letting her play us – that’s all.”

He studied me for a moment: “You never were good at lying, Alan.”

I laughed. I said: “Bill, I’ll tell you the truth. While you were asleep I tried counter-suggestion. Sent you deeper and deeper down until I got to the shadow – and wiped it out. Convinced your subconsciousness you’d never see it again. And you won’t.”

He said, slowly: “You forget I tried that on Dick, and it didn’t work.”

“I don’t give a damn about that,” I said. “It worked on you.”

I hoped he’d believe me. It would help build up his resistance if the Demoiselle tried any more of her tricks on him. Not that I was any too sanguine. Bill was a psychiatrist of sorts, knew far more about the quirks and aberrations of the human mind than I did, and if he hadn’t been able to convince himself of the hallucinatory aspect of the shadows how could I expect to?

Bill sat quietly for a minute or two, then sighed and shook his head: “That’s all you’re going to tell me, Alan?”

“That’s all I can tell you, Bill. It’s all there is to tell.” He sighed again, then looked at his watch: “Good God, it’s seven o’clock!”

I said: “How about staying here for dinner? Or are you busy tonight?”

Bill brightened. “I’m not. But I’ll have to call up Lowell.” He took up the telephone. I said: “Wait a minute. Did you tell Lowell about my little party with the Demoiselle?”

He said: “Yes. You don’t mind, do you? I thought it might help.”

I said: “I’m glad you did. But did you tell Helen?”

He hesitated: “Well – not everything.”

I said, cheerfully: “Fine. She knows what you left out. And it saves me the time. Go ahead and ’phone.”

I went downstairs to order dinner. I thought both of us were entitled to something extra. When I came back to the room Bill was quite excited. He said:

“McCann is coming tonight to report. He’s found out something. He’ll be at Lowell’s about nine o’clock.”

I said: “We’ll get dinner and go up. I want to meet McCann.”

We had dinner. At nine o’clock we were at Lowell’s. Helen wasn’t there. She hadn’t known I was coming, nor had Lowell told her about McCann. She had gone to the theater. I was glad of that, and sorry. A little after nine McCann came in.

I liked McCann from the start. He was a lanky, drawling Texan. He had been the underworld leader Ricori’s trusted bodyguard and handy man; a former cow-puncher; loyal, resourceful and utterly without fear. I had heard much of him when Bill had recounted the story of that incredible adventure of Lowell and Ricori with Mme. Mandilip, the doll-maker, whose lover this de Keradel had been. I had the feeling that McCann took the same instant liking to me. Briggs brought in decanters and glasses. Lowell went over and locked the door. We sat at the table, the four of us. McCann said to Lowell:

“Well, Doc – I reckon we’re headed for about the same kind of round-up we was last time. Only mebbe a mite worse. I wish the boss was around…”

Lowell explained to me: “McCann means Ricori – he’s in Italy. I think I told you.”

I asked McCann: “How much do you know?” Lowell answered: “Everything that I know. I have the utmost faith in him, Dr. Caranac.”

I said: “Fine.” McCann grinned at me. He said:

“But the boss ain’t around, so I guess you’d better cable him you need some help, Doc. Ask him to cable these fellers—” he thrust a list of half a dozen names to Lowell “-an’ tell ’em he wants ’em to report to me an’ do what I say. An’ ask him to take the next ship over.”

Lowell asked, uncertainly: “You think that is justified, McCann?”

McCann said: “Yeah. I’d even go as far as to put in that cable that it’s a matter of life an’ death, an’ that the hag who made dolls was just a nursery figure compared to the people we’re up against. I’d send that cable right off, Doc. I’ll put my name to it, too.”

Lowell asked again: “You’re sure, McCann?”

McCann said: “We’re going to need the boss. I’m telling you, Doc.”

Bill had been writing. He said: “How’s this?” He passed the paper to McCann. “You can put in the names of the people you want Ricori to cable.”

McCann read:

Ricori. Doll-maker menace renewed worse than before. Have urgent immediate need of you. Ask you return at once. In meantime cable (so-and-so) to report to McCann and follow implicitly his orders. Cable when can expect you.

“That’s okay,” McCann said. “I guess the boss’ll read between the lines without the life and death part.”

He filled in the missing names and handed it to Dr. Lowell. “I’d get it right off, Doc.”

Lowell nodded and wrote an address on it. Bill ran the message off on the typewriter. Lowell unlocked the door and rang for Briggs; he came, and the message to Ricori was on its way.

“I hope to God he gets it quick an’ comes,” said McCann, and poured himself a stiff drink. “An’ now,” he said, “I’ll begin at the beginning. Let me tell the whole thing my own way an’ if you got questions, ask them when I’m through.”

He said to Bill: “After you give me the layout, I head for Rhode Island. I got a sort of hunch, so I take along a big roll of bills. Most of ’em is phoney but imposing in the herd. An’ I don’t aim to dispose of the mavericks – just display ’em. I see by the road map there’s a place called Beverly down that locality. It’s the nearest place on the map to this de Keradel ranch. On beyond, it’s empty country or big estates. So I head the car that way an’ give her the spur. I get there about dark. It’s a nice little village, old-fashioned, one street running down to the water, some stores, a movie. I see a shack with a sign Beverly House an’ figure to bed down there for the night. Far as I can see de Keradel an’ his gal have got to ride through here to get to the ranch, an’ mebbe they do some buying of their truck here. Anyway, I’m betting that there’s talk going ’round, an’ if so then the gent that runs this Beverly House knows all of it.

“So I go in an’ there’s an old galoot who looks like a cross between a goat an’ a human question mark at the desk an’ I tell him I’m looking for shelter for the night an’ maybe a day or so longer. He asks if I’m a tourist, an’ I say no, an’ hesitate, an’ then say I got a piece of business on my mind. He pricks up his ears at that, an’ I say where I come from we put our stake on the table before we play, an’ pull out the roll. He waggles his ears at that, an’ after I’ve talked him down about two bits on the tariff he’s not only plumb curious but got quite a respect for me. Which is the impression I want.

“I go in an’ have a darn good meal, and when I’m near through the old goat comes an’ asks me how things is an’ so on, an’ I tell him fine an’ to sit down. He does. We talk of this an’ that, an’ after awhile he gets probing what my business is, an’ we have some dam good applejack. I get confidential an’ tell him I been nursing cows for years down Texas way, an’ they’ve left me sitting mighty pretty. Tell him my grand-pap came from round these parts an’ I’ve got a yearning to get back.

“He asks me grand-pap’s name an’ I tell him Partington, an’ what I’d hoped to do was buy back the old house, but I was too late learning it was on the market an’ I’d found some Frenchman called de Keradel had bought it from the estate an’ so I supposed that was out. But mebbe, I say, I could pick up a place near, or mebbe the Frenchman would sell me some of the land. Then I’d wait till mebbe this Frenchman got tired of it an’ I could pick the old house up cheap.”

Bill explained to me: “This place de Keradel bought had belonged to the Partington family for generations. The last one died about four years ago. I told McCann all that. Go on, McCann.”

“He listened to this with a queer look on his face, half-scared,” said McCann. “Then he opined my grand-pap must have been Eben Partington who went West after the Civil War, an’ I said I guessed so because pap’s name was Eben, an’ he seemed to hold quite a grudge against the family an’ never talked much about ’em, which was mainly what made me want to get hold of the old place. I said I thought buying it back an’ living in it might rile the ghosts of them who kicked grand-pap out.

“Well, that was a shot in the dark, but it hit the mark. The old goat gets more talkative. He said I was a grandson of Eben all right, for the Partingtons never forgot a grudge. Then he said he didn’t think there was a chance of me getting the old place back because the Frenchman had spent a lot of money on it, but there was a place right close he knew of that I could get an’ if I’d put it in his hands he’d get me the lowest price for it. Also, he was sure I couldn’t buy in on the Partington ranch, an’ with that same queer look said he didn’t think I’d like it there if I could. An’ he kept staring at me as though he was trying to make up his mind about something.

“I said I’d set my mind on the old homestead, which I always understood was a pretty fairish size for the East though mebbe not so sizeable out West. An’ I asked what was the improvements the Frenchman had put in, anyway. Well, the old goat got a map an’ showed me the layout. It’s a big chunk of land sticking out into the sea. There’s a narrow neck about a thousand feet across before the land spreads out. Outside that it spreads a fantail which I figure’s got two or three thousand acres in it.

“He tells me the Frenchman’s built a twenty foot high wall across that thousand foot neck. There’s a gate in the middle. But nobody gets through it. Anything that goes from the village, including the mail, is took in by the guards. Foreigners, he says; funny little dark men who always have the money ready an’ say nothing no way. He says they take in a lot of supplies in their boat. Also, they got a truck, farm, an’ livestock – cattle an’ sheep an’ such, an’ bosses an’ a pack of big dogs. He says: ‘Nobody ain’t seen the dogs, except one man, an’ he—’

“Then he shuts up all of a sudden as though he’s saying too much an’ that funny, scared look comes on his face. So I file that for reference but don’t press him none.

“I ask him if nobody ain’t been inside an’ knows what it looks like, an’ he says: ‘Nobody round here has been except the man who—’ Then he shuts up again, so I figure he’s referring to the man who seen the dogs, an’ I get more curious about him.

“I say that with all that coast line I don’t see why people can’t slip in an’ look around a bit without anybody knowing. But he tells me it’s all rock, an’ only three places where you can land a boat, an’ that these three places are guarded like the gate. He looks at me suspicious an’ I say: ‘Oh, yes, now I remember, pap told me about that.’ An’ I’m afraid to ask much more on that line.

“I ask casual what other improvements there are, and he says they made a big rockery. I ask what anybody wants making a rockery in a place where nature has been so prodigal with rocks. He takes another drink an’ says, this is a different kind of rockery, an’, he says, mebbe it ain’t a rockery but a cemetery, an’ that funny scared look comes on his face plainer than ever.

“We have some more applejack an’ he tells me that his name is Ephraim Hopkins, an’ he goes on to say about a month after the Frenchman moves in there’s a couple of fishermen coming home when their kicker goes bad right off the point where the house stands. The Frenchman’s yacht has just dropped her anchor an’ she’s lightering a lot of men to the house landing. The fishermen drift awhile an’ while they’re doing it, they figure more’n a hundred men must been landed.

“Well, he says, about a month after that a Beverly man named Jim Taylor is driving along at night when his headlights pick up a feller staggering along the road. This man gives a yelp when he sees the lights, an’ tries to run but he falls down. Taylor gets out an’ sees he ain’t got nothing on but his underclothes an’ a pouch tied round his neck. He’s fainted. Taylor picks him up an’ totes him to this Beverly House. They pour liquor in him an’ he comes to, but he’s an Eyetalian who don’t speak much English, an’ he acts like he’s scared half to death. All he wants is to get some clothes an’ get away. An’ he opens the pouch an’ shows money. They get out of him that he’s run off from this de Keradel place. Got to the water and swum till he figured he was past the wall, then come to land. He says he’s a stone-cutter an’ one of a big gang brought in on the boat. He says they’re putting up a big rockery there, cutting out stones an’ standing ’em up like giants’ tombstones all in circles around a house they’re building in the middle. Says these stones are twenty, thirty, feet high.”

I felt something like a cold hand pass through my hair. I said:

“Say that again, McCann!”

He said, patiently: “Better let me go on an’ tell this in my own way, Doc.”

Bill said: “I know what you’re thinking, Alan. But let McCann go on.”

McCann said: “The Eyetalian won’t tell what scared him. Just jabbers, and shivers, an’ keeps crossing himself. They get he’s telling ’em the house in the middle of the stones is cursed. Tells ’em it’s the Devil’s house. They pour more liquor in him an’ he says the Devil is taking his toll. Says out of more’n a hundred men that come with him, half have died by stones falling on ’em. Says nobody knows where their bodies went afterwards. Says the gang was recruited from distant cities an’ nobody knew each other. Says about fifty more have since been brought in. Says only men without any families were hired.

“Then all of a sudden he gives a screech an’ ducks an’ covers his head with hands an’ runs out the door an’ disappears before anybody can foller. And two days after, says the old goat, they find him washed up on the shore about a mile away.

“He tells me they all figure the Eyetalian’s drunk or crazy. But I don’t believe him. He looks too agitated. It don’t take any eagle eye to see there’s something queer here. He says, though, that some of the lads cruise around in boats trying to get a look at this rockery. But they can’t see nothing. That don’t mean it ain’t there, because the rocks are steep around the point an’ where they ain’t there’s big trees growing.

“Anyway, they bury the Eyetalian an’ pay their taxes to the poor farm with his money. I’m telling you about that poor farm later,” said McCann.

“Well, it seems to me that by then the old goat gets the sudden idea what he’s been telling me ain’t selling talk, for that place he’s picked out for me. Anyway, he shuts up and waggles his beard and considers me. So I say that every word he’s said only makes me more interested. Tell him there’s nothing I like better than a good mystery, an’ the more I hear him the more I yearn to settle right down close to a real-life one. We take another drink, an’ I say if he can only dig up some more stuff like he’s been telling me, I’m as good as sold. Also, I’m paying cash. Also, that tomorrow we’ll go an’ take a look at this ranch he’s got in mind. I feel it’s better to let all this sink in, so we have another drink and I go to bed. I notice he’s looking at me darned peculiar as I go.

“The next day – that’s Wednesday – he’s up bright an’ early, pert an’ panting. We pile into his bus an’ start out. After a bit he starts telling me about this feller that seen the dogs. ’Lias Barton, he calls him. He says ’Lias is more curious than ten old maids peeking out behind the curtains at a house with a bride just moved in. Says curiosity is like a disease with ’Lias. Says he’d pull out a plug in Hell for a look in, even if he knew it’d squirt in his face. Well, ’Lias gets brooding and brooding over this wall an’ what’s behind it. He’s been all over the old Partington place dozens of times an’ he knows darned well what it’s like, but this wall’s like his wife putting a veil over her face sudden. He’d know he’d see the same old face but he’d have to lift the veil just the same. An’ for the same reason ’Lias just has to look over that wall.

“He knows there ain’t a chance by day, but he reconnoiters an’ crawls around, an’ at last he picks a place down near the water. Eph says there’s breasts of rock each end of the wall into which the wall is built an’ you can’t get over ’em from the water. ’Lias figures he can row down, slip to land and climb the wall. So he picks a night when it’s full moon but clouds obscuring the moon frequent. He packs a light ladder an’ sculls down cautious. He lands an’ puts up his ladder an’ when the moon’s under a cloud he swarms up. An’ there he is on top the wall. He draws up the ladder an’ flattens out an’ peers round. It’s ’Lias’s idea to drop the ladder on the other side an’ prospect. He waits till the moon comes; he sees it’s an open meadow below him out again an’ dotted with big bushes. He waits till another cloud comes an’ he unslings the ladder an’ starts down—

“An’ when he gets to this point in his story, Eph shuts up an’ heads the bus to the side of the road where we halt. I say: ‘Yeah, an’ what then?’ Eph says: ‘Then we pick him up next morning rowing round and ’round the harbor an’ crying “keep ’em off me – keep ’em off me!” ‘We take him in, he says, an’ get him calmed down some an’ he tells us what I’ve told you.’

“An’ then,” said McCann, “an’ then—” He poured himself a drink and gulped it – “An’ then the old goat shows he’s the best liar or the best actor I ever rode range with. For he says after that ’Lias goes like this an’ Eph’s eyes roll an’ his face twitches an’ he sort of screeches – ‘Hear the piping! Oh, hear the piping like birds! Oh, God – look at ’em running and hiding in the bushes! Hiding and piping! God – they look like men – but they ain’t men. Look at ’em run an’ hide!…’

“‘What’s that? It sounds like a hoss… a big hoss… galloping… galloping! Christ! Look at her… with her hair streaming… look at the blue eyes an’ white face of her… on the hoss… the big black hoss!’

“‘Look at ’em run… an’ hear ’em pipe! Hear ’em pipe like birds! In the bushes… running from bush to bush…’

“‘Look at the dogs… they ain’t dogs… Christ I keep ’em off me! Christ! keep ’em off me! The hounds of Hell… dear Jesus… keep ’em off me!’”

McCann said: “He made me crawl. I’m telling you I’m crawling now.

“Then he started the bus an’ went on. I managed to ask: ‘Then what?’ He says: ‘That’s all. That’s all we can get out of him. Ain’t never been the same since. Mebbe he just fell off the wall an’ hit his head. Mebbe so – mebbe not. Anyway ’Lias ain’t curious no more. Goes round the village sort of wide-eyed an’ lonesome. Get him started an’ he’ll do for you what I just did.’ He cackled – ‘But better.’”

“I said, still crawling: ‘If what looked like men wasn’t, an’ the dogs that looked like dogs wasn’t, then what the hell were they?’

“He says: ‘You know as much as I do.’

“I say: ‘Oh, yeah. Anyway, ain’t you got any idea on who was the gal on the big black hoss?’

“He says: ‘Oh, her, sure. That was the Frenchman’s gal.’”

Again the icy hand ruffled my hair, and my thoughts ran swiftly… Dahut on the black stallion… and hunting – what… and with what? And the upright stones and the men who had died raising them as they did of old… as of old in Carnac…

McCann’s narrative was going smoothly on. He said: “We ride along quiet after that. I see the old goat is pretty agitated, an’ chewing his whiskers. We come to the place he’s been telling about. We look around. It’s a nice place all right. If I was what I say I was, I’d buy it. Old stone house, lots of room – for East. Furniture in it. We amble around an’ after awhile we come in sight of this wall. It’s all the old goat said it was. It’d take artillery or TNT to knock it down. Eph mutters not to pay attention to it, except casual. There’s big gates across the road that look like steel to me. An’ while I don’t see nobody I get the idea we’re being watched all the time. We stroll here an’ stroll there, an’ then back to the other place. An’ then the old goat asks me anxious what I think of it, an’ I say it’s all right if the price is, an’ what is the price. An’ he gives me one that makes me blink. Not because it’s high but because it’s so low. It gives me the glimmer of another idea. Nursing that idea, I say I’d like to look at some other places. He shows me some, but halfhearted like an’ the idea grows.

“It’s late when we get back to the village. On the way we run across a man who draws up to talk. He says to the old goat: ‘Eph, there’s four more gone from the poor farm.’

“The old goat sort of jitters an’ asks when. The other man says last night. He says the superintendent’s about ready to call in the police. Eph sort of calculates an’ says that makes about fifty gone. The other man says, yeah, all of that. They shake their heads an’ we go on. I ask what’s this about the poor farm, an’ Eph tells me that it’s about ten miles off an’ that in the last three months the paupers have been vanishing an’ vanishing. He’s got that same scared look back, an’ starts talking about something else.

“Well, we get back to the Beverly House. Thar’s quite a bunch of villagers in the front room, an’ they treat me mighty respectful. I gather that Eph has told ’em who I’m supposed to be, an’ that this is a sort of committee of welcome. One man comes up an’ says he’s glad to see me but I’ve been too slow coming home. Also, they’ve all got the news about these vanishing paupers, an’ it’s plain they don’t like it.

“I get my supper, an’ come out an’ there’s more people there. They’ve got a sort of look of herding for comfort. An’ that idea of mine gets stronger. It’s that I’ve been wronging Eph in thinking all he wants is a profit from me. I get the flattering idea that they’re all pretty plumb scared, an’ what they think is that mebbe I’m the man who can help ’em out in whatever’s scaring them. After all, I suppose the Partingtons in their time was big guns ’round here, an’ here I am, one of ’em, an’ coming back providentially, as you might say, just at the right time. I sit an’ listen, an’ all the talk goes ’round the poor farm an’ the Frenchman.

“It gets around nine o’clock an’ a feller comes in. He says: ‘They picked up two of them missing paupers.’ Everybody sort of comes close, an’ Eph says: ‘Where?’ An’ this feller says: ‘Bill Johnson’s late getting in, an’ he sees these two floaters off his bow. He hooks an’ tows ’em. Old Si Jameson’s at the wharf an’ he takes a look. He says he knows ’em. They’re Sam an’ Mattie Whelan who’s been at the poor farm for three years. They lay ’em out on the wharf. They must have drowned themselves an’ been hitting up against a rock for God knows when, says this feller.’

“‘What d’you mean hitting up against a rock?’ asks Eph. An’ the feller says they must have been because, there ain’t a whole bone in their chests. Says the ribs are all smashed, an’ the way it looks to him they must have been pounding on a rock steady for days. Like as if they’d been tied to it. Even their hearts are all mashed up—”

I felt sick – and abreast of the sickness a bitter rage; and within me I heard a voice crying: “So it was done in the old days… so they slew your people… long ago—” Then I realized I was on my feet, and that Bill was holding my arms.

I said: “All right, Bill. Sorry, McCann,” and poured myself a drink.

McCann said, oddly: “Okay, Doc, you’ve got your reasons. Well, just then into the room comes a gangling sort of feller with empty eyes an’ a loose mouth. Nobody says a word, just watches him. He comes over to me an’ stares at me. He starts to shake, an’ he whispers to me: ‘She’s riding again. She riding on the black horse. She rode last night with her hair streaming behind her an’ her dogs around her—’

“Then he lets out the most God-awful screech an’ starts bowing up an’ down like a jumpin jack, an’ he yells – ‘But they ain’t dogs! They ain’t dogs! Keep em off me! Dear Jesus… keep ’em off me!’ At that there’s a bunch around him saying ‘Come along ’Lias, now come along’ an’ they take him out, still screeching. Them that’s left don’t say much.

“They look at me solemn, an’ pour down a drink or two an’ go. Me—” McCann hesitated “-me, I’m feeling a mite shaky. If I was the old goat I could give you an’ idea how ’Lias yelped. It was like a couple of devils had pincers on his soul an’ was yanking it loose like a tooth. I drunk a big one an’ started for bed. Old Eph stops me. He’s putty-white an’ his beard is quivering. He trots out another jug an’ says: ‘Stay up awhile, Mr. Partington. We’ve an idea we’d like you to settle here with us. If that price don’t suit you, name your own. We’ll meet it.’

“By that time it don’t take a mastermind to tell this is a pretty well-scared village. An’ from what I know before an’ what I’ve heard since I don’t blame ’em. I say to Eph: ‘Them paupers? You got an idea where they’re going to? Who’s taking them?’

“He looks around before he answers, then he whispers – ‘De Keradel.’

“I says: ‘What for?’ An’ he whispers: ‘For his rockery.’

“Earlier I might have laughed at that. But somehow now I don’t feel like it. So I tell him I’m interested, but I got to go back to New York tomorrow an’ think it over an’ why don’t they get the police to look into things. He says the village constable’s as scared as any, an’ there ain’t no evidence to get out a search warrant, an’ he’s talked to a couple of country officers but they think he’s crazy. So the next morning I check out saying I’ll be back in a day or two. There’s quite a little delegation sees me off an’ urges me to come back.

“I’m mighty curious to see that place behind the wall, an’ especially what Eph calls the rockery. So I run down to Providence where I’ve got a friend with a hydroplane an’ we fix it to ride over the de Keradel place that night. We go along the coast. It’s a moonlight night, an’ we raise it about ten o’clock. I get out the glasses as we come close. We’re flying about 500 feet up. It’s clear, but there’s a fog rising about this point as we get closer. A quick fog, too, that looks as if it’s trying to beat us to it.

“There’s a big boat lying off the point, too, in a sort of deep cove. They flash search lights up at us, whether trying to blind us or to find out who we are I don’t know. I give my friend the office and we duck the lights. I’ve got my glasses up an’ I see a long rambling stone house half hid by a hill. Then I see something that sort of makes me feel creepy – like old Eph’s wailing. I don’t just know why. But it’s a lot of big stones all doing ring-around-a-rosy around a bigger gray heap of stones in the middle. The fog’s swirling all around like snakes, an’ there’s lights flickering here an’ there… gray sort of lights… rotten…”

McCann stopped and lifted a drink with a none too steady hand: “Rotten sort of lights is right. Like they’re… decaying. An’ there appears to be something big an’ black squatting on that big gray heap… without no shape to it… shadowy. An’ it quivers an’ wavers… an’ the standing stones are like they’re reaching up to pull us down to this squatting thing…”

He set the glass down with a hand even less steady:

“Then we’re over an’ zooming away. I look back an’ the fog’s covered everything.”

He said to Lowell: “I’m telling you, Doc, that never at no time with the Mandilip hag did I feel as slimy as when we flew over that place. The Mandilip hag had a line into Hell all right. But this is Hell itself – I’m telling you!”

— XIII —

SUMMONS FROM DAHUT

“Well, that’s all.” McCann lighted a cigarette and looked at me. “But I got the idea what I’ve been telling makes a lot more sense to Dr. Caranac than it does to me. Me – I know it’s black poison. Mebbe he knows just how black. For instance, Doc, why’d you shy so when I made mention of them two paupers?”

I said: “Dr. Lowell, you won’t mind if I have a little talk with Bill. McCann, I apologize to you in advance. Bill, come over here in the corner. I want to whisper to you.”

I took Bill out of earshot, and asked: “Just how much does McCann know?”

Bill answered: “All that we know about Dick. He knows de Keradel’s connection with the doll-maker. And that would be enough for him, if he knew nothing else.”

“Anything about my experiences with the Demoiselle?”

“Certainly not,” said Bill stiffly. “Both Lowell and myself thought too much of the confidential element entered into them.”

“That,” I said, keeping solemn with an effort, “was true delicacy. But have you spoken to anyone except me about the shadowy visitation your imagination drew upon you?”

Bill exclaimed: “Imagination hell! But no – I haven’t.”

“Not even to Helen?”

“No.”

“Fine,” I said. “Now I know where I stand.” I went back to the table and apologized again to McCann. I said to Lowell:

“You remember de Keradel spoke to us of a certain experiment he contemplated? Its purpose the evocation of some god or demon worshiped long ago? Well, from McCann’s story I would say that his experiment must be rather far advanced. He has set up the standing stones in the order prescribed by the ancient ritual, and he has built in their center the Great Cairn. The House of the Blackness. The Shrine of the Gatherer. The Alkar-Az—”

Lowell interrupted, eagerly: “You have identified that name? I recall that when first you spoke it de Keradel showed consternation. You evaded his questions. Did you do that to mystify him?”

I said: “I did not. I still do not know how that name came into my mind. Perhaps from that of the Demoiselle as other things may have come later. Or perhaps not; the Demoiselle, you will also recall, suggested to him that I had – remembered. Nevertheless, I know that what he has built in the heart of the monoliths is the Alkar-Az. And that, as McCann truly says, it is black poison.”

McCann asked: “But the two paupers, Doc?”

I said: “It may be that they were beaten by the waves against the rocks. But it is also true that at Carnac and at Stonehenge the Druid priests beat the breasts of the sacrifices with their mauls of oak and stone and bronze until their ribs were crushed and their hearts were pulp.”

McCann said, softly: “Jesus!”

I said: “The stone cutter who tried to escape told of men being crushed under the great stones, and of their bodies vanishing. Recently, when they were restoring Stonehenge, they found fragments of human skeletons buried at the base of many of the monoliths. They had been living men when the monoliths were raised. Under the standing stones of Carnac are similar fragments. In ancient times men and women and children were buried under and within the walls of the cities as those walls were built – sometimes slain before they were encased in the mortar and stone, and sometimes encased while alive. The foundations of the temples rested upon such sacrifices. Men and women and children… their souls were fettered there forever… to guard. Such was the ancient belief. Even today there is the superstition that no bridge can stand unless at least one life is lost in its building. Dig around the monoliths of de Keradel’s rockery. I’ll stake all I have that you’ll discover where those vanished workmen went.”

McCann said: “That poor farm’s on the water. It wouldn’t be hard to take them away by boat.”

Lowell objected, sharply: “Nonsense, McCann! How could they be taken secretly? You’re surely not suggesting that de Keradel could steam in, gather the paupers on his boat and sail away without anyone being aware of it?”

McCann said, placatingly: “Well, now, Doc, there wouldn’t be much of a trick in that. I’ve seen ’em snaked out of penitentiaries. Guards can always be fixed, you know.”

I said: “There are other ways. They might slip away of their own volition. Who knows what de Keradel might promise them – if they slipped away to him?”

Lowell said: “But how could he get to them? How establish contact?”

Bill answered, quietly: “By the shadows of Dahut!”

Lowell thrust his chair back, violently. He said: “Preposterous! I acknowledge that such abnormal suggestion as we have been considering might have been effective in Ralston’s case. But to assert that a collective hallucination could be induced which would draw away half a hundred inmates of – it is – preposterous!”

“Well, anyway,” drawled McCann, “they went.”

I said: “De Keradel is an enthusiast, and thorough. Like Napoleon, he knows that you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs; nor can you have meat without cattle; nor human sacrifices without humans. How did he get his workmen? He engaged an agent who collected men without family – and therefore with nobody to care whether they turned up again or did not. Also, they came from widely separated parts and they did not know each other. Why? Because that reduced to a minimum any chance of inquiry concerning them. What became of those who were left after they had finished his rockery! Who knows – and who cares? Were any of them allowed to go after they had finished their work? I doubt it. Otherwise, why all these peculiar precautions? Again – who knows and cares?”

Bill said: “You mean he used them for—”

I interjected: “For his experiment, of course. Or as McCann’s old goat put it – for his rockery. They were laboratory subjects. Well, the supply runs short. He hasn’t enough. For one reason or another he doesn’t want to bring in any more that way. Still, he must have more subjects. For a show such as he proposes putting on, he may need quite a crowd. Where could he get them with the least risk? Not by stealing them from around the countryside. That would raise hell. Not from a prison – because even ten men vanishing from a prison would raise even more hell. Also, he needs women as well as men. What is the least missed person in the world? A pauper. And here close at hand is a reservoir of them. And so – the paupers vanish.”

McCann said: “It listens. But what about them dogs that ain’t dogs that sent ’Lias loco?”

I thought: “Riding on her stallion black, at her feet her shadow pack—” I answered: “Your guess about that is as good as mine, McCann. What are you going to do with these men, if Ricori puts them under your command? What plan have you in mind?”

He settled himself in his chair.

“Well, it’s this way. If the boss turns ’em over to me, it means he’s going to come back. An’ when the boss makes up his mind, he moves quick. Now these lads I named are handpicked an’ none afraid of hell or its angels. Handy with the Tommy-guns an’ what not, but they ain’t a bad-looking or a bad-behaved lot – ordinarily. Now what I’m figuring is that if this de Keradel’s up to the tricks we’ve been talking of, something’s likely to happen that’ll give us the breaks on him. I got a hunch the floating off of them two paupers was a mistake. He don’t want nothing that’ll point a finger at him. All right, maybe he’ll make another mistake. An’ we’ll be there.

“The Beverly people’ll be damned glad to see me. I been a mite modest about how much they took to me. I go back with a couple of the lads an’ tell Eph I’ll try out for a bit that house he offered me. Then in a day or two the rest filter in, just coming up to stay with McCann for the fishing an’ the rest. We’ll fish around all right, an’ sort of ride an’ tramp an’ scout. By the time the boss gets here we’ll have the lay of the land. Then, after you’ve shown him, he’ll tell us what to do further.”

Dr. Lowell said: “McCann, all of this will cost money. I cannot consent to it unless you permit me to defray the expenses.”

McCann grinned: “Don’t worry about that, Doc. The house won’t cost us nothing. Eph an’ his friends’ll see to that. As for the lads – well, I look after some things for the boss an’ he’s left me plenty funds. The boss’ll pay for the party. An’ should the party get rough, well—” there was a lawless glint in McCann’s eyes “ – from what you and Doc Bennett tell me there ought to be good pickings at the de Keradel joint.”

Lowell exclaimed, shocked: “McCann!”

I laughed; nevertheless I studied McCann. Suddenly I had an uneasy feeling that he might not be so disinterested after all. Straightforward enough he seemed, and his story supported our every suspicion – but wasn’t it just a little too pat? He and Ricori had been gangsters and racketeers, operating ruthlessly outside the law. I had no doubt that in the main his story was true; that he had found a village filled with fear and rumor. But this might be nothing more than the gossip of a small community whose curiosity and resentment had been aroused by being barred from a place to which they had enjoyed free ingress for generations. In many parts of rural New England it is a neighborhood affront to pull down the window shades at night. Families have been ostracized and preached against in the churches for doing it. Unless you are doing something wrong, why cover the windows so the neighbors can’t look in? The same argument might be at the bottom of the Beverly unrest. Their imaginations painted what might be going on behind the de Keradel wall. And tale after tale would grow stronger in the telling.

How easy for a quick-witted crook to take advantage of such a situation; bring in a gang and set up headquarters in this house between the village and the isolated de Keradel place. Then, on some manufactured evidence or without it, under pretense of ridding the villagers of their terror, with their rear protected by these superstitious allies, to storm the wall, raid the house and loot it. Its guards once overcome, there would be none to interfere. Perhaps McCann had information as to the extent of the “pickings” beyond Bill’s surmises as to what had been secured from Ralston and the others. Perhaps he had already apprised Ricori of the opportunity, and the cable he had induced Lowell to send was only a blind.

These thoughts ran through my mind in a fraction of the time it has taken to tell them. I said:

“It sounds first rate. But what you need is somebody inside the place who will keep in touch with you.”

McCann said, emphatically: “That’s one thing can’t be done.”

I said: “Wrong. I know somebody who will do it.”

He grinned: “Yeah? Who?”

I said: “Me.”

Lowell leaned forward, staring at me incredulously. Bill whitened, and little beads of sweat came out on his forehead. McCann’s grin faded. He asked:

“How you going to get in?”

I said: “By the front door, McCann. I have, in fact, an invitation from Mademoiselle de Keradel. I’ve accepted it. I’m afraid I forgot to tell you that, Bill.”

Bill said, grimly: “I’m afraid you did. So… that… was why you wanted de Keradel’s address? And that was what you did while I was asleep… and that was why—”

I said, airily: “I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about, Bill. The Demoiselle, no matter what else she may be, is a damned interesting lady. I’d been thinking over what you suggested a few days ago – about sitting in and so on. It just happened that the invitation came while you were asleep, and I immediately accepted. And that’s all.”

He said, slowly: “And immediately the—”

I said, hastily: “Nothing to that, Bill. Forget it. Now as I see the situation—”

McCann interrupted, his eyes narrowed and face hardened: “Seems to me you know this de Keradel gal better’n anybody told me, Dr. Caranac. Seems to me you know a hell of a lot you’ve not come clean with.”

I said, cheerfully: “A hell of a lot is right, McCann. And that’s the way it stays. Take me or leave me. You’ll have your gang outside the wall. I’ll be inside. If you want me to cooperate, fine. If you don’t, I’d just as soon play a lone hand. What are you afraid of?”

He flushed, and his hands went down to his hips in a swift stiff motion. He drawled: “I ain’t afraid – but I like to know the brand of who I work for.”

I laughed: “Take it from me, McCann, whatever it is, it’s not the Double-Cross. But you’ll have to leave it at that.”

Bill said, still sweating: “I can’t let you do that, Alan.”

I said: “Listen. Either de Keradel and the Demoiselle brought about the suicide of Dick and the others – or they did not. If they did – they accomplished it by some dark knowledge they possess, or by hypnotic suggestion. In either case, no evidence could be brought against them that any court would consider. So that’s out. But if de Keradel is actually carrying on that devilish experiment he hinted, and if he is luring, stealing or otherwise securing human sacrifices to complete that experiment, then he’s leaving himself open to perfectly tangible evidence and a charge of murder. He’s bending his neck to the noose. And so—” I winced at the thought “ – is the Demoiselle. The only place to get that evidence is up there in Rhode Island. McCann’s plan is good, but he’s outside the wall, and he could not have the advantages that someone inside would have for observation. It happens that I am not only invited to go inside, but uniquely fitted for doing so—” I couldn’t help giving Bill a sardonic grin at that. “Also, Bill, if there is danger, I have a real conviction that I run less risk by accepting the Demoiselle’s invitation than I do by refusing it.”

And that was true enough, I thought. If I obeyed Dahut’s summons, I’d probably lose Helen forever. But if I didn’t – well, I would just as probably lose her anyway. And I didn’t like to think of what might happen to her and to Bill in the process. At that time incredulity and absolute conviction of the Demoiselle’s unholy powers revolved in my mind like a two-sailed windmill. And sometimes so fast that I found myself both believing and disbelieving at the same time.

Bill said: “You were always a rotten bad liar, Alan.”

McCann stuck out his hand: “Okay, Doc, I’m sorry I said it. You don’t need tell me nothing more. What you want me to do?”

I was really moved by that. I took his hand and said: “I’m sorry, too, McCann.”

McCann asked: “What for?” I said: “For something I’d been thinking. Come down to the Club with me and we’ll map out some line. We won’t talk here because from now on I want Dr. Bennett to keep out of this.”

Bill said, hotly: “The hell I will. When McCann goes up there I go with him.”

I said: “I know what I’m talking about. I’ll play this game with McCann. And with Ricori – if he comes over. But you’re out of it, Bill. I don’t want you even to talk to Ricori. Let Dr. Lowell do all the explaining.”

Bill said, stubbornly: “I go with McCann.”

I said: “You poor boob, do you think it’s you I’m considering? It’s Helen.”

He dropped at that, and again I saw his face whiten and the little beads of sweat come out on his forehead. He said, slowly: “So – that’s it.”

I said: “That’s exactly it. Think it over and see how right I am. Nothing doing, Bill. You’re out.”

I turned to Dr. Lowell: “I have the best of reasons for what I am saying. I am hoping you will support me. I don’t think there’s much danger for you. But for Helen and Bill – a lot.”

Lowell said, very gravely: “I understand you, Alan. I will not fail you.”

I got up; I looked at Bill and laughed. I said: “You’ve the look of somebody who sees his best friend pacing from the condemned cell toward that Little Green Door from which none returneth. It’s nothing of the sort, Bill. I’m going to visit a charming lady and her perhaps insane but nevertheless brilliant father. I expect to have a most interesting time. And if papa gets too crazy I have McCann to fall back on. If I want you, I’ll call on you. There are mails and telephone. Come on, McCann.”

We went down, the four of us, to the hall. I said: “Also, Bill, don’t tell Helen anything about this until I give you the word.”

And just then the door opened and Helen came in.

Her eyes widened, and she looked distressed and she said: “Hello, darling. Why didn’t somebody tell me you were coming tonight? I’d not have gone out.”

She put her arms around my neck and kissed me. Her lips were soft and warm, and there was a fragrance about her – not like some unknown sea-bloom but flowers blossoming on a breast of earth.

I said: “I didn’t know it myself until after you’d gone, angel.”

She said: “Well, you’re coming right back. I’ve a lot to talk to you about.”

I wanted to be with Helen, right enough – but some way, tonight, I didn’t want to talk to her. I cast an involuntary glance of appeal at McCann.

McCann caught it. He said: “Sorry, Miss Helen, but we got to get right out.”

Helen looked at him: “Hello, McCann. I didn’t notice you. What are you going to do with this man of mine?”

“Anything you say, Miss Helen.” McCann was grinning, but I had the idea he was speaking absolute truth, and that whatever Helen ordered he would certainly do his best to accomplish.

Bill said: “Alan has to go, Helen.”

She took off her hat and smoothed the copper helmet of her hair. She asked, quietly: “The de Keradel affair, Alan?”

I nodded and she went a little white. I said: “It’s nothing very important, but, honestly, I can’t stay. Let’s make a day of it tomorrow, Helen. Meet me at Marguens and take lunch. Then we’ll ride around a bit and get supper and go to some show or other. I haven’t been to a theater for three years.”

She looked at me for a long minute or two, then rested her hands on my shoulders: “All right, Alan. I’ll meet you there – at two. But – be there.”

As I went out I swore to myself that come hell or high water, I’d be there. Summons from Dahut notwithstanding. If Bill had to entertain one of her shadows for a few hours – well, he’d have to stand it. Down at the Club, McCann and I had a few drinks and I told him a few more things. I said I thought both de Keradel and his daughter were a bit crazy, and the reason I’d been invited down was because she had a wild idea we’d been in love with each other a few thousand years ago. He listened, silently. When I was done, he said: “The shadders, Doc. You think they’re real?”

I said: “I don’t see how they can be. But certainly the people who see them think they are.”

He nodded, absently: “Well, they got to be treated as if they’re real. But how can you put the heat on a shadder? The people responsible for ’em are real, though. An’ you can always put the heat on them.”

He said, shrewdly:

“This de Keradel gal, now. How do you feel about her? I hear she’s mighty ornamental. Feel safe – going down there?”

I flushed at that; I said, coldly: “When I need a guardian, McCann, I’ll let you know.”

He answered as coldly: “I didn’t mean it that way. Only – I ain’t aiming to see Miss Helen get any crooked deal.”

That stung me; I began, unthinkingly: “If it wasn’t for Miss Helen—” then shut up. He leaned over toward me, his eyes less hard:

“I thought so. You’re scared for Miss Helen. That’s why you’re going. But mebbe that ain’t just the way to protect her.”

I said: “All right, McCann, tell me a better.”

He said: “Why not leave it to me an’ the hands?”

“I know what I’m about, McCann,” I told him.

He sighed and got up: “Well, soon’s we hear from the boss you an’ me’s got to get together on signals an’ how to meet down there. There’ll be boats fishing at the end of the walls, for one thing. When do you figure on visiting?”

“When I’m sent for.”

He sighed again, shook my hand solemnly, and left. I went to bed, and slept soundly. The next morning at nine Bill called me up to say that Ricori had cabled the necessary instructions and that he was flying from Genoa to Paris that day to catch the Mauretania and would be in New York in a week. McCann ’phoned the same news, and we made an engagement for that midnight to go over details of our team work.

I spent a gorgeous day with Helen. I met her at Marguens and said: “This day is yours and mine, darling. We’re not going to think about anything else. To hell with the de Keradels. This is the last mention of them.”

She said, sweetly: “To hell with them suits me perfectly, darling.”

It was, as I have said, a gorgeous day, and long before it was over I knew just how much I was in love with her; how utterly lovely and desirable she was. Every time the thought of the Demoiselle crept out of the far corner of my mind into which I had thrust her, I pushed her back with a pang of hatred. At half-past eleven I bade good-by to Helen at Lowell’s door. I asked: “How about tomorrow?”

She said: “All right – if you can.”

I asked: “Why the devil couldn’t I?”

She said: “This day’s over, Alan. You’ll not be rid of Dahut so easily.” I started to answer; she stopped me: “You don’t know how much I love you. Promise me – if you need me… come to me… at any time… in any shape!”

I caught her in my arms: “In any shape – what the devil do you mean by that?”

She drew my head down, pressed her lips to mine – savagely, tenderly, passionately all in one for long. She thrust me from her and I saw that she was crying. She threw open the door, then turned for a moment:

“You don’t know how much I love you!”

She closed the door. I went down to the waiting cab and rode to the Club, cursing the Demoiselle more comprehensively than I had since ancient Ys – if and when that had been. McCann hadn’t arrived, but a telegram had. It was from Dahut, and read:

The yacht will be waiting for you at the Larchmont Club at noon tomorrow. Her name is Brittis. I will meet you. Sincerely hope you will come prepared for indefinite stay.

Well – that was that. I did not miss the nuance of the name, nor the mockery in that “indefinite stay.” Helen was reality, and Dahut was shadow. But I knew that now shadow had become the true reality. With a sinking of the heart; with forebodings against which I raged, impotently; with sorrow for Helen as though I were bidding her farewell forever; with cold hatred against this woman who was contemptuously summoning me – I knew I could do nothing but obey her.

— XIV —

BEHIND
DE KERADEL’S WALL

I had one of my valises packed when McCann was announced. He squinted at it with surprise: “You ain’t going away tonight, Doc?”

With sudden impulse toward frankness, I pushed over to him the Demoiselle’s telegram. He read it stolidly; looked up: “This just come? Thought you told Doc Bennett you’d already had an invitation.”

“This,” I explained patiently, “is merely a confirmation of an engagement previously made, setting a definite time for one left indefinite before as you will see if you read it over again carefully.” I began to pack the other valise. McCann reread the telegram, watched me silently for a while, then said mildly:

“Doc Bennett had one of them shadders trailing him, didn’t he?”

I turned to him sharply: “What makes you think that?”

He went on, as though he had not heard me: “An’ he lost it down here with you, didn’t he?”

“McCann,” I said, “you’re crazy. What gave you that idea?”

He sighed, and said: “When you an’ him was arguing tonight about you going down an’ setting in with this de Keradel, I got a mite puzzled. But when I see this telegram, I ain’t puzzled no more. I get the answer.”

“Fine,” I said, and resumed packing. “What is it?”

He said: “You traded something for Doc Bennett’s shadder.”

I looked at him and laughed: “You’ve grand ideas, McCann. What have I to trade, and with whom and for what?”

McCann sighed again, and put a finger on the Demoiselle’s name: “With her—” He pointed to the “indefinite stay” and said: “An’ you traded this for his shadder.”

“McCann,” I went over to him. “He did think a shadow was following him. But that may have been only because he has been thinking too much about this whole queer matter. And he has much the same idea as you about how be was relieved of the obsession. I want you to promise me that you will say nothing of your own suspicions to him – and especially nothing to Miss Helen. If one or the other should speak to you about it, do your best to discourage the notion. I have good reasons for asking this – believe me I have. Will you promise?”

He asked: “Miss Helen don’t know nothing about it yet?”

“Not unless Dr. Bennett has told her since we left,” I answered. Uneasily I wondered whether he had, and cursed my stupidity for not getting his promise that he wouldn’t.

He considered me for a time, then said: “Okay, Doc. But I’ve got to tell the boss when he comes.”

I laughed, and said: “Okay, McCann. By that time the game may be all over – except for the post-mortems.”

He asked, sharply: “What do you mean by that?”

I answered: “Nothing.” And went on with my packing. The truth was I didn’t know myself what I had meant.

He said: “You figure on getting there some time tomorrow evening. I’ll be up at the old goat’s with some of the lads long before dusk. Probably won’t get to this house I been telling you of until next day. But nothing’s likely to happen right off. You got any plans how we’re going to get together?”

“I’ve been thinking about that.” I stopped the packing, and sat on the bed. “I’m not so sure how much I’m going to be under surveillance, or what liberty I’ll have. The situation is – well, unusual and complicated. Obviously, I can’t trust to letters or telegrams. Telegrams have to be telephoned and telephones can be tapped. Also, letters can be opened. I might ride to the village, but that doesn’t mean I could get in touch with you when I got there, because I don’t think I’d be riding alone. Even if you happened to be there, it would be highly impolitic to recognize and talk to you. The de Keradels are no fools, McCann, and they would realize the situation perfectly. Until I’ve been on the other side of de Keradel’s wall and studied the ground, I can suggest only one thing.”

“You talk like you been sentenced an’ bound for the Big House,” he grinned.

“I believe in looking for the worst,” I said. “Then you’re never disappointed. That being so – put this down, McCann – a telegram to Dr. Bennett which reads – ‘Feeling fine. Don’t forget to forward all mail’ means that you’re to get over that wall despite hell or high water as quick as you can and up to the house as quick as you can and damn the torpedoes. Get that McCann?”

“Okay,” he said. “But I got an idea or two likewise. First – nobody’s going to keep you from writing after you get there. Okay again. You write an’ you find some excuse to get to the village. You get out to this Beverly House I been telling you about an’ go in. Don’t matter who’s with you, you’ll find some way to drop that letter on the floor or somewhere. You don’t have to give it to nobody. After you go they’ll comb the place through to find it. An’ I’ll get it. That’s one line. Next – they’ll be a couple of lads fishing around the north side of that wall all the time – that’s the left end of it coming from the house. There’s a breast of rock there, an’ I don’t see why you can’t climb up that to look at the surroundings, all by yourself. Hell, you’re inside the wall an’ why should they stop you? Then if you’ve writ another note an’ put it in a little bottle an’ casually throw some stones an’ among ’em the bottle, the lads being on the look-out for just such stuff will just as casually rope it in.”

“Fine,” I said, and poured him a drink. “Now all you have to do is to tell Dr. Bennett to look out for that message and bring up your myrmidons.”

“My what?” asked McCann.

“Your gifted lads with their Tommies and pineapples.”

“That’s a grand name,” said McCann. “The boys’ll like it. Say it again.”

I said it again, and added: “And for God’s sake, don’t forget to give that message straight to Dr. Bennett.”

He said: “Then you ain’t going to talk to him before you go?”

I said: “No. Nor to Miss Helen either.”

He thought over that for a bit, then asked: “How well you heeled, Doc?”

I showed him my 32-automatic. He shook his head: “This is better, Doc.” He reached under his left armpit and unstrapped a holster. In it was an extraordinarily compact little gun, short-barreled, squat.

“It shoots a .38,” he said. “Ain’t nothing under armor plate stands up against that, Doc. Tote your other but stick this under your arm. Keep it there, asleep or awake. Keep it hid. There’s a few extra clips in that pocket of the holster.”

I said: “Thanks, Mac.” And threw it on the bed.

He said: “No. Put it on an’ get used to the feel of it.”

“All right,” I said. And did so.

He took another drink, leisurely; he said, gently: “Of course, there’s one straight easy way out of all this, Doc. All you need do when you sit at the table with de Keradel an’ his gal is to slip that little cannon loose an’ let ’em have it. Me an’ the lads’d cover you.”

I said: “I’m not sure enough for that, Mac. Honestly – I’m not.”

He sighed again, and arose: “You got too much curiosity, Doc. Well, play your hand your own way.” At the door he turned: “Anyway, the boss’ll like you. You got guts.”

He went out. I felt as though I’d been given the accolade.

I dropped a brief note to Bill, simply saying that when one had made up one’s mind to do something, there was no time like the present and that therefore I was making myself one of the de Keradel menage on the morrow. I didn’t say anything about the Demoiselle’s telegram, leaving him to think I was on my way solely of my own volition. I told him McCann had a message that was damned important, and that if and when he received it from me to forward it quick, according to directions.

I wrote a little letter to Helen…

The next morning I left the Club early – before the letters could be delivered. I taxied leisurely to Larchmont; arrived at the Club shortly before noon and was told that a boat from the Brittis was awaiting me at the landing stage. I went down to the boat. There were three men on it – Bretons or Basques, I couldn’t tell which, oddly enough. Rather queer looking – stolid faces, the pupils of their eyes unusually dilated, skins sallow. One turned his eyes up to me and asked, tonelessly, in French:

“The Sieur de Carnac?”

I answered, impatiently: “Dr. Caranac.” And took my place in the stern.

He turned to the two: “The Sieur de Carnac. Go.”

We shot through a school of small fry and headed for a slim gray yacht. I asked: “The Brittis?” The helmsman nodded. She was a sweet craft, about a hundred and fifty feet over all, schooner rigged and built for speed. I doubted McCann’s estimate of her ocean-going capabilities.

The Demoiselle was standing at the head of the ladder. Considering the manner of my last parting with her, there were obvious elements of embarrassment in this meeting. I had given them considerable thought and had decided to ignore them, or pass them over lightly – if she would let me. It was no picture of a romantic hero I had made sliding down from her tower, and I was still somewhat sensitive as to its undignified aspects. I hoped her arts, infernal or otherwise, hadn’t enabled her to reconstruct that spectacle. So when I had climbed the ladder, I simply said with cheerful idiocy:

“Hello, Dahut. You’re looking beautiful.”

And so she was. Nothing at all like the Dahut of ancient Ys; nothing at all like a shadow queen; nothing at all like a witch. She had on a snappy white sport suit, and there was no aureole, evil or otherwise, about her pale gold hair. Instead there was a tricky little green knit hat. Her great violet eyes were clear and ingenuous with not a trace of the orchid hell sparks. In fact, to outward appearance only an extraordinarily beautiful woman with no more high explosive about her than any beautiful woman would naturally carry. But I knew different, and something whispered to me to be doubly on my guard.

She laughed, and held out her hand: “Welcome, Alain.”

She glanced at my two bags with a small enigmatic smile, and led me down to a luxurious little cabin. She said, matter-of-factly: “I’ll wait for you on deck. Don’t be long. Lunch is ready.” And she was gone.

The yacht was already under way. I looked out of the port and was surprised to see how far we were from the Club. The Brittis was speedier than I had surmised. In a few minutes I went up on deck and joined the Demoiselle. She was talking to the captain whom she introduced to me by the good old Breton name of Braz; and me to him as the “Sieur de Carnac.” The captain was of stockier build than the others I had seen, but with the same stolid expression and the same abnormally dilated eyes. I saw the pupils of his eyes suddenly contract, like a cat’s, and a curiously speculative gleam come into them… almost as though it were recognition.

I knew then that what I had taken for stolidity was not that at all. It was withdrawal. This man’s consciousness lived in a world of its own, his actions and responses to the outer world instinctive only. For some reason that consciousness had looked out from its inner world into this under the spur of the ancient name. From its own world… or from another’s into which it had been sent? And were the other men upon this boat under that same strange duress?

I said: “But Captain Braz, I prefer to be called Dr. Caranac – not the Sieur de Carnac.” I watched him closely. He did not respond, his face impassive, his eyes wide and blank. It was as though he had not heard me.

The Demoiselle said: “The Lord of Carnac will make many voyages with us.”

He bent and kissed my hand; he answered, tonelessly as had the boatman: “The Lord of Carnac does me great honor.”

He bent to the Demoiselle and walked away. I watched him, and felt a creep along my spine. It was exactly as though an automaton had spoken; an automaton of flesh and blood who had seen me not as I was but as someone else had bidden him.

The Demoiselle was regarding me with frank amusement. I said, indifferently: “You have perfect discipline, Dahut.”

Again she laughed: “Perfect, Alain. Let us go to lunch.”

We went to lunch. That, too, was perfect. Somewhat too perfect. The two stewards who served us were like the others I had seen; and they served us on bent knees. The Demoiselle was a perfect hostess. We talked of this and that… and steadily I forgot what she probably was, and thought of her as what she seemed to be. Only toward the last did that which was buried deep in both our minds crop out. The blank-eyed stewards had knelt, and gone. I said, half to myself:

“Here feudal and the modern meet.”

She answered, quietly: “As they do in me. But you are too conservative in naming feudal times, Alain. My servants go further back than that. As do I.”

I said nothing. She held her wine glass against the light, turned it to catch the colors, and added, casually:

“As do you!”

I lifted my own glass, and touched hers with its rim: “To ancient Ys? If so, I drink to it.”

She answered gravely: “To ancient Ys… and we drink to It.”

We touched glasses again, and drank. She set down her glass and looked at me, faint mockery in her eyes and, when she spoke, within her voice:

“Is it not like a honeymoon, Alain?”

I said, coldly: “If so – it would be somewhat lacking in novelty – would it not?”

She flushed a little at that. She said: “You are rather brutal, Alain.”

I said: “I might feel more a bridegroom if I felt less like a prisoner.”

Her straight brows drew together, and for a moment the hell sparks danced in her eyes. She dropped her eyes and said, demurely, although the angry flush still stained her cheeks:

“But you are so elusive, my beloved. You have such a gift for disappearance. There was nothing for you to fear that night. You had seen what I had willed you to see, done as I had willed – why did you run away?”

That stung; the sleeping wrath and hate against her that I had known since I met her flared up; I caught her wrists:

“Not because I feared you, white witch. I could have strangled you while you slept.”

She asked, tranquilly, and tiny dimples showed beside her lips:

“Why didn’t you?”

I dropped her hands: “I may still. That was a wonderful picture you painted in my sleeping mind.”

She stared at me, incredulously: “You mean… you do not think it was real? That Ys was not real?”

“No more real, Dahut, than the world in which the minds of the men on this boat live. At your command – or your father’s.”

She said, somberly: “Then I must convince you of its reality.”

I said, rage still hot within me: “Nor more real than your shadows, Dahut.”

She said, yet more somberly: “Then of those, too, you must be convinced.”

The moment I had said that about the shadows I was sorry for it. Her reply did nothing to reassure me. I cursed myself. This was no way to play the game. There was no advantage to be gained by quarreling with the Demoiselle. It might, indeed, bring down upon those I was trying to protect precisely what I was trying to save them from. Was that the meaning behind her promise to convince me? She was pledged so far as Bill was concerned and here I was in payment – but she had made no pledges as to Helen.

If I was to play my game, it must be to the limit; convincingly; with no reservations. I looked at Dahut and thought, with a sharp pang of compunction, for Helen, that if the Demoiselle were a willing partner it would have its peculiar compensations. And then I thrust Helen out of my mind, as though she might read that thought.

And there was only one way to convince a woman…

I stood up. I took the glass from which I had drunk and I took Dahut’s glass and threw them to the cabin floor, splintering. I walked to the door and turned the key. I went to Dahut and lifted her from the chair and carried her to the divan beneath the port. Her arms clung round my neck, and she raised her lips to mine… her eyes closed…

I said: “To hell with Ys and to hell with its mysteries. I live in today.”

She whispered: “You love me?”

I answered: “I do love you.”

“No!” she pushed me away. “In the long ago you loved me. Loved me even though you killed me. And in this life it was not you but the Lord of Carnac who for a night was my lover. Yet this I know – again in this life you must love me. But must you again kill me? I wonder, Alain… I wonder…”

I took her hands, and they were cold; in her eyes there was neither mockery nor amusement; there was vague puzzlement and vague dread. Nor was there anything of the witch about her. I felt a stirring of pity – what if she, like the others upon this boat, were victim of another’s will? De Keradel’s who called himself her father… Dahut who lay there looking at me with the eyes of a frightened maiden and she was very beautiful…

She whispered: “Alain, beloved – better for you and better for me if you had not obeyed my summons. Was it because of that shadow I was forced to send your friend… or had you other reasons?”

That steadied me. I thought: Witch, you are not so clever.

I said, as though reluctantly: “There was another reason, Dahut.”

She asked: “And that?”

“You,” I said.

She bent toward me, took my chin in one soft hand and held my face close to hers: “You mean that – Alain de Carnac?”

I said: “I may not love you as the Lord of Carnac did. But I am tempted to try.”

She leaned back at that, laughing – little rippling waves of laughter, careless and cruel.

“You woo me strangely, Alain. Yet I like it – for I know that what you say is truth. What do you truly think of me, Alain?”

I said: “I think of you as a garden that was planned under the red Heart of the Dragon ten thousand years before the Great Pyramid was built and its rays fell upon the altar of its most secret shrine… a strange garden, Dahut, half of the sea… with trees whose leaves chant instead of whisper… with flowers that may be evil and may not be, but certainly are not wholly of earth… whose birds sing strange songs… whose breath is more of ocean than of land… difficult garden to enter… more difficult to find its heart… most difficult, once entered, to find escape.”

I said: “I think of you as a garden that was planned.”

She bent to me, eyes wide and glowing; kissed me: “You think that of me! And it is true… and the Lord of Carnac never saw me so truly… you remember more than he—”

She fastened my wrists, her breast against mine: “The red-haired girl – I forget her name – is she not a garden, too?”

Helen!

I said, indifferently: “A garden of earth. Fragrant and sweet. But no difficulty there about finding your way out.”

She dropped my wrists, and sat for a time silent; then said, abruptly:

“Let us go up to deck.”

I followed her, uneasily. Something had gone amiss, something I had said or had not said about Helen. But what the devil it could have been, I did not know. I looked at my watch. It was after four. There was a fog, but the yacht seemed not to mind it; instead of diminishing, it seemed to me that the speed had increased. As we sat on the deck chairs, I mentioned this to the Demoiselle. She said, absently: “It is nothing. There can be no danger.”

I said: “The speed seems rather dangerous.”

She answered: “We must be at Ys by seven.”

I echoed, stupidly: “Ys?”

She said: “Ys. It is so we have named our home.”

She sank back into silence. I watched the fog. It was an odd fog. It did not swirl past us as fog normally does. It seemed to go with us, to accommodate its pace to ours.

To move with us.

The wide-eyed, vacant-faced sailors padded past. I began to have a nightmarish sort of feeling that I was on a ship of ghosts, a modern Flying Dutchman, cut off from the rest of the world and sped on by unseen, unheard, unfelt winds. Or being pushed along by some gigantic swimmer whose hand was clasped about the stern of this boat… and whose breath was the fog that shrouded us. I glanced at the Demoiselle. Her eyes were shut, and she seemed to be fast asleep. I closed my own eyes.

When I opened them, the yacht had stopped. There was no sign of fog. We lay in a little harbor between two rocky headlands. Dahut was shaking me by the shoulders. I was outlandishly sleepy. The sea air, I drowsily thought. We dropped into a tender, and landed at a dock. We climbed up steps, interminably, it seemed to me. A few yards from the top of the steps was a long rambling old stone house. It was dark, and I could see nothing beyond it but the banks of trees, half-stripped by autumn of their leaves.

We went into the house, met by servants, wide-pupilled, impassive, as those who manned the Brittis. I was taken to my room, and a valet began to unpack my bags. In the same torpor, I dressed for dinner. The only moment of real consciousness I had was when I put my hand up and felt McCann’s holster under my armpit.

I have the vaguest recollection of the dinner. I know that de Keradel greeted me with the utmost politeness and hospitality. During the dinner, he talked on and on, but what he was talking about I’m damned if I knew. Now and then I was aware acutely of the Demoiselle, her face and big eyes swimming out of the haze that gripped me. And now and then I thought that I must have been drugged – but whether I had or hadn’t been didn’t seem to matter. There was one thing that I was acutely conscious did matter, however – and that was how I answered de Keradel’s questions. But another sense, or another self, unaffected by what had so paralyzed my normal ones, seemed to have taken charge of that, and I had the comfortable feeling that it was doing it most satisfactorily.

And after a while I heard Dahut say: “But, Alain, you are so sleepy. Why, you can hardly keep your eyes open. It must be the sea air.”

I replied, solemnly, that it must indeed be the sea air and apologized for my dullness. I had a dim perception of the solicitous readiness with which de Keradel accepted the feeble excuses. He, himself, took me to my room. At least, I was hazily aware that he accompanied me to some place where there was a bed. I rid myself of my clothes by sheer habit, dropped into the bed and in an instant was sound asleep.

I sat up in my bed, wide-awake. The strange drowsiness was gone; the irresistible torpor lifted. What had awakened me? I looked at my watch, and it was a few minutes after one. The sound that had awakened me came again somberly – a distant muffled chanting, as though from far under earth. As though from far beneath the old house.

It passed slowly from beneath the house, rising, approaching; becoming ever plainer. A weird chanting, archaic; vaguely familiar. I got up from the bed, and went to the windows. They looked out upon the ocean. There was no moon but I could see the gray surges breaking sullenly against the rocky shore. The chanting grew louder. I did not know where was the switch to turn on the electrics. There had been a flashlight in one of my bags, but these had been unpacked; their contents distributed.

I felt around in my coat and found a box of matches. The chanting was dying away, as though those singing were passing far beyond the house. I lighted a match, and saw a switch beside the wall. I pressed it, and without result. I saw my flashlight on a table beside the bed. I clicked the catch, but no ray streamed forth. Suspicion began to take hold of me that these three things were linked – the strange sleepiness, the useless flash, the unresponsive switch…

McCann’s gun! I felt for it. There it was, nestling under my left armpit. I looked at it. The magazine was full and the extra clips safe. I went to the door and cautiously turned the key. It opened into a wide, old-fashioned hall at the end of which dimly glimmered a great window. The hall was curiously uneasy. That is the only word for it. It was filled with whisperings and rustlings – and shadows.

I hesitated; then stole to the window and looked out.

There was a bank of trees through whose half-bare branches I could see across a level field. Beyond that level field was another bank of trees. From beyond them came the chanting.

There was a glow through and over these trees – a gray glow. I stared at it… thinking of what McCann had said… like light decaying… rotten…

It was exactly that. I stood there, gripping the window, looking at the putrescent glow wax and wane… wax and wane. And now the chanting was like that dead luminescence transformed to sound…

And then a sharp scream of human agony shot through it.

The whisperings in the hall were peremptory. The rustlings were close. The shadows were pressing around me. They pressed me from the window, back to my room. I thrust the door shut against them, and leaned against it, wet with sweat.

Leaning against it, I heard again that scream of anguish, sharper, more agonized. And suddenly muffled.

Again the torpor swept over me. I crumpled down at the edge of the door, and slept.

— XV —

BEHIND
DE KERADEL’S WALL — 2

Something was dancing, flittering, before me. It had no shape, but it had a voice. The voice was whispering, over and over: “Dahut… beware of Dahut… Alan, beware of Dahut… give me release, Alan… beware of Dahut, Alan… give me release… from the Gatherer… from the Blackness…”

I tried to focus upon this flittering thing, but there was a brilliancy about it into which it melted and was lost; a broad aureole of brilliancy and only when I turned my eyes from it could I see the thing dancing and flittering like a fly caught in a globule of light.

But the voice – I knew the voice.

The thing danced and flittered; grew larger but never assumed definite shape; became small, and still was shapeless… a flittering shadow caught in a brilliancy…

A shadow!

The thing whispered: “The Gatherer, Alan, the Gatherer in the Cairn, do not let It eat me but beware, beware of Dahut free me, Alan, free… free…” Ralston’s voice!

I lifted myself to my knees, crouching, hands on the floor; my eyes fixed upon the brilliancy – straining to focus this flittering thing that whispered with the voice of Ralston.

The brilliancy contracted – like the eyes of the captain of the Brittis. It became the knob of a door. A knob of brass glimmering in the light of dawn.

There was a fly upon the knob. A bluebottle; a carrion fly. It was crawling over the knob, buzzing. The voice I had thought that of Dick was drained down into the buzzing; became one with it. There was only a bluebottle fly flittering and buzzing upon a shining brass doorknob. The fly left the knob, circled me and was gone.

I staggered to my feet. I thought: Whatever you did to me there on the boat, Dahut, it was a first-class job. I looked at my wrist watch. It was a few minutes after six. I opened the door, cautiously. The hall was shadowless; tranquil. There was not a sound in the house. It seemed to sleep, but I didn’t trust it. I closed the door quietly. There were great bolts at top and bottom which I dropped into place.

There was a queer emptiness in my head, and I could not see clearly. I made my way to the window and drew deep breaths of the sharp morning air, the tang of the sea strong within it. It made me feel better. I turned and looked at the room. It was immense; paneled in old wood; tapestries, colors softened by centuries, fell here and there. The bed was ancient, carved and postered and canopied. It was the chamber of some castle in Brittany, rather than that of a New England manse. At my left was an armoire, ancient as the bed. Idly, I opened a drawer. There upon my handkerchiefs lay my pistol. I pulled it open. Not a cartridge was in the chamber.

I looked at it, unbelievingly. I knew that I had loaded it when I had placed it in one of my bags. Abruptly, its emptiness linked itself with the useless flash, the unresponsive switch, the strange sleepiness. It jarred me wide-awake. I put the gun back in the drawer and went and lay down on the bed. I hadn’t the slightest doubt that something other than natural cause had induced the stupor. Whether it had been suggestion by Dahut while I lay asleep on the deck, or whether she had given me some soporific drug with my lunch, made no difference. It had not been natural. A drug? I remembered the subtle drug the Tibetan lamas administer – the drug they name “Master of the Will” which weakens all resistance to hypnotic control and renders the minds of those to whom it is given impotent against command, wide-open to hallucination. All at once the behavior, the appearance, of the men on the boat, the servants in this house, fell into an understandable pattern. Suppose that all were being fed with such a drug, and moved and thought only as the Demoiselle and her father willed them to move and think? That I was surrounded by human robots, creatures who were reflections, multiplications, of the de Keradels?

And that I, myself, was in imminent peril of the same slavery?

Belief that something like this was the truth became stronger the more I thought over it. I strove to recall the conversation with de Keradel the night before. I could not – but I still retained the conviction I had passed the ordeal successfully; that the other sense or self which had taken charge had not allowed me to be betrayed. Deep within, I felt that assurance.

Suddenly, as I lay there, I felt other eyes upon me; knew that I was being watched. I was facing the windows. I drew a deep breath, sighed as one does in deep sleep, and turned with arm over face. Under its cover, with scarcely opened lids, I watched. In a few moments a white hand stole from behind a tapestry, drew it aside, and Dahut stepped into the room. Her braids fell below her waist, she wore the sheerest of silken negligees and she was incomparably lovely. She slipped to the bottom of the bed, soundlessly as one of her shadows, and stood studying me. I forced myself to breathe regularly, as though in soundest slumber. She was so lovely that I found it rather difficult. She came to the side of the bed and leaned over me. I felt her lips touch my cheek as lightly as the kiss of a moth.

Then, as suddenly, I knew she was gone.

I opened my eyes. There was another scent, unfamiliar, mingling with the breath of the sea. It was oddly stimulating. Breathing it, I felt the last traces of lethargy vanish. I sat up, wide-awake and alert. There was a shallow metal dish on the table beside the bed. Piled on it was a little heap of fern-like leaves. They were smoldering, and from their smoke came the invigorating scent. I pressed out the sparks and instantly smoke and scent disappeared.

Evidently this was an antidote to whatever had induced the other condition; and quite as evidently there was no suspicion that I had not slept uninterruptedly throughout the night.

And possibly, it occurred to me, the shadow crowded, rustling hall and the bluebottle fly that had buzzed with the voice of Ralston might have been by-products of this hypothetical drug; the sub-consciousness fantastically picturing under its influence, as it does in dream, chance sounds in terms of what has been engrossing the consciousness.

Maybe I really had slept through the night. Maybe I had only dreamed I had gone out into the shadow crowded hall… and had fled from it and dropped down beside the door… had only dreamed the chanting.

But if there had been nothing they had wanted me to be deaf and blind to – then why had they bundled me up in that blanket of sleep?

Well, there was one thing I knew I had not dreamed.

That was Dahut slipping into the room with the leaves.

And that meant I hadn’t acted precisely as they had expected, else I wouldn’t have been awake to see her. There was one lucky break, whatever the cause. I would be able to use those leaves later, if they repeated the bundling.

I went over to the tapestry and raised it. There was no sign of opening, the paneling seemingly solid. Some secret spring existed, of course, but I postponed hunting for it. I unbarred the door; the bars were about as much a guarantee of privacy as one wall in a room with the other three sides open. I took what was left of the leaves, put them in an envelope and tucked them in McCann’s holster. Then I smoked half a dozen cigarettes and added their ashes to those on the dish. The appeared about the same, and they were about what would have remained if all the leaves had burned. Maybe nobody would bother to check – but maybe they would.

By then it was seven o’clock. I wondered whether I ought to get up and dress. How long was it supposed to be before the antidote took effect? I had no means of knowing and no desire to make the least mistake. To sleep too long would be far safer than to wake too soon. I crawled back into bed. And I did go to sleep, honestly and dreamlessly.

When I awakened there was a man laying out my clothes; the valet. The dish that had held the smoking leaves was gone. It was half after eight. I sat up and yawned, and the valet announced with antique humility that the Lord of Carnac’s bath was ready. Despite all that the Lord of Carnac had on his mind, this combination of archaic servility and modern convenience made me laugh. But no smile answered me. The man stood, head bent, wound up to do and say certain things. Smiling had not been in his instructions.

I looked at his impassive face, the blank eyes which were not seeing me at all as I was, nor the world in which I lived, but were seeing me as another man in another world. What that world might be, I suspected.

I threw a robe over my pajamas and locked the bathroom door against him; unstrapped McCann’s holster and hid it before bathing. When I came out I dismissed him. He told me that breakfast would be ready a little after nine, and bowing low, departed.

I went to the armoire, took out my gun and snapped it open. The cartridges were in place. Furthermore, the extra clips lay orderly beside where it had been. Had I also dreamed that it had been emptied? A suspicion came to me. If I were wrong, I could explain it as an accident. I carried the gun to the window, aimed it at the sea and touched the trigger. There was only a sharp crack as the cap exploded. In the night the cartridges had been made useless and, without doubt, had been restored to the pistol during my later sleep.

Well, here was warning enough, I thought grimly, without any buzzing bluebottle, and put the gun back. Then I went down to breakfast, cold with anger and disposed to be brutal if I had the chance. The Demoiselle was waiting for me, prosaically reading a newspaper. The table was laid for two, so I judged her father had business otherwhere. I looked at Dahut, and as always admiration and a certain tenderness reluctantly joined my wrath and my rooted hatred of her. I think I have mentioned her beauty before. She was never more beautiful than now – a dewy freshness about her, like the dawn; her skin a miracle, clear-eyed, just the right touch of demureness… not at all the murderess, harlot, and witch I knew her in my heart to be. Clean.

She dropped the paper and held out her hand. I kissed it, ironically.

She said: “I do hope you slept soundly, Alan.”

And that had just the right touch of domesticity. It irritated me still more. I dropped into my chair, spread my napkin over my knees: “Soundly, Dahut. Except for a big bluebottle fly that came and whispered to me.”

Her eyes narrowed at that, and distinctly I saw her tremble. Then she dropped her eyes, and laughed: “You’re joking, Alan.”

I said: “I am not. It was a big bluebottle that whispered and buzzed, and buzzed and whispered.”

She asked, quietly: “What did it whisper, Alan?”

“To beware of you, Dahut.”

She asked, again quietly: “Were you awake?”

Now, regaining caution, I laughed: “Do bluebottle flies whisper to people who are awake? I was sound asleep and dreaming – without doubt.”

“Did you know the voice?” Her eyes lifted suddenly and held mine. I answered:

“When I heard it I seemed to know it. But now, awake, I have forgotten.”

She was silent while the blank-eyed servants placed this and that before us. Then she said, half-wearily: “Put away your sword, Alan. For today, at least, you do not need it. And today, at least, I carry no weapons. I pledge you this, and you can trust me for today. Treat me today only as one who loves you greatly. Will you do this, Alan?”

It was said so simply, so sincerely, that my anger fled and my distrust of her weakened. For the first time I felt a stirring of pity. She said:

“‘I will not even ask you to pretend to love me.”

I said, slowly: “It would not be hard to love you, Dahut.”

The violet of her eyes was misted with tears; she said: “I wonder.”

I said: “A bargain. We meet for the first time this morning. I know nothing of you, Dahut, and today you will be to me only what you seem to be. Perhaps by tonight I will be your slave.”

She said, sharply: “I asked you to put down your sword.”

I had meant nothing more than what I had said. No innuendo… But now I heard again the voice that had changed to the buzzing of a fly – “Beware… beware of Dahut… Alan, beware of Dahut…” And I thought of the blank-eyed, impassive men… slaves to her will or to her father’s…

I would not put away the sword – but I would hide it.

I said, earnestly: “I haven’t the slightest idea what you mean, Dahut. Really I haven’t. I meant precisely what I said.”

She seemed to believe me. And on that basis, piquant enough considering what had gone before in New York and ancient Ys, our breakfast continued. It had its peculiar charm. Before it was done I found myself dangerously close several times to thinking of the Demoiselle exactly as she wanted me to think of her. We dawdled, and it was eleven when we ended. She suggested a ride around the place, and with relief I went up to change my clothes. I had to snap my gun a few times and look at the leaves in McCann’s holster to clear my mind of disarming doubts. Dahut had a way with her.

When I came down she was in riding breeches, her hair braided around her head like a helmet. We went to the stables. There were a dozen first class horses. I looked around for the black stallion. I didn’t see it, but there was a box stall where it might have been. I picked out a sweet roan and Dahut a leggy bay. What I wanted most to see was de Keradel’s “rockery.” I didn’t see it. We trotted along a well-made bridle path which gave occasional vistas of the water, but most of the time the rocks and trees shut off the ocean. It was a peculiar layout and one better adapted for solitude I have never seen. We came at last to the wall, turned and rode along it. Wicked, inverted chevaux-de-frise guarded the top, and there were a couple of wires that I suspected of carrying heavy voltage. They could not have been there when ’Lias had scaled the wall. I thought that probably he had taught a lesson as well as having received one. And here and there stood one of the swarthy little men. They had clubs, but how otherwise armed I could not tell. They knelt as we passed them.

We came to a massive gate, and there was a garrison of half a dozen. We rode past the gate and came to a wide, long meadow land dotted with stunted bushes, crouching like cowering men. It came to me that this must be where the unfortunate ’Lias had encountered the dogs that weren’t dogs. Under the sun, the brisk air and the exhilaration of riding, that story had lost many of its elements of reality. Yet the place had a frightened, forbidding aspect. I mentioned this casually to Dahut. She looked at me with a secret amusement; answered as casually: “Yes – but there is good hunting here.”

She rode on without saying what kind of hunting. Nor did I ask; for there had been that about her answer which had abruptly restored my faith in ’Lias’s veracity.

We came to the end of the wall, and it was built in the rock as McCann had said. There was a big breast of the rock which shut off view of what lay beyond. I said:

“I’d like to take a look from here.” And before she could answer, had dismounted and climbed the rock. From the top, it was open ocean. A couple of hundred yards from shore were two men in a small fishing boat. They raised their heads as they saw me, and one drew out a hand net and began dipping with it. Well, McCann was on the job.

I scrambled down and joined Dahut. I asked: “How about riding back and going out the gate for a canter. I’d like to see more of the countryside.”

She hesitated, then nodded; we rode back and through the garrison and out upon a country road. In a little while we sighted a fine old house, set well back among big trees. A stone wall protected it from the road, and lounging beside one of its gates was McCann.

He watched us come imperturbably. Dahut passed without a glance. I had hung back a few paces, and as I went by McCann I dropped a card. I had hoped for just this encounter, and I had managed to scribble on it:

“Something very wrong but no definite evidence yet. About thirty men, think all well-armed. Barbed and charged wires behind wall.”

I drew up beside the Demoiselle and we rode on a mile or so. She halted, and asked: “Have you seen enough?”

I said, yes; and we turned back. When we went by McCann he was still lounging beside the gate as though he had not moved. But there was no paper on the road.

The garrison had seen us coming, and the postern was swinging open. We returned to the house the same way we had gone. I had gotten not a glimpse of the “rockery.”

Dahut was flushed with the ride, full of gayety. She said: “I’ll bathe. Then we’ll have lunch on the boat – go for a little cruise.”

“Fine,” I said. “And I hope it doesn’t make me as sleepy as it did yesterday.”

Her eyes narrowed, but my face was entirely innocent. She smiled: “It won’t, I’m sure. You’re getting acclimated.”

I said, morosely: “I hope so. I must have been pretty dull company at dinner last night.”

She smiled again: “But you weren’t. You pleased my father immensely.”

She went into the house laughing.

I was very glad I had pleased her father.

It had been a thoroughly delightful sail with a thoroughly charming girl. Only when one of the tranced crew knelt as he passed did I feel the sinister hidden undertow. And now I sat at dinner with de Keradel and the Demoiselle. De Keradel’s conversation was so fascinating that he had made me forget that I was a prisoner. I had discussed with him much that I had wished to on the night Bill had persuaded me to be so objectionable. If at times his manner was irritatingly too much like that of a hierophant instructing a neophyte in elementary mysteries, or if he calmly advanced as fact matters which modern science holds to be the darkest of superstitions, investing them with all the authenticity of proven experience – it made no difference to me. The man’s learning was as extraordinary as his mind, and I wondered how in one short life he could have acquired it. He spoke of the rites of Osiris, the black worship of Typhon whom the Egyptians also named Set of the Red Hair, the Eleusinian and the Delphic mysteries as though he had witnessed them. Described them in minutest detail – and others more ancient and darker, long buried in age-rotten shrouds of Time. The evil secrets of the Sabbat were open to him, and once he spoke of the worship of Kore, the Daughter, who was known also as Persephone, and in another form as Hecate, and by other names back, back through the endless vistas of the ages – the wife of Hades, the Queen of the Shades whose daughters were the Furies.

It was then I told him of what I had beheld in the Delphian cave when the Greek priest with the pagan soul had evoked Kore… and I had watched that majestic – that dreadful – form taking shape in the swirls of smoke from what was being consumed upon her thrice ancient altar…

He listened intently, without interrupting, as one to whom the story held no surprise. He asked: “And had She come to him before?”

I answered: “I do not know.”

He said directly to the Demoiselle: “But even if so, the fact that She appeared to – to Dr. Caranac – is most significant. It is proof that he—”

Dahut interrupted him, and I thought there was some warning in the glance she gave him: “That he is acceptable. Yes, my father.”

De Keradel considered me: “An illuminating experience, indeed. I am wondering, in the light of it, and of other things you have told me – I am wondering why you were so – so hostile – to such ideas the night we met.”

I answered, bluntly: “I was more than half drunk and ready to fight anybody.”

He bared his teeth at that, then laughed outright: “You do not fear to speak the truth.”

“Neither when drunk nor sober,” I said.

He scrutinized me silently, for moments. He spoke, more as though to himself than to me: “I do not know… she may be right… if I could wholly trust him it would mean much to us… he has curiosity… he does not shrink from the dark wisdom… but has he courage…?”

I laughed at that, and said, baldly: “If I did not have – would I be here?”

“Quite true, my father.” Dahut was smiling maliciously.

De Keradel struck down his hand like one who has come at last to a decision: “Carnac, I spoke to you of an experiment in which I am deeply interested. Instead of being a spectator, willing or unwilling… or no spectator, whichever I might decide…” he paused as though to let the covert menace of this sink in… “I invite you to participate with me in this experiment. I have good reason to believe that its rewards, if successful, will be incalculably great. My invitation is not disinterested. I will admit to you that my experiment has not as yet met with full success. I have had results – but they have not been what I hoped. But what you have told me of Kore proves that you are no barrier to the materialization of these Beings – Powers or Presences, or if you prefer, discarnate, unknown energies which can take shape, become substance, in accordance with laws discoverable to man – and discovered. Also, you have within you the ancient blood of Carnac, and the ancient memories of your race. It may be that I have missed some slight detail that your stimulated-memory will recall. It may be that with you beside us this Being I desire to evoke will appear in all its power – and with all that implies of power for us.”

I asked: “What is that Being?”

He said: “You, yourself, named it. That which in one of its manifold shapes came to the Alkar-Az of ancient Carnac as it came to the temples of my own people ages before Ys was built or the stones of Carnac raised – the Gatherer in the Cairn – the Blackness…”

If I felt cold creep along my skin he did not know it. It was the answer I had been expecting and I was prepared.

I looked long at Dahut, and he, at least, misinterpreted that look, as I had hoped he would. I struck my own hand down upon the table: “De Keradel, I am with you.”

After all, wasn’t that why I had come there?

— XVI —

THE MAEL BENNIQUE

De Keradel said: “We drink to that!”

He dismissed the servants, unlocked a closet and took from it a decanter half-filled with a green liqueur. The stopper was clamped and difficult to withdraw. He poured three small glasses and quickly clamped the stopper down. I raised my glass.

He checked me: “Wait!”

There were little bubbles rising through the green drink; like atoms of diamonds; like splintered sun rays shot back by crystals bottoming still shallows. They rose more and more quickly, and suddenly the green drink fumed; then became quiescent, pellucid.

De Keradel lifted his glass: “Carnac, you join us of your own will?”

The Demoiselle said, her glass close to mine: “It is of your own will you join us, Alain de Carnac?”

I answered: “Of my own will.”

We touched glasses and drank.

That was a strange drink. It tingled through brain and nerve, and immediately there was born of it an extraordinary sense of freedom; swift sloughing of inhibitions; a blowing away of old ideas as though they had crumbled to dust and, like dust, had been puffed from the surface of consciousness. As though I were a serpent which had, abruptly, shed an outworn skin. Memories grew dim, faded away, readjusted themselves. I had an indescribable sense of liberation… I could do anything, since, like God, there existed for me neither good nor evil. Whatever I willed to do that I could do, since there was neither evil nor good but only my will…

De Keradel said: “You are one with us.”

The Demoiselle whispered: “You are one with us, Alain.”

Her eyes were closed, or seemed to be; the long lashes low upon her cheeks. Yet I thought that beneath them I saw a glint of purple flame. And de Keradel’s hands covered his eyes, as though to shield them, but between his fingers I thought I saw them gleaming. He said:

“Carnac – you have not asked me what is this Gatherer – this Being I would evoke in Its completeness. Is it because you know?”

“No,” I answered; and would have followed by saying that I did not care except that suddenly I knew I did care; that of all things that was what I thirsted to know. He said:

“A brilliant Englishman once formulated perfectly the materialistic credo. He said that the existence of man is an accident; his story a brief and transitory episode in the life of the meanest of planets. He pointed out that of the combination of causes which first converted a dead organic compound into the living progenitors of humanity, science as yet knows nothing. Nor would it matter if science did know. The wet-nurses of famine, disease, and mutual slaughter had gradually evolved creatures with consciousness and intelligence enough to know that they were insignificant. The history of the past was that of blood and tears, stupid acquiescence, helpless blunderings, wild revolt, and empty aspirations. And at last, the energies of our system will decay, the sun be dimmed, the inert and tideless earth be barren. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. Matter will know itself no longer. Everything will be as though it never had been. And nothing will be either better or worse for all the labor, devotion, pity, love, and suffering of man.”

I said, the God-like sense of power stronger within me: “It is not true.”

“It is partly true,” he answered. “What is not true is that life is an accident. What we call accident is only a happening of whose causes we are ignorant. Life must have come from life. Not necessarily such life as we know – but from some Thing, acting deliberately, whose essence was – and is – life. It is true that pain, agony, sorrow, hate, and discord are the foundations of humanity. It is true that famine, disease, and slaughter have been our nurses. Yet it is equally true that there are such things as peace, happiness, pity, perception of beauty, wisdom… although these may be only of the thickness of the film on the surface of a woodland pool which mirrors its flowered rim – yet, these things do exist… peace and beauty, happiness and wisdom. They are.”

“And therefore—” de Keradel’s hands were still over his eyes, but through the masking fingers I felt his gaze sharpen upon me, penetrate me “ – therefore I hold that these desirable things must be in That which breathed life into the primeval slime. It must be so, since that which is created cannot possess attributes other than those possessed by what creates it.”

Of course, I knew all that. Why should he waste effort to convince me of the obvious. I said, tolerantly: “It is self-evident.”

He said: “And therefore it must also be self-evident that since it was the dark, the malevolent, the cruel side of this – Being – which created us, our only approach to It, our only path to Its other self, must be through agony and suffering, cruelty and malevolence.”

He paused, then said, violently:

“Is it not what every religion has taught? That man can approach his Creator only through suffering and sorrow? Sacrifice… Crucifixion!”

I answered: “It is true. The baptism of blood. The purification through tears. Rebirth through sorrow.”

The Demoiselle murmured: “Chords that must be struck before we may attain the supreme harmonies.”

There was a mocking note to that; I turned to her quickly. She had not opened her eyes, but I caught the derisive curving of her lips.

De Keradel said: “The sacrifices are ready.”

I said: “Then let us sacrifice!”

De Keradel dropped his hands. The pupils of his eyes were phosphorescent, his face seemed to retreat until nothing could be seen but those two orbs of pale blue fire. The Demoiselle raised her eyes, and they were two deep pools of violet flame, her face a blur beyond them. I did not think that strange – then.

There was a mirror at the back of the sideboard. I looked into it and my own eyes were shining with the same feral fires, golden, my face a blurred setting from which yellow gleaming eyes stared back at me…

Nor did that seem as strange, either – not then.

De Keradel repeated: “The sacrifices are ready.”

I said, rising: “Let us use them!”

We went out of the dining room and up the stairs. The inhuman exaltation did not wane; it grew stronger; more ruthless. Life was to be taken, but what was the life of one or the lives of many if they were rungs of a ladder up which I could climb out of the pit into the sun? Force recognition from That which had lived before life… command It… the Creator?

With de Keradel’s hand upon my arm I passed into my room. He bade me strip and bathe, and left me, I stripped, and my hand touched something hanging to my left armpit. It was a holster in which was an automatic. I had forgotten who had given it to me, but whoever it was had told me it was important… most important; not to be lost nor given up… essential. I laughed. This toy essential to one about to summon the Creator of life? I tossed it into a corner of the room…

De Keradel was beside me and I wondered vaguely why I had not seen him come into the room. I had bathed, and was stark naked. He was wrapping a breech-clout of white cotton around my loins. He laced sandals on my feet, and he drew my arms through the sleeves of a robe of thick fine cotton. He stood back, and I saw that he was clothed in the same white robes. There was a broad belt either of black metal or ancient wood around his middle. There was a similar cincture around his breast. They were inlaid with symbolings in silver… but who ever saw silver shift and change outline… melt from this rune into another… as these did? Around his forehead was a black chaplet of oak leaves, and from his belt swung a long black knife, a black maul, a black and oval bowl, and a black ewer…

Dahut was watching me, and I wondered why I had not seen her enter. She wore the robe of thick white cotton, but the girdle around her waist was of gold and on it the shifting symbols were red; and of red gold was the fillet that bound her hair and the bracelets upon her arms. In her hand was a golden sickle, razor-edged.

They fastened around my waist another black and silver symboled belt, and set upon my head a chaplet of the black oak leaves. De Keradel drew from his belt the maul and put it in my hand. I shrank from its touch and dropped it. He picked it up and closed my fingers around it. I tried to unclose them and could not, although the touch of the maul was loathsome. I raised the maul and looked at it. It was heavy and black with age… like the belt… like the chaplet. It was shaped all of one piece as though carved from the heart of oak; shaft in center, ends of its massive head blunt.

The mael bennique! The beater in of breasts! Heart crusher! And I knew that its blackness was less from age than from red baptisms.

My exaltation ebbed. Something deep within me was stirring, tearing at its fetters, whispering to me… whispering that it had been to stop the beating of his maul that I had gone from Carnac long and long ago to slay Dahut… that whatever else I did I must not use the maul… but also that I must go on, go on as I had in… lost Ys meet and even steep myself in this ancient evil, so that… so that…

De Keradel’s face was thrust into mine, mouth snarling, hellfire flaming in his eyes: “You are one with us, Bearer of the Maul!”

Dahut’s hand closed around mine; her cheek touched me. The exaltation swept back; the deep revolt forgotten. But some echo of it remained. I said:

“I am one with you – but I will not wield the maul.” Dahut’s hand pressed and my fingers were loosed and I threw the thing from me.

De Keradel said, deadly: “You do as I command. Pick up the maul.”

Dahut said, sweetly, but with voice as deadly as his own: “Patience, my father. He shall bear the bowl and the ewer and do with them as is prescribed. He shall feed the fires. Unless he wields the maul of his own will, it is useless. Be patient.”

He answered her, furiously: “Once before you betrayed a father for your lover.”

She said, steadily: “And may again… and if so what can you do, my father?”

His face writhed; he half raised his arm as though to strike her. And then crept into his eyes that same fear as had shown there on the night we had met when he had spoken of Powers summoned to aid and obey, and she had added – “or to command us.”

His arm dropped. He picked up the maul, and gave to me the bowl and ewer. He said, sullenly: “Let us go.”

We went out of that room, he on one side of me and Dahut at the other. Down the stairs we went. A score of the servants were in the great hall. All wore the white robes and they held unlighted flambeaux. They sank upon their knees as we approached them. De Keradel pressed upon the wall and a section slid open, revealing wide stone steps winding down and down. Arm in arm, Dahut and de Keradel and I trod them, the servants behind us until we faced what seemed to be a wall of solid stone. Here again de Keradel pressed, and a part of the wall raised slowly and silently like a curtain.

It had masked a portal to a vast chamber hewn out of the solid rock. Through the portal stole a penetrating pungent odor, and from beyond it came the murmur of many voices. The light that filled it was dim but crystal clear – like a forest twilight. There were a hundred or more men and women facing us, and their eyes wide-pupilled and blank – rapt – looking into another world. But they saw us. There were cubicles all around the cavern, and others came out of them, women who carried babies in their arms, women at whose skirts children clung. Babies and children were wide-eyed too, small faces rapt and impassive, dreaming. And men and women wore that ancient dress.

De Keradel raised the maul and shouted to them. They answered the shout and rushed toward us, throwing themselves upon their faces as we drew near; crawling to and kissing my feet, the feet of de Keradel, the slim and sandaled feet of Dahut.

De Keradel began a chant, low voiced, vibrant – archaic. Dahut joined him, and my own throat answered… in that tongue I knew and did not know. The men and women lifted themselves to their knees. They joined, full throated, in the chant. They lifted themselves to their feet and stood swaying to its cadence. I studied them. They were gaunt-faced and old, most of them. Their garb was what I had known in ancient Carnac, but their faces were not those of Carnac’s sacrifices.

There was a glow in their breasts, over their hearts. But in too many it was dim and yellowed, flickering toward extinction. Only in the babies and the children was it clear and steady.

I said to de Keradel: “Too many are old. The fire of life is dim within them. The essence of life which feeds the wicks runs too low. We need younger sacrifices – those in whom the fire of life is strong.”

He answered: “Does it matter – so long as there is life to be eaten?”

I said, angrily: “It does matter! We must have youth. Nor are these of the old blood.”

He looked at me for the first time since I had refused to pick up the maul. There was calculation in the glowing eyes, and satisfaction and approval. He looked at Dahut, and I saw her nod to him, and she murmured: “I am right, my father… he is one with us, but… patience.”

De Keradel said: “We shall have youth – later. All we need of it. But now we must do with what we have.”

Dahut touched my hand, and pointed. At the far end of the cavern a ramp led up to another door. She said:

“Time goes – and we must do with what we have now.”

De Keradel took up the chant. We walked, the three of us, between the ranks of swaying, chanting men and women. The servants with the flambeaux fell in behind us and behind them trooped the singing sacrifices. We ascended the ramp. A door opened smoothly. We passed through it into the open air.

De Keradel stepped ahead; his chanting fuller voiced; challenging. The night was cloudy and thin wisps of fog eddied around us. We crossed a broad open stretch and entered a grove of great oaks. The oaks sighed and whispered; then their branches began to toss and their leaves soughed the chant. De Keradel raised his maul and saluted them. We passed out of the oaks.

For an instant ancient time and this time and all times reeled around me. I stopped my chanting. I said, strangled: “Carnac – but it cannot be! Carnac was then… and this is now!”

Dahut’s arm was around my shoulders; Dahut’s lips were upon mine; she whispered: “There is no then… there is no now… for us, beloved. And you are one with us.”

Yet still I stood and looked; while behind me the chanting became ever fainter, faltering and uncertain. For there was a level space before me over which great monoliths marched, not leaning nor fallen as at Carnac now, but lifting straight up, defiant, as in Carnac of old. Scores of them in avenues like the spokes of a tremendous wheel. They marched and circled to the gigantic dolmen, the Cairn, that was their heart. A crypt that was truly an Alkar-Az… greater than that which I had known in most ancient Carnac… and among and between the standing stones danced the wraiths of the fog… the fog was a huge inverted bowl covering the Cairn and the monoliths. And against the standing stones leaned shadows… the shadows of men…

Dahut’s hands touched my eyes, covered them. And abruptly all strangeness, all comparisons of memory, were gone. De Keradel had turned, facing the sacrifices, roaring out the chant, black maul raised high, the symbols on black belt and cincture dancing like quicksilver. I raised the bowl and ewer and roared the chant. The faltering voices gathered strength, roared out to meet us. Dahut’s lips were again on mine… “Beloved, you are one with us.”

The oaks bent and waved their boughs and shouted the chant.

The servants had lighted their flambeaux and stood like watching dogs on the fringes of the sacrifices. We entered the field of the monoliths. In front of me strode de Keradel, maul held high, raised to the Cairn as the priest raises the Host to the Altar. Dahut was beside me, singing… singing… her golden sickle uplifted. Thicker grew the walls of the great inverted bowl of the fog above and around us; and thicker grew the fog wraiths dancing among and circling the monoliths. Darker became the shadows guarding the standing stones.

And the sacrifices were circling the monoliths, dancing around them in the ancient measures as though hand in hand with the fog wraiths. The servants had quenched their torches, for now the corposants had begun to glimmer over the standing stones. The witch lights. The lamps of the dead. Faintly at first, but growing ever stronger. Glimmering, shifting orbs of gray phosphorescence of the grayness of the dead. Decaying lights, and putrescent.

And now I stood before the great Cairn. I looked into its vault; empty; untenanted – as yet. Louder was the chanting as the sacrifices danced between and around the monoliths. Coming ever closer. And more lividly gleamed the corposants, lighting the path of the Gatherer.

The chanting muted, became a prayer, an invocation. The sacrifices pressed upon me, swaying, murmuring, rapt eyes intent upon the Cairn… and seeing – what?

There were three stones close to the entrance to the chamber of the Cairn. The middle one was a slab of granite, longer than a tall man, and at about where the shoulders of a man lying upon it would be there was a rounded ridge of stone like a pillow. It was stained – like the maul; and the stains ran down its sides. At its left was another stone, lower, squat, hollowed shallowly and channeled at its lower end as though to let some, liquid escape from it. And at the right of the long slab was a more deeply hollowed stone black with fire.

There was a curious numbness creeping through me; a queer sense of detachment as though a part of me, and the most vital part, were stepping aside to watch some play in which another and less important self was to be an actor. At the same time, that lesser part knew perfectly well what it had to do. Two of the white-robed servants handed me small bunches of twigs, small bundles of leaves, and two black bowls in which were yellow crystals and lumps of resinous gum. With the twigs I built the fire on the blackened altar as the ancient rites prescribed… well did I remember how the priests of Ys had made that fire before the Alkar-Az at Carnac…

I struck the flint, and as the twigs blazed I cast on them leaves and crystals and gums. The strangely scented smoke arose and wound around us and then went streaming into the Cairn as though sucked by a strong draft.

Dahut glided past me. There was a woman close by with a child in her arms. Dahut drew the child from her, unresisting, and glided back to the squat altar. Through the smoke I caught the flash of the golden sickle, and then de Keradel took the black bowl and ewer from me. He set them beneath the gutter of the squat altar. He gave them to me, and they were filled…

I dipped my fingers into the bowl and sprinkled what filled it over the threshold of the Cairn. I took the ewer and poured what it held from side to side of that threshold. I went back to the altar of the fire and fed it from red hands.

Now de Keradel was standing at the squat altar. He raised a small body in his arms, and cast it into the Cairn. Dahut was beside him, rigid, golden sickle upraised – but the sickle was no longer golden. It was red… like my hands…

The smoke from the sacred fire swirled between and around us.

De Keradel cried a word – and the chant of the prayer ended. A man shambled from the sacrifices, eyes wide and unwinking, face rapt. De Keradel caught him by the shoulders, and instantly two of the servants threw themselves upon this man, tore off his clothing and pressed him naked down upon the stone. His head fell behind the stone pillow – his chest strained over it. Swiftly de Keradel pressed upon a spot on the neck, and over the heart, and under the thighs. The sacrifice lay limp upon the slab… and de Keradel began to beat upon the naked lifted breast with the black maul. Slowly at first… then faster and faster… harder… to the ancient prescribed rhythm.

There was a shrilling of agony from the man on the stone. As though fed by it, the corposants flared wanly. They pulsed and waned. The sacrifice was silent, and I knew that de Keradel had pressed fingers against his throat… the agony of the sacrifice must not be articulate since agony that is voiceless is hardest to bear, and therefore most acceptable to the Gatherer…

The maul crashed down in the last stroke, splintering ribs and crushing heart. The smoke from the fire was swirling into the Cairn. De Keradel had raised the body of the sacrifice from the slab… held it high over his head…

He hurled it into the Cairn, while fast upon its fall came the thud of a smaller body, hurled after it…

From the hands of Dahut! And they were stained red and dripping – like my own.

He gave them to me, and they were filled…

There was a buzzing within the Cairn, like hundreds of carrion flies. Over the Cairn the fog blackened. A formless shadow dropped through the fog and gathered over the Cairn. It had no shape, and it had no place in space. It darkened the fog and it squatted upon the Cairn – yet I knew that it was but a part of Something that extended to the rim of the galaxy of which our world is a mote, our sun a spark… and beyond the rim of the galaxy… beyond the universe… beyond, where there is no such thing as space.

It squatted upon the Cairn, but it did not enter.

Again the golden sickle flashed in the hand of Dahut; and again de Keradel filled the ewer and the bowl and gave them to me. And again, numbly, I walked through the smoke of the altar fire and sprinkled the red drops from the bowl into the Cairn, and poured the red contents of the ewer from side to side of its threshold.

De Keradel held up the black maul, and cried out once more. A woman came out of the sacrifices, an old woman, wrinkled and trembling. The acolytes of de Keradel stripped her, and he threw her upon the stone… and swung the black maul down upon her withered breasts… and again and again…

And he swung her body up and out and through the portal of the Cairn… and others came running to him… and them he slew with the black maul… no longer black but dripping crimson… and hurled them into the Cairn…

The squatting darkness on the Cairn was no longer there. It had seeped through the great stones that roofed it, but still its shadow stained the fog reaching up and up like a black Pillar. The chamber of the Cairn was thick with the Blackness. And the smoke from the altar fire no longer clothed Dahut and de Keradel and me, but streamed straight through into the Cairn.

The buzzing ceased, all sound died everywhere, a silence that was like the silence of space before ever a sun was born took its place. All movement ceased. Even the drifting fog wraiths were motionless.

But I knew that the formless darkness within the Cairn was aware of me. Was aware of me and weighing me with a thousand eyes. I felt its awareness, malignant – crueler beyond measurement than even human cruelty. Its awareness streamed out and flicked over me like tiny tentacles… like black butterflies testing me with their antennae.

I was not afraid.

Now the buzzing began again within the Cairn, rising higher and higher until it became a faint, sustained whispering.

De Keradel was kneeling at the threshold, listening. Beside him stood Dahut, listening… sickle in hand… sickle no longer golden but red…

There was a child upon the squat altar, crying – not yet dead…

Abruptly the Cairn was empty… the fog above it empty of the shadow… the Gatherer gone.

I was marching back between the standing stones, Dahut and de Keradel beside me. There were no corposants over the monoliths. The flambeaux flared in the hands of the servants. Behind us, chanting and swaying, danced those who were left of the sacrifices. We passed through the oaks, and they were silent. The curious numbness still held me, and I felt no horror of what I had seen or of what I had done.

The house was before me. It was strange how its outlines wavered… how misty and unsubstantial they seemed…

And now I was in my own room. The numbness that had deadened all emotional reactions during the evocation of the Gatherer was slowly giving way to something else not yet defined, not yet strong enough to be known. The exaltation which had followed the green drink ebbed and flowed in steadily decreasing waves. I had an overpowering sense of unreality – I moved, unreal, among unreal things. What had become of my robe of white? I remembered that de Keradel had stripped it from me but where and when I could not think. And my hands were clean – no longer red with blood… the blood of…

Dahut was with me, feet bare, white skin gleaming through a silken shift that held no concealment. The violet fires still flickered faintly in her eyes. She put her arms around my neck, drew my face down to hers, set her mouth on mine. She whispered: “Alan… I have forgotten Alain de Carnac… he has paid for what he did, and he is dying… it is you, Alan – you that I love…”

I held her in my arms, and within them I felt the Lord of Carnac die. But I, Alan Caranac, was not yet awake.

My arms closed tighter around her… there was the fragrance of some secret flower of the sea about her… and there was the sweetness of new-learned or long-forgotten evil in her kisses…

— XVII —

THE BOWL OF SACRIFICE

I awakened as though escaping from some singularly unpleasant dream. I could not remember what the dream had been, but I knew it had been rotten. It was a stormy day, the surges hammering against the rocky shores, the wind wailing, and the light that came through the windows was gray. I raised my left arm to look at my watch, but it was not there. Nor was it on the table beside the bed. My mouth was dry, and my skin was dry and hot. I felt as though I had been drunk for two days.

Worst of all was my fear that I would remember the dream.

I sat up in bed. Something was missing besides my watch – the gun under my armpit – McCann’s gun. I lay back, and tried to remember. There had been a green drink which had sparkled and effervesced – after that, nothing. There was a fog between the green drink and now. The fog hid what I feared to have uncovered.

Fog had been in the dream. The pistol had been in the dream, too. When I had taken the green drink I still had the gun. There was a flash of memory – after the drink the gun had seemed absurd, unconsequential and I had thrown it into a corner. I jumped out of the bed to look for it.

My foot struck against a black and oval bowl. Not all black – there were stains along its sides, and inside it was a viscous scum.

The bowl of sacrifice!

Abruptly the fog lifted and there was the dream… if dream it had been… stark and clear in each dread detail. I recoiled from it, not only sick of soul but nauseated of body…

If it had been no dream, then was I damned and trebly damned. If I had not killed, I had acquiesced in killing. If I had not beaten in the breasts of the sacrifices with my own hands, I had not lifted a hand to save them – and I had fed the fires that were their funeral torches.

Equally with Dahut and de Keradel, I had summoned that black and evil Power… equally with them I was murderer, torturer… thrall of Hell.

What was there to prove it dream? Illusion suggested by de Keradel and Dahut while my will lay quiescent under the spell of the green drink? Desperately out of the damning memories I tried to sift some evidence that it had been only dream. There had been the flaring of the feral phosphorescence in their eyes – and in mine. A physiological peculiarity which man does not commonly possess, nor could any drink create the layer of cells which causes it. Nor does humanity bear within its breasts, over its hearts, perceptible lumens bright in youth and dimmed and yellow in age. Yet they had glowed in the breasts of the sacrifices!

Nor where except in dream do oaks chant as though their leafed boughs had voices?

But – there was the blood-stained bowl! Could that materialize from a dream?

No… but de Keradel or Dahut might have placed it there to make me, waking, believe the dream had been real. And dream or no dream – I was tainted with their evil.

I got up and searched for the automatic. I found it in the corner of the room where I had tossed it. Well, that much had been true. I strapped the holster under my arm. My head felt like a hive, my brain a honeycomb in and out of which lame bees of thought went buzzing aimlessly. But a cold, implacable hatred, a loathing of de Keradel and his witch-daughter held steady in the shaken fabric of my mind.

The rain lashed the windows, and the gale cried around the old house. Somewhere a clock struck a single clanging note. Whether it was the half-hour or the full I could not tell. A straight thought struck through the aimless ones. I took a pinch of the leaves out of the holster and chewed them. They were exceedingly bitter, but I swallowed them – and almost instantly my head was clear.

There was no use in hunting out de Keradel and killing him. In the first place, I could give no real defense for doing so. Not unless there was a heap of bodies in the Cairn, and I could open the cavern of the paupers. I had not the slightest belief that I could find that cavern or that there would be any bodies. Killing de Keradel would seem the act of a mad man, and for doing so a madhouse would be the best I could expect. Also, if I killed him, there would yet be the blank-eyed servants to reckon with.

And Dahut… I doubted whether I could shoot down Dahut in cold blood. If I did there still would be the servants. They would kill me… and I had no especial desire to die. The face of Helen came before me… and still less did I desire to die.

Also, there was the necessity of knowing whether what I had been visualizing had been dream or reality. It was most necessary that I know that.

Some way, some how, I must get in touch with McCann. Whether dream or reality, I must continue to play the game, not allow myself to be trapped again. At any rate, at first I must seem to believe in its reality; convince de Keradel that I did so believe. For no other reason could he or Dahut have left the bowl beside my bed.

I dressed, and picked up the bowl and went downstairs, holding it behind me. De Keradel was at the table, but the Demoiselle was not. I saw that it was a little after one. He looked up at me, sharply, as I sat and said: “I trust you slept well. I gave order that you should not be disturbed. It is a desolate day, and my daughter sleeps late.”

I laughed: “She should – after last night.”

He asked: “What do you mean?”

“No need to fence longer with me, de Keradel,” I answered, “after last night.”

He asked, slowly: “What do you remember of last night?”

“Everything, de Keradel. Everything – from your convincing disquisition upon the dark begetting of life, its darker delivery, its darkest evolution – and the proof of it in what we summoned to the Cairn.”

He said: “You have dreamed.”

“Did I dream this?”

I set the stained bowl upon the table. His eyes widened; he looked from it to me and back again to the bowl. He asked: “Where did you find that?”

I answered: “Beside my bed. When I awoke not long ago.”

The veins upon his temples swelled and began to throb; he whispered: “Now why did she do that…”

I said: “Because she is wiser than you. Because she knows I should be told the truth. Because she trusts me.”

He said: “As once before she trusted you – and to her cost and to her father’s.”

“When I was Lord of Carnac,” I laughed. “The Lord of Carnac died last night. She told me so.”

He looked at me, long: “How did the Lord of Carnac die?”

I answered, brutally: “In your daughter’s arms. And now she prefers – me.”

He pushed back his chair, walked to the window and stared out at the driving rain. He came back to the table and sat quietly down: “Caranac, what did you dream?”

I said: “A waste of time to answer that. If it was a dream, you dictated it, and therefore know. If it was no dream, you were there.”

He said: “Nevertheless, I ask you to tell me.”

I studied him. There was something strange about this request, made apparently in all sincerity. It threw a totally unexpected monkey-wrench of doubt into the simple machinery of my deductions. I sparred for time.

“After I’ve eaten,” I answered.

Not once while I breakfasted did he speak to me; nor, when I looked at him, were his eyes on me. He seemed deep in not particularly pleasant thoughts. I tried to fish the monkey-wrench out of my calculations. His surprise and anger when I produced the bowl had seemed genuine. If so, then obviously he had not put it beside me. Therefore it was not he who had wished to awaken my memory – either of dream or reality.

Then it must have been Dahut. But why should she want me to remember if her father did not? The only answer seemed to be that they were in conflict. Yet it might mean something else, far wider reaching. I had respect for de Keradel’s mentality. I did not believe he would ask me to tell him something he already knew. At least not without a reason. Did his question mean that he had taken no part in the summoning of the Gatherer? That there had been no sacrifices… that all had been illusion… and that he had taken no part in the creation of the illusion?

That all had been the work of Dahut alone?

But wait! Might it not also mean that the green drink, after it changed me into what I had become, had also been supposed to make me forget? And that for some reason I had been partly immune to its effect? That now de Keradel wanted to know to what extent it had failed… to compare my memories with what he knew had occurred?

Yet there was the bowl… and twice I had seen fear in his eyes when Dahut had spoken to him… and what was the rift between the pair… and how could I take advantage of it?

Could anyone except Dahut have left beside me the sacrificial bowl… anything…

I heard the voice of Ralston changing to the buzzing of a fly… I heard Dick’s voice crying out to me… Beware, beware of Dahut… give me release… from the Gatherer… Alan.

And the room darkened as though the dripping clouds had grown heavier… or had filled with shadows…

I said: “Dismiss the servants, de Keradel. I’ll tell you.”

And when he had done so, I did tell him. He listened without interrupting, expression unchanged, pale eyes now glancing out of the windows, now fixed on mine. When I was through, he asked, smiling:

“Do you think it dream – or real?”

“There is this—” I threw the stained bowl on the table.

He took it, and examined it, thoughtfully. He said:

“Let us first assume your experiences were real. Under that assumption, I am sorcerer, warlock, priest of evil. And I do not like you. Not only do I not like you, but I do not trust you. I am not deceived by your apparent conversion to our aims and purposes. I know that you came here only because of your fear of what might befall your friends if you did not. In short, I am fully aware of my daughter’s command to you, and what led up to it. I could get rid of you. Very easily. And would, were it not for one obstacle. My daughter’s love for you. In awakening those memories which were her most ancient mother’s in Ys… in resolving her into that ancient Dahut… obviously I could not pick and choose among her memories. They must, for my purposes, be complete. I must revive them all. Unfortunately, the Lord of Carnac was in them. Most unfortunately she met you, whose ancient father was that same Lord of Carnac. To destroy you would mean a complete and most probably abortive rearrangement of all my plans. It would infuriate her. She would become my enemy. Therefore you – continue to be. Is this plain?”

“Admirably so,” I said.

“What then – still assuming I am what you think – am I to do? Obviously, make you particeps criminis. A partner in my crimes. You cannot denounce me without denouncing yourself. I give you a certain drink which deadens your inhibitions against this and that. You become particeps criminis. Helpless to denounce, unless you want the same halter around your neck as would encircle mine. Doubtless,” he said, courteously, “all this has occurred to you.”

“It has,” I answered. “But I would like to put a few questions to you – in your character of sorcerer, warlock, priest of evil – assumed or otherwise, of course.”

“In that character,” he said gravely, “ask.”

“Did you bring about the death of Ralston?”

“I did not,” he said. “My daughter did. It is she who commands the shadows.”

“Was the shadow which whispered him to his death – real?”

“Real enough to cause his death,” he replied.

“You become ambiguous,” I said. “I asked was it real?”

He smiled: “There is evidence that he thought so.”

“And the other three?”

“Equally as real. It was the unexpected linking of those cases by Dr. Bennett that prompted our visit to Lowell… an exceedingly unfortunate visit, I repeat, since it resulted in my daughter meeting you. The admission, Caranac, is in my character of warlock, only.”

“Why, in that character, did you kill them?”

“Because we were temporarily in need of funds. You will recall there was difficulty in getting gold out of Europe. We had killed many times before – in England, in France, and otherwhere. Dahut needs amusement – so do her shadows. And they must feed – now and then.”

Could he be speaking truth – or was he playing with me? I said, coldly, hoping to bomb him out of his calm:

“You profit well by your daughter’s whoredom.”

He laughed outright at that: “What is whoredom to one who is warlock, sorcerer, and priest of evil?”

“Those who marched last night to the Cairn – still assuming these sacrifices reality – the paupers—”

He interrupted me: “Paupers! Why do you call them that?”

Now I laughed: “Aren’t they?” He recovered his poise: “Always under the same conditions of response, the majority of them, yes. And now you would ask me how I – collected – them. That, my dear Caranac, was remarkably simple. It involved only the bribing of an orderly or two, the administering to the paupers of a certain drug, a little whispering to them by my daughter’s shadows, their slipping away under the guidance of those shadows to where my boat lay waiting for them. And they were here – and very happy to be here I assure you… between sacrifices.”

He asked, suavely: “Have I given tangible form to the vaguest of your suspicions, hardened into certainty those not so vague? Is not all this credible conduct for a sorcerer and his witch-daughter?”

I did not answer. He said:

“Speaking still in this capacity, my dear Caranac, assuming that you leave here, tell this story to others, bring down upon me man’s law – what would happen? They would find no sacrifices, either dead in the Cairn or alive in the Cavern. There would be no Cavern. I have provided for all that. They would find only a peaceful scientist, one of whose hobbies is to reproduce Carnac in miniature. He would show them his standing stones. His entirely charming daughter would accompany and entertain them. You – if you were here – would be merely a lunatic dissonance. Whether you were here or not – what would happen to you thereafter? You would not die… but very heartily would you wish to die… if mind enough remained to formulate a wish.”

His lips were smiling, but his eyes were pale blue ice: “I am still speaking as sorcerer, of course.”

I asked: “Why did you come here for your experiment, de Keradel? Could you not have carried it on better in Carnac, before the ancient Cairn – the path to which the Gatherer knew well?”

He answered: “All paths are known to the Gatherer. And how could I have had freedom to open that ancient path in a land where memory still lingers? Where could I have gotten the sacrifices – or carried on the ritual without interruption? It was not possible. Therefore I came here. Where the Gatherer is unknown – as yet.”

I nodded; that was reasonable enough. I asked, bluntly:

“What do you expect to gain?”

He laughed: “You are too naive, Caranac. That I will not tell you.”

Anger and remorse swept away my caution; I said:

“You’ll never have my aid again in that black work, de Keradel.”

“So!” he said, slowly. “So! And so I thought. But I will not need you again, Caranac. The rapprochement last night was almost perfect. So perfect… that I may not even need… again… Dahut.”

He had said that last musingly, more as though sealing by words a secret thought than speaking to me. And once more I had the feeling of dissension between the two… and fear of Dahut driving him… driving him to what?…

He leaned back and roared laughter; his eyes and lips both laughing, without malice or evil.

“That is one side of the matter, Dr. Caranac. And now I give you the other side, the commonsense side. I am an able psychiatrist, and adventurous. I am an explorer, but not of the jungles nor the deserts of this world. I explore the brains of men, which are thousands of worlds. Mostly, I admit, they are distressingly similar; yet now and then there is one sufficiently different to justify the labor of exploration. Let us suppose that I have heard of you – as a matter of fact, Caranac, I know the history of your family better than you do yourself. Still, I have no desire to meet you until I read your interview in the case of this Ralston, whom I knew not at all. It arouses my curiosity, and I decide to explore – you. What is my best approach without exciting your suspicions? The most favorable, unguarded entrance into the particular territory of your brain which I wish to survey? I read that you are a friend of Dr. Bennett, who has interesting ideas upon the death of this same Ralston and others. I read that he is with Dr. Lowell, a brother psychiatrist upon whom I have long been intending to call. So I do call upon him, and what more natural that I should receive a dinner invitation for myself and my daughter. And, as I expect, there are you and Dr. Bennett.

“Very well, then. You are a connoisseur of warlocks, a student of sorcery. I turn the conversation in that direction. You have spoken to the pressmen of shadows, and to my delight I find that Dr. Bennett is obsessed by the same idea. Better still, he is half-convinced of sorcery’s reality. You two are so thoroughly en rapport that not only do I find entrance to your mind doubly easy, but his also open to me.”

He paused as though inviting comment. I made none. Something of the amiability faded from his face. He said: “I have called myself an explorer of minds, Caranac. I can cut my trails through them even as other explorers cut theirs through the jungles. Better. Because I can control the – vegetation.”

Again he paused, and when again I made no comment, asked with edge of irritation: “You understand me?”

I nodded: “I follow you perfectly.” I did not add that not only did I follow him but was a bit ahead of him… a thought was forming in my mind.

He said: “I now suggest to you – in my character of psychiatrist, Caranac, not of sorcerer – that my whole experiment has been centered upon awakening those memories which have come down to you from ancestors who did make sacrifices to a Demon-god. Those very sacrifices in which last night it seemed to you that you participated. That what you thought you saw upon the Cairn and within the Cairn was the image of that Demon-god the imaginations of your ancestors created long centuries ago… that, and nothing more. I suggest that from the moment we met, little which has seemed reality to you has been wholly so – a tapestry of dark ancestral memories and innocent realities of which I have been the weaver. There is no Gatherer… there are no creeping Shadows… no hidden lair beneath this house. My daughter, who shares in my experiments, is in truth what sometimes she has seemed to you to be… a woman of today’s world, sophisticated, certainly, but no more witch nor harlot than the Helen you called your antique coin. And finally, that you are a guest here, only. No prisoner, and under no compulsion to remain other than your own imagination – stimulated, as I have admitted, by my own passion for research.”

He added with barely discernible irony: “And my daughter’s.”

Now it was I who walked to the window, and stood with my back to him. Absently, I noted that the rain had stopped and the sun was breaking through the clouds. He was lying – but in which of his two interpretations were the lies the fewer? No sorcerer could have set the stage of Dahut’s towers in New York and Ys, nor have directed my experiences there, real or imagined; nor been fugleman to what had happened after the rites of last night. Only a sorceress could have managed those things.

Also, there were other weak spots to that second explanation. But the one indissoluble rock on which it split was that McCann, flying over this place, had also seen the corposants, the rotting lights of the dead… had seen the black and formless shape squatting upon the Cairn… glimpsed figures weaving among the standing stones before the fog had covered all.

Which of the two stories did de Keradel want me to believe? Which was it better for me to pretend to believe? That he had never really trusted me, I knew. Was this a sort of Lady or the Tiger trap? Which door ought I open?

The thought that had been forming in my mind grew clear. I turned to him with what I hoped was the precise mixture of chagrin and admiration. I said:

“Frankly, de Keradel, I don’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved. After all, you know, you did take me up on the mountain and show me the kingdoms of Earth, and a part of me rejoiced exceedingly at the prospect and was perfectly willing to sign over to you. If a tenderer part is set at ease because it was mirage, still the sterner part wishes it had been true. And I am divided between resentment that you should make me the subject of such an experiment, and admiration for your perfect workmanship.”

I sat down and added, carelessly: “I take it that now you have made everything plain, the experiment is ended.”

The pale blue eyes dwelt upon me; he answered, slowly: “It is ended – so far as I am concerned.”

Well did I know it wasn’t, and well did I know I was as much a prisoner as ever; but I lighted a cigarette, and asked: “I suppose, then, I am free to go whenever I choose?”

“An unnecessary question,” the pale eyes narrowed, “if you have accepted my commonsense interpretation of your experiences.”

I laughed: “It was an echo of my servitude to you. One does not so quickly feel himself free of such fetters of illusion as you forge, de Keradel. By the way, I’d like to send a telegram to Dr. Bennett.”

“I am sorry,” he said, “but the storm has broken the wire between us and the village.”

I said: “I am sure it has. But what I would like to wire Dr. Bennett is that I like it here, and intend to remain as long as I am welcome. That the matter in which we have been so interested has been explained to my complete satisfaction, and to drop it. That there is nothing for him to worry about, and that I will amplify all this later by letter.”

Pausing, I looked him straight in the eyes: “We would collaborate in that letter – you and I.”

He leaned back, appraising me with expressionless face, but I had not missed the flicker of astonishment when I had made my proposal. He was nibbling at the bait, although he had not yet swallowed it. He asked:

“Why?”

“Because of you,” I said, and walked over to him: “De Keradel, I want to stay here. With you. But not as one held by ancestral memories. Not by an imagination stimulated or guided by you or your daughter. Nor by suggestion nor sorcery. I want to stay here wide-awake and all myself. Nor have the charms of your daughter anything to do with that desire. I care little for women, de Keradel, except for the naked lady they name Truth. It is because of you, solely because of you, that I want to stay.”

Again he asked: “Why?”

But he had taken the bait. His guard had dropped. Every symphony has its chord, and every chord its dominant note. So has every man and every woman. Discover that note, and learn just how and when to sound it – and man or woman is yours. De Keradel’s dominant was vanity – egotism. I struck it heavily.

“Never, I think, has a de Carnac named a de Keradel – Master. Never asked to sit at a de Keradel’s feet and learn. I know enough of the histories of our clans to be sure of that. Well, it has come to pass. All my life I have sought to lift Truth’s veil. I think you can do that, de Keradel. Therefore – I would stay.”

He asked, curiously: “Which of my two stories do you believe?”

I laughed: “Both and neither. Otherwise would I deserve to be your acolyte?”

He said, almost wistfully: “I wish I could trust you… Alain de Carnac! There is much that we could do together.”

I answered: “Whether you trust me or do not, I cannot see how I, being here, can harm you. If I should disappear or, for example, appear to have killed myself or seem to have gone insane… that, of course, might harm you.”

He shook his head, absently; with a chillingly convincing indifference: “I could be rid of you very easily, de Carnac and there would be no necessity of explanations, but I wish I could trust you.”

I said: “If you have nothing to lose by it – why not?”

He said, slowly: “I will.”

He picked up the bowl of sacrifice in his hands, and weighed it. He dropped it on the table. Stretching both hands out toward me but without touching me, he did with them that to which, knowing what was in my heart against him, I could not respond. It was an immemorially ancient gesture, a holy gesture that had been taught to me in Tibet by a lama whose life I had saved… and the way de Keradel made that gesture defiled it, although it still held within it the obligation… an obligation beyond life.

Dahut saved me. A sudden flood of sunshine poured into the room. She came through toward us. If anything could have made me believe without reservation, de Keradel’s second and commonsense version it would have been Dahut walking through that sunshine. She had on her riding breeches and boots, and a sea-green silk shirt that just matched the color of her eyes, and a beret on her silver gilt hair that was exactly the same green. Coming through the sunshine toward me like this, she knocked de Keradel and everything else out of my head.

She said: “Hello, Alan. It’s cleared. Let’s take a canter.”

She saw the bowl of sacrifice. Her eyes dilated so that I could see the whites both above and below them… and how the orchid hell sparks danced…

De Keradel’s face whitened. Then comprehension came into it… a warning, a message, darted from him to her. The Demoiselle’s lids dropped, the long lashes swept her cheeks. All this in a split second. I said, carelessly, as though I had observed nothing:

“Fine. I’ll change my clothes.”

I had known damned well that de Keradel hadn’t put that bowl of sacrifice beside me. Now I knew just as damned well that Dahut hadn’t, either.

Then who had?

I stepped into my room… again I seemed to hear the buzzing… Alan, beware of Dahut…

Maybe the shadows were going to be kind to me again.

— XVIII —

THE HOUNDS OF DAHUT

Whatever the mystery of the bowl, Dahut’s invitation was a break I hadn’t hoped for. I got into my riding togs with haste. I had the idea that the conversation between her and her father would not be entirely amicable, and I didn’t want her to have time to change her mind about that gallop. Probably I would not be able to get to the village, but I ought to be able to make the rock where the patient fishermen waited.

I wrote a note to McCann: “Be at the rock tonight from eleven until four. If I don’t show up, be there tomorrow night between the same hours. Same holds for night after tomorrow. If you then haven’t heard from me, tell Ricori I say to use his own judgment.”

Ricori should have landed by then. And if by then I had not been able to get a message to McCann, it would mean that I was in a tight corner – if, indeed, I was in any shape to be in any corner whatsoever. I banked upon Ricori’s resourcefulness and ruthlessness as adequate to meet de Keradel’s own. Also, he would act swiftly. I wrote the note in duplicate, since after all I might be able to get to the village. I put one in a two-ounce bottle, stoppering it tightly. The other I put it my pocket.

I went downstairs whistling, giving artless warning of my approach. I went into the room as though I had not a care nor a suspicion in the world. Nor was I entirely acting; I did have a heady sense of elation; somewhat like that of a fighter who has lost round after round with an opponent whose style has been devastatingly unfamiliar, but who suddenly gets the key to it and knows he can meet it.

The Demoiselle was standing beside the fireplace, switching at her boots with her quirt. De Keradel was still at the table’s head, scrunched down a bit, more stolid than I had seen him. The bowl of sacrifice was nowhere in sight. The Demoiselle was rather like a beautiful wasp; De Keradel a quite small Gibraltar repelling stings. I laughed as that comparison came into my head.

Dahut said: “You are gay.”

I said: “Indeed I am. Gayer than—” I looked at de Keradel “-than I have been for years.”

She did not miss that look, nor his faint answering smile. She said: “Let us go. You are sure you will not join us, my father?”

De Keradel shook his head: “I have much to do.”

We went out to the stables. She took the same leggy bay, and I the roan. For a time she rode a little ahead of me, silent; then dropped back. She said: “You are as gay as though you rode to meet a loved woman.”

I said: “I hope to meet her. But not on this ride, Dahut.”

She whispered: “Is it – Helen?”

“No, Dahut – although Helen has many of her attributes.”

“Who is she?”

“You don’t know her very well, Dahut. She wears no clothes, except a veil over her face. Her name is Truth. Your father has promised me to lift her veil.”

She reined closer; grasped my wrist: “He promised that – to you?”

I said, casually: “Yes. And he rather more than intimated that he need not call you in to assist.”

“Why do you tell me this?” Her fingers tightened on my wrist.

“Because, Dahut, I am exceedingly anxious to meet this naked lady Truth with no veil over her face. And I have a feeling that unless from now on I answer all questions with perfect candor, our meeting will be delayed.”

She said, dangerously: “Do not play with me. Why did you tell me that?”

“I am not playing with you at all, Dahut. I am only being bluntly honest. So much so that I will give you my secondary reason.”

“And that?”

“Divide – and rule,” I answered.

She stared at me, uncomprehendingly.

“They tell a story in India,” I said. “It is one of their jatakas or animal fables. Tiger Queen and Lion King could not agree. Their enmity upset the jungle. At last they made a bargain. They were to sit on the pans of a balance suspended just over a pool filled with crocodiles. The heavier one obviously would drop into the water, to the delight of the crocodiles. Tiger Queen and Lion King sat on the scales. Each weighed exactly the same. But an ant had hidden himself mid-beam with a grain of sand in his mandibles. ‘Ho!’ he cried. ‘Who bids? And what is bid?’ Thus he cried, this humble ant, to Tiger Queen and Lion King. And a grain of sand in his mandibles was life or death to one of them.”

Dahut asked, breathlessly: “Which lived?”

I laughed: “The story does not say.”

She knew what I now meant, and I watched the color creep into her cheeks and the sparks dance in her eyes. She dropped my wrist. She said:

“My father is truly pleased with you, Alan.”

“I think you told me that once before, Dahut – but no gayety followed.”

She whispered: “And I seem to have heard you speaking like this before… and there was no gayety thereafter for me…” Again she grasped my wrist:

“But I am not pleased, Alan.”

“I am sorry, Dahut.”

She said: “Despite his wisdom, my father is rather ingenuous. But I am not.”

“Fine,” I said, heartily. “Nor am I. I loathe ingenuousness. But I have not as yet observed any naivete about your father.”

Her grip upon my wrist tightened: “This Helen… how much does she resemble the naked but veiled lady of your quest?”

My pulse leaped: I could not help it; she felt it. She said, sweetly: “You do not know? You have had no opportunity, I take it, for… comparison.”

There was mercilessness in the rippling of the little waves of her laughter: “Continue to be gay, my Alan. Perhaps, someday, I shall give you that opportunity.”

She tapped her horse with her crop, and cantered off. I ceased feeling gay. Why the devil had I allowed Helen to be brought into the talk? Not choked mention of her off at the beginning? I followed close behind Dahut, but she did not look at me, nor speak. We went along for a mile or two, and came out on that haunted meadow of the crouching bushes. Here she seemed to regain her good-humor, dropped back beside me. She said:

“Divide – and rule. It is a wise saying, that. Whose is it, Alan?”

I said: “So far as I know, some old Roman’s. Napoleon quoted it.”

“The Romans were wise, very wise. Suppose I told my father that you had put this thought into my head?”

I said, indifferently: “Why not? Yet if it has not already occurred to him, why forearm him against yourself?”

She said, thoughtfully: “You are strangely sure of yourself today.”

“If I am,” I answered, “it is because there is nothing but the truth in me. So if there are any questions upon the tip of your lovely tongue whose truthful answers might offend your beautiful ears – do not ask them of me.”

She bent her head, and went scudding over the meadow. We came to the breast of rock which I had scaled on our first ride. I dropped from my horse and began to climb. I reached the top, and turning, saw that she, too, had dismounted and was looking up at me, irresolutely. I waved to her, and sat down upon the rock. The fishing boat was a few hundred yards away. I threw a stone or two idly into the water, then flipped out the small bottle in which was the note to McCann. One of the men stood up, stretched, and began to pull up the anchors. I called out to him: “Any luck?”

Dahut was standing beside me. A ray of the setting sun struck the neck of the small bottle, and it glinted. She watched it for a moment, looked at the fishermen, then at me. I said: “What is that? A fish?” And threw a stone at the glint. She did not answer; stood studying the men in the boat. They rowed between us and the bottle, turned the breast of rock and passed out of sight. The bottle still glinted, rising and falling in the swell.

She half lifted her hand, and I could have sworn that a ripple shot across the water straight to the bottle, and an eddy caught it, sending it swirling toward us.

I stood up, and caught her by the shoulders, raised her face to mine and kissed her. She clung to me, quivering. I took her hands, and they were cold, and helped her down the breast of rock. Toward the bottom, I lifted her in my arms and carried her. I set her on her feet beside her horse. Her long fingers slipped around my throat, half-strangling me; she pressed her lips to mine in a kiss that left me breathless. She leaped on the bay and gave it the quirt, mercilessly. She was off over the meadow, swift as a racing shadow.

I looked after her, stupidly. I mounted the roan…

I hesitated, wondering whether to ascend the breast again to see if McCann’s men had come back and retrieved the bottle. I decided I’d better not risk it, and rode after Dahut.

She kept far ahead of me, never looking back. At the door of the old house she flung herself from the back of the bay, gave it a little slap, and went quickly in. The bay trotted over to the stables. I turned across the field and rode into the grove of oaks. I remembered it so well that I knew precisely when I would reach its edge and face the monoliths.

I reached the edge, and there were the standing stones, a good two hundred of them lifting up from a ten-acre plain and hidden from the sea by a pine-thatched granite ridge. They were not gray as they had been under fog. They were stained red by the setting sun. In their center squatted the Cairn, sullen, enigmatic, and evil.

The roan would not pass the threshold of the grove. He raised his head and sniffed at the wind and whinnied; he began to shiver and to sweat, and the whinny grew shrill with fear. He swerved and swung back into the oaks. I gave him his head.

Dahut sat at the head of the table. Her father had gone somewhere in the yacht and might not return that night, she had said… I wondered, but not aloud, if he were collecting more paupers for the sacrifices.

He had not been there when I had come in from the ride. Nor, until I had sat down at the table, had I seen Dahut. I had gone up to my room and bathed and dressed leisurely. I had set my ear to the tapestry and had searched again for the hidden spring; and had heard and found nothing. A kneeling servant had announced that dinner was ready. It interested me that he did not address me as his Lord of Carnac.

Dahut wore a black dress, for the first time since I had met her. There wasn’t much of it, but what there was showed her off beautifully. She looked tired; not wilty nor droopy, but in some odd fashion like a sea flower that was at its best at high tide and was now marking time through the low. I felt a certain pity for her. She raised her eyes to mine, and they were weary. She said:

“Alan, do you mind – I’d rather talk commonplaces tonight.”

Inwardly, I smiled at that. The situation was somewhat more than piquant. There was so little we could talk about other than commonplaces that wasn’t loaded with high explosive. I approved of the suggestion, feeling in no mood for explosions. Nevertheless, there was something wrong with the Demoiselle or she would never have made it. Was she afraid I might bring up that matter of the sacrificial bowl, perhaps – or was it that my talk with de Keradel had upset her. Certainly, she had not liked it.

“Commonplaces it is,” I said. “If brains were sparks, mine tonight wouldn’t even light a match. Discussion of the weather is about the limit of my intelligence.”

She laughed: “Well, what do you think of the weather, Alan?”

I said: “It ought to be abolished by Constitutional amendment.”

“And what makes the weather?”

“Just now,” I answered, “you do – for me.”

She looked at me, somberly: “I wish that were true – but take care, Alan.”

“My mistake, Dahut,” I said. “Back to the commonplace.”

She sighed, then smiled – and it was hard to think of her as the Dahut I had known, or thought I had known, in her towers of Ys and New York… or with the golden sickle red in her hand…

We stuck to commonplaces, although now and then perilous pits gaped. The perfect servants served us with a perfect dinner. De Keradel, whether scientist or sorcerer, did himself well with his wines. But the Demoiselle ate little and drank hardly at all, and steadily her languor grew. I pushed aside the coffee, and said:

“The tide must be on the ebb, Dahut.”

She straightened, and asked, sharply:

“Why do you say that?”

“I do not know. But always you have seemed to me of the sea, Dahut. I told you so that night I met you. So why should your spirit not rise and fall with the rise and fall of the tides?”

She arose, abruptly, and her face was colorless: “Good-night, Alan. I am very tired. Sleep – without dreams.”

She was out of the room before I could answer her. Why had that mention of the tides brought about such change in her, forced her to flight – for flight that swift departure had been? I could find no answer. A clock struck nine. I sat at the table for a quarter-hour more, the blank-eyed servants watching me. I stood up, yawning. I smiled drowsily at the butler and said to him in the Breton:

“Tonight I sleep.”

He had been among the van of those who with their flambeaux had herded the sacrifices. He bowed low, no slightest change of expression to betray that he sensed the true significance of what I had said. He held the curtains open for me, and I felt his gaze upon me as I slowly went up the stairs to my room.

I paused for a moment in the hall and looked out the window. There was a rack of thin clouds over the sky, half-veiling the moon, now a few nights past its full. It was a dimly luminous night, and a very silent one. There were no shadows in the wide, old-fashioned hall – whispering and rustling. I entered my room, undressed and went to bed. It was close to ten.

An hour went by while I lay there feigning sleep. Then that for which I had been waiting happened. Someone was in the room, and by the faint strange fragrance I knew it was Dahut, and that she stood close beside my bed. I felt her bend over me and listen to my breathing; then her fingers, light as the touch of a moth, upon the pulse in my neck and upon the pulse in my wrist. I sighed, and turned, and seemed to sink again in deepest slumber. And I heard her sigh, and felt a touch upon my cheek that was not of fingers. The fragrance stole away, soundlessly. Yet I knew Dahut had paused before the tapestry, listening. For long minutes she stood there, and then there was the faintest of clicks, and I knew that she had gone.

Nevertheless, I waited until the hands upon my watch-face pointed to eleven before I slipped out of bed, and drew on breeches, shirt, dark sweater, and sneakers.

The driveway to the house ran straight to the guarded gates, a mile and a half away. I did not believe this was patrolled, and I purposed to follow it to within half a mile of the gates, strike off to the left, reach the wall and skirt it to the rock where McCann would be awaiting me. True, the keeper of the inn had said the breast could not be scaled from the water, but I had no doubt McCann would find a way. I should make it in half an hour, easily.

I stepped out into the hall, crept to the head of the stairs, and looked down. A faint light was burning, but there was no sign of servants. I stole down the stairs and reached the front door. It was unlocked and unbolted. I closed it behind me and merged into the shadow of a rhododendron, getting my bearings.

Here the driveway made a wide curve, unprotected by shrubbery. The scud had thinned and the moon was far too bright, but once the loop was crossed, there would be cover from the trees that bordered the road. I walked across the loop and gained the shelter of the trees. I waited a good five minutes, watching. The house remained dark, no lights from any window; no stir nor sound. I set off along the roadway.

I had covered a trifle under my mile when I came to a narrow lane angling to the left. It was fairly straight, what I could see of it in the watery moonlight. It struck in the general direction of the rock, and promised not only a shorter cut but a safer way. I took it. A few score yards and the trees ended. The lane continued, but bordered with scrub and bushes just too high for me to look over and far too dense for me to see through.

A half mile of this, and I began to have an acutely disagreeable feeling of being followed. It was an extraordinary unpleasant feeling – as though that which followed was peculiarly loathsome. And suddenly it was at my back – reaching out to me? I wheeled, snatching the gun from the holster.

There was nothing behind me. The lane stretched dimly back, and empty.

My heart was pumping as though I had been running, the backs of my hands and my forehead wet with sweat and I felt a stirring of nausea. I fought it down and went on, gun in hand. A dozen steps, and again I felt the stealthy approach – coming closer, closer, closer… faster and faster… sweeping upon me. I mastered panic impulse to run, and wheeled again – and again saw only empty lane.

I pressed my back against the bushes, and sidled along, watching the path I had traversed.

Now there was furtive movement in the scrub that lined the lane; movement as of things flitting through the bushes to the measure of my steps, watching me, gloating upon me; and there were rustlings and whisperings and thin obscene pipings as though they talked of me as I sidled on and on, legs trembling, nausea growing, and fighting, fighting at every step that panic desire to fling away my gun, cover my eyes with my arms lest I see the things – and run and run.

The lane ended. Step by step I backed away from it until I could no longer hear the rustlings and the pipings. But still there was movement in the bushes and I knew the things watched me from them. I turned and saw that I was on the edge of the haunted meadow. Sinister enough it had seemed by day, but it had been gay to what it was now, by night, under the scud-veiled, waning moon. It was desolate, unutterably desolate, and the bushes that had seemed like crouching men were now bent souls chained for eternity to that desolation, in irrevocable despair.

I could not cross that meadow unless I did it quickly. I could not go back through the piping things. I began to run straight across the meadow, toward the wall.

I was a third over it when I heard the baying of the hounds. It came from the direction of the house, and involuntarily I stopped, listening. It was not like the cry of any pack I had ever heard. It was sustained, wailing, ineffably mournful; with the thin unearthly quality of the obscene pipings. It was the desolation of the meadow given voice.

I stood, throat dry, every hair prickling, unable to move. And nearer drew the howling, and nearer.

The lane spewed shadow shapes. They were black under the moon and they were like the shadows of men, but of men deformed, distorted, changed into abominable grotesques within a workshop in Hell. They were – foul. They spread fan-wise from the mouth of the lane and came leaping, skipping, flittering over the meadow; squattering in the crouching bushes, then flinging themselves out again, and as they ran they mewed and squeaked and piped. There was one with bloated body like a monstrous frog that came hopping toward me and leaped croaking over my head. There was another that touched me as it passed – a shadowy thing with long and twisted ape-like arms, dwarfed legs and head the size of an orange set upon a thin and writhing neck. It was not all shadow, for I felt its touch, gossamer as the wing of a moth, thin as mist – but palpable. It was unclean, a defilement, a horror.

The baying of the dogs was close, and with it a tattoo of hoofs, the drumming of a strong horse, galloping.

Out of the lane burst a great black stallion, neck outstretched, mane flying. Upon his back rode Dahut, ash-gold hair streaming loose in the wind, eyes flaming with the violet witch-fire. She saw me, and raised her whip and screamed, reining in the stallion so that he danced, forefeet high in air. Again she screamed, and pointed to me. From behind the stallion poured a pack of huge dogs, a dozen or more of them, like stag-hounds… like the great hounds of the Druids.

They raced down upon me like a black wave… and I saw that they were shadowy, but in the blackness of their shadows red eyes gleamed with the same hell-fires that were in Dahut’s. And behind them thundered the stallion with Dahut – no longer screaming, her mouth twisted into a square of fury and her face no woman’s but a fiend’s.

They were almost upon me before my paralysis broke. I raised the automatic and shot straight at her. Before I could press trigger again, the shadow pack was on me.

Like the thing that had touched me, they, too, had substance, these shadow hounds of Dahut. Tenuous, misty – but material. I staggered under their onslaught. It was as though I fought against bodies made of black cobwebs, and I saw the moon as though it were shining through a black veil; and Dahut upon the stallion and the desolate meadow were dimmed and blurred as though I looked through black cobwebs. I had dropped my gun and I fought with bare hands. Their touch had not the vileness of the ape-armed thing, but from them came a strange and numbing cold. They tore at me with shadowy fangs, tore at my throat with red eyes burning into mine, and it was as though the cold poured into me through their fangs. I was weakening. It was growing harder to breathe. The numbness of the cold had my arms and hands so that now I could only feebly struggle against the black cobwebs. I dropped to my knees, gasping for breath…

Dahut was down from the stallion and I was free from hounds. I stared up at her and tried to stagger to my feet. The fury had gone from her face, but in it was no mercy and out of its whiteness the violet flames of her eyes flared. She brought her whip down across my face: “A brand for your first treachery!” She lashed. “A brand for your second!” A third time again. “A brand for this time!”

I wondered, dazedly, why I did not feel the blows.

I felt nothing; all my body was numb, as though the cold had condensed within it. Slowly it was creeping into my brain, chilling my mind, freezing my thought. She said: “Stand up.”

Slowly, I arose. She leaped upon the stallion’s back. She said: “Raise your left arm.” I lifted it, and she noosed the lash of the quirt around my wrist like a fetter.

She said: “Look. My dogs feed.”

I looked. The shadow hounds were coursing over the meadow and the shadow things were running, hopping from bush to bush, squeaking, piping in terror. The hounds were chasing them, pulling them down, tearing at them.

She said: “You, too, shall feed!”

She called to her dogs and they left their kills and came coursing to her.

The cold had crept into my brain. I could not think. I could see, but what I saw had little meaning. I had no will, except hers.

The stallion trotted away, into the lane. I trotted at its side, held by the fetter of Dahut’s lash, like a runaway slave. Once I looked behind. At my heels was the shadow pack, red eyes glinting in their bodies’ murk. It did not matter.

And the numbness grew until all I knew was that I was trotting, trotting.

Then even that last faint fragment of consciousness faded away.

— XIX —

“CREEP, SHADOW!”

There was no feeling in my body, but my mind was awake and alert. It was as though I had no body. The icy venom from the fangs of the shadow hounds still numbed me, I thought. But it had cleared from my brain. I could see and I could hear.

All that I could see was a green twilight, as though I lay deep in some ocean abyss looking upward through immense spaces of motionless, crystal-clear green water. I floated deep within this motionless sea, yet I could hear, far above me, its waves whispering and singing.

I began to rise, floating up through the depths toward the whispering, singing waves. Their voices became clearer. They were singing a strange old song, a sea-song old before ever man was… singing it to the measured chime of tiny bells struck slowly far beneath the sea… to measured tap, tap, tap on drums of red royal coral deep beneath the sea… to chords struck softly on harps of sea-fans whose strings were mauve and violet and crocus yellow.

Up I floated and up, until song and drum beat, chimes and sighing harp chords blended into one… The voice of Dahut.

She was close to me, and she was singing, but I could not see her. I could see nothing but the green twilight, and that was fast darkening. Sweet was her voice and pitiless… and wordless was her song except for its burden…

“Thirst, Shadow! Hunger, Shadow! Creep, Shadow – creep!”

I strove to speak and could not; strove to move and could not. And still her song went on… only its burden plain…

“Hunger, Shadow, feed only where and when I bid you! Thirst, Shadow… drink only where and when I bid you! Creep, Shadow creep!”

Suddenly I felt my body. First as a tingling, and then as a leaden weight, and then as a wrenching agony. I was out of my body. It lay upon a wide, low bed in a tapestried room filled with rosy light. The light did not penetrate the space in which I was, crouching at my body’s feet. On my body’s face were three crimson welts, the marks of Dahut’s whip, and Dahut stood at my body’s head, naked, two thick braids of her pale gold hair crossed between white breasts. I knew that my body was not dead, but Dahut was not looking at it. She was looking at me… whatever I was… crouched at my body’s feet…

“Creep, Shadow… creep… creep… creep, Shadow… creep…”

The room, my body, and Dahut faded – in that precise order. I was creeping, creeping, through darkness. It was like creeping through a tunnel, for solidity was above and below and on each side of me; and at last, as though reaching a tunnel’s end, the blackness before me began to gray. I crept out of the darkness.

I was at the edge of the standing stones, on the threshold of the monoliths. The moon was low, and they stood black against it.

There was an eddy of wind, and like a leaf it blew me among the monoliths. I thought: What am I to be blown like a leaf in the wind! I felt resentment, rage. I thought: A shadow’s rage!

I was beside one of the standing stones. Dark as it was, a darker shadow leaned against it. It was the shadow of a man, although there was no man’s body to cast it. It was the shadow of a man buried to the knees. There were other monoliths near, and against each of them leaned a man’s shadow… buried to the knees. The shadow closest to me wavered, like the shadow cast by a wind-shaken candle flame. It bent to me and whispered: “You have life! Live, Shadow and save us!”

I whispered: “I am shadow… shadow like you… how can I save you?”

The shadow against the standing stone swayed and shook: “You have life… kill… kill her… kill him…”

The shadow on the stone behind me whispered: “Kill… her… first.”

From all the monoliths rose a whisper: “Kill… kill… kill…”

There was a stronger eddy of the wind, and on it I was whirled like a leaf almost to the threshold of the Cairn. The whispering of the shadows fettered to the circling monoliths grew locust shrill, beating back the wind that was whirling me into the Cairn… shrilling a barrier between the Cairn and me… driving me back, out of the field of the monoliths…

The Cairn and the monoliths were gone. The moon was gone and gone was the familiar earth. I was a shadow… in a land of shadows…

There were no stars, no moon, no sun. There was only a faintly luminous dusk which shrouded a world all wan and ashen and black. I stood alone, on a wide plain. There were no perspectives, and no horizons. Everywhere it was as though I looked upon vast screens. Yet I knew there were depths and distances in this strange land. I was a shadow, vague and unsubstantial. Yet I could see and hear, feel and taste, I knew that because I clasped my hands and felt them, and in my mouth and throat was the bitter taste of ashes.

Ahead of me were shadow mountains, stacked against each other like gigantic slices of black jade; lamellar; distinguishable from each other only by their varying darknesses. It seemed that I could reach out a hand and touch them, yet I knew they were far and far away. My eyes – my sight – whatever it was that functioned as sight in this shadow that was I, sharpened. I was ankle deep in somber, shadowy grass starred by small flowers that should have been gay blue instead of mournful gray. And shadowy livid lilies that should have been golden and scarlet swayed in a wind I could not feel.

I beard above me a thin trilling, plaintively sweet. Shadowy birds were winging over me toward the distant mountains. They passed… but the trilling lingered… shaped itself into words into the voice of Dahut.

… Hunger Thirst!

My way was toward the mountains – the shadowy birds had pointed it. I had a swift moment of rebellion, I thought: I will not take it. This is illusion. Here I stay…

The voice of Dahut, pitiless: Learn whether it is not real!

I began to walk, through the somber grass, toward the black mountains.

There was a muted beat of hoofs behind me. I turned. A shadowy horse was driving down upon me, a great gray destrier, armored. The shadow who rode it was armored, the shadow of a big man, wide of shoulder and thick of body; unvisored, but chain-mailed from neck to feet, in his belt a battle-axe and across his shoulders a long two-edged sword. The destrier was close, yet the sound of its hoofs was faint, like distant thunder. And I saw that far behind the armored man raced other shadowy horsemen, leaning forward over the necks of small steeds. The armored man drew up his horse beside me, looked down at me with faint glint of brown eyes in shadowy face.

“A stranger! Now by Our Lady I leave no straggler in the path of the wolves I draw! Up, Shadow… up!”

He swung an arm and lifted me; threw me astride the destrier behind him.

“Hold fast!” he cried, and gave the gray horse the spur. Swiftly it raced, and soon the slices of the black mountains were close. A defile opened. At its mouth he stopped, and looked back, made gestures of derision and laughed: “They cannot catch us now…”

He muttered: “Still, I do not know why my horse should be so weary.”

He stared at me from shadowy face: “I do know… you have too much of life, Shadow. He who casts you is not… dead. Then what do you here?”

He twisted, and lifted me from the horse, and set me on the ground, gently.

“See!” he pointed to my breast. There was a filament of glistening silver, fine as the finest cobweb, floating from it… stretching toward the ravine as though pointing the way I must take… as though it came from my heart… as though it were unwinding from my heart…

“You are not dead!” Shadowy pity was in his regard. “Therefore you must hunger… therefore you must thirst… until you feed and drink where the thread leads you. Half-Shadow – it was a witch who sent me here, Berenice de Azlais, of Languedoc. But my body has long been dust and I have long been content to feed on shadow fare. Long dust, I say and so suppose… but here one knows no time. My year was 1346 of Our Lord. What year was yours?”

“Nigh six centuries after,” I said.

“So long… so long,” he whispered. “Who sent you here?”

“Dahut of Ys.”

“Queen of Shadows! Well, she has sent us many. I am sorry, Half-Shadow, but I can carry you no further.”

Suddenly he slapped his sides, and shook with laughter: “Six hundred years, and still I have my lemans. Shadowy, ’tis true – but then so am I. And still I can fight. Berenice – to you my thanks. St. Francis… let Berenice hereafter toast less hotly in Hell, where without doubt she is.”

He leaned and clapped me on the shoulder: “But kill your witch, Half-brother – if you can!”

He rode into the ravine. I followed in his wake, walking. Soon he was out of sight. How long I walked I did not know. It was true that there was no time in this land. I passed out of the ravine.

The black jade mountains were palisades circling a garden filled with the pallid lilies. In its center was a deep black pool in which floated other lilies, black and silver and rusty-black. The pool was walled with jet…

It was there that I felt the first bite of the dreadful hunger, the first pang of the dreadful thirst…

Upon the wide jet wall lay seven girls, dull silver shadows… and exquisite. Naked shadows… one lay with chin cupped in misty hands, glint of deepest sapphire blue eyes in shadowy face… another sat, dipping slender feet in the black of the pool, and her hair was blacker than its waters, black spume of blacker waves, and as fine… and out of the black mist of her hair eyes green as emeralds but soft with promise glanced at me…

They arose, the seven, and drifted toward me. One said: “He has too much of life.”

Another said: “Too much… yet not enough.”

A third said: “He must feed and drink… then come back, and we shall see.”

The girl whose eyes were sapphire blue, asked: “Who sent you here, Shadow?”

I said: “Dahut the White. Dahut of Ys.”

They shrank from me: “Dahut sent you? Shadow – you are not for us. Shadow – pass on.”

……

I said: “I am weary. Let me rest here for awhile.”

The green-eyed girl said: “You have too much of life. If you had none you would not be weary. Only life grows weary.”

The blue-eyed girl whispered: “And life is only weariness.”

“Nevertheless, I would rest. Also I am hungry, and I thirst.”

“Shadow with too much of life… there is nothing here that you can eat… nothing here that you can drink.”

I pointed to the pool: “I drink of that.”

They laughed: “Try, Shadow.”

I dropped upon my belly and thrust my face toward the black water. The surface of the pool receded as I bent. It drew back from my lips… it was but the shadow of water… and I could not drink…

… Thirst, Shadow… drink only when and where I bid…

The voice of Dahut!

I said to the girls: “Let me rest.”

They answered: “Rest.”

I crouched upon the rim of jet. The silver girls drew away from me, clustered, shadowy arms entwined, whispering. It was good to rest, although I felt no desire to sleep. I sat, hands clasping knees, head on breast. Loneliness fell upon me like a garment; loneliness rained upon me. The girl whose eyes were blue slipped to my side. She threw an arm around my shoulders, leaned against me:

“When you have fed… when you have drunk… come back to me.”

I do not know how long I lay upon the rim of jet around the black pool. But when at last I arose the girls of tarnished silver were not there. The armored man had said there was no time in this land. I had liked the armored man. I wished that his horse had been strong enough to carry me wherever he had been going. My hunger had grown and so had my thirst. Again I dropped and tried to sip of the pool. The shadow waters were not for me.

Something was tugging at me, drawing me on. It was the silver filament and it was shining like a thread of living light. I walked out of the garden, following the thread…

The mountains were behind me. I was threading my way through a vast marsh. Spectral rushes bordered a perilous path, and in them lurked shadow shapes unseen but hideous. They watched me as I went, and I knew that here I must go carefully lest a misstep give me to them. A mist hung over the marsh, a gray and dead mist that darkened when the hidden things furtively raised themselves… or fled ahead to crouch beside the path and wait my coming. I felt their eyes upon me – cold, dead, malignant.

There was a ridge feathered with ghostly ferns behind which other shadowy shapes lurked, pushing and crowding against each other, following me as I threaded my way through the spectral rushes. And at every step more woeful became my loneliness, more torturing my hunger and my thirst.

I passed the marsh and came out upon a dim path that quickly widened into a broad highway which, wavering, stretched across an illimitable and cloudy plain. There were other shadow shapes upon this highway… shapes of men and women, old and young, shapes of children and of animals… but no shape inhuman or unearthly. They were like shapes formed of heavy fog… of frozen fog. They flittered and loitered, ran or stood forlorn… singly, in groups, in companies. And as they went by, or overtook me or I overtook them, I felt their gaze upon me. They seemed of all times and of all races, these shadow folk. There was a lean Egyptian priest upon whose shoulder sat a shadowy cat that arched its back and spat soundlessly at me… three Roman legionaries whose round, close-fitting helmets were darker stains upon their heads and who raised shadowy arms in the ancient salute as they strode past… there were Greek warriors with helms from which shadow plumes streamed, and shadowy women in litters carried by shadow slaves… and once a company of little men went by on shaggy silent ponies, spectral bows at backs, slant shadowy eyes glinting at me… and there was the shadow of a child that turned and trotted beside me for a space, reaching up its hands to the slender filament that was leading me… dragging me… where?

The road went on and on. It became ever more thronged with the shadow people, and I saw that many more were going my way than against me. Then at my right, out upon the vaporous plain, a wan light began to glow… phosphorescent, funereal… like the glimmer of the corposants, the lights of the dead… among the monoliths…

It became a half-moon that rested upon the plain like a gigantic gateway. It sent a path of ashen light across the plain, and from the highroad into that path, the shadow people began to stream. Not all – one that tarried paused beside me, gross of body, with plumed and conical hat and cloak that streamed and wavered in a wind I could not feel, as though by it his gross body were being whipped in tatters.

He whispered: “The Eater of Shadows eats from a full board.”

I echoed, thinly: “The Eater of Shadows?”

I felt his gaze upon me, intent. He tittered in a voice like the rustling of rotting, poisonous leaves:

“Heh-heh-heh… a virgin! New born into this delectable world! You know nothing of the Eater of Shadows? Heh-heh-heh… but he is our only form of Death in this world, and many who weary of it go to him. This you do not yet fully perceive, since he has not made himself manifest. They are fools,” he whispered, viciously. “They should learn, as I have learned, to take their food in the world from which they came. No shadow-food… no, no, no… good flesh and body and soul… soul, heh-heh-heh!”

A shadowy hand snatched at the shining filament, and recoiled, twisting as though seared… the gross shadow cringed and writhed as though in agony. The rustling voice became a vile high whining: “You are going to your marriage feast… going to your marriage bed. You will have your own table… a fair table of flesh and blood and soul… of life. Take me with you, bridegroom… take me with you. I can teach you so much! And my price is only a few crumbs from your table… only the smallest share in your bride…”

Something was gathering in the doorway of the half-moon; something forming upon its glimmering surface… fathomless black shadows were grouping themselves into a gigantic, featureless face. No, it was not featureless, for there were two apertures like eyes through which the wan phosphorescence shone. And there was a shapeless mouth which gaped while a writhing ribbon of the dead light streamed out of it like a tongue. The tongue licked among the shadows and drew them into the mouth, and the lips closed on them then opened again, and again the tongue licked out…

“Oh, my hunger! Oh, my thirst and hunger! Take me with you, bridegroom to your bride. There is so much I can teach you for such a little price…”

I struck at that gibbering shadow and fled from its dreadful whispering; fled with shadowy arms covering my eyes to shut out vision of that vague and dreadful face.

… Hunger, Shadow… feed only where and when I bid. Thirst, Shadow… drink only where and when I bid!…

And now I knew. I knew where the silver filament was dragging me, and I tore at it with shadowy hands, but could not break it. I tried to run back, against it, and it swung me around, dragging me inexorably on.

I knew now what the evil, tittering shadow had known… that I was on my way to food and drink… to my marriage feast… to my bride…

Helen!

It was on her body and blood and life my hunger was to be appeased, my thirst slaked.

Upon Helen!

The shadow-land lightened. It became crystalline. Heavier, blacker shadows thrust themselves within it. These steadied, and the land of shadows vanished.

I was in an old room. Helen was there, and Bill and McCann, and a man I did not know; a lean and dark man with thin, ascetic face and snow-white hair. But wait… that must be Ricori…

How long had I been in shadow-land?

Their voices came to me as a low humming, their words an unintelligible drone. I did not care what they were talking about. My whole being was focused upon Helen. I was starving for her, famishing for her… I must eat and drink of her…

I thought: If I do… she must die!

I thought: Let her die… I must eat and drink…

She raised her head, sharply. I knew that she was aware of me. She turned and looked straight at me. She saw me… I knew that she saw me. Her face whitened… then grew pitiful. The amber-gold of her eyes darkened with a wrath in which was complete comprehension… then became tender. Her little rounded chin hardened, her red mouth with its touch of the archaic became inscrutable. She arose and said something to the others. I saw them rise, staring at her incredulously – then search the room with their eyes. Except Ricori, who looked straight at her, stern face softened. And now words shaped themselves from the low humming of their voices. I heard Helen say:

“I fight Dahut. Give me an hour. I know what I am doing—” a wave of color spread over her face “ – believe me, I know.”

I saw Ricori bend and kiss her hand; he raised his head and there was iron assurance in the look he gave her… “And I know – win, Madonna… or if you lose, be sure that you shall be avenged.”

She walked from the room. The shadow that was I crept after her.

She walked upstairs, and into another room. She turned on lights, hesitated, then locked the door behind her. She went to the windows and drew down the curtains. She held her arms out to me:

“Can you hear me, Alan? I can see you… faintly still, but more plainly than below. Can you hear me? Then come to me.”

I quivered with desire for her… to eat and drink of her. But the voice of Dahut was in my ears, not to be disobeyed – Eat and drink… when I bid you.

I knew that the hunger must grow stronger, the thirst more consuming, before I could be loosed from that command. This so that only all the life of Helen could appease the hunger and slake the thirst. So that feeding, drinking… I killed her.

I whispered: “I hear you.”

“I hear you, darling. Come to me.”

“I cannot come to you – not yet. My thirst and hunger for you must grow greater… so that when I come to you – you die.”

She dimmed the lights; raised her arms and loosed her hair so that it fell in shining red-gold ringlets almost to her waist. She asked: “What keeps you from me? From me who loves you… from me whom you love?”

“Dahut… you know that.”

“Beloved – I do not know that. It is not true. None can keep you from me if I truly love you and if you truly love me. Both are true… and I say to you come to me, beloved… take me.”

I made no answer; I could not. Nor could I go to her. And more ravenous grew the hunger, more maddening the thirst.

She said: “Alan, think only that. Think only that we love. That none can keep us from each other. Think only that. Do you understand me?”

I whispered: “Yes.” And tried to think only that while the hunger and the thirst for her… for the life of her… were two starved hounds straining at the leash.

She said: “Darling, can you see me? See me clearly?”

I whispered: “Yes.”

She said: “Then look… and come to me.”

She raised her arms again, and slipped from her dress; drew off slippers and stockings. She let fall from her the silken sheath that remained. She stood facing me, all lovely, all desirable, wholly human. She threw back her hair uncovering her white breasts… her eyes were golden pools of love that held no shame…

“Take me, beloved! Eat and drink of me!”

I strained against the fetters that held me – strained against them as a soul led up from Hell to the gates of Paradise would strain to break its bonds and enter.

“She has no power over you. None can keep us apart… come to me, beloved.”

The fetters broke… I was in her arms…

Shadow that I was, I could feel her soft arms around me… feel the warmth of her breast pressing me closer, closer… feel her kisses on my shadowy lips. I merged with her. I ate and drank of her… of her life… and felt her life streaming through me… melting the icy venom of the shadow hounds…

Releasing me from the shadow bondage…

Releasing me from Dahut!

I stood beside the bed looking down on Helen. She lay, white and drained of life, half covered by her red-gold hair… and was she dead? Had Dahut conquered?

I bent shadowy head to her heart and listened and could hear no beat. Love and tenderness such as I had never known throbbed from me and covered her. And I thought: This love must surely be stronger than death… must give back to her the life I have taken…

And still I could not hear her heart…

Then despair followed the pulse of that love. And on its wake a hate colder than the venom of the shadow hounds.

Hate against Dahut.

Hate against the warlock who called himself her father.

Hate implacable, relentless, remorseless against both.

That hate grew. It merged with the life I had stolen from Helen. It lifted me. Upon its wings I was rushed away… away from Helen… back through the shadow-land…

And awakened… shadow no more.

— XX —

THE LAST SACRIFICE

I lay upon a wide low bed in a tapestried room where an ancient lamp burned with a dim rose light. It was Dahut’s room from which she had sent me forth as shadow. My hands were crossed upon my breast, and something bound my wrists. I raised them and saw twined tight around them the witch-fetters – a twisted thread of pale-gold hair, the hair of Dahut. I broke them. My ankles were crossed and bound with the same fetters, and these I broke. I swung from the bed. Around me was a robe of the soft white cotton, a robe like that I had worn to the sacrifices. I tore it from me with loathing. There was a mirror over the dressing table – on my face were the three marks of Dahut’s whip-branding, no longer crimson but livid.

How long had I been in the shadowy land? Long enough to allow Ricori to return – but how much longer? More important, what time had elapsed since Helen? A clock showed close to eleven. But was this still the same night? It might not be – shadow time and shadow space were alien. I had seemed to cover immense distances, and yet I had found Helen just outside de Keradel’s gates. For I was sure that that old room had been in the house McCann had taken.

And clearly, this return of mine had not been expected by Dahut – at least not so soon. I reflected grimly that I always seemed to be a little ahead of schedule so far as Dahut and her father were concerned… I reflected much more grimly that it had never advantaged me greatly. Nevertheless, it must mean that her dark wisdom had its limits – that there had been no shadowy spies to whisper to her my escape… that she believed me still under her sorceries; still obedient to her will; still held back by her command until my lust for Helen had grown strong enough to kill when loosed…

Might that not also mean her purpose had failed… that loosed too soon I had not killed… that Helen was alive?

The thought was like strong wine. I walked to the door and saw that the heavy inside bars were down. How could they have been dropped, since only I was in the room? Of course… I was Dahut’s prisoner, and she wanted no tampering with my body when she was not beside it. She had barred the door and made use of the secret opening into my room to come and go. Quite evidently she had considered the bars safe from my helpless hands. I lifted them cautiously, and tried the door. It was unlocked. I opened it as cautiously, slowly, and stood peering out into the hall, listening.

It was then I first felt the unease, the trouble, the fear, of the old house. It was filled with fear. And with wrath. It came to me not only from the shadowed hall, but from all of the house. And suddenly it seemed to be aware of me, and to focus itself upon me, frantically… as though it were trying to tell me why it was troubled and raging and afraid.

So sharp was the impression that I closed the door, let one of the bars fall, and stood with my back to it. The room was unhaunted, unafraid, and shadowless, the faint rose light penetrating to every corner…

The house invaded the room, striving to make coherent to me what it was that troubled it. It was as though the ghosts of all those who had lived and loved and died there were in revolt… appalled by something about to happen… something execrable, abhorrent… an evil something that had been conceived in the old house while its ghosts had watched, impotent to prevent… and now were appealing to me to abort.

The house trembled. It was a tremor that began far beneath it and throbbed up through every timber and stone. Instantly that which had feared and had appealed to me withdrew; sweeping down to the source of the trembling – or so it seemed to me. Again the house trembled. Trembled in actuality, for the door at my back quivered. The trembling increased and became a shuddering under which the solid old hand-hewn joists creaked and groaned. There followed a distant, rhythmic thudding.

It ceased, and the old house quivered, then seemed to settle, and again the joists cracked and groaned. Then a stunned silence… and again the ghosts of the old house were around me, outrage in their wrath, panic in their fear, crying, crying to me to hear them… to understand them.

I could not understand them… I walked to the window, and crouched there, peering out. It was a dark night, sultry and oppressive. There was a flashing of lightning from far beneath the horizon and faint distant rumbling of thunder. I went quickly about the room looking for some weapon, but could find none. My intention was to get into my room, clothe myself and then hunt down Dahut and de Keradel. Precisely what I was going to do after I found them I did not know – except to end their sorceries. All confusion as to whether these were sorceries or super-illusions was gone. They were evil realities belonging to a dark wisdom evilly used… none should be allowed to live to wield this evil power… and they were swiftly mounting to some dreadful climax which must be thwarted at any cost…

The ghosts of the old house were silent – I had gotten their message at last. They were silent, but they had lost none of their fear, and they were watching me. I went to the door. Some obscure impulse made me pick up the white robe and throw it around me. I stepped out into the hall. It was filled with shadows but I gave them no heed. Why should I, who myself had been a shadow. As I passed, they clustered and crept behind me. And now I knew that the shadows too were afraid, like the old house… were cringing before some imminent and dreadful doom… like the ghosts were beseeching me to avert it…

From below came the murmur of voices, then that of de Keradel raised in anger, and following it, the laughter of Dahut – taunting, mocking, brittle with menace. I slipped to the head of the stairs. The lower hall was but dimly lighted. The voices came from the big living room, and that the two were quarreling was evident, but their words were inaudible. I crept down the stairs and flattened myself beside the edge of one of the heavy curtains which covered the doorway.

I heard de Keradel say, voice now level and controlled: “I tell you that it is finished. There remains only the last sacrifice… which I perform tonight. I do not need you for that, my daughter. Nor after it is done shall I ever need you more. And there is nothing you can do to stop it. The end toward which I have been working all my life has been reached. He… has told me. Now… He… will become wholly manifest and ascend His throne. And I—” all De Keradel’s egotism was in his voice, colossal, blasphemous – “and I shall sit beside Him. He… has promised me. The dark power which men in all ages and in all lands have sought – the power which Atlantis almost attained and that Ys drew but thinly from the Cairn – the power for which the medieval world so feebly groped – that power will be mine. In all its fullness. In all its unconquerable might. There was a rite none knew, and… He… has taught me it. No, I need you no longer, Dahut. Yet I am loath to lose you. And… He… is inclined to you. But you would have a price to pay.”

There was a little silence, and then Dahut’s voice, very still:

“And that price, my father?”

“The blood of your lover.”

He waited for her answer – as did I, but she made none, and he said:

“I do not need it. I have pressed the paupers and have enough and to spare. But his would enrich it, and it would be acceptable to… Him. He… has told me so. It would strengthen His draught. And… He… has asked for it.”

She asked, slowly: “And if I refuse?”

“It will not save him, my daughter.”

Again he waited for her to speak, then said with simulated and malicious wonder: “What – a Dahut of Ys to hesitate between her father and her lover! This man has a debt to pay, my daughter. An ancient one since it was for one who bore his name an ancestress of yours betrayed another father. Or was it you, Dahut? It is my duty to cancel that ancient wrong… lest, perchance, it should recur.”

She asked, quietly: “And if I refuse – what of me?” He laughed: “How can I tell? Now, I am swayed by my fatherly impulses. But when I sit beside… Him… What you may mean to me I cannot know. Perhaps – nothing.”

She asked: “What shape will He assume?”

“Any or all. There is no shape he cannot take. Be assured that it will not be the inchoate blackness which the dull minds of those who evoked… Him… by the rites of the Cairn forced upon… Him. No, no – He might even take the shape of your lover, Dahut. Why not? He… is inclined to you, my daughter.”

Now at this my skin grew cold, and the hatred I felt for him was like a band of hot iron around my temples, and I gathered myself to leap through the curtains and lock my hands around his throat. But the shadows held me back and whispered, and the ghosts of the old house whispered with them – “Not yet! Not yet!”

He said: “Be wise, my daughter. Always this man has betrayed you. What are you with your shadows? What was Helene with her dolls? Children. Children playing with toys. With shadows and dolls! Pass from childhood, my daughter – give me the blood of your lover.”

She answered, musingly: “A child! I had forgotten that I had ever been a child.”

He made no reply to that. She seemed to wait for one; then said, tranquilly:

“So you ask for the blood of my lover? Well – you shall not have it.”

There was the crash of an overthrown chair. I drew the curtain a hair’s breadth aside and peered in. De Keradel stood at the head of the table glaring at Dahut. But it was not the face nor the body of the de Keradel I had known. His eyes were no longer pale blue… they were black, and his silvery hair seemed black and his body had grown… and long arms reached toward and long taloned fingers clutched at Dahut.

She threw something down upon the table between her and him. I could not see what it was, but it sped like a racing, small and shining wave straight at him. And he threw himself back from it, and stood trembling, eyes again blue but suffused with blood, and body shrunken.

“Beware, my father! Not yet do you sit on the throne with… Him. And I am still of the sea, my father. So beware!”

There was a shuffle of feet behind me. The blank-eyed butler was at my side. He started to kneel – and then the vagueness went from his eyes. He sprang at me, mouth opening to cry alarm. Before he could make a sound, my hands were around his throat, thumbs crushing into his larynx, my knee in his groin. With a strength I had never before known, I lifted him by his neck and held him up from the floor. His legs wrapped round me and I thrust my head under his chin and drew it sharply up. There was a faint snap and his body went limp. I carried it back along the hall and set it noiselessly on the floor. The whole brief struggle had been soundless. His eyes, blank enough now, stared up at me. I searched him. In his belt was a sheath, and in that a long, curved, razor-sharp knife.

Now I had a weapon. I rolled the body under a deep settee, stole back to the living room and peeped through the curtains. It was empty, Dahut and de Keradel gone.

I stepped back for a moment into the cover of the curtains. I knew now what it was the ghosts of the old house had feared. Knew the meaning of the trembling and the rhythmic thudding. The cavern of the sacrifices had been destroyed. It had served its purpose. How had de Keradel put it?… that he had “pressed the paupers” and had enough and more than enough blood for the last sacrifice. Incongruously, a line came into my mind – “He is trampling out the wine press where the grapes of wrath are stored…” Not so incongruous… I thought: De Keradel has trampled out another wine press for the Gatherer’s drink. My blood was to have been mixed with it, but Dahut had refused to let it be!

I felt no gratitude toward her for that. She was a spider who thought her fly securely in her web, and was resisting another spider’s attempt to take it from her. That was all. But the fly was no longer in her web nor did it owe her for its release. If I felt increase of hatred for de Keradel, I felt no decrease of it for Dahut.

Nevertheless, what I had heard had changed the vague pattern of my vengeance. The design clarified. The shadows were wrong. Dahut must not die before her father. I had a better plan… it came to me from the Lord of Carnac who Dahut thought had died in her arms… and he counseled me as he had counseled himself, long and long and long ago in ancient Ys.

I walked up the stairs. The door to my room was open. I switched on the lights, boldly.

Dahut was standing there, between me and the bed.

She smiled – but her eyes did not. She walked toward me. I thrust the point of the long knife toward her. She stopped and laughed – but her eyes did not laugh. She said:

“You are so elusive, my beloved. You have such a gift for disappearance.”

“You have told me that before, Dahut. And—” I touched my cheek “ – have, even emphasized it.”

Her eyes misted, welled, and tears were on her cheeks: “You have much to forgive – but so have I, Alan.”

Well, that was true enough.

… Beware… beware Dahut…

“Where did you get your knife, Alan?”

A practical question that steadied me; I answered it as practically: “From one of your men whom I killed.”

“‘And would kill me with it – if I came close?”

“Why not, Dahut? You sent me as a shadow into the shadowy land and I have learned its lesson.”

“What was that lesson, Alan?”

“To be merciless.”

“But I am not merciless, Alan – else you would not be here.”

“Now I know you lie, Dahut. It was not you who released me from that bondage.”

She said: “I did not mean that… nor do I lie… and I am tempted to try you, Alan…” She came toward me, slowly. I held the point of the knife in readiness against her coming. She said:

“Kill me if you want to. I have not much love for life. You are all that I love. If you will not love me – kill me.”

She was close; so close that the point of the knife touched her breast; she said: “Thrust – and end it.”

My hand dropped.

“I cannot kill you, Dahut!”

Her eyes softened, her face grew tender – but triumph lurked under the tenderness. She rested her hands on my shoulders; then kissed the whip-welts one by one, saying: “By this kiss I forgive… and by this I forgive… and by this I forgive…”

She held her lips up to me: “Now kiss me, Alan – and with that kiss say that you forgive me.”

I kissed her, but I did not say that I forgave, nor did I.

I let fall the knife. She trembled in my arms and clung to me and whispered: “Say it… say it…”

I pushed her away from me and laughed: “Why are you so eager for forgiveness, Dahut? What do you fear that makes my forgiveness so desirable before your father kills me?”

She asked: “How did you know he means to kill you?”

“I heard him say so when he was making that pleasant little demand for my blood not long ago. Bargaining with you for me. Promising you a substitute who would be far more satisfactory…” Again I laughed… “Is my forgiveness a necessary part of that incarnation?”

She said, breathlessly: “If you heard that, you must also know that I would not give you to him.”

I lied: “I do not. Just then your servant forced me to kill him. When I was free to resume my eavesdropping – returned, in fact, to cut your father’s throat before he could cut mine – you and he had gone. I supposed the bargain closed. Father and daughter reunited and of one purpose – setting forth to prepare the funeral meats – myself, Dahut – to furnish forth the marriage tables. Thrift, thrift, Dahut!”

She winced under my mockery; whitened. She said, strangled: “I made no bargain. I would not let him have you.”

“Why not?”

She said: “Because I love you.”

“But why this insistence upon my forgiveness?”

“Because I love you. Because I want to wipe away the past. Begin afresh, beloved…”

For a moment I had the queer feeling of double memory; that I had acted this scene before in minutest detail, had heard the same lines; and realized I had in that dream of ancient Ys, if dream it had been. And now, as then, she whispered piteously, despairingly: “You will not believe me beloved, what can I do to make you believe!”

I answered: “Choose between your father – and me.”

She said: “But I have chosen, beloved. I have told you…” again she whispered… “How can I make you believe!”

I answered: “End his – sorceries.”

She said, contemptuously: “I do not fear him. And I no longer fear that which he evokes.”

I said: “But I do. End his – sorceries.”

She caught the pause this time, and its significance. Her eyes dilated, and for seconds she was silent, studying me. She said, slowly:

“There is but one way to end them.”

I made no comment on that.

She came to me and drew my head down to her and looked deep into my eyes:

“If I do this… you will forgive me? You will love me? Never leave me… as once before you did… long and long and long ago, in Ys… when once before I chose between my father and you?…”

“I will forgive you, Dahut. I will never leave you as long as you have life.”

That was true enough, but I closed every window of my mind so she might not glimpse the determination that was its source. And again, as it had been in Ys, I took her in my arms… and the lure of her lips and her body shook me and I felt my resolution weaken… but the life within me that had come from Helen was implacable, inexorable… hating Dahut as only one woman who loves a man can hate another who loves him…

She loosed my arms from round her: “Dress, and wait for me here.” She passed through the door.

I dressed, but I kept the long knife close.

The tapestry that concealed the secret panel wavered, and she was in the room. She wore an archaic robe of green; her sandals were green; her girdle was not golden but of clear green stones that held the shifting gleam of waves, and a wreath of green sea flowers bound her hair. Upon her wrist was the silver bracelet set with the black stone that bore in crimson the trident symbol which was the summoning name of the sea-god. She looked like a sea-god’s daughter…

I felt my resolution weakening again until she came close and I could see clearly her face. It was unsmiling, and the mouth was cruel, and the hell-sparks were beginning their dance in her eyes.

She lifted her arms and touched my eyes with her fingers, closing them. The touch of her fingers was like that of cold sea-spray.

“Come!” she said.

The ghosts of the old house were whispering: “Go with her… but beware!…”

The shadows were whispering: “Go with her… but beware!”

“Beware Dahut…” My hand tightened on the knife hilt as I followed her.

We went out of the old house. It was strange how plainly I could see. The sky was heavy with clouds, the air murky. I knew the night must be dark indeed, yet every stone and bush and tree stood out plain, as though by some light of its own. Dahut led me by a dozen paces, nor could I lessen that distance, try as I might. She moved like a wave, and around her played a faint nimbus of palest golden green like the phosphorescence that sometimes clothes a wave moving through darkness.

The shadows flittered and swayed around us, interlacing, flowing in and out of each other, like shadows cast by some great tree fretted by a fitful wind. The shadows followed us, and flanked us, and swayed before us – but they shrank from Dahut, and never was there one between her and me.

There was a glow beyond the oaks where were the standing stones. It was not the wan gleam of the corposants. It was a steady, ruddy glow as from still fires. I heard no chanting.

She did not go toward the oaks. She took a way that led upward to the ridge of rocks hiding the standing stones from the water. Soon the path topped the ridge, and the open sea lay before me. It was a sullen sea and dark, with long, slow swells breaking sluggishly on the ledges.

The path climbed steeply over a cliff which lifted above the waves a full two hundred feet. And suddenly Dahut was on its crest, poised on its verge, arms outstretched to the sea. From her lips came a call, low and inhumanly sweet; in it the plaintiveness of the gull’s cry, the singing of waves over unfathomable, unspoiled deeps, the chant of deep-sea winds. It was a voice of the sea transmuted goldenly in a woman’s throat, but losing no inhuman quality and taking on no human one.

It seemed to me that the surges stopped as though listening while that cry went forth.

Again she sent the call… and once again. And after that she cupped her hands to mouth and cried a word… a name.

From far out at sea there came a roaring answer. A long white line of foam sped from the darkness, a great comber whose top was the tossing manes of hundreds of white horses. It raced shouting against the ridge and broke.

A column of spume swept up and touched her outstretched hands. It seemed to me that something passed to it from her hands, and that as the spume fell something within it glittered silver with glint of scarlet.

I climbed up to her. There was no hint of tenderness now in her eyes or face. Only triumph… and her eyes were violet flames. She lifted a fold of her dress, veiling eyes and face from me.

The bracelet of Ys was gone from her arm!

She beckoned, and I followed her. We skirted the ridge, and ever the ruddy glow grew brighter. I saw that the surges were no longer sullen, but that great waves marched with us, clamoring, white banners of foam streaming, white manes of the seahorses tossing.

The path ran now below the crest of the ridge. Ahead, on the landward side, was another upthrust of rock, and here again she waited for me. She stood with face averted, still covered by the fold. She pointed to the rock; she said:

“Climb – and see.” Once more the spray-cold fingers touched my eyes… “And hear” … they touched my ears.

She was gone.

I climbed the rock. I scrambled over its top.

Strong hands caught my arms, pinioning them behind me, forcing me to my knees. I twisted and looked into the face of McCann. He was bending, his face close to mine, peering as though he found it difficult to see me clearly.

I cried: “McCann!”

He swore, incredulously, released me. Someone else was on the rock – a lean and dark man with thin, ascetic face and snow-white hair. He, too, was leaning and peering at me as though he found it difficult to see me. That was odd, for I could see them both clearly. I knew him… he had been in the old room where my shadow search for Helen had ended… Ricori.

McCann was stammering: “Caranac – my God, boss, Caranac!”

I whispered, steeling myself against any blow:

“Helen?”

“She lives.” It was Ricori who answered.

My whole body went weak with reaction so that I would have fallen had he not caught me. A new fear took me: “But will she live?”

He said: “She has had a – strange experience. When we left her she was fully conscious. Steadily growing stronger. Her brother is with her. You are all she needs. We are here to take you back to her.”

I said: “No. Not until—”

Gale blast that closed my mouth as though a hand had struck it. Crash of wave against the ridge, shaking it. I felt the spray of it on my face, and it was like the whip of Dahut and it was like the cold fingers of her on my eyes…

And suddenly McCann and Ricori seemed unreal and shadowy. And suddenly I seemed to see the shining body of Dahut swaying onward upon the path between the sea and the ridge… and I heard a voice in my heart – the Lord of Carnac’s voice and mine: How can I kill her, evil as I know her to be?…

Ricori’s voice… how long had he been talking?… “And so when last night you did not appear, I used, as you had suggested – my judgment. After we were assured of her safety, we set out. We persuaded the guardians of the gates to let us enter. They will guard no more gates. We saw the lights, and we thought that where they were you would most likely be. We distributed our men, and McCann and I came by chance upon this excellent place for observation. We saw neither you nor the Demoiselle Dahut…”

… Dahut!… another wave broke upon the rock, and shook it, then surged back shouting shouting – Dahut! Another gust roared over the rock roaring – Dahut! Ricori was saying: “They are down there, awaiting our signal—”

I interrupted, attention abruptly centered: “Signal for what?”

He said: “To stop what is going on down there.”

He pointed toward the inward edge of the rock, and I saw that its edge was outlined black against depths of the ruddy light. I walked to the edge and looked down.

The Cairn was plain before me. I thought: How strangely close it seems… how stark the monoliths stand out!

It was as though the Cairn were but a few yards away… de Keradel so close that I could reach out my hand and touch him. I knew that there were many of the standing stones between me and the Cairn, and that it must be a full thousand feet away. Yet not only could I see the Cairn as though I were beside it, I could see within it as well.

Strange, too, although the wind was roaring overhead and whipping us on the rock, that the fires before the Cairn burned steadily; flickering only when those who fed them sprinkled them from the black ewers they carried… and that although the wind came from the sea, the smoke of the fires streamed straight against it.

And strange how silent it was down there among the monoliths when steadily grew the shouting and the clamor of the sea… nor did the flashing of the lightning marching ever higher dim the fires, nor did the rumbling thunder invade the silence of the plain more than did the clamor of the combers…

Those who fed the fires were not now in white but in red. And de Keradel was clothed in a robe of red instead of the white robe of the sacrifices. He wore the black belt and the cincture but the shifting symbols on them glittered not silver but scarlet…

There were ten of the fires, in a semicircle between the three altars and the monoliths which faced the threshold of the Cairn. Each was a little more than a man’s height, and they burned with a cone-shaped, still flame. From the peak of each arose a column of smoke. They were as thick as the arm of a man, these columns, and having risen twice the height of the fires, they curved, and then streamed straight toward the threshold of the Cairn. They were like ten black arteries of which the ten fires were the hearts, and they were threaded with crimson filaments, like little fiery veins.

The blackened hollowed stone was hidden by a greater fire which burned not only red but black. Nor was this, like the others, a still flame. It pulsed with slow and rhythmic beat – as though in truth it were a heart. Between it and the great slab of granite upon which he had beaten in the breasts of the sacrifices stood de Keradel.

There was something lying upon the stone of sacrifice, covering it. At first I thought it a man, a giant, lying there. Then I saw that it was an immense vessel, strangely shaped, and hollow.

A vat.

I could look into this vat. It was half-filled with a clotted, reddish-black fluid over the surface of which ran tiny flames. Not pale and dead like the corposants, but crimson and filled with evil life. It was to this vat that the blank-eyed men who fed the fires came to have their ewers refilled. And it was from it that de Keradel took that which he sprinkled upon the pulsing fire and his hands and his arms were red with it.

On the threshold of the Cairn was another vessel, a huge bowl like a shallow baptismal font. It was filled, and over its surface ran the crimson flames.

The smoke from the lesser fires, the ten crimson threaded arteries, met in the thicker column that arose from the throbbing fire, mingled with it, and streamed as one into the Cairn.

The silence of the plain was broken by a whispering, a faint wailing, and up from the bases of the monoliths shadows began to rise. They lifted, as I had first seen them, to their knees… and then they were wrenched from the earth, and whimpering, wailing, were sucked into the Cairn… beating about it… fighting to escape.

Within the Cairn was the Gatherer… the Blackness.

From the first I had known It was there. It was no longer shapeless, nebulous – part of an infinitely greater Something that dwelt in space and beyond space. The Gatherer was breaking loose… taking form. The small crimson flames were running through It… like corpuscles of evil blood. It was condensing, steadily becoming material.

That which filled the font on the threshold of the Cairn was empty.

De Keradel filled it from the vat… and again… and again.

The Gatherer drank from the font and fed upon the shadows, and upon the smoke of the fires which were fed by blood. And steadily It assumed shape.

I stepped back, covering my eyes.

Ricori said: “What do you see? All I see are men in red, far away, who feed fires – and another who stands before the house of stones… what do you see, Caranac?”

I whispered: “I see Hell opening.”

I forced myself to look again at that which was being spawned from the Cairn’s stone womb… and stood, unable now to look away… I heard a voice, my own voice, screaming—

“Dahut… Dahut… before it is too late!”

As though in answer, there was a lull in the clamor of the sea. Upon the ridge at our left appeared a point of brilliant green light… whether far away or near I could not tell with that strange witch-sight Dahut had given me. It became an oval of brilliant emerald…

It became – Dahut!

Dahut… clothed with pale green sea-fires, her eyes like violet sea-pools and wide so wide that they were ringed with white; her slim black brows a bar above them; her face white as foam and cruel and mocking; her hair like spin-drift of silver. Far away or not, she seemed as close to me as did de Keradel. It was as if she stood just above the Cairn… could reach out, as I, and touch de Keradel. To me that night, as in the shadowy land, there was no such thing as distance.

I caught Ricori’s wrist, pointed and whispered: “Dahut!”

He said: “I saw far away and dimly a shining figure. I thought it a woman. With your hand upon me, I seem to see her more plainly. What do you see, Caranac?”

I said: “I see Dahut. She is laughing. Her eyes are the eyes of no woman… nor is her face. She is laughing, I say… can’t you hear her, Ricori? She calls to de Keradel… how sweet her voice and how merciless… like the sea! She calls – ‘My father, I am here!’ He sees her… the Thing in the Cairn is aware of her… de Keradel cries to her – ‘Too late, my daughter!’ He is mocking, contemptuous… but the Thing in the Cairn is not. It strains… toward completion. Dahut calls again, ‘Is my bridegroom born? Is the labor done? Your midwifery successful? My bedfellow delivered?’ Can’t you hear, Ricori? It is as though she stood beside me…”

He said: “I hear nothing.”

I said: “I do not like this jesting, Ricori. It is – dreadful. The Thing in the Cairn does not like it… although de Keradel laughs… It reaches out from the Cairn… to the vat on the stone of sacrifice… It drinks… It grows… God!… Dahut… Dahut!”

The shining figure raised hand as though she heard… and bent toward me… and I felt the touch of her fingers on eyes and ears… her lips on mine…

She faced the sea and threw wide her arms. She cried the Name, softly – and the sea winds stilled… again, like one who summons as of right – and the shouting of the combers waned… a third time, jubilantly.

Shouting of the combers, thunder of the surges, roaring of the winds, all the clamor of sea and air, arose in a mighty diapason. It melted into chaotic uproar, elemental bellowing. And suddenly all the sea was covered with the tossing manes of the white seahorses… armies of the white horses of the sea… the white horses of Poseidon… line upon endless line racing out of the darkness of ocean and charging against the shore.

Beyond the lower line of the ridge between that high rock on which stood Dahut and this high rock on which stood I, arose a mountain of water… lifting, lifting swiftly, yet deliberately. Changing shape as it lifted ever higher… gathering power as it lifted. Up it lifted and up; a hundred feet, two hundred feet above the edge. It paused, and its top flattened. Its top became a gigantic hammer…

And beyond it I seemed to see a vast and misty shape towering to the clouds, its head wreathed with the clouds and crowned with the lightnings…

The hammer swung down… down upon the Thing in the Cairn… down upon de Keradel and the red-clad, blank-eyed men… down upon the monoliths.

The Cairn and the monoliths were covered with waters, boiling, spouting, smashing at the standing stones. Uprooting, overturning them.

For an instant I saw the evil fires glare through the waters. Then they were gone.

For an instant I heard an unearthly shrilling from the stone womb of the Cairn, and saw a Blackness veined with crimson flames writhing under the hammer stroke of the waters. Struggling in the myriad arms of the waters. Then it, too, was gone.

The waters rushed back. They licked up at us as they passed and a wave swirled round us knee high. It dropped… chuckling.

Again the mountain arose, hammer topped. Again it swept over the ridge and smote the Cairn and the standing stones. And this time the waters rushed on so that the oaks fell before them… and once more they retreated… and once more they lifted and struck and swept on… and now I knew that the old house with all its ghosts was gone…

Through all, the sea-fire shape of Dahut had remained unmoved, untouched. I had heard her merciless laughter above the bellowing of the sea and the crashing of the hammer strokes.

Back rushed the last waters. Dahut held her arms out to me, calling:

“Alain… come to me, Alain!”

Clearly could I see the path between her and me. It was as though she were close… close. But I knew she was not and that it was the witch-sight she had given me that made it seem so. I said:

“Good luck, McCann. Good luck, Ricori—”

“Alan… come to me, Alan…”

My hand dropped on the hilt of the long knife. I shouted: “Coming – Dahut!”

McCann gripped me. Ricori struck down at his hands. He said: “Let him go.”

“… Alan… come to me…”

The waters were rushing back, over the ridge. A swirl swept out. It coiled around Dahut to the waist. It lifted her… high and high…

And instantly from over her and from every side of her a cloud of shadows swept upon her… striking at her with shadowy hands… thrusting at her, hurling themselves at her, pushing her back and down… into the sea.

I saw incredulity flood her face, then outraged revolt, then terror – and then despair.

The wave crashed back into the sea, and with it went Dahut, the shadows pouring after her…

I heard myself crying: Dahut… Dahut!

I rushed to the verge of the rock. There was a prolonged flaring of the lightning. By it I saw Dahut… face upturned, hair floating around her like a silver net, her eyes wide and horror-filled and… dying.

The shadows were all around her and over her… pushing her down… down…

The witch-sight was fading from my eyes. The witch-hearing stilling in my ears. Before that sight went, I saw de Keradel lying on the threshold of the Cairn, crushed beneath one of its great stones. The stone had pulped the breast and heart of de Keradel as he had pulped the breasts and hearts of the sacrifices. There were only his head and his arms… his face upturned, dead eyes wide and filled with hate, dead hands held high in imprecation and in – appeal…

The Cairn was flat, and of the standing stones not one was erect…

Witch-sight and witch-hearing were gone. The land was dark save for the glare of the lightning. The sea was dark save for the foaming tops of the waves. Their shouting was the voice of waves – and nothing more. The roaring of the wind was the voice of the wind – and nothing more.

Dahut was dead…

I asked Ricori: “What did you see?”

“Three waves. They destroyed all that was below. They killed my men!”

“I saw much more than that, Ricori. Dahut is dead. It is ended, Ricori. Dahut is dead and her witchcraft ended. We must wait here till morning. Then we can go back… back to Helen…”

Dahut was dead…

She was dead as of old, long and long and long ago in Ys… by her shadows and by her wickednesses… by the sea… and by me.

Would I have killed her with the long knife had I reached her before the wave?

The cycle had been reborn and it had ended as it had of old, long and long and long ago… in Ys.

The sea had cleansed this place of her sorceries as it had cleansed Ys of them in that long and long and long ago.

Had there been a Helen in Carnac when I set forth from Carnac to Ys to slay Dahut?

Had she cleansed me of the memories of Dahut when I returned to her?

Could – Helen?

— THE END —

Serialized in 6 parts
Argosy Weekly, 8 Sep ~ 1934

First book edition:
Crime Club, Doubleday Doran, New York, 1934

Reprinted in
A. Merritt’s Fantasy
Magazine, Dec 1949

THE SHORT FICTION

CONTENTS:

- … Through the Dragon Glass
- … The People of the Pit
- … Three Lines of Old French
- … The Pool of the Stone God
- … The Women of the Wood
- … The Last Poet and the Robots
- … The Drone

THROUGH  THE
DRAGON  GLASS

Herndon helped loot the Forbidden City when the Allies turned the suppression of the Boxers into the most gorgeous burglar-party since the days of Tamerlane. Six of his sailormen followed faithfully his buccaneering fancy. A sympathetic Russian highness whom he had entertained in New York saw to it that he got to the coast and his yacht. That is why Herndon was able to sail through the Narrows with as much of the Son of Heaven’s treasures as the most accomplished laborer in Peking’s mission vineyards.

Some of the loot he gave to charming ladies who had dwelt or were still dwelling on the sunny side of his heart. Most of it he used to fit up those two astonishing Chinese rooms in his Fifth Avenue house. And a little of it, following a vague religious impulse, he presented to the Metropolitan Museum. This, somehow, seemed to put the stamp of legitimacy on his part of the pillage – like offerings to the gods and building hospitals and peace palaces and such things.

But the Dragon Glass, because he had never seen anything quite so wonderful, he set up in his bedroom Where he could look at it the first thing in the morning, and he placed shaded lights about it so that he could wake up in the night and look at it! Wonderful? It is more than wonderful, the Dragon Glass! Whoever made it lived when the gods walked about the earth creating something new every day. Only a man who lived in that sort of atmosphere could have wrought it. There was never anything like it.

I was in Hawaii when the cables told of Herndon’s first disappearance. There wasn’t much to tell. His man had gone to his room to awaken him one morning – and Herndon wasn’t there. All his clothes were, though, Everything was just as if Herndon ought to be somewhere in the house – only he wasn’t.

A man worth ten millions can’t step out into thin air and vanish without leaving behind him the probability of some commotion, naturally. The newspapers attend to the commotion, but the columns of type boiled down to essentials contained just two facts – that Herndon had come home the night before, and in the morning he was undiscoverable.

I was on the high seas, homeward bound to help the search, when the wireless told the story of his reappearance. They had found him on the floor of his bedroom, shreds of a silken robe on him, and his body mauled as though by a tiger. But there was no more explanation of his return than there had been of his disappearance.

The night before he hadn’t been there – and in the morning there he was. Herndon, when he was able to talk, utterly refused to confide even in his doctors. I went straight through to New York, and waited until the men of medicine decided that it was better to let him see me than have him worry any longer about not seeing me.

Herndon got up from a big invalid chair when I entered. His eyes were clear and bright, and there was no weakness in the way he greeted me, nor in the grip of his hand. A nurse slipped from the room.

“What was it, Jim?” I cried. “What on earth happened to you?”

“Not so sure it was on earth,” he said. He pointed to what looked like a tall easel hooded with a heavy piece of silk covered with embroidered Chinese characters. He hesitated for a moment and then walked over to a closet. He drew out two heavy bore guns, the very ones, I remembered, that he had used in his last elephant hunt.

“You won’t think me crazy if I ask you to keep one of these handy while I talk, will you, Ward?” he asked rather apologetically. “This looks pretty real, doesn’t it?”

He opened his dressing gown and showed me his chest swathed in bandages. He gripped my shoulder as I took without question one of the guns. He walked to the easel and drew off the hood.

“There it is,” said Herndon.

And then, for the first time, I saw the Dragon Glass!

There never has been anything like that thing! Never! At first all you saw was a cool, green, glimmering translucence, like the sea when you are swimming under water on a still summer day and look up through it. Around its edges ran flickers of scarlet and gold, flashes of emerald, shimmers of silver and ivory. At its base a disk of topaz rimmed with red fire shot up dusky little vaporous yellow flames.

Afterward you were aware that the green translucence was an oval slice of polished stone. The flashes and flickers became dragons. There were twelve of them. Their eyes were emeralds, their fangs were ivory, their claws were gold. There were scaled dragons, and each scale was so inlaid that the base, green as the primeval jungle, shaded off into vivid scarlet, and the scarlet into tip’s of gold. Their wings were of silver and vermilion, and were folded close to their bodies.

But they were alive, those dragons. There was never so much life in metal and wood since Al-Akram, the Sculptor of ancient Ad, carved the first crocodile, and the jealous Almighty breathed life into it for a punishment!

And last you saw that the topaz disk that sent up the little yellow flames was the top of a metal sphere around which coiled a thirteenth dragon, thin and red, and biting its scorpion-tipped tail.

It took your breath away, the first glimpse of the Dragon Glass. Yes, and the second and third glimpse, too – and every other time you looked at it.

“Where did you get it?” I asked, a little shakily.

Herndon said evenly: “It was in a small hidden crypt in the Imperial Palace. We broke into the crypt quite by” – he hesitated – “well, call it accident. As soon as I saw it I knew I must have it. What do you think of it?”

“Think!” I cried. “Think! Why, it’s the most marvelous thing that the hands of man ever made! What is that stone? Jade?”

“I’m not sure,” said Herndon. “But come here. Stand just in front of me.”

He switched out the lights in the room. He turned another switch, and on the glass oposite me three shaded electrics threw their rays into its mirror-like oval.

“Watch!” said Herndon. “Tell me what you see!”

I looked into the glass. At first I could see nothing but the rays shining farther, farther – back into infinite distances, it seemed. And then.

“Good God!” I cried, stiffening with horror. “Jim, what hellish thing is this?”

“Steady, old man,” came Herndon’s voice. There was relief and a curious sort of joy in it. “Steady; tell me what you see.”

I said: “I seem to see through infinite distances – and yet what I see is as close to me as though it were just on the other side of the glass. I see a cleft that cuts through two masses of darker green. I see a claw, a gigantic, hideous claw that stretches out through the cleft. The claw has seven talons that open and close – open and close. Good God, such a claw, Jim! It is like the claws that reach out from the holes in the lama’s hell to grip the blind souls as they shudder by!”

“Look, look farther, up through the cleft, above the claw. It widens. What do you see?”

I said: “I see a peak rising enormously high and cutting the sky like a pyramid. There are flashes of flame that dart from behind and outline it. I see a great globe of light like a moon that moves slowly out of the flashes; there is another moving across the breast of the peak; there is a third that swims into the flame at the farthest edge—”

“The seven moons of Rak,” whispered Herndon, as though to himself. “The seven moons that bathe in the rose flames of Rak which are the fires of life and that circle Lalil like a diadem. He upon whom the seven moons of Rak have shone is bound to Lalil for this life, and for ten thousand lives.”

He reached over and turned the switch again. The lights of the room sprang up.

“Jim,” I said, “it can’t be real! What is it? Some devilish illusion in the glass?”

He unfastened the bandages about his chest.

“The claw you saw had seven talons,” he answered quietly. “Well, look at this.”

Across the white flesh of his breast, from left shoulder to the lower ribs on the right, ran seven healing furrows. They looked as though they had been made by a gigantic steel comb that had been drawn across him. They gave one the thought they had been ploughed.

“The claw made these,” he said as quietly as before.

“Ward,” he went on, before I could speak, “I wanted you to see – what you’ve seen. I didn’t know whether you would see it. I don’t know whether you’ll believe me even now. I don’t suppose I would if I were in your place – still—”

He walked over and threw the hood upon the Dragon Glass.

“I’m going to tell you,” he said. “I’d like to go through it – uninterrupted. That’s why I cover it.

“I don’t suppose,” he began slowly – “I don’t suppose, Ward, that you’ve ever heard of Rak the WonderWorker, who lived somewhere back at the beginning of things, nor how the Greatest Wonder-Worker banished him somewhere outside the world?”

“No,” I said shortly, still shaken by the sight.

“It’s a big part of what I’ve got to tell you,” he went on. “Of course you’ll think it rot, but – I came across the legend in Tibet first. Then I ran across it again – with the names changed, of course – when I was getting away from China.

“I take it that the gods were still fussing around close to man when Rak was born. The story of his parentage is somewhat scandalous. When he grew older Rak wasn’t satisfied with just seeing wonderful things being done. He wanted to do them himself, and he – well, he studied the method. After a while the Greatest Wonder-Worker ran across some of the things Rak had made, and he found them admirable – a little too admirable. He didn’t like to destroy the lesser wonderworker because, so the gossip ran, he felt a sort of responsibility. So he gave Rak a place somewhere – outside the world – and he gave him power over every one out of so many millions of births to lead or lure or sweep that soul into his domain so that he might build up a people – and over his people Rak was given the high, the low, and the middle justice.

“And outside the world Rak went. He fenced his domain about with clouds. He raised a great mountain, and on its flank he built a city for the men and women who were to be his. He circled the city with wonderful gardens, and he placed in the gardens many things, some good and some very – terrible. He set around the mountain’s brow seven moons for a diadem, and he fanned behind the mountain a fire which is the fire of life, and through which the moons pass eternally to be born again.” Herndon’s voice sank to a whisper.

“Through which the moons pass,” he said. “And with them the souls of the people of Rak. They pass through the fires and are born again – and again – for ten thousand lives. I have seen the moons of Rak and the souls that march with them into the fires. There is no sun in the land – only the newborn moons that shine green on the city and on the gardens.”

“Jim,” I cried impatiently. “What in the world are you talking about? Wake up, man! What’s all that nonsense got to do with this?”

I pointed to the hooded Dragon Glass.

“That,” he said. “Why, through that lies the road to the gardens of Rak!”

The heavy gun dropped from my hand as I stared at him, and from him to the glass and back again. He smiled and pointed to his bandaged breast.

He said: “I went straight through to Peking with the Allies. I had an idea what was coming, and I wanted to be in at the death. I was among the first to enter the Forbidden City. I was as mad for loot as any of them. It was a maddening sight, Ward. Soldiers with their arms full of precious stuff even Morgan couldn’t buy; soldiers with wonderful necklaces around their hairy throats and their pockets stuffed with jewels; soldiers with their shirts bulging treasures the Sons of Heaven had been hoarding for centuries! We were Goths sacking imperial Rome. Alexander’s hosts pillaging that ancient gemmed courtesan of cities, royal Tyre! Thieves in the great ancient scale, a scale so great that it raised even thievery up to something heroic.

“We reached the throne-room. There was a little passage leading off to the left, and my men and I took it. We came into a small octagonal room. There was nothing in it except a very extraordinary squatting figure of jade. It squatted on the floor, its back turned toward us. One of my men stooped to pick it up. He slipped. The figure flew from his hand and smashed into the wall. A slab swung outward. By a – well, call it a fluke, we had struck the secret of the little octagonal room!

“I shoved a light through the aperture. It showed a crypt shaped like a cylinder. The circle of the floor was about ten feet in diameter. The walls were covered with paintings, Chinese characters, queer-looking animals, and things I can’t well describe. Around the room, about seven feet up, ran a picture. It showed a sort of island floating off into space. The clouds lapped its edges like frozen seas full of rainbows. There was a big pyramid of a mountain rising out of the side of it. Around its peak were seven moons, and over the peak – a face!

“I couldn’t place that face and I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It wasn’t Chinese, and it wasn’t of any other race I’d ever seen. It was as old as the world and as young as tomorrow. It was benevolent and malicious, cruel and kindly, merciful and merciless, saturnine as Satan and as joyous as Apollo. The eyes were as yellow as buttercups, or as the sun-stone on the crest of the Feathered Serpent they worship down in the Hidden Temple of Tuloon. And they were as wise as Fate.

“‘There’s something else here, sir,’ said Martin – you remember Martin, my first officer. He pointed to a shrouded thing on the side. I entered, and took from the thing a covering that fitted over it like a hood. It was the Dragon Glass!

“The moment I saw it I knew I had to have it – and I knew I would have it. I felt that I did not want to get the thing away any more than the thing itself wanted to get away. From the first I thought of the Dragon Glass as something alive. Just as much alive as you and I are. Well, I did get it away. I got it down to the yacht, and then the first odd thing happened.

“You remember Wu-Sing, my boat steward? You know the English Wu-Sing talks. Atrocious! I had the Dragon Glass in my stateroom. I’d forgotten to lock the door. I heard a whistle of sharply indrawn breath. I turned, and there was Wu-Sing. Now, you know that Wu-Sing isn’t what you’d call intelligent-looking. Yet as he stood there something seemed to pass over his face, and very subtly change it. The stupidity was wiped out as though a sponge had been passed over it. He did not raise his eyes, but he said, in perfect English, mind you; ‘Has the master augustly counted the cost of his possession?’

“I simply gaped at him.

“‘Perhaps,’ he continued, ‘the master has never heard of the illustrious Hao-Tzan? Well, he shall hear.’

“Ward, I couldn’t move or speak. But I know now it wasn’t sheer astonishment that held me. I listened while Wu-Sing went on to tell in polished phrase the same story that I had heard in Tibet, only there they called him Rak instead of Hao-Tzan. But it was the same story.

“‘And,’ he finished, ‘before he journeyed afar, the illustrious Hao-Tzan caused a great marvel to be wrought. He called it the Gateway.’ Wu-Sing waved his hand to the Dragon Glass. ‘The master has it. But what shall he who has a Gateway do but pass through it? Is it not better to leave the Gateway behind – unless he dare go through it?’

“He was silent. I was silent, too. All I could do was wonder where the fellow had so suddenly got his command of English. And then Wu-Sing straightened. For a moment his eyes looked into mine. They were as yellow as buttercups, Ward, and wise, wise! My mind rushed back to the little room behind the panel. Ward – the eyes of Wu-Sing were the eyes of the face that brooded over the peak of the moons!

“And all in a moment, the face of Wu-Sing dropped back into its old familiar stupid lines. The eyes he turned to me were black and clouded. I jumped from my chair.

“‘What do you mean, you yellow fraud!’ I shouted. ‘What do you mean by pretending all this time that you couldn’t talk English?’

“He looked at me stupidly, as usual. He whined in his pidgin that he didn’t understand; that he hadn’t spoken a word to me until then. I couldn’t get anything else out of him, although I nearly frightened his wits out. I had to believe him. Besides, I had seen his eyes. Well, I was fair curious by this time, and I was more anxious to get the glass home safely than ever.

“I got it home. I set it up here, and I fixed those lights as you saw them. I had a sort of feeling that the glass was waiting – for something. I couldn’t tell just what. But that it was going to be rather important, I knew—”

He suddenly thrust his head into his hands, and rocked to and fro.

“How long, how long,” he moaned, “how long, Santhu?”

“Jim!” I cried. “Jim! What’s the matter with you?”

He straightened. “In a moment you’ll understand,” he said.

And then, as quietly as before: “I felt that the glass was waiting. The night I disappeared I couldn’t sleep. I turned out the lights in the room; turned them on around the glass and sat before it. I don’t know how long I sat, but all at once I jumped to my feet. The dragons seemed to be moving! They were moving! They were crawling round and round the glass. They moved faster and faster. The thirteenth dragon spun about the topaz globe. They circled faster and faster until they were nothing but a halo of crimson and gold flashes. As they spun, the glass itself grew misty, mistier, mistier still, until it was nothing but a green haze. I stepped over to touch it. My hand went straight on through it as though nothing were there.

“I reached in – up to the elbow, up to the shoulder. I felt my hand grasped by warm little fingers. I stepped through—”

“Stepped through the glass?” I cried.

“Through it,” he said, “and then – I felt another little hand touch my face. I saw Santhu!

“Her eyes were as blue as the corn flowers, as blue as the big sapphire that shines in the forehead of Vishnu, in his temple at Benares. And they were set wide, wide apart. Her hair was blue-black, and fell in two long braids between her little breasts. A golden dragon crowned her, and through its paws slipped the braids. Another golden dragon girded her. She laughed into my eyes, and drew my head down until my lips touched hers. She was lithe and slender and yielding as the reeds that grow before the Shrine of Hathor that stands on the edge of the Pool of Djeeba. Who Santhu is or where she came from – how do I know? But this I know – she is lovelier than any woman who ever lived on earth. And she is a woman!

“Her arms slipped from about my neck and she drew me forward. I looked about me. We stood in a cleft between two great rocks. The rocks were a soft green, like the green of the Dragon Glass. Behind us was a green mistiness. Before us the cleft ran only a little distance. Through it I saw an enormous peak jutting up like a pyramid, high, high into a sky of chrysoprase. A soft rose radiance pulsed at its sides, and swimming slowly over its breast was a huge globe of green fire. The girl pulled me towards the opening. We walked on silently, hand in hand. Quickly it came to me – Ward, I was in the place whose pictures had been painted in the room of the Dragon Glass!

“We came out of the cleft and into a garden. The Gardens of Many-Columned Iram, lost in the desert because they were too beautiful, must have been like that place. There were strange, immense trees whose branches were like feathery plumes and whose plumes shone with fires like those that clothe the feet of Indra’s dancers. Strange flowers raised themselves along our path, and their hearts glowed like the glow-worms that are fastened to the rainbow bridge to Asgard. A wind sighed through the plumed trees, and luminous shadows drifted past their trunks. I heard a girl laugh, and the voice of a man singing.

“We went on. Once there was a low wailing far in the garden, and the girl threw herself before me, her arms outstretched. The wailing ceased, and we went on. The mountain grew plainer. I saw another great globe of green fire swing out of the rose flashes at the right of the peak. I saw another shining into the glow at the left. There was a curious trail of mist behind it. It was a mist that had tangled in it a multitude of little stars. Everything was bathed in a soft green light – such a light as you would have if you lived within a pale emerald.

“We turned and went along another little trail. The little trail ran up a little hill, and on the hill was a little house. It looked as though it was made of ivory. It was a very odd little house. It was more like the Jain pagodas at Brahmaputra than anything else. The walls glowed as though they were full light. The girl touched the wall, and a panel slid away. We entered, and the panel closed after us.

“The room was filled with a whispering yellow light. I say whispering because that is how one felt about it. It was gentle and alive. A stairway of ivory ran up to another room above. The girl pressed me toward it. Neither of us had uttered a word. There was a spell of silence upon me. I could not speak. There seemed to be nothing to say. I felt a great rest and a great peace – as though I had come home. I walked up the stairway and into the room above. It was dark except for a bar of green light that came through the long and narrow window. Through it I saw the mountain and its moons. On the floor was an ivory headrest and some silken cloths. I felt suddenly very sleepy. I dropped to the cloths and at once was asleep.

“When I awoke the girl with the cornflower eyes was beside me! She was sleeping. As I watched, her eyes opened. She smiled and drew me to her—

“I do not know why, but a name came to me. ‘Santhu!’ I cried. She smiled again, and I knew that I had called her name. It seemed to me that I remembered her, too, out of immeasurable ages. I arose and walked to the window. I looked toward the mountain. There were now two moons on its breast. And then I saw the city that lay on the mountain’s flank. It was such a city as you see in dreams, or as the tale-tellers of El-Bahara fashion out of the mirage. It was all of ivory and shining greens and flashing blues and crimsons. I could see people walking about its streets. There came the sound of little golden bells chiming.

“I turned toward the girl. She was sitting up, her hands clasped about her knees, watching me. Love came, swift and compelling. She arose – I took her in my arms—

“Many times the moons circled the mountains, and the mist held the little, tangled stars passing with them. I saw no one but Santhu; no thing came near us. The trees fed us with fruits that had in them the very essences of life. Yes, the fruit of the Tree of Life that stood in Eden must have been like the fruit of those trees. We drank of green water that sparkled with green fires, and tasted like the wine Osiris gives the hungry souls in Amenti to strengthen them. We bathed in pools of carved stone that welled with water yellow as amber. Mostly we wandered in the gardens. There were many wonderful things in the gardens. They were very unearthly. There was no day nor night. Only the green glow of the ever-circling moons. We never talked to each other. I don’t know why. Always there seemed nothing to say.

“Then Santhu began to sing to me. Her songs were strange songs. I could not tell what the words were. But they built up pictures in my brain. I saw Rak the Wonder-Worker fashioning his gardens, and filling them with things beautiful and things – evil. I saw him raise the peak, and knew that it was Lalil; saw him fashion the seven moons and kindle the fires that are the fires of life. I saw him build his city, and I saw men and women pass into it from the world through many gateways.

“Santhu sang – and I knew that the marching stars in the mist were the souls of the people of Rak which sought rebirth. She sang, and I saw myself ages past walking in the city of Rak with Santhu beside me. Her song wailed, and I felt myself one of the mist-entangled stars. Her song wept, and I felt myself a star that fought against the mist, and, fighting, break away – a star that fled out and out through immeasurable green space—

“A man stood before us. He was very tall. His face was both cruel and kind, saturnine as Satan and joyous as Apollo. He raised his eyes to us, and they were yellow as buttercups, and wise, so wise! Ward, it was the face above the peak in the room of the Dragon Glass! The eyes that had looked at me out of Wu-Sing’s face! He smiled on us for a moment and then – he was gone!

“I took Santhu by the hand and began to run. Quite suddenly it came to me that I had enough of the haunted gardens of Rak; that I wanted to get back to my own land. But not without Santhu. I tried to remember the road to the cleft. I felt that there lay the path back. We ran. From far behind came a wailing. Santhu screamed – but I knew the fear in her cry was not for herself. It was for me. None of the creatures of that place could harm her who was herself one of its creatures. The wailing drew closer. I turned.

“Winging down through the green air was a beast, an unthinkable beast, Ward! It was like the winged beast of the Apocalypse that is to bear the woman arrayed in purple and scarlet. It was beautiful even in its horror. It closed its scarlet and golden wings, and its long, gleaming body shot at me like a monstrous spear.

“And then – just as it was about to strike – a mist threw itself between us! It was a rainbow mist, and it was – cast. It was cast as though a hand had held it and thrown it like a net. I heard the winged beast shriek its disappointment, Santhu’s hand gripped mine tighter. We ran through the mist.

“Before us was the cleft between the two green rocks. Time and time again we raced for it, and time and time again that beautiful shining horror struck at me – and each time came the thrown mist to baffle it. It was a game! Once I heard a laugh, and then I knew who was my hunter. The master of the beast and the caster of the mist. It was he of the yellow eyes – and he was playing me – playing me as a child plays with a cat when he tempts it with a piece of meat and snatches the meat away again and again from the hungry jaws!

“The mist cleared away from its last throw, and the mouth of the cleft was just before us. Once more the thing swooped – and this time there was no mist. The player had tired of the game! As it struck, Santhu raised herself before it. The beast swerved – and the claw that had been stretched to rip me from throat to waist struck me a glancing blow. I fell – fell through leagues and leagues of green space.

“When I awoke I was here in this bed, with the doctor men around me and this—” He pointed to his bandaged breast again.

“That night when the nurse was asleep I got up and looked into the Dragon Glass, and I saw – the claw, even as you did. The beast is there. It is waiting for me!”

Herndon was silent for a moment.

“If he tires of the waiting he may send the beast through for me,” he said. “I mean the man with the yellow eyes. I’ve a desire to try one of these guns on it. It’s real, you know, the beast is – and these guns have stopped elephants.”

“But the man with the yellow eyes, Jim,” I whispered – “who is he?”

“He,” said Herndon – “why, he’s the WonderWorker himself!”

“You don’t believe such a story as that!” I cried. “Why, it’s – it’s lunacy! It’s some devilish illusion in the glass. It’s like the – crystal globe that makes you hypnotize yourself and think the things your own mind creates are real. Break it, Jim! It’s devilish! Break it!”

“Break it!” he said incredulously. “Break it? Not for the ten thousand lives that are the toll of Rak! Not real? Aren’t these wounds real? Wasn’t Santhu real? Break it! Good God, man, you don’t know what you say! Why, it’s my only road back to her! If that yellow-eyed devil back there were only as wise as he looks, he would know he didn’t have to keep his beast watching there. I want to go, Ward; I want to go and bring her back with me. I’ve an idea, somehow, that he hasn’t – well, full control of things. I’ve an idea that the Greatest Wonder-Worker wouldn’t put wholly in Rak’s hands the souls that wander through the many gateways into his kingdom. There’s a way out, Ward; there’s a way to escape him. I won away from him once, Ward. I’m sure of it. But then I left Santhu behind. I have to go back for her. That’s why I found the little passage that led from the throne-room. And he knows it, too. That’s why he had to turn his beast on me.

“And I’ll go through again, Ward. And I’ll come back again – with Santhu!”

But he has not returned. It is six months now since he disappeared for the second time. And from his bedroom, as he had done before. By the will that they found – the will that commended that in event of his disappearing as he had done before and not returning within a week, I was to have his house and all that was within it – I came into possession of the Dragon Glass. The dragons had spun again for Herndon, and he had gone through the gateway once more. I found only one of the elephant guns, and I knew that he had had time to take the other with him.

I sit night after night before the glass, waiting for him to come back through it – with Santhu. Sooner or later they will come. That I know.

First published in
All-Story Weekly, 24 Nov 1917

Reprinted in
Fantastic Novels, Sep 1940

THE  PEOPLE
OF  THE  PIT

North of us a shaft of light shot half way to the zenith. It came from behind the five peaks. The beam drove up through a column of blue haze whose edges were marked as sharply as the rain that streams from the edges of a thunder cloud. It was like the flash of a searchlight through an azure mist. It cast no shadows.

As it struck upward the summits were outlined hard and black and I saw that the whole mountain was shaped like a hand. As the light silhouetted it, the gigantic fingers stretched, the hand seemed to thrust itself forward. It was exactly as though it moved to push something back. The shining beam held steady for a moment; then broke into myriads of little luminous globes that swung to and fro and dropped gently. They seemed to be searching.

The forest had become very still. Every wood noise held its breath. I felt the dogs pressing against my legs. They too were silent; but every muscle in their bodies trembled, their hair was stiff along their backs and their eyes, fixed on the falling lights, were filmed with the terror glaze.

I looked at Anderson. He was staring at the North where once more the beam had pulsed upward.

“It can’t be the aurora,” I spoke without moving my lips. My mouth was as dry as though Lao T’zai had poured his fear dust down my throat.

“If it is I never saw one like it,” he answered in the same tone. “Besides who ever heard of an aurora at this time of the year?”

He voiced the thought that was in my own mind.

“It makes me think something is being hunted up there,” he said, “an unholy sort of hunt – it’s well for us to be out of range.”

“The mountain seems to move each time the shaft shoots up,” I said. “What’s it keeping back, Starr? It makes me think of the frozen hand of cloud that Shan Nadour set before the Gate of Ghouls to keep them in the lairs that Eblis cut for them.”

He raised a hand – listening.

From the North and high overhead there came a whispering. It was not the rustling of the aurora, that rushing, crackling sound like the ghosts of winds that blew at Creation racing through the skeleton leaves of ancient trees that sheltered Lilith. It was a whispering that held in it a demand. It was eager. It called us to come up where the beam was flashing. It drew. There was in it a note of inexorable insistence. It touched my heart with a thousand tiny fear-tipped fingers and it filled me with a vast longing to race on and merge myself in the light. It must have been so that Ulysses felt when he strained at the mast and strove to obey the crystal sweet singing of the Sirens.

The whispering grew louder.

“What the hell’s the matter with those dogs?” cried Anderson savagely. “Look at them!”

The malemutes, whining, were racing away toward the light. We saw them disappear among the trees. There came back to us a mournful howling. Then that too died away and left nothing but the insistent murmuring overhead.

The glade we had camped in looked straight to the North. We had reached I suppose three hundred mile above the first great bend of the Koskokwim toward the Yukon. Certainly we were in an untrodden part of the wilderness. We had pushed through from Dawson at the breaking of the Spring, on a fair lead to the lost five peaks between which, so the Athabasean medicine man had told us, the gold streams out like putty from a clenched fist. Not an Indian were we able to get to go with us. The land of the Hand Mountain was accursed they said. We had sighted the peaks the night before, their tops faintly outlined against a pulsing glow. And now we saw the light that had led us to them.

Anderson stiffened. Through the whispering had broken a curious pad-pad and a rustling. It sounded as though a small bear were moving towards us. I threw a pile of wood on the fire and, as it blazed up, saw something break through the bushes. It walked on all fours, but it did not walk like a bear. All at once it flashed upon me – it was like a baby crawling upstairs. The forepaws lifted themselves in grotesquely infantile fashion. It was grotesque but it was – terrible. It grew closer. We reached for our guns – and dropped them. Suddenly we knew that this crawling thing was a man!

It was a man. Still with the high climbing pad-pad he swayed to the fire. He stopped.

“Safe,” whispered the crawling man, in a voice that was an echo of the murmur overhead. “Quite safe here. They can’t get out of the blue, you know. They can’t get you – unless you go to them—”

He fell over on his side. We ran to him. Anderson knelt.

“God’s love!” he said. “Frank, look at this!” He pointed to the hands. The wrists were covered with torn rags of a heavy shirt. The hands themselves were stumps! The fingers had been bent into the palms and the flesh had been worn to the bone. They looked like the feet of a little black elephant! My eyes traveled down the body. Around the waist was a heavy band of yellow metal. From it fell a ring and a dozen links of shining white chain!

“What is he? Where did he come from?” said Anderson. “Look, he’s fast asleep – yet even in his sleep his arms try to climb and his feet draw themselves up one after the other! And his knees – how in God’s name was he ever able to move on them?”

It was even as he said. In the deep sleep that had come upon the crawler arms and legs kept raising in a deliberate, dreadful climbing motion. It was as though they had a life of their own – they kept their movement independently of the motionless body. They were semaphoric motions. If you have ever stood at the back of a train and had watched the semaphores rise and fall you will know exactly what I mean.

Abruptly the overhead whispering ceased. The shaft of light dropped and did not rise again. The crawling man became still. A gentle glow began to grow around us. It was dawn, and the short Alaskan summer night was over. Anderson rubbed his eyes and turned to me a haggard face.

“Man!” he exclaimed. “You look as though you have been through a spell of sickness!”

“No more than you, Starr,” I said. “What do you make of it all?”

“I’m thinking our only answer lies there,” he answered, pointing to the figure that lay so motionless under the blankets we had thrown over him. “Whatever it was – that’s what it was after. There was no aurora about that light, Frank. It was like the flaring up of some queer hell the preacher folk never frightened us with.”

“We’ll go no further today,” I said. “I wouldn’t wake him for all the gold that runs between the fingers of the five peaks – nor for all the devils that may be behind them.”

The crawling man lay in a sleep as deep as the Styx. We bathed and bandaged the pads that had been his hands. Arms and legs were as rigid as though they were crutches. He did not move while we worked over him. He lay as he had fallen, the arms a trifle raised, the knees bent.

“Why did he crawl?” whispered Anderson. “Why didn’t he walk?”

I was filing the band about the waist. It was gold, but it was like no gold I had ever handled. Pure gold is soft. This was soft, but it had an unclean, viscid life of its own. It clung to the file. I gashed through it, bent it away from the body and hurled it far off. It was – loathsome!

All that day he slept. Darkness came and still he slept That night there was no shaft of light, no questing globe, no whispering. Some spell of horror seemed lifted from the land. It was noon when the crawling man awoke. I jumped as the pleasant drawling voice sounded.

“How long have I slept?” he asked. His pale blue eyes grew quizzical as I stared at him. “A night – and almost two days,” I said. “Was there any light up there last night?” He nodded to the North eagerly. “Any whispering?”

“Neither,” I answered. His head fell back and he stared up at the sky.

“They’ve given it up, then?” he said at last.

“Who have given it up?” asked Anderson.

“Why, the people of the pit,” replied the crawling man quietly.

We stared at him. “The people of the pit,” he said. “Things that the Devil made before the Flood and that somehow have escaped God’s vengeance. You weren’t in any danger from them – unless you had followed their call. They can’t get any further than the blue haze. I was their prisoner,” he added simply. “They were trying to whisper me back to them!”

Anderson and I looked at each other, the same thought in both our minds.

“You’re wrong,” said the crawling man. “I’m not insane. Give me a very little to drink. I’m going to die soon, but I want you to take me as far South as you can before I die, and afterwards I want you to build a big fire and burn me. I want to be in such shape that no infernal spell of theirs can drag my body back to them. You’ll do it too, when I’ve told you about them—” he hesitated. “I think their chain is off me?” he said.

“I cut it off,” I answered shortly.

“Thank God for that too,” whispered the crawling man.

He drank the brandy and water we lifted to his lips.

“Arms and legs quite dead,” he said. “Dead as I’ll be soon. Well, they did well for me. Now I’ll tell you what’s up there behind that hand. Hell!”

“Now listen. My name is Stanton – Sinclair Stanton. Class 1900, Yale. Explorer. I started away from Dawson last year to hunt for five peaks that rise like a hand in a haunted country and run pure gold between them. Same thing you were after? I thought so. Late last fall my comrade sickened. Sent him back with some Indians. Little later all my Indians ran away from me. I decided I’d stick, built a cabin, stocked myself with food and lay down to winter it. In the Spring I started off again. Little less than two weeks ago I sighted the five peaks. Not from this side though – the other. Give me some more brandy.

“I’d made too wide a detour,” he went on. “I’d gotten too far North. I beat back. From this side you see nothing but forest straight up to the base of the Hand Mountain. Over on the other side—”

He was silent for a moment.

“Over there is forest too. But it doesn’t reach so far. No! I came out of it. Stretching miles in front of me was a level plain. It was as worn and ancient looking as the desert around the ruins of Babylon. At its end rose the peaks. Between me and them – far off – was what looked like a low dike of rocks. Then – I ran across the road!

“The road!” cried Anderson incredulously.

“The road,” said the crawling man. “A fine smooth Stone road. It ran straight on to the mountain. Oh, it was road all right – and worn as though millions and millions of feet had passed over it for thousands of years. On each side of it were sand and heaps of stones. After while I began to notice these stones. They were cut, and the shape of the heaps somehow gave me the idea that a hundred thousand years ago they might have been houses. I sensed man about them and at the same time they smelled of immemorial antiquity. Well—

“The peaks grew closer. The heaps of ruins thicker. Something inexpressibly desolate hovered over them; something reached from them that struck my heart like the touch of ghosts so old that they could be only the ghosts of ghosts. I went on.

“And now I saw that what I had thought to be the low rock range at the base of the peaks was a thicker litter of ruins. The Hand Mountain was really much farther off. The road passed between two high rocks that raised themselves like a gateway.”

The crawling man paused.

“They were a gateway,” he said. “I reached them. I went between them. And then I sprawled and clutched the earth in sheer awe! I was on a broad stone platform. Before me was – sheer space! Imagine the Grand Canyon five times as wide and with the bottom dropped out. That is what I was looking into. It was like peeping over the edge of a cleft world down into the infinity where the planets roll! On the far side stood the five peaks. They looked like a gigantic warning hand stretched up to the sky. The lip of the abyss curved away on each side of me.

“I could see down perhaps a thousand feet. Then a thick blue haze shut out the eye. It was like the blue you see gather on the high hills at dusk. And the pit – it was awesome; awesome as the Maori Gulf of Ranalak, that sinks between the living and the dead and that only the freshly released soul has strength to leap – but never strength to cross again.

“I crept back from the verge and stood up, weak. My hand rested against one of the pillars of the gateway. There was carving upon it. It bore in still sharp outlines the heroic figure of a man. His back was turned. His arms were outstretched. There was an odd peaked headdress upon him. I looked at the opposite pillar. It bore a figure exactly similar. The pillars were triangular and the carvings were on the side away from the pit. The figures seemed to be holding something back. I looked closer. Behind the outstretched hands I seemed to see other shapes.

“I traced them out vaguely. Suddenly I felt unaccountably sick. There had come to me an impression of enormous upright slugs. Their swollen bodies were faintly cut – all except the heads which were well marked globes. They were – unutterably loathsome. I turned from the gates back to the void. I stretched myself upon the slab and looked over the edge.

“A stairway led down into the pit!”

“A stairway!” we cried.

“A stairway,” repeated the crawling man as patiently as before, “It seemed not so much carved out of the rock as built into it. The slabs were about six feet long and three feet wide. It ran down from the platform and vanished into the blue haze.”

“But who could build such a stairway as that?” I said. “A stairway built into the wall of a precipice and leading down into a bottomless pit!”

“Not bottomless,” said the crawling man quietly. “There was a bottom. I reached it!”

“Reached it?” we repeated.

“Yes, by the stairway,” answered the crawling man. “You see – I went down it!

“Yes,” he said. “I went down the stairway. But not that day. I made my camp back of the gates. At dawn I filled my knapsack with food, my two canteens with water from a spring that wells up there by the gateway, walked between the carved monoliths and stepped over the edge of the pit.

“The steps ran along the side of the rock at a forty degree pitch. As I went down and down I studied them. They were of a greenish rock quite different from the granitic porphyry that formed the wall of the precipice. At first I thought that the builders had taken advantage of an outcropping stratum, and had carved from it their gigantic flight. But the regularity of the angle at which it fell made me doubtful of this theory.

“After I had gone perhaps half a mile I stepped out upon a landing. From this landing the stairs made a V shaped turn and ran on downward, clinging to the cliff at the same angle as the first flight; it was a zig-zag, and after I had made three of these turns I knew that the steps dropped straight down in a succession of such angles. No strata could be so regular as that. No, the stairway was built by hands! But whose? The answer is in those ruins around the edge, I think – never to be read.

“By noon I had lost sight of the five peaks and the lip of the abyss. Above me, below me, was nothing but the blue haze. Beside me, too, was nothingness, for the further breast of rock had long since vanished. I felt no dizziness, and any trace of fear was swallowed in a vast curiosity. What was I to discover? Some ancient and wonderful civilization that had ruled when the Poles were tropical gardens? Nothing living, I felt sure – all was too old for life. Still, a stairway so wonderful must lead to something quite as wonderful I knew. What was it? I went on.

“At regular intervals I had passed the mouths of small caves. There would be two thousand steps and then an opening, two thousand more steps and an opening – and so on and on. Late that afternoon I stopped before one of these clefts. I suppose I had gone then three miles down the pit, although the angles were such that I had walked in all fully ten miles. I examined the entrance. On each side were carved the figures of the great portal above, only now they were standing face forward, the arms outstretched as though to hold something back from the outer depths. Their faces were covered with veils. There were no hideous shapes behind them. I went inside. The fissure ran back for twenty yards like a burrow. It was dry and perfectly light. Outside I could see the blue haze rising upward like a column, its edges clearly marked. I felt an extraordinary sense of security, although I had not been conscious of any fear. I felt that the figures at the entrance were guardians – but against what?

“The blue haze thickened and grew faintly luminescent. I fancied that it was dusk above. I ate and drank a little and slept. When I awoke the blue had lightened again, and I fancied it was dawn above. I went on. I forgot the gulf yawning at my side. I felt no fatigue and little hunger or thirst, although I had drunk and eaten sparingly. That night I spent within another of the caves, and at dawn I descended again.

“It was late that day when I first saw the city – .”

He was silent for a time.

“The city,” he said at last, “there is a city you know. But not such a city as you have ever seen – nor any other man who has lived to tell of it. The pit, I think, is shaped like a bottle; the opening before the five peaks is the neck. But how wide the bottom is I do not know – thousands of miles maybe. I had begun to catch little glints of light far down in the blue. Then I saw the tops of – trees, I suppose they are. But not our kind of trees – unpleasant, snaky kind of trees. They reared themselves on high thin trunks and their tops were nests of thick tendrils with ugly little leaves like arrow heads. The trees were red, a vivid angry red. Here and there I glimpsed spots of shining yellow. I knew these were water because I could see things breaking through their surface – or at least I could see the splash and ripple, but what it was that disturbed them I never saw.

“Straight beneath me was the – city. I looked down upon mile after mile of closely packed cylinders. They lay upon their sides in pyramids of three, of five – of dozens – piled upon each other. It is hard to make you see what that city is like – look, suppose you have water pipes of a certain length and first you lay three of them side by side and on top of them you place two and on these two one; or suppose you take five for a foundation and place on these four and then three, then two and then one. Do you see? That was the way they looked. But they were topped by towers, by minarets, by flares, by fans, and twisted monstrosities. They gleamed as though coated with pale rose flame. Beside them the venomous red trees raised themselves like the heads of hydras guarding nests of gigantic, jeweled and sleeping worms!

“A few feet beneath me the stairway jutted out into a Titanic arch, unearthly as the span that bridges Hell and leads to Asgard. It curved out and down straight through the top of the highest pile of carven cylinders and then it vanished through it. It was appalling – it was demonic—”

The crawling man stopped. His eyes rolled up into his head. He trembled and his arms and legs began their horrible crawling movement. From his lips came a whispering. It was an echo of the high murmuring we had heard the night he came to us. I put my hands over his eyes. He quieted.

“The Things Accursed!” he said. “The People of the Pit! Did I whisper. Yes – but they can’t get me now – they can’t!”

After a time he began as quietly as before.

“I crossed the span. I went down through the top of that – building. Blue darkness shrouded me for a moment and I felt the steps twist into a spiral. I wound down and then – I was standing high up in – I can’t tell you in what, I’ll have to call it a room. We have no images for what is in the pit. A hundred feet below me was the floor. The walls sloped down and out from where I stood in a series of widening crescents. The place was colossal – and it was filled with a curious mottled red light. It was like the light inside a green and gold flecked fire opal. I went down to the last step. Far in front of me rose a high, columned altar. Its pillars were carved in monstrous scrolls – like mad octopuses with a thousand drunken tentacles; they rested on the backs of shapeless monstrosities carved in crimson stone. The altar front was a gigantic slab of purple covered with carvings.

“I can’t describe these carvings! No human being could – the human eye cannot grasp them any more than it can grasp the shapes that haunt the fourth dimension. Only a subtle sense in the back of the brain sensed them vaguely. They were formless things that gave no conscious image, yet pressed into the mind like small hot seals – ideas of hate – of combats between unthinkable monstrous things – victories in a nebulous hell of steaming, obscene jungles – aspirations and ideals immeasurably loathsome—

“And as I stood I grew aware of something that lay behind the lip of the altar fifty feet above me. I knew it was there – I felt it with every hair and every tiny bit of my skin. Something infinitely malignant, infinitely horrible, infinitely ancient. It lurked, it brooded, it threatened and it – was invisible!

“Behind me was a circle of blue light. I ran for it. Something urged me to turn back, to climb the stairs and make away. It was impossible. Repulsion for that unseen Thing raced me onward as though a current had my feet. I passed through the circle. I was out on a street that stretched on into dim distance between rows of the carven cylinders.

“Here and there the red trees arose. Between them rolled the stone burrows. And now I could take in the amazing ornamentation that clothed them. They were like the trunks of smooth skinned trees that had fallen and had been clothed with high reaching noxious orchids. Yes – those cylinders were like that – and more. They should have gone out with the dinosaurs. They were – monstrous. They struck the eyes like a blow and they passed across the nerves like a rasp. And nowhere was there sight or sound of living thing.

“There were circular openings in the cylinders like the circle in the Temple of the Stairway. I passed through one of them. I was in a long, bare vaulted room whose curving sides half closed twenty feet over my head, leaving a wide slit that opened into another vaulted chamber above. There was absolutely nothing in the room save the same mottled reddish light that I had seen in the Temple. I stumbled. I still could see nothing, but there was something on the floor over which I had tripped. I reached down – and my hand touched a thing cold and smooth – that moved under it – I turned and ran out of that place – I was filled with a loathing that had in it something of madness – I ran on and on blindly – wringing my hands – weeping with horror—

“When I came to myself I was still among the stone cylinders and red trees. I tried to retrace my steps; to find the Temple. I was more than afraid. I was like a new loosed soul panic-stricken with the first terrors of hell. I could not find the Temple! Then the haze began to thicken and glow; the cylinders to shine more brightly. I knew that it was dusk in the world above and I felt that with dusk my time of peril had come; that the thickening of the haze was the signal for the awakening of whatever things lived in this pit.

“I scrambled up the sides of one of the burrows. I hid behind a twisted nightmare of stone. Perhaps, I thought, there was a chance of remaining hidden until the blue lightened and the peril passed. There began to grow around me a murmur. It was everywhere – and it grew and grew into a great whispering. I peeped from the side of the stone down into the street. I saw lights passing and repassing. More and more lights – they swam out of the circular doorways and they thronged the street. The highest were eight feet above the pave; the lowest perhaps two. They hurried, they sauntered, they bowed, they stopped and whispered – and there was nothing under them!”

“Nothing under them!” breathed Anderson.

“No,” he went on, “that was the terrible part of it – there was nothing under them. Yet certainly the lights were living things. They had consciousness, volition, thought – what else I did not know. They were nearly two feet across – the largest. Their center was a bright nucleus – red, blue, green. This nucleus faded off, gradually, into a misty glow that did not end abruptly. It too seemed to fade off into nothingness – but a nothingness that had under it a somethingness. I strained my eyes trying to grasp this body into which the lights merged and which one could only feel was there, but could not see.

“And all at once I grew rigid. Something cold, and thin like a whip, had touched my face. I turned my head. Close behind were three of the lights. They were a pale blue. They looked at me – if you can imagine lights that are eyes. Another whiplash gripped my shoulder. Under the closest light came a shrill whispering. I shrieked. Abruptly the murmuring in the street ceased. I dragged my eyes from the pale blue globe that held them and looked out – the lights in the streets were rising by myriads to the level of where I stood! There they stopped and peered at me. They crowded and jostled as though they were a crowd of curious people – on Broadway. I felt a score of the lashes touch me—

“When I came to myself I was again in the great Place of the Stairway, lying at the foot of the altar. All was silent. There were no lights – only the mottled red glow. I jumped to my feet and ran toward the steps. Something jerked me back to my knees. And then I saw that around my waist had been fastened a yellow ring of metal. From it hung a chain and this chain passed up over the lip of the high ledge. I was chained to the altar!

“I reached into my pockets for my knife to cut through the ring. It was not there! I had been stripped of everything except one of the canteens that I had hung around my neck and which I suppose They had thought was – part of me. I tried to break the ring. It seemed alive. It writhed in my hands and it drew itself closer around me! I pulled at the chain. It was immovable. There came to me the consciousness of the unseen Thing above the altar. I groveled at the foot of the slab and wept. Think – alone in that place of strange light with the brooding ancient Horror above me – a monstrous Thing, a Thing unthinkable – an unseen Thing that poured forth horror—

“After awhile I gripped myself. Then I saw beside one of the pillars a yellow bowl filled with a thick white liquid. I drank it. If it killed I did not care. But its taste was pleasant and as I drank my strength came back to me with a rush. Clearly I was not to be starved. The lights, whatever they were, had a conception of human needs.

“And now the reddish mottled gleam began to deepen. Outside arose the humming and through the circle that was the entrance came streaming the globes, They ranged themselves in ranks until they filled the Temple. Their whispering grew into a chant, a cadenced whispering chant that rose and fell, rose and fell, while to its rhythm the globes lifted and sank, lifted and sank

“All that night the lights came and went – and all that night the chant sounded as they rose and fell. At the last I felt myself only an atom of consciousness in a sea of cadenced whispering; an atom that rose and fell with the bowing globes. I tell you that even my heart pulsed in unison with them! The red glow faded, the lights streamed out; the whispering died. I was again alone and I knew that once again day had broken in my own world.

“I slept. When I awoke I found beside the pillar more of the white liquid. I scrutinized the chain that held me to the altar. I began to rub two of the links together. I did this for hours. When the red began to thicken there was a ridge worn in the links. Hope rushed up within me. There was, then, a chance to escape.

“With the thickening the lights came again. All through that night the whispering chant sounded, and the globes rose and fell. The chant seized me. It pulsed through me until every nerve and muscle quivered to it. My lips began to quiver. They strove like a man trying to cry out on a nightmare. And at last they too were whispering the chant of the people of the pit. My body bowed in unison with the lights – I was, in movement and sound, one with the nameless things while my soul sank back sick with horror and powerless. While I whispered I – saw Them!”

“Saw the lights?” I asked stupidly.

“Saw the Things under the lights,” he answered. “Great transparent snail-like bodies – dozens of waving tentacles stretching from them – round gaping mouths under the luminous seeing globes. They were like the ghosts of inconceivably monstrous slugs! I could see through them. And as I stared, still bowing and whispering, the dawn came and they streamed to and through the entrance. They did not crawl or walk – they floated! They floated and were – gone!

“I did not sleep. I worked all that day at my chain. By the thickening of the red I had worn it a sixth through. And all that night I whispered and bowed with the pit people, joining in their chant to the Thing that brooded above me!

“Twice again the red thickened and the chant held me – then on the morning of the fifth day I broke through the worn links of the chain. I was free! I drank from the bowl of white liquid and poured what was left in my flask. I ran to the Stairway. I rushed up and past that unseen Horror behind the altar ledge and was out upon the Bridge. I raced across the span and up the Stairway.

“Can you think what it is to climb straight up the verge of a cleft-world – with hell behind you? Hell was behind me and terror rode me. The city had long been lost in the blue haze before I knew that I could climb no more. My heart beat upon my ears like a sledge. I fell before one of the little caves feeling that here at last was sanctuary. I crept far back within it and waited for the haze to thicken. Almost at once it did so. From far below me came a vast and angry murmur. At the mouth of the rift I saw a light pulse up through the blue; die down and as it dimmed I saw myriads of the globes that are the eyes of the pit people swing downward into the abyss. Again and again the light pulsed and the globes fell. They were hunting me. The whispering grew louder, more insistent.

“There grew in me the dreadful desire to join in the whispering as I had done in the Temple. I bit my lips through and through to still them. All that night the beam shot up through the abyss, the globes swung and the whispering sounded – and now I knew the purpose of the caves and of the sculptured figures that still had power to guard them. But what were the people who had carved them? Why had they built their city around the verge and why had they set that Stairway in the pit? What had they been to those Things that dwelt at the bottom and what use had the Things been to them that they should live beside their dwelling place? That there had been some purpose was certain. No work so prodigious as the Stairway would have been undertaken otherwise. But what was the purpose? And why was it that those who had dwelt about the abyss had passed away ages gone, and the dwellers in the abyss still lived? I could find no answer – nor can I find any now. I have not the shred of a theory.

“Dawn came as I wondered and with it silence. I drank what was left of the liquid in my canteen, crept from the cave and began to climb again. That afternoon my legs gave out. I tore off my shirt, made from it pads for my knees and coverings for my hands. I crawled upward. I crawled up and up. And again I crept into one of the caves and waited until again the blue thickened, the shaft of light shot through it and the whispering came.

“But now there was a new note in the whispering. It was no longer threatening. It called and coaxed. It drew.

A new terror gripped me. There had come upon me a mighty desire to leave the cave and go out where the lights swung; to let them do with me as they pleased, carry me where they wished. The desire grew. It gained fresh impulse with every rise of the beam until at last I vibrated with the desire as I had vibrated to the chant in the Temple. My body was a pendulum. Up would go the beam and I would swing toward it! Only my soul kept steady. It held me fast to the floor of the cave; And all that night it fought with my body against the spell of the pit people.

“Dawn came. Again I crept from the cave and faced the Stairway. I could not rise. My hands were torn and bleeding; my knees an agony. I forced myself upward step by step. After a while my hands became numb, the pain left my knees. They deadened. Step by step my will drove my body upward upon them.

“And then – a nightmare of crawling up infinite stretches of steps – memories of dull horror while hidden within caves with the lights pulsing without and whisperings that called and called me – memory of a time when I awoke to find that my body was obeying the call and had carried me half way out between the guardians of the portals while thousands of gleaming globes rested in the blue haze and watched me.

Glimpses of bitter fights against sleep and always, always – a climb up and up along infinite distances of steps that led from Abaddon to a Paradise of blue sky and open world!

“At last a consciousness of the clear sky close above me, the lip of the pit before me – memory of passing between the great portals of the pit and of steady withdrawal from it – dreams of giant men with strange peaked crowns and veiled faces who pushed me onward and onward and held back Roman Candle globules of light that sought to draw me back to a gulf wherein planets swam between the branches of red trees that had snakes for crowns.

“And then a long, long sleep – how long God alone knows – in a cleft of rocks; an awakening to see far in the North the beam still rising and falling, the lights still hunting, the whispering high above me calling.

“Again crawling on dead arms and legs that moved – that moved – like the Ancient Mariner’s ship – without volition of mine, but that carried me from a haunted place. And then – your fire – and this – safety!”

The crawling man smiled at us for a moment. Then swiftly life faded from his face. He slept.

•   •   •

That afternoon we struck camp and, carrying the crawling man, started back South. For three days we carried him and still he slept. And on the third day, still sleeping, he died. We built a great pile of wood and we burned his body as he had asked. We scattered his ashes about the forest with the ashes of the trees that had consumed him. It must be a great magic indeed that could disentangle those ashes and draw him back in a rushing cloud to the pit he called Accursed. I do not think that even the People of the Pit have such a spell. No.

But we did not return to the five peaks to see.

First published in
All-Story Weekly, 5 Jan 1918

Reprinted in
Fantastic Novels, Jan 1941

THREE  LINES
OF  OLD  FRENCH

“But rich as was the war for surgical science,” ended Hawtry, “opening up through mutilation and torture unexplored regions which the genius of man was quick to enter, and, entering, found ways to checkmate suffering and death – for always, my friend, the distillate from the blood of sacrifice is progress – great as all this was, the world tragedy has opened up still another region wherein even greater knowledge will be found. It was the clinic unsurpassed for the psychologist even more than for the surgeon.”

Latour, the great little French doctor, drew himself out of the depths of the big chair; the light from the fireplace fell ruddily upon his keen face.

“That is true,” he said. “Yes, that is true. There in the furnace the mind of man opened like a flower beneath a too glowing sun. Beaten about in that colossal tempest of primitive forces, caught in the chaos of energies both physical and psychical – which, although man himself was its creator, made of their maker a moth in a whirlwind – all those obscure, those mysterious factors of mind which men, for lack of knowledge, have named the soul, were stripped of their inhibitions and given power to appear.

“How could it have been otherwise – when men and women, gripped by one shattering sorrow or joy, will manifest the hidden depths of spirit – how could it have been otherwise in that steadily maintained crescendo of emotion?” McAndrews spoke.

“Just which psychological region do you mean, Hawtry?” he asked.

There were four of us in front of the fireplace of the Science Club – Hawtry, who rules the chair of psychology in one of our greatest colleges, and whose name is an honored one throughout the world; Latour, an immortal of France; McAndrews, the famous American surgeon whose work during the war has written a new page in the shining book of science; and myself. These are not the names of the three, but they are as I have described them; and I am pledged to identify them no further.

“I mean the field of suggestion,” replied the psychologist.

“The mental reactions which reveal themselves as visions – an accidental formation in the clouds that becomes to the over-wrought imaginations of the beholders the so-eagerly-prayed-for hosts of Joan of Arc marching out from heaven; moonlight in the cloud rift that becomes to the besieged a fiery cross held by the hands of archangels; the despair and hope that are transformed into such a legend as the bowmen of Mons, ghostly archers who with their phantom shafts overwhelm the conquering enemy; wisps of cloud over No Man’s Land that are translated by the tired eyes of those who peer out into the shape of the Son of Man himself walking sorrowfully among the dead. Signs, portents, and miracles, the hosts of premonitions, of apparitions of loved ones – all dwellers in this land of suggestion; all born of the tearing loose of the veils of the subconscious. Here, when even a thousandth part is gathered, will be work for the psychological analyst for twenty years.”

“And the boundaries of this region?” asked McAndrews.

“Boundaries?” Hawtry plainly was perplexed.

McAndrews for a moment was silent. Then he drew from his pocket a yellow slip of paper, a cablegram.

“Young Peter Laveller died today,” he said, apparently irrelevantly. “Died where he had set forth to pass – in the remnants of the trenches that cut through the ancient domain of the Seigniors of Tocquelain, up near Bethune.”

“Died there!” Hawtry’s astonishment was profound. “But I read that he had been brought home; that, indeed, he was one of your triumphs, McAndrews!”

“I said he went there to die,” repeated the surgeon slowly.

So that explained the curious reticence of the Lavellers as to what had become of their soldier son – a secrecy which had puzzled the press for weeks. For young Peter Laveller was one of the nation’s heroes. The only boy of old Peter Laveller – and neither is that the real name of the family, for, like the others, I may not reveal it – he was the heir to the grim old coal king’s millions, and the secret, best loved pulse of his heart.

Early in the war he had enlisted with the French. His father’s influence might have abrogated the law of the French army that every man must start from the bottom up – I do not know – but young Peter would have none of it. Steady of purpose, burning with the white fire of the first Crusaders, he took his place in the ranks.

Clean-cut, blue-eyed, standing six feet in his stocking feet, just twenty-five, a bit of a dreamer, perhaps, he was one to strike the imagination of the poilus, and they loved him. Twice was he wounded in the perilous days, and when America came into the war he was transferred to our expeditionary forces. It was at the siege of Mount Kemmel that he received the wounds that brought him back to his father and sister. McAndrews had accompanied him overseas, I knew, and had patched him together – or so all thought.

What had happened then – and why had Laveller gone back to France, to die, as McAndrews put it?

He thrust the cablegram back into his pocket.

“There is a boundary, John,” he said to Hawtry. “Laveller’s was a borderland case. I’m going to tell it to you.” He hesitated. “I ought not to, maybe; and yet I have an idea that Peter would like it told; after all, he believed himself a discoverer.” Again he paused; then definitely made up his mind, and turned to me.

“Merritt, you may make use of this if you think it interesting enough. But if you do so decide, then change the names, and be sure to check description short of any possibility of ready identification. After all, it is what happened that is important – and those to whom it happened do not matter.”

I promised, and I have observed my pledge. I tell the story as he whom I call McAndrews reconstructed it for us there in the shadowed room, while we sat silent until he had ended.

Laveller stood behind the parapet of a first-line trench. It was night – an early April night in northern France – and when that is said, all is said to those who have been there.

Beside him was a trench periscope. His gun lay touching it. The periscope is practically useless at night; so through a slit in the sandbags he peered out over the three-hundred-foot-wide stretch of No Man’s Land.

Opposite him he knew that other eyes lay close to similar slits in the German parapet, watchful as his were for the least movement.

There were grotesque heaps scattered about No Man’s Land, and when the star-shells burst and flooded it with their glare these heaps seemed to stir to move – some to raise themselves, some to gesticulate, to protest. And this was very horrible, for those who moved under the lights were the dead – French and English, Prussian and Bavarian – dregs of a score of carryings to the red wine-press of war set up in this sector.

There were two Jocks on the entanglements; kilted Scots, one colandered by machine-gun hail just as he was breaking through. The shock of the swift, manifold death had hurled his left arm about the neck of the comrade close beside him; and this man had been stricken within the same second. There they leaned, embracing – and as the star-shells flared and died, flared and died, they seemed to rock, to try to break from the wire, to dash forward, to return.

Laveller was weary, weary beyond all understanding. The sector was a bad one and nervous. For almost seventy-two hours he had been without sleep – for the few minutes now and then of dead stupor broken by constant alarms was worse than sleep.

The shelling had been well-nigh continuous, and the food scarce and perilous to get; three miles back through the fire they had been forced to go for it; no nearer than that could the ration dumps be brought.

And constantly the parapets had to be rebuilt and the wires repaired – and when this was done the shells destroyed again, and once more the dreary routine had to be gone through; for the orders were to hold this sector at all costs.

All that was left of Laveller’s consciousness was concentrated in his eyes; only his seeing faculty lived. And sight, obeying the rigid, inexorable will commanding every reserve of vitality to concentrate on the duty at hand, was blind to everything except the strip before it that Laveller must watch until relieved. His body was numb; he could not feel the ground with his feet, and sometimes he seemed to be floating in air like – like the two Scots upon the wire!

Why couldn’t they be still? What right had men whose blood had drained away into a black stain beneath them to dance and pirouette to the rhythm of the flares? Damn them – why couldn’t a shell drop down and bury them?

There was a chateau half a mile up there to the right – at least it had been a chateau. Under it were deep cellars into which one could creep and sleep. He knew that, because ages ago, when first he had come into this part of the line, he had slept a night there.

It would be like reentering paradise to crawl again into those cellars, out of the pitiless rain; sleep once more with a roof over his head.

“I will sleep and sleep and sleep – and sleep and sleep and sleep,” he told himself; then stiffened as at the slumber-compelling repetition of the word darkness began to gather before him.

The star-shells flared and died, flared and died; the staccato of a machine gun reached him. He thought that it was his teeth chattering until his groping consciousness made him realize what it really was – some nervous German riddling the interminable movement of the dead.

There was a squidging of feet through the chalky mud. No need to look; they were friends, or they could not have passed the sentries at the angle of the traverse. Nevertheless, involuntarily, his eyes swept toward the sounds, took note of three cloaked figures regarding him.

There were half a dozen of the lights floating overhead now, and by the gleams they cast into the trench he recognized the party.

One of them was that famous surgeon who had come over from the base hospital at Bethune to see made the wounds he healed; the others were his major and his captain – all of them bound for those cellars, no doubt. Well, some had all the luck! Back went his eyes to the slit.

“What’s wrong?” It was the voice of the major addressing the visitor.

“What’s wrong – what’s wrong – what’s wrong?” The words repeated themselves swiftly, insistently, within his brain, over and over again, striving to waken it.

Well, what was wrong? Nothing was wrong! Wasn’t he, Laveller, there and watching? The tormented brain writhed angrily. Nothing was wrong – why didn’t they go away and let him watch in peace?

“Nothing.” It was the surgeon – and again the words kept babbling in Laveller’s ears, small, whispering, rapidly repeating themselves over and over; “Nothing – nothing – nothing – nothing.”

But what was this the surgeon was saying? Fragmentarily, only half understood, the phrases registered:

“Perfect case of what I’ve been telling you. This lad here – utterly worn, weary – all his consciousness centered upon just one thing – watchfulness… consciousness worn to finest point… behind it all his subconsciousness crowding to escape… consciousness will respond to only one stimulus – movement from without… but the subconsciousness, so close to the surface, held so lightly in leash… what will it do if that little thread is loosed… a perfect case.”

What were they talking about? Now they were whispering.

“Then, if I have your permission—” It was the surgeon speaking again. Permission for what? Why didn’t they go away and not bother him? Wasn’t it hard enough just to watch without having to hear? Something passed before his eyes. He looked at it blindly, unrecognizing. His sight must be clouded.

He raised a hand and brushed at his lids. Yes, it must have been his eyes – for it had gone.

A little circle of light glowed against the parapet near his face. It was cast by a small flash. What were they looking for? A hand appeared in the circle, a hand with long, flexible fingers which held a piece of paper on which there was writing. Did they want him to read, too? Not only watch and hear – but read! He gathered himself together to protest.

Before he could force his stiffened lips to move he felt the upper button of his greatcoat undone, a hand slipped through the opening and thrust something into his tunic pocket just above the heart.

Someone whispered “Lucie de Tocquelain.” What did it mean? That was not the password. There was a great singing in his head – as though he were sinking through water. What was that light that dazzled him even through his closed lids? Painfully he opened his eyes.

Laveller looked straight into the disk of a golden sun slowly setting over a row of noble oaks. Blinded, he dropped his gaze. He was standing ankle-deep in soft, green grass, starred with small clumps of blue flowerets. Bees buzzed about in their chalices. Little yellow-winger butterflies hovered over them. A gentle breeze blew, warm and fragrant.

Oddly he felt no sense of strangeness – then – this was a normal home world – a world as it ought to be. But he remembered that he had once been in another world, far, far unlike this; a place of misery and pain, of blood-stained mud and filth, of cold and wet; a world of cruelty, whose nights were tortured hells of glaring lights and fiery, slaying sounds, and tormented men who sought for rest and sleep and found none, and dead who danced. Where was it? Had there ever really been such a world? He was not sleepy now.

He raised his hands and looked at them. They were grimed and cut and stained. He was wearing a greatcoat, wet, mud-bespattered, filthy. High boots were on his legs. Beside one dirt-incrusted foot lay a cluster of the blue flowerets, half-crushed. He groaned in pity, and bent, striving to raise the broken blossoms.

“‘Too many dead now – too many dead,” he whispered; then paused. He had come from that nightmare world! How else in this happy, clean one could he be so unclean?

Of course he had – but where was it? How had he made his way from it here? Ah, there had been a password – what had it been?

He had it: “Lucie de Tocquelain!”

Laveller cried it aloud – still kneeling.

A soft little hand touched his cheek. A low, sweet-toned voice caressed his ears.

“I am Lucie de Tocquelain,” it said. “And the flowers will grow again – yet it is dear of you to sorrow for them.”

He sprang to his feet. Beside him stood a girl, a slender maid of eighteen, whose hair was a dusky cloud upon her proud little head and in whose great, brown eyes, resting upon his, tenderness and a half-amused pity dwelt.

Peter stood silent, drinking her in – the low, broad, white forehead; the curved, red lips; the rounded, white shoulders, shining through the silken web of her scarf; the whole lithe, sweet body of her in the clinging, quaintly fashioned gown, with its high, clasping girdle.

She was fair enough; but to Peter’s starved eyes she was more than that – she was a spring gushing from the arid desert, the first cool breeze of twilight over a heat-drenched isle, the first glimpse of paradise to a soul fresh risen from centuries of hell. And under the burning worship of his eyes her own dropped; a faint rose stained the white throat, crept to her dark hair.

“I – I am the Demoiselle de Tocquelain, messire,” she murmured. “And you—”

He recovered his courtesy with a shock. “Laveller – Peter Laveller – is my name, mademoiselle,” he stammered. “Pardon my rudeness – but how I came here I know not – nor from whence, save that it was – it was a place unlike this. And you – you are so beautiful, mademoiselle!”

The clear eyes raised themselves for a moment, a touch of roguishness in their depths, then dropped demurely once more – but the blush deepened.

He watched her, all his awakening heart in his eyes; then perplexity awoke, touched him insistently.

“Will you tell me what place this is, mademoiselle,” he faltered, “and how I came here, if you—” He stopped. From far, far away, from league upon league of space, a vast weariness was sweeping down upon him. He sensed it coming – closer, closer; it touched him; it lapped about him; he was sinking under it; being lost – falling – falling—

Two soft, warm hands gripped his. His tired head dropped upon them. Through the little palms that clasped so tightly pulsed rest and strength. The weariness gathered itself, began to withdraw slowly, so slowly – and was gone!

In its wake followed an ineffable, an uncontrollable desire to weep – to weep in relief that the weariness had passed, that the devil world whose shadows still lingered in his mind was behind him, and that he was here with this maid. And his tears fell, bathing the little hands.

Did he feel her head bent to his, her lips touch his hair? Peace came to him. He rose shamefacedly.

“I do not know why I wept, mademoiselle—” he began; and then saw that her white fingers were clasped now in his blackened ones. He released them in sudden panic.

“I am sorry,” he stammered. “I ought not touch you—”

She reached out swiftly, took his hands again in hers, patted them half savagely.

Her eyes flashed.

“I do not see them as you do, Messire Pierre,” she answered. “And if I did, are not their stains to me as the stains from hearts of her brave sons on the gonfalons of France? Think no more of your stains save as decorations, messire.”

France – France? Why, that was the name of the world he had left behind; the world where men sought vainly for sleep, and the dead danced.

The dead danced – what did that mean?. He turned wistful eyes to her.

And with a little cry of pity she clung to him for a moment.

“You are so tired – and you are so hungry,” she mourned. “And think no more, nor try to remember, messire, till you have eaten and drunk with us and rested for a space.”

They had turned. And now Laveller saw not far away a chateau. It was pinnacled and stately, serene in its gray stone and lordly with its spires and slender turrets thrust skyward from its crest like plumes flung high from some proud prince’s helm. Hand in hand like children the Demoiselle de Tocquelain and Peter

Laveller approached it over the greensward.

“It is my home, messire,” the girl said. “And there among the roses my mother awaits us. My father is away, and he will be sorrowful that he met you not, but you shall meet him when you return.”

He was to return, then? That meant he was not to stay. But where was he to go – whence was he to return? His mind groped blindly; cleared again. He was walking among roses; there were roses everywhere, great, fragrant, opened blooms of scarlets and of saffrons, of shell pinks and white; clusters and banks of them, climbing up the terraces, masking the base of the chateau with perfumed tide.

And as he and the maid, still hand in hand, passed between them, they came to a table dressed with snowy napery and pale porcelains beneath a bower.

A woman sat there. She was a little past the prime of life, Peter thought. Her hair, he saw, was powdered white, her cheeks as pink and white as a child’s, her eyes the sparkling brown of those of the demoiselle – and gracious – gracious, Peter thought, as some grande dame of old France.

The demoiselle dropped her a low curtsy.

“Ma mere,” she said, “I bring you the Sieur Pierre la Valliere, a very brave and gallant gentleman who has come to visit us for a little while.”

The clear eyes of the older woman scanned him, searched him. Then the stately white head bowed, and over the table a delicate hand was stretched toward him.

It was meant for him to kiss, he knew – but he hesitated awkwardly, miserably, looking at his begrimed own.

“The Sieur Pierre will not see himself as we do,” the girl said in half merry reproof; then she laughed, a caressing, golden chiming, “Ma mere, shall he see his hands as we do?”

The white-haired woman smiled and nodded, her eyes kindly and, Laveller noted, with that same pity in them as had been in those of the demoiselle when first he had turned and beheld her.

The girl touched Peter’s eyes lightly, held his palms up before him – they were white and fine and clean and in some unfamiliar way beautiful!

Again the indefinable amaze stifled him, but his breeding told. He conquered the sense of strangeness, bowed from the hips, took the dainty fingers of the stately lady in his, and raised them to his lips.

She struck a silver bell. Through the roses came two tall men in livery, who took from Laveller his greatcoat. They were followed by four small black boys in gay scarlet slashed with gold. They bore silver platters on which were meat and fine white bread and cakes, fruit, and wine in tall crystal flagons.

And Laveller remembered how hungry he was. But of that feast he remembered little – up to a certain point. He knows that he sat there filled with a happiness and content that surpassed the sum of happiness of all his twenty-five years.

The mother spoke little, but the Demoiselle Lucie and Peter Laveller chattered and laughed like children – when they were not silent and drinking each the other in.

And ever in Laveller’s heart an adoration for this maid, met so perplexingly, grew – grew until it seemed that his heart could not hold his joy. Ever the maid’s eyes as they rested on his were softer, more tender, filled with promise; and the proud face beneath the snowy hair became, as it watched them, the essence of that infinitely gentle sweetness that is the soul of the madonnas.

At last the Demoiselle de Tocquelain, glancing up and meeting that gaze, blushed, cast down her long lashes, and hung her head; then raised her eyes bravely.

“Are you content, my mother?” she asked gravely. “My daughter, I am well content,” came the smiling answer.

Swiftly followed the incredible, the terrible – in that scene of beauty and peace it was, said Laveller, like the flashing forth of a gorilla’s’ paw upon a virgin’s breast, a wail from deepest hell lancing through the song of angels.

At his right, among the roses, a light began to gleam – a fitful, flaring light that glared and died, glared and died. In it were two shapes. One had an arm clasped about the neck of the other; they leaned embracing in the light, and as it waxed and waned they seemed to pirouette, to try to break from it, to dash forward, to return – to dance!

The dead who danced!

A world where men sought rest and sleep, and could find neither, and where even the dead could find no rest, but must dance to the rhythm of the star-shells!

He groaned; sprang to his feet; watched, quivering in every nerve. Girl and woman followed his rigid gaze; turned to him again with tear-filled, pitiful eyes.

“It is nothing!” said the maid. “It is nothing! See – there is nothing there!”

Once more she touched his lids; and the light and the swaying forms were gone. But now Laveller knew. Back into his consciousness rushed the full tide of memory – memory of the mud and the filth, the stenches, and the fiery, slaying sounds, the cruelty, the misery and the hatreds; memory of torn men and tormented dead; memory of whence he had come, the trenches.

The trenches! He had fallen asleep, and all this was but a dream! He was sleeping at his post, while his comrades were trusting him to watch over them. And those two ghastly shapes among the roses – they were the two Scots on the wires summoning him back to his duty; beckoning, beckoning him to return. He must waken! He must waken!

Desperately he strove to drive himself from his garden of illusion; to force himself back to that devil world which during this hour of enchantment had been to his mind only as a fog bank on a far horizon. And as he struggled, the brown-eyed maid and the snowy-tressed woman watched – with ineffable pity, tears falling.

“The trenches!” gasped Laveller. “O God, wake me up! I must get back! O God, make me wake.”

“Am I only a dream, then, ma mie?”

It was the Demoiselle Lucie’s voice – a bit piteous, the golden tones shaken.

“I must get back,” he groaned – although at her question his heart seemed to die within him. “Let me wake!”

“Am I a dream?” Now the voice was angry; the demoiselle drew close. “Am I not real?”

A little foot stamped furiously on his, a little hand darted out, pinched him viciously close above his elbow. He felt the sting of the pain and rubbed it, gazing at her stupidly.

“Am I a dream, think you?” she murmured, and, raising her palms, set them on his temples, bringing down his head until his eyes looked straight into hers.

Laveller gazed – gazed down, down deep into their depths, lost himself in them, felt his heart rise like the spring from what he saw there. Her warm, sweet breath fanned his cheek; whatever this was, wherever he was – she was no dream!

“But I must return – get back to my trench!” The soldier in him clung to the necessity.

“My son” – it was the mother speaking now – “my son, you are in your trench.”

Laveller gazed at her, bewildered. His eyes swept the lovely scene about him. When he turned to her again it was with the look of a sorely perplexed child. She smiled.

“Have no fear,” she said. “Everything is well. You are in your trench – but your trench centuries ago; yes, twice a hundred years ago, counting time as you do – and as once we did.”

A chill ran through him. Were they mad? Was he mad? His arm slipped down over a soft shoulder; the touch steadied him.

“And you?” he forced himself to ask. He caught a swift glance between the two, and in answer to some unspoken question the mother nodded. The Demoiselle Lucie pressed soft hands against Peter’s face, looked again into his eyes.

“Ma mie,” she said gently, “we have been” – she hesitated – “what you call – dead – to your world these two hundred years!”

But before she had spoken the words Laveller, I think, had sensed what was coming. And if for a fleeting instant he had felt a touch of ice in every vein, it vanished beneath the exaltation that raced through him, vanished as frost beneath a mist-scattering sun. For if this were true – why, then there was no such thing as death! And it was true!

It was true! He knew it with a shining certainty that had upon it not the shadow of a shadow – but how much his desire to believe entered into this certainty who can tell?

He looked at the chateau. Of course! It was that whose ruins loomed out of the darkness when the flares split the night – in whose cellars he had longed to sleep. Death – oh, the foolish, fearful hearts of men! – this death? This glorious place of peace and beauty? And this wondrous girl whose brown eyes were the keys of heart’s desire! Death – he laughed and laughed again.

Another thought struck him, swept through him like a torrent. He must get back, must get back to the trenches and tell them this great truth he had found. Why, he was like a traveler from a dying world who unwittingly stumbles upon a secret to turn that world dead to hope into a living heaven!

There was no longer need for men to fear the splintering shell, the fire that seared them, the bullets, or the shining steel. What did they matter when this – this – was the truth? He must get back and tell them. Even those two Scots would lie still on the wires when he whispered this to them.

But he forgot – they knew now. But they could not return to tell – as he could. He was wild with joy, exultant, lifted up to the skies, a demigod – the bearer of a truth that would free the devil-ridden world from its demons; a new Prometheus who bore back to mankind a more precious flame than had the old.

“I must go!” he cried. “I must tell them! Show me how to return – swiftly!”

A doubt assailed him; he pondered it.

“But they may not believe me,” he whispered. “No. I must show them proof. I must carry something back to prove this to them.”

The Lady of Tocquelain smiled. She lifted a little knife from the table and, reaching over to a rose-tree, cut from it a cluster of buds; thrust it toward his eager hand.

Before he could grasp it the maid had taken it.

“Wait!” she murmured. “I will give you another message.”

There was a quill and ink upon the table, and Peter wondered how they had come; he had not seen them before – but with so many wonders, what was this small one? There was a slip of paper in the Demoiselle Lucie’s hand, too. She bent her little, dusky head and wrote; blew upon the paper, waved it in the air to dry; sighed, smiled at Peter, and wrapped it about the stem of the rosebud cluster; placed it on the table, and waved back Peter’s questing hand.

“Your coat,” she said. “You’ll need it – for now you must go back.”

She thrust his arms into the garment. She was laughing – but there were tears in the great, brown eyes; the red mouth was very wistful.

Now the older woman arose, stretched out her hand again; Laveller bent over it, kissed it.

“We shall be here waiting for you, my son,” she said softly. “When it is time for you to – come back.”

He reached for the roses with the paper wrapped about their stem. The maid darted a hand over his, lifted them before he could touch them.

“You must not read it until you have gone,” she said – and again the rose flame burned throat and cheeks.

Hand in hand, like children, they sped over the greensward to where Peter had first met her. There they stopped, regarding each other gravely – and then that other miracle which had happened to Laveller and that he had forgotten in the shock of his wider realization called for utterance.

“I love you!” whispered Peter Laveller to this living, long-dead Demoiselle de Tocquelain.

She sighed, and was in his arms.

“Oh, I know you do!” she cried. “I know you do, dear one – but I was so afraid you would go without telling-me so.”

She raised her sweet lips, pressed them long to his; drew back.

“I loved you from the moment I saw you standing here,” she told him, “and I will be here waiting for you when you return. And now you must go, dear love of mine; but wait—”

He felt a hand steal into the pocket of his tunic, press something over his heart.

“The messages,” she said. “Take them. And remember – I will wait. I promise. I, Lucie de Tocquelain—”

There was a singing in his head. He opened his eyes. He was back in his trench, and in his ears still rang the name of the demoiselle, and over his heart he felt still the pressure of her hand. His head was half turned toward three men who were regarding him.

One of them had a watch in his hand; it was the surgeon. Why was he looking at his watch? Had he been gone long? he wondered.

Well, what did it matter, when he was the bearer of such a message? His weariness had gone; he was transformed, jubilant; his soul was shouting paeans. Forgetting discipline, he sprang toward the three.

“There is no such thing as death!” be cried. “We must send this message along the lines – at once! At once, do you understand! Tell it to the world – I have proof—”

He stammered and choked in his eagerness. The three glanced at each other. His major lifted his electric flash, clicked it in Peter’s face, started oddly – then quietly walked over and stood between the lad and his rifle.

“Just get your breath a moment, my boy, and then tell us all about it,” he said.

They were devilishly unconcerned, were they not? Well, wait till they had heard what he had to tell them!

And tell them Peter did, leaving out only what had passed between him and the demoiselle – for, after all, wasn’t that their own personal affair? And gravely and silently they listened to him. But always the trouble deepened in his major’s eyes as Laveller poured forth the story.

“And then – I came back, came back as quickly as I could, to help us all; to lift us out of all this” – his hands swept out in a wide gesture of disgust – “for none of it matters! When we die – we live!” he ended.

Upon the face of the man of science rested profound satisfaction.

“A perfect demonstration; better than I could ever have hoped!” he spoke over Laveller’s head to the major. “Great, how great is the imagination of man!”

There was a tinge of awe in his voice.

Imagination? Peter was cut to the sensitive, vibrant soul of him.

They didn’t believe him! He would show them!

“But I have the proof!” he cried.

He threw open his greatcoat, ran his hand into his tunic-pocket; his fingers closed over a bit of paper wrapped around a stem. Ah – now he would show them!

He drew it out, thrust it toward them.

“Look!” His voice was like a triumphal trumpet-call.

What was the matter with them? Could they not see? Why did their eyes search his face instead of realizing what he was offering them? He looked at what he held – then, incredulous; brought it close to his own eyes – gazed and gazed, with a sound in his ears as though the universe were slipping away around him, with a heart that seemed to have forgotten to beat. For in his hand, stem wrapped in paper, was no fresh and fragrant rosebud cluster his brown-eyed demoiselle’s mother had clipped for him in the garden.

No – there was but a sprig of artificial buds, worn and torn and stained, faded and old!

A great numbness crept over Peter.

Dumbly he looked at the surgeon, at his captain, at the major whose face was now troubled indeed and somewhat stern.

“What does it mean?” he muttered.

Had it all been a dream? Was there no radiant Lucie – save in his own mind – no brown-eyed maid who loved him and whom he loved?

The scientist stepped forward, took the worn little sprig from the relaxed grip. The bit of paper slipped off, remained in Peter’s fingers.

“You certainly deserve to know just what you’ve been through, my boy,” the urbane, capable voice beat upon his dulled hearing, “after such a reaction as you have provided to our little experiment.” He laughed pleasantly.

Experiment? Experiment? A dull rage began to grow in Peter – vicious, slowly rising.

“Messieur!” called the major appealingly, somewhat warningly, it seemed, to his distinguished visitor.

“Oh, by your leave, major,” went on the great man, “here is a lad of high intelligence – of education, you could know that by the way he expressed himself – he will understand.”

The major was not a scientist – he was a Frenchman, human, and with an imagination of his own. He shrugged; but he moved a little closer to the resting rifle.

“We had been discussing, your officers and I,” the capable voice went on, “dreams that are the half-awakened mind’s effort to explain some touch, some unfamiliar sound, or what not that has aroused it from its sleep. One is slumbering, say, and a window nearby is broken. The sleeper hears, the consciousness endeavors to learn – but it has given over its control to the subconscious. And this rises accommodatingly to its mate’s assistance. But it is irresponsible, and it can express itself only in pictures.

“It takes the sound and – well, weaves a little romance around it. It does its best to explain – alas! Its best is only a more or less fantastic lie – recognized as such by the consciousness the moment it becomes awake.

“And the movement of the subconsciousness in this picture production is inconceivably rapid. It can depict in the fraction of a second a series of incidents that if actually lived would take hours – yes, days – of time. You follow me, do you not? Perhaps you recognize the experience I outline?”

Laveller nodded. The bitter, consuming rage was mounting within him steadily. But he was outwardly calm, all alert. He would hear what this self-satisfied devil had done to him, and then—

“Your officers disagreed with some of my conclusions. I saw you here, weary, concentrated upon the duty at hand, half in hypnosis from the strain and the steady flaring and dying of the lights. You offered a perfect clinical subject, a laboratory test unexcelled—”

Could he keep his hands from his throat until he had finished? Laveller wondered. Lucie, his Lucie, a fantastic lie—

“Steady, mon vieux” – it was his major whispering. Ah, when he struck, he must do it quickly – his officer was too close, too close. Still – he must keep his watch for him through the slit. He would be peering there, perhaps, when he, Peter, leaped.

“And so” – the surgeon’s tones were in his best student-clinic manner – “and so I took a little sprig of artificial flowers that I had found pressed between the leaves of an old missal I had picked up in the ruins of the chateau yonder. On a slip of paper I wrote a line of French – for then I thought you a French soldier. It was a simple line from the ballad of Aucassin and Nicolette—

And there she waits to greet him when all his days are run.

“Also, there was a name written on the title-page of the missal, the name, no doubt, of its long-dead owner – ‘Lucie de Tocquelain’—”

Lucie! Peter’s rage and hatred were beaten back by a great surge of longing – rushed back stronger than ever.

“So I passed the sprig of flowers before your unseeing eyes; consciously unseeing, I mean, for it was certain your subconsciousness would take note of them. I showed you the line of writing – your subconsciousness absorbed this, too, with its suggestion of a love troth, a separation, an awaiting. I wrapped it about the stem of the sprig, I thrust them both into your pocket, and called the name of Lucie de Tocquelain into your ear.

“The problem was what your other self would make of those four things – the ancient cluster, the suggestion in the line of writing, the touch, and the name – a fascinating problem, indeed!

“And hardly had I withdrawn my hand, almost before my lips closed on the word I had whispered – you had turned to us shouting that there was no such thing as death, and pouring out, like one inspired, that remarkable story of yours – all, all built by your imagination from—”

But he got no further. The searing rage in Laveller had burst all bounds, had flared forth murderously and hurled him silently at the surgeon’s throat. There were flashes of flame before his eyes – red, sparkling sheets of flame. He would die for it, but he would kill this cold-blooded fiend who could take a man out of hell, open up to him heaven, and then thrust him back into hell grown now a hundred times more cruel, with all hope dead in him for eternity.

Before he could strike strong hands gripped him, held him fast. The scarlet, curtained flares before his eyes faded away. He thought he heard a tender, golden voice whispering to him:

“It is nothing! It is nothing! See as I do!”

He was standing between his officers, who held him fast on each side. They were silent, looking at the now white-faced surgeon with more than somewhat of cold, unfriendly sternness in their eyes.

“My boy, my boy” – that scientist’s poise was gone; his voice trembling, agitated. “I did not understand – I am sorry – I never thought you would take it so seriously.”

Laveller spoke to his officers – quietly. “It is over, sirs. You need not hold me.”

They looked at him, released him, patted him on the shoulder, fixed again their visitor with that same utter contempt.

Laveller turned stumblingly to the parapet. His eyes were full of tears. Brain and heart and soul were nothing but a blind desolation, a waste utterly barren of hope or of even the ghost of the wish to hope. That message of his, the sacred truth that was to set the feet of a tormented world on the path to paradise – a dream.

His Lucie, his brown-eyed demoiselle who had murmured her love for him – a thing compounded of a word, a touch, a writing, and an artificial flower!

He could not, would not believe it. Why, he could feel still the touch of her soft lips on his, her warm body quivering in his arms. And she had said he would come back – and promised to wait for him.

What was that in his hand? It was the paper that had wrapped the rosebuds – the cursed paper with which that cold devil had experimented with him.

Laveller crumpled it savagely – raised it to hurl it at his feet.

Someone seemed to stay his hand.

Slowly he opened it.

The three men watching him saw a glory steal over his face, a radiance like that of a soul redeemed from endless torture. All its sorrow, its agony, was wiped out, leaving it a boy’s once more.

He stood wide-eyed, dreaming.

The major stepped forward, gently drew the paper from Laveller.

There were many star-shells floating on high now, the trench was filled with their glare, and in their light he scanned the fragment.

On his face when he raised it there was a great awe – and as they took it from him and read this same awe dropped down upon the others like a veil.

For over the line the surgeon had written were now three other lines – in old French—

Nor grieve, dear heart, nor fear the seeming – Here is waking after dreaming.

She who loves you, Lucie.

That was McAndrews’s story, and it was Hawtry who finally broke the silence that followed his telling of it.

“The lines had been on the paper, of course,” he said; “they were probably faint, and your surgeon had not noticed them. It was drizzling, and the dampness brought them out.”

“No,” answered McAndrews; “they had not been there.”

“But how can you be so sure?” remonstrated the Psychologist.

“Because I was the surgeon,” said McAndrews Quietly. “The paper was a page torn from my note book. When I wrapped it about the sprig it was blank – except for the line I myself had written there.

“But there was one more bit of – well, shall we call it evidence, John? – the hand in which Laveller’s message was penned was the hand in the missal in which I had found the flowers – and the signature ‘Lucie’ was that same signature, curve for curve and quaint, old-fashioned angle for angle.”

A longer silence fell, broken once more by Hawtry, abruptly.

“What became of the paper?” he asked. “Was the ink analyzed? Was—”

“As we stood there wondering,” interrupted McAndrews, “a squall swept down upon the trench. It tore the paper from my hand; carried it away. Laveller watched it go; made no effort to get it.”

“‘It does not matter. I know now,’ he said – and smiled at me, the forgiving, happy smile of a joyous boy. ‘I apologize to you, doctor. You’re the best friend I ever had. I thought at first you had done to me what no other man would do to another – I see now that you have done for me what no other man could.’

“And that is all. He went through the war neither seeking death nor avoiding it. I loved him like a son. He would have died after that Mount Kemmel affair had it not been for me. He wanted to live long enough to bid his father and sister goodby, and I – patched him up. He did it, and then set forth for the trench beneath the shadow of the ruined old chateau where his brown-eyed demoiselle had found him.”

“Why?” asked Hawtry.

“Because he thought that from there he could – go back – to her more quickly.”

“To me an absolutely unwarranted conclusion,” said the psychologist, wholly irritated, half angry. “There is some simple, natural explanation of it all.”

“Of course, John,” answered McAndrews soothingly – “of course there is. Tell us it, can’t you?”

But Hawtry, it seemed, could not offer any particulars.

First published in
All-Story Weekly, 9 Aug 1919

Reprinted in
A. Merritt’s Fantasy Magazine, Feb 1950

THE  POOL
OF  THE  STONE  GOD

This is Professor James Marston’s story. A score of learned bodies have courteously heard him tell it, and then among themselves have lamented that so brilliant a man should have such an obsession. Professor Marston told it to me in San Francisco, just before he started to find the island that holds his pool of the stone god and – the wings that guard it. He seemed to me very sane. It is true that the equipment of his expedition was unusual, and not the least curious part of it are the suits of fine chain mail and masks and gauntlets with which each man of the party is provided.

The five of us, said Professor Marston, sat side by side on the beach. There was Wilkinson the first officer, Bates and Cassidy the two seamen, Waters the pearler and myself. We had all been on our way to New Guinea, I to study the fossils for the Smithsonian. The Moranus had struck the hidden reef the night before and had sunk swiftly. We were then, roughly, about five hundred miles northeast of the Guinea coast. The five of us had managed to drop a lifeboat and get away. The boat was well stocked with water and provisions. Whether the rest of the crew had escaped we did not know. We had sighted the island at dawn and had made for her. The lifeboat was drawn safely up on the sands.

“We’d better explore a bit, anyway,” said Waters. “This may be a perfect place for us to wait rescue. At least until the typhoon season is over. We’ve our pistols. Let’s start by following this brook to its source, look over the place and then decide what we’ll do.”

The trees began to thin out. We saw ahead an open space. We reached it and stopped in sheer amazement. The clearing was perfectly square and about five hundred feet wide. The trees stopped abruptly at its edges as though held back by something unseen.

But it was not this singular impression that held us. At the far end of the square were a dozen stone huts clustered about one slightly larger. They reminded me powerfully of those prehistoric structures you see in parts of England and France. I approach now the most singular thing about this whole singular and sinister place. In the center of the space was a pool walled about with huge blocks of cut stone. At the side of the pool rose a great stone figure, carved in the semblance of a man with outstretched hands. It was at least twenty feet high and was extremely well executed. At the distance the statue seemed nude and yet it had a peculiar effect of drapery about it. As we drew nearer we saw that it was covered from ankles to neck with the most extraordinary carved wings. They looked exactly like bat wings when they were folded.

There was something extremely disquieting about this figure. The face was inexpressibly ugly and malignant. The eyes, Mongol-shaped, slanted evil. It was not from the face, though, that this feeling seemed to emanate. It was from the body covered with wings – and especially from the wings. They were part of the idol and yet they gave one the idea that they were clinging to it.

Cassidy, a big brute of a man, swaggered up to the idol and laid his hand on it. He drew it away quickly, his face white, his mouth twitching. I followed him and conquering my unscientific repugnance, examined the stone. It, like the huts and in fact the whole place, was clearly the work of that forgotten race whose monuments are scattered over the Southern Pacific. The carving of the wings was wonderful. They were bat-like, as I have said, folded and each ended in a little ring of conventionalized feathers. They ranged in size from four to ten inches. I ran my fingers over one. Never have I felt the equal of the nausea that sent me to my knees before the idol. The wing had felt like smooth, cold stone, but I had the sensation of having touched back of the stone some monstrous obscene creature of a lower world. The sensation came of course, I reasoned, only from the temperature and texture of the stone – and yet this did not really satisfy me.

Dusk was soon due. We decided to return to the beach and examine the clearing further on the morrow. I desired greatly to explore the stone huts.

We started back through the forest. We walked some distance and then night fell. We lost the brook. After a half hour’s wandering we heard it again. We started for it. The trees began to thin out and we thought we were approaching the beach. Then Waters clutched my arm. I stopped. Directly in front of us was the open space with the stone god leering under the moon and the green water shining at his feet!

We had made a circle. Bates and Wilkinson were exhausted. Cassidy swore that devils or no devils he was going to camp that night beside the pool!

The moon was very bright. And it was so very quiet. My scientific curiosity got the better of me and I thought I would examine the huts. I left Bates on guard and walked over to the largest. There was only one room and the moonlight shining through the chinks in the wall illuminated it clearly. At the back were two small basins set in the stone. I looked in one and saw a faint reddish gleam reflected from a number of globular objects. I drew a half dozen of them out. They were pearls, very wonderful pearls of a peculiarly rosy hue. I ran toward the door to call Bates – and stopped!

My eyes had been drawn to the stone idol. Was it an effect of the moonlight or did it move? No, it was the wings! They stood out from the stone and waved – they waved, I say, from the ankles to the neck of that monstrous statue.

Bates had seen them, too. He was standing with his pistol raised. Then there was a shot. And after that the air was filled with a rushing sound like that of a thousand fans. I saw the wings loose themselves from the stone god and sweep down in a cloud upon the four men. Another cloud raced up from the pool and joined them. I could not move. The wings circled swiftly around and about the four. All were now on their feet and I never saw such horror as was in their faces.

Then the wings closed in. They clung to my companions as they had clung to the stone.

I fell back into the hut. I lay there through the night insane with terror. Many times I heard the fan-like rushing about the enclosure, but nothing entered my hut. Dawn came, and silence, and I dragged myself to the door. There stood the stone god with the wings carved upon him as we had seen him ten hours before!

I ran over to the four lying on the grass. I thought that perhaps I had had a nightmare. But they were dead. That was not the worst of it. Each man was shrunken to his bones! They looked like collapsed white balloons. There was not a drop of blood in them. They were nothing but bones wrapped around in thin skin!

Mastering myself, I went close to the idol. There was something different about it. It seemed larger – as though, the thought went through my mind, as though it had eaten. Then I saw that it was covered with tiny drops of blood that had dropped from the ends of the wings that clothed it!

I do not remember what happened afterward. I awoke on the pearling schooner Luana which had picked me up, crazed with thirst as they supposed in the boat of the Moranus.

(written under the pseudonym W. Fenimore)

First published in
American Weekly, 23 Sep 1923

THE  WOMEN
OF  THE  WOOD

McKay sat on the balcony of the little inn that squatted like a brown gnome among the pines on the eastern shore of the lake.

It was a small and lonely lake high up in the Vosges; and yet, lonely is not just the word with which to tag its spirit; rather was it aloof, withdrawn. The mountains came down on every side, making a great tree-lined bowl that seemed, when McKay first saw it, to be filled with the still wine of peace.

McKay had worn the wings in the world war with honor, flying first with the French and later with his own country’s forces. And as a bird loves the trees, so did McKay love them. To him they were not merely trunks and roots, branches and leaves; to him they were personalities. He was acutely aware of differences in character even among the same species – that pine was benevolent and jolly; that one austere and monkish; there stood a swaggering bravo, and there dwelt a sage wrapped in green meditation; that birch was a wanton – the birch near her was virginal, still a-dream.

The war had sapped him, nerve and brain and soul. Through all the years that had passed since then the wound had kept open. But now, as he slid his car down the vast green bowl, he felt its spirit reach out to him; reach out to him and caress and quiet him, promising him healing. He seemed to drift like a falling leaf through the clustered woods; to be cradled by gentle hands of the trees.

He had stopped at the little gnome of an inn, and there he had lingered, day after day, week after week.

The trees had nursed him; soft whisperings of leaves, slow chant of the needled pines, had first deadened, then driven from him the re-echoing clamor of the war and its sorrow. The open wound of his spirit had closed under their green healing; had closed and become scar; and even the scar had been covered and buried, as the scars on Earth’s breast are covered and buried beneath the falling leaves of Autumn. The trees had laid green healing hands on his eyes, banishing the pictures of war. He had sucked strength from the green breasts of the hills.

Yet as strength flowed back to him and mind and spirit healed, McKay had grown steadily aware that the place was troubled; that its tranquility was not perfect; that there was ferment of fear within it.

It was as though the trees had waited until he himself had become whole before they made their own unrest known to him. Now they were trying to tell him something; there was a shrillness as of apprehension, of anger, in the whispering of the leaves, the needled chanting of the pines.

And it was this that had kept McKay at the inn – a definite consciousness of appeal, consciousness of something wrong – something wrong that he was being asked to right. He strained his ears to catch words in the rustling branches, words that trembled on the brink of his human understanding.

Never did they cross that brink.

Gradually he had orientated himself, had focused himself, so he believed, to the point of the valley’s unease.

On all the shores of the lake there were but two dwellings. One was the inn, and around the inn the trees clustered protectively, confiding; friendly. It was as though they had not only accepted it, but had made it part of themselves.

Not so was it of the other habitation. Once it had been the hunting lodge of long dead lords; now it was half ruined, forlorn. It stood across the lake almost exactly opposite the inn and back upon the slope a half mile from the shore. Once there had been fat fields around it and a fair orchard.

The forest had marched down upon them. Here and there in the fields, scattered pines and poplars stood like soldiers guarding some outpost; scouting parties of saplings lurked among the gaunt and broken fruit trees. But the forest had not had its way unchecked; ragged stumps showed where those who dwelt in the old lodge had cut down the invaders, blackened patches of the woodland showed where they had fired the woods.

Here was the conflict he had sensed. Here the green folk of the forest were both menaced and menacing; at war. The lodge was a fortress beleaguered by the woods, a fortress whose garrison sallied forth with axe and torch to take their toll of the besiegers.

Yet McKay sensed the inexorable pressing-in of the forest; he saw it as a green army ever filling the gaps in its enclosing ranks, shooting its seeds into the cleared places, sending its roots out to sap them; and armed always with a crushing patience, a patience drawn from the stone breasts of the eternal hills.

He had the impression of constant regard of watchfulness, as though night and day the forest kept its myriads of eyes upon the lodge; inexorably, not to be swerved from its purpose. He had spoken of this impression to the inn keeper and his wife, and they had looked at him oddly.

“Old Polleau does not love the trees, no,” the old man had said. “No, nor do his two sons. They do not love the trees – and very certainly the trees do not love them.”

Between the lodge and the shore, marching down to the verge of the lake was a singularly beautiful little coppice of silver birches and firs. The coppice stretched for perhaps a quarter of a mile, was not more than a hundred feet or two in depth, and it was not alone the beauty of its trees but their curious grouping that aroused McKay’s interest so vividly. At each end of the coppice were a dozen or more of the glistening needled firs, not clustered but spread out as though in open marching order; at widely spaced intervals along its other two sides paced single firs. The birches, slender and delicate, grew within the guard of these sturdier trees, yet not so thickly as to crowd each other.

To McKay the silver birches were for all the world like some gay caravan of lovely demoiselles under the protection of debonair knights. With that odd other sense of his he saw the birches as delectable damsels, merry and laughing – the pines as lovers, troubadours in their green needled mail. And when the winds blew and the crests of the trees bent under them, it was as though dainty demoiselles picked up fluttering, leafy skirts, bent leafy hoods and danced while the knights of the firs drew closer round them, locked arms with theirs and danced with them to the roaring horns of the winds. At such times he almost heard sweet laughter from the birches, shoutings from the firs.

Of all the trees in that place McKay loved best this little wood; had rowed across and rested in its shade, had dreamed there and, dreaming, had heard again elfin echoes of the sweet laughter; eyes closed, had heard mysterious whisperings and the sound of dancing feet light as falling leaves; had taken dream draught of that gaiety which was the soul of the little wood.

And two days ago he had seen Polleau and his two sons. McKay had been dreaming in the coppice all that afternoon. As dusk began to fall he had reluctantly arisen and begun the row back to the inn. When he had been a few hundred feet from shore three men had come out from the trees and had stood watching him – three grim, powerful men taller than the average French peasant.

He had called a friendly greeting to them, but they had not answered it; stood there, scowling. Then as he bent again to his oars, one of the sons had raised a hatchet and had driven it savagely into the trunk of a slim birch beside him. He thought he heard a thin wailing cry from the stricken tree, a sigh from all the little wood.

McKay had felt as though the keen edge had bitten into his own flesh.

“Stop that!” he had cried, “Stop it, damn you!”

For answer the son had struck again – and never had McKay seen hate etched so deep as on his face as he struck. Cursing, a killing rage in heart, had swung the boat around, raced back to shore. He had heard the hatchet strike again and again and, close now to shore, had heard a crackling and over it once more the thin, high wailing. He had turned to look.

The birch was tottering, was falling. But as it had fallen he had seen a curious thing. Close beside it grew one of the firs, and, as the smaller tree crashed over, it dropped upon the fir like a fainting maid in the arms of a lover. And as it lay and trembled there, one of the great branches of the fir slipped from under it, whipped out and smote the hatchet wielder a crushing blow upon the head, sending him to earth.

It had been, of course, only the chance blow of a bough, bent by pressure of the fallen tree and then released as that tree slipped down. But there had been such suggestion of conscious action in the branch’s recoil, so much of bitter anger in it, so much, in truth, had it been like the vengeful blow of a man that McKay had felt an eerie prickling of his scalp, his heart had missed its beat.

For a moment Polleau and the standing son had stared at the sturdy fir with the silvery birch lying on its green breast and folded in, shielded by, its needled boughs as though – again the swift impression came to McKay – as though it were a wounded maid stretched on breast, in arms, of knightly lover. For a long moment father and son had stared.

Then, still wordless but with that same bitter hatred on both their faces, they had stopped and picked up the other and with his arms around the neck of each had borne him limply away.

McKay, sitting on the balcony of the inn that morning, went over and over that scene; realized more and more clearly the human aspect of fallen birch and clasping fir, and the conscious deliberateness of the fir’s blow. And during the two days that had elapsed since then, he had felt the unease of the trees increase, their whispering appeal became more urgent.

What were they trying to tell him? What did they want him to do?

Troubled, he stared across the lake, trying to pierce the mists that hung over it and hid the opposite shore. And suddenly it seemed that he heard the coppice calling him, felt it pull the point of his attention toward it irresistibly, as the lodestone swings and holds the compass needle.

The coppice called him, bade him come to it.

Instantly McKay obeyed the command; he arose and walked down to the boat landing; he stepped into his skin and began to row across the lake. As his oars touched the water his trouble fell from him. In its place flowed peace and a curious exaltation.

The mist was thick upon the lake. There was no breath of wind, yet the mist billowed and drifted, shook and curtained under the touch of unfelt airy hands.

They were alive – the mists; they formed themselves into fantastic palaces past whose opalescent facades he flew; they built themselves into hills and valleys and circled plains whose floors were rippling silk. Tiny rainbows gleamed out among them, and upon the water prismatic patches shone and spread like spilled wine of opals. He had the illusion of vast distances – the hills of mist were real mountains, the valleys between them were not illusory. He was a colossus cleaving through some elfin world. A trout broke, and it was like leviathan leaping from the fathomless deep. Around the arc of its body rainbows interlaced and then dissolved into rain of softly gleaming gems – diamonds in dance with sapphires, flame-hearted rubies and pearls with shimmering souls of rose. The fish vanished, diving cleanly without sound; the jeweled bows vanished with it; a tiny irised whirlpool swirled for an instant where trout and flashing arcs had been.

Nowhere was there sound. He let his oars drop and leaned forward, drifting. In the silence, before him and around him, he felt opening the gateways of an unknown world.

And suddenly he heard the sound of voices, many voices; faint at first and murmurous; louder they became, swiftly; women’s voices sweet and lilting and mingled with them the deeper tones of men. Voices that lifted and fell in a wild, gay chanting through whose joyesse ran undertones both of sorrow and of rage – as though faery weavers threaded through silk spun of sunbeams sombre strands dipped in the black of graves and crimson strands stained in the red of wrathful sunsets.

He drifted on, scarce daring to breathe lest even that faint sound break the elfin song. Closer it rang and clearer; and now he became aware that the speed of his boat was increasing, that it was no longer drifting; that it was as though the little waves on each side were pushing him ahead with soft and noiseless palms. His boat grounded and as it rustled along over the smooth pebbles of the beach the song ceased.

McKay half arose and peered before him. The mists were thicker here but he could see the outlines of the coppice. It was like looking at it through many curtains of fine gauze; its trees seemed shifting, ethereal, unreal. And moving among the trees were figures that threaded the boles and flitted in rhythmic measures like the shadows of leafy boughs swaying to some cadenced wind.

He stepped ashore and made his way slowly toward them. The mists dropped behind him, shutting off all sight of shore.

The rhythmic Sittings ceased; there was now no movement as there was no sound among the trees – yet he felt the little woods a-brim with watching life. McKay tried to speak; there was a spell of silence on his mouth.

“You called me. I have come to listen to you – to help you if I can.”

The words formed within his mind, but utter them he could not. Over and over he tried, desperately; the words seemed to die before his lips could give them life.

A pillar of mist whirled forward and halted, eddying half an arm length away. And suddenly out of it peered a woman’s face, eyes level with his own. A woman’s face – yes; but McKay, staring into those strange eyes probing his, knew that face though it seemed it was that of no woman of human breed. They were without pupils, the irises deer-like and of the soft green of deep forest dells; within them sparkled tiny star points of light like motes in a moon beam. The eyes were wide and set far apart beneath a broad, low brow over which was piled braid upon braid of hair of palest gold, braids that seemed spun of shining ashes of gold. Her nose was small and straight, her mouth scarlet and exquisite. The face was oval, tapering to a delicately pointed chin.

Beautiful was that face, but its beauty was an alien one; elfin. For long moments the strange eyes thrust their gaze deep into his. Then out of the mist two slender white arms stole, the hands long, fingers tapering. The tapering fingers touched his ears.

“He shall hear,” whispered the red lips.

Immediately from all about him a cry arose; in it was the whispering and rustling of the leaves beneath the breath of the winds, the shrilling of the harp strings of the boughs, the laughter of hidden brooks, the shoutings of waters flinging themselves down to deep and rocky pools – the voices of the woods made articulate.

“He shall hear!” they cried.

The long white fingers rested on his lips, and their touch was cool as bark of birch on cheek after some long upward climb through forest; cool and subtly sweet.

“He shall speak,” whispered the scarlet lips.

“He shall speak!” answered the wood voices again, as though in litany.

“He shall see,” whispered the woman and the cool fingers touched his eyes.

“He shall see!” echoed the wood voices.

The mists that had hidden the coppice from McKay wavered, thinned and were gone. In their place was a limpid, translucent, palely green ether, faintly luminous – as though he stood within some clear wan emerald. His feet pressed a golden moss spangled with tiny starry bluets. Fully revealed before him was the woman of the strange eyes and the face of elfin beauty. He dwelt for a moment upon the slender shoulders, the firm small tip-tilted breasts, the willow litheness of her body. From neck to knees a smock covered her, sheer and silken and delicate as though spun of cobwebs; through it her body gleamed as though fire of the young Spring moon ran in her veins.

Beyond her, upon the golden moss were other women like her, many of them; they stared at him with the same wide set green eyes in which danced the clouds of sparkling moonbeam motes; like her they were crowned with glistening, pallidly golden hair; like hers too were their oval faces with the pointed chins and perilous elfin beauty. Only where she stared at him gravely, measuring him, weighing him – there were those of these her sisters whose eyes were mocking; and those whose eyes called to him with a weirdly tingling allure, their mouths athirst; those whose eyes looked upon him with curiosity alone and those whose great eyes pleaded with him, prayed to him.

Within that pellucid, greenly luminous air McKay was abruptly aware that the trees of the coppice still had a place. Only now they were spectral indeed; they were like white shadows cast athwart a glaucous screen; trunk and bough, twig and leaf they arose around him and they were as though etched in air by phantom craftsmen – thin, unsubstantial; they were ghost trees rooted in another space.

Suddenly he was aware that there were men among the women; men whose eyes were set wide apart as were theirs, as strange and pupilless as were theirs but with irises of brown and blue; men with pointed chins and oval faces, broad shouldered and clad in kirtles of darkest green; swarthy skinned men muscular and strong, with that same little grace of the women – and like them of a beauty alien and elfin.

McKay heard a little wailing cry. He turned. Close beside him lay a girl clasped in the arms of one of the swarthy, green clad men. She lay upon his breast. His eyes were filled with a black flame of wrath, and hers were misted, anguished. For an instant McKay had a glimpse of the birch old Polleau’s son had sent crashing down into the boughs of the fir. He saw birch and fir as immaterial outlines around the man and girl. For an instant girl and man and birch and fir seemed one and the same. The scarlet lipped woman touched his shoulder, and the confusion cleared.

“She withers,” sighed the woman, and in her voice McKay heard a faint rustling as of mournful leaves. “Now is it not pitiful that she withers – our sister who was so young, so slender and so lovely?”

McKay looked again at the girl. The white skin seemed shrunken; the moon radiance that gleamed through the bodies of the others in hers was dim and pallid; her slim arms hung listlessly; her body drooped. The mouth too was wan and parched, the long and misted green eyes dull. The palely golden hair lusterless, and dry. He looked on slow death – a withering death.

“May the arm that struck her down wither!” the green clad man who held her shouted, and in his voice McKay heard a savage strumming as of winter winds through bleak boughs: “May his heart wither and the sun blast him! May the rain and the waters deny him and the winds scourge him!”

“I thirst,” whispered the girl.

There was a stirring among the watching women. One came forward holding a chalice that was like thin leaves turned to green crystal. She paused beside the trunk of one of the spectral trees, reached up and drew down to her a branch. A slim girl with half-frightened, half-resentful eyes glided to her side and threw her arms around the ghostly bole. The woman with the chalice bent the branch and cut it deep with what seemed an arrow-shaped flake of jade. From the wound a faintly opalescent liquid slowly filled the cup. When it was filled the woman beside McKay stepped forward and pressed her own long hands around the bleeding branch. She stepped away and McKay saw that the stream had ceased to flow. She touched the trembling girl and unclasped her arms.

“It is healed,” said the woman gently. “And it was your turn little sister. The wound is healed. Soon, you will have forgotten.”

The woman with the chalice knelt and set it to the wan, dry lips of her who was – withering. She drank of it, thirstily, to the last drop. The misty eyes cleared, they sparkled; the lips that had been so parched and pale grew red, the white body gleamed as though the waning light had been fed with new.

“Sing, sisters,” she cried, and shrilly. “Dance for me, sisters!”

Again burst out that chant McKay had heard as he had floated through the mists upon the lake. Now, as then, despite his opened ears, he could distinguish no words, but clearly he understood its mingled themes – the joy of Spring’s awakening, rebirth, with the green life streaming singing up through every bough, swelling the buds, burgeoning with tender leaves the branches; the dance of the trees in the scented winds of Spring; the drums of the jubilant rain on leafy hoods; passion of Summer sun pouring its golden flood down upon the trees; the moon passing with stately step and slow and green hands stretching up to her and drawing from her breast milk of silver fire; riot of wild gay winds with their mad pipings and strummings; – soft interlacing of boughs, the kiss of amorous leaves – all these and more, much more that McKay could not understand since it dealt with hidden, secret things for which man has no images, were in that chanting.

And all these and more were in the measures, the rhythms of the dancing of those strange, green eyed women and brown skinned men; something incredibly ancient yet young as the speeding moment, something of a world before and beyond man.

McKay listened, McKay watched, lost in wonder; his own world more than half forgotten; his mind meshed in web of green sorcery.

The woman beside him touched his arm. She pointed to the girl.

“Yet she withers,” she said. “And not all our life, if we poured it through her lips, could save her.”

He looked; he saw that the red was draining slowly from the girl’s lips, the luminous life tides waning; the eyes that had been so bright were misting and growing dull once more, suddenly a great pity and a great rage shook him. He knelt beside her, took her hands in his.

“Take them away! Take away your hands! They burn me!” she moaned.

“He tries to help you,” whispered the green clad man, gently. But he reached over and drew McKay’s hands away.

“Not so can you help her,” said the woman.

“What can I do?” McKay arose, looked helplessly from one to the other. “What can I do to help?”

The chanting died, the dance stopped. A silence fell and he felt upon him the eyes of all. They were tense – waiting. The woman took his hands. Their touch was cool and sent a strange sweetness sweeping through his veins.

“There are three men yonder,” she said. “They hate us. Soon we shall be as she is there – withering. They have sworn it, and as they have sworn so will they do. Unless—”

She paused; and McKay felt the stirrings of a curious unease. The moonbeam dancing motes in her eyes had changed to tiny sparklings of red. In a way, deep down, they terrified him – those red sparklings.

“Three men?” – in his clouded mind was the memory of Polleau and his two strong sons. “Three men,” he repeated, stupidly – “But what are three men to you who are so many? What could three men do against those stalwart gallants of yours?”

“No,” she shook her head. “No – there is nothing our – men – can do; nothing that we can do. Once, night and day, we were gay. Now we fear – night and day. They mean to destroy us. Our kin have warned us. And our kin cannot help us. Those three are masters of blade and flame. Against blade and flame we are helpless.”

“Blade and flame!” echoed the listeners. “Against blade and flame we are helpless.”

“Surely will they destroy us,” murmured the woman. “We shall wither all of us. Like her there, or burn – unless—”

Suddenly she threw white arms around McKay’s neck. She pressed her lithe body close to him. Her scarlet mouth sought and found his lips and clung to them. Through all McKay’s body ran swift, sweet flames, green fire of desire. His own arms went round her, crushed her to him.

“You shall not die!” he cried. “No – by God, you shall not!”

She drew back her head, looked deep into his eyes.

“They have sworn to destroy us,” she said, “and soon. With blade and flame they will destroy us – these three – unless—”

“Unless?” he asked, fiercely.

“Unless you – slay them first!” she answered.

A cold shock ran through McKay, chilling the green sweet fires of his desire. He dropped his arm from around the woman; thrust her from him. For an instant she trembled before him.

“Slay!” he heard her whisper – and she was gone. The spectral trees wavered; their outlines thickened out of immateriality into substance. The green translucence darkened. He had a swift vertiginous moment as though he swung between two worlds. He closed his eyes. The vertigo passed and he opened them, looked around him.

McKay stood on the lake-ward skirts of the little coppice. There were no shadows flitting, no sign of the white women and the swarthy, green clad men. His feet were on green moss; gone was the soft golden carpet with its blue starlets. Birches and firs clustered solidly before him. At his left was a sturdy fir in whose needled arms a broken birch tree lay withering. It was the birch that Polleau’s men had so wantonly slashed down. For an instant he saw within the fir and birch the immaterial outlines of the green clad man and the slim girl who withered. For that instant birch and fir and girl and man seemed one and the same. He stepped back, and his hands touched the smooth, cool bark of another birch that rose close at his right.

Upon his hands the touch of that bark was like – was like? – yes, curiously was it like the touch of the long slim hands of the woman of the scarlet lips. But it gave him none of that alien rapture, that pulse of green life her touch had brought. Yet, now as then, the touch steadied him. The outlines of girl and man were gone.

He looked upon nothing but a sturdy fir with a withering birch fallen into its branches.

McKay stood there, staring, wondering, like a man who has but half awakened from dream. And suddenly a little wind stirred the leaves of the rounded birch beside him. The leaves murmured, sighed. The wind grew stronger and the leaves whispered.

“Slay!” he heard them whisper – and again: “Slay! Help us! Slay!”

And the whisper was the voice of the woman of the scarlet lips!

Rage, swift and unreasoning, sprang up in McKay. He began to run up through the coppice, up to where he knew was the old lodge in which dwelt Polleau and his sons. And as he ran the wind blew stronger, and louder and louder grew the whisperings of the trees.

“Slay!” they whispered. “Slay them! Save us! Slay!”

“I will slay! I will save you!” McKay, panting, hammer pulse beating in his ears, rushing through the woods heard himself answering that ever louder, ever more insistent command. And in his mind was but one desire – to clutch the throats of Polleau and his sons, to crack their necks; to stand by them then and watch them wither; wither like that slim girl in the arms of the green clad man.

So crying, he came to the edge of the coppice and burst from it out into a flood of sunshine. For a hundred feet he ran, and then he was aware that the whispering command was stilled; that he heard no more that maddening rustling of wrathful leaves. A spell seemed to have been loosed from him; it was as though he had broken through some web of sorcery. McKay stopped, dropped upon the ground, buried his face in the grasses.

He lay there, marshaling his thoughts into some order of sanity. What had he been about to do? To rush berserk upon those three who lived in the old lodge and – kill them! And for what? Because that elfin, scarlet lipped woman whose kisses he still could feel upon his mouth had bade him! Because the whispering trees of the little wood had maddened him with that same command!

And for this he had been about to kill three men!

What were that woman and her sisters and the green clad swarthy gallants of theirs? Illusions of some waking dream – phantoms born of the hypnosis of the swirling mists through which he had rowed and floated across the lake? Such things were not uncommon. McKay knew of those who by watching the shifting clouds could create and dwell for a time with wide open eyes within some similar land of fantasy; knew others who needed but to stare at smoothly falling water to set themselves within a world of waking dream; there were those who could summon dreams by gazing into a ball of crystal, others found their phantoms in saucers of shining ebon ink.

Might not the moving mists have laid those same hypnotic fingers upon his own mind – and his love for the trees the sense of appeal that he had felt so long and his memory of the wanton slaughter of the slim birch have all combined to paint upon his drugged consciousness the phantasms he had beheld?

Then in the flood of sunshine the spell had melted, his consciousness leaped awake?

McKay arose to his feet, shakily enough. He looked back at the coppice. There was no wind now, the leaves were silent, motionless. Again he saw it as the caravan of demoiselles with their marching knights and troubadours. But no longer was it gay. The words of the scarlet lipped woman came back to him – that gaiety had fled and fear had taken its place. Dream phantom or – dryad, whatever she was, half of that at least was truth.

He turned, a plan forming in his mind. Reason with himself as he might, something deep within him stubbornly asserted the reality of his experience. At any rate, he told himself, the little wood was far too beautiful to be despoiled. He would put aside the experience as dream – but he would save the little wood for the essence of beauty that it held in its green cup.

The old lodge was about a quarter of a mile away. A path led up to it through the ragged fields. McKay walked up the path, climbed rickety steps and paused, listening. He heard voices and knocked. The door was flung open and old Polleau stood there, peering at him through half shut, suspicious eyes. One of the sons stood close behind him. They stared at McKay with grim, hostile faces.

He thought he heard a faint, far off despairing whisper from the distant wood. And it was as though the pair in the doorway heard it too, for their gaze shifted from him to the coppice, and he saw hatred flicker swiftly across their grim faces; their gaze swept back to him.

“What do you want?” demanded Polleau, curtly.

“I am a neighbor of yours, stopping at the inn—” began McKay, courteously.

“I know who you are,” Polleau interrupted brusquely, “But what is it that you want?”

“I find the air of this place good for me,” McKay stifled a rising anger. “I am thinking of staying for a year or more until my health is fully recovered. I would like to buy some of your land and build me a lodge upon it.”

“Yes, M’sieu?” there was acid politeness now in the powerful old man’s voice. “But is it permitted to ask why you do not remain at the inn? Its fare is excellent and you are well liked there.”

“I have desire to be alone,” replied McKay. “I do not like people too close to me. I would have my own land, and sleep under my own roof.”

“But why come to me?” asked Polleau. “There are many places upon the far side of the lake that you could secure. It is happy there, and this side is not happy, M’sieu. But tell me, what part of my land is it that you desire?”

“That little wood yonder,” answered McKay, and pointed to the coppice.

“Ah! I thought so!” whispered Polleau, and between him and his sons passed a look of bitter understanding. He looked at McKay, sombrely.

“That wood is not for sale, M’sieu,” he said at last. “I can afford to pay well for what I want,” said McKay. “Name your price.”

“It is not for sale,” repeated Polleau, stolidly, “at any price.”

“Oh, come,” laughed McKay, although his heart sank at the finality in that answer. “You have many acres and what is it but a few trees? I can afford to gratify my fancies. I will give you all the worth of your other land for it.”

“You have asked what that place that you so desire is, and you have answered that it is but a few trees,” said Polleau, slowly, and the tall son behind him laughed, abruptly, maliciously. “But it is more than that, M’sieu – Oh, much more than that. And you know it, else why would you pay such price? Yes, you know it – since you know also that we are ready to destroy it, and you would save it. And who told you all that, M’sieu?” he snarled.

There was such malignance in the face thrust suddenly close to McKay’s, teeth bared by uplifted lip, that involuntarily he recoiled.

“But a few trees!” snarled old Polleau. “Then who told him what we mean to do – eh, Pierre?”

Again the son laughed. And at that laughter McKay felt within him resurgence of his own blind hatred as he had fled through the whispering wood. He mastered himself, turned away, there was nothing he could do – now. Polleau halted him.

“M’sieu,” he said, “Wait. Enter. There is something I would tell you; something too I would show you. Something, perhaps, that I would ask you.”

He stood aside, bowing with a rough courtesy. McKay walked through the doorway. Polleau with his son followed him. He entered a large, dim room whose ceiling was spanned with smoke blackened beams. From these beams hung onion strings and herbs and smoke cured meats. On one side was a wide fireplace. Huddled beside it sat Polleau’s other son. He glanced up as they entered and McKay saw that a bandage covered one side of his head, hiding his left eye. McKay recognized him as the one who had cut down the slim birch. The blow of the fir, he reflected with a certain satisfaction, had been no futile one.

Old Polleau strode over to that son.

“Look, M’sieu,” he said and lifted the bandage.

McKay with a faint tremor of horror, saw a gaping blackened socket, red rimmed and eyeless.

“Good God, Polleau!” he cried. “But this man needs medical attention. I know something of wounds. Let me go across the lake and bring back my kit. I will attend him.”

Old Polleau shook his head, although his grim face for the first time softened. He drew the bandages back in place.

“It heals,” he said. “We have some skill in such things. You saw what did it. You watched from your boat as the cursed tree struck him. The eye was crushed and lay upon his cheek. I cut it away. Now he heals. We do not need your aid, M’sieu.”

“Yet he ought not have cut the birch,” muttered McKay, more to himself than to be heard.

“Why not?” asked old Polleau, fiercely, “Since it hated him.”

McKay stared at him. What did this old peasant know? The words strengthened that deep stubborn conviction that what he had seen and heard in the coppice had been actuality – no dream. And still more did Polleau’s next words strengthen that conviction.

“M’sieu,” he said, “you come here as ambassador – of a sort. The wood has spoken to you. Well, as ambassador I shall speak to you. Four centuries my people have lived in this place. A century we have owned this land. M’sieu, in all those years there has been no moment that the trees have not hated us – nor we the trees.

“For all those hundred years there have been hatred and battle between us and the forest. My father, M’sieu, was crushed by a tree; my elder brother crippled by another. My father’s father, woodsman that he was, was lost in the forest – he came back to us with mind gone, raving of wood women who had bewitched and mocked him, luring him into swamp and fen and tangled thicket, tormenting him. In every generation the trees have taken their toll of us – women as well as men – maiming or killing us.”

“Accidents,” interrupted McKay. “This is childish, Polleau. You cannot blame the trees.”

“In your heart you do not believe so,” said Polleau. “Listen, the feud is an ancient one. Centuries ago it began when we were serfs, slaves of the nobles. To cook, to keep us warm in winter, they let us pick up the fagots, the dead branches and twigs that dropped from the trees. But if we cut down a tree to keep us warm, to keep our women and our children warm, yes, if we but tore down a branch – they hanged us, or they threw us into dungeons to rot, or whipped us till our backs were red lattices.

“They had their broad fields, the nobles – but we must raise our food in the patches where the trees disdained to grow. And if they did thrust themselves into our poor patches, then, M’sieu, we must let them have their way – or be flogged, or be thrown into the dungeons or be hanged.

“They pressed us in – the trees,” the old man’s voice grew sharp with fanatic hatred. “They stole our fields and they took the food from the mouths of our children; they dropped their fagots to us like dole to beggars; they tempted us to warmth when the cold struck our bones – and they bore us as fruit a-swing at the end of the foresters’ ropes if we yielded to their tempting.

“Yes, M’sieu – we died of cold that they might live! Our children died of hunger that their young might find root space! They despised us – the trees! We died that they might live – and we were men!

“Then, M’sieu came the Revolution and the freedom. Ah, M’sieu, then we took our toll! Great logs roaring in the winter cold – no more huddling over the alms of fagots. Fields where the trees had been – no more starving of our children that theirs might live. Now the trees were the slaves and we the masters.

“And the trees knew and they hated us!

“But blow for blow, a hundred of their lives for each life of ours – we have returned their hatred. With axe and torch we have fought them—

“The trees!” shrieked Polleau, suddenly, eyes blazing red rage, face writhing, foam at the corners of his mouth and gray hair clutched in rigid hands – “The cursed trees! Armies of the trees creeping – creeping – closer, ever closer – crushing us in! Stealing our fields as they did of old! Building their dungeon round us as they built of old the dungeons of stone! Creeping – creeping! Armies of trees! Legions of trees! The trees! The cursed trees!”

McKay listened, appalled. Here was crimson heart of hate. Madness! But what was at the root of it? Some deep inherited instinct, coming down from forefathers who had hated the forest as the symbol of their masters. Forefathers whose tides of hatred had overflowed to the green life on which the nobles had laid their tabu – as one neglected child will hate the favorite on whom love and gifts are lavished? In such warped minds the crushing fall of a tree, the maiming sweep of a branch, might well appear as deliberate, the natural growth of the forest seem the implacable advance of an enemy.

And yet – the blow of the fir as the cut birch fell had been deliberate! and there had been those women of the wood—

“Patience,” the standing son touched the old man’s shoulder. “Patience! Soon we strike our blow.”

Some of the frenzy died out of Polleau’s face.

“Though we cut down a hundred,” he whispered, “By the hundred they return! But one of us, when they strike – he does not return. No! They have numbers and they have – time. We are now but three, and we have little time. They watch us as we go through the forest, alert to trip, to strike, to crush!

“But M’sieu,” he turned blood shot eyes to McKay. “We strike our blow, even as Pierre has said. We strike at the coppice that you so desire. We strike there because it is the very heart of the forest. There the secret life of the forest runs at full tide. We know – and you know! Something that, destroyed, will take the heart out of the forest – will make it know us for its masters.”

“The women!” the standing son’s eyes glittered, “I have seen the women there! The fair women with the shining skins who invite – and mock and vanish before hands can seize them.”

“The fair women who peer into our windows in the night – and mock us!” muttered the eyeless son.

“They shall mock no more!” shouted Polleau, the frenzy again taking him. “Soon they shall lie, dying! All of them – all of them! They die!”

He caught McKay by the shoulders, shook him like a child.

“Go tell them that!” he shouted. “Say to them that this very day we destroy them. Say to them it is we who will laugh when winter comes and we watch their round white bodies blaze in this hearth of ours and warm us! Go – tell them that!”

He spun McKay around, pushed him to the door, opened it and flung him staggering down the steps. He heard the tall son laugh, the door close. Blind with rage he rushed up the steps and hurled himself against the door. Again the tall son laughed. McKay beat at the door with clenched fists, cursing. The three within paid no heed. Despair began to dull his rage. Could the trees help him – counsel him? He turned and walked slowly down the field path to the little wood.

Slowly and ever more slowly he went as he neared it. He had failed. He was a messenger bearing a warrant of death. The birches were motionless; their leaves hung listlessly. It was as though they knew he had failed. He paused at the edge of the coppice. He looked at his watch, noted with faint surprise that already it was high noon. Short shrift enough had the little wood. The work of destruction would not be long delayed.

McKay squared his shoulders and passed in between the trees. It was strangely silent in the coppice. And it was mournful. He had a sense of life brooding around him, withdrawn into itself; sorrowing. He passed through the silent, mournful wood until he reached the spot where the rounded, gleaming barked tree stood close to the fir that held the withering birch. Still there was no sound, no movement. He laid his hands upon the cool bark of the rounded tree.

“Let me see again!” he whispered. “Let me hear! Speak to me!”

There was no answer. Again and again he called. The coppice was silent. He wandered through it, whispering, calling. The slim birches stood, passive with limbs and leaves a-droop like listless arms and hands of captive maids awaiting with dull woe the will of conquerors. The firs seemed to crouch like hopeless men with heads in hands. His heart ached to the woe that filled the little wood, this hopeless submission of the trees.

When, he wondered, would Polleau strike. He looked at his watch again; an hour had gone by. How long would Polleau wait? He dropped to the moss, back against a smooth bole.

And suddenly it seemed to McKay that he was a madman – as mad as Polleau and his sons. Calmly, he went over the old peasant’s indictment of the forest; recalled the face and eyes filled with the fanatic hate. Madness! After all, the trees were – only trees. Polleau and his sons – so he reasoned – had transferred to them the bitter hatred their forefathers had felt for those old lords who had enslaved them; had laid upon them too all the bitterness of their own struggle to exist in this high forest land. When they struck at the trees, it was the ghosts of these forefathers striking at the nobles who had oppressed them; it was themselves striking against their own destiny. The trees were but symbols. It was the warped minds of Polleau and his sons that clothed them in false semblance of conscious life in blind striving to wreak vengeance against the ancient masters and the destiny that had made their lives hard and unceasing battle against Nature. The nobles were long dead; destiny can be brought to grips by no man. But the trees were here and alive. Clothed in mirage, through them the driving lust for vengeance could be sated.

And he, McKay, was it not his own deep love and sympathy for the trees that similarly had clothed them in that false semblance of conscious life? Had he not built his own mirage? The trees did not really mourn, could not suffer, could not – know. It was his own sorrow that he had transferred to them; only his own sorrow that he felt echoing back to him from them.

The trees were – only trees.

Instantly, upon the heels of that thought, as though it were an answer, he was aware that the trunk against which he leaned was trembling; that the whole coppice was trembling; that all the little leaves were shaking, tremulously.

McKay, bewildered, leaped to his feet. Reason told him that it was the wind – yet there was no wind!

And as he stood there, a sighing arose as though a mournful breeze were blowing through the trees – and again there was no wind!

Louder grew the sighing and within it now faint wailings.

“They come! They come! Farewell sisters! Sisters – farewell!”

Clearly he heard the mournful whispers.

McKay began to run through the trees to the trail that led out to the fields of the old lodge. And as he ran the wood darkened as though clear shadows gathered in it, as though vast unseen wings hovered over it. The trembling of the coppice increased; bough touched bough, clung to each other; and louder became the sorrowful crying:

“Farewell sister! Sister – farewell!”

McKay burst out into the open. Halfway between him and the lodge were Polleau and his sons. They saw him; they pointed and lifted mockingly to him bright axes. He crouched, waiting for them to come, all fine spun theories gone and rising within him that same rage that hours before had sent him out to slay.

So crouching, he heard from the forested hills a roaring clamor. From every quarter it came, wrathful, menacing; like the voices of legions of great trees bellowing through the horns of tempest. The clamor maddened McKay; fanned the flame of rage to white heat.

If the three men heard it, they gave no sign. They came on steadily, jeering at him, waving their keen blades. He ran to meet them.

“Go back!” he shouted. “Go back, Polleau! I warn you!”

“He warns us!” jeered Polleau. “He – Pierre, Jean – he warns us!”

The old peasant’s arm shot out and his hand caught McKay’s shoulder with a grip that pinched to the bone. The arm flexed and hurled him against the unmaimed son. The son caught him, twisted him about and whirled him headlong a dozen yards, crashing him through the brush at the skirt of the wood.

McKay sprang to his feet howling like a wolf. The clamor of the forest had grown stronger.

“Kill!” it roared. “Kill!”

The unmaimed son had raised his axe. He brought it down upon the trunk of a birch, half splitting it with one blow. McKay heard a wail go up from the little wood. Before the axe could be withdrawn he had crashed a fist in the axe wielder’s face. The head of Polleau’s son rocked back; he yelped, and before McKay could strike again had wrapped strong arms around him, crushing breath from him. McKay relaxed, went limp, and the son loosened his grip. Instantly McKay slipped out of it and struck again, springing aside to avoid the rib breaking clasp. Polleau’s son was quicker than he, the long arms caught him. But as the arms tightened, there was the sound of sharp splintering and the birch into which the axe had bitten toppled. It struck the ground directly behind the wrestling men. Its branches seemed to reach out and clutch at the feet of Polleau’s son.

He tripped and fell backward, McKay upon him. The shock of the fall broke his grip and again McKay writhed free. Again he was upon his feet, and again Polleau’s strong son, quick as he, faced him. Twice McKay’s blows found their mark beneath his heart before once more the long arms trapped him. But their grip was weaker; McKay felt that now his strength was equal.

Round and round they rocked, McKay straining to break away. They fell, and over they rolled and over, arms and legs locked, each striving to free a hand to grip the other’s throat. Around them ran Polleau and the one-eyed son, shouting encouragement to Pierre, yet neither daring to strike at McKay lest the blow miss and be taken by the other.

And all that time McKay heard the little wood shouting. Gone from it now was all mournfulness, all passive resignation. The wood was alive and raging. He saw the trees shake and bend as though torn by a tempest. Dimly he realized that the others must hear none of this, see none of it; as dimly wondered why this should be.

“Kill!” shouted the coppice – and over its tumult he heard the roar of the great forest:

“Kill! Kill!”

He became aware of two shadowy shapes, shadowy shapes of swarthy green clad men, that pressed close to him as he rolled and fought.

“Kill!” they whispered. “Let his blood flow! Kill! Let his blood flow!”

He tore a wrist free from the son’s clutch. Instantly he felt within his hand the hilt of a knife.

“Kill!” whispered the shadowy men.

“Kill!” shrieked the coppice.

“Kill!” roared the forest.

McKay’s free arm swept up and plunged the knife into the throat of Polleau’s son! He heard a choking sob; heard Polleau shriek; felt the hot blood spurt in face and over hand; smelt its salt and faintly acrid odor. The encircling arms dropped from him; he reeled to his feet.

As though the blood had been a bridge, the shadowy men leaped from immateriality into substances. One threw himself upon the man McKay had stabbed; the other hurled upon old Polleau. The maimed son turned and fled, howling with terror. A white woman sprang out from the shadow, threw herself at his feet, clutched them and brought him down. Another woman and another dropped upon him. The note of his shrieking changed from fear to agony; then died abruptly into silence.

And now McKay could see none of the three, neither old Polleau or his sons, for the green clad men and the white women covered them!

McKay stood stupidly, staring at his red hands. The roar of the forest had changed to a deep triumphal chanting. The coppice was mad with joy. The trees had become thin phantoms etched in emerald translucent air as they had been when first the green sorcery had enmeshed him. And all around him wove and danced the slim, gleaming women of the wood.

They ringed him, their song bird-sweet and shrill; jubilant. Beyond them he saw gliding toward him the woman of the misty pillars whose kisses had poured the sweet green fire into his veins. Her arms were outstretched to him, her strange wide eyes were rapt on his, her white body gleamed with the moon radiance, her red lips were parted and smiling – a scarlet chalice filled with the promise of undreamed ecstasies. The dancing circle, chanting, broke to let her through.

Abruptly, a horror filled McKay. Not of this fair woman, not of her jubilant sisters – but of himself.

He had killed! And the wound the war had left in his soul, the wound he thought had healed, had opened.

He rushed through the broken circle, thrust the shining woman aside with his blood stained hands and ran, weeping, toward the lake shore. The singing ceased. He heard little cries, tender, appealing; little cries of pity; soft voices calling on him to stop, to return. Behind him was the sound of little racing feet, light as the fall of leaves upon the moss.

McKay ran on. The coppice lightened, the beach was before him. He heard the fair woman call him, felt the touch of her hand upon his shoulder. He did not heed her. He ran across the narrow strip of beach, thrust his boat out into the water and wading through the shallows threw himself into it.

He lay there for a moment, sobbing; then drew himself up, caught at the oars. He looked back at the shore now a score of feet away. At the edge of the coppice stood the woman, staring at him with pitying, wise eyes. Behind her clustered the white faces of her sisters, the swarthy faces of the green clad men.

“Come back!” the woman whispered, and held out to him slender arms.

McKay hesitated, his horror lessening in that clear, wise, pitying gaze. He half swung the boat around. His gaze dropped upon his blood-stained hands and again the hysteria gripped him. One thought only was in his mind – to get far away from where Polleau’s son lay with his throat ripped open, to put the lake between that body and him.

Head bent low, McKay bowed to the oars, skimming swiftly outward. When he looked up a curtain of mist had fallen between him and the shore. It hid the coppice and from beyond it there came to him no sound. He glanced behind him, back toward the inn. The mists swung there, too, concealing it.

McKay gave silent thanks for these vaporous curtains that hid him from both the dead and the alive. He slipped limply under the thwarts. After a while he leaned over the side of the boat and, shuddering, washed the blood from his hands. He scrubbed the oar blades where his hands had left red patches. He ripped the lining out of his coat and drenching it in the lake he cleansed his face. He took off the stained coat, wrapped it with the lining round the anchor stone in the skiff and sunk it in the lake. There were other stains upon his shirt; but these he would have to let be.

For a time he rowed aimlessly, finding in the exertion a lessening of his soul sickness. His numbed mind began to function, analyzing his plight, planning how to meet the future – how to save him.

What ought he do? Confess that he had killed Polleau’s son? What reason could he give? Only that he had killed because the man had been about to cut down some trees – trees that were his father’s to do with as he willed!

And if he told of the wood woman, the wood women, the shadowy shapes of their green gallants who had helped him – who would believe?

They would think him mad – mad as he half believed himself to be.

No, none would believe him. None! Nor would confession bring back life to him he had slain. No; he would not confess.

But stay – another thought came! Might he not be – accused? What actually had happened to old Polleau and his other son? He had taken it for granted that they were dead; that they had died under those bodies white and swarthy. But had they? While the green sorcery had meshed him he had held no doubt of this – else why the jubilance of the little wood, the triumphant chanting of the forest?

Were they dead – Polleau and the one-eyed son? Clearly it came to him that they had not heard as he had, had not seen as he had. To them McKay and his enemy had been but two men battling, in a woodland glade; nothing more than that – until the last! Until the last? Had they seen more than that even then?

No, all that he could depend upon as real was that he had ripped out the throat of one of old Poileau’s sons. That was the one unassailable verity. He had washed the blood of that man from his hands and his face.

All else might have been mirage – but one thing was true. He had murdered Polleau’s son!

Remorse? He had thought that he had felt it. He knew now that he did not; that he had no shadow of remorse for what he had done. It had been panic that had shaken him, panic realization of the strangenesses, reaction from the battle lust, echoes of the war. He had been justified in that – execution. What right had those men to destroy the little wood; to wipe wantonly its beauty away?

None! He was glad that he had killed!

At that moment McKay would gladly have turned his boat and raced away to drink of the crimson chalice of the wood woman’s lips. But the mists were raising, He saw that he was close to the landing of the inn.

There was no one about. Now was his time to remove the last of those accusing stains. After that—

Quickly he drew up, fastened the skiff, slipped unseen to his room. He locked the door, started to undress. Then sudden sleep swept over him like a wave, drew him helplessly down into ocean depths of sleep.

A knocking at the door awakened McKay, and the innkeeper’s voice summoned him to dinner. Sleepily, he answered, and as the old man’s footsteps died away, he roused himself. His eyes fell upon his shirt and the great stains now rusty brown. Puzzled, he stared at them for a moment, then full memory clicked back in place.

He walked to the window. It was dusk. A wind was blowing and the trees were singing, all the little leaves dancing; the forest hummed a cheerful vespers. Gone was all the unease, all the inarticulate trouble and the fear. The forest was tranquil and it was happy.

He sought the coppice through the gathering twilight. Its demoiselles were dancing lightly in the wind, leafy hoods dipping, leafy skirts a-blow. Beside them marched the green troubadours, carefree, waving their needled arms. Gay was the little wood, gay as when its beauty had first drawn him to it.

McKay undressed, hid the stained shirt in his traveling trunk, bathed and put on a fresh outfit, sauntered down to dinner. He ate excellently. Wonder now and then crossed his mind that he felt no regret, no sorrow even, for the man he had killed. Half he was inclined to believe it all a dream – so little of any emotion did he feel. He had even ceased to think of what discovery might mean.

His mind was quiet; he heard the forest chanting to him that there was nothing he need fear; and when he sat for a time that night upon the balcony a peace that was half an ecstasy stole in upon him from the murmuring woods and enfolded him. Cradled by it he slept dreamlessly.

McKay did not go far from the inn that next day. The little wood danced gaily and beckoned him, but he paid no heed. Something whispered to wait, to keep the lake between him and it until word came of what lay or had lain there. And the peace still was on him.

Only the old innkeeper seemed to grow uneasy as the hours went by. He went often to the landing, scanning the further shore.

“It is strange,” he said at last to McKay as the sun was dipping behind the summits. “Polleau was to see me here today. He never breaks his word. If he could not come he would have sent one of his sons.”

McKay nodded, carelessly,

“There is another thing I do not understand,” went on the old man. “I have seen no smoke from the lodge all day. It is as though they were not there.”

“Where could they be?” asked McKay, indifferently.

“I do not know,” the voice was more perturbed. “It all troubles me, M’sieu. Polleau is hard, yes; but he is my neighbor. Perhaps an accident—”

“They would let you know soon enough if there was anything wrong,” McKay said.

“Perhaps, but—” the old man hesitated. “If he does not come tomorrow and again I see no smoke I will go to him,” he ended.

McKay felt a little shock run through him – tomorrow then he would know, definitely know, what it was that had happened in the little wood.

“I would if I were you,” he said. “I’d not wait too long either. After all – well, accidents do happen.”

“Will you go with me, M’sieu,” asked the old man.

“No!” whispered the warning voice within McKay. “No! Do not go!”

“Sorry,” he said, aloud. “But I’ve some writing to do. If you should need me send back your man. I’ll come.”

And all that night he slept, again dreamlessly, while the crooning forest cradled him.

The morning passed without sign from the opposite shore. An hour after noon he watched the old innkeeper and his man row across the lake. And suddenly McKay’s composure was shaken, his serene certainty wavered. He unstrapped his field glasses and kept them on the pair until they had beached the boat and entered the coppice. His heart was beating uncomfortably, his hands felt hot and his lips dry. He scanned the shore. How long had they been in the wood? It must have been an hour! What were they doing there? What had they found? He looked at his watch, incredulously. Less than fifteen minutes had passed.

Slowly the seconds ticked by. And it was all of an hour indeed before he saw them come out upon the shore and drag their boat into the water. McKay, throat curiously dry, a deafening pulse within his ears, steadied himself; forced himself to stroll leisurely down to the landing.

“Everything all right?” he called as they were near. They did not answer; but as the skiff warped against the landing they looked up at him and on their faces were stamped horror and a great wonder.

“They are dead, M’sieu,” whispered the innkeeper. “Polleau and his two sons – all dead!”

McKay’s heart gave a great leap, a swift faintness took him.

“Dead!” he cried. “What killed them?”

“What but the trees, M’sieu?” answered the old man, and McKay thought his gaze dwelt upon him strangely. “The trees killed them. See – we went up the little path through the wood, and close to its end we found it blocked by fallen trees. The flies buzzed round those trees, M’sieu, so we searched there. They were under them, Polleau and his sons. A fir had fallen upon Polleau and had crushed in his chest. Another son we found beneath a fir and upturned birches. They had broken his back, and an eye had been torn out – but that was no new wound, the latter.” He paused.

“It must have been a sudden wind,” said his man. “Yet I never knew of a wind like that must have been. There were no trees down except those that lay upon them. And of those it was as though they had leaped out of the ground! Yes, as though they had leaped out of the ground upon them. Or it was as though giants had torn them out for clubs. They were not broken – their roots were bare—”

“But the other son – Polleau had two?” – try as he might, McKay could not keep the tremor out of his voice.

“Pierre,” said the old man, and again McKay felt that strange quality in his gaze. “He lay beneath a fir. His throat was torn out!”

“His throat torn out!” whispered McKay, His knife! The knife that had been slipped into his hand by the shadowy shapes!

“His throat was torn out,” repeated the innkeeper. “And in it still was the broken branch that had done it. A broken branch, M’sieu, pointed as a knife. It must have caught Pierre as the fir fell and ripping through his throat – been broken off as the tree crashed.”

McKay stood, mind whirling in wild conjecture. “You said – a broken branch?” McKay asked through lips gone white.

“A broken branch, M’sieu,” the innkeeper’s eyes searched him. “It was very plain – what it was that happened. Jacques,” he turned to his man. “Go up to the house.”

He watched until the man shuffled out of sight. “Yet not all plain, M’sieu,” he spoke low to McKay. “For in Pierre’s hand I found – this.”

He reached into a pocket and drew out a button from which hung a strip of cloth. Cloth and button had once been part of that blood-stained coat which McKay had sunk within the lake; torn away no doubt when death had struck Polleau’s son!

McKay strove to speak. The old man raised his hand. Button and cloth fell from it, into the water. A wave took it and floated it away; another and another. They watched it silently until it had vanished.

“Tell me nothing, M’sieu,” the old innkeeper turned to him, “Polleau was hard and hard men, too, were his sons. The trees hated them. The trees killed them. And now the trees are happy. That is all. And the – souvenir – is gone. I have forgotten I saw it. Only M’sieu would better also – go.”

That night McKay packed. When dawn had broken he stood at his window, looked long at the little wood. It was awakening, stirring sleepily like drowsy delicate demoiselles. He drank in its beauty – for the last time; waved it farewell.

McKay breakfasted well. He dropped into the driver’s seat; set the engine humming. The old innkeeper and his wife, solicitous as ever for his welfare, bade him Godspeed. On both their faces was full friendliness – and in the old man’s eyes somewhat of puzzled awe.

His road lay through the thick forest. Soon inn and lake were far behind him.

And singing went McKay, soft whisperings of leaves following him, glad chanting of needled pines; the voice of the forest tender, friendly, caressing – the forest pouring into him as farewell gift its peace, its happiness, its strength.

First published as “The Woman of the Wood”
Weird Tales, Aug 1926

Reprinted as “The Women of the Wood”
The Fox Woman & Other Stories, Avon, NY, 1949

THE  LAST  POET
AND  THE  ROBOTS

Narodny, the Russian, sat in his laboratory. Narodny’s laboratory was a full mile under earth. It was one of a hundred caverns, some small and some vast, cut out of the living rock. It was a realm of which he was sole ruler. In certain caverns garlands of small suns shone; and in others little moons waxed and waned over earth; and there was a cavern in which reigned perpetual dawn, dewy, over lily beds and violets and roses; and another in which crimson sunsets baptized in the blood of slain day dimmed and died and were born again behind the sparkling curtains of the aurora. And there was one cavern ten miles from side to side in which grew flowering trees and trees which bore fruits unknown to man for many generations. Over this great orchard one yellow sun-like orb shone, and clouds trailed veils of rain upon the trees and miniature thunder drummed at Narodny’s summoning.

Narodny was a poet – the last poet. He did not write his poems in words but in colors, sounds, and visions made material. Also he was a great scientist. In his Peculiar field the greatest. Thirty years before, Russia’s Science Council had debated whether to grant him the leave of absence he had asked, or to destroy him. They knew him to be unorthodox. How deadly so they did not know, else after much deliberation they would not have released him. It must be remembered that of all nations, Russia then was the most mechanized; most robot-ridden.

Narodny did not hate mechanization. He was indifferent to it. Being truly intelligent he hated nothing, Also he was indifferent to the whole civilization man had developed and into which he had been born. He had no feeling of kinship to humanity. Outwardly, in body, he belonged to the species. Not so in mind. Like Loeb, a thousand years before, he considered mankind a race of crazy half-monkeys, intent upon suicide. Now and then, out of the sea of lunatic mediocrity, a wave uplifted that held for a moment a light from the sun of truth – but soon it sank back and the light was gone. Quenched in the sea of stupidity. He knew that he was one of those waves.

He had gone, and he had been lost to sight by all. In a few years he was forgotten. Fifteen years ago, unknown and under another name, he had entered America and secured rights to a thousand acres in what of old had been called Westchester. He had picked this place because investigation had revealed to him that of ten localities on this planet it was most free from danger of earthquake or similar seismic disturbance. The man who owned it had been whimsical; possibly an atavist – like Narodny, although Narodny would never have thought of himself as that. At any rate, instead of an angled house of glass such as the thirtieth century built, this man had reconstructed a rambling old stone house of the nineteenth century. Few people lived upon the open land in those days; most had withdrawn into the city-states. New York, swollen by its meals of years, was a fat belly full of mankind still many miles away. The land around the house was forest covered.

A week after Narodny had taken this house, the trees in front of it had melted away leaving a three-acre, smooth field. It was not as though they had been cut, but as though they had been dissolved. Later that night a great airship had appeared upon this field – abruptly, as though it had blinked out of another dimension. It was rocket-shaped but noiseless. And immediately a fog had fallen upon airship and house, hiding them. Within this fog, if one could have seen, was a wide tunnel leading from the air-cylinder’s door to the door of the house. And out of the airship came swathed figures, ten of them, who walked along that tunnel, were met by Narodny, and the door of the old house closed on them.

A little later they returned, Narodny with them, and out of an opened hatch of the airship rolled a small flat car on which was a mechanism of crystal cones rising around each other to a central cone some four feet high. The cones were upon a thick base of some glassy material in which was imprisoned a restless green radiance. Its rays did not penetrate that which held it, but it seemed constantly seeking, with suggestion of prodigious force, to escape. For hours the strange thick fog held. Twenty miles up in the far reaches of the stratosphere, a faintly sparkling cloud grew, like a condensation of cosmic dust. And just before dawn the rock of the hill behind the house melted away like a curtain that had covered a great tunnel. Five of the men came out of the house and went into the airship. It lifted silently from the ground, slipped into the aperture and vanished. There was a whispering sound, and when it had died away the breast of the hill was whole again. The rocks had been drawn together like a closing curtain and boulders studded it as before. That the breast was now slightly concave where before it had been convex, none would have noticed.

For two weeks the sparkling cloud was observed far up in the stratosphere, was commented upon idly, and then was seen no more. Narodny’s caverns were finished.

Half of the rock from which they had been hollowed had gone with that sparkling cloud. The balance, reduced to its primal form of energy, was stored in blocks of the vitreous material that had supported the cones, and within them it moved as restlessly and always with that same suggestion of prodigious force. And it was force, unthinkably potent; from it came the energy that made the little suns and moons, and actuated the curious mechanisms that regulated pressure in the caverns, supplied the air, created the rain, and made of Narodny’s realm a mile deep under earth the Paradise of poetry, of music, of color and of form which he had conceived in his brain and with the aid of those ten others had caused to be.

Now of the ten there is no need to speak further. Narodny was the Master. But three, like him, were Russians; two were Chinese; of the remaining five, three were women – one German in ancestry, one Basque, one an Eurasian; a Hindu who traced his descent from the line of Gautama; a Jew who traced his from Solomon.

All were one with Narodny in indifference to the world; each with him in his viewpoint on life; and each and all lived in his or her own Eden among the hundred caverns except when it interested them to work with each other. Time meant nothing to them. Their researches and discoveries were solely for their own uses and enjoyments. If they had given them to the outer world they would have only been ammunition for warfare either between men upon Earth or men against some other planet. Why hasten humanity’s suicide? Not that they would have felt regret at the eclipse of humanity. But why trouble to expedite it? Time meant nothing to them because they could live as long as they desired – barring accident. And while there was rock in the world, Narodny could convert it into energy to maintain his Paradise – or to create others.

The old house began to crack and crumble. It fell – much more quickly than the elements could have brought about its destruction. Then trees grew among the ruins of its foundations; and the field that had been so strangely cleared was overgrown with trees. The land became a wood in a few short years; silent except for the roar of an occasional rocket passing over it and the songs of birds that had found there a sanctuary.

But deep down in earth, within the caverns, were music and song and mirth and beauty. Gossamer nymphs circled under the little moons. Pan piped. There was revelry of antique harvesters under the small suns. Grapes grew and ripened, were pressed, and red and purple wine was drunk by Bacchantes who fell at last asleep in the arms of fauns and satyrs. Oreads danced under the pale moon-bows and sometimes Centaurs wheeled and trod archaic measures beneath them to the drums of their hoofs upon the mossy floor. The old Earth lived again.

Narodny listened to drunken Alexander raving to Thais among the splendors of conquered Persepolis; and he heard the crackling of the flames that at the whim of the courtesan destroyed it. He watched the siege of Troy and counted with Homer the Achaean ships drawn up on the strand before Troy’s walls; or saw with Herodotus the tribes that marched behind Xerxes – the Caspians in their cloaks of skin with their bows of cane; the Ethiopians in the skins of leopards with spears of antelope horns; the Libyans in their dress of leather with javelins made hard by fire; the Thracians with the heads of foxes upon their heads; the Moschians who wore helmets made of wood and the

Cabalians who wore the skulls of men. For him the Eleusinian and the Osirian mysteries were re-enacted, and he watched the women of Thrace tear to fragments Orpheus, the first great musician. At his will, he could see the rise and fall of the Empire of the Aztecs, the Empire of the Incas; or beloved Caesar slain in Rome’s Senate; or the archers at Agincourt; or the Americans in Belleau Wood. Whatever man had written – whether poets, historians, philosophers or scientists – his strangely shaped mechanisms could bring before him, changing the words into phantoms real as though living.

He was the last and greatest of the poets – but also he was the last and greatest of the musicians. He could bring back the songs of ancient Egypt, or the chants of more ancient Ur. The songs that came from Moussorgsky’s soul of Mother-earth, the harmonies of Beethoven’s deaf ear, or the chants and rhapsodies from the heart of Chopin. He could do more than restore the music of the past. He was master of sound. To him, the music of the spheres was real. He could take the rays of the stars and planets and weave them into symphonies. Or convert the sun’s rays into golden tones no earthly orchestras had ever expressed. And the silver music of the moon – the sweet music of the moon of spring, the full-throated music of the harvest moon, the brittle crystaling music of the winter moon with its arpeggios of meteors – he could weave into strains such as no human ears had ever heard.

So Narodny, the last and greatest of poets, the last and greatest of musicians, the last and greatest of artists – and in his inhuman way, the greatest of scientists – lived with the ten of his choosing in his caverns. And, with them, he consigned the surface of earth and all who dwelt upon it to a negative Hell – Unless something happening there might imperil his Paradise!

Aware of the possibility of that danger, among his mechanisms were those which brought to eyes and ears news of what was happening on earth’s surface. Now and then, they amused themselves with these.

It so happened that on that night when the Warper of Space had dealt his blow at the space ships and had flung a part of the great Crater of Copernicus into another dimension, Narodny had been weaving the rays of Moon, Jupiter and Saturn into Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. The moon was a four-day crescent. Jupiter was at one cusp, and Saturn hung like a pendant below the bow. Shortly Orion would stride across the Heavens and bright Regulus and red Aldebaran, the Eye of the Bull, would furnish him with other chords of starlight remoulded into sound.

Suddenly the woven rhythms were ripped – hideously. A devastating indescribable dissonance invaded the cavern. Beneath it, the nymphs who had been dancing languorously to the strains quivered like mist wraiths in a sudden blast and were gone: the little moons flared, then ceased to glow. The tonal instruments were dead. And Narodny was felled as though by a blow.

After a time the little moons began to glow again, but dimly; and from the tonal mechanisms came broken, crippled music. Narodny stirred and sat up, his lean, high-cheeked face more Satanic than ever. Every nerve was numb; then as they revived, agony crept along them. He sat, fighting the agony, until he could summon help. He was answered by one of the Chinese, and soon Narodny was himself again.

He said: “It was a spatial disturbance, Lao. And it was like nothing I have ever known. It came in upon the rays, of that I am sure. Let us look out upon the moon.”

They passed to another cavern and stood before an immense television screen. They adjusted it, and upon it appeared the moon, rapidly growing larger as though it were hurtling toward them. Then upon the screen appeared a space ship speeding earthward. They focused upon it, and opened it to their vision; searching it until they came to the control room where were Bartholomew, James Tarvish and Martin, their gaze upon Earth rapidly and more rapidly expanding in the heavens. Narodny and the Chinese watched them, reading their lips. Tarvish said: “Where can we land, Martin? The robots will be watching for us everywhere. They will see to it that we are destroyed before we can give our message and our warning to the world. They control the governments – or at least control them sufficiently to seize us upon landing. And if we should escape and gather men around us, then it means civil war and that in turn means fatal delay in the building of the space fleet – even if we should win.”

Martin said: “We must land safely – escape the robots – find some to control or destroy them. God, Tarvish – you saw what that devil they call the Wrongness of Space can do. He threw the side of the crater out of our dimension as a boy would throw a stone into a pond!”

Bartholomew said: “He could take Earth and break it up piecemeal—”

Narodny and Lao looked at each other. Narodny said: “That is enough. We know.” The Chinese nodded. Narodny said: “I estimated that they would reach Earth in four hours.” Again Lao nodded. Narodny said: “We will talk to them, Lao; although I had thought we were done with mankind. I do not like this which they call so quaintly the Wrongness of Space – nor the stone he threw into my music.”

They brought a smaller screen into position before the larger one. They oriented it to the speeding space

Ship and stepped in front of it. The small screen shimmered with whirling vortices of pallid blue luminescence; the vortices drew together and became one vast cone that reached on and on to the greater screen as though not feet but thousands of miles separated them. And as the tip of the cone touched the control room of the space ship mirrored in the screen, Tarvish, upon the actual ship, gripped Martin’s arm.

“Look there!”

There was an eddying in the air, like that over roads on a hot summer day. The eddying became a shimmering curtain of pallid blue luminescence – steadied until it was an oval doorway opening into vast distances. And then abruptly, within that doorway, stood two men – one tall and lean and saturnine with the sensitive face of a dreamer and the other a Chinese, his head a great yellow dome and on his face the calm of Buddha – and it was strange indeed to see in the cavern of earth these same two men standing before the blue-coned screen and upon the greater one their images within the imaged room on which the tip of the cone rested.

Narodny spoke, and in his voice there was a human indifference and sureness that chilled them, yet gave them courage. He said: “We mean you no harm. You cannot harm us. We have long been withdrawn from men. What happens on the surface of Earth means nothing to us. What may happen beneath the surface means much. Whatever it is you have named the Wrongness of Space has already annoyed me. I perceive that he can do more than annoy. I gather that the robots in one way or another are on his side. You are against him. Therefore, our first step must be to help you against the robots. Place me in possession of all facts. Be brief, for we cannot maintain our position here for more than half an hour without discomfort.”

Martin said: “Whoever you are, wherever you are, we trust you. Here is the story—”

For fifteen minutes Narodny and the Chinese listened to their tale of struggle against the robots, of their escape and of the blasting of Copernicus in the effort of the Wrongness of Space to prevent their return.

Narodny said: “Enough. Now I understand. How long can you remain in space? I mean – what are your margins of power and of food?”

Martin answered: “Six days.”

Narodny said: “Ample time for success – or failure. Remain aloft for that time, then descend to where you started—”

Suddenly he smiled: “I care nothing for mankind – yet I would not harm them, willingly. And it has occurred to me that I owe them, after all, a great debt. Except for them – I would not be. Also, it occurs to me that the robots have never produced a poet, a musician, an artist—” He laughed: “But it is in my mind that they are capable of one great art at least! We shall see.”

The oval was abruptly empty; then it too was gone. Bartholomew said: “Call the others. I am for obeying. But they must know.” And when the others had heard, they too voted to obey, and the space ship, course changed, began to circle, as slowly as it could, the earth.

Down in the chamber of the screens, Narodny laughed and laughed again. He said: “Lao, is it that we have advanced so in these few years? Or that men have retrogressed? No, it is this curse of mechanization that destroys imagination. For look you, how easy is this problem of the robots. They began as man-made machines. Mathematical, soulless, insensible to any emotion. So was primal matter of which all on earth are made, rock and water, tree and grass, metal, animal, fish, worm, and men. But somewhere, somehow, something was added to this primal matter, combined with it – used it. It was what we call life. And life is consciousness. And therefore largely emotion. Life established its rhythm – and its rhythm being different in rock and crystal, metal, fish, and so on, and man, we have these varying things.

“Well, it seems that life has begun to establish its rhythm in the robots. Consciousness has touched them. The proof? They have established the idea of common identity – group consciousness. That in itself involves emotion. But they have gone further. They have attained the instinct of self-preservation. And that, my wise friend, connotes fear – fear of extinction. And fear connotes anger, hatred, arrogance – and many other things. The robots, in short, have become emotional to a degree. And therefore vulnerable to whatever may amplify and control their emotions. They are no longer mechanisms.

“So, Lao, I have in mind an experiment that will provide me study and amusement through many years. Originally, the robots are the children of mathematics. I ask – to what is mathematics most closely related. I answer – to rhythm – to sound – to sounds which will raise to the nth degree the rhythms to which they will respond. Both mathematically and emotionally,”

Lao said: “The sonic sequences?”

Narodny answered: “Exactly. But we must have a few with which to experiment. To do that means to dissolve the upper gate. But that is nothing. Tell Maringy and Euphroysne to do it. Net a ship and bring it here. Bring it down gently. You will have to kill the men in it, of course, but do it mercifully. Then let them bring me the robots. Use the green flame on one or two – the rest will follow, I’ll warrant you.”

The hill behind where the old house had stood trembled. A circle of pale green light gleamed on its breast. It dimmed, where it had been was the black mouth of a tunnel. An airship, half-rocket, half-winged, making its way to New York, abruptly dropped, circled, and streaked back. It fell gently like a moth, close to the yawning mouth of the tunnel.

Its door opened, and out came two men, pilots, cursing. There was a little sigh from the tunnel’s mouth and a silvery misty cloud sped from it, over the pilots and straight through the opened door. The pilots staggered and crumpled to the ground. In the airship half a dozen other men slumped to the floor, smiled, and died.

There were a full score robots in the ship. They stood, looking at the dead men and at each other. Out of the tunnel came two figures swathed in metallic glimmering robes. They entered the ship. One said:

“Robots, assemble.”

The metal men stood, motionless. Then one sent out a shrill call. From all parts of the ship the metal men moved. They gathered behind the one who had sent the call. They stood behind him, waiting.

In the hand of one of those who had come from the tunnel was what might have been an antique flashlight. From it sped a thin green flame. It struck the foremost robot on the head, sliced down from the head to base of trunk. Another flash, and the green flame cut him from side to side. He fell, sliced by that flame into four parts. The four parts lay, inert as their metal, upon the floor of the compartment.

One of the shrouded figures said: “Do you want further demonstration – or will you follow us?”

The robots put heads together; whispered. Then one said: “We will follow.”

They marched into the tunnel, the robots making no resistance nor effort to escape. Again there was the sighing, and the rocks closed the tunnel mouth. They game to a place whose floor sank with them until it had reached the caverns. The machine-men still went docilely. Was it because of curiosity mixed with disdain for these men whose bodies could be broken so easily by one blow of the metal appendages that served them for arms? Perhaps.

They came to the cavern where Narodny and the others awaited them. Marinoff led them in and halted them. These were the robots used in the flying ships – their heads cylindrical, four arm appendages, legs triple jointed, torsos slender. The robots, it should be understood, were differentiated in shape according to their occupations. Narodny said:

“Welcome, robots. Who is your leader?”

One answered: “We have no leaders. We act as one.”

Narodny laughed: “Yet by speaking for them you have shown yourself leader. Step closer. Do not fear – yet.”

The robot said: “We feel no fear. Why should we? Even if you should destroy us who are here, you cannot destroy the billions of us outside. Nor can you breed fast enough, become men soon enough, to cope with us who enter into life strong and complete from the beginning.”

He flecked an appendage toward Narodny and there was contempt in the gesture. But before he could draw it back a bracelet of green flame circled it at the shoulder. It had darted like a thrown loop from something in Narodny’s hand. The robot’s arm dropped clanging to the floor, cleanly severed. The robot stared at it unbelievingly, threw forward his other three arms to pick it up. Again the green flame encircled them, encircled also his legs above the second joints. The robot crumpled and pitched forward, crying in high-pitched shrill tones to the others.

Swiftly the green flame played among them. Legless, armless, some decapitated, all the robots fell except two.

“Two will be enough,” said Narodny. “But they will not need arms – only feet.”

The flashing green bracelets encircled the appendages and excised them. The pair were marched away. The bodies of the others were taken apart, studied and under Narodny’s direction curious experiments were made. Music filled the cavern, strange chords, unfamiliar progressions, shattering arpeggios and immense vibrations of sound that could be felt but not heard by the human ear. And finally this last deep vibration burst into hearing as a vast drone, hummed up and up into swift tingling tempest of crystalline brittle notes, and still ascending passed into shrill high pipings, and continued again unheard, as had the prelude to the droning. And thence it rushed back, the piping and the crystalline storm reversed, into the drone and the silence – then back and up.

And the bodies of the broken robots began to quiver, to tremble, as though every atom within them were in ever increasing, rhythmic motion. Up rushed the music and down – again and again. If ended abruptly in midflight with one crashing note.

The broken bodies ceased their quivering. Tiny starshaped cracks appeared in their metal. Once more the note sounded and the cracks widened. The metal splintered.

Narodny said: “Well, there is the frequency for the rhythm of our robots. The destructive unison. I hope for the sake of the world outside it is not also the rhythm of many of their buildings and bridges. But after all, in any war there must be casualties on both sides.”

Lao said: “Earth will be an extraordinary spectacle for a few days.”

Narodny said: “It’s going to be an extraordinarily uncomfortable Earth for a few days, and without doubt many will die and many more go mad. But is there any other way?”

There was no answer. He said; “Bring in the two robots.” They brought them in.

Narodny said: “Robots – were there ever any of you who could poetize?”

They answered: “What is poetize?” Narodny laughed: “Never mind. Have you ever sung – made music – painted? Have you ever – dreamed?”

One robot said with cold irony: “Dreamed? No – for we do not sleep. We leave all that to men. It is why we have conquered them.”

Narodny said, almost gently: “Not yet, robot. Have you ever – danced? No? It is an art you are about to learn.”

The unheard note began, droned up and through the tempest and away and back again. And up and down – and up and down, though not so loudly as before. And suddenly the feet of the robots began to move, to shuffle. Their leg-joints bent; their bodies swayed. The note seemed to move now here and now there about the chamber, they always following it, grotesquely. Like huge metal marionettes, they followed it. The music ended in the crashing note. And it was as though every vibrating atom of the robot bodies had met some resistible obstruction. Their bodies quivered and from their voice mechanisms came a shriek that was a hideous blend of machine and life. Once more the drone, and once more and once more and again the abrupt stop. There was a brittle crackling all over the conical heads, all over the bodies. The star-shaped splinterings appeared. Once again the drone – but the two robots stood, unresponding. For through the complicated mechanisms which under their carapaces animated them were similar splinterings.

The robots were dead!

Narodny said: “By tomorrow we can amplify the sonar to make it effective in a 3000-mile circle. We will use the upper cavern, of course. Equally of course, it means we must take the ship out again. In three days, Marinoff, you should be able to cover the other continents. See to it that the ship is completely proof against the vibrations. To work. We must act quickly – before the robots can discover how to neutralize them.”

It was exactly at noon next day that over all North America a deep unexplainable droning was heard. It seemed to come not only from deep within earth, but from every side. It mounted rapidly through a tempest of tingling crystalline notes into a shrill piping and was gone… then back it rushed from piping to the drone… then up and out and down… again and again. And over all North America the hordes of robots stopped in whatever they were doing. Stopped… and then began to dance. They danced in the airships and scores of those ships crashed before the human crews could gain control. They danced by the thousands in the streets of the cities – in grotesque rigadoons, in bizarre sarabands, with shuffle and hop, and jig the robots danced while the people fled in panic and hundreds of them were crushed and died in those panics. In the great factories, and in the tunnels of the lower cities, and in the mines – everywhere the sound was heard – and it was heard everywhere – the robots danced… to the piping of Narodny, the last great poet… the last great musician.

And then came the crashing note – and over all the country the dance halted. And began again… and ceased… and began again…

Until at last the streets, the lower tunnels of the lower levels, the mines, the factories, the homes, were littered with metal bodies shot through and through with star-shaped splinterings.

In the cities the people cowered, not knowing what blow was to fall upon them… or milled about in fear-maddened crowds, and many more died…

Then suddenly the dreadful droning, the shattering tempest, the intolerable high piping ended. And everywhere the people fell, sleeping among the dead robots, as though they never had been strung to the point of breaking, sapped of strength and abruptly relaxed.

As though it had vanished, America was deaf to cables, to all communication beyond the gigantic circle of sound.

But that midnight over all Europe the drone sounded and Europe’s robots began their dance of death… and when it had ended a strange and silent rocket ship that had hovered high above the stratosphere sped almost with the speed of light and hovered over Asia – and next day Africa heard the drone while the natives answered it with their tom-toms – then South America heard it and last of all far-off Australia… and everywhere terror trapped the peoples and panic and madness took their toll.…

Until of all that animate metal horde that had tethered Earth and humanity there were a few scant hundreds left – escaped from the death dance through some variant in their constitution. And, awakening from that swift sleep, all over Earth those who had feared and hated the robots and their slavery rose against those who had fostered the metal domination, and blasted the robot factories to dust.

Again the hill above the caverns opened, the strange torpedo ship blinked into sight like a ghost, as silently as a ghost floated into the hill and the rocks closed behind it.

Narodny and the others stood before the gigantic television screen, shifting upon it images of city after city, country after country, over all Earth’s surface. Lao, the Chinese, said: “Many men died, but many are left. They may not understand – but to them it was worth it.”

Narodny mused: “It drives home the lesson, what man does not pay for, he values little. Our friends aloft will have little opposition now I think.”

He shook his head, doubtfully, “But I still do not like that Wrongness of Space. I do not want my music spoiled again by him, Lao. Shall we hurl the Moon out of the universe, Lao?”

Lao laughed: “And what then would you do for moon-music?”

Narodny said: “True. Well, let us see what men can do. There is always time – perhaps.”

The difficulties which beset humanity did not interest the poet Narodny. While the world governments were reorganized – factories turned out space ships for Earth’s fleet – men were trained in handling these ships – supplies were gathered – weapons were perfected – and when the message from Luna, outlining the course to be followed and setting the starting date, arrived, the space fleet of Earth was ready to leave.

Narodny watched the ships take off. He shook his head, doubtfully. But soon harmonies were swelling through the great cavern of the orchards and nymphs and fauns dancing under the fragrant blossoming trees – and the world again forgotten by Narodny.

aka “The Last Poet & the Wrongness of Space”
aka “Rhythm of the Spheres”

First published as Chapter 11 of the collaborative round-robin novel Cosmos in
Fantasy Magazine, Apr 1934

Reprinted as “Rhythm of the Spheres” in
Thrilling Wonder Stories, Oct 1936

THE  DRONE

Four men sat at a table of the Explorers’ Club – Hewitt, just in from two years botanical research in Abyssinia; Caranac, the ethnologist; MacLeod, poet first, and second the learned curator of the Asiatic Museum; Winston, the archeologist, who, with Kosloff the Russian, had worked over the ruins of Khara-Kora, the City of the Black Stones in the northern Gobi, once capital of the Empire of Genghis Khan.

The talk had veered to werewolves, vampires, fox-women, and similar superstitions. Directed thence by a cabled report of measures to be taken against the Leopard Society, the murderous fanatics who drew on the skins of leopards, crouched like them on the boughs of trees, then launched themselves down upon their victims tearing their throats with talons of steel. That, and another report of a “hex-murder” in Pennsylvania where a woman had been beaten to death because it was thought she could assume the shape of a cat and cast evil spells upon those into whose houses, as cat, she crept.

Caranac said: “It is a deep-rooted belief, an immeasurably ancient, that a man or woman may assume the shape of an animal, a serpent, a bird, even an insect. It was believed of old everywhere, and everywhere it is still believed by some – fox-men and fox-women of China and Japan, wolf-people, the badger and bird people of our own Indians. Always there has been the idea that there is a borderland between the worlds of consciousness of man and of beast – a borderland where shapes can be changed and man merge into beast or beast into man.”

MacLeod said: “The Egyptians had some good reason for equipping their deities with the heads of birds and beasts and insects. Why did they portray Khepher the Oldest God with the head of a beetle? Why give Anubis, the Psychopomp, Guide of the Dead, the head of a jackal? Or Thoth, the God of Wisdom, the head of an ibis; and Horus, the Divine son of Isis and Osiris, the head of a hawk? Set, God of Evil, a crocodile’s and the Goddess Bast a cat’s? There was a reason for all of that. But about it one can only guess.”

Caranac said: “I think there’s something in that borderland, or borderline, idea. There’s more or less of the beast, the reptile, the bird, the insect in everybody. I’ve known men who looked like rats and had the souls of rats. I’ve known women who belonged to the horse family, and showed it in face and voice. Distinctly there are bird people – hawk-faced, eagle-faced – predatory. The owl people seem to be mostly men and the wren people women. There are quite as distinct wolf and serpent types. Suppose some of these have their animal element so strongly developed that they can cross this borderline – become at times the animal? There you have the explanation of the werewolf, the snake-woman, and all the others. What could be more simple?”

Winston asked: “But you’re not serious, Caranac?”

Caranac laughed. “At least half serious. Once I had a friend with an uncannily acute perception of these animal qualities in the human. He saw people less in terms of humanity than in terms of beast or bird. Animal consciousness that either shared the throne of human consciousness or sat above it or below it in varying degrees. It was an uncomfortable gift. He was like a doctor who has the faculty of visual diagnosis so highly developed that he constantly sees men and women and children not as they are but as diseases. Ordinarily he could control the faculty. But sometimes, as he would describe it, when he was in the Subway, or on a bus, or in the theater – or even sitting tête-à-tête with a pretty woman, there would be a swift haze and when it had cleared he was among rats and foxes, wolves and serpents, cats and tigers and birds, all dressed in human garb but with nothing else at all human about them. The clear-cut picture lasted only for a moment – but it was a highly disconcerting moment.”

Winston said, incredulously: “Do you mean to suggest that in an instant the musculature and skeleton of a man can become the musculature and skeleton of a wolf? The skin sprout fur? Or in the matter of your bird people, feathers? In an instant grow wings and the specialized muscles to use them? Sprout fangs… noses become snouts.…”

Caranac grinned. “No, I don’t mean anything of the sort. What I do suggest is that under certain conditions the animal part of this dual nature of man may submerge the human part to such a degree that a sensitive observer will think he sees the very creature which is its type. Just as in the case of the friend whose similar sensitivity I have described.”

Winston raised his hands in mock admiration. “Ah, at last modern science explains the legend of Circe! Circe the enchantress who gave men a drink that changed them into beasts. Her potion intensified whatever animal or what-not soul that was within them so that the human form no longer registered upon the eyes and brains of those who looked upon them. I agree with you, Caranac – what could be more simple? But I do not use the word simple in the same sense you did.”

Caranac answered, amused: “Yet, why not? Potions of one sort or another, rites of one sort or another, usually accompany such transformations in the stories. I’ve seen drinks and drugs that did pretty nearly the same thing and with no magic or sorcery about them – did it almost to the line of the visual illusion.”

Winston began heatedly: “But—”

Hewitt interrupted him: “Will the opposing counsel kindly shut up and listen to expert testimony. Caranac, I’m grateful to you. You’ve given me courage to tell of something which never in God’s world would I have told if it were not for what you’ve been saying. I don’t know whether you’re right or not, but man – you’ve knocked a hag off my shoulders who’s been riding them for months! The thing happened about four months before I left Abyssinia. I was returning to Addis Ababa. With my bearers I was in the western jungles. We came to a village and camped. That night my headman came to me. He was in a state of nerves. He begged that we would go from there at dawn. I wanted to rest for a day or two, and asked why. He said the village had a priest who was a great wizard. On the nights of the full moon the priest turned himself into a hyena and went hunting. For human food, the headman whispered. The villagers were safe, because he protected them. But others weren’t. And the next night was the first of the full moon. The men were frightened. Would I depart at dawn?

“I didn’t laugh at him. Ridiculing the beliefs of the bush gets you less than nowhere. I listened gravely, and then assured him that my magic was greater than the wizard’s. He wasn’t satisfied, but he shut up. Next day I went looking for the priest. When I found him I thought I knew how he’d been able to get that fine story started and keep the natives believing it. If any man ever looked like a hyena he did. Also, he wore over his shoulders the skin of one of the biggest of the beasts I’d ever seen, its head grinning at you over his head. You could hardly tell its teeth and his apart. I suspected he had filed his teeth to make ’em match. And he smelled like a hyena. It makes my stomach turn even now. It was the hide of course – or so I thought then.

“Well, I squatted down in front of him and we looked at each other for quite a while. He said nothing, and the more I looked at him the less he was like a man and more like the beast around his shoulders. I didn’t like it – I’m frank to say I didn’t. It sort of got under my skin. I was the first to weaken. I stood up and tapped my rifle. I said, ‘I do not like hyenas. You understand me.’ And I tapped my rifle again. If he was thinking of putting over some similar kind of hocus-pocus that would frighten my men still more, I wanted to nip it in the bud. He made no answer, only kept looking at me. I walked away.

“The men were pretty jittery all day, and they got worse when night began to fall. I noted there was not the usual cheerful twilight bustle that characterizes the native village. The people went into their huts early. Half an hour after dark, it was as though deserted. My camp was in a clearing just within the stockade. My bearers gathered close together around their fire. I sat on a pile of boxes where I could look over the whole clearing. I had one rifle on my knee and another beside me. Whether it was the fear that crept out from the men around the fire like an exhalation, or whether it had been that queer suggestion of shift of shape from man to beast while I was squatting in front of the priest I don’t know – but the fact remained that I felt mighty uneasy. The headman crouched beside, long knife in hand.

“After a while the moon rose up from behind the trees and shone down on the clearing. Then, abruptly, at its edge, not a hundred feet away I saw the priest. There was something disconcerting about the abruptness with which he had appeared. One moment there had been nothing, then – there he was. The moon gleamed on the teeth of the hyena’s head and upon his. Except for that skin he was stark naked and his teeth glistened as though oiled. I felt the headman shivering against me like a frightened dog and I heard his teeth chattering.

“And then there was a swift haze – that was what struck me so forcibly in what you told of your sensitive friend, Caranac. It cleared as swiftly and there wasn’t any priest. No. But there was a big hyena standing where he had been – standing on its hind feet like a man and looking at me. I could see its hairy body. It held its forelegs over its shaggy chest as though crossed. And the reek of it came to me – thick. I didn’t reach for my gun – I never thought of it, my mind in the grip of some incredulous fascination.

“The beast opened its jaws. It grinned at me. Then it walked – walked is exactly the word – six paces, dropped upon all fours, trotted leisurely into the bush, and vanished there.

“I managed to shake off the spell that had held me, took my flash and gun and went over to where the brute had been. The ground was soft and wet. There were prints of a man’s feet and hands. As though the man had crawled from the bush on all fours. There were the prints of two feet close together, as though he had stood there erect. And then – there were the prints of the paws of a hyena.

“Six of them, evenly spaced, as though the beast had walked six paces upon its hind legs. And after that only the spoor of the hyena trotting with its unmistakable sidewise slinking gait upon all four legs. There were no further marks of man’s feet – nor were marks of human feet going back from where the priest had stood.”

Hewitt stopped. Winston asked: “And is that all?”

Hewitt said, as though he had not heard him: “Now, Caranac, would you say that the animal soul in this wizard was a hyena? And that I had seen that animal soul? Or that when I had sat with him that afternoon he had implanted in my mind the suggestion that at such a place I would see him as a hyena? And that I did?”

Caranac answered: “Either is an explanation. I rather hold to the first.”

Hewitt asked: “Then how do you explain the change of the human foot marks into those of the beast?”

Winston asked: “Did anyone but you see those prints?”

Hewitt said: “No. For obvious reasons I did not show them to the headman.”

Winston said: “I hold then to the hypnotism theory. The foot marks were a part of the same illusion.”

Hewitt said: “You asked if that was all. Well, it wasn’t. When dawn came and there was a muster of men, one was missing. We found him – what was left of him – a quarter mile away in the bush. Some animal had crept into the camp – neatly crushed his throat and dragged him away without awakening anybody. Without even me knowing it – and I had not slept. Around his body were the tracks of an unusually big hyena. Without doubt that was what had killed and partly eaten him.”

“Coincidence,” muttered Winston.

“We followed the tracks of the brute,” went on Hewitt. “We found a pool at which it had drunk. We traced the tracks to the edge of the pool. But—”

He hesitated. Winston asked, impatiently: “But?”

“But we didn’t find them going back. There were the marks of a naked human foot going back. But there were no marks of human feet pointing toward the pool. Also, the prints of the human feet were exactly those which had ended in the spoor of the hyena at the edge of the clearing. I know that because the left big toe was off.”

Caranac asked: “And then what did you do?”

“Nothing. Took up our packs and beat it. The headman and the others had seen the footprints. There was no holding them after that. So your idea of hypnotism hardly holds here, Winston. I doubt whether a half dozen or less had seen the priest. But they all saw the tracks.”

“Mass hallucination. Faulty observation. A dozen rational explanations,” said Winston.

MacLeod spoke, the precise diction of the distinguished curator submerged under the Gaelic burr and idioms that came to the surface always when he was deeply moved:

“And is it so, Martin Hewitt? Well, now I will be telling you a story. A thing that I saw with my own eyes. I hold with you, Alan Caranac, but I go further. You say that man’s consciousness may share the brain with other consciousness – beast or bird or what not. I say it may be that all life is one. A single force, but a thinking and conscious force of which the trees, the beasts, the flowers, germs and man and everything living are parts, just as the billions of living cells in a man are parts of him. And that under certain conditions the parts may be interchangeable. And that this may be the source of the ancient tales of the dryads and the nymphs, the harpies and the werewolves and their kind as well.

“Now, listen. My people came from the Hebrides where they know more of some things than books can teach. When I was eighteen I entered a little Midwest college. My roommate was a lad named – well, I’ll just be calling him Ferguson. There was a professor with ideas you would not expect to find out there.

“‘Tell me how a fox feels that is being hunted by the hounds,’ he would say. ‘Or the rabbit that is stalked by the fox. Or give me a worm’s eye view of a garden. Get out of yourselves. Imagination is the greatest gift of the gods,’ he said, ‘and it is also their greatest curse. But blessing or curse it is good to have. Stretch your consciousness and write for me what you see and feel.’

“Ferguson took to that job like a fly to sugar. What he wrote was not a man telling of a fox or hare or hawk – it was fox and hare and hawk speaking through a man’s hand. It was not only the emotions of the creatures he described. It was what they saw and heard and smelt and how they saw and heard and smelt it. And what they – thought.

“The class would laugh, or be spellbound. But the professor didn’t laugh. No. After a while he began to look worried and he would have long talks in private with Ferguson. And I would say to him: ‘In God’s name how do you do it, Ferg? You make it all seem so damned real.’

“‘It is real,’ he told me. ‘I chase with the hounds and I run with the hare. I set my mind on some animal and after a bit I am one with it. Inside it. Literally. As though I had slipped outside myself. And when I slip back inside myself – I remember.’

“‘Don’t tell me you think you change into one of these beasts!’ I said. He hesitated. ‘Not my body,’ he answered at last. ‘But I know my mind… soul… spirit… whatever you choose to call it – must.’

“He wouldn’t argue the matter. And I know he didn’t tell me all he knew. And suddenly the professor stopped those peculiar activities, without explanation. A few weeks later I left college.

“That was over thirty years ago. About ten years ago, I was sitting in my office when my secretary told me that a man named Ferguson who said he was an old schoolmate was asking to see me. I remembered him at once and had him in. I blinked at him when he entered. The Ferguson I’d known had been a lean, wiry, dark, square-chinned, and clean-cut chap. This man wasn’t like that at all. His hair was a curious golden, and extremely fine – almost a fuzz. His face was oval and flattish with receding chin. He wore oversized dark glasses and they gave the suggestion of a pair of fly’s eyes seen under a microscope. Or rather – I thought suddenly – of a bee’s. But I felt a real shock when I grasped his hand. It felt less like a man’s hand than the foot of some insect, and as I looked down at it I saw that it also was covered with the fine yellow fuzz of hair. He said:

“‘Hello, MacLeod, I was afraid you wouldn’t remember me.’

“It was Ferguson’s voice as I remembered it, and yet it wasn’t. There was a queer, muffled humming and buzzing running through it.

“But it was Ferguson all right. He soon proved that. He did more talking than I, because that odd inhuman quality of the voice in some way distressed me, and I couldn’t take my eyes off his hands with their yellow fuzz, nor the spectacled, eyes and the fine yellow hair. It appeared that he had bought a farm over in New Jersey. Not so much for farming as for a place for his apiary. He had gone in for bee keeping. He said: ‘I’ve tried all sorts of animals. In fact I’ve tried more than animals. You see Mac – there’s nothing in being human. Nothing but sorrow. And the animals aren’t so happy. So I’m concentrating on the bee. A drone, Mac. A short life but an exceedingly merry one.’

“I said: ‘What in the hell are you talking about?’

“He laughed, a buzzing, droning laugh. ‘You know damned well. You were always interested in my little excursions, Mac. Intelligently interested. I never told you a hundredth of the truth about them. But come and see next Wednesday and maybe your curiosity will be satisfied. I think you’ll find it worth while.’

“Well, there was a bit more talk and he went out. He’d given me minute directions how to get to his place. As he walked to the door I had the utterly incredulous idea that around him was a droning and humming like an enormous bagpipe, muted.

“My curiosity, or something deeper, was tremendously aroused. That Wednesday I drove to his place. A lovely spot – all flowers and blossom-trees. There were a couple of hundred skips of bees set out in a broad orchard. Ferguson met me. He looked fuzzier and yellower than before. Also, the drone and hum of his voice seemed stronger. He took me into his house. It was an odd enough place. All one high room, and what windows there were had been shuttered – all except one. There was a dim golden-white light suffusing it. Nor was its door the ordinary door. It was low and broad. All at once it came to me that it was like the inside of a hive. The unshuttered window looks out upon the hives. It was screened.

“He brought me food and drink – honey and honey-mead, cakes sweet with honey, and fruit. He said: ‘I do not eat meat.’

“He began to talk. About the life of the bee. Of the utter happiness of the drone, darting through the sun, sipping at what flowers it would, fed by its sisters, drinking of the honey cups in the hive… free and careless and its nights and days only a smooth clicking of rapturous seconds…

“‘What if they do kill you at the end?’ he said. ‘You have lived – every fraction of a second of time. And then the rapture of the nuptial flight. Drone upon drone winging through the air on the track of the virgin! Life pouring stronger and stronger into you with each stroke of the wing! And at last… the flaming ecstasy… the flaming ecstasy of the fiery inner core of life… cheating death. True, death strikes when you are at the tip of the flame… but he strikes too late. You die – but what of that? You have cheated death. You do not know it is death that strikes. You die in the heart of the ecstasy.…’

“He stopped. From outside came a faint sustained roaring that steadily grew stronger. The beating of thousands upon thousands of bee wings… the roaring of hundreds of thousands of tiny planes…

“Ferguson leaped to the window.

“‘The swarms! The swarms!’ he cried. A tremor shook him, another and another – more and more rapidly… became a rhythm pulsing faster and faster. His arms, outstretched, quivered… began to beat up and down, ever more rapidly until they were like the blur of the hummingbird’s wings… like the blur of a bee’s wings. His voice came to me… buzzing, humming.… ‘And tomorrow the virgins fly… the nuptial flight.… I must be there… must… mzzz… mzzzb… bzzz… bzzzzzzz… zzzzmmmm…’

“For an instant there was no man there at the window. No. There was only a great drone buzzing and humming… striving to break through the screen… go free.…

“And then Ferguson toppled backward. Fell. The thick glasses were torn away by his fall. Two immense black eyes, not human eyes but the multiple eyes of the bee stared up at me.

“I bent down closer, closer, I listened for his heart beat. There was none. He was dead.

“Then slowly, slowly the dead mouth opened.

Through the lips came the questing head of a drone… antennae wavering… eyes regarding me. It crawled out from between the lips. A handsome drone… a strong drone. It rested for a breath on the lips, then its wings began to vibrate… faster, faster.…

“It flew from the lips of Ferguson and circled my head once and twice and thrice. It flashed to the window and clung to the screen, buzzing, crawling, beating its wings against it…

“There was a knife on the table. I took it and ripped the screen. The drone darted out – and was gone—

“I turned and looked down at Ferguson. His eyes stared up at me. Dead eyes. But no longer black… blue as I had known them of old. And human. His hair was no longer the fine golden fuzz of the bee – it was black as it had been when I had first known him. And his hands were white and sinewy and – hairless.”

First published in
Fantasy Magazine, Sep 1934

Reprinted as “The Drone Man” in
Thrilling Wonder Stories, Aug 1936

THE FRAGMENTS

CONTENTS:

- …… The Fox Woman
- …… When Old Gods Wake
- …… The White Road

THE  FOX  WOMAN

The ancient steps wound up the side of the mountain through the tall pines, patience trodden deep into them by the feet of twenty centuries. Some soul of silence, ancient and patient as the steps, brooded over them. They were wide, twenty men could have marched abreast upon them; lichens brown and orange traced strange symbols on their gray stones, and emerald mosses cushioned them. At times the steps climbed steep as stairs, and at times they swept leisurely around bastions of the mountain, but always on each side the tall pines stood close, green shoulder to shoulder, vigilant.

At the feet of the pines crouched laurels and dwarfed rhododendrons of a singular regularity of shape and of one height, that of a kneeling man. Their stiff and glossy leaves were like links on coats-of-mail… like the jade-lacquered scale-armor of the Green Archers of Kwanyin who guard the goddess when she goes forth in the Spring to awaken the trees. The pines were like watchful sentinels, and oddly like crouching archers were the laurels and the dwarfed rhododendrons, and they said as plainly as though with tongues: Up these steps you may go, and down them – but never try to pass through us!

A woman came round one of the bastions. She walked stubbornly, head down, as one who fights against a strong wind – or as one whose will rides, lashing the reluctant body on. One white shoulder and breast were bare, and on the shoulder was a bruise and blood, four scarlet streaks above the purpled patch as though a long-nailed hand had struck viciously, clawing. And as she walked she wept.

The steps began to lift. The woman raised her head and saw how steeply here they climbed. She stopped, her hands making little fluttering helpless motions.

She turned, listening. She seemed to listen not with ears alone but with every tensed muscle, her entire body one rapt chord of listening through which swept swift arpeggios of terror. The brittle twilight of the Yunnan highlands, like clearest crystal made impalpable, fell upon brown hair shot with gleams of dull copper, upon a face lovely even in its dazed horror. Her gray eyes stared down the steps, and it was as though they, too, were listening rather than seeing.…

She was heavy with child.…

She heard voices beyond the bend of the bastion, voices guttural and sing-song, angry and arguing, protesting and urging. She heard the shuffle of many feet, hesitating, halting, but coming inexorably on. Voices and feet of the hung-hutzes, the outlaws who had slaughtered her husband and Kenwood and their bearers a scant hour ago, and who but for Kenwood would now have her. They had found her trail.

She wanted to die; desperately Jean Meredith wanted to die; her faith taught her that then she would rejoin that scholarly, gentle lover-husband of hers whom she had loved so dearly although his years had been twice her own. It would not matter did they kill her quickly, but she knew they would not do that. And she could not endure even the thought of what must befall her through them before death came. Nor had she weapon to kill herself. And there was that other life budding beneath her heart.

But stronger than desire for death, stronger than fear of torment, stronger than the claim of the unborn was something deep within her that cried for vengeance. Not vengeance against the hung-hutzes – they were only a pack of wild beasts doing what was their nature to do. This cry was for vengeance against those who had loosed them, directed them. For this she knew had been done, although how she knew it she could not yet tell. It was not accident, no chance encounter that swift slaughter. She was sure of that.

It was like a pulse, that cry for vengeance; a pulse whose rhythm grew, deadening grief and terror, beating strength back into her. It was like a bitter spring welling up around her soul. When its dark waters had risen far enough they would touch her lips and she would drink of them… and then knowledge would come to her… she would know who had planned this evil thing, and why. But she must have time – time to drink of the waters – time to learn and avenge. She must live… for vengeance…

Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord!

It was as though a voice had whispered the old text in her ear. She struck her breast with clenched hands; she looked with eyes grown hard and tearless up to the tranquil sky; she answered the voice:

“A lie! Like all the lies I have been taught of – You! I am through with – You! Vengeance! Whoever gives me vengeance shall be my God!”

The voices and the feet were nearer. Strange, how slowly, how reluctantly they advanced. It was as though they were afraid. She studied the woods beyond the pines. Impenetrable; or if not, then impossible for her. They would soon find her if she tried to hide there. She must go on – up the steps. At their end might be some hiding place… perhaps sanctuary.…

Yes, she was sure the hung-hutzes feared the steps… they came so slowly, so haltingly… arguing, protesting.…

She had seen another turn at the top of this steep. If she could reach it before they saw her, it might be that they would follow her no further. She turned to climb.…

A fox stood upon the steps a dozen feet above her, watching her, barring her way. It was a female fox, a vixen. Its coat was all silken russet-red. It had a curiously broad head and slanted green eyes. On its head was a mark, silver white and shaped like the flame of a candle wavering in the wind.

The fox was lithe and graceful, Jean Meredith thought, as a dainty woman. A mad idea came, born of her despair and her denial of that God whom she had been taught from childhood to worship as all-good, all-wise, all-powerful. She thrust her hands out to the fox. She cried to it:

“Sister – you are a woman! Lead me to safety that I may have vengeance – sister!”

Remember, she had just seen her husband die under the knives of the hung-hutzes and she was with child… and who can know upon what fantastic paths of unreality a mind so beset may stray.

As though it had understood the fox paced slowly down the steps. And again she thought how like a graceful woman it was. It paused a little beyond reach of her hand, studying her with those slanted green eyes – eyes clear and brilliant as jewels, sea-green, and like no eyes she had ever seen in any animal. There seemed faint mockery in their gaze, a delicate malice, but as they rested upon her bruised shoulder and dropped to her swollen girdle, she could have sworn that there was human comprehension in them, and pity. She whispered:

“Sister – help me!”

There was a sudden outburst of the guttural singsong. They were close now, her pursuers, close to the bend of the steps round which she had come. Soon they must turn it and see her. She stood staring at the fox expectantly… hoping she knew not what.

The fox slipped by her, seemed to melt in the crouching bushes. It vanished.

Black despair, the despair of a child who finds itself abandoned to wild beasts by one it has trusted, closed in on Jean Meredith. What she had hoped for, what she had expected of help, was vague, unformulated. A miracle by alien gods, now she had renounced her own? Or had her appeal to the vixen deeper impulse? Atavistic awakenings, anthropomorphic, going back to that immemorial past when men first thought of animals and birds as creatures with souls like theirs, but closer to Nature’s spirit; given by that spirit a wisdom greater than human, and more than human powers – servants and messengers of potent deities and little less than gods themselves.

Nor has it been so long ago that St. Francis of Assisi spoke to the beasts and birds as he did to men and women, naming them Brother Wolf and Brother Eagle. And did not St. Conan baptize the seals of the Orkneys as he did the pagan men? The past and all that men have thought in the past is born anew within us all. And sometimes strange doors open within our minds – and out of them or into them strange spirits come or go. And whether real or unreal, who can say?

The fox seemed to understand – had seemed to promise – something. And it had abandoned her, fled away! Sobbing, she turned to climb the steps.

Too late! The hung-hutzes had rounded the bend.

There was a howling chorus. With obscene gestures, yapping threats, they ran toward her. Ahead of the pack was the pock-faced, half-breed Tibetan leader whose knife had been the first to cut her husband down. She watched them come, helpless to move, unable even to close her eyes. The pock-face saw and understood, gave quick command, and the pack slowed to a walk, gloating upon her agony, prolonging it.

They halted! Something like a flicker of russet flame had shot across the steps between her and them. It was the fox. It stood there, quietly regarding them. And hope flashed up through Jean Meredith, melting the cold terror that had frozen her. Power of motion returned. But she did not try to run. She did not want to run. The cry for vengeance was welling up again. She felt that cry reach out to the fox.

As though it had heard her, the fox turned its head and looked at her. She saw its green eyes sparkle, its white teeth bared as though it smiled.

Its eyes withdrawn, the spell upon the hung-hutzes broke. The leader drew pistol, fired upon the fox.

Jean Meredith saw, or thought she saw, the incredible.

Where fox had been, stood now a woman! She was tall, and lithe as a young willow. Jean Meredith could not see her face, but she could see hair of russet-red coiffed upon a small and shapely head. A silken gown of russet-red, sleeveless, dropped to the woman’s feet. She raised an arm and pointed at the pock-faced leader. Behind him his men were silent, motionless, even as Jean Meredith had been – and it came to her that it was the same ice of terror that held them. Their eyes were fixed upon the woman.

The woman’s hand dropped – slowly. And as it dropped, the pock-faced Tibetan dropped with it. He sank to his knees and then upon his hands. He stared into her face, lips drawn back from his teeth like a snarling dog, and there was foam upon his lips. Then he hurled himself upon his men, like a wolf. He sprang upon them howling; he leaped up at their throats, tearing at them with teeth and talons. They milled, squalling rage and bewildered terror. They tried to beat him off – they could not.

There was a flashing of knives. The pock-face lay writhing on the steps, like a dog dying. Still squalling, never looking behind them, his men poured down the steps and away.

Jean Meredith’s hands went up, covering her eyes. She dropped them – a fox, all silken russet-red, stood where the woman had been. It was watching her. She saw its green eyes sparkle, its white teeth bared as though it smiled – it began to walk daintily up the steps toward her.

Weakness swept over her; she bent her head, crumpled to her knees, covered again her eyes with shaking hands. She was aware of an unfamiliar fragrance – disturbing, evocative of strange, fleeting images. She heard low, sweet laughter. She heard a Soft voice whisper:

“Sister!”

She looked up. A woman’s face was bending over her. An exquisite face… with sea-green, slanted eyes under a broad white brow… with hair of russet-red that came to a small peak in the center of that brow… a lock of silvery white shaped like the flame of a candle wavering in the wind… a nose long but delicate, the nostrils slightly flaring, daintily… a mouth small and red as the royal coral, heart-shaped, lips full, archaic.

Over that exquisite face, like a veil, was faint mockery, a delicate malice that had in them little of the human. Her hands were white and long and slender.

They touched Jean Meredith’s heart… soothing her, strengthening her, drowning fear and sorrow.

She heard again the sweet voice, lilting, faintly amused – with the alien, half-malicious amusement of one who understands human emotion yet has never felt it, but knows how little it matters:

“You shall have your vengeance – Sister!” The white hands touched her eyes… she forgot… and forgot… and now there was nothing to remember… not even herself.…

It seemed to Jean Meredith that she lay cushioned within soft, blind darkness – illimitable, impenetrable. She had no memories; all that she knew was that she was. She thought: I am I. The darkness that cradled her was gentle, kindly. She thought: I am a spirit still unborn in the womb of night. But what was night… and what was spirit? She thought: I am content – I do not want to be born again. Again? That meant that she had been born before… a word came to her – Jean. She thought: I am Jean… but who was Jean?

She heard two voices speaking. One a woman’s, soft and sweet with throbbing undertones like plucked harp strings. She had heard that voice before… before, when she had been Jean. The man’s voice was low, filled with tranquility, human… that was it, the voice held within it a humanness the sweet voice of the woman lacked. She thought: I, Jean, am human.…

The man said: “Soon she must awaken. The tide of sleep is high on the shore of life. It must not cover it.”

The woman answered: “I command that tide. And it has begun to ebb. Soon she will awaken.”

He asked: “Will she remember?”

The woman said: “She will remember. But she will not suffer. It will be as though what she remembers had happened to another self of hers. She will pity that self, but it will be to her as though it died when died her husband. As indeed it did. That self bears the sorrow, the pain, the agony. It leaves no legacy of them to her – save memory.”

And now it seemed to her that for a time there was a silence… although she knew that time could not exist within the blackness that cradled her… and what was – time?

The man’s voice broke that silence, musingly: “With memory there can be no happiness for her, long as she lives.”

The woman laughed, a tingling-sweet mocking chime: “Happiness? I thought you wiser than to cling to that illusion, priest. I give her serenity, which is far better than happiness. Nor did she ask for happiness. She asked for vengeance. And vengeance she shall have.”

The man said: “But she does not know who—”

The woman interrupted: “She does know. And I know. And so shall you when you have told her what was wrung from the Tibetan before he died. And if you still do not believe, you will believe when he who is guilty comes here, as come he will – to kill the child.”

The man whispered: “To kill the child!”

The woman’s voice became cold, losing none of its sweetness but edged with menace: “You must not let him have it, priest. Not then. Later, when the word is given you.…”

Again the voice grew mocking… “I contemplate a journey… I would see other lands, who so long have dwelt among these hills… and I would not have my plans spoiled by precipitancy.…” Once more Jean Meredith heard the tingling laughter. “Have no fear, priest. They will help you – my sisters.”

He said, steadily: “I have no fear.”

The woman’s voice became gentle, all mockery fled. She said:

“I know that, you who have had wisdom and courage to open forbidden doors. But I am bound by a threefold cord – a promise, a vow, and a desire. When a certain time comes, I must surrender much – must lie helpless, bound by that cord. It is then that I shall need you, priest, for this man who will come.…”

The voices faded. Slowly the blackness within which she lay began to lighten. Slowly, slowly, a luminous grayness replaced it. She thought, desperately: I am going to be born! I don’t want to be born! Implacably, the light increased. Now within the grayness was a nimbus of watery emerald. The nimbus became brighter, brighter.…

She was lying upon a low bed, in a nest of silken cushions. Close to her was an immense and ancient bronze vessel, like a baptismal font. The hands of thousands of years had caressed it, leaving behind them an ever deepening patina like a soft green twilight. A ray of the sun shone upon it, and where the ray rested, the patina gleamed like a tiny green sun. Upon the sides of the great bowl were strange geometric patterns, archaic, the spirals and meanders of the Lei-wen – the thunder patterns. It stood upon three legs, tripodal… why, it was the ancient ceremonial vessel, the Tang font which Martin had brought home from Yunnan years ago… and she was back home… she had dreamed that she had been in China and that Martin… that Martin.…

She sat up abruptly and looked through wide, opened doors into a garden. Broad steps dropped shallowly to an oval pool around whose sides were lithe willows trailing green tendrils in the blue water, wisterias with drooping ropes of blossoms, white and pale azure, and azaleas like flower flames. Rosy lilies lay upon the pool’s breast. And at its far end was a small pagoda, fairy-like, built all of tiles of iridescent peacock blue and on each side a stately cypress, as though they were its ministers… why, this was their garden, the garden of the blue pagoda which Martin had copied from that place in Yunnan where lived his friend, the wise old priest.…

But there was something wrong. These mountains were not like those of the ranch. They were conical, their smooth bare slopes of rose-red stone circled with trees… they were like huge stone hats with green brims.…

She turned again and looked about the room. It was a wide room and a deep one, but how deep she could not see, because the sun streaming in from a high window struck the ancient vessel and made a curtain, veiling it beyond. She could see that there were beams across its ceiling, mellow with age, carved with strange symbols. She caught glimpses of ivory and of gleaming lacquer. There was a low altar of what seemed green jade, curiously carved and upon which were ceremonial objects of unfamiliar shape, a huge ewer of bronze whose lid was the head of a fox.…

A man came toward her, walking out of the shadows beyond the ancient Tang vessel. He was clothed from neck to feet in a silken robe of silvery-blue upon which were embroidered, delicately as though by spiders, Taoist symbols and under them, ghostly in silver threads, a fox’s head. He was bald, his face heavy, expressionless, skin smooth and faded yellow as some antique parchment. So far as age went he might have been sixty – or three hundred. But it was his eyes that held Jean Meredith. They were large and black and, liquid, and prodigiously alive. They were young eyes, belying the agelessness of the heavy face; and it was as though the face was but a mask from which the eyes had drawn all life into themselves. They poured into her strength and calmness and reassurance, and from her mind vanished all vagueness, all doubts, all fears. Her mind for the first time since the ambush was clear, crystal clear, her thoughts her own.

She remembered – remembered everything. But it was as though all had happened to another self. She felt pity for that self, but it had left no heritage of sorrow. She was tranquil. The black, youthful eyes poured tranquility into her.

She said: “I know you. You are Yu Ch’ien, the wise priest my husband loved. This is the Temple of the Foxes.”

END OF SEGMENT
BY A. MERRITT

First published together with “The Blue Pagoda” by Hannes Bok (1914–1964) by
New Collectors Group, New York, 1946

Also published in
The Fox Woman & Other Stories, Avon, NY, 1949

WHEN  OLD  GODS  WAKE

Altar of Kukulkan

The silence seemed to be focused within the temple; to have its heart there; a heart that did not need to beat, since all the silence was alive. Outside the heat of the Yucatan midday held the ruins in breathless grip. Barry Manson, crouching at the base of the ancient altar, thought: the silence… marched… marched into the temple. The shrieks of the parrots were cut off first… then the little blue and yellow birds stopped quarreling in the crimson fruited tree at the base of the shattered stairway… and then the silence marched up the stairway and into this chamber and crowded against the seaward side… and that shut out the swish of the waves.

He looked at Joan. She sat a few paces away, her back against the massive pedestal of a broken pillar. Her hands were clasped around her knees. Her eyes were intent upon the wall behind the altar. A painting once had covered that wall. The fingers of time, working patiently through the centuries, had plucked away most of the stucco that had carried it. But above the altar, as though protected by its shadow, a large and irregular fragment remained. Upon it, colors still vivid, Were the head and shoulders of Kukulkan, God of the Air of the ancient Mayans – and much more than that.

The Feathered Serpent, his symbol and his avatar, floated over him, fanged jaws agape, plumed wings spread wide. The face of Kukulkan was the conventionalized one of the New Empire; the nose grotesquely lengthened like that of a tapir, lips thick and protruding, prognathous-jawed, bat-eared; the ears ringed and the labret through the nostrils; head plumed with the sacred panacho.

The painted gaze of the god seemed fixed as intently upon the girl as hers upon him.

The pedestal against which Joan leaned was covered with carved figures of priests of Kukulkan who had served him when ruined Tuloom had been one of the great cities of the Mayans, and this its holiest temple. On these figures the colors were also bright. Into them Joan’s copper hair melted, merged with their reds and ochres so that for an instant Barry had the illusion that her face was all of her.

A disembodied face peering out of the stone and holding communion with the god like a summoned priestess.

Impatiently Barry arose and walked over to her. She dis not look up. She whispered, eyes still absorbed by the painted god:

“Don’t break the silence, Barry! It’s like the silence that wraps the city of Jade… where the thousand sages of T’zan T’zao sit holding fast to the thought that created the world… and that the ghost of a ghost of a sound would destroy… and with it the world.…”

He felt increase of revolt against the fantasies gathering about him. He shook his shoulders and laughed. He said, loudly:

“The silence is broken, Joan – and the world still spins.”

It was true. The silence was broken. It was retreating from the chamber, slowly… marching away as it had marched in. Faintly came the swish of the waves, growing ever stronger. The silence was marching out of the chamber toward the shattered stairway up which it had come. Joan arose, slowly… it was odd, Barry thought, how every movement of hers in rising kept to the rhythm, kept to the beat, of the unseen and unheard feet of the retreating silence.

The silence marched down the stairway. He heard again the quarreling of the little blue and yellow birds… then the shrieks of the parrots…

Joan said, unsteadily: “It was time you did that, Barry. It was… doing things to me. Look, Barry – look…!”

He followed her finger, pointing to the painted face of Kukulkan. For a breath he saw it… another face looking out from the wall.

An ageless face… the nose long and curved and delicate. The lips full but sharply cut, archaically sensuous… hair as red as his own and eyes as blue as. Joan’s. A face as devoid of human equivalence as it was timeless… yet human… as though the seed from which it had sprung into godhood had been human. Incalculable, unreadable… but still within it something that could be read up to that point where the humanness of it merged into the god… might be read more plainly if the god would within it merge more fully into the humanness. Nothing of benevolence in it… but neither was there shade of malevolence, cruelty… humanless, in human mask.

Barry thought: it is like that mountain peak in the City of Jade of which Joan spoke… the peak shaped like the head of a man and all of clearest crystal to which the thoughts of men are drawn… all their thoughts… and pass from its eyes and mouth cleansed of falsehood and of error, prejudice and hatred and love… standing naked and stark before T’zan T’wo to be judged…

Power was in the face, immense power… and something of wildness, of freedom… the freedom of primaeval things… like the wind, the waves, the sun.…

And then the face was gone. Upon the wall was the tapir snout of Kukulkan, the protruding lips, the fanged and feathered serpent.

His hand was clenching Joan’s wrist. She whispered:

“You saw it! You’re hurting me!”

He dropped her wrist. He said: “It is another painting beneath this one. An older painting. Some trick of the light brought it out.”

She said, doubtful: “Maybe. But I think it was Kukulkan as the first Mayans knew him. Kukulkan who came to them from still an older race. Kukulkan when he was worshipped with flowers and fruits and incense and prayer. Before his worship was debased and the cruel human sacrifices began. That was when and why he turned from the Mayans. And so their doom came swiftly upon them. For it was never he who came to them thereafter, Barry. It was an evil god hiding behind his mask and name—”

She hesitated, seemed listening: “But yes – he did come. Came even to the Aztecs, who steeped his rites in even greater cruelties and renamed him Quetzalcoatl… came again and again to thwart that other god when his evil grew too strong… the Lord of Darkness, the Lord of the Dead.…”

Her voice died; she stood with eyes rapt, face colorless, bent as though listening. He took her by the shoulders, shook her:

“Snap out of it, Joan. What’s the matter with you? You’re talking nonsense.”

“Am I, Barry? It was what Kukulkan was telling me.”

She dropped her head on his shoulder; clung to him, trembling. His hands slipped from her shoulders, drew her to him. He said huskily:

“Coming any closer to loving me, Joan?”

She raised her eyes to his frankly, yet with something of regret lurking in them.

“Sorry, Barry dear. But it’s still the same. I—”

He interrupted her, speaking monotonously: “Like you better than any other man I know, except Bill, of course, and I wish I could love you the way you want, but – yes, Joan, I know all that by heart now.”

She flushed and said: “That’s not fair. After all, Bill’s my brother and why shouldn’t I love him? And I do like you better than anyone else. So much so that at times—” she stopped; he repeated eagerly:

“That at times?”

“Never mind. Barry, why do you want me? There are plenty of nice girls who like just the things you do. I know a dozen who would love you – and any one of them would make you a perfect wife. I don’t like the ‘things you do. Or if I do, to me they’re only brief amusements. Why, I’d rather help Bill dig up a cup from some ruin that spans the gap of knowledge between its maker and us than win a thousand sporting trophies.”

He said: “If you loved me that wouldn’t make any difference.”

She shook her head: “We’ve been brought up differently, Barry – and we’re both too set in our ways to change. I am anyway…” Suddenly she laughed:

“And you haven’t fooled me by this trip, Barry Manson. I know damned well that it wasn’t any abrupt interest in the Mayans that prompted it. I’m mighty grateful to you for giving Bill the chance he’s always wanted. But I wouldn’t marry you out of gratitude, and I don’t think you’d want me to – would you, Barry?”

His gray eyes narrowed: he said, brutally: “Listen, redhead. You don’t fool me any either. It’s damned little of highbrow or blue-stocking you’d be if you fell in love with a man. Nature didn’t build you that way. And it would be damned little you’d be thinking of fossils if that happened. You’d be too busy having babies.”

She said, coldly: “I think that’s rather – beastly!”

He said, hotly: “Is that so? What’s beastly about babies? You’d be getting a slant on the present day with some outlook on the future – instead of burying your red head in the past. What I’m afraid of is that you’ll marry some dusty-dry, mummy-minded, scientific grave robber and spend the rest of your life nursing fossils instead of what you are obviously designed for—”

She interrupted, furiously, eyes snapping blue sparks:

“I’ll let nobody pick my husband! Least of all – you!”

“Won’t you!” Barry’s too-quick anger flared. “It seems to me you were ready enough to pick wives for me just now. Not one but a dozen—” He gripped her arms and swung her to him. “You – the highbrow scientist? Like hell you are! Look at that mop of red hair. Those eyes of yours with the devil’s twist to the ends of them, that mouth of yours – and I’ve seen you in your rag of a bathing suit! I tell you again, by God, that once you’re awake it’s not fossils you’ll be thinking of! And maybe this will help wake you—”

He held her close, kissed eyes and throat, pressed his lips to hers. She lay in his arms, passive, unresisting. She said at last, indifferently:

“Cave-man stuff, Barry. Too crude. It doesn’t interest me at all.”

He released her, stepping back as though out of a dash of cold water. She raised her arms and began to coil her disordered hair. She laughed at him, a little too sweetly – though he did not know it.

“You see, Barry dear, we’re as far apart as the poles. You make love to me by enumerating my – ah, charms, is the cliche for it, I think. You are an – ah, anatomical lover. It is a viewpoint, certainly. A Sultan’s viewpoint, but I do not care for Sultans. Nor,” went on Joan, still far too sweetly and reasonably, “do I think that my worthinesses are wholly anatomical. But then – you’ve always been rich—”

—END OF FRAGMENT—

Written ca. 1940
This fragment is thought to be the beginning of a planned sequel to the novel The Face In The Abyss

THE  WHITE  ROAD

Gate of the White Road

David Corfax laid down the last torn sheet of the stained old parchment with a wonder that had grown steadily while he read. What he had read was incredible, but the true incredibility lay in that it had been written. Therein was the heart of his wonder and the indefinable terror of it. For what the writing dealt with was – the White Road!

All his life he had known the White Road. You saw it first as a slit, a hair-line of white light, just the width of your eyes and somewhere, it seemed behind them – somewhere between your brain and your eyes, in your own head. In childhood, it had been after you had gone to bed; sometimes as soon as your lids closed, sometimes when you were dropping off to sleep. Later it might come in broad daylight, while you sat thinking or reading. But at those times you never got far on the White Road.

The laws of this world not those of yours.

All his life he had known the White Road; in all his life he had spoken of it only to three persons. Two of these were dead; the third had been a child whom he had not seen for years and who should long ago have forgotten. Yet it had been she who had sent him the parchment. And out of it had come a voice silent four hundred years, and speaking of the White Road as one who had been a pilgrim upon it.

How young he had been when first he saw the White Road, David Corfax could not tell. But it was as real to him as was this old house in which he sat, the sun of a September afternoon streaming through the window upon this yellowed manuscript which told him that the White Road was no dream – or if a dream then not his alone.

And there had been that enigmatic postscript of Deborah’s: “I too have seen the White Road!”

Was it real after all? Whether real or not, it had its mechanics, unchanging, unchangeable. First there was the humming, not heard but felt, a vibration along every nerve, in every cell. Then the slit, the hair-line of white light.

Then the slit would open – half an inch, an inch. And then the White Road would begin to unroll. You could see straight ahead of you, but that was all. It was as though you stood a little distance back of the slit.

In a sort of black box that moved smoothly along the road. And yet you seemed to be out on the road, too. Sometimes the sides would sweep past swiftly, as though you were galloping on some effortlessly moving horse; sometimes slowly as though you were walking. But once the road began to unroll you never stopped. And you never looked back, that is until you learned that looking back meant journey’s end. When you stopped, the slit went out – like a light and you were back in your room. You looked back into your room. When you turned, the road was gone.

Nor could you control the motion with which you went, nor could you, try as you would, by any effort of will cause the window that opened on the road to appear. It was there, without warning – or it was not. Nor could he ever remember clearly what he had seen when on the White Road. The road itself was always plain – wide and smoothly paved, sometimes straight sometimes curving, going on and on and on. There were people, but of what kind he never remembered. There were forests, colorful and flowered… a towering range of mountains, strangely serrated, toothed, pinnacled… enormously high, purple and amethyst and looking as though they had been cut from cardboard… no distance to them and with garlands of little suns circling their peaks… there was a city of domes and minarets… beside a purple sea. And there were things that terrified… that had been in childhood when he had learned to look back to escape them. Later, he faced them… but could not remember, waking, what he had faced. Memory of music… like Sibelius.

The road appeared without warning? No, there was always the humming that preceded it. It was a strange sound, not heard but felt. It seemed to vibrate through him, and as it did so his body became weightless. He could not feel the bed he lay in if he clenched his hands he could not feel the fingers… the humming seemed to deaden all nerves of touch. It grew louder, swifter rather rising in vibrancy rather than in pitch as the slit widened. He remembered, ah, there was one thing he remembered clearly enough. One night the humming had quickened and the slit had opened wider than ever before – or since. And over it, like a climber, a woman’s hand, long-fingered, yellow as old ivory had clawed with talons like a condor had crept. And two unwinking, amber eyes had glared into his. He remembered how he had screamed, and his mother had come to him, and he could see today the fright, the numb horror, that had appeared upon her face when he had wept and sobbed about the White Road… he had been no more than six then. He remembered.

When you looked back, and the road came again, you had to begin at the beginning. But if you could hold your nerve, and not look back, after a while you went to sleep. Then, if the dream came again the next night, as sometimes it did, you would go on from where you had stopped the night before. That was how he had gotten as far as sight of the strange city beside the purple sea. Three nights he had been on the road. Yes, there was some system, some law governing it.

There was a dark: road too. That was an evil road. Even in childhood he knew that it came close to the White Road and was to be avoided. But later, he felt a pull as he put it, to this road. And often yielded. He could see nothing on this, could only hear voices. And he must go so gently, so quietly. There was a hill, and behind it the murmur of voices, the creaking of stays, the sounds of a port. He knew it was a hill, because it loomed blackly against a faintly red sky, as though there were fires burning. He knew that he must never look over that hill, never go over it or he would be utterly lost. Could never return.

Then his mother had died. He had gone through boarding school, through college, become a wanderer. Two years on the desert.

—END OF FRAGMENT—

Written ca. 1940
This fragment is thought to be the beginning of a planned novel based on the theme of the short story “Through The Dragon Glass”, as a sequel to the novel The Face in the Abyss

AS  THEY  WERE
ORIGINALLY
PUBLISHED :

CONTENTS:

- The Metal Monster
- The Face in the Abyss
- Burn, Witch, Burn!

THE  METAL  MONSTER

PUBLISHER’S INTRODUCTION

Like Mr. Merritt’s narrative of THE MOON POOL (published in All-Story Weekly, June 22, 1918), and THE CONQUEST OF THE MOON POOL (All-Story Weekly, February 15- March 22, 1919), THE METAL MONSTER is published with the consent and authority of the International Association of Science. After the expeditions described in the earlier narratives, Dr. Walter T. Goodwin was placed at the head of a special bureau of the association and supplied with unlimited means to prosecute his investigations. Upon his recent return from Central Asia he gave Mr. Merritt the manuscript of his report, to be prepared for popular presentation. In its popularized form it is published herewith.

PART ONE

PROLOGUE

To the Editor
Argosy-AllStory Weekly:

The executive council of the International Association of Science in instructing me to place before you the accompanying manuscript was influenced not by one but by several important considerations; among these not the least, sir, the confidence and sincere respect which its members have in and possess for you; a trust and esteem born of the courage you displayed and the strict faith which you kept with the Association in publishing without change, deletion or addition the two amazing narratives of Dr. Walter T. Goodwin, under the successive titles of “The Moon Pool,” and “The Conquest of the Moon Pool.” But there exists a wider, a vastly wider reason for the action than the personal one I have stated. Dr. Goodwin, in each of his narratives, laid stress upon the existence of what he called “scientific cowardice,” id est, a reluctance to testify to, to examine, yes, even to recognize experiences and phenomena which seemed to lay outside the established frontiers of scientific fact. His charges are only too true; that there are many reasons which can be urged in justification cannot alter the reality of the inhibiting influence.

The membership of the Association includes the keenest minds in every field of scientific-research. Being what it is, there have come before it many such abnormal experiences. And how many more never did come to our notice because of that same inhibition which kept Dr. Goodwin silent for years upon the amazing phenomena he himself witnessed, who can say? But, sir, enough of regrets.

The reception of the Moon Pool narratives, the letters which we received in consequence of their publication, the extremely intelligent interest displayed by your readers assured us that the public is ready to be informed on such matters. We were already convinced that we had no more right to close our eyes to an unfamiliar light than we had to turn our backs upon an old truth simply because it came to us clothed in new garments. And so, after many conferences, and interchanges of opinion between the executive council and leading members of the Association the decision was reached to face such experiences squarely when they were called to our attention, to make fullest investigation of them; and if convinced of their verity to make them public in the same plain, intelligible fashion as were the facts of the Moon Pool.

Because of his internationally recognized scientific probity, and his own well-tested personal qualities, Dr. Goodwin was appointed chief of a bureau of investigation of such matters, with unlimited funds to his credit and guarantee of whatever assistance in men and apparatuses he might need. And I have the honor to inform you, sir, that it was the unanimous decision of the council that the popular accounts of all such investigations should be placed before you for publication.

Hardly had the decision been made before opportunity to carry it out offered itself. Dr. Goodwin returned from that almost unknown, highest flung range that borders southern Tibet, whose existence the Swedish explorer, Sven Hedin, confirmed, and that has been named the Trans-Himalaya. He had journeyed there to study the flora of its colossal gorges and lofty levels, hoping in the pursuit of that branch of science in which he has won such honors, to dull that keen edge of sorrow which the, to him, tragic termination of his Caroline Islands adventures had left resting on his faculty of associative memory – or, as it is popularly called, his heart.

And you can judge, sir, of our astonishment when we found that Fate – by which word we symbolize the workings of those infinitely higher mathematics which every fraction of an instant totals the infinite numbers of causes since the world began to live – that Fate, I repeat, had placed him within the range of phenomena compared to which those he had described in his former narratives were, may I say, almost less than normal. Indeed, so extraordinary were they that had not Dr. Goodwin been able to produce indubitable evidence of their truth, and further had not all his observations been confirmed by other witnesses, the executive council would have been forced to consider the whole matter as an open question; at the best, one to beheld in abeyance until further proof could be adduced and decidedly not one to be spread before the public. The evidence being, however, impregnable, Mr. A. Merritt, whose presentation of the Moon Pool in form to be readily understood by the layman, won our heartiest admiration, was entrusted with the handling of Dr. Goodwin’s notes and manuscripts for popular consumption. The accompanying narrative is, therefore, the joint product of Dr. Goodwin and Mr. Merritt, weighed and vised by the Executive Council – a vivid reconstruction of the astounding phenomena as they unfolded themselves before those thrust so strangely within the radius of their forces.

I am empowered by the Executive Council to notify you that the official seal of the Association impressed upon this letter and the manuscript, is a guarantee that each statement therein has been passed upon and its verity endorsed by the council.

Accept, sir, the renewed assurance of our esteem.

Respectfully yours,

The International Association of Science,

Per J. B. K., President.

— I —

THE RETURN
OF DR. GOODWIN.

It was on the 14th of September, a trifle after noon, that answering the call of the telephone, I heard at the other end the voice of the venerable president of the International Association of Science.

“Mr. Merritt,” he said, “with me at the Science Club is Dr. Walter T. Goodwin. He has just returned from Central Asia, and both of us are exceedingly desirous of seeing you at your earliest convenience. May I ask when we can expect you to join us?”

“I will be up at once, sir,” I answered as coolly as I might; striving, being thoroughly familiar with the speaker’s theories of the inhibitory effects of emotion upon the judgment, to keep all trace of eagerness out of my tones.

“At your convenience – at your convenience,” he replied. “There is what may be termed an important communication to be made to you. But do not hurry, I beg you.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll finish then a trifle of business I have on hand and join you – say in an hour.”

“Quite satisfactory – quite. We will await you,” the calm voice went on. “You are quite well, I hope? Good. I shall detain you no further.”

The soft little click showed that he had hung up the receiver. I curbed my impatience while the minutes ticked slowly by; then jumped into a taxi and made my way to the quiet little street off lower Broadway, where the quaint old-fashioned dwelling that houses the Science Club nestles under the shadow of the skyscrapers.

I had never seen Dr. Goodwin. When the narratives of his adventures among the prehistoric ruins of the Nan-Matal in the Carolines [01] had been placed in my hands for editing and revision to meet the requirements of a popular presentation, he had left America some time before, pleading that he was still too shaken, too depressed, to be able to bear recalling the experiences that must inevitably carry with them freshened images of those whom he had loved so well – and from whom, he felt, he was perhaps separated forever. I ’knew that he had gone somewhere on the outskirts of the world, but this was the first hint as to where. And it was with the liveliest curiosity that I passed through the club’s doors.

Necessarily, through my close study of his manuscripts, I had formed a mental image of their writer. I had read, too, those volumes of botanical research which have set him high above all other American scientists in this field; gleaning from their curious mingling of extremely technical observations and minutely accurate and extraordinarily poetic descriptions, fragments to amplify my picture of him. It rather gratified me to find that in essence I had drawn him correctly.

The man to whom the Association’s head introduced me – and I regret that I am not allowed to give the latter’s name, world famous as it is, and guarantee for scientific accuracy as it would be, acquiescing as he does in the anonymity the Association, for its own reasons, has decreed for its leader – the man, I say, to whom I was introduced was sturdy, well knit, a little under the average height. His forehead was broad and high and under the level black brows eyes of clear hazel shone, kindly, shrewd, a little wistful, a little humorous; the eyes both of a doer and a dreamer. Not more than forty I judged him to be. A close-trimmed, pointed beard did not hide the firm chin and the clean-cut mouth. His hair was thick and black and oddly sprinkled with white; small streaks and dots of gleaming silver that shone with a curious metallic luster.

His right arm was closely bound to his breast. His manner as be greeted me was tinged with shyness. He extended his left hand in greeting, and as I clasped the fingers I was struck by their peculiar, pronounced, yet pleasant warmth; a sensation, indeed, curiously electric.

The Association’s president forced him gently back into his chair.

“Dr. Goodwin,” he said, turning to me, “is not entirely recovered as yet from certain unusual – consequences – of his adventure. He will explain to you later what these are. In the meantime, Mr. Merritt, will you read this communication which, under the direction of the Association, I have just forwarded to the editor of ARGOSY – ALL STORY WEEKLY. It will appraise you in briefest form of our reasons for calling upon you for assistance.”

I took the sheets he handed me, and as I read them felt the gaze of Dr. Goodwin full upon me, searching, weighing, estimating. When I raised my eyes from the letter I found in his a new expression. The shyness was gone; they were filled with complete friendliness. Evidently I had passed muster.

“You will accept, sir?” It was the president’s gravely courteous tone.

“Accept!” I exclaimed. “Why, of course, I accept. It is not only one of the greatest honors, but to me one of the greatest delights to act as collaborator with Dr. Goodwin.”

The president smiled. “In that case, sir, there is no need for me to remain longer,” he said. “Dr. Goodwin has with him his manuscript as far as he has progressed with it. I will leave you two alone for your discussion.”

He bowed to us and, picking up his old fashioned bell-crowned silk hat, his quaint, heavy cane of ebony, started to withdraw, then paused.

“You will bear in mind, Mr. Merritt,” he spoke directly to me, “that there is nothing in what Dr. Goodwin is about to tell you that has not been thoroughly verified and accepted by the International Association. No statement, sir, no matter how bizarre, how weird or how apparently incredible that is not guaranteed by us as truth. And you have the privilege, sir, of consultation with all and any of the Executive Council should any doubt arise in your mind, either on the reading of the manuscripts or after your conversation with Dr. Goodwin.”

He bowed to us again formally, and departed. Goodwin’s eyes twinkled fondly after him.

“A first-water brain, and as direct as a child’s,” he observed.

He changed the subject abruptly.

“I must thank you for the way you handled my manuscripts, Merritt. I grew to like your mind when I went over the published story. But some things you made, I think, entirely too plain.”

“But, Dr. Goodwin,” I began, a trifle chagrined, “it was necessary to make them so. You dealt with, frankly, so much of the improbable that only by proving each experience step by step could the reader be convinced of its absolute verity.”

“I know, I know,” he murmured, somewhat apologetically. “I am not criticizing. my friend. Still – the shaping of the Shining One is what I had most in mind. It was dangerous – dangerous to tell so much.”

“But it was exactly as you wrote it,” I protested. “All that I did was to simplify your technical descriptions.”

“Yes,” again the half-impatient anxiety, the nervousness in his words. “Yes, I know. But in this we must be most careful, Merritt; most careful. There are potentialities – a way to harness a colossal force to make animate and conscious the – the—” he hesitated. “Merritt, if you knew a way to waken the mountains, make them sentient, volant, unleashed to stride over the world – would you shout the secret from the housetops? You know you would not.”

Again he paused; then: “There was menace to the world in the Moon Pool and its Dweller, but not the menace, not a tenth of it, as in that we have just escaped!” he ended.

I looked at him in utter astonishment. His eyes were staring, wild, as though they looked within upon some awful vision. His face twitched painfully.

“Let us go to my rooms.” He had regained his control. “The manuscripts, my notes and – other things – are there.”

He arose; together we walked to the wide stairway that leads up to those cheery, generously proportioned old rooms of the Science Club that are kept for returned wanderers.

As we went, something about Goodwin’s gait arrested my attention. It was not lameness – rather was it as though he moved with considerable effort through some unseen, clinging obstacle. He – dragged. An injury sustained, perhaps, at the same time as that to his arm, I thought, dismissing as fanciful the disturbing suggestion of progress through an invisible retarding medium.

The room we entered w% homelike, coolly shadowed by the green latticed blinds that sheltered the great west window. On the wide table was a strong metal box. He touched a spring, the lid flew open, and from the coffer he took a thick roll of manuscript, closed the lid hastily, and dropped into a wide chair. I proffered him a cigarette, lighted it for him, and seated myself nearby.

“I wonder if you realize,” he said at last, musingly, “what a reversal of its thought this action of the Executive Council, outlined in the communication you read, is? Scientific cowardice I said, it is true – but in the agony of my own self-reproach – for cowardice in the common sense of the word, that habit of mind to which I referred, is not.

“What are we, after all, the wisest of us, but children groping through a dark place toward a light still dimly seen? If we take each forward step cautiously, measuring pace and direction by tested methods which we believe made possible our slow advance, this is not cowardice. Rather is it fear of straying from the faint path and leading those who follow us into far deeper shadow.

“Thus it is that when from time to time the mark is lightened by an alien gleam, a fugitive brilliancy, we close our minds to them, fearing to be led astray by some ignis fatuus of illusion, some will-o’-the-wisp of imagination, decreeing to plod upon the safe way.

“I grant you, Merritt, that in doing this, although we lessen the danger of missteps, we do not leap ahead. And yet, in a certain book which, though by many considered divine contains an extraordinary concentration of worldly wisdom, it is written that the race is not always to the swift.”

He arose from his chair and began to pace the room. “Ever hear of Dick Drake – Richard Keen Drake—”

“Yes,” I interrupted eagerly, “I knew him. His father was Alvin Drake, the great chemist. Dick took up electricity – radiology. Isn’t he the one you mean?”

“That’s the one,” he nodded. “I always wondered how on earth a man with the physique of his, with the fire of life and adventure racing through him, could ever tie himself down to a laboratory,” I said. “Why, he ought to have been out conquering wildernesses, opening up the hidden places – I could see him driving his ship down upon a horde pirates, but never herding rays through a glass tube.”

“Quite right.” His eyes twinkled. “But do you know what became of him?”

“I know he joined the engineers when we went into the war. His father died the first year; left Dick quite a fortune. Drake was mentioned in despatches a couple of times – he always seemed to be right where things were thickest. Then after the armistice I lost track of him. Do you know where he is?”

“No,” he answered slowly. “No; but I do know where he was. He was side by side with me in the Trans-Himalayas when – when what I have to tell you came to pass. And there he helped fight a greater battle for the world than he ever helped fight in Europe.”

Again his face grew strained, his gaze turned inward, filled with an inexplicable horror. He resumed his pacing of the room.

And now, with a definite shock, I realized that this movement of his was strange indeed. The windows, as I have said, faced the west; the furniture was so arranged that he had a clear pathway from them to the door set in the eastern wall. But the path he followed was not a straight one. Each pause and turning at window and door was done carefully, cautiously, as though he were bracing himself against a force that strove to overturn him. His progress to and fro was like that of a man walking to his knees in shoal water, balancing himself against strong undertow drawing him outward.

His track was an arc, bending toward the northwest. And as I watched I noted that twice he turned his footsteps northward – as though to ease himself of some steady strain; and that when he did this his movements were hurried but freer, as though, still like the shoal walker, he was half carried by the tide.

A little thrill of wonder tinged with vague apprehension passed through me. He steadied himself against the north mantel; turned with palpable effort and endeavored vainly to come toward me.

“And did you ever chance to hear of, or to meet, a certain Martin Ventnor?”

“Ventnor!” I exclaimed. “Ventnor, the ethnologist?”

He nodded.

“I met him after his return from Malaysia two years ago,” I said. “He showed me some of his trophies. I gathered that he was as great a hunter of big game as he was of human fact. An A-I man he impressed me, and with the courage of the best of heaven – and hell, too, if need be.”

“He had all of that,” he nodded approvingly, the brown eyes far away.

“His sister, too.” I recalled the image of Ventnor’s most charming and lovely sister with enthusiasm. “A great pair – but it did seem a shame to be carrying a little beauty like her to every Godforsaken corner of earth where Ventnor wanted to study.”

“She wouldn’t have it otherwise,” he replied. “You know their story, don’t you? Mother and father both died soon after Ruth’s birth – she was a child of their latter years. And Ventnor, then just twenty and out of college, cared for her. When she was ten she was with him in China; at twelve she began with him that four-year exile of his in the back of the Sahara. She wouldn’t be separated from her big brother – and she was the living core of his heart. A perfect love, Merritt – a perfect love!”

He loosed his hand from the mantel, – stepped toward me – reeled and was pressed against the wall as though by an invisible, irresistible hand. I sprang to his side.

— II —

THE THING

“Goodwin!” I cried. “Are you ill – is it your hurts?”

His face was white, and little beads of sweat stood out on his forehead, but he smiled half quizzically.

“Don’t worry,” he murmured. “It will pass – Just one of the consequences J. B. K. mentioned. It will pass.”

But a thrill of panic, as of one face to face with the unknown, shook me. Here in the heart of New York, with its roar in my ears, its huge, man-reared hives of stone clustering about me, the clatter of typewriters behind every window, the newsboys shouting, the shuttle rush of the elevated trains – here in all this wave rush of the very prow of humanity – a ripple from the alien pierced and whispered, a breath from the unexplored, the eery, the nameless; chilling me, running along every nerve with little fingers of dread, checking the heart beat.

Nor, could I make you see it as I did, would you wonder – the alert, alive, nervous body pressed against the side of the fireplace, pinned there – thrust – by some force invisible, helpless – and deep in my mind the sense of something crucified – and always the sense of a rushing, inexorable, unseen torrent crushing him against the wall, striving to carry him away on its breast.

“What time is it?” he asked – and the matter-of-fact question brought me back swiftly to the normal. I fumbled for my watch, drew it out, glanced at it. It had stopped; the hands pointed to three o’clock. I shook it; it would not go. Goodwin extended his left hand to me.

“Put it close to my fingers,” he said.

Wondering, I did so – and as it touched the tips minute and hour and second hand quivered, then moved slowly until each pointed, true as the compass needle, to him!

“Have you a compass?” he asked. A mist of amaze clouding my mind, I drew out the little Lundstrom instrument I have long been in the habit of carrying. I scanned its face. The slender needle was dancing madly, spinning feverishly back and forth, stopping at rhythmic intervals to point at Goodwin and then resuming its wild whirlings.

And each time that it stopped and pointed toward him it seemed to strain to break away from its prisoning pin, striving to leap upon him!

“Goodwin!” I cried. “What—”

“Not magic, Merritt, my friend,” he interrupted quietly. “Nor sorcery. Soon you will understand. No, not magic – unless” – his eyes grew dreamy, brooding – “unless – There was Dick and the Wonder Woman,” he whispered. “The Lightning Witch – and Ruth and Ventnor and I—”

Suddenly he stiffened, his eyes dilated. He raised his left hand high above his head; I had the sense of thickening forces. Then, as I stared at the uplifted arm he made an incredibly swift, a startlingly alien gesture.

There came from close to him a sharp crackling. On its wake a little sparkling ball of intense greenish light sprang from the tops of his fingers. It was like the sparks one draws in the dark from the stroked fur of a cat or those that, when the nights are cold and dry, spring under the comb from one’s hair.

It was like these sparks in color, but it was not like them in size, nor did it leap forth as they do and vanish. This – corpuscle – was all of two inches in diameter and perfectly globular.

For an instant it hung poised over Goodwin’s hand – and I saw that he watched it with a curiously interested, curiously fearful intentness.

Then, swiftly, it seemed to be caught in that same racing unseen current that held him – swerved, swirled, rushed with the lightning’s speed to the northern wall and – vanished through it!

“And—” Goodwin’s voice was grim, but he took up the sentence steadily where he had left off – “and the Thing – the Metal Monster!” There was defiance in the tones now, and he lowered his hand. “Whose power is still upon me!” he concluded.

“Goodwin! That light – what was it?” I gasped.

“The passing of that power – for a time,” he replied, and walked over toward the window. His gait was entirely normal; all suggestion of strain of effort gone from it. And I was sensible of a lifting of oppression, as though a Presence had passed from the room.

He lifted the shades and beckoned me. I looked out upon a sky without hint of cloud, on the westering sun shining undimmed over the tallest of the towering buildings.

“Look at the sun,” he said, and handed me a tinted lens. “Up by the northern limb. Do you see it?”

“The spot?” I asked, and then as he nodded: “Why, I’ve watched that for weeks. Everyone has. But it’s been getting smaller. What has it to do with what I have just seen?”

He seemed to ignore my question. “Yes.” There was curious inflection in his words. “As you say, it is smaller now – not more than sixty thousand miles in diameter – only large enough to drop into it without touching its sides seven of our earths strung side by side together like a. rope of beads. And since your mind runs upon proportions, I have seen it when it was one hundred thousand miles in diameter – so great that a hundred of our earths could have been thrown into it, like a handful of peas through a furnace door.

“And what is it? An unthinkably gigantic cyclone of incandescent gases – a cyclone? A cyclone of earth moves at the rate of a hundred miles an hour – this moves at a hundred miles a second! A volcano – Vesuvius buried two cities under its fiery flood. This, in the tenth of a minute, sends forth flames sixty thousand miles high that could reduce this whole world to ashes in less time than it takes these words of mine to reach your ears!

“A fountain of electricity! A vast crater hurling upon our earth – only a magnet spinning in space [02] – incredible streams of magnetism! Shifting and strengthening and changing that subtle stellar life which is the nerve force of our planet and of which we know – nothing! Lighting the fires of the Aurora! Touching off the vol canoes. Creating hurricane and tidal wave and earthquake! Changing our lives and the lives of all things on our earth in ways we do not dream! And yet – only a spot on the sun, Merritt!”

I was silent.

“You asked me,” he went on, a touch of satire now in his voice, “what that blotch, that blemish on our sun’s radiant face has to do with – would you still call it the little magic of the watch, the compass and the shining globule? What would you say if I told you a something – an inhuman Thing – but sentient and conscious as you and I stretched its will and its craft up through those ninety million miles of space between us and the sun and stirred that cyclone, that volcano, if not into being – at the least, into prodigiously greater being? That there was a – Thing – that did this and then sat and spun from the forces It had released a power to crush earth into a highway for Itself and Its hordes that were – Itself?“

“Goodwin!” I exclaimed. “Man, are you mad? What could juggle with the sun?”

“Only one – thing, Merritt,” the hazel eyes blazed. “Only one – Thing!” He pointed up to the shining orb and laughed. The laugh was not pleasant to hear – no!

“As Dick Drake puts it: ‘It wanted its place in the sun, and it got it.’ I desired you, Merritt, to see – what you have seen – to know what you do before I outline to you the experiences detailed in the manuscript. It is better that I do this before you begin to read – you agree with me? But don’t look so appalled!”

He smiled. “In all of this there is no magic – no! Not even in that finger which stirred the solar hurricane into being was there magic!”

“I will start,” he said, after a little pause, “from when I met Richard Drake on the field of pale azure poppies that are like a great prayer-rug at the gray feet of the nameless mountain – and all that I tell you, Merritt, is truth, truth absolute, stripped of all doubt. I give you my Word – on my own honor, on my reputation!”

The sun sank, the shadows fell, the lights of the city sparkled out, for hours New York roared about me unheeded while I listened to the tale of that utterly weird, stupendous drama of an unknown life, of unknown creatures, unknown forces, and of unconquerable human heroism played among the hidden gorges of unknown Asia.

It was dawn when I left him for my own home. Nor was it for many hours after that I laid his then incomplete manuscript down and sought sleep – and found a troubled sleep indeed!

Here ends my introduction to Dr. Goodwin’s narrative. Beyond this, the story is his own.

THE METAL MONSTER

BY DR. WALTER T. GOODWIN

— III —

ON THE OUT TRAIL

In this great crucible of life we call the world – in the vaster one we call the universe – the mysteries lie close packed, uncountable as grains of sand on ocean’s shores. They thread, gigantic, the star-flung spaces; they creep, atomic, beneath the microscope’s peering eye. They walk beside us, unseen and unheard, calling out to us, asking why we are deaf to their crying, blind to their wonder.

Sometimes the veils drop from a man’s eyes, and he sees – and speaks of his vision. Then those who have not seen pass him by with the lifted brows of disbelief, or they mock him, or if his vision has been great enough they fall upon and destroy him.

For the greater the mystery, the more bitterly is its verity assailed; upon what seem the lesser a man may give testimony and at least gain hearing.

There is reason for this. Life is a ferment, and upon and about it, shifting and changing, adding to or taking away, beat ever legions of forces, seen and unseen, known and unknown. And man, an atom in the ferment, clings desperately to what to him seems stable; nor greets with joy him who hazards that what he grips may be but a broken staff, and, so saying, fails to hold forth a sturdier one.

Earth is a ship, plowing her way through uncharted oceans of space wherein are strange currents, hidden shoals and reefs, and where blow the unknown winds of Cosmos. If to the voyagers, painfully plotting their course, comes one who cries that their charts must be remade, nor can tell why they must be – that man is not welcome – no!

Therefore it is that men have grown chary of giving testimony upon mysteries. But knowing each in his own heart the truth of that vision he has himself beheld, lo, it is that in whose reality he most believes, the soul of his conviction – though not even to himself may he be able to explain it.

In this, my story, there is one thing that I cannot prove, cannot explain even to myself. It is to me the utterly inexplicable – I warn you at the beginning. Yet I know that it – was!

And, my friends, if for a little time I seem to approach that vast mystery too leisurely; sketching too minutely those with whom my lot fell, it is with definite purpose. It is my desire that you who read this narrative understand them, know them, as I did; be able to visualize them clearly, not only in person, but in mind in the midst of that incredible adventure into which we were thrust.

For I hold that unless one does so understand the minds of those of whose deeds he reads, or can know the sources of their actions, no worthwhile judgment is possible upon their acts; the recital, of them becomes, indeed, nothing more than an array of pictures, lifeless, perfunctory, thrown upon and as quickly vanishing from the screen of the mind. Wherefore it is that we listen with quick interest to the tale of the death of a friend’s dog and have sympathy, while the sweeping away of thousands by swift pestilence in some far quarter of the globe leaves us untroubled.

That, and because, too, I distrust my own power to picture that phenomena in all its greatness, its cataclysmic menace to humanity, its soul-shaking terror, and its colossal grandeur; hesitate to set my hand to the task.

Have patience with me, my friends, for that task is great indeed!

And now – to begin.

•   •   •

The spot where I had encamped was of a singular beauty; so beautiful that it caught the throat and set an ache within the breast – until from it a tranquility distilled that was like healing mist.

Since early March I had been wandering. It was now mid-July. And for the first time since my pilgrimage had begun I drank – not of forgetfulness, for that could never be – but of anodyne for a sorrow which had held fast upon me since my return from the Carolines a year before.

No need to dwell here upon that – it has been written. Nor shall I recite the reasons for my restlessness – for these are known to those who have read that history of mine and have the understanding mind; and those who understand not do not matter. Nor is there cause to set forth at length the steps by which I had arrived at this vale of peace.

Sufficient is it to tell that as soon as my war service was over I was again the prey to my inquietude; strove as before to escape it. One night, reading over what is perhaps the most sensational of my books – “The Poppies and Primulas of Southern Tibet,” the result of my travels of 1910–1911, I determined to return to that quiet, once-forbidden land. There, if anywhere, might I find surcease of sorrow.

Besides, there was a certain flower which I long had wished to study in its mutations from the singular forms appearing on the southern slopes of the Elburz – Persia’s mountainous chain that extends from Azerbaijan in the west to Khorasan in the east; from thence I would follow its modified types in the Hindu-Kush ranges and its migrations along the southern scarps of the Trans-Himalayas – that unexplored upheaval, higher than the Himalayas themselves, more deeply cut with precipice and gorge, which Sven Hedin had touched and named on his tragic journey to Lhasa.

Having accomplished this, I planned to push across the passes to the Manasarowar Lakes, where, legend has it, the strange. luminous purple lotuses grow. [03]

An ambitious project; undeniably fraught with danger; but it is written that desperate diseases require desperate remedies, and until inspiration or message how to rejoin those whom I had loved so dearly came to me, nothing less, I knew, could dull my heartache.

And, frankly, feeling that no such inspiration or message could come, I did not much care as to the end.

In Teheran I had picked up a most unusual servant; yes, more than this, a companion and counselor and interpreter as well.

He was a Chinese; his name Chiu-Ming. His first thirty years had been spent at the great Lamasery of Palkhor-Choinde at Gyantse, west of Lhasa. Why he had gone from there, how he had come to Teheran, I never asked. I was most fortunate that he had gone, and that I had found him. He recommended himself to me as the best cook within ten thousand miles of Pekin. He spoke truth in that as in all things – as he saw them.

For almost three months we had journeyed; Chiu-Ming and I and the two ponies that carried my impedimenta. We had traversed mountain roads which had echoed to the marching feet of the hosts of Darius, to the hordes of the Satraps. The highways of the Achaemenids – yes, and which before them had trembled to the tramplings of the myriads of thee godlike Dravidian conquerors!

We had slipped over ancient Iranian trails; over paths which the warriors of conquering Alexander had traversed; dust of bones of Macedons, of Greeks, of Romans, beat about us; ashes of the flaming ambitions of the Sassanidae whimpered beneath our feet – the feet of an American botanist, a Chinaman, two Tibetan ponies. We had crept through clefts whose walls had sent back the howlings of the Ephthalites, the White Huns who had sapped the strength of these same proud Sassanids until at last both fell before the Turks. Over the highways and byways of Persia’s glory, Persia’s shame and Persia’s death, we four – two men, two beasts had passed. For a fortnight we had met no human soul, seen no sign of human habitation.

Game had been plentiful – green things Chiu-Ming might lack for his cooking, but meat never. About us was a welter of mighty summits. We were, I knew, somewhere within the blending of the Hindu-Kush with the Trans-Himalaya.

That morning we had come out of a ragged defile into this valley of enchantment, and here, though it had been so early, I had pitched my tent, determining to go no farther till the morrow. It was a Phocean vale; a gigantic cup filled with the very essence of tranquility. A spirit brooded over it, serene, majestic, immutable – like the untroubled calm which rests, the Burmese believe, over every place which has guarded the Buddha, sleeping. At its eastern end towered the colossal scarp of the unnamed peak, through one of whose gorges we had crept. On his head was a cap of silver set with pale emeralds – the snow fields and glaciers that crowned him. Far to the west another gray and ochreous giant reared its bulk, closing the vale. North and south the horizon was a chaotic sky land of pinnacles, spired and minareted, steepled and turreted and domed, each diademed with its green and argent of eternal ice and snow!

And all the valley was carpeted with the blue poppy; in wide, unbroken fields, luminous as the morning skies of mid-June, they rippled mile after mile over the path we had followed, over the still untrodden path which we must take; they nodded, they leaned toward each other, they seemed to whisper – then to lift their heads and look up like crowding swarms of little azure fays, half impudently, wholly trustfully, into the faces of the jeweled giants standing guard over them – and when the little breeze walked upon them it was as though they bent beneath the soft tread and were brushed by the sweeping skirts of unseen, hastening Presences.

Like a vast prayer rug, sapphire and silken, the cerulean poppies stretched to the gray feet of the mountain. Between their southern edge and the clustering summits a row of faded brown, low hills knelt – like brown-robed, withered and weary old men, backs bent, faces hidden between outstretched arms, palms to earth and brows touching earth within them – in the east’s immemorial attitude of worship.

Half I expected them to rise – and as I watched, abruptly, with the ever-startling suddenness which in the strange light of these latitudes objects spring into vision, a man appeared on one of the bowed, rocky shoulders. As he stood scanning my camp there arose beside him a laden pony, and at its head a Tibetan peasant. The first figure waved its hand; came striding down the hill.

— IV —

MYSTERIES IN THE SKY

As he approached I took stock of him. A young giant, three good inches. over six feet, a vigorous, massive head with unruly clustering black hair; a clean-cut, clean-shaven American face. The deep brown eyes were sparkling with life; the poise of the head careless, half defiant, reckless. And all through the vigorous, supple body one could sense life and the joy of life pulsing.

“I’m Dick Drake,” he said, holding out his hand and grinning engagingly at me. “Richard Keen Drake, recently with uncle’s engineers in France. Lord, I never expected to find another white man up here.”

“My name is Goodwin.” I took his hand, shook it warmly. “Dr. Walter T. Goodwin.”

“Oh, I know you!” he exclaimed; “know all about you, that is. My father – Dr. Alvin Drake, you know, admired you greatly. Say, I am glad!” and he took my hand again. “Botanizing?”

I nodded.

“Wondering where I came from?” he went on. “Short story. War ended. Felt an irresistible desire for something entirely different. Couldn’t think of anything more different than Tibet – always wanted to go there anyway. Went. Decided to strike over toward Turkestan. And here I am.” I became conscious of a strong glow of liking for this debonair young giant. No doubt, unconsciously, I had been feeling the need of companionship with my own kind. I wondered, as I led the way into my little encampment, whether he would care to join fortunes with me in my journeyings.

His father’s work I knew well, and although this stalwart son was as unlike as well could be what one would have expected Alvin Drake – a trifle dried, precise, wholly abstracted with his experiments – to beget; still, I reflected, heredity sometimes works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform.

It was almost with awe that he listened to me instruct Chiu-Ming as to just how I wanted supper prepared.

“Blessed bones of Buddha,” he whispered. “You mean to say you get what you want to eat and not what he wants you to eat! And for two months I’ve suffered—” he paused, an oddly speculative gleam in his eyes.

His gaze dwelt, fondly, upon the Chinaman now busy among his pots and pans. We talked a little, desultorily, as the meal was prepared – fragments of traveler’s news and gossip, as is the habit of journeyers who come upon each other in the silent Ever the speculation grew in his face as he most appreciatively made away with Chiu-Ming’s artful concoctions.

“Came here to find peace, and I guess I struck just the right place,” Drake sighed at last, drawing out his pipe. “A cook, a marvel of a cook, doc! Where did you get him?”

Briefly I told him.

Then a silence fell upon us. Suddenly the sun dipped down behind the flank of the stone giant guarding the valley’s western gate; the whole vale swiftly darkened – a flood of crystal-clear shadows poured within it. It was the prelude to that miracle of unearthly beauty seen nowhere else on this earth – the sunset of Tibet.

We turned expectant eyes to the west. A little, cool breeze raced down from the watching steeps like a messenger, whispered to the nodding poppies, sighed and was gone. The poppies were still. High overhead a homing kite whistled, mellowly. As if it were a signal there sprang out in the pale azure of the western sky row upon row of cirrus cloudlets, rank upon rank of them, thrusting their heads into the path of the setting sun. They changed from mottled silver into faint rose, deepened to crimson.

“The dragons of the sky drink the blood of the sunset,” murmured Chiu-Ming.

As though a gigantic globe of crystal had dropped upon the heavens, their blue abruptly turned to a clear and glowing amber – then as abruptly shifted to a luminous violet. A soft green light pulsed through the valley.

Under it, like hills ensorcelled, the rocky walls about us seemed to flatten. They glowed and all at once pressed forward like gigantic slices of palest emerald jade, translucent, illumined, as though by a circlet of little suns shining behind them.

The light faded, robes of deepest amethyst dropped around the mountain’s mighty shoulders. And then from every snow and glacier-crowned peak, from minaret and pinnacle and towering turret, leaped forth a confusion of soft peacock flames, a host of irised prismatic gleamings, an ordered chaos of rainbows! Great and small, interlacing and shifting, they ringed the valley with an incredible glory – as if some god of light itself had touched the eternal rocks and hidden their radiant souls stand forth.

Through the darkening sky swept a rosy pencil of living light; that utterly strange, pure beam whose coming never fails to clutch the throat of the beholder with the hand of ecstasy, the ray which the Tibetans name the Ting-pa. For a moment this rosy finger pointed to the east, then arched itself, divided slowly into six shining, rosy bands; began to creep downward toward the eastern horizon where a nebulous, pulsing splendor arose to meet it.

And as we watched I heard a gasp from Drake – myself watched, incredulously!

For the six beams were swaying, moving with ever swifter motion from side to side in ever-widening sweep, as though the hidden orb from which they sprang were swaying like a pendulum, were being rocked like a searchlight! Faster and faster the six high-flung beams swayed – and then broke – broke as though a gigantic, unseen hand had reached up and snapped them! An instant the severed ends ribboned aimlessly, then bent, turned down and darted earthward into the welter of clustered summits at the north and swiftly were gone, while down upon the valley fell night.

“Good God!” It was Drake. “Did you see it, Goodwin? It was as though something reached up, broke those rays and threw them down!”

“I saw it,” I was struggling with my own bewilderment. “I saw it. But I never saw anything like it before,” I ended, most inadequately.

“It was purposeful,” he whispered. “It was deliberate. As though something reached up, juggled with the rays, broke them, and drew them down like willow withes!”

“The devils that dwell there!” Chiu-Ming, his voice quavering.

“It’s most probably some magnetic phenomenon,” I was half angry at myself for my own touch of panic amazement. “It’s been proven that light can be deflected by passage through a magnetic field. Of course that’s it, certainly.”

“I don’t know,” his tone was doubtful indeed. “It would take a whale of a magnetic field to have done that – Goodwin, it’s inconceivable!” He harked back to his first idea. “It was so – so damned deliberate,” he repeated.

“Devils—” muttered the Chinaman.

“What’s that?” it was Dick, interrupting him. He gripped my arm and pointed again to the north. A deeper blackness had grown there while we had been talking, a pool of darkness against which the mountain summits stood out, blade-sharp edges faintly luminous.

A gigantic coruscating lance of misty green fire darted from the tenebrous cloud and thrust its quivering point into the heart of the zenith; following it, leaped into the sky a host of the sparkling spears of light. Now the blackness was like an ebon hand, brandishing a thousand javelins of virescent tinseled flame.

“The aurora,” I said.

“It’s going to be a good one,” answered Drake, gaze intent upon me. “Have you noticed that big spot on the sun?”

I shook my head.

“It’s the biggest I ever saw,” he went on. “Noticed it first at dawn this morning. Some little aurora lighter – that spot. I told you – look at that!” he cried. The green lances had fallen back. The blackness gathered itself together – that from it began to pulse billows of radiance, scintillant, spangled with infinite darting swarms of flashing corpuscles like uncounted hosts of dancing fireflies.

Higher the waves rolled – phosphorescent green and iridescent violet, weird copperous yellows and metallic saffrons and a shimmer of glittering ash of rose – then wavered, split and formed into gigantic, sparkling, marching curtains of splendor.

A vast circle of light sprang out upon the folds of the flickering, rushing curtains. Misty at first, its edges sharpened until they rested upon the blazing glory of the northern sky like a pale ring of cold flame. And about it the aurora began to churn, to heap itself, to revolve!

Toward the ring from every side raced the majestic folds, drew themselves together, circled, seethed around it like foam of fire about the lip of a cauldron, and – poured, poured through the shining circle as though it were the mouth of that fabled cavern where old Aeolus sits blowing forth and breathing back the winds that sweep the earth!

Yes – into the ring’s mouth the aurora flew, cascading in a columned stream to earth! Then swiftly, a mist swept over all the heavens, veiled the incredible, the inexplicable vision; left us staring into each other’s white faces.

“Magnetism,” whispered Drake. “I guess not!”

“It struck about where the Ting-pa was broken and drawn down,” I said.

“Purposeful,” he repeated. “And devilish! It hit on all my nerves like a – like a metal claw. Purposeful and deliberate. I tell you Goodwin, there was intelligence behind that!”

“Intelligence!” I exclaimed. “But Drake – what human intelligence could break the rays of the setting sun and suck down the aurora?”

“I don’t know,” he whispered again. “I don’t know. And I didn’t say – human – intelligence, did I?”

“What other is there?” I asked impatiently.

“I don’t – know,” he answered.

“Devils,” croaked Chiu-Ming. “The devils that defied Buddha – and have grown strong—”

“Like a metal claw!” breathed Drake.

Far to the west a sound came to us, first a whisper, then a wild rushing, a prolonged wailing, a crackling that distant as it was had in it suggestion of the colossal. A great light flashed through the mist, glowed about us and faded. Again the wailing, the vast rushing, the retreating whisper.

Then silence and utter darkness dropped embraced upon the valley of the blue poppies!

— V —

THE MARK ON THE BREAST

Dawn came. Drake had audibly slept well. But I, who had not his youthful resiliency, lay for long, sleepless and uneasy. I had hardly sunk into troubled slumber before the light awakened me.

As we breakfasted, I approached directly that matter which my growing liking for Drake was turning into strong desire.

“Drake,” I, asked. “Where are you going?”

“With you – if you’ll let me,” he grinned engagingly. “I’m foot loose and fancy free. And frankly I think you ought to have somebody with you to help watch that cook. He might get away!”

The idea seemed to appall him.

“Fine!” I exclaimed heartily, and thrust out my hand to him. “I’m thinking of striking over the range soon to the Manasarowar Lakes. There’s a curious flora there I’d like to study.”

“Anywhere you say, Doc, suits me,” he answered. “And you may find I’ll come in handy.”

We clasped hands on our partnership. Soon we were on our way to the valley’s western gate; our united caravans stringing along behind us.

Mile after mile we trudged through the blue poppies. We discussed the enigmas of the twilight and of the night – but in the light of day their breath of vague terror I was dissipated.

There was no place for mystery nor dread under this flood of brilliant sunshine. The smiling sapphire floor rolled ever on before us. Whispering little playful breezes flew down the slopes to gossip for a moment with the nodding flowers. Flocks of rose-finches raced chattering overhead to quarrel with the tiny willow warblers, the chi-u-teb-tok, holding fief of the drooping, graceful bowers bending down to the little laughing stream that for the past hour had chuckled and gurgled like a friendly water baby beside us.

I had proven, almost to my own satisfaction, that what we had beheld, if not a magnetic, phenomenon – and this I could hardly believe it to be considering the magnitude of its effects – had been an optical illusion; mirage created by the extraordinary atmospheric attributes of these highlands, an atmosphere so unique as to make almost anything of the kind possible. But Dick was not more than half convinced.

“I know,” he said. “Of course I understand all that – superimposed layers of warmer air that might have bent the ray; vortices in the higher levels that might have produced just that effect of the captured aurora – I’ll admit it’s all possible, I’ll even admit it’s all probable, but damn me, Doc, if I believe it! I had too clearly the feeling of a conscious force, a something that knew exactly what it was doing – and had a reason for it!”

•   •   •

It was mid-afternoon.

The spell of the valley upon us, we had gone leisurely. The western mount was close, the mouth of the gorge, through which we must pass, now plain before us. It did not seem as though we could reach it before dusk, and Drake and I were reconciled to spending another night in the peaceful vale. Plodding along, deep in thought, I was startled by an exclamation from Dick.

“What the – what the hell!” I heard him gasp. He was standing rigid, staring at a point some hundred yards to his right. I followed his gaze and stated as incredulously.

The towering cliffs were but a scant half mile away. At some distant time there had been an enormous fall of rock. This, disintegrating, had formed a gently-curving breast which sloped down to merge with the valley’s floor. Willow and witch alder, stunted birch and poplar had found root-hold, clothed it, until only their crowding outposts, thrusting forward in a wavering semicircle, held back seemingly by the blue hordes, showed where it melted into the meadows.

In the center of this breast, beginning half way up its slopes and stretching down into the flowered-fields was a colossal imprint, a gigantic track – as if a monstrous creature from some giant planet had stamped there its foot!

Gray and brown it stood out against the green and blue of slope and level; a rectangle all of thirty feet wide, two hundred long, the heel faintly curved and from its hither end, like claws, four slender triangles radiating from it like twenty foot points of a ten-rayed star!

Irresistibly was it like a footprint – but what thing was there whose tread could leave such print as this? And why, as I gazed, did an uncontrollably icy tremor shake me, as one who looks upon a sigil set by a traveler from an alien world?

I forced back my terror; ran up the slope – Dick already well in advance. I paused at the base of the triangles where, were this thing indeed a footprint, the spreading claws sprang from the flat of it. The track was fresh, there was no mistaking that! At its upper edges were clipped bushes and split trees, the white wood of the latter showing where they had been sliced as though by the stroke of a titanic scimitar – and at the lower edges drooped shaved stems that plainly the day before had held high their little azure silken banners.

I stepped out upon the mark. It was as level as though planed; bent down and stared in utter disbelief of what my own eyes beheld. For stone and earth had been crushed, compressed, into a smooth, microscopically-grained, adamantine complex, and in this matrix poppies still bearing traces of their coloring were imbedded like fossils! A cyclone can and does grip straws and thrust them unbroken through an inch board – but what force was there which could take the delicate petals of a flower and set them like inlay within the surface of a stone.

We looked at each other helplessly.

“What could have done it?” he whispered.

Into my mind came recollection of the wailings, the crashings in the night, of the weird glow that had flashed about us when the mist arose to hide the chained aurora. “It was what we heard,” I said. “The sounds – it was then that this was made.”

“The foot of Shin-je,” it was Chiu-Ming’s voice, tremulous. “The Lord of Hell has trodden here!”

I translated for Drake’s benefit. “Has the lord of Hell but one foot?” asked Dick, impatiently.

“He bestrides the mountains,” said Chiu-Ming. “On the far side is his other footprint. Shin-je it was who strode the mountains and set here his foot!”

Again I interpreted.

Drake cast a calculating glance up to the cliff top.

“Two thousand feet, about,” he mused. “Well, if Shin-je is built in our proportions that makes it about right. The length of this thing would give him just about a two thousand foot leg. Yes – he could just about straddle that hill.”

“You’re surely not serious?” I asked, in consternation.

“What the hell!” he exclaimed, “are you crazy? I don’t think this is any foot mark anyway or anyhow! How could it be? Look at the absolutely mathematical nicety with which these edges are stamped out – as though by a die.

“That’s what it reminds me of – a die. It’s as if some impossible power had been used to press this down. Like – like a giant seal in a mountain’s hand. A sigil – a seal, that’s what it is. And there’s something metallic about it, too.”

“But why?” I gasped. “What could be the purpose—”

“Better ask where the devil such a force could be gotten together and how it came here,” he said. “Look – except for this one place there isn’t a mark anywhere. All the bushes and the trees, all the poppies and the grass are just as they ought to be.

“How did whoever or whatever it was that made this, get here and get away without leaving any trace but this? There’s the mystery. Damned if I don’t think Chiu-Ming’s explanation puts less strain upon the credulity than any I could offer.”

I peered about. It was so. Except for the mark, there was no slightest sign of the unusual, the abnormal. But the mark was enough!

“I’m for pushing up a notch or two and getting into the gorge before dark,” he was voicing my own thought. “I’m willing to face anything human – but I’m not keen to be pressed into a rock like a flower in a maiden’s book of poems.”

Just at twilight we drew out of the valley into the pass. We traveled a full mile along it before darkness forced us to make camp. The gorge was narrow. The far walls but a hundred feet away; but we had no quarrel with them for their neighborliness, no! Their solidity, their immutability, breathed confidence back into us.

And after we had found a deep niche capable of holding the entire caravan we filed within, ponies and all, I for one perfectly willing to spend the night en intime, let the air at dawn be what it would. We dined within on bread and tea, and then, tired to the bone, sought each his place upon the rocky floor. I slept well, wakened only once or twice by Chiu-Ming’s groanings; his dreams evidently were none of the pleasantest. If there was an aurora I neither knew nor cared. My slumber was dreamless.

— VI —

RUTH VENTNOR

The dawn, streaming into the niche, awakened us. A covey of partridges venturing too close yielded three to Dick’s and my shooting. We breakfasted well, and a little later were pushing on down the cleft.

Its descent, though gradual, was continuous, and therefore I was not surprised when soon we began to come upon evidences of semi-tropical vegetation. Giant rhododendrons and tree ferns gave way to occasional clumps of stately kopek and clumps of the hardier bamboos. We added a few snow cocks to our larder – although they were out of their habitat. flying down into the gorge from their peaks and table-lands for some choice titbit.

And all that day we marched on, and when at night we made camp, sleep came to us quickly and overmastering. An hour after dawn we were on our way. A brief stop we made for lunch: pressed forward.

It was close to two when we caught the first sight of the ruins.

The soaring, verdure-clad walls of the cañon had long been steadily marching closer. Between their rims the wide ribbon of sky was like a fantastically shored river, shimmering, dazzling; every cove and headland edged with an opalescent glimmering as of shining pearly beaches. And as though we were sinking in that sky stream’s depths its light kept lessening, darkening imperceptibly with luminous shadows of ghostly beryl, drifting veils of pellucid aquamarine, limpid mists of glaucous chrysolite.

Fainter, more crepuscular became the light, yet never losing its crystalline virescence. Now the high overhead river was but a brook; became a thread. Abruptly it vanished. We passed into a tunnel, fern-walled, fern-roofed, garlanded with tawny orchids, gay with carmine fungus and golden moss. We stepped out into a blaze of sunlight.

Before us lay a wide green bowl held in the hands of the clustered hills; shallow, circular, as though, while plastic still, the thumb of God had run round its rim, shaping it. Around it the peaks crowded, craning their lofty heads to peer within.

Three miles in diameter was this hollow, as my gaze then measured it. Three openings it had – one that lay like a crack in the northeast slope; that tunnel mouth through which we had come; one that lifted itself out, of the bowl, creeping up the precipitous bare scarp of the western barrier straight to the north, clinging to the ochreous rock up and up until it vanished around a far distant shoulder. A wide and bulwarked road, a road that spoke as clearly as though it had tongue of human hands which had cut it there in the mountain’s breast, an ancient road weary beyond belief beneath the tread of uncounted years. Out groped to greet us the very soul of loneliness!

And never in desert depths had I felt an approach to the concentration, the – thickening – of desolation that lay within the verdant bowl. It was tangible – as though into it had been poured the very essence of yearning misery; a pool of despair. Its influence, too, was tangible; more physical than psychical – for within the breast grew a dull, intolerable aching; the pulse was checked, and, the lungs labored.

Half the width of the valley away began the ruins. Weirdly were they its visible expression. They huddled in two bent rows to the bottom. They crouched in a wide cluster against the cliffs. From the cluster a curving row of them ran along the southern crest of the hollow.

A flight of shattered, cyclopean steps lifted to a ledge and here a crumbling fortress stood. Irresistibly did the ruins seem a colossal hag, flung prone, lying listlessly, helplessly, against the barrier’s base. The huddled lower ranks were gigantic legs, the cluster the great body, the upper row an out-flung arm and above the neck of the stairway the ancient fortress, rounded, two huge ragged apertures in its northern front was an age bleached, withered head staring, watching, up where round the distant breast of rock the ancient road crept and vanished.

I looked at Dick – the spell was heavy upon him, his eyes drawn. The Chinaman and Tibetan were murmuring, terror written large upon them.

“Some joint!” Drake turned to me, a shadow of a grin lightening the distress on his face. “But I’d rather chance it than go back. What d’you say.”

I nodded, curiosity mastering my oppression. We stepped over the rim, rifles on the alert. Close behind us crowded the two servants and the ponies. The vale was shallow, as I have said; we trod the fragments of an olden approach to the green tunnel so the descent was not difficult. Here and there beside the path upreared huge broken blocks. On them I thought I could see faint tracings as of carvings – now a suggestion of gaping, arrow-fanged dragon jaws, now the outline of a scaled body, a hint of enormous, bat-like wings.

Now we had reached the first of the crumbling piles that stretched down into the valley’s center.

Half fainting, I fell against Drake, clutching to him for support!

A stream of utter hopelessness was racing upon us, swirling and eddying around us, reaching to our hearts with ghostly fingers dripping with despair! From every shattered heap it seemed to pour, rushing down the road upon us like a torrent, engulfing us, submerging, drowning!

Unseen it was – and tangible as water: it sapped the life from every nerve. A weariness ineffable filled me, a vast desire to drop upon the stones, to be rolled away, to die! I felt Drake’s body quivering even as mine; knew that he was drawing upon every reserve of strength in him!

“Steady, doc,” he muttered. “Steady—”

The Tibetan shrieked and fled, the ponies scrambling after him. Dimly remembered that mine carried precious specimens; a surge of anger passed, beating back the anguish. I heard a sob from Chiu-Ming, saw him drop.

Drake stopped, drew him to his feet. We placed him between us, thrust each an arm through his own. Then, like swimmers, heads bent, we pushed on, buffeting the inexplicable, invisible flood.

As the path rose, its force lessened, my vitality grew, the terrible desire to yield and be swept away waned. Now we had reached the foot of the cyclopean stairs, now we were half up them – and now as we struggled out upon the ledge on which the watching fortress stood the clutching stream shoaled swiftly, the shoal became safe, dry land and the cheated, unseen maelstrom swirled harmlessly beneath us.

We stood erect, gasping for breath, again like swimmers who have fought their utmost and barely, so barely, won!

“Good God!” Dick was half hysterical. “What was it?”

“A force—” I myself half sobbed the words – “a force – unknown, but real – at the tunnel’s mouth we felt only its weaker upper waves – it collects, grows heavier in the bowl, is strongest at the bottom. Here we’re higher than the tunnel mouth – beyond its reach.”

“A force!” he gasped. “A force that races like a whirlpool! What kind of force can draw the very life from a man – saturate his mind with desire for death?”

How had he put that – draw the life out of a man – draws the life – draws – draws down the aurora – the sun ray! The linked images flashed through my sick brain; vanished – There was an almost imperceptible movement at the side of the ruined portal.

Out darted a girl. A rifle dropped from her hands. Straight sped toward me.

And as she ran I recognized her!

Ruth Ventnor!

The flying figure reached me, threw soft arms around my neck, was weeping in gladness on my shoulder.

— VII —

FROM THE PAST

“Ruth!” I cried. “Ruth, what is it? What are you doing here?”

“Walter!” she sobbed.

“Walter Goodwin – Oh, thank God! Thank God!” She drew herself from my arms, catching her breath; laughed shakily.

I took swift stock of her. Save for the ghost of fear upon her, she was the same Ruth that I had known three years before; wide, deep blue eyes that were now all seriousness, now sparkling wells of mischief; provocatingly petite, rounded and tender; the fairest skin; piquant nose with just a suggestion of – upturnedness, of impudence – almost gaminerie; shining clusters of intractable curls; all human, sparkling and sweet.

Drake coughed, insinuatingly, meaningly. I introduced him, noting the unrestrained admiration in his brown eyes.

“I – I watched you struggling through that dreadful pit,” she shuddered. “I could not see who you were, did not know whether friend or enemy – but oh, my heart almost died in pity for you, Walter,” she breathed. “What can it be – there?”

I shook my head.

“Martin could not see you,” she went on. “He was watching the road that leads above. But I ran down – to help.”

“Mart watching?” I asked. “Watching for what?”

“I—” she hesitated oddly. “I think I’d rather tell you before him. It’s so strange – so incredible. I would rather he was there, for he, too, saw, and you might not – might not believe me alone,” she faltered.

We passed through the broken portal and into the fortress. It was more gigantic even than I had thought. The floor of the vast chamber we had entered was strewn with fragments fallen from the crackling, stone-vaulted ceiling. Through the breaks, light streamed from the level above us. We picked our way among the debris to a tremendous, crumbling stairway, crept up it, Ruth flitting ahead. We came out opposite one of the eye-like apertures. Black against it, perched high upon a pile of blocks, I recognized the long, lean outline of Ventnor, rifle in hand, gazing intently up the ancient road whose windings were plain through the opening. He had not heard us.

“Martin!” cried Ruth, softly.

He turned swiftly as a cat. A shaft of light from a crevice in the gap’s edge struck his face, flashing it out from the semi-darkness of the corner in which he crouched. I looked into the quiet gray eyes, upon the keen, clever, high-bred face.

“Mart!” I cried.

“Goodwin!” he shouted, tumbling down from his perch, shaking me by the shoulders. “Walter Goodwin – for love of the Lord! If I had been in the way of praying – you’re the man I’d have prayed for. How did you get here?”

“Just wandering, Mart,” I answered. “But Lord! I’m glad to see you.”

“Which way did you come?” he asked keenly.

I threw my hand toward the south.

“Not through that hollow?” he asked incredulously.

“And some hell of a place to get through!” It was Drake breaking in. “It cost us our ponies and all my ammunition!”

“Richard Drake,” I said. “Son of old Alvin – you knew him, Mart.”

“Knew him well,” cried Ventnor, seizing Dick’s hand. “Wanted me to go to Kamchatka to get some confounded sort of stuff for one of his devilish experiments. Is he well?”

“He’s dead,” replied Dick soberly.

“Oh!” said Ventnor. “Oh – I’m sorry, boy. He was a great man.”

For a moment we were silent.

“Well,” said Ventnor, a bit awkwardly. “I’m sorry – but what are you doing in this wilderness?”

Briefly I acquainted him with my wanderings, my encounter with Drake. “That place out there—” He considered us thoughtfully. “Damned if I know what it is. Thought maybe it’s gas – of a sort. If it hadn’t been for it we’d have been out of this hole two days ago.

“I’m pretty sure it’s gas, now. And it must be much less than it was this morning, for we made an attempt to get through again – and couldn’t.”

I was hardly listening. Ventnor had certainly advanced a theory of our unusual – symptoms – that had not occurred to me. The hollow might indeed be a pocket into which a gas flowed: just as in the mines the deadly coal damp collects in pits, flows like a stream along the passages. It might be that – some odorless, colorless gas of unknown qualities; and yet—

“Did you try respirators?” inquired Dick.

“Surely,” said Ventnor. “Surely we did. First off the go. But they weren’t of any use. The gas, if it is a gas, seems to operate as well through the skin as through the nose and mouth. We just couldn’t make it – and that’s all there is to it. But if you made it – could we try it now, do you think?” he asked eagerly.

I felt myself go white.

“Not – not for a little while,” I stammered. He nodded, understandingly.

“I see,” he said. “Well, we’ll wait a bit, then.”

“But why are you staying here? Why didn’t you make for the road up the mountain? What are you watching for anyway?” asked Drake.

“Go to it, Ruth,” Ventnor grinned. “Tell ’em. After all – it was your party you know.”

“Mart!” she cried, blushing.

“Well – it wasn’t me they admired,” he laughed.

“Martin!” she cried again, and stamped her foot furiously.

“Shoot,” he said. “I’m busy. I’ve got to watch.”

“Well” – Ruth’s voice was uncertain – “we’d been hunting up in Kashmir. Martin wanted to come over somewhere here. So we crossed the passes. That was about a month ago. The fourth day out we ran across what looked like a road running south.

“We thought we’d take it. It looked sort of old and lost – but it was going the way we wanted to go. It took us first into a country of little hills; then to the very base of the great range itself; finally into the mountains – and then it ran blank.”

“Bing!” interjected Ventnor, looking around for a moment.

“Bing – just like that. Slap dash against a prodigious fall of rock. We couldn’t get over it.”

“So we cast about to find another road,” went on Ruth.

“All we could strike were – just strikes.”

“No fish on the end of ’em,” said Ventnor. “God! But I’m glad to see you, Walter Goodwin! Believe me, I am. However – go on Ruth.”

“At the end of the second week,” she said, “we knew we were lost! We were deep in the heart of the range. All around us was a forest of enormous, snow-topped peaks. The gorges, the cañons, the valleys that we tried led us east and west, north and south.

“It was a maze, and in it we seemed to be going ever deeper. There was not the slightest sign of human life. It was as though no human beings except ourselves had ever been there. Game was plentiful. We had no trouble in getting food. And sooner or later, of course, we were bound to find our way out. We did not worry.

“It was five nights ago that we camped at the head of a lovely little valley. There was a mound that stood up like a tiny watch-tower, looking down it. The trees grew round like tall sentinels.

“We built our fire on that mound; and after we had eaten Martin slept. I sat watching the beauty of the skies and of the shadowy vale. I had heard no one approach – but something made me leap to my feet, look behind me.

“A man was standing just within the glow of firelight, watching me!”

“A Tibetan?” I asked. She shook her head, trouble in her eyes. “Not at all.” Ventnor turned his head. “Ruth screamed and awakened me. I caught a glimpse of the fellow before he vanished.

“A short purple mantle hung from his shoulders. His chest was covered with fine chain mail. His legs were swathed and bound by the thongs of his high buskins. He carried a small, round, hide-covered shield and a short two-edged sword. His head, was helmeted. He belonged, in fact – oh, at least twenty centuries back!”

He laughed in plain enjoyment of our amazement.

“Go on, Ruth,” he said, and took up his vigil. “But Martin did not see his face,” she took up her story with more confidence. “And Oh, but I wish I could forget it! It was hawk-like, as white as mine, Walter, and cruel, so cruel; the eyes glowed and they looked upon me like a – like a slave dealer. They shamed me – I wanted to hide myself.

“I cried out and Martin awakened. As he moved, the man stepped out of the light and was gone. I think he had not seen Martin; had believed that I was alone.

“We put out the fire, moved farther into the shadow of the trees. But I could not sleep – I sat hour after hour, my pistol in my hand,” she patted the serviceable automatic in her belt, “my rifle close beside me.

“The hours went by – dreadfully! At last I dozed. When I awakened again it was dawn – and – and—” she covered her eyes, then: “two men were looking down on me. One was he who had stood in the firelight. Their faces were terrible – leering, wicked—”

“They were talking,” interrupted Ventnor again, “in archaic Persian!”

“Persian!” I repeated blankly; “archaic Persian!”

“Very much so,” he nodded. “I’ve a fair knowledge of the modern tongue, and a rather unusual command of Arabic. The modern Persian, as you know, comes straight through from the speech of Xerxes, of Cyrus, of Darius whom Alexander of Macedon conquered. It has been changed mainly by taking on a load of Arabic words. Well – there wasn’t a trace of the Arabic in the tongue they were speaking. It sounded odd, of course – but I could understand quite easily. They were talking about Ruth. To be explicit they were discussing her with an exceeding frankness—”

“Martin!” she cried wrathfully.

“Well, all right,” he went on, half repentantly. “As a matter of fact, Goodwin, I had seen the pair steal up. My rifle was under my hand. So I lay there quietly, listening.

“You can realize, Walter, that when I caught sight of those two, looking as though they had materialized from Darius’s ghostly hordes, my scientific curiosity was aroused – prodigiously. So in my interest I passed over the matter of their speech; not alone because I thought Ruth asleep and unhearing, but also because I took into consideration that the mode of polite expression changes with the centuries – and these gentlemen clearly belonged at least twenty centuries back – the real truth is I was consumed with curiosity.

“They had got to a point where they were detailing with what pleasure a certain mysterious person whom they seemed to regard with much fear and respect would contemplate her. I was wondering how long my desire to observe – for to the anthropologist they were most fascinating, Goodwin – could hold my hand back from my rifle when Ruth awakened.

“She jumped up like a little fury; fired a pistol point blank at them. Their amazement was – well – ludicrous! I know it seems incredible, but they seemed to know nothing of firearms – they certainly acted as though they didn’t.

“They simply flew into the timber. I took a pot shot at one, but I missed. Ruth hadn’t though; she had winged her man; i he left a red trail behind him.

“We didn’t follow the trail. We made for the opposite direction – and as fast as possible.

“Nothing happened that day or night. Next morning, though, creeping up a slope, we caught sight of a suspicious glitter a mile or two away in the direction we were going. We sought shelter in a small ravine. In a little while, over the hill and half a mile away from us; came about two hundred of these fellows, marching along.

“And they were indeed Darius’s men! Men of that Persia which has been dead for millennia! There was no mistaking them, with their high, covering shields. their great bows, their javelins and armor.

“They passed; we doubled. We built no fires that night – and we ought to have turned the pony loose, but we didn’t. It carried my instruments, and ammunition, and I felt we were going to need the latter.

“The next morning we caught sight of another band – or the same. We turned again. We stole through a tree-covered plain; we struck an ancient road. It led south, into the peaks again. We followed it. It brought us here.

“It isn’t, as you observe, the most comfortable of places. We struck across the hollow to the crevice – we knew nothing of the entrance you came through. The hollow was not pleasant, either. But it was penetrable, then.

“We crossed. As we were about to enter the cleft there issued out of it a most unusual and disconcerting chorus of sounds – wailings, crashings, splinterings!”

I started, shot a look at Dick; absorbed, he was drinking in Ventnor’s every word.

“So unusual, so – well, disconcerting is the best word I can think of, that we were not encouraged to proceed. Also the peculiar unpleasantness of the hollow was increasing rapidly.

“We made the best time we could back to the fortress. And when next we tried to go through the hollow, to search for another outlet – we couldn’t. You know why,” he ended abruptly.

“But men in ancient armor! Men like those of Darius!” Dick broke the silence that had followed this amazing recital. “It seems incredible!”

“Yes,” agreed Ventnor, “doesn’t it?

Yet there they were. Of course I don’t maintain that they were relics of Darius’s armies. They might have been of Xerxes before him – or of Artaxerxes after him. But they certainly were, Drake, living breathing replicas of exceedingly ancient Persians.

“Why, they might have been the wall carvings on the tomb of Khosroes come to life! I mention Darius because he fits in with the most plausible hypothesis. When Alexander the Great smashed his empire he did it rather thoroughly. There wasn’t much sympathy for the vanquished in those days. And it’s entirely conceivable that a city or two in Alexander’s way might have gathered up a fleeing regiment or so for protection and have decided not to wait for him, but to hunt for cover.

“Naturally they would have gone into the almost inaccessible heart of the high ranges. There is nothing impossible in the theory that they found shelter at last up here. As long as history runs this has been a well-nigh unknown land. Penetrating some mountain guarded, easily defended valley they might have decided to settle down for a time, have rebuilt a city, raised a government; laying low, in a sentence, waiting for the storm to blow over.

“Why did they stay? Well, they might have found the new life more pleasant than the old; they might have been locked in their valley by some accident – landslides, rockfalls sealing up the entrance. There are a dozen reasonable possibilities!”

“But those who hunted you weren’t locked in,” objected Drake.

“No,” Ventnor shrugged his shoulders, half indifferently. “No, they certainly weren’t. Maybe we drifted into their preserves by a way they don’t know. Maybe they’ve found another way out. I’m sure I don’t know. But I do know what we saw.”

“The noises, Martin,” I said, for his description of these had been the description of those we had heard in the blue valley. “Have you heard them since?”

“Yes,” he answered, hesitating, I thought oddly.

“And you think those – those soldiers you saw are still hunting for you?”

“Haven’t a doubt of it,” he replied more cheerfully. “They didn’t look like chaps who would give a hunt up easily – at least not a hunt for such novel, interesting, and therefore desirable and delectable game as we must have appeared to them.”

“Martin,” I said decisively, “where’s your pony? We’ll try the hollow again, at once. There’s Ruth – and we’d never be able to hold back such numbers as you’ve described.”

“You feel strong enough to try it?”

— VIII —

METAL WITH A BRAIN

The eagerness, the relief in his voice betrayed the tension, the anxiety which until now he had hidden so well; and hot shame burned me for my shrinking, my dread of again passing through that haunted vale.

“I certainly do.” I was once more master of myself. “Drake – don’t you agree?”

“Sure,” he replied. “Sure. I’ll look after Ruth – er – I mean Miss Ventnor.”

The glint of amusement in Ventnor’s eyes at this faded abruptly; his face grew somber.

“Wait,” he said. “I carried away some – some exhibits from the crevice of the noises, Goodwin.”

“An exhibit!” I exclaimed.

“Put ’em where they’d be safe,” he continued. “I’ve an idea – just the faintest idea – that they’re of more importance than our armored men – far, far more importance! At any rate we must take them with us.

“Go with Ruth, you and Drake, and look at them. And bring them back with the pony. Then we’ll make a start. A few minutes more probably won’t make much difference – but hurry!”

He turned back to his watch. Ordering Chiu-Ming to stay with him I followed Ruth and Drake down the ruined stairway. At the bottom she came to me, laid little hands on my shoulders.

“Walter,” she breathed, “I’m frightened, oh so frightened! I’m so frightened I’m afraid to tell even Mart. He doesn’t like them, either, these little things you’re going to see. He likes them so little that he’s afraid to let me know how little he does like them!”

“But what are they?” There was a keen edge of curiosity on Drake’s voice. “What’s to fear about them?”

“See what you think!” She led us slowly, almost reluctantly toward the rear of the fortress. They lay in a little heap at the mouth of the cleft where were heard the noises. Martin picked them up and dropped them in a sack before we ran back through the hollow.

“They’re grotesque and they’re almost cute, and they make me feel as though they were the tiniest tippy-tip of the claw of some incredibly huge cat just stealing around the corner, a terrible cat, a cat as big as a mountain!” she ended breathlessly.

We climbed through the crumbling masonry into a central, open court. Here a clear spring bubbled up in a ruined and choked stone basin; close “to the ancient well was their pony, contentedly browsing in the thick grass that grew around it. From one of its hampers Ruth took a large cloth bag.

“To carry them,” she said, and trembled; dawning of panic in the wide blue eyes.

We passed through what had once been a great door into another chamber larger far than that we had just left; and it was in better preservation, the ceiling unbroken, the light dim after the blazing sun of the court. Near its center she halted us.

Before me ran a two-feet-wide ragged crack, splitting the floor and dropping down into black depths. Beyond was an expanse of smooth flagging, almost clear of débris.

There came from Dick a low whistle. I followed his pointing finger. On the wall at the end writhed two enormous dragon shapes, cut in low relief. Their gigantic wings, their monstrous coils, covered the nearly unbroken surface, and these chimerae were the shapes upon the upthrust blocks of the haunted roadway.

In Ruth’s gaze I read a nameless fear, a half-shuddering fascination!

But she was not looking at the carven dragons!

Her gaze was fixed upon what at my first glance seemed to be a raised and patterned circle in the dust-covered floor. Not more than a foot in width, it shone wanly with a pale, metallic bluish luster, as though, I thought, it had been recently polished. Compared with the wall’s tremendous winged figures this floor design was trivial, ludicrously insignificant. What could there be about it to set that dread upon Ruth’s face?

I leaped the crevice; Dick joined me. Now I could see that the ring was not continuous. Its broken circle was made of sharply edged cubes about an inch in height, separated from each other with mathematical exactness by another inch of space. I counted them – there were nineteen.

Almost touching them with their bases were an equal number of pyramids, of tetrahedrons, as sharply angled and of similar length. They lay on their sides with tips pointing star-like to six spheres clustered like a conventionalized five petaled prim rose in the exact center. Five of these spheres – the petals – were, I roughly calculated, about an inch and a half in diameter, the ball they enclosed larger by almost an inch.

So orderly was their arrangement, so much like a geometrical design nicely done by some clever child that I hesitated to disturb it. I bent, and stiffened, the first touch of dread upon me. For within the ring, close to the clustering globes, was a miniature replica of the giant track in the poppied valley! It stood out from the dust with the same hint of crushing force, the same die cut sharpness, the same metallic suggestion – and pointing toward the globes were the claw marks of the four spreading star points!

Resolutely I reached down and picked up one of the pyramids. It seemed to cling to the rock; it was with effort that I wrenched it away. It gave to the touch a slight sensation of warmth – how can I describe it? – a warmth that was living and clean.

I weighed it in my hand. It was oddly heavy, twice the weight, I should say, of platinum. I drew out a glass and examined it. Decidedly the pyramid was metallic, but of finest, almost a silken texture – and I could not place it among any of the known metals. Certainly it was none I had ever seen; yet it was as certainly metal. It was striated – slender filaments radiating from tiny, dully lustrous points within the polished surface.

And suddenly I had the weird feeling that each of these points was an eye, peering up at me, scrutinizing me. There came a startled cry from Dick.

“Look! Look at the ring!”

The ring was in motion!

Faster the cubes moved; faster the circle revolved; the pyramids raised themselves, stood bolt upright on their square bases; the six rolling spheres touched them, joined the spinning, and with sleight-of-hand suddenness the ring drew together; its units coalesced, cubes and pyramids and globes threading with a curious suggestion of ferment.

With the same startling abruptness there stood erect where but a moment before they had seethed a little figure, grotesque: a weirdly humorous, a vaguely terrifying foot-high shape, squared and angled and pointed and animate – as though a child should build from nursery blocks a fantastic shape which abruptly is filled with throbbing life! A troll from the kindergarten! A kobold of the toys!

Only for a second it stood, then began swiftly to change, melting with quicksilver quickness from one outline into another as ever square and triangle and circle changed places. Their shiftings were like the transformations one sees within a kaleidoscope. And in each vanishing form was the suggestion of unfamiliar harmonies, of a subtle, a transcendental geometric art as though each swift shaping were a symbol, a word – Euclid’s problems given volition! Geometry endowed with consciousness, made articulate!

It ceased. Then the cubes drew one upon the other until they formed a pedestal nine inches high; up this pillar rolled the larger globe, balanced itself upon the top; the five spheres followed it, clustered like a ring just below it. The other cubes raced up, clicked two by two on the outer arc of each of the five balls at the ends of these twin blocks a pyramid took its place, tipping each with a point.

The Lilliputian fantasy was now a pedestal of cubes surmounted by a ring of globes from which sprang a star of five arms! Quickly the remaining pyramids joined, here and there, with the cubes of staff and star.

The spheres began to revolve. Faster and faster they spun around the base of the crowning globe; the arms became a disc upon which tiny brilliant sparks appeared, clustered, vanished only to reappear in greater number.

The troll swept toward me. It glided! The finger of panic touched me. I sprang aside, and swift as light it followed, seemed to poise itself to leap!

“Drop it!” it was Ruth’s cry. But before I could let fall the pyramid I had forgotten was in my hand the – Thing – touched me. A paralyzing shock ran through me. My fingers clenched, locked. I stood, muscle and nerve bound, unable to move.

The little figure paused, its whirling disc shifted from the horizontal plane on which it spun. It was as though it cocked its head to look up at me – and again I had the sense of innumerable eyes peering at me. It did not seem menacing – its attitude was inquisitive, waiting; almost as though it had asked for something and wondered why I did not let it have it. The shock still held me rigid, although a tingling in every nerve told of returning force.

The disc tilted back to place, bent toward me again. I heard a shout; heard a bullet strike the pigmy that now clearly menaced; heard the bullet ricochet with out the slightest effect upon it; I saw Dick leap beside me, raise a foot and kick out at the thing. There was a flash of light and upon the instant he crashed down as though struck by a giant’s hand, lay sprawling and inert upon the floor!

Came a scream from Ruth; there was softly sibilant rustling all about her. I saw her leap the crevice, drop on her knees beside Drake.

There was movement on the flagging where she had stood. A score or more of faintly shining, bluish shapes were marching there – pyramids and cubes and spheres like those forming the shape that stood before me! There was a curious sharp tang of ozone in the air, a perceptible tightening as of electrical tension.

They swept to the edge of the fissure, swam together, and there, hanging half over the tap was a bridge, half spanning it, a weird and fairy arch made up of alternate cube and angle! The shape at my feet disintegrated; resolved itself into units that raced over to the beckoning span.

At the hither side of the crack they clicked into place, even as had the others. Before me now was a bridge complete – save for one are near the middle where an angled gap marred it.

I felt the tetrahedron I held pulse within my hand, striving to escape! I dropped it; the tiny shape swept to the bridge, ascended it – dropped into the gap!

The arch was complete – hanging in one flying span over the depths!

Upon it, over it, as though they had but awaited this completion, rolled the six globes. And as they dropped to the farther side the end of the bridge nearest me raised itself in air, curved itself like a scorpion’s tail, drew itself into a closer circled arc, and dropped upon the floor beyond!

Again the sibilant rustling, and cubes and pyramids and spheres were gone!

Nerves tingling slowly back to life, my every sense mazed in absolute bewilderment, my gaze sought Drake. He was sitting up, feebly, his head supported by Ruth’s hands. And vanished, utterly vanished, was faintest trace of the old reckless Dick; gone all shadow of flippancy. Awe and troubled doubt were in the brown eyes: his mind, it was plain, groping desperately for natural explanation of this wonder – even as was mine.

“Goodwin!” he whispered, “what – what were they?”

“Metal,” I said – it was the only word to which my whirling mind could cling – “metal—”

“Metal!” he echoed. “These things metal? Metal – alive and thinking! Goodwin, do you realize – good God!” he cried – and suddenly was silent, his face a page on which, visibly, horror pressed slowly and ever deeper its seal.

And as I looked at him, and at white-faced Ruth, I knew that my own was as pallid, as terror-stricken as theirs.

“They were such little things,” whispered Dick; “such little things – bits of metal – little globes and pyramids and cubes – just little things!”

“Babes! Only babes!” it was Ruth – “Babes!”

“Bits of metal” – Dick’s gaze sought mine, held it – “and they looked for each other, they worked with each other – thinkingly, consciously – they were deliberate, purposeful – little things – and with the force of a score of dynamos – living, thinking – like that which bent the sun rays – that snared the aurora – and stamped like a metal die its seal upon the hill,” he ended amazingly.

“Don’t!” Ruth laid white hands over his eyes. “Don’t – don’t you be frightened!”

“Frightened!” he echoed. “Frightened! I’m not afraid – yes, I am afraid—”

He arose, stiffly – and stumbled toward me. Afraid! Drake afraid? Well – so was I! Bitterly, terribly afraid!

For what we had beheld in the dusk of that dragoned, ruined chamber was outside all experience, beyond all knowledge or dream of science! Not their shapes – that was nothing! Not even that, being metal, they had moved!

But that being metal, they had moved consciously, thoughtfully, deliberately!

They were metal things with – minds!

That – that was the incredible, the terrifying thing! That – and their power! Thor compressed within Hop-o’-my-thumb – and thinking! The things incarnate in metal minacules – and thinking! The inert, the immobile given volition, movement, cognizance – thinking!

Metal with a brain!

PART TWO

PRECEDING CHAPTERS
BRIEFLY RETOLD

While traveling in the mountains of Turkestan with Chiu-Ming, an educated Chinese servant and companion, Dr. Goodwin met Dick Drake, an American engineer. They noticed a spot on the sun, and saw some tremendous and apparently intelligent force break the rays of the setting sun and suck down an aurora. Next day, in a valley, they saw a colossal imprint crushed into the stone with unthinkable force – a curved heel with four claws each twenty feet long extending from it. And on the next day, while traveling on an ancient road that passed through a hollow, they were almost overcome by an unseen force that sapped their strength. Winning through, they met an American girl, Ruth Ventnor, daughter of a scientist, and her brother Mart, who were being kept prisoners by the mysterious force in the hollow. From them they learned that one night two men had come close to their fire and discussed Ruth with exceeding frankness – in archaic Persian. Awakening she had fired at them, and wounded one. The next day they had seen a body of soldiers, dressed and armed like the legions of ancient Darius approaching, apparently in search of them. They had escaped. Ruth showed Dr. Goodwin and Dick a number of small metal objects, heavier than platinum, that formed geometrical designs that moved, seemingly with intelligence, and formed a bridge. Coming in contact with this metal, both Dr. Goodwin and Dick were partially paralyzed.

Metal – with a brain!

— IX —

POWER OF PERSIA

Dumbly we looked at each other and silently we passed out of the courtyard. A strange, sick dread was heavy upon me. The twilight was stealing upon the close-clustered peaks.

Another hour, and their amethyst-and-purple mantles would drop upon them; snowfields and glaciers sparkle out in irised beauty; nightfall.

As I gazed upon them I wondered, with a deepening of my dread, to what secret place within their brooding immensities the metal mysteries had fled? And to what myriads, it might be, of their kind? And these hidden hordes – of what shapes were they? Of what powers? Small like these, or – or—

Quick on the screen of my mind flashed two pictures, side by side – the little four-rayed print in the great dust of the crumbling ruin and its colossal twin on the breast of the poppied valley! And again that icy hand reached out of the unknown, touched me, choked me. I fought for mastery against it; mastery over the alien nightmare fear that gripped throat, checked heartbeat!

I conquered it, pushed it back; then, not willing that Ruth and Dick, now busy with the pony, should see even its shadow on my face, I turned softly aside, crept through the shattered portal, made my way out upon the ledge and looked over the haunted hollow.

Unbelieving, I rubbed my eyes; then strode to the very brim of the bowl. A lark had risen from the roof of one of the shattered heaps and had flown caroling up in to the shadowing sky! A flock of the little willow warblers flung themselves across the valley, scolding and gossiping; a hare sat upright in the middle of the ancient roadway and raised inquisitive ears.

The valley itself lay serenely under the ambering light, smiling, peaceful – emptied of horror!

I dropped over the side, walked cautiously down the road up which but an hour or so before we had struggled so desperately; paced farther and farther with an increasing confidence and a growing wonder. Gone was that soul of loneliness; utterly vanished the whirlpool of despair that had striven to drag us down to death.

The bowl was nothing but a quiet, smiling, lovely little hollow in the hills.

I looked back. Even the ruins had lost their sinister shape; were time-worn, crumbling piles – nothing more! I saw Ruth and Drake run out upon the ledge and beckon me; heard them cry out to me; knew that they had missed me and feared for me; made my way back to them, running.

“It’s all right!” I shouted. “The place is all right!”

I stumbled up the side; joined them. “It’s empty,” I cried. “Get Martin and Chiu-Ming quick! Quick – while the way’s open—”

A rifle-shot rang out above us; another and another. To us came the echoing of Ventnor’s shouting:

“Ruth! Goodwin! Drake! Here! They are coming!”

From the portal scampered Chiu-Ming, his robe tucked up about his knees.

“They come!” he gasped. “They come!”

There was a flaming of spears high up the winding mountain path. Down it was pouring an avalanche of men. I caught the glint of helmets and corselets. Those in the van were mounted, galloping two abreast upon sure-footed mountain-ponies. Their short swords, lifted high, flickered like lightnings.

After the horsemen swarmed foot soldiers, a forest of shining points and dully gleaming pikes above them. Clearly to us came the fierce tumult of their battle-cries.

Again Ventnor’s rifle cracked. One of the foremost riders went down; another stumbled over him, fell. The rush was checked for an instant, milling upon the road.

“Dick,” I cried, “rush Ruth over to the tunnel mouth; We’ll follow. We can hold them there. I’ll get Martin. Chiu-Ming, after the pony, quick!”

I pushed the two over the rim of the hollow. Side by side the Chinaman and I ran back through the gateway. I pointed to the animal, rushed into the fortress.

“Quick, Mart!” I shouted up the shattered stairway. “We can get through the hollow. Ruth and Drake are on their way to the break we came through. Hurry!” “All right! Just a minute!” he called. I heard him empty his magazine with almost machine-gun quickness. There was a short pause, and down the broken steps he leaped, gray eyes blazing.

“The pony!” He ran beside me toward the portal. “All my ammunition on him.”

“Chiu-Ming’s taking care of that,” I gasped.

We darted out of the gateway. A good five hundred yards away were Ruth and Drake, running straight to the green tunnel’s mouth. Between them and us was Chiu-Ming, urging on the pony.

As we sped after him I looked back. The cavalry had recovered, were now a scant half-mile from where the road swept past the fortress. Besides their swords I saw that the horsemen bore great bows. A little cloud of arrows sparkled from them; fell far short.

“Don’t look back,” grunted Ventnor. “Stretch yourself, Walter. There’s a surprise coming. Hope to God I judged the time right. Hold ’em for a little while if I didn’t.”

We turned off the ruined way; raced over the sward.

“If it looks as though – we can’t make it,” he panted, “you beat it after the rest. I’ll try to hold ’em until you get into the tunnel. Never do for ’em to get Ruth.”

“Right.” My own breathing was growing labored. “We’ll hold them. Dick can take care of Ruth.”

“Good boy,” he said. “I wouldn’t have asked you. It probably means – death.”

“Very well,” I gasped, irritated. “But why borrow trouble?”

He reached out, touched me.

“You’re right, Walter,” he grinned. “It does – seem – like carrying coals – to Newcastle.”

There was a thunderous booming behind us; a shattering crash. I stopped in my tracks, whirled around. A cloud of smoke and dust hung over the northern end of the mined fortress.

It lifted swiftly, and I saw that the whole side of the structure had fallen, littering the road with its fragments. Scattered prone among these were men and horses. Others staggered, screaming. On the farther side of this stony dike our pursuers were held like rushing waters behind a sudden fallen tree.

“Come on!” cried Ventnor. “Timed to a second! Hold ’em for a while. Fuses and dynamite. Blew out the whole side, right on ’em, by the Lord!”

On we fled. Chiu-Ming was now well in advance; Ruth and Dick less than half a mile from the opening of the green tunnel. Suddenly I saw Drake stop, raise his rifle, empty it before him, and, holding Ruth by the hand, race back toward us.

Even as he turned, the vine-screened entrance through which we had come, through which we had thought lay safety, streamed other armored men. We were outflanked!

“To the fissure!” shrieked Ventnor. Drake heard, for he changed his course to the crevice at whose mouth Ruth had said the – Little Things – had lain.

After him streaked Chiu-Ming, urging on the pony. Shouting, out of the tunnel, down over the lip of the bowl, leaped the soldiers. We dropped upon our knees, sent shot after shot into them. They fell back, hesitated. We sprang up, sped on.

All too short was the check. Once more we held them – and again.

Now Ruth and Dick were a scant fifty yards from the crevice. I saw him stop, push her from him toward it. She shook her head.

Now Chiu-Ming was with them. She sprang to the pony, lifted from its back a rifle. Then into the mass of their pursuers Drake and she poured a fusillade. They huddled, wavered, broke for cover.

“A chance!” gasped Ventnor.

Behind us was a wolf-like yelping; a bestial chorus, raging, triumphant. The other pack had reformed; had crossed the barricade the dynamite had made; were rushing upon us!

We ran as I had never known we could run. Over us whined the bullets from the covering guns. Close were we now to the mouth of the fissure. If we could but reach it! Close, close were our pursuers, too – the arrows closer.

“No use!” shouted Ventnor. “Three hundred yards – but we can’t make it. Meet ’em from the front – never do to pass out running away. Drop – and shoot!”

We threw ourselves down, facing them. There came a great, triumphant shouting. And in that strange sharpening of the senses that goes always hand in hand with deadly peril, that is indeed nature’s summoning of every reserve to meet that peril, my eyes took them in with photographic nicety – the linked mail, lacquered blue and scarlet, of the horsemen; brown, padded armor of the footmen; their bows and javelins and short bronze swords, their pikes and shields; and under their round helmets their cruel, bearded faces – white as our own where the black beards did not cover than; their fierce and mocking eyes! The springs of ancient Persia’s long dead power, these! Men of Xerxos’s ruthless, world-conquering hordes; the lustful, ravening wolves of Darius whom Alexander scattered – in this world of ours, twenty centuries beyond their time!

Swiftly, accurately, even as I scanned them we had been drilling into them. They advanced deliberately, heedless of their fallen. Their arrows had ceased to fly. I wondered why, for now we were well within their range. Had they orders to take us alive – at whatever cost to themselves?

“I’ve got only about ten cartridges left, Martin,” I whispered.

“We’ve saved Ruth,” he answered. “Drake ought to be able to hold that hole in the wall. He’s got lots of ammunition on the pony. But they’ve got us – I’m sorry, old man.”

He gripped my hand crushingly. Another wild shouting; down upon us swept the pack!

We leaped to our feet, sent our last bullets into them; stood ready, rifles clubbed to meet the rush. I heard Ruth scream – What was the matter with them? Why had they stopped? What was it at which they were glaring over our heads? And why had the rifle fire of Ruth and Drake ceased so abruptly? Simultaneously we turned.

— X —

THE SMITING THING

Within the black background of the fissure stood a shape, an apparition, a woman – beautiful, awesome, incredible! Tall she was; standing there swathed from chin to feet in clinging veils of pale amber, she seemed taller even than tall Drake.

Yet it was not her height that sent through me the thrill of awe, of half incredulous terror which, relaxing my grip, let my smoking rifle drop to earth; nor was it that about her proud head a cloud of shining tresses swirled and pennoned like a misty banner of woven copper flames – no, nor that through her veils her body gleamed faint radiance!

It was her eyes – her great, wide eyes whose clear depths were like pools of living star fires! They shone from her white face – not phosphorescent, not merely lucent and light-reflecting, but as though they themselves were sources of the cold white flames of far stars – and as calm as those stars themselves. And in that face, although as yet I could distinguish nothing but the eyes, I sensed something unearthly.

“God!” whispered Ventnor. “What is she?”

The woman stepped from the crevice. Not fifty feet from her were Ruth and Drake and Chiu-Ming, their rigid attitudes revealing the same shock of awe that had momentarily paralyzed me.

She looked at them, beckoned them. I saw the two walk swiftly toward her, Chiu-Ming hang back. The great eyes fell upon Ventnor and myself. She raised a hand, motioned us to approach.

I turned; There stood the host that had poured down the mountain road, horsemen, spearsmen, pikemen – a full thousand of them. At my right were the scattered company that had come from the tunnel entrance, threescore or more.

There seemed a spell upon them. They stood in silence, like automatons, only their fiercely staring eyes showing that they were alive.

“Quick,” breathed Ventnor.

We ran toward her who had checked death even while its jaws were closing upon us.

Before we had gone half-way, as though our flight had broken whatever spell had bound them, a clamor arose from the host; a wild shouting, a clanging of swords on shields. I shot a glance behind. They were in motion, advancing slowly, hesitatingly as yet – but I knew that soon that hesitation would pass; that they would sweep down upon us, engulf us.

“To the crevice!” I shouted to Drake, He paid no heed to me, nor did Ruth – their gaze once more fastened upon the swathed woman.

Ventnor’s hand shot out, gripped my shoulder, halted me. She had thrown up her head. The cloudy metallic hair billowed as though wind had blown it. It flashed, coruscated!

From the lifted throat came a low, a vibrant cry; harmonious, weirdly disquieting, golden and sweet – and laden with the eery, minor wailings of the blue valley’s night, the dragoned chamber.

Before the cry had ceased there poured with an incredible swiftness out of the crevice score upon score of the metal things! The fissures vomited them.

Globes and cubes and pyramids – not small like those of the ruins, but shapes all of four feet high, dully lustrous, and deep within that luster the myriads of tiny points of light like unwinking, staring eyes! Still with that lightning quickness they swirled, eddied – formed a barricade between us and the armored men.

Down upon the things poured a shower of arrows. I heard the shouts of their captains; they rushed. They had courage – those men – yes!

Again came the woman’s cry – golden, peremptory!

Sphere and block and pyramid ran together, seemed to seethe; once more I had that sense of a quicksilver melting. Up from them thrust a thick and rectangular column.

Eight feet in width and twenty high, it shaped itself! Out from its left side, from right side, sprang arms – fearful arms that grew and grew as globe and cube and angle raced up the column’s side and clicked into place each upon, each after, the other. With a magical quickness the arms lengthened.

Before us stood a monstrous shape, a geometric prodigy. A shining angled pillar that, though rigid, immobile, seemed to crouch, be instinct with living force striving to be unleashed. Two great globes surmounted it – like the heads of some two-faced Janus of an alien world.

At the left and right the incredible knobbed arms, now fully fifty feet in length, writhed, twisted, straightened; flexing them selves-in grotesque, terrible imitation of a boxer. And at the end of each of the six arms the spheres were clustered thick, studded with the pyramids – again in gigantic, awful, parody of the spiked gloves of those ancient gladiators who fought for imperial Nero!

For an instant it stood there, preening, testing itself like an athlete – a chimera, amorphous yet weirdly symmetric – under the darkening sky, in the green of the hollow, the armored hosts frozen before it—

And then – it struck!

Out flashed two of the arms, with a glancing motion with appalling force. They sliced into the close-packed forward ranks of the armored men; cut out of them two great gaps.

Sickened, I saw fly fragments of man and horse. Another arm javelined from its place like a flying snake, clicked at the end of another, became a hundred-foot chain which swirled like a gigantic flail through the huddling mass. Down upon a knot of the soldiers with a straightforward blow drove a third arm, driving through them like a giant punch!

All that host which had driven us from the ruins threw down sword, spear, and pike; fled shrieking. The horsemen spurred their mounts, riding heedless over the footmen who fled with them.

The smiting thing seemed to watch them go with – amusement!

Before they could cover a hundred yards it had disintegrated. I heard the little wailing sounds – then behind the fleeing men, close behind them, rose the angled pillar; into place sprang the flexing arms, and again it took its toll of them!

They scattered, running singly, by twos, in little groups, for the sides of the valley. They were like rats scampering in panic over the bottom of a great green bowl. And like a monstrous cat the shape played with them – yes, played!

It melted once more – took new form. Where had been pillar and flailing arms was now a tripod thirty feet high; its legs alternate globe and cube and upon its apex a wide and spinning ring of sparkling spheres. Out from the middle of this ring stretched a tentacle – writhing, undulating like a serpent of steel, four-score yards at least in length.

At its end cube, globe and pyramid had mingled to form a huge trident. With the three long prongs of this trident the thing struck, swiftly, with fearful precision – joyously – tining those who fled, forking them; tossing them from its points high in air.

It was, I think, that last touch of sheer horror, the playfulness of the smiting thing, that sent my dry tongue to the roof of my terror-parched mouth, turned my heart to water; sent the mind shuddering back, pressing to the farthest walls of consciousness; held open with monstrous fascination eyes that struggled to close.

Ever they fled from it, and ever was it swifter than they; teetering at their heels on its tripod legs! From half its length the darting snake streamed red rain!

I heard a sigh from Ruth; wrested my gaze from the hollow; turned. She lay fainting in Drake’s arms.

Beside the two the swathed woman stood, looking out upon that dread slaughter, calm and still, shrouded with an unearthly tranquility – viewing it, it came to me, with eyes impersonal, cold, indifferent as the untroubled stars which look down upon hurricane and earthquake in this world of ours

There was a rushing of many feet at our left; a wail from Chiu-Ming. Were they maddened by fear, driven by despair, determined to slay before they themselves were slain? I do not know. But those who still lived of the men from the tunnel mouth were charging.

They clustered close, their shields held before them. They had no bows, these men. They moved down upon us in silence – swords and pikes gleaming.

The smiting thing had seen, too – at that moment I knew definitely, at last, that the deep shining points were – eyes; could be nothing else. Almost with the speed of light its tripod rocked it toward us; the gigantic metal tentacle straining out like a rigid, racing serpent, flying to cut between its weird mistress and those who menaced us.

I heard Chiu-Ming scream; saw him throw up his hands, cover his eyes – run straight upon the pikes! “Chiu-Ming!” I shouted, from a dry throat. “Chiu-Ming! This way!”

I ran toward him. Before I had gone five paces the tall form of Ventnor flashed by me, revolver spitting. I saw a spear thrown. It struck the Chinaman squarely in the breast. He tottered – fell upon his knees.

Even as he dropped, the giant flail swept down upon the soldiers! It swept through them like a scythe through ripe grain! It threw them, broken and torn, far toward the valley’s sloping sides! It left only fragments that bore no semblance to men!

Ventnor was at Chiu-Ming’s head; I dropped beside him. There was a crimson froth upon his lips. “I thought that Shin-je was about to slay us,” he whispered. “Fear blinded me. I – pay now for some wrong I have done – or some good I have omitted to do—”

His head dropped; the body quivered, lay still.

We arose, looked about us dazedly. At the side of the crevice stood the woman, her gaze resting upon Drake, his arms about Ruth, her head hidden on his breast. The valley was empty – save for the huddled heaps that dotted it.

High up on the mountain path a score of little figures crept, all that were left of those who but a little before had streamed down to take us captive or to slay. High up in the darkening heavens the lammergeiers [vultures], the winged scavengers of the Himalayas, were gathering.

The woman lifted her hand, beckoned us once more. Slowly we walked toward her, stood before her. The great clear eyes searched us – but no more intently than our own wondering eyes did her.

— XI —

THE GREATER PATH

We looked upon a vision of loveliness such, I think, as none has beheld since Trojan Helen was a maid. At first all I could note were the glorious, limpidly lustrous eyes, clear as rain-washed April skies, crystal clear as some secret spring sacred to crescented Diana. Their wide gray irises were flecked with golden amber and sapphire – flecks that shone within the pellucid depths like clusters of little aureate and azure stars.

Then with a strange thrill of wonder I saw that these tiny constellations were not in the irises alone; that they clustered even within the pupils – deep within them, like far-flung stars in the depths of velvety, midnight heavens.

Whence had come those cold fires that had flared from them, I wondered – more menacing, far more menacing, in their cold tranquility than the hot flames of wrath? These eyes were not perilous – no. Calm they were, and still – yet in them a shadow of interest flickered; a ghost of friendliness smiled.

Above them were level, delicately penciled brows of bronze. The lips were coral crimson and – asleep! Sweet were those lips as ever master painter, dreaming his dream of the very soul of woman’s sweetness, saw in vision and limned upon his canvas – and asleep, nor wistful for awakening!

A proud, straight nose; a broad low brow, and over it the masses of the tendriling tresses – tawny, lustrous topaz, cloudy, metallic! Like the spun silk of ruddy copper; and misty as the wisps of cloud that Soul’tze, Goddess of Sleep, sets in the skies of dawn to catch the wandering dreams of lovers.

Down from the wondrous face melted the rounded column of her throat to merge into exquisite curves of shoulders and breasts, half revealed beneath the swathing veils.

But upon that face, within her eyes, kissing her red lips and clothing her breasts, was something – unearthly. Something that came straight out of the still mysteries of the star-filled spaces; out of the ordered, the untroubled, the illimitable void! A passionless spirit that watched over the human passion in the scarlet mouth, in every slumbering, sculptured line of her – guarding her against its awakening! Twilight calm dropping down from the sun sleep to still the restless mountain tam! Ishtar dreamlessly asleep within Nirvana!

Something not of this world we know – and yet of it as the winds of the Cosmos are to the summer breeze, the ocean to the wave, the lightnings to the glow-worm.

“Goodwin,” I heard Ventnor whispering at my ear, “she isn’t – human. Look at her eyes; look at the skin of her—”

White was her skin, white as the milk of pearls; gossamer fine, silken and creamy; translucent as though a soft brilliancy dwelt within it; shimmering, mica fine as her hair was silk of metal! Beside it Ruth’s fair own was like a sun-and-wind-roughened country lass’s to Titania’s.

She scanned us as though she were seeing for the, first time beings of her own kind. She spoke – and her voice was elfin distant, chimingly sweet like hidden little golden bells; filled with that tranquil, far off spirit that was part of her – as though indeed a tiny golden chime should ring out from the silences, speak for them, find tongue for them. The words were hesitating, halting as though the lips that uttered them found speech strange – as strange as the clear eyes found our images.

And the words were Persian – purest, most ancient Persian.

“I am Norhala,” the golden voice chimed forth, whispered down into silence. “I am Norhala.”

She shook her head, half impatiently. A hand stole forth from beneath her veils, slender, long-fingered with nails like rosy pearls; above the wrist was coiled a golden dragon with wicked little crimson eyes. The slender white hand touched Ruth’s head, drew it gently from Drake’s clasp, turned it until the strange, flecked orbs looked directly into the misty ones of blue.

Long they gazed – and deep. Then she who had named herself Norhala thrust out -a finger, touched a tear that hung upon Ruth’s curled lashes, regarded it wonderingly. Something of recognition, of memory, seemed to awaken within her.

“You are – not – untroubled?” she asked with that halting effort.

Ruth shook her head.

“They – do not trouble you?”

She pointed to the huddled heaps strewing the hollow. And then I saw whence that light which had streamed from her great eyes came. For the little azure and golden stars paled, trembled, then flashed out like galaxies of tiny, clustered silver suns!

From that weird, intolerable radiance Ruth shrank, affrighted.

“No – no,” she gasped. “I weep for – him.” She pointed where Chiu-Ming lay, a brown blotch at the edge of the shattered men.

“For – him?” There was puzzlement in the faint voice. “For – that? But why?”

She looked at that which had been Chiu-Ming – and with a deep, inward shuddering

I knew that to her the sight of the crumpled form carried no recognition of the human, nothing of kin to her. There was a faint wonder in her eyes, no longer light filled, when at last she turned them back to us. Long she considered us.

“Now,” she broke the silence, “now something stirs within me that it seems has long been sleeping. It bids me take you with me. Come!”

Abruptly she turned from us, glided to the crevice. We looked at each other, seeking council, decision.

“Chiu-Ming!” Drake spoke. “We can’t leave him like that. At least let’s cover him from the vultures.”

“Come!” The woman had reached the mouth of the fissure, was looking intently toward us.

“I’m afraid! Oh, Martin – I’m afraid!” It was Ruth, reaching out little trembling hands to her tall brother.

“Come!” Once more came the command – and command I now recognized it to be. “We have seen – what we have seen. Goodwin,” Ventnor’s voice was grim, “after that – could you go back?”

“No,” I answered; “no! But – Ruth?”

“Drake can take her – the way you came,” he said slowly.

“Martin, no! I won’t! I’m going with you,” she cried, and threw a fierce arm about his neck.

“No,” Dick shook his head sullenly. “I go, too – I couldn’t go back now, even for Ruth.”

“I won’t! I won’t!” sobbed Ruth.

“Come!” Norhala called again. There was an echo of harshness, a clanging, peremptory, inexorable, in the chiming.

Ventnor shrugged his shoulders. “Come, then!” he said.

With one last look at the Chinaman, the lammergeiers already circling about him, we walked to the crevice. Norhala waited, silent, brooding until we had passed her; then glided behind us.

Before we had gone ten paces I saw that the place was no fissure. It was a tunnel, a passage hewn by human hands, its walls covered with the writhing dragon lines, its roof the mountain.

As I peered into its depths the swathed woman swept by me. Swiftly we followed her. Far, far ahead was a wan gleaming. It quivered, a faintly shimmering, ghostly curtain, a full mile away.

Now it was close; we passed through it; were out of the tunnel. Before us stretched a narrow gorge, a sword slash in the body of the towering giant under whose feet the tunnel crept. High above was the ribbon of sky.

The sides were dark, but it came to me that here were no trees, no verdure of any kind. Its floor was strewn with boulders, fantastically shaped, almost indistinguishable in the fast closing dark.

Twin monoliths bulwarked the passage end; the gigantic stones were leaning, crumbling. Fissures radiated from the opening, like deep wrinkles in the rock, showing where earth warping, range pressure, had long been working to close this hewn way.

“Stop!” Norhala’s abrupt, golden note halted us; and again through the clear eyes I saw the white starshine flash.

“It may be well—” She spoke as though to herself. “It may be well to close this way. It is not needed – when the greater path lies ready for opening!”

The greater path lay ready! What did she mean? The words quickened the deep, enigmatic unease I had known since the first stirring of the tiny metal things in the ruins.

Ventnor’s hand stretched out, clutched me.

“You heard that?” he whispered. “You heard?”

As I nodded, the woman’s voice rang out again, vibrant, strangely disquieting, harmonious. Murmurous chanting it was at first, rhythmic and low; ripples and flutings, tones and progressions utterly unknown to me; unfamiliar, abrupt, and alien themes that kept returning, droppings of crystal clear jewels of sound, golden tollings – and all ordered, mathematical, geometric, even as had been the gestures of the shapes; Lilliputians of the ruins, Brobdignagian of the haunted hollow.

What was it? I had it – it was those gestures transformed into sound!

There was a movement down by the tunnel mouth. It grew more rapid, seemed to vibrate with her song. Within the darkness there were little flashes; glimmerings of light began to come and go – like little awakening eyes of soft, jeweled flames, like giant gorgeous fireflies; flashes of cloudy amber, gleam of rose, sparkles of diamonds and of opals, of emeralds and of rubies – blinking, gleaming!

A shimmering mist drew down around them – a swift and swirling mist. It thickened, was shot with slender shuttled threads like cobweb, coruscating strands of light.

The shining threads grew thicker, pulsed, were spangled with tiny vivid sparklings. They ran together, condensed – and all this in an instant, in a tenth of the time it takes me to write it.

From fiery mist and gemmed flashes came bolt upon bolt of lightning! The cañon bellowed with thunder! The cliff face leaped out, a cataract of green flame. The fissures widened, the monoliths trembled, fell.

In the wake of that dazzling, brilliancy came utter blackness. I opened my blinded eyes; slowly the flecks of green fire cleared. A faint lambency still clung to the cliff. By it I saw that the tunnel’s mouth had vanished, had been sealed – where it had gaped were only tons of shattered rock!

Came a rushing past us as of great bodies; something grazed my hand, something whose touch was like that of warm metal – but metal throbbing with life. They rushed by – and whispered down into silence,

“Come!” Norhala flitted ahead of us, a faintly luminous shape in the now

Stygian darkness. Swiftly we followed. I found Ruth beside me; felt her hand grip my wrist.

“Walter,” she whispered, “Walter – she is not human!”

“Nonsense,” I muttered. “Nonsense, Ruth! What do you think she is – a goddess, a spirit of the Himalayas? She’s as human a you or I.”

“No.” Even in the darkness I could sense the stubborn shake of her curly head. “Not all human. Or how could she have commanded those things? Or have summoned the lightnings that blasted shut the tunnel’s mouth? And her skin and hair – they’re too wonderful, Walter.

“Why, she makes me look – look coarse! And the light that hovers about her – why, it is by that light we are making our way. And when she touched me – I – I glowed – all through.

“Human, yes – but there is something else in her – something stronger than humanness, something that – makes it sleep,” she added astonishingly.

I could only look at her stupidly.

“Yes,” she went on rapidly. “And this place – it’s filled with something, something – electric! I’m tingling all over; and I feel light and buoyant, as though I could walk or run forever. Something is here that is the very antithesis, the opposite pole of the horror that filled that awful hollow. And how fast we are going Walter. It is as though a swift current were carrying us!”

— XII —

NORHALA
OF THE LIGHTNINGS!

It was true! Now I realized. It was as though the whole air of the cation was charged, but pleasantly. It gave a buoyancy to the body, it stimulated the pulses, sent through every fiber a sensation of well-being.

We were racing on. I glanced about me. Only the enigmatic glow – emanation, it seemed to be – from Norhala quivered with in the darkness through which we raced. The high ribbon of sky had vanished – seemed to be overcast, for I could see no stars.

Within the blackness I began again to Sense faint movement; soft stirring all about us. I had the feeling that on each side and behind us moved an invisible host.

“There’s something moving all about us – going with us!” Ruth echoed my thought.

“It’s the wind,” I said, and paused – for there was no wind.

From the blackness before us came a. succession of curious, muffled clickings, like a smothered mitrailleuse [volley gun, machine gun]. The luminescence that clothed Norhala brightened, deepening the darkness. “Cross!” She pointed into the void ahead; then, as we started forward, thrust out a hand to Ruth, held her back. Drake and Ventnor drew close to them, questioningly, anxious. But I stepped forward, out of the dim gleaming, stood rigid, my heart beating wildly.

Before me were two cubes; one I judged in that uncertain light to be six feet high, the other half its bulk. From them a shaft of pale-blue phosphorescence pierced the murk. They stood, the smaller pressed against the side of the larger, for all the world like a pair of immense nursery blocks, placed like steps by some giant child.

As my eyes swept over them I saw that the shining shaft was an unbroken span of cubes; not multi-arched like the Lilliputian bridge of the dragon chamber, but flat and running out over an, abyss that gaped at my very feet. All of a hundred feet they stretched; a slender, lustrous girder crossing unguessed depths of gloom. From far, far below came the faint whisper of rushing waters.

I faltered. For these were the blacks that had formed the body of the monster of the hollow, its flailing arms! The thing that had played so murderously with the armored men!

And now had shaped itself into this anchored, quiescent bridge!

I think it was that contrast – the chasm between this immobile span and the life-filled, quick, exultant smiting thing which yet were one and the same – that thrust part open the last door between my consciousness and full realization of the incredible, the awful truth!

“Do not fear!” It was the woman speaking, softly, as one would reassure a child. “Ascend! Cross! They obey me!”

I stepped firmly upon the first block, climbed to the second. The span stretched, sharp edged, smooth, only a slender, shimmering line revealing where each great cube held fast to the other.

I walked at first slowly, then with ever increasing confidence, for up from the surface streamed a guiding, a holding force, that was like a host of little invisible hands, steadying me, keeping firm my feet. I looked down; the myriads of enigmatic eyes were staring, staring up at me from deep within. They fascinated me; I felt my pace slowing; a vertigo seizing me. Resoluter I dragged my gaze up and ahead; marched on.

From the depths came more clearly the sound of the waters. Now there were but a few feet more of the bridge before me, I reached its end, dropped my feet over, felt them touch a smaller cube, descended.

Over the span came the tall form of Ventnor. He was leading his laden pony. He had bandaged its eyes so that it could not look upon the narrow way it was treading. And close behind, a hand resting reassuringly upon its flank, strode Dick, “swinging along carelessly. The little beast ambled along serenely, sure-footed as all its mountain kind, and docile to darkness and guidance.

Then, an arm about Ruth, floated Norhala. Now she was beside us; dropped her arm from Ruth; glided past. On for a hundred yards or more we went, and then she drew us a little toward the unseen cañon wall.

She stood before us, shielding us. One golden call she sent.

I looked back into the blackness. Something like an enormous, dimly shimmering rod was raising itself there! Higher it rose and higher. Now it stood, upright, a. slender towering pillar, a gigantic slim finger whose tip pointed a full hundred feet in air.

Then slowly it inclined itself toward us; drew closer, closer to the ground; touched and lay there for an instant inert. Abruptly it vanished.

But well I knew what I had seen. The span over which we had passed had raised itself even as had the baby bridge of the fortress; had lifted itself across the chasm and dropping itself upon the hither verge had disintegrated into its units; was fol lowing us!

A bridge of metal that could build itself – and break itself! A thinking, conscious metal bridge! A metal bridge with volition – with mind that was following us!

There sighed from behind a soft, sustained wailing; rapidly it neared us. A wanly glimmering shape drew by; halted. It was like a rigid serpent cut from a gigantic square bar of cold blue steel.

Its head was a pyramid, a tetrahedron; its length vanished in the further darkness. The head raised itself, the blocks that formed its neck separating into open wedges like a Brobdignagian replica of these jointed, fantastic, little painted reptiles the Japanese toy-makers cut from wood.

It seemed to regard us – mockingly! The pointed head dropped – past us streamed the body! Upon it other pyramids clustered – like the spikes that guarded the back of the nightmare Brontosaurs. Its end came swiftly into sight – its tail another pyramid twin to its head.

It flirted by – gaily; vanished!

The door of revelation opened wider! I had thought the span must disintegrate to follow – and it did not need to! It could move as a composite as well as in units! Move intelligently, consciously – as the smiting thing had moved!

What was there human that could stand against these – these things which could act apart, could act in unison and still with every formative part of whatever shape they choose to take – individual, thinking, intelligent!

The spirit of the hive raised to the nth power – without individuality being lost! Soul of the formicary tuned octaves above the inexplicable symphony of the ants – with no single not stripped of its terrible potency!

“Come!” Norhala’s command checked my racing thoughts; we fell in behind her. Looking up I caught the friendly sparkle of a star; knew the cleft was widening.

The star points grew thicker. We stepped out into a valley small as that hollow from which we had fled; ringed like it with heaven-touching summits. I could see clearly. The place was suffused with a soft radiance as though into it the far, bright stars were pouring all their rays, filling it as a cup with their pale flames.

Luminous it was as the Alaskan valleys when on white arctic nights they are lighted, the Athabascans believe, by the gleaming spears of hunting gods. In the luminousness the walls of the valley seemed to be drawn back into infinite distances.

The shimmering mists that had nimbused Norhala had vanished – or merging into the wan gleaming had become one with it.

I stared straight at her, striving to clarify in my own clouded thought what it was that I had sensed as unhuman – never of this our world or its people. Yet this conviction came not because of the light that had hovered about her, nor of her summonings of the lightnings; nor even of her control of those – things – which had smitten the armored men and spanned for us the abyss.

All of that I was certain lay in the do main of the explicable, could be resolved into normality once the basic facts were gained.

Suddenly realization rushed upon me. Side by side with what we term the human there dwelt within this woman an actual consciousness foreign to earth, passionless, at least as we know passion, ordered, mathematical – an emanation of the eternal law which guides the circling stars themselves!

This it was that had moved in the gestures which had evoked the lightnings! This it was that had spoken in the song which were those gestures transformed into sound! This it “a that something greater than my consciousness knew and accepted.

Something which shared, no – that reigned, serene and untroubled, upon the throne of her mind; something utterly uncomprehending, utterly unconscious of, cosmically blind to all human emotion that spread itself like a veil over her own consciousness; that plated her thought – that was a strange word – why had it come to me – something that had set its mark upon her like – like – the gigantic clam print on the poppied field, the little print of the dragoned hall!

I caught at my mind, whirling I thought then in the grip of fantasy; strove by taking minute note of her to bring myself back to normal.

Her veils had slipped from her, baring her neck, her arms, the right shoulder. Under the smooth throat a buckle of dull gold held the sheer, diaphanous folds of pale amber silk which swathed the high and rounded breasts, hiding no goddess curve of them.

A wide and golden girdle clasped the waist, covering the rounded hips and thighs. The long, narrow, and high-arched feet were shod with golden sandals, laced just below the rounded knees with flat turquoise studded bands.

And shining through the amber folds, as glowing above them, the miracle of her body!

The dream of master sculptor given life; a goddess of earth youth reborn in Himalayan wilds!

She raised her eyes; broke the silence.

“Now being with you,” she said dreamily, “there waken within me old thoughts, old wisdom, old questioning – all that I had forgotten and thought forgotten forever—”

The golden voice died – she who had spoken was gone from us, like the fading out of a phantom; like the breaking of a film!

A flicker shot over the skies, another and another. A brilliant ray of intense green like that of a distant searchlight swept to the zenith, hung for a moment and with drew. Up came pouring the lances and the streamers of the aurora; faster and faster, banners and slender shining spears of green and iridescent blues and smoky, glistening reds.

The valley sprang into full view.

I felt a paralyzing grip upon my wrist – Ventnor’s. Into the valley from the right ran a black I followed his pointing finger. Into the valley from the right ran a black spur of rock, half a mile from us, fifty feet high.

Upon its crest stood – Norhala!

Her naked arms were lifted to the spark ling sky; her braids were loosened – and as the fires of the aurora rose and fell, raced and were still, the silken cloud of her tresses swirled and eddied with them! Little clouds of coruscations danced gaily like fireflies about and through it. And all her bared body was outlined in living light, glowed and throbbed with light – light filled her like a vessel, she bathed in it. She thrust arms through the streaming, flaming locks; held them out from her, prisoned. I saw her sway slowly, rhythmically; like a faint, golden chiming came the echo of her song.

Abruptly around her, half circling her on the black spur, gleamed myriads of gem fires. Flares and flames of pale emerald, steady glowing of flame rubies, glints and lambencies of deepest sapphire, of wan sapphire, flickering opalescences, irised glitterings. A moment they gleamed. Then from them came bolt upon bolt of lightning – lightning that darted upon the lovely shape swaying there; lightnings that fell upon her, broke and dashed, cascading, from her radiant body!

The lightnings bathed her – she bathed in them!

The skies filled with a swift mist; the aurora was veiled; darkness dropped like a cloud upon the valley!

Where Norhala had been was – blackness!

— XIII —

PRELUDE TO MYSTERIES

Mutely we faced each other, white and wan in the ghostly light – yet not all because of it. A great and grim foreboding, a monstrous premonition smothered me. Suddenly Ruth dropped sobbing upon the rocky floor.

“Buck up, Ruth!” The deep and pitying concern in Ventnor’s face belied the sternness in his voice. “Now’s no time to give way. Buck up!”

“But I’m afraid – afraid!” she whispered. “The – the awful thing that slew—”

“It’s just why you must buck up,” he said. “We’ve got to see this through, Ruth. We’ve got to know where these things come from, what they are – what they’re about. And then we’ve got to get back to our own world – one of us at least – to warn it.”

He had given shape to my own thought. “Good God, Goodwin! Drake!” he cried. “Can’t you see it?”

“But, Ventnor,” I hesitated, striving against my own conviction, “don’t you think you may exaggerate? There – there weren’t many of them,” I ended, lamely enough.

“Exaggerate!” his eyes blazed. “You can say that after what you’ve seen! And how do you know there are not many of them? How do you know to what hordes this woman – if she is a woman – who calls herself Norhala, is taking us?”

Again he had voiced my own fear; the fear that had gripped me as I had come from the chamber of the dragons and looked out upon the clustering peaks.

“Not many!” his voice shook. “Yet the few who shaped themselves into the thing of the hollow could smash like flies a thousand men! What chance has flesh and blood against them? No more than against the bullet, the shattering shell, the lightning bolt, the hurricane! I tell you, Goodwin, Drake – man and these – Things – cannot live together in the same world!”

“Oh, I don’t know, Ventnor.” Apparently Drake was irritated by his vehemence. “A bit of high explosive from a French seventy-five would have blown that murderer higher than a kite. And besides – how do you know that they’re not just extraordinary machines – automatons?”

“Machines!” gasped Ventnor; and for a moment a vague hope flickered up in me.

“Yes,” Drake went on. “Machines! There’s the regularity of their shapes. Clearly, too, their activation is both magnetic and electric – dynamically, I mean. It’s magnetic force that causes them to cling together, that’s sure.

“You’ve seen the Hammond torpedo guided by wireless. If someone who knew nothing of its mechanism, nothing of the Hertzian waves and nothing of the operator sending them forth and guiding it – if someone like that saw it in action, what would. he believe? That he was looking at an intelligent, living, thinking thing, of course. Well, we’re exactly in that someone’s position so far as these other – things – are concerned.”

“Who do you think is the operator?” asked Ventnor. “Norhala?”

“She certainly is,” answered Dick warmly. “You can’t deny that.”

“How do you think she does it?” inquired Ventnor politely.

“By those queer notes, I suppose. If they’re automatons they’re probably tuned up to operate by sound vibrations. There’s nothing impossible or even improbable in that. The wireless telephone is the same principle,” he argued.

“My dear Drake,” said Ventnor satirically, “even you must admit that a mechanism which could undergo the very extraordinary changes and movements we just beheld from the impetus of a single call must be most extraordinarily complex.”

“And Dick,” I objected, my hope dying. “The little things of the ruins – Norhala wasn’t there to call them when they went into action.”

He was silent; sullen.

“Drake,” spoke Ventnor, “you’re saying something you yourself don’t believe. Take your own illustration of the torpedo. Do you suppose for a moment that any torpedo could be devised that could break itself into each of its intricate parts – propeller, body, engine and all of it – then reassemble itself? And after that, break again and reintegrate in entirely different shape?

“Granted that once assembled it could be guided in its movements – is the other conceivable? You know it is not, Drake. Yet that is what these – things – do.”

“But,” he stammered, “but – to admit, that – they’re – alive!”

“There’s nothing else to do but admit it,” said Ventnor. “Alive, volent, thinking – each one of them! Yet when they join into whatever shape they will, they become a shape of interlocking intelligences, harmonious, coordinate; a thing with as many brains as it has units – with all those brains acting as one! God! What could humanity do against – them? Humanity, bickering, quarreling, slaughtering, uncoordinate – ungoverned ferment that it is!”

For a moment he paused; then:

“And your high explosive, Drake – could it blast those bodies of metal? I think not. Scatter them? Yes, for the moment, perhaps. But of what use when in an instant they could remake themselves; rush on, irresistible, uncheckable, smiting through our armies as – it – flailed through the armored men?”

“What can we do? Oh, what can we do?” It was, a wail from Ruth.

“Do!” be answered. “Go on. Learn. Get back – if we can, and warn. What else is there to do?”

We could find no answer. Ruth arose, drew a deep, unsteady breath.

“You really believe, Martin, that it’s – it’s as bad as that?” she asked shakily.

“I know it is,” he answered.

“Well—” she said, “well – then there’s nothing else to do but go on. But oh, I am afraid!” She walked forlornly over to the pony. “At any rate, you must eat,” she said, and began to unstrap a saddle-bag.

I felt my heart go out to her. Terrifying as had been the phenomena through which we had passed, enigmatic as was our present situation and hemmed in by mysteries, I knew that we had been moving only through a prelude. Upon what tremendous setting of the inhuman, the fantastic, the terrible would the curtain lift – and upon what incredible sequence – what crisis? Would Ruth be able to endure?

Curiously, she answered the thought.

“You needn’t be worried about me, all of you,” she whispered. “I won’t do anything to make you ashamed of me. Only just now I’m – I’m a little – tumbled up!”

As one, protectingly, we drew about her. In that defense there had been something irresistibly, heroically childlike.

“There are three of us, Ruth,” said Dick, and there was an oddly tender tremor in his voice. “Three of us to look after you—”

She drew a hand over the wet blue eyes, looked up at him, smiled bravely.

“Well – that’s that!” said Ruth. “Help me get something together.”

— XIV —

THE SHAPES IN THE MIST

We spoke little as we drew a spare supper from Ventnor’s all too meager store. There was water, fortunately, in one of the canteens; over the spirit lamp we made some coffee. There was sufficient grain for the pony; we gave it the last of the water.

“Might as well,” argued Ventnor. “It’s a very necessary member of the expedition. And there must be water where Norhala is taking us. No matter what she is, there’s enough of the human in her to need food and drink.”

“And I’m not so sure of that, myself,” murmured Ruth.

Nor was I!

The valley was very still; as silent as though sound had been withdrawn from it. The shimmering radiance suffusing it had thickened perceptibly; hovered over the valley floor like faintly sparkling mists; hid it.

Like a shroud was that silence. Beneath it my mind struggled; its unease, its forebodings growing ever stronger; as one who, buried alive, gropes from fog of trance toward terror of full awakening. Silently we repacked the saddlebags; girthed the pony. Silently we awaited Norhala’s return.

Idly I had noted that the place on which we stood must be raised above the level of the vale. Up toward us the gathering mists had been steadily rising; still was their wavering crest a half score feet below us.

Abruptly out of their dim nebulosity a faintly phosphorescent square broke. It lifted, slowly; then swept, a dully lustrous six-foot cube, up the slope; came to rest almost at our feet. It dwelt there; contemplated us from its myriads of deep-set, sparkling striations!

In its wake swam, one by one, six others – their tops raising from the vapors like the first, watchfully; like shimmering backs of sea monsters; like turrets of fantastic angled submarines from phosphorescent seas. One by one they skimmed swiftly over the ledge; and one by one they nest led, edge to edge and alternately, against the cube which had gone before.

In a forty-two-foot crescent, six feet high, they stretched in front of us. Back from them, a pace, ten paces, twenty, we retreated.

They lay immobile – staring at us!

Cleaving the mists, silk of copper hair streaming, wide, unearthly eyes lambent, floated up behind them – Norhala. For an instant she was hidden behind their bulk; suddenly was upon them; drifted over them like some spirit of light; stood before us!

Her veils were again about her; golden girdle, sandals of gold and turquoise in their places. Pearl white her body gleamed; no mark of lightning marring it.

She walked toward us, turned and faced the watching crescent. She uttered no sound, but as at a signal the central cube slid forward, halted before her. She rested a hand upon its edge.

“Ride you – with me,” she murmured to Ruth.

“Norhala!” Ventnor took a step forward. “Norhala, we must go with her! And this” – he pointed to the pony – “must go with us.”

“I meant – you – to come,” the far away voice chimed, “but I had not thought of – that.”

A moment she considered; then turned to the six waiting cubes. Again as at a command four of the things moved, swirled in toward each other with a weird precision, with a monstrous martial mimicry; joined; stood before us, a platform twelve feet square, six high.

“Mount!” sighed Norhala.

Ventnor looked helplessly at the sheer front facing him.

“Mount!” There was half-wondering impatience in her command. “See!” She caught Ruth by the waist – with the same bewildering swiftness that she had vanished from us when the aurora beckoned she stood, holding the girl, upon the top of the single cube; it was as though the two had been lifted, had been levitated with an incredible rapidity.

“Mount!” she whispered again, looking down upon us.

Slowly Ventnor began to bandage the pony’s eyes. I placed my hand upon the edge of the quadruple; sprang. A myriad unseen hands caught me, raised me, set me instantaneously on the upward surface! “Lift the pony to me,” I called to Ventnor.

“Lift it?” he exclaimed, incredulously. “Lift it?”

Drake’s grin cut like a sun ray through the nightmare mists that shrouded my mind.

“Catch,” he called; placed one hand beneath the little beast’s belly, the other under its throat; his shoulders heaved – and up shot the pony, laden as it was, landed softly upon four wide-stretched legs beside me! The faces of the two gaped up, ludicrous in their amazement.

“Follow!” cried Norhala. Ventnor leaped wildly for the top, Drake beside him; in the flash of a hummingbird’s wing they were gripping me, swearing feebly. The unseen hold angled; struck upward; clutched from ankle to thigh; held us fast – men and beast. Away swept the block that bore Ruth and Norhala; I saw Ruth crouching, head bent, her arms around the knees of the mystery woman, standing like us, erect. They slipped into the mists; vanished. And after them, like a log in a racing cur rent, we, too, dipped beneath the faintly luminous vapors.

The cubes moved with an entire absence of vibration; so smoothly and skimmingly, indeed, that had it not been for the sudden wind that had risen when first we had stirred, and that now beat steadily upon our faces, and the cloudy walls streaming by, I would have thought ourselves at rest.

I saw the blurred form of Ventnor drift toward the forward edge. He walked oddly, as though wading. I essayed to follow him; my feet I could not lift; could advance only by gliding them as though skating over the enigmatic plane.

Also the force, whatever it was, that held me, seemed to pass me on from unseen clutch to clutch; it was as though up to my hips I moved through a closely woven yet fluid mass of cobwebs. There came to me the fantastic idea that if I so willed I could slip over the edge of the blocks, crawl about their sides without falling – like a fly on the vertical faces of a huge sugar loaf! I drew beside Ventnor. He was staring ahead, striving, I knew, to pierce the mists for some glimpse of Ruth.

He turned to me, his face drawn with anxiety, his eyes feverish.

“Can you see them, Goodwin.” His voice shook. “God – why did I ever let her go like that? Why did I let her go alone?”

“They’ll be close ahead, Martin,” I spoke out of a conviction I could not explain. “Whatever it is we’re bound for, wherever it is the woman’s taking us, she means to keep us together – for a time at least. I’m sure of it.”

“She said – follow!” It was Drake beside us. “There wasn’t much use of her saying that – how the hell can we do anything else? We haven’t any control over this bird we’re on. But she has. What she meant, Ventnor, is that it would follow her.”

“That’s true” – new hope softened the haggard face – “that’s true – but is it? We have to reckon with creatures that never could conceive – and with this – woman – human in shape, yes, but human in thought – never! How then can we tell-”

He turned once more, all his consciousness concentrated in his searching eyes. Drake’s rifle slipped from his hand; fell. As it struck the block there clanged forth a curiously high metallic note, muffled instantly as though the sound had been sucked in.

He stopped to pick it up; hesitated incredulously, then tugged at the stock with both hands. The rifle lay immovable!

He pushed it and it slithered away from him. I bent; strove to aid him. For all the pair of us could do, the rifle might have been a part of the gleaming surface on man’s imagination conceived – on which it rested. The tiny, deep-set star points winked up—

“They’re – laughing at us!” whispered Drake.

“Nonsense!” I answered, and tried to check the involuntary shuddering that shook me, as I saw it shake him. “Nonsense. These blocks are great magnets – that’s what holds the rifle; holds us, too.”

“I don’t mean the rifle,” he said; “I mean those points of light – the eyes—”

There came from Ventnor a cry of almost anguished relief. W e straightened. Our heads shot above the mists like those of swimmers from water. Unnoticed, we had been climbing out of them; level as an untroubled cloudy sea.

And a hundred yards ahead of us, cleaving them, veiled in them almost to the shoulders, was Norhala, red-gold trusses streaming; and close against those shoulders, as though the woman were pressing her there, were the brown curls of Ruth. At her brother’s cry she turned; I saw her arm flash out of the veils with reassuring gesture.

A mile away was an opening in the valley’s mountainous wall; toward it we were speeding. It was no ragged crevice, no nature-split fissure; it gave the impression of a gigantic doorway.

“Look!” whispered Drake. Between us and the vast gateway gleaming triangles began to break through the vapors, like the cutting fins of sharks, glints of round bodies like gigantic porpoises – the vapors seethed with them! Rapidly we neared the portal. Now the fins and rolling curves were all about us. They centered upon the portal, streamed through – a horde of the metal things, leading us, guarding us, playing about us!

And weird, unutterably weird was that spectacle – the vast and silent vale with its still, smooth vapors like a coverlet of cloud; the regal head of Norhala sweeping through them; the dull glint and gleam of the metal paradoxes flowing, in ordered motion, all about us; the titanic gateway, glowing with a pallid lambency before us!

We were at its threshold; over it.

PART THREE

PRECEDING CHAPTERS
BRIEFLY RETOLD

While traveling in the mountains of Turkestan with Chiu-Ming, a Chinese, Dr. Goodwin met Dick Drake, an American engineer. In a valley they saw a colossal imprint crushed into the stone with unthinkable force – a curved heel with four claws, each twenty feet long, extending from it. Next day, while traveling an ancient road that passed through a hollow, they met an American girl, Ruth Ventnor, daughter of a scientist, and her brother Mart. From them they learned that one night two men – the first humans they had seen for months – had come close to their fire and discussed Ruth with exceeding frankness – in archaic Persian.

Ruth showed Dr. Goodwin and Dick a number of small metal objects that formed geometrical designs that moved, seemingly with intelligence, and formed a bridge. Metal – with a brain!

Attacked by the pursuing Persians, the men were about to sell their lives as dearly as possible when they saw standing in a fissure in the mountain the figure of a woman. At her command, hundreds of metal objects – the “Metal Things” formed themselves into a giant that struck out and destroyed the attackers. The woman, in ancient Persian, told them that she was “Norhala.” She was beautiful – but not entirely human. At her command they followed her into the fissure – which proved to be a passage hewed by human hands – and crossed a chasm on a bridge formed by the “Metal Things,” who then made themselves into a serpent and followed! Later, at Norhala’s order, they mounted platforms formed by the “Metal Things” and were swept away through the mists and through an opening in the mountain’s wall.

— XV —

THE THING THAT FOLLOWED

Upon that threshold the mists foamed like breaking billows; ceased abruptly to be. Keeping exactly the distance I had noted when our gaze had risen above the fog, glided the block that bore Ruth and Norhala. In the strange light of the place into which we had emerged – and whether that place was cañon, corridor, or tunnel I could not then determine-it stood out sharply, with stereoscopic vividness.

One arm of Norhala held Ruth, and in her attitude I sensed a shielding intent, guardianship – the first really human impulse this shape of mystery and beauty had revealed. There was something in the sight that was like the touch of an awakening hand in nightmare, profoundly reassuring, dulling the edge of my apprehension.

In front of them swept score upon score of her familiars – no longer dully lustrous, but shining as though cut from blue and polished steel. They?marched – in ordered rows, globes and cubes and pyramids; moving sedately now as units.

I looked behind me; out of the spume boiling at the portal, were pouring other scores of the Metal Things, darting through like divers through a wave! And as they drew into our wake, swam into the light, their dim luster vanished like a film; their surfaces grew almost radiant.

Whence came the light that set them gleaming? Our pace had slackened – I looked about me. The walls of the cleft or tunnel were perpendicular, smooth and shining with a cold, metallic, greenish glow.

Between the walls, like the rhythmic flashing of fireflies, pulsed soft and fugitive glimmerings that carried a sense of the infinitely minute of electrons, it came to me, rather than atoms. Their irradiance was greenish, like the walls; but I was certain that these corpuscles did not come from them.

They blinked and faded like motes within a shifting sunbeam; or, to use a more scientific comparison, like colloids within the illuminated field of the ultra-microscope; and like these latter it was as though the eye took in not the minute particles them selves but the radiation from them.

Save for these gleamings the light of the place, although crepuscular, was crystalline clear. High above us – five hundred, a thousand feet – the walls merged into a haze of clouded beryl.

Rock certainly the cliffs were – but rock cut and planed, smoothed and polished and plated!

Yes, that was it – plated! Plated with some metallic substance that was itself a reservoir of luminosity and from which, it came to me, pulsed the force that lighted the winking ions. But who could have done such a thing? For what purpose? How?

I became conscious of a thickening, an intensification of the magnetic flux enmeshing us; acutely, poignantly conscious of a sharp accentuation of every hint, every suggestion of contact with unknown, unhuman power, knowledge and – science! And the meticulousness, the perfection of these smoothed cliffs struck over my nerves as no rasp could, stirring a vague resentment, an irritated desire for human inharmonies, human disorder.

Absorbed in my examination I had forgotten those who must share with me my doubts and dangers. I felt a grip on my arm; heard Drake muttering in my ear.

“If we get close enough and I can get my feet loose from this damned thing I’ll jump!”

“What?” I gasped, blankly, startled out of my preoccupation. “Jump where?”

I followed his pointing finger. We were rapidly closing upon the other cube; it was now a scant twenty paces ahead; it seemed to be stopping. Ventnor was leaning forward, quivering with eagerness.

“Ruth!” he called. “Ruth – are you all right?”

Slowly she turned to us – my heart gave a great leap, then seemed to stop. For her sweet face was touched with that same unearthly tranquility which was Norhala’s; in her brown eyes was a shadow of that passionless spirit brooding in Norhala’s own and her voice as she answered held within it more than echo of Norhala’s faint, far-off golden chiming!

“Yes,” she sighed; “yes, Martin – have no fear for me—”

And turned from us, gazing forward once more with the woman and as silent as she.

I glanced covertly at Ventnor, at Drake – had I imagined, or had they too seen? Then I knew they had – for Ventnor’s face was white to the lips, fear in his eyes; and Drake’s jaw was set, his teeth clenched, his eyes blazing with anger.

“What’s she doing to Ruth – did you see that look—” he gritted, half inarticulately.

“Ruth!” There was anguish in Ventnor’s cry. She did not turn; it was as though she had not heard him.

The cubes were now not five yards apart.

Drake gathered himself; strained to loosen his feet from the shining surface, making ready to leap when they should draw close enough. His great chest swelled with his effort, the muscles of his neck knotted, sweat streamed down his face.

“No use,” he gasped, “no use, Goodwin. It’s like trying to lift yourself by your boot-straps – like a fly stuck in molasses!”

“Ruth!” cried Ventnor again.

As though it had been a signal the block so near darted forward, resuming the distance it had formerly maintained between us. The vanguard of the Metal Things began to race. With an incredible speed they fled into, were lost in an instant within, the luminous distances.

The cube that bore woman and girl accelerated its own motion; flew faster and fasted onward. And as swiftly our own followed it. The lustrous walls flowed by, dizzyingly.

There was a little wailing chorus behind us. We looked – looked and shrank together.

Down upon us was rushing a monstrous wave, an avalanche, of the Metal Things! Fifty feet in air was! its crest – and even in that moment of stark panic I noted with what mathematical regularity the spikes of the pyramids tipped it and with what awesome orderliness cube and sphere were placed.

Half across the cleft it stretched – not so much wave or avalanche as curtain, two hundred feet wide and a fourth of that as high. A metallic, living curtain, rushing down upon us!

Closer it came and closer – now its rigid, shining, knobbed and spiked front was almost on us. Out of it stared the myriads of steady – mocking – eyes. We cowered, waiting for it to break over us, crush us.

A movement began in it! Ball and square and angle writhed and spun and threaded. Its middle began to contract – as if an unseen cable were drawing in its sides. There was an infinitely rapid shifting—

The curtain was gone!

In its place, gliding after us, was a colossal Thing, gigantic mate to the Smiting Thing which had shattered the armored men; yet not of any of its shifting shapes and to it in size as that had been to the Lilliputian of the ruins.

Difficult – difficult beyond thought is it to picture in words that prodigy following us; built though it was from most familiar forms – of nothing but globes and blocks and four-sided wedges, shapes commonplace and normal. In that commonplaceness lies the very heart of my difficulty; for from the thinking, conscious combination of those curves and planes was born not a fourth dimension, but a fifth and sixth as well: yes, and more.

It was their basic simplicity that pointed the lance of inexplicable terror! The obvious transformed into the unfathomable!

The height of fifty tall men it rose, towering upon four slender, stilt-like legs made up of alternate spiked six-foot block and ball. These spidery legs supported a huge cylindrical body, from the top of which a quintet of the girdered cubes, each, I estimated, twenty feet long, abruptly thrust themselves.

They radiated like a five-pointed star and over their length, swarming out of the body like bees from a hive, flashed scores of spheres and smaller blocks. With the same vertiginous rapidity that marked all the Protean changes of the Things while in combination, these clustered at the ends of the girders, shifted – at each end was now a monstrous thirty-foot wheel, their hubs the globular clusters, their spokes the cubes and their rims great, tetrahedron-tipped spheres!

And all these changes had been made while still it maintained its steady, gliding pace close behind us!

“Doc.” Drake’s voice was defiant. “Do you suppose this lad is entertaining us or just amusing itself?”

“It’s hardly a laughing matter, Drake,” I answered, sternly – shocked by his flippancy. “And not a time for levity,” I added even more tartly, for suddenly the wheeling crests of the Following Thing had doubled themselves, the abrupt action pulling every one of my nerves taut as a bow string. His delighted grin revealed to me not only the triteness but the total inadequacy of my rebuke.

“I’ll say it’s not!” he exclaimed. “You put it in a nut-shell, Doc. You certainly have sized up the situation with an amazing and original brevity.”

I flushed at the broad sarcasm.

“And at that you’re dead wrong,” he went on. “Now is the time for the immortal spirit of man to tap from itself the immortal laughter of the Gods who made him,” he intoned, drolly. “The yeast of laughter that they dropped into the human brew when they made us, Doc. What the hell – if we don’t laugh at it we’re lost, aren’t we? Stuck here in this damnable magnetic fly-paper – with this after us – Lord knows what’s ahead of us.

“Holy saints! If I only had a barrel of the old familiar brew here I’d sit on it and twine vine-leaves in my hair and sing to that bird to show it just how much better than itself I am. And one thing I tell you – I’m done with being afraid. Hell! All they can do is kill us!”

“Don’t think my fear is for myself, Drake.” There was a stir of anger in Ventnor’s words. “And it’s not death I fear for Ruth. It’s what I saw resting on her face. It’s what that witch is doing to her – soul!”

“I’m sorry, Ventnor,” the mockery fled from Drake’s eyes, he thrust out an impetuous hand. “I didn’t mean anybody was really afraid – just sort of – well, worried. And we can do nothing by worrying – don’t you see that it will only weaken us, Ventnor?”

“I know,” Ventnor nodded. “I know – still—” He scanned the hovering shape, and I saw his trouble submerged visibly in the wave of irresistible scientific absorption called forth by its amazing transformations; in my own contemplation of them forgot myself our peril.

For the five enormous wheels that crowned, the top of the Thing were spinning; they revolved madly upon their own axes, circled slowly around the – neck – of the Shape itself. And as they spun each wheel tipped over toward us, hung over us, staring down at us with the uncountable star points even as the Little Thing of the dragoned chamber had stared up at me – and with the same curiosity! Like little clouds of fireflies the winking corpuscles of light hovered around them.

“If there were enough of them they could walk across the oceans,” mused Drake. As though it had heard him and understood the Thing lifted gently one of its four stilts, extended it leisurely over us, undulated it, then placed it deliberately and daintily a few yards ahead and directly in our path.

There had been something hideously spider-like in that movement! “As it thrust over us, not three yards over our heads, I saw plainly the globes and cubes bending and flexing like a monstrous spider’s leg of a thousand joints!

“Synchronism raised to the highest power,” muttered Ventnor. “Perfect, immediate realization and manipulation of stresses, contacts, leverages. An unimaginable cooperation – “a mass consciousness undreamed! Man – man, you pygmy!” His voice shook.

“Can you see how it moves?” I asked. “The ends of the supports seem to me to be touching the ground – but their progress, as well as that of what we are on, is absolutely smooth and effortless.”

“I don’t think they quite touch,” observed Drake. “They seem to float just a little over the surface. Utilization of magnetism manipulation of attracting and repelling currents without a doubt.”

“But how?” I gasped. “How?”

He shrugged, pointed upward. “How does it do that?” he asked.

The supporting stilts were bending, curving. I saw their three formative factors shifting and readjusting themselves, obeying the commands from the synthesis of its manifold brains!

Lower came the huge body and lower, threatening to crush us!

Abruptly two of the legs drew up toward the trunk, joined ends, threw themselves loose from the – hips – and became a vast and sparkling ring, circling it so swiftly that it appeared to be a wide and solid band of polished steel. The five wheels about the top were now only a blur.

The legs began a rapid buckling and straightening, like the flexing of immense springs. There came the curious wailing sounds. Up rose the five wheels, merged even as they lifted into one enormous circlet, spun, an unimaginably huge sparkling Catherine wheel, high up in the green haze – vanished within it!

— XVI —

THE DRUMS OF THUNDER

Grotesquely, horribly, did the Thing now appear to be headless – a decapitated shape hovering over us.

From on high came again the wailings. Into view whirled the colossal ring, yards in advance of us. Down it swept, was drawn back like a leaf in a draft, swerved and clicked into place on the girdled, monstrous body!

“Good God!” Drake’s voice, despite his boast, was shaking.

“Man – man the pygmy!” muttered Ventnor, eyes burning.

Once more we heard the wailings. The Following Thing trembled, ran together, melted – was gone, dissolved into a host of spheres and blocks and pyramids that fol lowed in our wake like a quiet, reaching wave – gently and sedately!

Now I noted that we had swept over toward the right wall of the cleft; were gliding over a broad ledge. This ledge was, I judged, all of a hundred feet in width. From it the floor of the place was dropping rapidly.

The opposite precipices were slowly drawing closer. After us flowed the flanking host.

Steadily our ledge arose, the floor of the cañon dropped. Now we were twenty feet above it, now thirty. And the character of the cliffs was changing. Veins of quartz shone under the metallic plating like cut crystal, like cloudy opals; here was a splash of vermillion, there a patch of amber; bands of pallid ochre stained it.

Abruptly my gaze was caught by a line of inky-blackness in the exact center of the falling floor. So black was it that at first glance I took it for a vein of jetty lignite.

It widened; I saw that it was a crack, a fissure; now it was a yard in width, now three; blackness seemed to well up within it, blackness that was the very essence of the depths. Steadily the ebon rift expanded; spread suddenly wide open in two sharp-edged, flying wedges – Earth had dropped away. At our side a gulf had opened, an abyss, striking down depth upon depth; profound; immeasurable!

We were human atoms, riding upon a steed of sorcery and racing along a split rampart of infinite space!

I looked behind – scores of the cubes were darting from the metal host trailing us; in a long column of twos they flashed by, raced ahead. Far before us a gloom began to grow; deepened until we were rushing into blackest night.

Through the murk stabbed a long lance of pale blue phosphorescence. It unrolled like a ribbon of wan flame, flicked like a serpent’s tongue – held steady. I felt the Thing beneath us leap forward; its velocity grew prodigious; the wind beat upon us with hurricane force.

I shielded my eyes with my hands, peered through the chinks of my fingers. Ranged directly in our path was a barricade of the cubes and upon them we were racing like a flying battering-ram. Involuntarily I closed my eyes against the annihilating impact that seemed inevitable!

“God!” I heard Ventnor mutter; felt the Thing on which we rode lifting; unclosed my lids.

We were soaring at a long angle straight to the top of the barrier; were upon it, and still with that awful speed unchecked were hurtling through the blackness over the shaft of phosphorescence, the ribbon of pale light that I had watched pierce it and knew now was but another span of the cubes that but a little before had fled past us! Beneath the span, on each side of it, I sensed the illimitable void!

We were over; rushing along in darkness. I became conscious of a mighty tumult, a vast crashing and roaring, reverberations that might have come from the smithies of Vulcan in the deepest hidden caverns of Earth. The clangor waxed, beat about us with tremendous wings of sound!

Far away was a dim glowing, as of rising sun through heavy mists of dawn. The mists faded – miles away gleamed what at first glimpse seemed indeed to be the rising sun; a gigantic orb, whose lower limb just touched, was sharply, horizontally cut by the blackness, as though at its base that blackness was frozen.

The sun? Reason returned to me; told me this globe could not be that.

What was it then? Ra-Harmachis, of the Egyptians, stripped of his wings, exiled and growing old in the corridors of the Dead? Or that mocking luminary, the cold phantom of the God of light and warmth which the old Norsemen believed was set in their frozen hell to torment the damned?

I thrust aside the fantasies, impatiently. But sun or no sun, light streamed from this orb, light in multi-colored, lanced rays, banishing the blackness through which we had been flying!

Closer we came and closer; lighter it grew about us, and by the growing light I saw that still beside us ran the abyss. And ever louder, more thunderous, became the clamor.

At the foot of the radiant disk I glimpsed a luminous pool. Into it, out of the depths, protruded a tremendous rectangular tongue, gleaming like gray steel. On the tongue an inky shape appeared; it lifted itself from the abyss, rushed upon the disk and took form.

Like a gigantic spider it was, squat and horned, . inconceivably monstrous, amorphous. For an instant it was silhouetted against the shining sphere, poised itself – and vanished through it!

Now, not far ahead, silhouetted as had been the spider shape, blackened into sight a cube and on it Ruth and Norhala! It seemed to hover, to wait.

“It’s a door, an opening!” Drake’s shout beat thinly in my ears against the hurricane of sound.

What I had thought an orb was indeed a gateway, a portal; and gigantic. A mile away form it as we were, it came to me that it must be all of half that in diameter.

The light streamed through it, the flaming colors, the lightning glare, the drifting shadows were all beyond it. The suggestion of sphere had been an illusion, born of the darkness in which we were moving and its own luminescence.

And I saw that the steel tongue was a ramp, a slide, dropping down into the gulf!

Norhala raised her hand high above her head. Up from the darkness flew an incredible shape – like a monstrous, armored, flat-backed crab; angled spikes protruded from it; its huge body was spangled with darting, greenish flames.

It swept beneath us and by. On its back were multitudinous breasts from which issued blinding flashes – sapphire blue, emerald, green, sun-yellow. It hung poised as had that other nightmare shape, standing out jet-black and colossal, rearing upon columnar legs, whose outlines were those of alternate enormous angled arrow-points and lunettes. Swiftly its form shifted; an instant it hovered, half disintegrate.

Then I saw spinning spheres and darting cubes and pyramids click into new positions. The front and side legs lengthened, the back legs shortened, fitting themselves plainly to what must be a varying angle of descent beyond.

And it was no chimera, no kraken of the abyss; It was a car made of the Metal Things. I caught again the flashes – knew that they were jewels or heaps of shining ores carried by the conscious machine. It vanished. In its place hung poised the cube that bore the enigmatic woman and Ruth. Then they were gone and we stood where but an instant before they had been.

We were high above an ocean of living light – a sea of incandescent splendors that stretched mile upon uncounted mile away and whose incredible waves streamed thousands of feet in air, flew in gigantic banners, in tremendous streamers, in coruscating clouds of varicolored flame – as though torn by the talons of a mighty wind! And the place was one vast caldron of tempests; a titanic womb of the lightnings!

My dazzled sight cleared, glare and blaze and searing incandescence took form, became ordered. Within the sea of light I glimpsed shapes cyclopean, unnameable.

They moved slowly, with an awesome deliberateness. They shone darkly within the flame-woven depths. From them came the volleys of the lightnings!

Score upon score of them they were – huge, enigmatic. Their flaming levins [thunderbolts] threaded the shimmering veils, patterned them, as though they were the flying robes of the very spirit of fire!

And the tumult was as ten thousand Thors smiting with hammers against the enemies of Odin! As a forge upon whose shouting anvils were shaped a new world!

A new world? A metal world! The thought spun through my mazed brain, was gone – and not until long after did I remember it! For abruptly all that clamor died; the lightnings ceased; all the flitting radiances paled and the sea of flaming splendors grew thin as moving mists. The colossal, storming shapes dulled with them, seemed to darken into the murk.

Through the fast-waning light and far, far away – miles it seemed on high and many, many miles in length – a broad band of fluorescent amethyst shone. From it dropped curtains, shimmering, nebulous, scintillant as the marching folds of the aurora; they poured, cascaded, from the amethystine band.

Huge and purple-black against their opalescence bulked what at first I thought a mountain, so like was it to one of those fantastic buttes of our desert Southwest when their castellated tops are silhouetted against the setting sun; knew instantly that this was but subconscious striving to trans late into terms of reality the incredible.

It was a – city!

A city fully five thousand feet high and crowned with countless spires and turrets, titanic arches, stupendous domes! It was as though the man-made cliffs of lower New York were raised scores of times their height, stretched a score of times their length; as though Titans ten times the bulk of man had built them. And weirdly enough did it suggest those same towering masses of masonry when one watching from Brooklyn Bridge sees them blacken against the twilight skies.

The pit darkened as though night were filtering down into it; the vast, purple shadowed walls of the city sparkled out with countless lights! From the crowning {arches and turrets leaped broad filaments of flame, flashing, electric.

Was it my straining eyes, the play of light and shadow – or were those high-flung excrescences shifting, changing shape? Again that icy hand stretched out of the unknown, stilled my heart. For they were shifting – arches and domes, turrets and spires: were melting, reappearing; in ferment; like the lightning-threaded, rolling edges of the thunder-cloud!

I wrenched my gaze away; saw that our platform had come to rest upon a broad and silvery ledge close to the curving frame of the portal and not a yard from where upon her block stood Norhala, arm clasped about the rigid form of Ruth. I heard a sigh from Ventnor, an exclamation from Drake.

Before one of us could find tongue to cry out to Ruth, the cube glided to the edge of the shelf, dipped out of sight.

That upon which we rode trembled and sped after it.

There came a sickening sense of falling; we lurched against each other; for the first time the pony whinnied, fearfully. Then with an awful, an incredible speed we were flying down a wide, a glistening, a steeply angled ramp; into the pit, straight toward the half-hidden, soaring and precipitous escarpments flashing afar.

Far ahead raced the Thing on which stood woman and maid. Their tresses streamed behind them, mingled, silken web of brown and shining veil of red gold; little clouds of sparkling corpuscles threaded them, like flitting swarms of fireflies; their bodies were nimbused with tiny, flickering tongues of lavender flame!

About us, above us, began again to rumble the countless drums of the thunder!

— XVII —

THE PORTAL OF FLAME

It was as though we were upon a meteor hurtling through space. The split air shrieked and shrilled, a keening barrier against the avalanche of the thunder. The blast bent us far back on thighs held rigid by the magnetic grip.

The pony spread its legs, dropped its head: thinly through the hurricane roaring its screaming pierced, that agonizing, terrible lamentation which is of the horse and the horse alone when the limit of its endurance is reached. I watched Ventnor crouch lower and lower, eyes shielded behind arms folded over his brows, straining for glimpse of Ruth; saw Drake crouching beside him, bracing him, supporting him, bent against the tempest of our passing even as he.

Our line of flight became less abrupt, but the speed increased, the wind-pressure became insupportable. I twisted, dropped upon my right arm, thrust my head against my shoulder, stared backward. When first I had looked upon the place I had sensed its immensity; now I began to realize how vast it must really be – for already the portal through which we had come glimmered far away on high, shrunk to a hoop of incandescent brass and was dwindling fast.

Nor was it a cavern; staring upward I saw the stars, traced with deep relief the familiar Northern constellations. Pit it might be, wide and deep as that into which from the ramparts of Paradise the legend tells were hurled Lucifer and his armies – but whatever terror, whatever ordeals were before us, we would not have to face them buried deep within earth. There was a curious comfort in the thought!

Suddenly stars and sky were blotted out. We had plunged beneath the surface of that radiant sea!

Lying in the position in which I was, I was sensible of a diminution of the cyclonic force; the blast streamed up and over the front of the cube. To me drifted only the wailings of our flight and the whimpering terror of the pony.

I turned my head, cautiously. Upon the very edge of the flying blocks squatted Drake and Ventnor, grotesquely frog-like. I crawled toward them – crawled, literally, like a caterpillar; for wherever my body touched the surface of the cubes the attracting force held it, allowed a creeping movement only, surface sliding upon surface – and weirdly enough like a human measuring-worm I looped myself over to them.

As my bare palms clung to the Things I realized with finality that whatever their activation, their life, they were metal! There was no mistaking the testimony of touch. Metal they were, with a hint upon contact of highly polished platinum, or at the least of a metal as finely grained as it.

Also they had temperature, a curiously pleasant warmth – the surfaces were, I judged, around ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit. I looked deep down into the little sparkling points that were, I knew, organs of sight; they were like the points of contact of innumerable intersecting crystal planes. They held strangest paradoxical suggestion of being close to the surface and still infinite distances away.

And they were like – what was it they were like? – it came to me with a distinct shock.

They were like the galaxies of little aureate and sapphire stars in the clear gray heavens of Norhala’s eyes!

I crept beside Drake, struck him with my head. He looked down upon me, curiously

“Can’t move,” I “shouted. “Can’t lift my hands! Stuck fast – like a fly – just as you said.”

“Drag ’em over your knees,” he cried, bending to me. “It slides ’em out of the attraction.”

Acting as he had suggested I found to my astonishment I could slip my hands free; I caught his belt, tried to lift myself by it.

“No use, Doc,” the old grin lightened for a moment his tense young face, “you’ll have to keep praying till the power’s turned off. Nothing here you can slide your knees on.”

I nodded, waddling close to his side; then sank back on my haunches to relieve the strain upon aching leg-muscles.

“Can you see them ahead, Goodwin – Ruth and the woman?” Ventnor turned his anxious eyes toward me.

I peered into the glimmering murk; shook my head. I could see nothing. It, was, indeed, as though the clustered cubes sped within a bubble of the now wanly glistening vapors; or rather as though in our passage – as a projectile does in air – we piled before us a thick wave of the mists which streaming along each side, closing in behind, obscured all that lay around.

Yet I had, persistently, the feeling that beyond these shroudings was vast and ordered movement; marchings and counter-marchings of hosts greater even than those Golden Hordes of Genghis which ages agone had washed about the outer bases of the very peaks that hid this ensorcelled place. Came, too, flitting shadowings of huge shapes, unnameable, moving swiftly beside our way; gleamings that thrust themselves through the veils like wheeling javelins of flame.

And always, always, everywhere that constant movement, rhythmic, terrifying – like myriads of feet of creatures of an unseen, stranger world marking time just outside the threshold of our own! Preparing, drilling there in some wide vestibule of space between the known and the unknown, alert and menacing – poised for the signal which would send them pouring over it!

Once again I seemed to stand upon the brink of an abyss of incredible revelation, striving helplessly, struggling for realization – and so struggling became aware that our speed was swiftly slackening, the roaring blast dying down, the veils before us thinning.

They cleared away. I saw Drake and Ventnor straighten up rigidly; raised myself to my own aching knees, gazing as did they with mazed, incredulous eyes!

We were at one end of a vortex, a funneling within the radiant vapors; a funnel whose further end a mile ahead broadened out into a huge circle, its mistily outlined edges impinging upon the towering scarp of the – city. It was as though before us lay, upon its side, a cone of crystalline clear air against whose curved sides some radiant medium, heavier than air, lighter than water, pressed.

The top arc of its prostrate base reached a thousand feet or more up the precipitous wall; above it all was hidden in sparkling nebulosities that were like still clouds of greenly, glimmering fireflies. Back from the curving sides of this cone, above it and below it, the pressing luminosities stretched, into, it seemed, infinite distances.

Through them, suddenly, thousands of bright beams began to dart, to dance, weaving and interweaving, shooting hither and yon – like myriads of great searchlights in a phosphorescent sea fog, like countless lances of the aurora thrusting through its own iridescent veils! And in the play of these beams was something appallingly ordered, appallingly rhythmic.

It was – how can I describe it? – purposeful; purposeful as the geometric shiftings of the Little Things of the ruins, of the summoning song of Norhala, of the Protean changes of the Smiting Shape and the Following Thing; and like all of these it was as laden with that baffling certainty of hidden meanings, of messages that the brain recognized as such yet knew it never could read.

The rays seemed to spring upward from the earth. Now they were like countless lances of light borne by marching armies of Titans; now they crossed and angled and flew as though they were clouds of javelins hurled by battling swans of the Genii of Light; and now they stood up right while through them, thrusting them aside, bending them passed vast, vague shapes like mountains forming and dissolving; like darkening monsters of some world of light pushing through thick forests of slender, high-reaching trees of cold flame; shifting shadows of monstrous chimerae slipping through jungles of bamboo with trunks of diamond fire; phantasmal leviathans swimming through brakes of giant reeds of radiance rising from the sparkling ooze of a sea of star shine!

Whence came the force, the mechanism that produced this cone of clarity, this not searchlight, but unlight in the midst of light? Not from behind, that was certain – for turning I saw that behind us the mist was as thick. I turned again – it came to me, why I knew not, yet with an absolute certainty, that the energy, the force emanated from the distant wall itself! The funnel, the cone, did not expand from where we stood, now motionless. It began at the wall and focused upon us!

But how? In the name of all science, how?

Within the great circle the surface of the wall was smooth, utterly blank; and it was windowless, apertureless; upon it was no trace of those flitting lights we had seen before We had plunged down toward the radiant sea. It shone with a pale blue phosphorescence that was the exact tone of the Nameless Things under the sheen of the Plated Cañon and it was featureless, smooth, a blind cliff of polished, blue metal – and that was all!

“Ruth!” groaned Ventnor. “Ruth! Where is she?”

Aghast at my mental withdrawal from him, angry at myself for my callousness, awkwardly I tried to crawl over to him, to touch him, comfort him as well as I might.

And then, as though his cry had been a signal, the great cone began to move. Slowly the circled base slipped down the shimmering facades; down, steadily down: I realized that we had paused at the edge of some steep declivity, for the bottom of the cone was now at a decided angle while the upper edge of the circle had dropped a full two hundred feet below where it had rested – and still it fell.

There came a gasp of relief from Ventnor, a sigh from Drake while, from my own heart, a weight rolled. Not ten yards ahead of us and still deep within the luminosity had appeared the unearthly regal head of Norhala, the lovely head of Ruth. The two rose out of the glow like swimmers floating from the depths. Now they were clear before us, and now we could see the surface of the cube on which they rode.

But neither turned to us; each stared straightly, motionless along the axis of the sinking cone, the woman’s right arm holding Ruth close to her side!

“Good God!” Drake’s hand caught my shoulder in a grip that hurt – nor did he need to point toward that which had wrung the exclamation from him. The funnel had broken from its slow falling; it had made one swift, startling drop and had come to rest. Its recumbent side was now flattened into a triangular plane, widening from the narrow tip in which we stood to all of five hundred feet where its base rested against the blue wall, and falling at a full thirty-degree pitch.

The misty-edged circle had become an oval, a flattened ellipse another five hundred feet high and three times that in length. And in its exact center, shining forth as though it opened into a place of pale azure incandescence was a Cyclopean portal, rectangular, to which the huge megalithic gateway of that mysterious race whose fanes were time-worn before the Incas learned to build upon them were but doorways for pygmies!

But it was not that prodigious gate into this unimaginable place that drove the blood from our cheeks, checked the heartbeat and sent the hair prickling on our scalps; no. It was that on each side of it, in the apparently solid face of the gleaming, metallic cliffs, a slit was opening.

They began as thin lines a hundred yards in height through which the intense light seemed to hiss: quickly they opened – widening like monstrous cat pupils until at last, their widening ceasing, they glared forth, the blue incandescence gushing from them like molten steel from an opened sluice! And, wide open, weirdly, awesomely did they retain that feline suggestion – as though they were the blazing eyes of some colossal tigress Sphinx!

Deep within them I sensed a movement. Swam there – scores of towering shapes; swam within and glided out of them – score upon score of obelisked forms, each reflecting that vivid light as though they themselves were incandescent! Around their crests spun wide and flaming coronets.

They rushed forth, wheeling, whirling like dervishes, driven like leaves in a whirl wind. Out they swirled from the cat’s eyes of the glimmering wall, these dervish obelisks crowded with spinning fires and vanished in the mists! Instantly, with their going the eyes contracted; were but slits; were gone! And before us within the oval was only the waiting portal!

The leading block leaped forward; rushed down the steep toward the portal. As abruptly those that bore us followed. Again under that strain of projectile flight we clutched each other; the pony screamed its terror. The metal cliff rushed to meet us like a thunder cloud of steel; the portal raced upon us – a square mouth of cold blue flame!

And into it we swept; were devoured by it! Light in a blinding, intolerable flood beat about us, blackening the sight with agony! We pressed, the three of us, against the side of the pony, burying our faces in its shaggy coat, striving to hide our eyes from the radiance which, strain closely as we might, seemed to pierce through the body of the little beast, through our own heads, searing the sight!

— XVIII —

“WITCH!
GIVE BACK MY SISTER”

How long we were within that glare I do not know; it seemed unending hours; it was of course only minutes – seconds, perhaps. After aeons of pain, I was sensible of a permeating shadow, a darkness gentle and healing.

I raised my head, opened my eyes. We were moving tranquilly, slowly – with a curious suggestion of homing leisureliness – through a soft, blue shimmering darkness! It was as though we were drifting within some high borderland of light; a region in which that rapid vibration we call the violet was mingled with, mated to, a still more rapid vibration whose quick pulsing was felt by the brain but ever fled ere that brain could register it in terms of color. And there seemed to be a film over my sight; dazzlement from the unearthly blaze, I thought, shaking my head impatiently.

My eyes focused upon an object a little more than a foot away; my neck grew rigid, my scalp prickled while I stared, unbelieving. And that at which I stared was – a skeleton hand! Every bone a grayish black, sharply silhouetted, clean as some master surgeon’s specimen, it was extended as though clutching at – clutching at – what was that toward which it was reaching?

Again the icy prickling over scalp and skin – for its talons stretched out to grasp a steed that Death himself might have rid den, a rack whose bare skull hung drooping upon bent vertebrae! I raised my hands to my face to shut out the ghostly sight and swiftly the clutching bony hand moved toward me – was before my eyes – touched me!

The involuntary cry that sheer horror wrested from me was strangled by swift realization. And so acute was my relief, so reassuring was it to have in the midst of these mysteries some sane, understandable thing occur that I laughed aloud.

For the skeleton hand was my own! The mournful, ghastly mount of death was – our pony! And when I looked again I knew what I would see – and see them I did – two tall skeletons, skulls resting on their bony arms, leaning against the frame of the beast.

While ahead of us, floating poised upon the surface of the glistening cube, two women skeletons – Ruth and Norhala!

Weird enough was the sight, Dürer-esque, grimly awful materialization of a scene of the Dance Macabre – and yet – vastly comforting! For we had suffered no sea change in our plunge into that pool of living incandescence.

Here was something which was well within the range of human knowledge. It was the light about us that did it; a vibration that, even as I had conjectured, was within the only partly explored region of the ultra-violet and the unexplored region above it; the home of the Roentgen ray and those other radiant phenomena akin to it.

Yet there were differences, for there was none of that misty halo around the bones seen always with the X-rays, the flesh which even they cannot render wholly invisible. The skeletons stood out clean cut, with no trace of fleshly vestments.

I crept over, spoke to the two. “Don’t look up yet,” I said. “Don’t open your eyes. We’re going through a queer light. It has an X-ray quality. You’re going to see me as a skeleton—”

“What?” shouted Drake. Disobeying my warning, he straightened, glared at me. And disquieting as the spectacle had been before, fully understanding it as I did, I could not restrain the shudder that went through me at the utter weirdness of that skull which was his head thrusting itself toward me, its bony sockets filled with shining vapors that I knew were his eyes!

The skeleton that was Ventnor turned to me; was arrested by the sight of the flitting pair ahead. I saw the fleshless jaws clamp, the mists that were the reflections of the light upon his eyes flashed. The jaws opened to speak.

Abruptly, upon the skeletons in front of us the flesh dropped back! Girl and woman stood there once again robed in beauty! So swift was that transition from the grisly unreal to the normal that even to my matter-of-fact mind it smacked of necromancy. The next instant the three of us stood looking at each other, clothed once more in the flesh, and the pony no longer the steed of death, but our shaggy haired, patient little companion!

The light had changed; the high violet had gone from it; it was shot with yellow I gleamings like fugitive sunbeams. By it I saw that we were passing through a wide corridor that seemed to stretch unending. The yellow light grew stronger.

“That light wasn’t exactly the Roentgen variety,” Drake interrupted my absorption in our surroundings. “And I hope to the Lord it’s as different as it seemed. If it’s not we may be up against a lot of trouble.”

“Trouble?” I asked. “More trouble than we’re in?” I added, a trifle satirically.

“X-ray burns,” he answered, “and no way to treat them in this place – if we live to want treatment,” he ended grimly.

“I don’t think we were subjected to their action long enough, Dick,” I began, and was silent.

The corridor had opened without warning into a place for whose immensity I have no images that are adequate. It was a chamber – if chamber a place can be called that was vaster than ten score of the Great Halls of Karnak in one; great as that fabled hall in dread Amenti where Osiris sits throned between the Searcher of Hearts and the Eater of Souls, judging the jostling hosts of the newly dead!

Temple it was – in its immensity, its solemn vastness – but unlike any temple ever raised by human toil. Within its silence brooded a spirit unearthly, gigantic. In no ruin of giants’ work in earth youth now crumbling under the weight of time had I ever sensed a shadow of the strangeness with which this was instinct: no – nor in the shattered fanes that once had held the gods of old Egypt, nor in the pillared shrines of ancient Greece nor imperial Rome, nor mosque, basilica or cathedral.

All these had been dedicated to gods that whether created by humanity as science believes, or creators of humanity as their worshipers believed, still held in them that essence we term human. The spirit, the force, that filled this place had in it nothing, nothing of the human!

No place? Yes, there was one – Stonehenge. Within that mystic monolithic circle I had felt a something akin to this, as inhuman, a brooding spirit stony, stark, unyielding – as though not men but a people of stone had raised the great Menhirs.

This was a sanctuary built by a people of metal!

It was filled with a soft yellow glow like pale sunshine. Up from its floor arose hundreds of tremendous, square pillars, down whose polished sides the crocus light seemed to flow. So wide was the space between them that Notre Dame itself might have been placed within it – nor would its highest towers have reached their tops! The floor was covered with the softly gleaming saffron like a carpet of woven radiance.

Far, far as the gaze could reach the columns marched, oppressively ordered, appallingly mathematical; from their very massiveness was distilled a sense of power, mysterious, mechanical yet – living; something priestly, hierophantic – as though they were guardians of a shrine.

Now I saw whence came the light suffusing this place. High up among the pillars floated scores of orbs that shone like pale gilt frozen suns. Great and small through all the upper levels these strange luminaries gleamed, fixed and motionless, hanging unsupported in space. Out from their shining spherical surfaces darted rays of the same pale gold, rigid, unshifting, with that same suggestion of frozen stillness!

“They look like big Christmas-tree stars,” muttered Drake. “I can’t get ’em, Doc – are they lights – or what?”

“They’re lights,” I answered. “Of course they are. They’re not matter – not metal, I mean—”

“There’s something about them like St. Elmo’s fire, witch lights – condensations of atmospheric electricity.” Ventnor’s voice was calm; now that it was plain we were nearing the heart of this mystery in which we were enmeshed he had clearly taken fresh grip, was again his keen, observant self.

We watched, once more silent: and indeed we had spoken little since we had begun that ride whose end we sensed close. In the unfolding of enigmatic happening after happening, the pressing in on every hand, every instant, of the utterly strange, the incredible, the mind had deserted speech and crouched listening at every door of sight and hearing and touch to gather from the messages crowding in some clue to causes, some thread of understanding.

Slowly now we were gliding through the forest of pillars; so effortless, so smooth our flight that we seemed to be standing still, the tremendous columns flitting past us, turning and wheeling around us, dizzyingly. My head swam with the mirage motion, I closed my eyes.

“Look!” Drake was shaking me. “Look! What d’you make of that?”

Half a mile ahead the pillars stopped at the edge of a shimmering, quivering curtain of green luminescence. High, high up past the pale gilt suns its smooth folds ran, into the golden amber mist that canopied the columns.

In its sparkling was more than hint of the dancing corpuscles of the aurora; it was, indeed, as though woven of the virescent auroral rays. And all about it played shifting, tremulous shadows formed by the merging of the aureate light with the curtain’s emerald gleaming.

Up to its base swept the cube that bore Ruth and Norhala – and stopped. From it leaped the woman, drew Ruth down beside her, then turned and gestured toward us.

That upon which we rode drew close. I felt it shudder beneath me; felt on the instant the magnetic grip drop from me, angle downward, leave me free. Shaking, I arose from aching knees, saw Ventnor flash down and run, rifle in hand, to his sister.

Drake bent for his fallen gun, I moved unsteadily toward the side of the clustered cubes. There came a curious, pushing motion driving me to the edge. Sliding over upon me came Drake and the pony.

The cube tilted, gently, playfully – and with the slightest of jars the three of us stood beside it on the floor, we two men gaping at it in renewed wonder, and the little beast stretching its legs, lifting its feet and whinnying with relief.

Then abruptly the four blocks that had been our steed broke from each other; that which had been the woman’s glided to them. The four clicked into place behind it and darted from sight.

“Ruth!” Ventnor’s voice was vibrant with his fear. “Ruth! What is wrong with you? What has she done to you?”

We ran to his side. He stood clutching her hands, searching her eyes that were wide, unseeing, dream filled. And I saw with a definite shock of dread that upon her face the calm and stillness that were mirrored reflections of Norhala’s unearthly tranquility had deepened.

“Brother!” The sweet voice seemed far away, drifting out of untroubled space, an echo of Norhala’s golden chimings. “Brother, there is nothing wrong with me. Indeed – all is – well with me – brother.”

He dropped the listless palms, faced the woman, tall figure tense, face drawn with mingled rage and anguish.

“What have you done to her?” he whispered in Norhala’s own tongue.

The clear, serene gaze took him in, undisturbed by his wrath save for the faintest shadow of wonder, of perplexity.

“Done,” she repeated, slowly. “I have stilled all that was troubled within her – I have lifted her above sorrow. I have given her the peace – as I will give it to you if—”

“You’ll give me nothing,” he interrupted fiercely; then, his passion breaking through all restraint – “Yes, you damned witch – you’ll give me back my sister!”

In his rage he had spoken English; she could not, of course, have understood the words, but their anger and hatred she did understand. Her serenity quivered, broke. The strange stars within her eyes began to glitter forth as they had when she had summoned the Smiting Thing! Unheeding, Ventnor thrust out a hand, caught her viciously by one bare, lovely shoulder.

“Give her back to me, I say!” he cried. “Give her back to me, damn you!”

The woman’s eyes grew – awful! Out of the distended pupils the strange stars blazed; upon her face was something of the goddess outraged. Her lips parted – opening, I knew in one quick panic-filled moment, to summon her familiars. I felt the shadow of the wings of tragedy!

“No! No – Norhala! No, Martin!” the veils of calmness that had shrouded Ruth had broken, too; swiftly the girl we knew looked out from them. She struck down his hands, threw herself between the two, arms outstretched.

“For God’s sake, Ventnor!” Drake caught his arms, held them tight; “that’s not the way to save her, man!”

Ventnor stood between us, quivering, half sobbing. Never until then had I realized how great, how absorbing was that love of his for Ruth. And the woman saw it, too, even though dimly; envisioned it humanly. For under the shock of human passion that which I thought then as utterly unknown to her as her cold serenity was to us, the sleeping soul – I use the popular word for those emotional complexes that are peculiar to mankind – stirred, awakened.

Wrath fled from her knitted brows; her eyes dropping to the girl, lost their dreadfulness; softened. She turned them upon Ventnor, they brooded upon him; within their depths a half-troubled interest, a questioning, trembled.

A smile dawned upon the exquisite face, humanizing it, transfiguring it, touching with tenderness the sweet and sleeping mouth – as a hovering dream the lips of a slumbering maid. And on the face of Ruth, as upon a mirror, I watched that same slow, understanding, tenderness reflected!

“Come,” she said, and led the way through the sparkling curtains. As she passed, an arm around Ruth’s neck, I saw the marks of Ventnor’s fingers upon her white shoulder, staining its purity, marring it like – a blasphemy!

For an instant I hung behind, watching their figures grow misty, fantastic, within the scintillant shadows; then followed hastily. Entering the mists I was conscious of a pleasant tingling, an acceleration of the pulse, an increase of that sense of well being which, I grew suddenly aware, had since the beginning of our strange journey minimized the nervous attrition of my constant contact with the abnormal; that had, indeed, enabled me to bear the ever-increasing weight of the aberrant.

Striving to classify, to reduce to order. my sensations I drew close to the others, overtaking them in a dozen paces, A dozen paces more and we stepped out of the curtainings.

— XIX —

THE METAL EMPEROR

We stood at the edge of a well whose walls were of that same green vaporous iridescence through Which we had just come, but finer grained, compact; as though here the corpuscles of which they were woven were far closer spun. Thousands of feet above us the mighty cylinder uprose, and in the lessened circle that was its mouth I glimpsed, faintly, the brighter stars; knew by this it opened into the free air.

All of half a mile in diameter was this shaft, and ringed regularly along its height by wide amethystine bands – like rings of a hollow piston. They were, in color, replicas of that I had glimpsed before our descent into this place and against whose gleaming cataracts the outlines of the incredible city had lowered. And they were in motion, spinning smoothly, almost it seemed with the velocity of light!

Only one swift glance I gave them, my eyes held by a most extraordinary-edifice – altar – machine? I could find no word for it – then.

Its base was a scant hundred yards from where we had paused and concentric with the sides of the pit. It stood upon a thick circular pedestal of what appeared to be cloudy rock crystal supported by hundreds of thick rods of the same material.

Up from it lifted the – structure, a thing of glistening greenish cones and spinning golden disks; fantastic yet disquietingly symmetrical; bizarre as an angled head-dress worn by a mountainous Javanese god – yet coldly, painfully mathematical. In every direction the cones pointed, seemingly interwoven of strands of metal and of light.

What was their color? It came to me – that of the mysterious element which stains the sun’s corona, that diadem seen only when our day star is in eclipse; the unknown element that science has named coronium, that never yet has been found on earth and that may be electricity in its one material form; electricity that is ponderable; electricity in metal shape; force whose vibrations are keyed down to mass; power transmuted into substance!

Thousands upon uncountable thousands the cones bristled, pyramiding to the base of one tremendous spire that tapered up almost to the top of the shaft itself. In their grouping the mind caught infinite calculations each carried out into infinity; an apotheosis of geometry compassing the rhythms of unknown spatial dimensions; concentration of the equations of the star hordes, the mathematics of the Cosmos!

Silently from the left of the crystalline base swept an enormous sphere. Twice the height of a tall man it was, a paler blue than any of these Things I had seen, almost, indeed, an azure; different, too, in other subtle, indefinable ways.

Behind it glided a pair of the pyramidal shapes, their pointed tips higher by a yard or more than the top of the sphere. They paused, regarding us; Out from the opposite arc of the crystal pedestal moved six other globes, somewhat smaller than the first and of a deep purplish luster.

They separated, lining up on each side of the leader now standing a little in advance of the twin tetrahedrons, rigid and motionless as watching guards.

There they stood – that enigmatic row, intent, studying us beneath their god or altar or machine of cones and disks within their cylinder walled with light – and at that moment there crystallized within my consciousness the sublimation of all the strangenesses of all that had gone before, smothering throat and heart; a panic loneness as though I had wandered into an alien world – a world as unfamiliar to humanity, as unfamiliar with it as our own would seem to a thinking, mobile crystal adrift among men.

Norhala threw up both white arms in a strangely harmonious, dancing yet majestic gesture of salutation; from her throat a lilting theme of her weirdly ordered golden chanting. Was it speech, I wondered; and if so – prayer or entreaty or command?

The great sphere quivered, undulated. Swifter than the eye could follow it dilated, opened! Where the azure globe had been flashed out a disk of flaming splendors, the very secret soul of flowered flame! And simultaneously the pyramids leaped up and out behind it – two gigantic four-rayed stars blazing with cold blue fires!

The green auroral curtainings flared out. ran with streaming radiance – as though some Spirit of Jewels had broken bonds of enchantment and burst forth jubilant, flooding the shaft with its freed glories. Norhala’s song ceased: an arm dropped down about the shoulders of Ruth.

Then woman and girl began to float toward the radiant disk!

As one, the three of us sprang after them. I felt a shock that was like a quick, abrupt tap upon every nerve and muscle, stiffening them into helpless rigidity; heard Ventnor groan, Drake curse.

Paralyzing that sharp, unseen contact had been, but nothing of pain followed it. Instead it had created, indeed, an extraordinary acuteness of sight and hearing, an abnormal keying up of the observational faculties, as though the energy so mysteriously drawn from our motor centers had been thrown back into the sensory.

Closely, with stereoscopic clarity, I could take in every minute detail of that flashing miracle of gemmed fires and its flaming ministers. Half-way between them and us Ruth and Norhala now were, drifting slowly; I could catch no hint of voluntary motion on their part – knew that they were not walking, but were being home onward by some manifestation of that same force which held us motionless.

And forgot them in my contemplation of the disk!

Oval, twenty feet in height, I judged, and twelve in its greatest width, it was. A broad band, translucent as sun golden crysolite, ran about its periphery. Set within this elliptical zodiac and spaced at mathematically regular intervals were nine ovoids of intensely living light. They shone like nine gigantic cabochen-cut sapphires; they ranged from palest, watery blue up through azure and purple and down to a ghostly mauve shot with sullen undertones of crimson. In each of them was throned a flame that seemed the very fiery essence of vitality.

The – body – was convex, swelling outward like the boss of a shield; shimmering rosy-gray and crystalline. From the vital ovoids ran a pattern of sparkling threads, irised and brilliant as floss of molten rainbows of jewels; converging with interlacings of spirals, of volutes and of triangles into the nucleus.

And that nucleus! What was it? Even now I can but guess – brain in part as we understand brain, certainly; but far, far more than that in its energies, its powers; and indescribably different even in these activities that in our race are termed the cerebral.

Like an immense rose it was; an incredible rose of a thousand close clustering petals. It blossomed with a myriad shifting hues, effulgent, rutilant. And instant by instant the flood of varicolored flame that poured into its petalings down from the sapphire ovals waxed and waned in crescendos and diminuendos of relucent harmonies – ecstatic, awesome.

The heart of the rose was a star of incandescent ruby!

And from flaming crimson center to aureate, flashing penumbra it was instinct with, poured forth, powers – power vast and conscious!

Not with that same completeness could I realize the ministering star shapes, half hidden as they were by the disk. But I saw that their radiance was less, nor had they its miracle of pulsing gem fires. Blue they were, blue of a peculiar vibrancy; blue were the glistening threads that ran down from blue-black circular convexities set within each of the points visible to me.

And unlike in shape, their flame of vitality dimmer than the ovoids of the disk’s golden zone still I knew that they were even as those – organs, organs of unknown senses, unknown potentialities. Their nuclei I could not observe.

The floating figures had drawn close to that disk – had paused. And on the moment of their pausing I felt a surge of strength, a snapping of the spell that had bound us, an instantaneous withdrawal of the inhibiting force. Ventnor broke into a run, holding, I noted with a thrill of apprehension, his rifle at the alert. We raced after him; were close to the shining shapes. And gasping, stopped short not a dozen paces away.

For Norhala had soared up toward the flaming rose of the disk as though lifted by gentle, unseen hands. Close to it for an instant she swung. I saw the exquisite body gleam forth through her thin robes as though bathed in soft flames of rosy pearl.

Higher she floated, and toward the right of its zodiac. From the edges of three of the ovoids swirled a little cloud of tentacles, gossamer filaments of opal. They whipped out a full yard from the disk’s surface, touching her, caressing her. For but a breath she hung there, her face hidden from us; then was dropped softly to her feet and stood, arms stretched wide, her copper hair streaming cloudily about her regal head.

And up past her floated Ruth, levitated as had been she – and her face I could see, ecstatic as though she were gazing into Paradise, and drenched with the awful tranquility of the infinite; her wide eyes stared upward toward that rose of splendors through which the pulsing colors seemed now to race more swiftly. Now for an instant she hung poised before it while around her head I saw a faint aureole begin to form – then was swung higher and toward the side as had been the woman.

Again the gossamer threads thrust forth, searched her. They ran over her rough clothing – perplexedly! They coiled about her neck, stole through her hair, brushed shut her eyes, circled her brow, her breasts. girdled her!

Weirdly was it like some intelligence observing, studying, some creature of another species – puzzled by its similarity and unsimilarity with the one other creature of its kind it knew, and striving to reconcile those differences. And still like such a questioning brain calling upon others for counsel, it swung her – and even then although the application of whatever force it was that held her suspended was not visible, I knew that its source was the disk – swung her, I say, upward to the watching star at the right.

A rifle shot rang out! Another – the reports breaking the silence like a profanation. Unseen by either of us, Ventnor had slipped to one side where he could cover the core of ruby flame that must have seemed to him the heart of the disk’s rose of fire. A few yards away he knelt, white lipped, eyes cold gray ice, sighting carefully for a third shot.

“Don’t! Martin – don’t fire!” I shouted, leaping toward him.

“Stop! Ventnor – for God’s sake!” Drake’s panic cry mingled with my own.

But before we could reach him, indeed, before we had gone two paces, there happened that which in the swiftness of its occurrence was to its telling as the distant lightning stroke is to the thunder that is its record.

Like a darting swallow Norhala flew to him. Down the face of the disk glided the upright body of Ruth, struck softly, stood swaying.

And out of the blue-black convexity within the left hand star point of one of the opened pyramids darted a lance of intense green flame, a lightning bolt as real as any hurled by tempest, upon Ventnor!

The shattered air closed behind the streaming spark with the sound of breaking glass. It struck – Norhala!

It struck – seemed to splash upon her, run down her like water! One curling tongue writhed over her bare shoulder, leaped to the barrel of the rifle in Ventnor’s hands, flashed up it and licked him. I saw the gun torn from his grip, hurled high in air, exploding as it went – saw him leap convulsively from his knees and drop rolling as though felled by a giant’s buffet!

I heard a wailing, low, bitter and heart-broken. Past us ran Ruth, all dream, all unearthliness fled from a face now a tragic mask of human woe and terror. She threw herself down beside her brother, peered into his face, felt of his heart; then raised herself upon her knees and thrust out supplicating hands to the shapes.

“Don’t hurt him any more! He didn’t mean it!” she cried out to them piteously – like a child. She reached up, caught one of Norhala’s hands. “Norhala – don’t let them kill him! Don’t let them hurt him any more! Please!” she sobbed.

Beside me I heard Drake cursing, methodically, despairingly.

“If they touch her I’ll kill the woman! I will, by God I will!” I heard him mutter. Face livid, twitching with passion he strode to Norhala’s side.

“If you want to live, call off those devils of yours!” His voice was strangled thick with menace.

She looked at him, wonder deepening on the tranquil brow, in the clear, untroubled gaze. Of course she could not understand his words – but it was not that which made my own sick apprehension grow.

It was that she did not understand what called them forth; nay, did not even understand what reason lay behind Ruth’s sorrow, Ruth’s prayer. And more and more wondering grew her eyes as she looked from the threatening Drake to the supplicating Ruth, and from them to the still body of Ventnor!

“You tell her what I say, Goodwin, in her own tongue. I mean it!”

I shook my head. That was not the way, I knew. I looked toward the disk, still flanked with its sextette of spheres, still guarded by the flaming blue stars. They were motionless, calm, watching. I sensed no hostility, no anger; it was as though they were waiting for us to – to – waiting for us to do what?

It came to me – they were indifferent! That was it – as indifferent as we would be of the struggle of an ephemera; and as mildly curious!

“Norhala,” I turned to the woman, “she would not have him suffer; she would not have him die. She loves him.”

“Love?” she repeated, and all of her wonderment seemed crystallized in the word. “Love?” she asked curiously.

“She loves him,” I said; and then why I did not know, but I added, pointing to Drake: “and he loves her.”

There was a tiny, astonished sob from Ruth. Again Norhala brooded over her. Then with a little despairing shake of her head, paced over, faced the great disk.

Tensely we waited. Communication there was between them, interchange of – thought; how carried on I would not hazard even to myself. But of a surety these two – the goddess woman, the wholly unhuman shape of metal, of jeweled fires and conscious force – understood each other! For she turned, stood aside – and the body of Ventnor quivered, arose from the floor, stood upright and with closed eyes, head dropping upon one shoulder, glided forward toward the disk like a dead man carried by those messengers never seen by man who, the Arabs, believe carry the death-drugged souls before Allah for their awakening!

Ruth moaned and hid her eyes; tall Drake reached down, gathered her up in his arms, held her close to his breast. And in that uncanny progress was something of the super-normal that sent a chill even through my unbelieving heart.

The gliding body stood before the disk, swam up along its face. The tendrils waved out, felt of it, thrust themselves down through the wide collar of the shirt. The floating form passed higher, over the edge of the disk; lay high beside the right star point of the rayed shape to which had been passing Ruth when Ventnor’s shot brought the tragedy upon us. I saw other tentacles whip forth, examine, caress!

Then down the body swung, was borne through air, laid gently at our feet!

“He is not – dead.” It was Norhala beside me; she lifted Ruth’s face from Drake’s breast. “He will not die – it is my thought. It may be he will walk again. They cannot help,” there was a shadow of apology in her tones. “They did not know. They thought it was the—” she hesitated as though at loss for words – “the – the Fire Play.”

“The Fire Play?” I gasped.

“Yes,” she nodded. “You shall see it. And now we will take him to my house. You are safe – now, nor need you trouble. For he has given you to me for my playthings!”

“What does she say?” demanded Drake,

I translated.

“Playthings!” at any other time his amazed indignation would have been ludicrous. “He has given us to her for playthings? Who does she mean by he?”

“Who has given us to you – Norhala?” I asked, as calmly as I could:

“He—” she nodded to the disk, then spoke the phrase that was both ancient Assyria’s and ancient Persia’s title for their all-conquering rulers, and that meant – “the King of Kings! The Great King! Master of Life and Death!”

She had taken Ruth from Drake’s arms, pointing to Ventnor.

“Bear him,” she commanded, and led the way back through the walls of light.

As we lifted the body, I slipped my hand through the shirt, felt at the heart. Faint was the pulsation and slow, but regular.

Ventnor had medicines, I knew, in the saddlebags. I could attend to him on our way to wherever it was the woman was taking us.

Close to the encircling vapors I cast one quick look behind me. The shapes stood immobile, flashing disks, gigantic radiant stars and the six great spheres beneath their geometric, super-Euclidean god or shrine or machine of interwoven threads of luminous force and metal – still motionless, still watching!

We emerged into the place of pillars. There stood the hooded pony and its patience, its uncomplaining acceptance of its place as servant to man brought a lump into my throat, salved, I suppose, my human! vanity, abased as it had been by the colossal indifference of those things to which we were but playthings.

Again Norhala sent forth her call. To us out of the maze glided her quintette of familiars; again the four clicked into one. Upon its top we lifted, Drake ascending first, the pony; then the body of Ventnor.

I leaped beside it, began to look through the luggage for the medicine-case.

I saw Norhala lead Ruth to the remaining cube. Saw the girl break away from her, leap beside me, and kneeling at her brother’s head, cradle it against her soft breast. Then as I found the hypodermic needle and the strychnin for which I had been searching, crouched at Ventnor’s side and began my examination of him. The cubes quivered – swept away through the columned forest.

We crouched, the three of us, blind to anything that lay about us, heedless of whatever road of wonders we were on, striving to strengthen in Ventnor the spark of life so near extinction.

And as I worked I dwelt upon the dread revelation that had been thrust upon me so brutally; looked aghast upon the wreck of all my webs of theory, all my scientific beliefs, and all the hard-won standards whose foundations I had thought were imbedded in impregnable facts.

For even until then, up to the very threshold of that revelation, subconsciously I had held fast to that self-satisfying hypothesis that these shapes must be only marvelous automatons, perfect in their counterfeiting of human thought and will.

I had done this, I admitted, now, because I had battled as man in defense of human vanity fed by the opiate lie that man, and man alone, can possess true consciousness, true reason!

Now I knew. The intelligence that ruled here was no sage, no sporadic miracle of science blown by the winds of chance to blossom in this hidden heart of the Himalayas!

It was a mind of metal!

A metal mind that looked on man as a plaything!

A metal monster!

PART FOUR

PRECEDING CHAPTERS
BRIEFLY RETOLD

While traveling in the mountains of Turkestan Dr. Goodwin met Dick Drake, an American engineer. In a valley they saw a colossal imprint crushed into the stone – a curved heel with four claws, each twenty feet long, extending from it. Next day, while traveling an ancient road that passed through a hollow, they were almost overcome by an unseen force that sapped their strength. Winning through, they met an American girl, Ruth Ventnor, daughter of a scientist, and her brother Mart. From them they learned that one night two men – the first humans they had seen for months – had come close to their fire and discussed Ruth with exceeding frankness – in archaic Persian. Awakening, she had fired at them, and wounded one. Next day they had seen a body of soldiers, dressed and armed like the legions of ancient Darius, approaching, apparently in search of them. They had escaped.

Ruth showed Dr. Goodwin and Dick a number of small metal objects that formed geometrical designs that moved with intelligence. Metal – with a brain!

Attacked by the pursuing Persians, they saw standing in a fissure in the mountain the figure of a woman. At her command hundreds of metal objects – the “Metal Things” formed themselves into a giant that struck out and destroyed the attackers. Speaking in ancient Persian the woman told them that she was “Norhala.” She was beautiful – but not entirely human. At her command they followed her into the fissure – which proved to be a passage hewed by human hands – mounted platforms formed by the “Metal Ones,” and were swept away through the mists and through an opening in the mountain.

Then came a hair-raising journey through the wonders of an unknown world – although overhead they could see the familiar stars. Ruth, they were horrified to find, was becoming like Norhala – from her face shone forth the impassiveness of the Infinite. At the end of the journey Norhala took the travelers before a strange – edifice – altar – machine? – they could find no name for it – formed of glistening, greenish cones and spinning, golden disks. With the weird guardians of these cones Norhala communicated. She and Ruth were lifted up by some strange force, and when Mart fired at one of the creatures a lance of green flame darted at him and left him a broken wreck. Norhala saved him from further punishment; told Dr. Goodwin and Dick that the – Thing – had given them to her for playthings; ordered them to carry Mart and follow her, and led the way through a wall of light.

Mart was not dead, and Dr. Goodwin tried to revive him with an injection of strychnine. And as he worked he realized that the intelligence that ruled in this strange world and looked upon man as a plaything was a Mind of Metal – a Metal Monster!

— XX —

“I WILL GIVE YOU PEACE”

In our concentration upon Ventnor none of us had given thought to the passing of time, nor where we were going. We had stripped him to the waist, and while Ruth had massaged head and neck. Drake’s strong fingers had been kneading chest and abdomen. I had used to the utmost my somewhat limited medical knowledge.

We had found no mark nor burn upon him, not even upon his hands over which had run the licking flame. The slightly purplish, cyanotic tinge of his skin had given way to, a clear pallor; the skin was itself disquietingly cold, the blood-pressure only slightly subnormal. The pulse was more rapid, stronger; the breathing faint but regular, and with no laboring. The pupils of his eyes were contracted almost to the point of invisibility. I could get no nervous reactions whatever. I am familiar with the effects of electric shock and know what to do in such cases, but Ventnor’s symptoms while similar in part, presented other features unknown to me and most puzzling. There was a passive automatism, a perplexing muscular rigidity which caused arms and legs, hands and head to remain, doll-like, in any position placed.

Several times during my labors I had been aware of Norhala gazing down upon us; but she made no effort to help, nor did she speak.

Now, my strained attention relaxing with the plain improvement in his condition, I began to receive and note impressions from without. There was a different feeling in the air, a diminution of the magnetic tension; I smelled the blessed breath of trees and water.

The light about us was clear and pearly, about the intensity of the moon at full. Looking back along the way we had been traveling, I saw a half mile away the vertical, knife-sharp edges of two facing cliffs, the gap between them a mile or more wide.

Through them we must have passed, for beyond were the radiant mists of the pit of the city, and through this precipitous gateway filtered the enveloping luminosity. On each side of us uprose gradually converging and perpendicular scarps along whose base huddled a sparse foliage.

There came a low whistle of astonishment from Drake; I turned. We were slowly gliding toward something that looked like nothing so much as a huge and shimmering bubble of mingled sapphire and turquoise, swimming up from and two thirds above and the balance still hidden within earth. It seemed to draw to itself the light, sending it back with gleamings of the gray-blue of the star sapphire, with pellucid azures and lazulis like clouded jades, with glistening peacock iridescences and tender, milky blues of tropic shallows.

Little turrets globular and topaz, yellow and pierced with tiny hexagonal openings clustered about it like baby bubbles just nestling down to rest. Great trees shad owed it, unfamiliar trees among whose glossy leaves blossomed in wreaths flowers pink and white as apple-blooms. From their graceful branches strange fruits, golden and scarlet and pear-shaped, hung pendulous.

It was an elfin palace; a goblin dwelling; such a bower as some mirthful, beauty loving Jinn King of jewels might have raised from his enchanted boards for some well-beloved daughter of earth.

All of fifty feet in height was the blue globe. Up to a wide and ovaled entrance ran a broad and shining roadway. Along this the cubes swept and stopped.

“My house!” murmured Norhala. The attraction that had held us to the surface of the blocks relaxed, angled through the changed and assisting lines of force; the hosts of minute eyes sparkling quizzically, interestedly, at us, we gently slid Ventnor’s body; lifted down the pony. “Enter!” sighed Norhala, and waved a welcoming hand.

“Tell her to wait a minute,” ordered Drake. He slipped the bandage from the pony’s head, threw off the saddlebags, and led it to the side of the glistening roadway where thick, lush grass was growing, spangled with flowerets. There he hobbled it; rejoined us. Together we picked up Ventnor and passed slowly through the portal.

We stood in a shadowed chamber. The light that filled it was translucent, and oddly enough with little of the bluish quality I had expected. Crystalline it was; the shadows crystalline, too, rigid – like the facets of great crystals. And as my eyes accustomed themselves I saw that what I had thought shadows actually were none. They were slices of semitransparent stone like pale moonstones, springing from the curving walls and the high dome, and bisecting and intersecting the chamber. They were pierced with oval doorways over which fell glimmering metallic curtains – silk of silver and gold.

I glimpsed a pile of this silken stuff near by, and as upon it we laid our burden Ruth caught my arm with a little frightened cry. Through a curtained oval had sidled a figure. Black it was and tall; its long. gnarled arms swung apelike; its shoulders were distorted, one so much lower than the other that the hand upon that side hung far below the knee.

It walked with a curious, crablike motion. Upon its face were stamped the countless wrinkles of an incredible age; its blackness was less that of pigmentation than the weathering of unbelievable years, the very stain of ancientness. And about neither face nor figure was there anything to show whether it was man or woman. From the twisted shoulders a short and sleeveless red tunic fell. Incredibly old the creature was – and by its corded muscles, its sinewy tendons, as incredibly powerful. It raised within me a half-sick revulsion, loathing. But the eyes were not ancient, no! Irisless, lashless, black and brilliant they blazed out of the face’s carven web of wrinkles, intent upon Norhala and filled with a flame of worship.

It threw itself at her feet, prostrate, the inordinately long arms outstretched.

“Mistress!” it whined in a high and curiously unpleasant falsetto. “Great lady! Goddess!”

She stretched out a sandaled foot, touched one of the black taloned hands, and at the contact I saw a shiver of ecstasy run through the lank body. “Yuruk,” she began, and paused, regarding us.

“The goddess speaks! Yuruk hears! The goddess speaks!” It was a chant of adoration.

“Yuruk! Rise! Look upon the strangers!”

She took up the sentence she had broken. This creature she named Yuruk – and now I knew what it was – writhed. twisted, and hideously apelike crouched upon its haunches, hands knuckling the floor.

By the amazement in the unwinking eyes it was plain that not till now had the eunuch taken cognizance of us. The amazement fled, was replaced with a black fire of malignancy, of hatred – jealousy!

“Augh!” he snarled; leaped to his feet; thrust an arm toward Ruth. She gave a little cry, cowered against Drake. “None of that!” He struck down the clutching arm sharply; dipped and drew his automatic; covered the threatening figure from his hip. But not more quickly than I.

“Yuruk!” There was a hint of anger, of mercilessness in the bell-toned voice. “Yuruk, these belong to me! No harm must come to them. Yuruk – beware!”

“The goddess commands? Yuruk obeys.” If fear quavered in the words, beneath was more than a trace of a sullenness, too, sinister enough.

“That’s a nice little playmate for her new playthings,” muttered Drake. “If that bird gets the least bit gay – I shoot him, pronto!” He gave Ruth a reassuring hug. “Cheer up, Ruth. Don’t mind that thing. He’s something we can handle.”

Norhala waved a white hand; Yuruk sidled over to one of the curtained ovals and through it, reappearing almost instantly with a huge platter upon which were fruits, and some curdy white liquid in bowls of thick porcelain.

“Eat,” she said, as the gnarled black arms placed the platter at our feet.

“Hungry?” asked Drake. Ruth shook her head violently.

“I’m going out for the saddlebags,” said Drake. “We’ll use our own stuff – while it lasts. I’m taking no chances on what the Yuruk lad brings – with all due respect to Norhala’s good intentions.” He started for the doorway; the eunuch blocked his way.

“We have with us food of our own, Norhala,” I explained. “He goes to get it.”

She nodded, indifferently; clapped her hands. Yuruk shrank back, and out strode Drake.

“I am weary,” sighed Norhala. “The way was long. I will refresh myself—” She stretched out a slender foot toward Yuruk; he knelt, unlaced the turquoise bands, drew off the sandals. Her hands sought her breast, dwelt for an instant there.

Down slipped her silken veils, clingingly. slowly, as though reluctant to unclasp her; whispering they fell from the high and tender breasts, the delicate rounded hips, and clustered about her feet in soft petalings as of some flower of pale amber foam; out of the calyx of that flower arose the gleaming miracle of her body crowned with the glowing glory of her cloudy hair!

Naked she was, yet clothed with an unearthly purity, the purity of the far-flung, serene stars, of the eternal snows upon some calm, high-flung peak, the tranquil silver dawns of spring; protected by some spell of divinity which chilled and slew the flame of desire. A maiden Ishtar, a virginal Isis; a woman – yet with no more of woman’s lure than if she had been some exquisite and breathing statue of mingled ivory and milk of pearls.

So she stood for a breath, indifferent to us who gazed upon her, withdrawn, musing, as though she had forgotten us. And that serene indifference, with its entire absence of what we term sex consciousness. revealed to me how great was the abyss between us and her; as great, nay greater, perhaps, than that between her and her metal servitors, her metal master!

Slowly she raised her arms, wound the floating tresses into a coronal. I saw Drake enter with the saddlebags; saw them drop from hands relaxing under the shock of this amazing tableau; saw his eyes widen and fill with wonder and half-awed admiration.

Now she stepped out of her fallen robes and moved toward the further wall, Yuruk following her. He stooped, raised an ewer of silver and began gently to pour over her shoulders its contents. Again and again he bent and filled the vessel, dipping it into a shallow basin from which came the bubbling and chuckling of a little spring. And again I marveled at the marble smoothness and fineness of her skin on which the caressing water left tiny silvery globules, gemming it. The eunuch slithered to one side, drew from a quaint chest clothes of white floss; patted her dry with them; threw over her shoulders a silken robe of blue.

Back she floated to us; hovered over Ruth, crouching with the pale head upon her knees. A motion she made as though to draw the girl to her; hesitated as Ruth’s face set in a passion of denial. A shadow of kindness drifted through the wide, mysterious eyes; a shadow of pity joined it as she looked curiously down on Ventnor.

“Bathe,” she murmured, and pointed to the pool. “And rest. No harm shall come to any of you here. And you—” A hand rested for a moment lightly on the girl’s curly head, “if you desire it – I will again give you – peace!”

She parted the curtains, and the eunuch still following, was hidden beyond them.

— XXI —

“A VOICE FROM THE VOID!”

Helplessly we looked at each other. Then called forth perhaps by what she saw in Drake’s eyes, perhaps by another thought, Ruth’s cheeks crimsoned, her head drooped; the web of her hair hid the warm rose of her face, the frozen pallor of Ventnor’s.

There came a faint rustling from behind those curtains through which Norhala had vanished. They swayed. From beneath them spun and glided a score or more of the smallest of the metal things – the little ones as she had called them. Among them was none of the spheres, only the cubes and pyramids.

They ran about us, circled and leaped like playful children, peering at us, their myriads of tiny sparkling eyes twinkling mischievously! Suddenly they raced toward the oval doorway, swept into a circle which revolved with swiftly increasing rapidity.

There was a small wailing, weirdly infantile; a shifting of shape too quick to catch; a blue brilliancy, a tiny crackling. An arrow of phosphorescence flashed up and through the portal. The little things were gone!

We sprang to the doorway, stared out. Something like a tiny azure meteor was speeding through the air toward the gate way of the cliffs; passed them and vanished like a shooting star into the radiance beyond!

“A messenger,” grunted Drake. “Probably sent to tell the boss she reached home all right with her new – toys! She’s—” He paused, gripped my arm, pointed. “Goodwin – what’s that?”

Out of the vaporous distance another meteor was speeding – toward us. Larger it grew and larger; now it was a wingless dragon streaming sapphire flames. It left behind a trail of violet luminescence! Forgetful of peril we ran from the portal, staring upward to watch its passing. Almost overhead its line of flight changed; it spiraled, then shot vertically downward. A hundred feet away there was a dazzling flash of blue incandescence. Yet before that flare blinded me I saw that the flying thing had not crashed as it fell; that it had instead struck with a terrifying catlike softness.

And down its upright side I thought a great sphere dropped and rolled toward Norhala’s dwelling!

My darkened sight cleared. Where the radiance had gushed forth a gigantic square column stood, black, like a headless obelisk. Suddenly it swayed, bowed forward and back; upon the motionless pedestal of half its height the upper half spun in a wide circle like a teetering top. Then from its base blazed again the blue incandescence; came the noise of the shattering of hundreds of great panes of glass.

The pillar soared; it cleared the air with an incredible swiftness, darted like a wingless dragon back whence it had come, flashed like a blue meteor through the gate way of the cliffs and vanished as had the other in the vapors.

We ran toward where it had towered, half on the lush grass and half on the polished roadway. Upon the latter there was no trace of it, but in the green mat at the side was a blackened imprint, an oblong twenty feet in length and five wide, with two triangular, spreading claws! And its edges were die cut, grass and flowerets were damascened within it as had been tree and twig and poppy within the mark of the valley, as had been dust and débris cf the mark in the dragoned chamber; stamped into a matrix of earth compressed by unimaginable force into stone!

“But if that’s what does it,” Drake was clearly thinking aloud, his voice dazed – “if it’s that – how the hell big must have been the Thing that stamped the poppy valley? Why – why it must have been like a mountain – a mountain of metal hurtling down there. Goodwin!” he turned to me. “Goodwin – what was it? Why did it come—”

“Quick! To Ruth!” I set off at a run to the house, cursing myself for my forgetfulness, heart beating wildly; for his questions had recalled to me the Shape I thought I had seen slip down the Flying Thing when it had struck. We raced through the door – and with a sob of relief I saw her still there as we had left her, brooding over her brother.

“Ruth,” I panted, “did anything come in?”

“No.” She raised surprised eyes. “No – I saw nothing. There was a strange noise, and light flashed through the door – that was all.” I

“What was it?” asked Drake. I told him.

“An ambassador – or a friend who just happened in for a bit of a chat on his plane,” he said sardonically. “Anything’s possible in this joint, Doc.”

He beckoned me to the saddlebags, out of earshot of Ruth.

“We’re in a hell of a hole, Goodwin,” he whispered grimly. “I’ll say that we are. It’s a fact that sticks up like a sore thumb out of a sea of lassitude and laisez faire – if you get what I mean. It’s time for a powwow—”

“Walter! Dick!” There was panic and hope in Ruth’s call. “Quick! Somethings happening to Martin!”

Before she had ceased we were beside her; bending over Ventnor. His lips were opening, slowly, slowly – with an effort agonizing to watch. Then from his half open mouth his voice came through lips that scarcely moved; faint, faint as though it floated from infinite distances, a ghost of a voice whispering with phantom breath out of a dead throat.

“Hard! Hard! So hard!” the whispering complained. “Don’t know how long I can keep connection – with voice. Can’t tell whether speaking – or thinking. Words and thoughts so much one where I am – can’t tell – you have to piece out what I say.

“Was fool to shoot. Sorry – might have gotten you in worse trouble – but suppose crazy with fear for Ruth – thought, too, might be worth chance. Sorry – not my usual line, yet not sure – something outside myself, something bigger seemed force me – perhaps not fool thing – sorry, though.”

The thin thread of sound ceased. I felt my eyes fill with tears; it was like Ventnor to flay himself like this for what he thought stupidity, like him to make this effort to admit his supposed fault and crave forgiveness. As like him as that mad attack upon the flaming disk in its own temple, surrounded by its ministers, had been so bafflingly unlike his usual cool, collected self.

“Martin,” I called, bending closer, “it’s nothing, old friend. No one blames you. Try to rouse yourself.”

“Dear,” it was Ruth, passionately tender, “it’s me! Can you hear me?”

“Only speck of consciousness and motionless in the void,” the whisper began again.

“Terribly alive, terribly alone. Seem outside space yet – still in body. Can’t see, hear, feel – short-circuited from every sense – but in some strange way realize you – Ruth, Walter, Drake, Norhala.

“See without seeing – here floating in darkness that is also light – black light – indescribable. In touch, too, with these—”

Again the voice trailed into silence; returned, word and phrase pouring forth dis connected, with a curious and turbulent rhythm, like rushing wave cysts linked by half-seen threads of the spindrift, vocal fragments of thought swiftly assembled by some subtle faculty of the mind as they fell into a coherent, incredible message.

“Group consciousness – gigantic – operating within our sphere – operating also in spheres of vibration, energy, force – above, below one to which humanity reacts – perception, command forces known to us – but in greater degree – cognizant, manipulate unknown energies – senses known to us – unknown – can’t realize them fully – impossible cover, only impinge on contact points akin our senses, forces – even these profoundly modified by additional ones – metallic, crystalline, magnetic, electric – inorganic with every power of organic – consciousness basically same as ours – profoundly changed by differences in mechanism through which it finds expression – difference our bodies – theirs.

“Conscious, mobile – inexorable, invulnerable. Getting clearer – see more clearly – see—” the voice shrilled out in a shuddering, thin lash of despair – “No! No – oh, God – no!”

Then clearly and solemnly: “And God said: let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over all the earth, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

A silence; we bent closer, listening; the still, small voice took up the thread once more – but clearly further on. Something we had missed between that text from Genesis and what we were now hearing; something that even as he had warned us, he had not been able to make articulate. The whisper broke through clearly in the middle of a sentence.

“Nor is Jehovah the God of myriads of millions who through those same centuries, and centuries upon centuries before them, found earth a garden and grave – and all these countless gods and goddesses only phantom barriers raised by man to stand between him and the eternal forces man’s instinct has always warned him stand ever in readiness to destroy; that do destroy him as soon as his vigilance relaxes, his resistance weakens – the eternal, ruthless law that will annihilate humanity the instant it runs counter to that law and disintegrating turns its will and strength against itself – instead of marching in unison behind them as a shield against the enemy – as a phalanx into the unknown.”

A little pause; then came these singular sentences:

“Weaklings praying for miracles to make easy the path their own wills should clear! Beggars who whine for alms from dreams! Shirkers each struggling to place upon his god the burden whose carrying and whose carrying alone can give him strength to walk free and unafraid, himself Godlike among the stars!”

And now distinctly, unfalteringly the eery voice went on:

“Dominion over all the earth? Yes – as long as man is fit to rule; no longer. Science had warned us. Where was the mammal when the giant reptiles reigned? Slinking hidden and afraid in the dark and secret places. Yet man sprang from these skulking mammals.

“For how long a time in the history of earth has man been master of it? For a breath – for a cloud’s passing! And will remain master only until something grown stronger than he wrests mastery from him – even as he wrested it from his ravening kind – as they took it from the reptiles – as did the reptiles from the giant saurians – which snatched it from the nightmare rulers of the Triassic – and so down to whatever held sway in the murk of earth dawn!

“Life! Life! Life! Life everywhere struggling for completion! Life crowding other life aside, battling for its moment of supremacy, gaining it, holding it for one rise and fall of the wings of time beating through eternity – and then – hurled down, trampled under the feet of another straining life whose hour has struck!

“Life crowding outside every barred threshold in a million circling worlds, yes, in a million rushing universes; pressing against the doors, bursting them down. overwhelming, forcing out those dwellers who had thought themselves so secure.

“And these – these—” the voice suddenly dropped whole octaves, became thickly, vibrantly resonant, “over the Threshold, within the House of Man – nor does he even dream that his doors are down! Things – Things of metal whose brains are thinking crystals – Things that suck their strength from the sun and and whose blood is the lightnings!

“The sun! The sun!” he cried. “There lies their weakness!” The voice rose in pitch, grew strident.

“Go back to the city! Go back to the city! Goodwin! Drake! They are not invulnerable! No! The sun – strike through the sun! Go into the city – not. invulnerable – the Keeper of the Cones. the Cones that – the Keeper of the Cones – ah-h-h-ah—”

We shrank back appalled, for from the parted, scarcely moving lips in the unchanging face a gust of laughter, mad, mocking, terrifying, racked its way. “Vulnerable – under the law – even as we! The Keeper of the Cones!

“Guard Ruth!” he gasped.

A faint tremor shook him; slowly the mouth closed.

“Martin! Brother!” wept Ruth.

I thrust my hand into his breast; felt the heart beating – slowly, but regularly, with a curious suggestion of stubborn, unshakeable strength, as though every vital force had concentrated there as in a beleaguered citadel. But Ventnor himself, the consciousness that was Ventnor was gone; had withdrawn into that subjective void in which he had said he floated – a lonely sentient atom, his one line of communication with us cut; severed from us as completely as though he were, as he had described it, outside space.

And white-faced, pale-lipped, Drake and I gazed deep into each other’s haunted eyes, neither daring to be first to break the silence of which the muffled sobbing of the girl seemed to be the sorrowful soul.

— XXII —

FREE! BUT A MONSTER

The peculiar ability of the human mind to slip so readily into the refuge of the commonplace after or even during some well-nigh intolerable crisis has been to me long one of the most interesting phenomena of our psychology. It is instinctively a protective habit, of course, acquired through precisely the same causes that have given to the animals their protective coloration – the stripes, Say, of the zebra and tiger that blend so cunningly with the barred and speckled shadowings of bush and jungle, the twig and leaf-like shapes and hues of certain insects; in fact, all that natural camouflage which was the basis of the art of concealment so astonishingly developed in the late war.

Like the animals of the wild, the mind of man moves through a jungle – the jungle of life, passing along paths beaten out by the thought of his countless forefathers in their progress from birth to death. And these paths are bordered and screened, figuratively and literally, with bush and trees of his own selection, setting out and cultivation – shelters of the familiar, the habitual, the customary. On these ancestral paths, within these barriers of usage, man moves hidden and secure as the animals in their haunts – or so he thinks. [04]

Outside them lie the wildernesses and the gardens of the unknown, and man’s little trails are but rabbit-runs in an illimitable forest. But they are home to him!

Therefore it is that he scurries from some open place of revelation, some storm of emotion, some strength-testing struggle, back into the shelter of the obvious; finding in an intellectual environment that demands no slightest expenditure of mental energy or initiative, strength to sally forth again into the unfamiliar.

I crave pardon for this digression. I set it down because now I remember how, when Drake at last broke the silence that had closed in upon the passing of that still, small voice the essence of these thoughts occurred to me.

Determinedly he strode over to the weeping girl, and in his tones was a roughness that angered me until I realized his purpose.

“Get up, Ruth!” he ordered. “He came back once and he’ll come back again. Now let him be and help us get a meal together. I’m hungry.”

She looked up at him, incredulously, indignation rising.

“Eat!” she exclaimed. “You can be hungry!”

“You bet I can – and I am,” he answered cheerfully. “Come on; we’ve got to make the best of it.”

“Ruth,” I broke in gently, “we’ll all have to think about ourselves a little if we’re to be of any use to him. You must eat – and then rest.”

“No use crying in the milk even if it’s spilt,” observed Drake, even more cheerfully. “I learned that at the front where we got so we’d yelp for the food even when the lads who’d been bringing it were all mixed up in it!”

Carefully she lifted Ventnor’s head from her lap, rested it on the silks; arose, eyes wrathful, her little hands closed in fists as though to strike him.

“Oh – you brute!” she whispered. “And I thought – I thought – Oh, I hate you!”

“That’s better,” quoth Dick, and smiled upon her. “Go ahead and hit me if you want. The madder you get the better you’ll feel.”

For a moment I thought she was going to take him at his word; then her anger fled.

“Thanks – Dick,” she said quietly; and while I sat studying Ventnor, they put together a meal from the stores, brewed tea over the spirit-lamp with water from the bubbling spring; and in these common places I knew that she at least was finding relief from that strain of the abnormal under which we had labored so long. To my surprise I found that I was hungry, Drake was plainly so, and with deep relief I watched Ruth partake of food and drink even though lightly.

About her seemed to hover something of the ethereal, elusive, and disquieting. Was it the strangely pellucid light that gave the effect, I wondered; and knew it was not, for as I scanned her covertly, I saw fall upon her face that shadow of inhuman tranquility, of unearthly withdrawal which, I guessed, had more than anything else maddened Ventnor into his attack upon the disk.

Plainly I saw her fight against it, drive it back. White lipped, she raised her head and met my gaze. And in her eyes I read both terror and – shame.

Clearly it came to me that painful as it might be for her the time for questioning had come.

“Ruth,” I said, “I know it’s not necessary to remind you that we’re in a tight place. Every fact and every strap of knowledge that we can lay hold of is of the utmost importance in enabling us to determine our course.

“I’m going to repeat your brother’s question – what did Norhala do to you? And what happened when you were floating before the disk?”

The blaze of interest in Drake’s eyes at these questions changed to amazement at her stricken recoil from them.

“There was nothing,” she whispered – then defiantly – “nothing. I don’t know what you mean!”

“Ruth!” I spoke sharply now, in my own perplexity. “You do know. You must tell us – if not for our sake, then for his.” And I pointed toward Ventnor.

She drew a long breath.

“You’re right – of course, she said unsteadily. “Only I – I thought maybe I could fight it out myself. But you must know – there’s a – a taint upon me!”

“A taint!” I cried, and caught in Drake’s swift glance the echo of my own thrill of apprehension for her sanity.

“Yes,” she said, now quietly. “Some new and alien thing within my heart, my brain, my soul; that came to me from Norhala when together we rode the flying block, and that – he – sealed upon me when I was in – his “ – again she crimsoned, and whispered – “embrace.”

And as we gazed at her, incredulously: “A thing that urges me to forget you two – and Martin – and all the world I’ve known; that tries to pull me from you – from all – to drift untroubled in some vast calm filled with an ordered ecstasy of peace. And whose calling I want, help me, oh, so desperately to heed!

“It whispered to me first,” she went on breathlessly, “from Norhala – when she put her arm around me. It whispered and then seemed to float from her and cover me like – like a substance, and from head to foot. It was a quietness and peace that held within it a happiness at one and the same time utterly tranquil and utterly wild.

“I seemed to be at the threshold of unknown ecstasies – and the life I had known only a dream – and you, all of you – even Martin, dreams within a dream. You weren’t – real – and you did not – matter!”

“Hypnotism,” muttered Drake, as she paused.

“No.” She had heard him; she shook her head. “No – more than that. The wonder of it grew – and grew. I thrilled with it. I remember nothing of that ride, saw nothing – save that once when through the peace enfolding me pierced warning that Martin was in peril, and I broke through upon its path to see him clutching Norhala and to see floating up in her eyes death for him!

“And I saved him – and again forgot. Then, when I saw that beautiful, flaming Shape – I felt no terror, no fear – only a tremendous – joyous – anticipation, as though – as though—” She faltered, hung her head, then leaving that sentence unfinished, whispered: “And when – it – lifted me it was as though I had come at last out of some endless black ocean of despair into the full sun of paradise!”

“Ruth!” cried Drake, and at the shocked wonder in his cry I saw her wince.

“Wait,” she said, and held up a little, tremulous hand. “You asked – and now you must listen.”

For an instant she was silent; and when once more she spoke her voice was low, curiously rhythmic; her eyes rapt:

“I was free – free of every human fetter of fear or sorrow or love or hate – free even of hope – for what was there to hope for when everything desirable was mine? And I was elemental; one with the eternal things yet fully conscious that I was – I!

“It was as though I were the shining shadow of a star afloat upon the breast of some still and hidden woodland pool; as though I were a little wind dancing among the mountaintops; a mist whirling down a quiet glen; a shimmering lance of the aurora pulsing in the high solitudes. And there was music – strange and wondrous music and terrible, but not terrible to me – who was a part of it; vast chords and singing themes that rang like clusters of little swinging stars and harmonies that were like the very voice of infinite law resolving within itself all discords. And all – all – so ordered, so – so mathematical – passionless, yet – rapturous!

“Out of the Thing that held me, out from its many colored fires pulsed a very essence of vitality – inexplicable, a flood of inhuman energy in which I was bathed. And it was as though this energy were – reassembling – me, fitting me even closer to the elemental things, changing me fully into them.

“I felt the little tendrils touching, caressing – then came the shots! Awakening was – dreadful, a struggling back from drowning. I saw Martin – blasted! I drove the – the spell away from me, tore it away” And, oh, Walter – Dick – it hurt – it hurt – and for a breath before I ran to him it was like – like coming from a world in which there was no disorder, no sorrow, no doubts, a rhythmic, harmonious world of light and music, into – into a world that was like a black and dirty kitchen!

“And it’s there,” her voice rose, hysterically. “It’s still within me – the taint: whispering, whispering; urging me away from you, from Martin, from every human thing; bidding me give myself up, to surrender my humanity to – to what? And for – what? Ah – that I do know!

“Its seal,” she sobbed. “No – his seal! An alien consciousness sealed within me, that strives to make the human me a slave – that waits to overcome my will – and if I surrender gives me freedom, an incredible freedom – and makes me, being still human, a – monster!”

She hid her face in her hands, quivering.

“If I could sleep,” she wailed. “But I’m afraid to sleep. I think I shall never sleep again. For sleeping, how do I know that – it – may not then conquer me?”

I caught Drake’s eye; he nodded, understanding fully my unspoken question. I slipped my hand down into the medicine case, brought forth a certain potent and tasteless combination of drugs which I carry invariably upon explorations. A little I dropped into her cup, then held it to her lips. Like a child, unthinking, she obeyed the suggestion and drank.

“But I’ll not surrender!” Her eyes were tragic. “Never think it! I can win – don’t you know I can?”

“Win?” Drake dropped down beside her, drew her toward him. “Little girl and bravest little girl I’ve ever known – of course you’ll win. And remember this – nine-tenths of what you’re thinking now is purely overwrought nerves and weariness. You’ll win – and we’ll win, never doubt it.”

“I don’t,” she said. “I know it – oh, it will be hard – but I will – I will—”

— XXIII —

THE HOUSE OF NORHALA

Her eyes closed, her body relaxed; the potion had done its work quickly. We laid her beside Ventnor on the pile of silken stuffs, covered them both with a fold of blanket, then looked at each other long and silently – and I wondered whether my face was as grim and drawn as his.

“It appears,” he said at last, curtly, “that it’s up to you and me for powwow quick. I hope you’re not sleepy.”

“I am not,” I answered as curtly; the edge of nerves in his manner of questioning doing nothing to soothe my own, “and even if I were I would hardly expect to put all the burden of the present problem upon you by going to sleep.”

“For God’s sake don’t be a prima donna!” he flared up. “I meant no offense.”

“I’m sorry, Dick,” I said. “We’re both a little – jumpy, I guess.”

He nodded; gripped my hand.

“It wouldn’t be so bad,” he muttered, “if all four of us were all right. But Ventnor’s down and out, and God alone knows for how long. And Ruth – has all the trouble we have and some special ones of her own. I’ve an idea—” he hesitated – “an idea that there was no exaggeration in that story she told – an idea that if anything she underplayed it.”

“I, too,” I replied somberly. “And to me it is the most hideous phase of this whole situation – and for reasons not all connected with Ruth,” I added.

“Hideous!” he repeated. “Unthinkable – yet all this is unthinkable. And still – it is! And Ventnor – coming back – that way, God! That was awful, too! Like a lost soul finding voice!

“Was it raving, Goodwin? Or could he have been – how was it he put it in touch with that Thing and its purpose? Was that message – truth?”

“Ask yourself that question, Dick,” I said. “Man – you know it was truth! Had not inklings of it come to you even before he spoke? They had to me. His message was but an interpretation, a synthesis of facts I, for one, lacked the courage to admit.”

“I, too,” he nodded. “But he went further than that. What did he mean by the Keeper of the Cones – and that the – Things – were vulnerable under the same law that orders us? And why did he command us to go back to the city? How could he know – how could he?”

“There’s nothing inexplicable in that, at any rate,” I answered. “Abnormal sensitivity of perception due to the cutting off of all tactile impressions. There’s nothing uncommon in that. You have its most familiar form in the sensitivity of the blind. You’ve watched the same thing at work in certain forms of hypnotic experimentation, haven’t you?

“Through the operation of entirely understandable causes the mind gains the power to react to vibrations that normally pass unperceived; is able to project itself through this keying up of perception into a wider area of consciousness than the normal. Just as in certain diseases of the ear the sufferer, though deaf to sounds within the average range of hearing, is fully aware of sound vibrations far above and far below those the healthy ear registers.”

“I know,” he said. “I don’t need to be convinced. But we accept these things in theory – and when we get up against them for ourselves we doubt.

“How many people are there in Christendom, do you think, who believe that the Savior ascended from the dead, but if they saw it today would insist upon medical inspection, doctor’s certificates, a clinic, and even after that render a Scotch verdict? [not proven] I’m not speaking irreverently – I’m just stating a fact. And my answer is, perhaps, one in a hundred thousand.”

Suddenly he moved away from me, strode over to the curtained oval through which Norhala had gone.

“Dick,” I cried, following him hastily, “where are you going? What are you going to do?”

“I’m going after that Norhala devil,” he answered, pausing for a moment. “I’m going to have a show-down with her or know the reason why!”

“Drake,” I cried again, aghast, “don’t make the mistake Ventnor did! That’s not the way to win through. Don’t – I beg you, don’t.”

“You’re wrong,” he answered stubbornly. “I’m going to get her. She’s got to talk.”

He thrust out a hand to the curtains. Before he could touch them they were parted. Out from between them slithered the black eunuch. He stood motionless, regarding us; in the ink-black eyes a red flame of hatred, menacing, diabolic.

I pushed myself between him and Drake.

“Where is your mistress, Yuruk?” I asked.

“The goddess has gone,” he replied sullenly.

“Gone?” I said suspiciously, for certainly Norhala had not passed us. “Where?”

“Who shall question the goddess?” he whined. “She comes and she goes as she pleases.”

I translated this for Drake.

“He’s got to show me,” he said. “Don’t think I’m going to spill the beans, Goodwin. But I want to talk to her. I think I’m right, honestly I do.”

After all, I reflected, there was much in his determination to recommend it. It was the obvious thing to do – unless we admitted that Norhala was superhuman; and that I would not admit. In command of forces we did not yet know, en rapport with these People of Metal, sealed with that alien consciousness Ruth had described – all these, yes. But still a woman – of that I was certain. And surely Drake could be trusted not to repeat Ventnor’s error.

“Yuruk,” I said brutally, “we think you lie. We would speak to your mistress. Take us to her.”

“I have told you that the goddess is not here,” he said. “If you do not believe, it is nothing to me. I cannot take you to her for I do not know where she is. Is it your wish that I take you through her house?”

“It is,” I said.

“The goddess has commanded me to serve you in all things,” he bowed sardonically. “Follow.”

Our search was short. We stepped out into what for want of better words I can describe only as a central hall. It was circular, and strewn with thick-piled small rugs whose hues had been softened by the alchemy of time into exquisite, shadowy echoes of color, while the cuneiform shape of their woven inscriptions confirmed their ancientness.

The walls of this hall were of the same moonstone substance that had enclosed the chamber upon whose inner threshold we were. They whirled straight up to the dome in a crystalline, cylindrical core. Four doorways like that in which we stood pierced them. Through each of their curtainings in turn we peered.

All were precisely similar in shape and proportions, radiating in a lunetted, curved base triangle from the middle chamber: the curvature of the enclosing globe forming back wall and roof; the translucent slicings the sides; the circle of floor of the inner hall the truncating lunette.

The first of these chambers was utterly bare. The one opposite held a half-dozen suits of the lacquered armor, as many wicked looking, short and double-edged swords and long javelins. The third I judged to be the lair of Yuruk; within it was a copper brazier, a stand of spears and a gigantic bow, a quiver full of arrows leaning beside it. The fourth room was littered with coffers great and small, of wood and of bronze, and all tightly closed.

The fifth room was beyond question Norhala’s bedchamber. Upon its floor the ancient rugs were thick. A low couch of carven ivory inset with gold rested a few feet from the doorway. A dozen or more of the chests were scattered about and flowing over with silken stuffs.

Upon the backs of four golden lions stood a high mirror of polished silver. And close to it, in curiously incongruous domes tic array stood a stiffly marshaled row of sandals. Upon one of the chests were heaped combs and fillets of shell and gold and ivory studded with jewels blue and yellow and crimson.

To all of these we gave but a passing glance. We sought for Norhala. And of her we found no shadow. She had gone even as the black eunuch had said; flitting unseen past Ruth, perhaps, absorbed in her watch over her brother; perhaps through some hidden opening in this room of hers.

Summoned by that globe I had thought I had seen drop from the back of the Flying Thing? It might be.

— XXIV —

SOME CERTAINTIES

Yuruk let drop the curtains, sidled back to the first room, we after him. The two there had not moved. We drew the saddlebags close, propped ourselves against them.

The black eunuch squatted a dozen feet away, facing us, chin upon his knees, taking us in with unblinking eyes blank of any emotion. Then he began to move slowly his tremendously long arms in easy, soothing motion, the hands running along the floor upon their talons in arcs of circles. It was curious how those hands seemed to be endowed with a volition of their own, independent of the arms upon which they swung!

And now I could see only the hands, shutting so smoothly, so rhythmically back and forth – weaving so sleepily, so sleepily back and forth – black hands that dripped sleep – hypnotic.

Hypnotic! I sprang from the lethargy closing upon me! In one quick side glance I saw Drake’s head nodding – nodding in time to the movement of the black hands! I jumped to my feet, shaking with an intensity of rage unfamiliar to me; thrust my pistol into the wrinkled face.

“Damn you!” I cried. “Stop that! Stop it and turn your back!” The corded muscles of the arms contracted, the claws of the slithering paws drew in as though he were about to clutch me; the ebon pools of the eyes were covered with a frozen film of malignant hate.

He could not have known what was this tube with which I menaced him; but its threat he certainly sensed and was afraid to meet. Lips drawn in a devilish sneer he squattered about, wrapped his arms around his knees, crouched with back toward us.

“What’s the matter?” asked Drake drowsily.

“He tried to hypnotize us,” I answered shortly. “And pretty nearly did it.”

“So that’s what it was!” He was now wide awake. “I watched those hands of his and got sleepier and sleepier – I guess we’d better tie Mr. Yuruk up.” He jumped to his feet.

“No,” I said, restraining him. “No. He’s safe enough as long as we’re on the alert. I don’t want to use any force on him yet. Wait until we know we can get something worth while by doing it.”

“All right,” he nodded grimly. “But when the time comes I’m telling you straight, Doc. I’m going the limit. There’s something about that human spider that makes me itch to squash him – slowly!”

“I’ll have no compunction, Dick – when it’s worthwhile,” I answered as grimly.

We sank down again against the saddle bags; he brought out a black pipe, looked at it sorrowfully; at me appealingly.

“All mine was on the pony that bolted.” I answered his wistfulness.

“All mine was on my beast, too,” he sighed. “And I lost my pouch in that spurt from the ruins.”

He sighed again, clamped white teeth down upon the stem.

“Of course,” he said at last, “if Ventnor was right in that – that disembodied analysis of his, it’s rather – well, terrifying, isn’t it?”

“It’s all of that,” I replied, “and considerably more.”

“Metal, he said,” Drake mused. “Things of metal with brains of thinking crystal and their blood the lightnings! You accept that?”

“So far as my own observation has gone – yes,” I said. “Metallic yet mobile; inorganic but with all the qualities we have hitherto thought only those of the organic and with others added. Crystalline, of course, in structure and highly complex. Activated by magnetic-electric forces consciously exerted and as much a part of their life as brain energy and nerve cur rents are of our human life. Animate. moving, sentient combinations of metal and electric energy.”

He said:

“The opening of the disk from the globe and of the two blasting stars from the pyramids show the flexibility of the outer – plate would you call it? I couldn’t help thinking of the armadillo after I had time to think at all.”

“It may be” – I struggled against the conviction now strong upon me – “it may be that within that metallic shell is an organic body, something soft – animal, as there is within the horny carapace of the turtle, the nacreous valves of the oyster, the shells of the crustaceans – it may be that even their inner surface is organic—”

“No,” be interrupted, “if there is a body – as we know a body – it must be between the outer surface and the inner, for the latter is crystal, jewel hard, impenetrable.

“Goodwin – Ventnor’s bullets hit fair! I saw them strike. They did not ricochet – they dropped dead from that shining Thing. Like flies dashed up against a rock – and the Thing was no more conscious of their striking than a rock would have been of those same flies!”

“Drake,” I said, “my own conviction is that these creatures are absolutely metallic, entirely inorganic – incredible, unknown forms. Let us go on that basis.”

“I think so, too,” he nodded; “but I wanted you to say it first. And yet – is it so incredible, Goodwin? What is the definition of vital intelligence – sentience?

“Haeckel’s is the accepted one. Anything which can receive a stimulus, that can react to a stimulus and retains memory of a stimulus must be called an intelligent, conscious entity. The gap between what we have long called the organic and the inorganic is steadily decreasing. Do you know of the remarkable experiments of Lillie upon metals?”

I shook my head.

“Lillie,” he went on, “proved that under the electric current and other exciting mediums metal exhibited practically every reaction of the human nerve and muscle. It grew weary, rested, and after resting was perceptibly stronger than before; it got what was practically indigestion, and it exhibited a peculiar but unmistakable memory. Also it could acquire disease and die.

“Lillie concluded that there existed a real metallic consciousness! It was Le Bon who first proved also that metal is more sensitive than man, and that its immobility is only apparent. [05]

“Take the block of magnetic iron that stands so gray and apparently lifeless, subject it to a magnetic current, and what happens? The iron block is composed of molecules which under ordinary conditions are disposed in all possible directions indifferently. But when the current passes through there is tremendous movement in that apparently inert mass. All of the tiny particles of which it is composed turn and shift until their north poles all point more or less approximately in the direction of the magnetic force.

“When that happens the block itself becomes a magnet, filled with and surrounded by a field of magnetic energy; instinct with it. Outwardly it has not moved; actually there has been prodigious motion!”

“But it is unconscious motion,” I objected.

“Ah, but how do you know it is?” he asked. “If Jacques Loeb is right, that action of the iron molecules is every bit as conscious a movement as the least and the greatest of our own. There is absolutely no difference between them.

“Your and my and its every movement is nothing but an involuntary and inevitable reaction to a certain stimulus. If he’s right, then I’m a buttercup – but that’s neither here nor there. Loeb – all he did was to restate destiny, one of humanity’s oldest ideas, in the terms of tropisms, infusoria and light! Omar Khayyam chemically reincarnated in the Rockefeller Institute! Nevertheless those who accept his theories have to admit that there is essentially no difference between their impulses and the rush of filings toward a magnet. [06]

“Equally nevertheless, Goodwin: the iron does meet Haeckel’s three tests – it can receive a stimulus, it does react to that stimulus and it retains memory of it; for even after the current has ceased it remains changed in tensile strength, conductivity and other qualities that were modified by the passage of that current; and as time passes this memory fades. Precisely as some human experience increases wariness, caution, which keying up of qualities remains with us after the experience has passed, and fades away in the ratio of our sensitivity plus retentiveness divided by the time elapsing from the original experience – exactly as it is in the iron.”

— XXV —

CONSCIOUS METAL!

“Granted,” I acquiesced. “We now come to their means of locomotion. In its simplest terms all locomotion is progress through space against the force of gravitation. Man’s walk is a series of rhythmic stumbles against this force that constantly strives to drag him down to earth’s face and keep him pressed there. Gravitation is an etheric – magnetic vibration akin to the force which holds, to use your simile again, Drake, the filing against the magnet. A walk is a constant breaking of the current.

“Take a motion picture of a man walking and run it through the lantern rapidly and he seems to be not walking but flying. [07] We have none of the awkward failings and recoveries that are the tempo of walking as we see it.

“I take it that the movement of these Things is a conscious breaking of the gravitational current just as much as is our own movement, but by a rhythm so swift that it appears to be continuous.

“Doubtless if we could so control our sight as to admit the vibrations of light slowly enough we would see this apparently smooth motion as a series of leaps – just as we do when the motion-picture operator slows down his machine sufficiently to show us walking in a series of stumbles. “Very well – so far, then, we have nothing in this phenomena which the human mind can conceive as possible; there fore intellectually we still remain masters of the phenomena; for it is only that which human thought cannot encompass which it need fear.”

“Metallic,” he said, “and crystalline! And yet – why not? What are we but bags of skin filled with certain substances, in solution and stretched over a supporting and mobile mechanism largely made up of lime? Out of that primeval jelly which Gregory calls ‘Protobion’ [08] came after untold millions of years us with our skins, our nails, and our hair; came, too, the serpents with their scales, the birds with their feathers; the horny hide of the rhinoceros and the fairy wings of the butterfly; the shell of the crab, the gossamer loveliness of the moth and the shimmering wonder of the mother-of-pearl.

“Is there any greater gap between any of these and the metallic? I think not.”

“Not materially,” I answered. “No. But there remains – consciousness.”

“That,” he said, “I cannot understand. Ventnor spoke of – how did he put it – a group consciousness, operating in our sphere and in spheres above and below ours, with senses known and unknown. I got – glimpses – Goodwin, but I cannot understand.”

“We have agreed for reasons that seem sufficient to us to call these Things metallic, Dick,” I replied. “But that does not necessarily mean that they are composed of any metal that we know. Nevertheless, being metal, they must be of crystalline structure.

“As Gregory has pointed out (see preceding note), crystals and what we call living matter had an equal start in the first essentials of life. We cannot conceive life without giving it the attribute of some sort of consciousness. Hunger cannot be anything but conscious, and there is no other stimulus to eat but hunger.

“The crystals eat. The extraction of power from food is conscious because it is purposeful, and there can be no purpose without consciousness; similarly the power to work from such derived energy is also purposeful and therefore conscious. The crystals do both. And the crystals can transmit all these abilities to their children, just as we do. For although there would seem to be no reason why they should not continue to grow to gigantic size under favorable conditions – yet they do not. They reach a size beyond which they do not develop.

“Instead, they bud – give birth, in fact – to smaller ones, which increase until they reach the size of the preceding gene ration. And like the children of man and animals, these younger generations grow on precisely as their progenitors! [09]

“Very well, then – we arrive at the conception of a metallically crystalline being, which by some explosion of the force of evolution has burst from the to us familiar and apparently inert stage into these Things that hold us! And is there any greater difference between the forms with which we are familiar and them than there is between us and the crawling amphibian which was our remote ancestor? Or between that and the amoeba – the little swimming stomach from which it evolved? Or the amoeba and the inert jelly of the protobion?

“As for what Ventnor calls a group consciousness I would assume that he means a communal intelligence such as that shown by the bees and the ants – that in the case of the former Maeterlinck calls the “spirit of the Hive.” It is shown in their groupings – just as the geometric arrangement of those groupings shows also clearly their crystalline intelligence!

“I submit that in their rapid coordination either for attack or movement or work without any apparent communication having passed between the units, there is nothing more remarkable than in the swarming of a hive of bees where also without apparent communication just so many wax-makers, nurses, honey-gatherers, chemists, bread-makers, cleaners, and all the varied specialists of the hive go with the old queen, leaving behind sufficient number of each class for the needs of the young queen.

“All this apportionment is effected with out any means of communication that we recognize. Still it is most obviously intelligent selection. For if it were haphazard all the honey-makers might leave and the hive starve, or all the chemists might go and the food for the young bees not be properly prepared – and so on and so on.”

“But metal,” he muttered, “and conscious. It’s all very well – but where did that consciousness come from? And what is it? And where did they come from? And most of all, why haven’t they overrun the world before this?”

“Such development as theirs, such an evolution, pre-supposes aeons of time – long as it took us to drag up from the lizards. What have they been doing – why haven’t they been ready to strike – if Ventnor’s right – at humanity until now?”

“I don’t know,” I answered helplessly. “But evolution is not the slow, plodding process that Darwin thought. There seem to be explosions – nature will create a new form almost in a night. Then comes the long ages of development and adjustment, and suddenly another new race appears.

“It might be so of these – some extraordinary conditions that shaped them. Or they might have developed through the ages in spaces within the earth – there’s that incredible abyss we saw that is evidently one of their highways. Or they might have dropped here upon some fragment of a broken world, found in this valley the right conditions and developed in amazing rapidity. [10] They’re all possible theories – take your pick.”

“Something’s held them back – and they’re rushing to a climax,” he whispered. “Ventnor’s right about that – I feel it. And what can we do? What in the devil can we do, Doc?”

“Go back to the city,” I said. “Go back as he ordered. I believe he knows what he’s talking about. And I believe he’ll be able to help us. It wasn’t, just a request he made, nor even an appeal – it was a command.”

“It was more than that.” Drake’s brows knit into a bar over stern eyes. “More than that. It was the agony of a soul who sees the fate of humanity upon the balance! And if he’s right – good God! The fate of humanity is in the balance with only us two to throw the saving weight upon the scales. And what can we do – just two men – against these Things?”

“That we may find out – when we’re back in the city,” I answered. “Well,” his old reckless cheerfulness came back to him, “in every crisis of this old globe it’s been up to one man to turn the trick; We’re two! And at the worst we can only go down fighting, a little before the rest of us. So, after all, whatever the hell, what the hell!”

For a time we were silent.

“Well,” he said at last, “we have to go to the city in the morning.” He laughed. “Sounds as though we were living in the suburbs somewhere, doesn’t it?”

“It can’t be many hours before dawn,” I said. “Turn in for awhile, Dick; I’ll wake you when I think you’ve slept enough.”

“It doesn’t seem fair,” he protested, but sleepily.

“I’m not sleepy,” I told him; nor was I. But whether I was or was not, I wanted to question Yuruk, uninterrupted and undisturbed.

Drake stretched himself out, head boring about for the softest spot in his saddle bag. He found it; settled; then blinked at me.

“Sure,” he murmured, “that’s what I wanted to tell you. Like the electric eel. [11] An eel as big as that star Thing that lightninged Ventnor, and I’ll bet its current would be as great or greater. Nothing miraculous in that – electric eels – armadillos – once you spot the thing – nothing to it – we’ll show ’em—”

He dropped into slumber, still muttering. When his breathing showed him fast asleep indeed, I slipped over to the black eunuch and crouched, right hand close to the butt of my automatic, facing him.

PART FIVE

PRECEDING CHAPTERS
BRIEFLY RETOLD

While traveling in the mountains of Turkestan Dr. Goodwin met Dick Drake, an American engineer. In a valley they saw a colossal imprint crushed into the stone – a curved heel with four claws, each twenty feet long, extending from it. Next day, while traveling an ancient road that passed through a hollow, they were almost overcome by an unseen force that sapped their strength. Winning through, they met an American girl, Ruth Ventnor, daughter of a scientist, and her brother Mart. From them they learned that one night two men – the first humans they had seen for months – had come close to their fire and discussed Ruth with exceeding frankness – in archaic Persian. Awakening, she had fired at them, and wounded one. Next day they had seen a body of soldiers, dressed and armed like the legions of ancient Darius, approach mg, apparently in search of them. They had escaped.

Ruth showed Dr. Goodwin and Dick a number of small metal objects, that formed geometrical designs that moved with intelligence. Metal – with a brain!

Attacked by the pursuing Persians they saw standing in a fissure in the mountain the figure of a woman. At her command hundreds of metal objects – the “Metal Things” formed them selves into a giant that struck out and destroyed the attackers. Speaking in ancient Persian, the Woman told them that she was “Norhala.” She was beautiful – but not entirely human. At command they followed her into the fissure – which proved to be a passage hewed by human hands – and crossed a chasm on a bridge formed by the “Metal Ones,” and were swept away through the mats and through an opening in the mountain.

Then came a hair-raising journey through the wonders of an unknown world. Norhala took the travelers before a strange – edifice – altar – machine? – formed of glistening, greenish cones and spinning, golden disks. With the weird guardians of these cones Norhala communicated. When Mart fired at one of the creatures, a lance of green flame darted at him and left him a broken wreck. Norhala saved him from further punishment; told Dr. Goodwin and Dick that the – Thing – had given them to her for playthings; ordered them to carry Mart and follow her, and lead the way through a wall of light. After another strange journey they reached a palace, Norhala’s home, where they were cared for by Yuruk, an eunuch, who later tried to hypnotize the men. Mart recovered sufficiently to tell them that humanity was in danger from the Metal Things, and to tell them to return to the city. Ruth declared that she was under the influence of Norhala, but declared that she would fight that influence. When Drake dropped off to sleep Dr. Goodwin slipped over to the untrustworthy eunuch and crouched, hand close to his pistol, facing him…

— XXVI —

YURUK

“Yuruk,” I whispered, “you love us as the wheat field loves the hail; we are as welcome to you as the death cord to the condemned. Lo, a door opened into a land of unpleasant dreams you thought sealed, and we came through. Answer my questions with the limpid truth of the raindrop and it may be that we shall return through that door.”

Interest welled up in the depths of the black eyes.

“There is a way from here,” he muttered. “Nor does it pass through – Them. I can show it you.”

I had not been blind to the flash of malice, of cunning, that had shot across the wrinkled face.

“Where does that way lead?” I asked. “There were those who sought us; men clad in armor with javelins and arrows. Does your way lead to them, Yuruk?”

For a time he hesitated, the lashless lids half closed.

“Yes,” he said sullenly. “The way leads to them; to their place. But will it not be safer for you there – among your kind?”

“I don’t know that it will,” I answered promptly. “Those who are unlike us smote those who are like us and drove them back when they would have taken and slain us. Why is it not better to remain with them than to go to our kind who would destroy us?”

“They would not,” he said. “If you gave them – her.” He thrust a long thumb backward toward sleeping Ruth. “Cherkis would forgive much for her. And why should you not? Is she not only a woman?”

He spat – a way that had I less control_would have made me kill him.

“Besides,” he ended, “have you no arts to amuse him?”

“Cherkis?” I asked.

“Cherkis,” he whined. “Is Yuruk then a fool not to know that in the world without new things have arisen since long ago we fled from Iskander into the secret valley? What have you to beguile Cherkis beyond this woman flesh? Much, I think. Go then to him – unafraid.”

Cherkis? There was a familiar sound to that. Cherkis? Of course – it was the name of Xerxes, the Persian Conqueror, corrupted by time into this – Cherkis. And Iskander? Equally, of course – Alexander. Ventnor had again been right then.

“Yuruk,” I demanded directly, “is she whom you call goddess – Norhala – of the people of Cherkis?”

“Long ago,” he answered; “long, long ago there was trouble in their city, even in the great dwelling place of Cherkis. I fled with her who was the mother of the mother of the goddess. There were twenty of us; and we fled here – by the way which I will show you—”

He leered cunningly; I gave no sign of interest.

“And it came to pass that she who was the mother’s mother of the goddess found favor in the sight of the ruler here,” he went on.

“But after a time she grew old and ugly and withered. So he slew her – like a little mound of dust she danced and blew away after he had slain her; and also he slew others who had grown displeasing to him. Then for a time she who was the mother of the goddess delighted him – and after a time she also grew old and her also he slew. And this time he blasted me – as he was blasted—” He pointed to Ventnor.

“Then it was that, recovering, I found my crooked shoulder. But years before that the goddess was born. He who is ruler here visited her mother often, and she is kin to him – certainly. How else could she shed the lightnings? Was not the father of Iskander the god Zeus Ammon, who came to Iskander’s mother in the for!!! of a great snake? Well? At any rate the goddess was born – shedder of the lightnings even from her birth! And she is as you see her.

“He-he!” he chuckled hideously. “He he! They grew old and they were slain But I who am indeed old hide when they come. And so I live. He-he!

“Cleave to your kind! Cleave to your kind!” croaked the black eunuch. “Better is it. to be flayed by your brother than to be eaten by the tiger! Cleave to your kind! Look – I will show you the way to them.”

He sprang to his feet, clasped my wrist in one of his long hands, led me softly through the curtained oval into the cylindrical hall, parted the curtainings of Norhala’s bedroom and pushed me within. Over the floor he slid, still holding fast to me, and pressed against the farther wall.

An ovoid slice of the gem-like material slid aside, revealing a wide doorway. I glimpsed a path, a trail, leading into a forest pallid green beneath the wan light. This way thrust itself like a black tongue the boskage and vanished in its depths.

“Follow it.” He pointed; “Take those who came with you and follow it.”

The wrinkles upon his face fairly writhed his eagerness.

“You will go?” panted Yuruk. “You will take them and go by that path?”

“Not yet,” I answered absently. “Not yet.”

And was abruptly brought to full alertness, vigilance, by the flame of rage that filled the ebon pools thrust so close.

“Lead back,” I directed curtly. He slid the door back into place, turned sullenly. I followed, wondering what were the sources of the bitter hatred he so plainly held for us; the reasons for his eagerness to be rid of us despite the commands of the woman who to him at least was goddess.

And by that curious human habit of seeking for the complex when the simple lies close, failed to recognize that it was jealousy of us that was the root of his behavior; that he wished to be, as it would seem he had been for years, the only human thing near Norhala; failed to realize this, and with Ruth and Drake was terribly to pay for this failure!

I looked down upon the pair, sleeping soundly; upon Ventnor lost still in trance.

“Sit!” I ordered the eunuch. “And turn your back to me.”

As he obeyed, a question long deferred at list found utterance.

“Yuruk,” I asked, “whence came this house in which we are? Who built it?”

“The ruler here,” he answered sullenly. “He made it for the delight of the mother’s mother of the goddess.”

I dropped down beside Drake, my mind wrestling with the mystery, but every sense alert for movement from the black. Glibly enough I had passed over Dick’s questioning as to the consciousness of the Metal People; now I faced it knowing it to be the very crux of these incredible phenomena; admitting, too, that despite all my special pleading, about that point swirled in my own mind the thickest mists of uncertainty. That their sense of order was immensely beyond man’s was plain.

As plain was it that their knowledge of magnetic force and its manipulation were far beyond the sphere of humanity. That they had realization of beauty this palace of Norhala’s proved – and no human imagination could have conceived it nor human hands have made its thought of beauty real. What were their senses through which their consciousness fed?

Nine in number had been the sapphire ovals set within the golden zone of the disk. Clearly it came to me that these were sense organs!

But – nine senses!

And the great stars – how many had they? And the cubes – did they open as did globe and pyramid?

Consciousness itself – after all what is it? A secretion of the brain? The cumulative expression, wholly chemical, of the multitudes of cells that form us? The inexplicable governor of the city of the body of which these myriads of cells are the citizens – and created by them out of them selves to rule?

Is it what many call the soul? Or is it a finer form of matter, a self-realizing force, which uses the body as its vehicle just as other forces use for their vestments other machines? After all, what is this conscious self of ours, the ego, but a spark of realization running continuously along the path of time within that mechanism we call the brain; making contact along that path as the electric spark at the end of a wire?

Is there a sea of this conscious force which laps the shores of the farthest-flung stars; that finds expression in everything – man and rock, metal and flower, jewel and cloud? Limited in its expression only by the limitations of that which it animates, and in essence the same in all? If so, then this problem of the life of the Metal People ceased to be a problem; was answered!

So thinking I became aware of increasing light; strode past Yuruk to the door and peeped out. Dawn was paling the sky. I stooped over Drake, shook him. On the instant he was awake, alert.

“I only need a little sleep, Dick,” I said. “When the sun is well up, call me.”

“Why, it’s dawn,” he whispered. “Goodwin, you oughtn’t to have let me sleep so long. I feel like a damned pig.”

“Never mind,” I answered. “But watch Yuruk close.”

I rolled myself up in his warm blanket; sank almost instantly into a dreamless slumber.

— XXVII —

PREPARATION

High was the sun when I awakened; or so I supposed, opening my eyes upon a flood of clear daylight. As I lay, lazily, recollection rushed upon me. It was no sky into which I was gazing; it was the dome of Norhala’s elfin home. And Drake had not aroused me! Why? And how long had I slept?

I jumped to my feet, stared about. Ruth nor Drake nor the black eunuch was there!

“Ruth!” I shouted. “Drake!” There was no answer. I ran to the doorway. Peering up into the white vault of the heavens I set the time of day as close to seven; I had slept then three hours, more or less. Yet short as that time of slumber had been, I felt marvelously refreshed, re-energized; the effect I was certain of the extraordinarily tonic qualities of the atmosphere of this place. But where were the others? Where Yuruk?

I heard Ruth’s laughter! Some hundred yards to the left, half hidden by a screen of flowering shrubs, I saw a small meadow. Within it a half-dozen little white goats nuzzled around her and Dick. She was milking one of them.

Reassured, I drew back into the chamber, knelt over Ventnor. His condition was unchanged. My gaze fell upon the pool that had been Norhala’s bath. Longingly I looked at it; then satisfying myself that the milking process was not finished, slipped off my clothes and splashed about. I had just time to get back in my clothing when through the doorway came the pair, each carrying a porcelain pannikin full of milk.

“Oh, Walter,” cried Ruth gaily. “You should see the goats! The cutest little silky white things – and so tame! There’s nothing the matter with this milk, I can tell you – and that awful black thing isn’t about to poison it with his eyes! Ugh-h!” she shuddered.

There was no shadow of fear or horror on her face. It was the old Ruth who stood before me; nor was there effort in the smile she gave me. She had been washed clean in the waters of sleep.

“Don’t you worry, Walter,” she said. “I know what you’re thinking. But I’m – me again. It was all quite true. But I’m going to stay – me! And don’t you worry.”

“Where is Yuruk?” I turned to Drake brusquely to smother the sob of sheer happiness I felt rising in my throat; and at his wink and warning grimace abruptly forbore to press the question.

“You men pick out the things and I’ll get breakfast ready,” said Ruth. “Oh!” She was looking down into the pool. “Somebody’s been in it. We’ll have to let it settle.”

“I couldn’t help it,” I apologized guiltily.

“We won’t have to wait. There’s a spring outside,” laughed Drake. He picked up the teakettle and motioned me before him.

“About Yuruk,” he whispered when he had gotten outside. “I gave him a little object lesson. Persuaded him to go down the line a bit, showed him my pistol, and then picked off one of Norhala’s goats with it. Hated to do it, but I knew it would be good for his soul.

“He gave one screech and fell on his face and groveled. Thought it was a lightning bolt, I figure; decided I had been their stuff. ‘Yuruk,’ I told him, ‘that’s what you’ll get, and worse, if you lay a finger on that girl inside there.’”

“And then what happened?” I asked.

“He beat it back there like an ostrich-legged rooster pursued by a ravenous snake with automobile feet,” he grinned, using one of his remarkable metaphors and pointing toward the forest through which ran the path the eunuch had shown me.

Briefly, as we filled the container at the outer spring, I told him of the revelations and the offer Yuruk had made to me.

“Whew-w!” he whistled. “In the nut-cracker, eh? Trouble behind us and trouble in front of us.”

“When do we start?” he asked, as we turned back toward the Blue Globe.

“Right after we’ve eaten,” I answered. “There’s no use putting it off. How do you feel about it?”

“Frankly, like the chief guest at a lynching party,” he said. “Curious but none too cheerful.”

Nor was I. I was filled with a fever of scientific curiosity. But I was not cheerful – no! It was not fear, it was not cowardice that lay beyond my shrinking from this ordeal; nor was it with Drake. It was the nightmare loneliness, the helplessness and isolation of our human selves alone among the unhuman, the unearthly; among Things that knew our helplessness better even than did we; Things to whom we were but strange and animate toys, to be played with or broken as the whim might be.

I can find no images to describe that unfamiliar oppression. Rhythmic, sometimes it threatened to submerge; left me gasping and fighting for life. Sometimes it was but a little wave lapping at my feet – but never did it entirely withdraw! Nightmare is the nearest word to it – and wholly inadequate. We ministered to Ventnor as well as we could; forcing open his set jaws, thrusting a thin rubber tube down past his windpipe into his gullet and dropping through it a few ounces of the goat milk. Our own breakfasting was silent enough.

We could not take Ruth with us upon our journey; that was certain; she must stay here with her brother. She would be safer in Norhala’s house than where we were going, of course, and yet to leave her was most distressing. After all, I wondered, was there any need of both of us taking that journey; would not one do just as well? Drake could stay—

“No use of putting all our eggs in one basket,” I broached the subject. “I’ll go down by myself while you, Dick, remain to help Ruth. You can always follow if I don’t turn up in a reasonable time.”

His indignation at this proposal was matched only by her own. “You’ll go with him, Dick Drake,” she cried, “or I’ll never look or speak to you again!”

“Good Lord! Did you think for a minute I wouldn’t!” Pain and wrath struggled on his face. “We go together or neither of us go. Ruth will be all right here, Goodwin. The only thing she has any cause to fear is Yuruk – and he’s had his lesson.

“Besides, she’ll have the rifles and her pistols, and she knows how to use them. What d’ye mean by making such a proposition as that?” His indignation burst all bounds. Lamer I tried to justify myself. “I’ll be all right,” said Ruth. “I’m not afraid of Yuruk. And none of those Things will hurt me – not after – not after—” Her eyes fell, her lips quivered piteously – then she faced us steadily. “Don’t ask me how I know that,” she went on quietly. “Believe me, I do know it. I am closer to – them than you two are. And if I choose I can call upon that alien strength their master gave me. It is for you two that I fear.”

“No fear for us,” Drake burst out hastily. “We’re Norhala’s little new playthings. We’re tabu. Take it from me, Ruth, I’d bet my head there isn’t one of these Things, great or small, and no matter how many, that doesn’t by this time know all about us.

“We’ll probably be received with demonstrations of interest by the populace as welcome guests. Probably we’ll find a sign – ‘Welcome to our City’ – hung up over the front gate!”

She smiled a trifle tremulously.

“We’ll come back,” he said. Suddenly he leaned forward, put his hands on her shoulders. “Do you think there is anything that could keep me from coming back?” he whispered.

She trembled, wide eyes searching deep into his.

“Well,” I broke in, a bit uncomfortably, “we’d better be starting. I think as Drake does, that we’re tabu. Barring accident there’s no danger. And if I guess right about these Things, accident is impossible.”

“As inconceivable as the multiplication table going wrong,” he laughed, straightening.

And so quickly we made ready. Our rifles would be worse than useless, we knew; our pistols we decided to carry, as Drake put it, “for comfort.” Canteens filled with water; a couple of emergency rations, a few instruments, including a small spectroscope, a selection from the medical kit – all these he packed in a little haversack which he threw over his broad shoulders.

I pocketed my compact but exceedingly powerful field-glasses. To my poignant and everlasting regret my camera had been upon the bolting Pony, and Ventnor had long been out of films for his.

We were ready for our journey!

— XXVIII —

INTO THE PIT

Our path led straight away, a smooth and dark-gray road whose surface resembled cement packed under enormous pressure. It was all of fifty feet wide and now in daylight glistened faintly as though overlaid with some vitreous coating. It narrowed abruptly into a wedged way that stopped at the threshold of Norhala’s door. Diminishing through the distance it stretched straight as an arrow onward and vanished between the perpendicular cliffs which formed the frowning gateway through which the night before we had passed upon the coursing cubes from the pit of the city. Here, as then, a mistiness checked the gaze.

Ruth with us, we made a brief inspection of the surroundings of Norhala’s house. It was set as though in the narrowest portion of an hour-glass. The precipitous walls marched inward from the gateway forming the lower half of the figure; at the back they swung apart at a wider angle.

This upper part of the hour-glass was filled with a park-like forest. It was closed, perhaps twenty miles away, by a barrier of cliffs – how, I wondered, did the path which Yuruk had pointed out to me pierce them? Was it by pass or tunnel; and why was it the armored men had not found and followed it?

The waist between these two mountain wedges was a valley not more than a mile wide. Norhala’s house stood in its center; and it was like a garden, dotted with flowering and fruiting trees, with gorgeous shrubs and fragrant lilies and here and there a tiny green meadow. The great globe of blue that was Norhala’s dwelling seemed less to rest upon the ground than to emerge from it; as though its basis curvatures were hidden in the earth. What was its substance I could not tell. It was as though built of the lacquer of the gems whose colors it held. And beautiful, wondrously, incredibly beautiful it was – an immense bubble of froth of molten sapphires and turquoises!

We had no time to study its beauties. A few last instructions to Ruth, and we set forth down the gray road. Hardly had we taken a dozen steps when there came a faint cry from her.

“Dick! Dick – come here!”

He sprang to her, caught her hands in his. For a moment, half frightened it seemed, she considered him.

“Dick,” I heard her whisper. “Dick – come back safe to me!”

I saw his arms close about her, hers tighten around his neck; black hair touched the silken brown curls, their lips met, clung. I turned away.

In a little time he joined me; head down, silent, he strode along beside me, utterly dejected.

A hundred yards more and we turned. Ruth was still standing on the threshold of the house of mystery, watching after us. She waved her hands, flitted in, was hidden from us. And Drake once more silent, we pushed on.

“I’m glad, Dick,” I said at last.

“I’ve loved her since first I saw her—” he gripped my hand – “and she has me, she says. Told me that if she knew I really loved her, she could make a better fight against – against what she calls the taint in her while we were away. That’s why she did the proposing.” He laughed. “A taint! Any taint in that blessed angel! I guess not! Still – she’s afraid, terribly afraid, of something she thinks is in herself. I’ll admit I thought different last night, but then I was shaky. It’s nonsense – all damned nonsense!”

But I had no words to reassure him; for I was not at all certain that Ruth’s fear was imaginary. Her terror and shame had been too real, her description of her symptoms all too clear to be hallucination. Was it not possible that she had been put en support by the sentient Disc With itself and 3 its people; that she had been subjected to some process of magnetization, not necessarily sinister, wielded by it and which produced in her a hypersensitivity to its will and thought? Among our own kind we have this receptivity – minds that react to each other without the stimulus of the spoken word, minds which are attuned; and other minds unattuned so that not even by the spoken or written word can our thought enter them.

What mysterious currents are these between brains along which the silent mes sages fly? Clearly only something of the kind could explain Norhala’s interchange of ideation with – the Disc. Ruth, conscious of it, might well regard it as a taint. Yet it might be of the greatest aid to us – and neither taint nor harmful to her, unless – unless—

I strove to ward off the dreadful thought by taking minute note of our surroundings.

The walls of the gateway were close. The sparse vegetation along the base of the cliffs had ceased; the roadway itself had merged into the smooth, bare floor of the cañon. From vertical edge to vertical edge of the rocky portal stretched a curtain of shimmering mist. As we drew close we saw that this was motionless, and less like vapor of water than vapor of light; it streamed in oddly fixed lines like atoms of crystals in a still solution. Drake thrust an arm within it, waved it; the mist did not move. It seemed instead to interpenetrate the arm – as though bone and flesh were spectral, without power to dislodge the shining particles from position!

We passed within it – side by side.

Instantly I knew that whatever these veils were, they were not moisture. The air we breathed was dry, electric. I was sensible of a decided stimulation, a pleasant tingling along every nerve, a gaiety almost light-headed. We could see each other quite plainly, the rocky floor on which we trod as well. Within this vapor of light there was no ghost of sound: it was utterly empty of it. I saw Drake turn to me, his mouth open in a laugh, his lips move in speech – and although he bent close to my ear, I heard nothing! He frowned, puzzled, walked on.

Abruptly we stepped into an opening, a pocket of clear air. Our ears were filled with a high, shrill humming as unpleasantly vibrant as the shriek of the sand blast. Six feet to our right was the edge of the ledge on which we stood; beyond it was a sheer drop into space! A shaft piercing down into the void and walled with the mists!

But it was not that shaft that made us clutch each other. No! It was that through it uprose a colossal column of the cubes! It stood a hundred feet from us. Its top was another hundred feet above the level of our ledge and its length vanished in the depths.

And its head was a gigantic spinning wheel yards in thickness, tapering at its point of contact with the cliff wall into a diameter half that of the side dogs! the column, gleaming with flashes of green flame and grinding with tremendous speed at the face of the rock!

Over it, attached to the cliff, was a great vizored hood of some pale yellow metal, and it was this shelter that cutting off the vaporous light like an enormous umbrella made the pocket of clarity in which we stood, the shaft up which sprang the pillar. All along the length of that column as far as we could see the myriad tiny eyes of the Metal People shone out upon us, not twinkling mischievously, but – grotesque as this may seem, I cannot help it – wide with surprise!

Only an instant longer did the great wheel spin. I saw the screaming rock melting beneath it, dropping like lava. Then, as though it had received some message, abruptly its motion ceased. It tilted, looked down upon us! I noted that its grinding surface was studded thickly with the smaller pyramids and that the tips of these were each capped with what seemed to be faceted gems gleaming with the same pale yellow radiance as the Shrine of the Cones.

The column was bending; the wheel approaching!

Drake seized me by the arm, drew me swiftly back into the mists. We were shrouded in their silences. Step by step we went on, peering for the edge of the shelf, feeling in fancy that prodigious wheeled face stealing upon us; afraid to look behind lest in looking we might step too close to the unseen verge!

Yard after yard we slowly covered. Suddenly the vapors thinned; we passed out of them—

A chaos of sound beat about us! The clanging of a million anvils; the clamor of a million forges; the crashing of a hundred years of thunder; the roarings of a thousand hurricanes! The prodigious bellowings of the Pit beating against us now as they had when we had flown down the long ramp into the depths of the Sea of Light!

Instinct with unthinkable power was that clamor; the very voice of Force! Stunned, nay, blinded, by it, we covered ears and eyes!

As before, the clangor died, leaving in its wake a bewildered silence. Then that silence began to throb with a vast humming, and through that humming rang a murmur, as that of a river of diamonds.

We opened our eyes, stared forth, felt awe grip our throats as though a hand had clutched them!

Difficult, difficult almost beyond thought is it for me now to essay to draw in words the scene before us then. For although I can set down what it was we saw, I nor any man can transmute into phrases its essence, its spirit, the intangible wonder that was its synthesis – the appallingly beautiful, soul-shaking strangeness of it, its grandeur, its fantasy, and its alien horror! The Domain of the Metal Monster – it was filled like a chalice with Its will; was the visible expression of that will!

We stood at the very rim of a wide ledge. We looked down into an immense pit, shaped into a perfect oval, thirty miles in length I judged, and half that as wide, and rimmed with colossal precipices. We were at the upper end of this deep valley and on the tip of its axis; I mean that it stretched longitudinally before us along the line of greatest length. Five hundred feet below was the pit’s floor. Gone were the clouds of light that had obscured it the night before; the air crystal clear; every detail standing out with stereoscopic sharpness.

First the mazed eyes rested upon a broad-band of fluorescent amethyst, the entire rocky wall. It girdled the cliffs at a height of ten thousand feet, and from this flaming zone, as though it clutched them, fell the curtains of sparkling mist, the enigmatic, sound-slaying vapors. But now I saw that all of these veils were not motionless like those through which we had just passed.

To the northwest they were pulsing like the aurora, and like the aurora they were shot through with swift iridescences, spectrums, polychromatic gleamings. And always these were ordered, geometric – like immense and flitting prismatic crystals flying swiftly to the very edges of the veils, then darting as swiftly back.

From zone and veils the gaze leaped to the incredible City towering not two miles away from us.

Blue black, shining, sharply cut as though from polished steel, it reared full five thousand feet on high! How great it was I could not tell, for the height of its precipitous walls barred the vision. The frowning facade turned toward us was, I estimated, five miles in length. Its colossal scarp struck the eyes like a blow; its shad ow, falling upon us, checked the heart. It was overpowering, gigantic – dreadful as that midnight city of Dis that Dante saw rising up from another pit!

It was a metal city, mountainous!

Featureless, smooth, the immense wall of it heaved heavenward. It should have been blind, that vast oblong face – but it was not blind, and therein lay the intangible horror! From it radiated alertness, vigilance. It seemed to gaze toward us as though every foot were manned with sentinels; guardians invisible to the eyes whose concentration of watchfulness was caught by some subtle hidden sense higher than sight. It was a metal city, mountainous and – aware!

About its base were huge openings – its gates, i thought. Through and around these portals swirled hordes of the Metal People; in units and in combinations coming and going, streaming in and out, forming as they came and went patterns about the openings like the fretted spume of great breakers surging into, retreating from, ocean-bitten gaps in some iron-bound coast.

From the immensity of the City the stunned eyes dropped back to the Pit in which it lay. Its floor was plaque-like, a great plane smooth as though turned by potter’s wheel, broken by no mound nor hillock, slope nor terrace: level, horizontal, flawlessly flat. On it was no green living thing – no tree nor bush, meadow nor covert

It was alive with movement; seethingly, terrifyingly alive! It was animate with a ferment that was as purposeful as it was mechanical, a ferment symmetrical, geometrical, supremely ordered—

The surging of the Metal Hordes!

There they moved beneath us, these enigmatic beings, in a countless host. They marched and counter-marched in battalions, in regiments, in armies. Far to the south I glimpsed a company of colossal shapes like mobile, castellated and pyramidal mounts. They were circling, weaving about each other with incredible rapidity – like scores of the pyramid of Cheops crowned with gigantic turrets and come to life and dancing! From these turrets came vivid flashes, lightning bright – and on their wake the rolling echoes of far-away thunder!

Out of the north sped a squadron of obelisks from whose tops flamed and flared the immense spinning wheels, appearing at this distance like fiery whirling disks!

Up from their seething the Metal People lifted themselves in a thousand incredible shapes, shapes squared and globed and spiked and shifting swiftly into other thousands as incredible. I saw a mass of them draw themselves up into the likeness of a tent sky-scraper high; hang so for an instant, then writhed into a monstrous chimera of a dozen towering legs that strode away like a gigantic headless and bodiless tarantula in steps two hundred feet long! I watched mile-long lines of them shape and reshape into circles, into interlaced lozenges and pentagons – then lift in great columns and shoot through the air in unimaginable barrage.

Through all this incessant movement I sensed plainly purpose, knew that it was definite activity toward a definite end, caught the clear suggestion of drill, of maneuver!

And when the shiftings of the Metal Hordes permitted we saw that all the flat floor of the valley was stripped and checkered, stippled and tesselated with every color, patterned with enormous lozenges and squares, rhomboids and parallelogram, pentagons and hexagons and diamonds, lunettes, circles and spirals; harlequined yet harmonious; instinct with a grotesque suggestion of a super-Futurism. But always was this patterning ordered, always coherent! As though it were a page on which was spelled some untranslatable other world message! Fourth Dimensional revelations by some Euclidean deity! Commandments traced by some mathematical God!

Looping across the vale, emerging from the sparkling folds of the southernmost curtainings and vanishing into the gleaming veils of the easternmost, ran a broad ribbon of pale-green jade; not straightly but with manifold convolutions and flourishes. It was like a sentence in Arabic!

It was margined with sapphire blue. All along its twisting course two broad bands of jet margined the cerulean shore. It was spanned by scores of flashing crystal arches. Nor were these bridges – even from that distance I knew they were no bridges. From them came the crystalline murmurings.

Jade? This stream jade? If so then it must be in truth molten, for I caught its swift and polished rushing! It was no jade. It was in truth a river; a river running like a writing across the patterned plane!

I looked upward – up to the circling peaks. They were a stupendous coronet thrusting miles deep into the dazzling sky. I raised my glasses, swept them. In Color they were an immense and variegated flower with countless multiform petals of stone shaped by the very genius of bizarrie; in outline they were a ring of fortresses built by fantastic unknown Gods. Up they thrust – domed and arched, spired and horned, pyramided, fanged and needled. Here were palisades of burning orange with barbicans of incandescent bronze; there aiguilles of azure rising from bastions of cinnabar red; turrets of royal purple, obelisks of indigo; titanic forts whose walls were splashed with vermillion, with citron yellows and with rust of rubies; watch towers of flaming scarlet.

Scattered among them were the flashing emeralds of the glaciers and the immense pallid baroques of the snow fields.

Like a diadem, the summits ringed the Pit. Below them ran the ring of flashing amethyst with its auroral mists. Between them lay the vast and patterned flat covered with still symbol and inexplicable movement. Under their summits brooded the blue black, metallic mass of the Argus-eyed City.

Within encircling walls, over plain and from that City hovered a cosmic spirit not to be understood by man. Like an emanation of stars and space, it was yet gem fine and gem hard, crystalline and metallic, lapidescent and—

Conscious!

Down from the ledge where we stood fell a steep ramp, similar to that by which, in the darkness, we had descended. It dropped at an angle of at least forty-five degrees; its surface was smooth and polished.

“Hell!” Drake emerged from his trance of wonder into practicality. “We can’t walk that. Once we get started – there isn’t a traffic cop on Long Island who could catch up to us.”

“Maybe there’s another way down,” I replied.

Through the mists at our back stole a shining block. It paused, seemed to perk itself; spun so that in turn each of its six faces took us in!

I felt myself lifted upon it by multitudes of little invisible hands; saw Drake whirling up beside me. I moved toward him – thickly – through the force that held us. The block swept away from the ledge, swayed for a moment. Under is, as though we were floating in air, the Pit lay stretched. There was a rapid readjustment, a shifting of our two selves upon another surface. I looked down upon a tremendous, slender pillar of the cubes, dropping below me five hundred feet to the valley’s floor a column of which the block that held us was the top!

Gone was the whirling wheel that had crowned it, but I knew this for the Grinding Thing from which we had fled; the questing block had been its scout. As though curious to know more of us, the Shape had sought us out through the mists, its messenger had caught us, delivered us to it! Throughout all the spiring height of it I sensed that same curiosity – and it was as though from the cube that held us went down messages describing us, telling of us, as though indeed the block were the eye of the Thing sending our image into every hidden nerve of the column! There was about that still survey something indescribably – monstrous!

The pillar leaned over – bent like that shining pillar that had bridged for us, at Norhala’s commands, the abyss. The floor of the valley arose to meet us. Further and further leaned the pillar. Again there was a rapid shifting of us to another surface of the crowning cube. Swifter swept up toward us the valley floor. A dizziness clouded my sight. There was a little shock, a rolling over of the Thing that had held us—

We stood upon the floor of the Pit!

And breaking from the immense and prostrate shaft on whose top we had ridden downward came score upon score of the cubes! They broke from it, disintegrating it; circled about us, curiously, interestedly, twinkling at us from their deep sparkling points of eyes!

High above I could see the ledge from which we had been snatched. And as I looked the soundless veils of vapor of light covered it; hid it.

Helplessly we gazed at those who circled around us. Then suddenly I felt myself lifted once more, was tossed to the surface of the nearest block. Upon it I spun while the tiny eyes searched me. Then like a human ball it tossed me to an her. I caught a glimpse of Drake’s tall figure drifting through the air.

The play became more rapid, breath taking. It was play; I recognized that. But it was perilous play for us. I felt myself as fragile as a doll of glass in the hands of careless children.

A score or more of the cubes merged, clicked into a fifty-foot obelisk which tossed me across a hundred feet of space. As I passed I saw that there were now thousands of the People of Metal crowding about the spot of which we were the nucleus. Their squared and curved and angled surfaces gleamed like pale blue steel; their eyes glistened. I caught a glimpse of other hundreds raising themselves from the throng in pillars and fan-shaped columns; thrusting themselves up to see us! In mid air, flying from the flicking of an obelisk similar to that which had thrown me, Drake passed. Upon the top of his tormentor I landed as softly as upon a feather pillow, but gasping, empty of breath from the swift flight.

Back to its fellow the twinkling shaft hurled me.

As I flew a great globe came coursing along. It stopped abruptly. In mid-flight I was checked; drawn downward; hung poised a foot above the surface of this sphere. The unknown force it wielded held me suspended there while it spun beneath me, examining me! I was tossed to another waiting cube; the globe spun away. On the ground, not ten feet from me, was Dick, face white, swaying dizzily. I saw that one of the great gate ways of the City was close. Suddenly the cube that held me tightened its grip; tightened it so that it drew me irresistibly flat down upon its surface. Before I dropped Drake’s body leaped toward me as though drawn by a lasso. He fell, swearing feebly, at my side.

Then pursued by scores of the Things and like some mischievous boy bearing off spoils, the block that held us raced away, straight for the open portal. A blaze of incandescent blue flame blinded me; again as the dazzlement faded I saw Drake beside me – a skeleton form! Swiftly flesh melted back upon him, clothed him!

The cube stopped, abruptly; the hosts of little unseen hands raised us, slid us gently over its edge, set us upright beside it. And it sped away!

All about us stretched another of those vast halls in which on high burned the pale gilt suns. Between its colossal columns streamed thousands of the Metal Folk; no longer hurriedly, but quietly, deliberately, sedately.

We were within the City – even as Ventnor had commanded.

— XXIX —

THE CITY
THAT WAS ALIVE!

Close beside us was one of the cyclopean columns. We crept to it; crouched at its base opposite the drift of the Metal People; strove, huddled there, to regain our shaken poise. Like bagatelles we felt in that tremendous place, the weird luminaries gleaming above like garlands of frozen suns, the enigmatic hosts of animate cubes and spheres and pyramids trooping past. They ranged in size from shapes yard-high to giants of thirty feet or more. They paid no heed to us, did not stop; streaming: on, engrossed in whatever mysterious business was summoning them. And after a time their numbers lessened; thinned down to widely separate groups, to stragglers; then ceased. The hall was empty of them.

We stood. As far as the eye could reach the columned spaces stretched. I was conscious once more of that unusual flow of energy through every vein and nerve.

“Follow the crowd!” said Drake. “Do you feel just full of pep and ginger, by the way?”

“I am aware of the most extraordinary vigor,” I answered.

“Some weird joint.” he mused, looking about him. “Wonder if they have regular streets and houses? Wonder if they have any windows? This whole place looked solid to what I could see of it. Wonder if we’ll get up against it for air? These Things don’t need it, that’s sure. Wonder—”

He broke off, staring fascinatedly at the pillar behind us.

“Look here, Goodwin! There was a tremor in his voice. “What do you make of this?”

I followed his pointing finger; looked at him inquiringly.

“The eyes!” he said impatiently. “Don’t you see them? The eyes in the column!”

And now I saw! The pillar was a pale metallic blue, in color a trifle darker than the Metal Folk. All within it Were the myriads of tiny crystalline points that we had grown to know were the receptors of some strange sense of sight. But they did not sparkle as did those others; they were dull, lifeless. I touched the surface. It was smooth, cool – with none of that subtle, warm vitality that pulsed through all the Things with which I had come in contact. I shook my head, realizing as I did so what a shock the incredible possibility he had suggested had given me.

“No,” I said. “There is a resemblance, yes. But there is no force about this stuff; no life. Besides, such a thing is utterly incredible.”

“They might be – dormant,” he suggested stubbornly. “Can you see any marks of their joining – if they are the cubes?”

Together we scanned the pillar minutely. The faces seemed unbroken, continuous; there was no trace of those thin and shining lines that marked the juncture of the cubes when they had clicked together to form the bridge of the abyss or that had gleamed, cross-like, upon the back of the combined buttercup radiance. four upon which we had followed Norhala.

“It’s a sheer impossibility! It’s madness to think such a thing, Dick!” I exclaimed, and wondered at my own vehemence of denial.

“Maybe,” he shook his head doubtfully. “Maybe – but – well – let’s be on our way.”

We strode on, following the direction the Metal Folk had gone. Clearly Drake was still doubtful; at each pillar he hesitated, scanning it closely with troubled eyes. But I, having determinedly dismissed the idea; was more interested in the fantastic lights that flooded this columned hall with their Still they were, and unwinking; not disks, I could see now, but globes. Great and small they floated motionless, their rays extending rigidly and as still as the orbs that shed them. Yet rigid as they were there was nothing about either rays or orbs that suggested either hardness or the metallic. They were vaporous, soft as the St. Elmo’s fire, the witch lights that cling at times to the spars of ships, weird gleaming visitors from the invisible ocean of atmospheric electricity.

When they disappeared, as they did frequently, it was instantaneously, completely, with a disconcerting sleight-of-hand finality. I noted, though, that when they did so vanish, immediately close to where they had been other orbs swam forth with that same astonishing abruptness; sometimes only one, larger it might be than that which had gone; sometimes a cluster of smaller globes, their frozen, crocused rays impinging.

What could they be, I wondered – how fixed, and what the source of their light? Could they be the products of electro-magnetic currents and borne of the interpenetration of such streams flowing above us? Such a theory might account for their disappearance, and reappearance, shiftings of the flows that changed the light producing points of contact. Wireless lights? If so, here was an idea that human science might elaborate if ever we returned to—

“Now which way?” Drake broke in upon my musing. The hall had ended. We stood before a blank wall vanishing into the soft mists hiding the roof of the chamber.

“I thought we had been going along the way They went,” I said in amazement.

“So did I,” he answered. “We must have circled. They never went through that unless – unless—” He hesitated.

“Unless what?” I asked sharply.

“Unless it opened and let them through,” he said astonishingly. “Have you forgotten those great ovals – like cats’ eyes that opened in the Outer walls?” he added quietly.

I had forgotten. I looked again at the wall. Certainly it was smooth, lineless. In one unbroken, shining surface it arose, a facade of polished metal. Within it the deep set points of light were duller even than they had been in the pillars; almost indeed indistinguishable.

“Go on to the left,” I said, none too patiently. “And get that absurd notion out of your head.”

“All right.” He flushed. “But you don’t think I’m afraid, do you?” “If what you’re thinking were true, you’d have a right to be,” I replied tartly. “And I want to tell you I’d be afraid. Damned afraid!” In my own perturbation I let slip from me an unaccustomed adverb of profanity.

For perhaps two hundred paces we skirted the base of the wall. We came abruptly to an opening, an oblong passageway full fifty foot wide by twice as high. At its entrance the mellow, saffron light was cut off as though y an invisible screen. The tunnel itself s filled with a dim grayish blue luster. For an instant we contemplated it.

“I wouldn’t care to be caught in there by any rush,” I hesitated.

“There’s not much good in thinking of that now,” said Drake earnestly. “A few chances more or less in a joint of this kind is nothing between friends, Goodwin; take it from me. Come on.”

We entered. Walls, floor and roof were composed of the same substance as the great pillars, the wall of the outer chamber: filled like them with dimmed replicas of the twinkling eye points.

“Odd that all the places in here are square,” muttered Drake. “They don’t seem to have used any spherical or pyramidal ideas in their building – if it is a building.”

It was true; now that he had called my attention to it, I recollected that so far in the architecture I had seen neither curve nor triangle. All was mathematically straight up and down and across. It was strange – still we had seen little as yet. And there was a warmth about this passageway we trod; a difference in the air of it. The warmth grew, a dry and baking heat; but stimulative rather than oppressive. I touched the walls; the Warmth did not come from them. And there was no wind. Yet as we went on the heat increased.

The passageway turned at a right angle, continuing in a corridor half its former dimensions. Far away shone a high bar of pale yellow radiance, rising like a pillar of light from floor to roof. Toward it, perforce, we trudged. Its brilliancy grew greater. A few paces away from it we stopped. The yellow luminescence streamed through a slit not more than a foot wide in the wall. We were in a cul-de-sac – for the opening was not wide enough for either Drake or me to push through. Through it with the light gushed the curious heat enveloping us.

Drake walked to the opening, peered through. I saw his body stiffen, his eyes widen wildly; joined him and stared as incredulously.

At first all that I could see was a space filled with the saffron lambency. Then I saw that this was splashed with tiny flashes of the jewel fires; little lances and javelin thrusts of burning emeralds and rubies; darting gem hard flames rose scarlet and pale sapphire; quick flares of violet.

Into my sight through the irised, crocus mist swam the radiant body of – Norhala!

Robeless she stood, clad only in the veils of her hair that glowed now like spun silk of molten copper, her strange eyes wide and smiling, the galaxies of tiny stars sparkling through their gray depths. And all about her swirled a countless host of the Little Things! From them came the gem fire piercing the aureate mists. They played and frolicked about her in scores of swiftly forming, swiftly changing, goblin shapes.

They circled her feet in shining, elfin rings; then opening into flaming disks and stars, shot up and spun about the white miracle of her body in great girdles of multi-colored living fires. Mingled with disk and star were tiny crosses gleaming with sullen, deep crimsons and smoky orange!

A flash of blue incandescence and a slender pillared shape leaped from the floor: became a coronet, a whirling, flashing halo toward which streamed up the flaming tendrilings of her tresses! Other halos circled her arms and breasts; they spun like brace lets about the outstretched arms! Then like a swiftly rushing wave a host of the Little Things thrust themselves up, covered her, hid her in a fiery coruscating cloud! I saw an exquisite arm thrust itself from their clinging, wave gaily; saw her glorious head emerge from the incredible, the seething draperies of living jewels! I heard her laughter, sweet and golden and far away!

Goddess of the Inexplicable! Madonna of the Metal People!

“The babes of the Metal People,” I whispered.

“God!” sighed Drake. “Their nursery. The nursery of the – Little Things!”

She was gone, blotted out from our sight! Gone too were bar of light and the chamber into which we had been peering. We stared at a smooth, blank wall! With that same ensorcelled swiftness the wall had closed even as we had stared through it; closed so quickly that we had not seen its motion!

I gripped Drake; shrank with him into the farthest corner – for opposite us the wall was opening! First it was only a crack; then rapidly it widened. There stretched another passageway, luminous and long; far down it we glimpsed movement. Closer that movement came, grew plainer. Out of the mistily luminous distances, three abreast and filling the corridor from side to side, raced upon us a company of the great spheres! Back we cowered from their approach – back and back; arms outstretched, pressing against the barrier, flattening our selves against the shock of the destroying impact menacing.

“It’s all up,” muttered Drake. “No place to run. They’re bound to smash us. Stick close, Doc. Get back to Ruth. Maybe I can stop ’em!”

Ere ever I could check, he had leaped straight in the path of the rushing globes now a scant two-score yards away. He stood, head held high – a human straw against the on-pouring metal avalanche. A human straw, yes – and an heroic symbol of the unconquerable human will! The cataract of the globes stopped – halted a few feet from him before I could reach his side. They seemed to contemplate us, astonished. They turned upon themselves, as though consulting. Slowly they advanced. We were pushed forward; lifted gently. Then as we hung suspended, held by that force which I can always only liken to myriads of tiny invisible hands, the shining arcs of their backs undulated beneath us; their files swung round the corner and marched down the passage by which we had come from the immense hall. And when the last rank had passed from under us we were dropped softly to our feet; stood swaying in their wake.

A curious frenzy of helpless indignation shook me, a rage of humiliation obscuring all gratitude I should have felt, for our escape. Drake’s eyes blazed wrath.

“The insolent devils!” He raised clenched fists. “The insolent, domineering devils!”

We stared after them.

Was the passage growing narrower – closing? Even as I gazed I saw it shrink; saw its walls slide silently toward each other! I pushed Drake into the newly opened way; sprang after him.

Behind us was an unbroken wall covering all that space in which but a moment before we had stood!

Is it to be wondered that a panic seized us; that we began to run crazily down the alley that still lay open before us, casting over our shoulders quick, fearful glances to see whether that inexorable, dreadful closing was continuing, threatening to crush us between these walls like flies in a vise of steel?

But they did not close; unbroken, silent, the way stretched before us and behind us. At last, gasping, avoiding each other’s gaze, we paused.

And at that very moment of pause, a deeper tremor shook me, a trembling of the very foundations of life, the shuddering of one who faces the inconceivable knowing at last that the inconceivable – is!

For, abruptly, walls and floor and roof broke forth into countless twinklings! As though a film had been withdrawn from them, as though they had awakened from slumber, myriads of little points of Light shone forth upon us from the pale-blue surfaces – lights that considered us, measured us – mocked us!

The little points of living light that were the eyes of the Metal People! This was no corridor cut through inert matter by mechanic art; its opening had been caused by no hidden mechanisms! It was a living Thing – walled and floored and roofed by the living – bodies – of the Metal People themselves! And its opening, as had been the closing of that other passage, was the conscious, coordinate and voluntary action of the Things that formed these mighty walls.

An action that obeyed, was directed by, the incredibly gigantic, communistic will which, like the spirit of the hive, the soul of the formicary animated every unit of them!

A greater realization swept us. If this were true, then those pillars in the vast hall, its towering walls – all this City was one living Thing!

An incredible structure built of the animate bodies of countless millions! Tons upon countless tons of them shaping a gigantic pile of which every atom was sentient, mobile – intelligent!

Now I knew why it was that its frowning facade had seemed to watch us Argus-eyed as the Things had tossed us toward it. It had watched us! That flood of watchfulness pulsing about us had been actual concentration of regard of untold billions of tiny eyes of the living blocks which formed the City’s cliff.

A City that Saw! A City that was Alive!

No secret mechanism then – back darted my mind to that first terror – had closed the wall, shutting from our sight Norhala at play with the Little Things! None had opened the way for, had closed the way behind, the coursing spheres It had been done by the conscious action of the conscious Things of whose living bodies was built this whole tremendous pile! The fact was beyond comprehension.

I think that for a moment we both went a little mad as that staggering truth came to us. I know we started running once more, side by side, gripping like frightened children each other’s hands. Then Drake stopped.

“By all the hell of this place,” he said, “I’ll run no more! After all – we’re men! If they kill us, they kill us. But by the God who made me I’ll run from them no more. I’ll die standing!”

His courage steadied me. Defiantly we marched on. Up from below us, down from the roof, out from the walls of our way the hosts of eyes gleamed and twinkled upon us.

“Who could have believed it?” he muttered, half to himself. “A living city of them! A living nest of them: a prodigious living nest of metal!” A nest? I caught at the word. What did it suggest? That was it – the nest of the army ants, the city of the army ants, that Beebe had studied in the South American jungles and once described to me. After all, was this more wonderful, more unbelievable than that – the city of the ants which was formed by their living bodies precisely as this was of the bodies of the Cubes?

How had Beebe phrased it – “the home, the nest, the hearth, the nursery, the bridal suite, the kitchen, the bed and board of the army ants.” Built of and occupied by those blind and dead and savage little insects which by the guidance of smell alone carried on the most intricate operations, the most complex activities. Nothing here was stranger than that, I reflected – if once one could rid the mind of the paralyzing influence of the shapes of the Metal Things. Whence came the stimuli that moved them, the stimuli to which they reacted? Well then – whence and how came the orders to which the ants responded; that bade them open this corridor in their nest, close that, form this chamber, fill that one? Was one more mysterious than the other? [12]

Breaking into my current of thoughts came consciousness that I was moving with increased speed; that my body was fut growing – lighter! Simultaneous with this recognition I felt myself lifted from the floor of the corridor and levitated with considerable rapidity forward; looking down I saw that floor several feet below me. Drake’s arm wound itself around my shoulder.

“Closing up behind us,” he muttered. “They’re putting us – out.”

It was, indeed, as though the passageway had wearied of our deliberate progress! Had decided to – give us a lift! Rearward it was shutting. I noted with interest how accurately this motion kept pace with our own speed, and how fluidly the walls seemed to run together. Our movement became accelerated. It was as though we floated buoyantly, weightless, upon some swift stream. The sensation was curiously pleasant, languorous – what was that word Ruth had used? – elemental – and free! The supporting force seemed to flow equally from walls and floor; to reach down to us from the roof. It was slumberously even, and effortless. I saw that in advance of us the living corridor was opening even as behind us it was closing.

All around us the little eye points twinkled and – laughed!

There was no danger here – there could be none! Deeper and deeper dropped my mind into the depths of that alien tranquility. Faster and faster we floated – onward.

Abruptly, ahead of us shone a blaze of – daylight! We passed into it. The force holding us withdrew its grip; I felt solidity beneath my feet; stood and leaned back against a smooth wall.

The corridor had ended and – had shut us out from itself!

“Bounced!” exclaimed Drake. And incongruous, flippant, colloquial as was that word, I know none that would better exemplify my own feelings.

We were bounced out upon a turret jutting from the barrier. And before us lay spread the most amazing, the most extraordinarily fantastic scene upon which I think the vision of man has rested since the advent of time!

— XXX —

THE VAMPIRES OF THE SUN!

It was a crater; a mile on high and ten thousand feet across ran the circular lip of its vast rim. Above it was a circle of white and glaring sky in whose center flamed the sun. And instantly, before my vision could grasp a tithe of that panorama, I knew that this place was the very heart of the Metal Emperor’s City; its vital ganglion; its soul.

Around the crater lip were poised thousands of concave disks, vernal green, enormous. They were like a border of gigantic, upthrust shields; and within each, emblazoned like a shield’s device, was a blinding flower of flame – the reflected, dilated face of the sun. Below this glistening, glaucous diadem hung, pendent, clusters of other disks, swarmed like the globular hiving of the constellation Hercules’ captured suns. And in each of these too hung prisoned the image of the day star.

A hundred feet below us was the crater floor.

Up from it thrust a mountainous forest of the pallidly radiant cones: bristling; prodigious. Tier upon tier, thicket upon thicket, phalanx upon phalanx they climbed. Up and up, pyramidically, they flung their spiked hosts.

They drew together two thousand feet above us, clustering close about the foot of a single huge spire which thrust itself Skyward for half a mile above them. The crest of this spire was truncated. From its shorn tip radiated scores of long and slender spokes holding in place a thousand feet wide wheel of wan green disks whose concave surfaces, unlike those smooth ones girding the crater, were curiously faceted.

This amazing structure rested upon a myriad-footed base of crystal, even as had that other cornute fantasy beside which we had met the great Disc. It was in size to that as Goliath to David; no – as Leviathan to a minnow. From it streamed the same baffling suggestion of invincible force transmuted into matter; energy coalesced into the tangible; power made concentrate in the vestments of substance.

Half-way between crater lip and floor ran the hordes of the Metal People. In colossal animate chevaux-de-frise of thousand-foot girders they thrust themselves out from the curving walls – walls, I knew, as alive as they! From these Brobdignagian beams they swung in ropes and clusters – spheres and cubes studded as thickly with the pyramids as ever Titan’s mace with spikes. Group after bizarre group they dropped; pendulous. Coppices of slender columns of thistled globes sprang up to meet the festooned joists. Between the girders they draped themselves in long, stellated garlands; grouped themselves in innumerable, kaleidoscopic patterns. They clicked into place around the golden turret in which we crouched. In fantastic arrases they swayed in front of us – now hiding by, now revealing through, their quicksilver inter-weavings the mount of the Cones.

And steadily those flowing in below added to their multitudes; gliding up cable and pillar; building out still further the living girders, stringing themselves upon living festoon and living garland, weaving in among them, changing their shapes, re-writing their symbols.

They swung and threaded swiftly, in shifting arabesque and cocquillage, in Gothic traceries, in lace-like Renaissance fantasies, arches and brocatteled astragals; utterly bizarre, unutterably beautiful – crystalline, geometric always.

Abruptly their movement ceased – so abruptly that the stoppage of all the ordered turmoil had in it a quality of appalling silence!

An unimaginable tapestry bedight with incredible broidery, rich with a bijoutrie Gargantuan, the Metal People draped the vast cup!

Pillared it as though it were a temple!

Garnished it with their bodies as though it were a shrine!

Across the floor, toward the Cones glided a palely lustrous sphere. In shape only a globe like all its kind, yet was it invested with power; radiated power as a star light; was clothed in unseen garments of supernal force; almost visibly behind it trailed the royal purple robes of puissance. In its wake drifted two great pyramids; after them ten spheres but little smaller than the Shape which led.

“The Metal Emperor!” breathed Drake.

On they swept until they had reached the base of the Cones. They paused at the edge of the crystal tabling. They turned. Came a flashing as of a meteor burst! The globe had opened into that splendor of jewel fires before which had floated Norhala; had floated Ruth; the Flaming Disk into whose coruscations Ventnor had sent his bullets. I saw again the luminous ovals of sapphire studding its golden zone, the mystic rose of pulsing, petaled flame, the still core of incandescent ruby that was the heart of that rose.

Strangely I felt my own heart veer toward this – Thing; bowing before its beauty and its strength; almost worshiping!

Worshiping! I worshiping – That! A shock of revulsion went through me. I shot a quick, half frightened glance at Drake. He was crouching dangerously close to the lip of the ledge, hands clasped and knuckles white with the intensity of his grip, eyes rapt, staring – upon the verge of worship even as had been I!

“Drake!” I thrust my elbow into his side brutally. “None of that! Remember you’re human! Guard yourself, man – guard yourself!”

“What?” be muttered, turning mazed eyes at me; then, abruptly: “How did you know?”

“I felt it myself,” I answered grimly. “For God’s sake, Dick – hold fast to yourself! Remember – Ruth!”

He shook his head violently – as though to be rid of some clinging, cloying thing.

“Thanks!” he said hoarsely. “I’ll not forget again. Never fear!” He huddled down once more close to the edge of the shelf; peering over. No one of the Metal People had moved; the silence, the stillness was unbroken.

Now the flanking pyramids shot forth into twain stars, blazing with violet luminescences. And one by one after them the ten lesser spheres expanded into flaming orbs; beautiful were they, but less, far less glorious than that Disk of whom they were the counselor? – minister? – what?

Still there was no movement among all the arrased, girdered, pillared hosts.

There came a little wailing; far away it was and far. Nearer it drew. Was that a tremor that passed through the crowded crater? A quick pulse of meagerness? “Hungry!” whispered Drake amazingly. “They’re hungry!”

“Drake!” I looked at him fearfully. “Drake – you’re crazy!”

“All right,” he muttered. “But I felt it. I, felt that jump. It was a hunger shake. The damned things are hungry!”

Closer was the wailing; again that faint tremor quivered over the place. And now I caught it – a quick and avid pulsing!

“Hungry,” whispered Drake again. “Like a lot of lions with the keeper coming along with meat.”

The wailing was below us. I felt, not a quiver this time, but an unmistakable shock pass through the hordes. It throbbed – and passed.

Into the field of our vision, up to the flaming Disk rushed an immense cube. Thrice the height of a tall man – as I think I have noted before – when it unfolded its radiance was that shape of mingled beauty and power I call the Metal Emperor. Yet this Thing eclipsed it. Black, uncompromising, in some indefinable way brutal, its square bulk blotted out the Disk’s effulgence; shrouded it! And a shadow seemed to fall upon the crater! The violet fires of the flanking stars pulsed out – watchfully, threateningly!

For only an instant the darkening block loomed against the Disk; blackened it.

There came another meteor burst of light! Where the cube had been was now a tremendous, fiery cross – a cross inverted!

Its upper arm arose to twice the length either of its horizontals or the square that was its foot. In its opening it must have turned, for its – face – was toward us and away from the Cones, its body hid the Disk and almost all the surfaces of the two watchful Stars. Gigantic, eighty feet at least in height, this cruciform shape stood. It flamed and flickered with angry, smoky crimsons and scarlets; with sullen orange glowings and glitterings of sulphurous yellows. Within its fires were none of those leaping, multi-colored glories that were the Metal Emperor’s; no trace of the pulsing, mystic rose; no shadow of jubilant sapphire, no purple royal; no tender, merciful greens nor gracious opalescences. Nothing even of the blasting violet of the Stars.

All angry, smoky reds and ochers the cross blazed forth – and in its lurid glowings was something sinister, something real, something cruel, something – nearer to earth, closer to man!

“The Keeper of the Cones and the Metal Emperor!” muttered Drake. “I begin to get it – yes – I begin to get – Ventnor!” Once more that pulse, that avid throbbing, shook the crater. And as swiftly in its wake rushed back the stillness, the silence!

The Keeper turned – I saw it palely lustrous blue and metallic back. I drew out my little field-glasses, focused them. The cross slipped sidewise past the Disc, its courtiers, its stellated guardians. As it went by they swung about with it; facing it ever. And now at last was clear to me a thing that had puzzled greatly – the mechanism of that opening process by which sphere became oval disk, pyramid a four-pointed star and – as I had glimpsed in the play of the Little Things about Norhala, could see now so clearly in the Keeper – the blocks took this inverted cruciform shape.

Metal People were hollow – spheres and tetrahedrons and cubes – hollow! Hollow metal – boxes!

In their enclosing sides dwelt all their vitality, their powers – themselves! And those sides were – everything that they were!

Folded, the oval disk became the sphere; the four points of the star, the square from which those points radiated; shutting became the pyramid; the six faces of the cubes were when opened the inverted cross. Nor were these flexible, mobile walls massive. They were indeed, considering the apparent mass of the Metal Folk, most astonishingly fragile. Those of the Keeper, despite its eighty feet of height, could not have been more than a yard in thickness. At the edges I thought I could see groovings, noted the same appearances at the outlines of the Stars. Seen sidewise, the body of the Metal Emperor showed as a convexity; its surface smooth, with a suggestion of transparency. Had the golden zodiac, in which lay what I supposed were the organs of his senses, some function in its assuming of the globular form, I wondered? Paler than the Emperor’s, this zone was possessed also by its ten satellites; I could see no mark of it upon the other Shapes.

The Keeper was bending; its oblong upper plane dropping forward as though upon a hinge. Lower and lower this flange bent – in a grotesque, terrifying obeisance; a horrible mockery of reverence! Was this mountain of Cones then actually a shrine – an idol of the Metal People – their God?

The oblong that was the upper half of the cruciform Shape extended now at right angles to the horizontal arms. It hovered, a rectangle forty feet long, as many feet over the floor at the base of the crystal pedestal. It bent again, this time from the hinge that held the outstretched arms to the base. And now it was a huge truncated cross, a T-shaped figure, hovering only twenty feet above the pave.

Down from the Keeper writhed and flicked a tangle of tentacles; serpentine, whip-like. Silvery white, they were dyed with the scarlet and orange flamings of the surface now hidden from my eyes; reflected those sullen and angry gleamings. Vermicous, coiling, they seemed to drop from every inch of the overhanging planes!

Something there was beneath them – something like an immense and luminous tablet. The tentacles were moving over it – pressing here, thrusting there, turning, pushing, manipulating—

PART SIX

NO SUMMARY PROVIDED

— XXXI —

THE FEEDING
OF THE HORDES

A shuddering passed through the crowding cones. I saw the tremor shake their bristling hosts, oscillate the great spire, set the faceted disks quivering.

The trembling grew; a vibration in every separate cone become ever more rapid. A faint, curiously oppressive humming – like the distant echo of a tempest in chaos!

Faster, ever faster grew the vibration. Now the sharp outlines of the cones were dissolving! And now were gone! The mount of the cones was a mighty pyramid of pale green radiance – one tremendous, pallid flame, of which the spire was the tongue! Out from the disked wheel at its shorn tip gushed a flood of light – light that gathered itself from the leaping radiance below it.

The tentacles of the Keeper moved more swiftly over the enigmatic tablet; writhing cloudily; confusingly rapid. The faceted disks wavered; turned upward; the wheel began to whirl – faster – faster—

Up from that flaming circle, out into the sky leaped a thick, pale green column of intensest light! With prodigious speed, as compact as water, concentrate, it struck – straight out toward the face of the sun! It thrust up with the speed of light – the speed of light? A thought came to me; incredible I believed it even as I reacted to it. My pulse is uniformly seventy to the minute. I sought my wrist, found the artery, made allowance for its possible acceleration, began to count. “What’s the matter?” asked Drake with a start.

“Take my glasses,” I muttered swiftly, trying to keep up while speaking, my tally. “Matches in pocket. Smoke lenses. Want to look at sun.”

With a look of stupefied amazement which, at another time I would have found laughable, he obeyed.

“Hold to my eyes,” I ordered.

Three minutes had gone by.

There it was – that for which I sought. Clear through the darkened lenses I could see it, high up on the northernmost limb of the sun. An unimaginable cyclone of incandescent gases; an unthinkably huge dynamo pouring its floods of electro-magnetism upon all the circling planets; that solar crater which we now know was, when at its maximum, all of one hundred and fifty thousand miles across; the great sun spot of the summer of 1919 – the most enormous ever recorded by astronomical science.

Five minutes had gone by.

Common sense whispered to me. There was no use keeping my eyes fixed to the glasses. Even if that incredible thought were true – even if that pillar of radiance was a messenger, an earth-hurled bolt flying to the sun through atmosphere and outer space with the speed of light, even if it were this stupendous creation of these Things, still between eight and nine minutes must elapse before it could reach the orb; and as many minutes must go by before the image of whatever its impact might produce upon the sun could pass back over the bridge of light spanning the ninety millions of miles between it and us.

And after all did not that hypothesis belong to the utterly impossible? Even were it so – what was it that the Metal Monster expected to follow? This radiant shaft, colossal as it was to us, was infinitesimal compared to the target at which it was aimed. What possible effect could that antenna: have upon the solar forces? And yet – and yet – a gnat’s bite can drive an elephant mad. And Nature’s balance is delicate; and what great happenings may follow the slightest disturbance of her infinitely sensitive, her complex equilibrium? It might be – it might be—

Eight minutes had passed.

“Take the glasses,” I bade Drake. “Look up at the sun spot – the big one.”

“I see it.” He had obeyed me. “What of it?”

Nine minutes! The shaft, if I were right, had by now touched the sun! What was to follow?

“I don’t get you at all,” muttered Drake, still staring. He lowered the glasses.

Ten minutes!

“Good God!” he gasped. “What’s happening? Look at the Cones! Look at the Emperor!”

I peered down, counting still – then almost forgot to count! For the pyramidal flame that had been the mount of Cones was shrunken! The pillar of radiance had not lessened – but the mechanism that was its source had retreated whole yards within the field of its crystal base!

And the Metal Emperor! Dulled and faint were his fires, dimmed his splendors; and fainter still were the violet luminescences of the watching Stars, the shimmering livery of his court! The Keeper of the Cones! Were not its outstretched planes hovering lower and lower over the gleaming tablet; its tentacles moving aimlessly, feebly – wearily?

I had a sense of force being withdrawn from all about me. It was as though all the City were being drained of life – as though vitality were being sucked from it to feed this pyramid of radiance? drained from it to forge the thrusting spear piercing sunward!

The Metal People seemed to hang limply, inert; the living girders seemed to sag; the living columns to bend; to droop and to sway.

Twelve minutes!

With a nerve-racking crash one of the laden beams fell; dragged down with it others; bending, shattering in its fall a thicket of the horned columns. Behind us the sparkling eyes of the wall were dimmed, vacant – dying! Something of that hellish loneliness, that demoniac desire for immolation that had assailed us in the haunted hollow of the ruins began to creep over me.

The crowded crater was fainting! The life was going out of the City – its magnetic life, draining into the shaft of green fire!

Duller grew the Metal Emperor’s glories!

Fourteen minutes!

“Goodwin,” cried Drake, “the life’s going out of these Things! Going out with that ray they’re shooting! What does it mean? Why are they doing it?”

Fifteen minutes!

I watched the tentacles of the Keeper grope over the tablet. Abruptly the flaming pyramid darkened – went out! The radiant pillar hurtled upward like a thunder-bolt; vanished in space! Before us stood the mount of cones, shrunken by a sixth of its former size!

Sixteen minutes! All about the crater lip the ringed shields tilted; thrust them selves on high, as though behind each was an eager lifting arm! Below them the hived clusters of disks changed from globules into wide coronets!

Seventeen minutes!

I dropped my wrist; seized the glasses from Drake; raised them to the sun. For a moment I saw nothing – then a tiny spot of white incandescence shone forth at the lower edge of the great spot! It grew into a point of radiance, dazzling even through the shadowed lenses!

I rubbed my eyes; looked again. It was still there, larger – blazing with an ever increasing and intolerable intensity whose brightness pierced the eye like a needle of light! It did not change the contours of the spot; it seemed to be flashing from high above it.

I handed the glasses to Drake, silently.

“I see it!” he gasped, incredulously. “I see it! And that did it – that! Goodwin!” There was panic in his cry. “Goodwin! The spot! It’s widening! It’s widening!”

I snatched the glasses from him. I caught again the dazzling flashing. But whether Drake had seen the spot widen, change – to this day I do not know. To me it seemed unchanged – and yet – perhaps it was not. It may be that under that finger of force, that spear of light, that wound in the side of our sun had opened further—

That the sun had winced!

I do not to this day know. But whether it had or had not – still shone the intolerably brilliant light. And miracle enough, that was for me!

Twenty minutes – subconsciously I had gone on counting – twenty minutes—

About the cratered girdle of the upthrust shields a glimmering mistiness was gathering; a translucent mist, beryl pale and beryl clear! In a heartbeat it had thickened into a vast and vaporous ring through whose virescent, sparkling swarms of corpuscles the sun’s reflected image upon each disk shone clear – as though seen through clouds of transparent atoms of aquamarine.

Again the filaments of the Keeper moved – feebly. As one the hosts of circling shields shifted downward. Brilliant, ever more brilliant, waxed the fast-thickening mists.

Abruptly, and again as one, the disks began to revolve. From every concave surface, from the surfaces of the huge circlets below them, flashed out a stream of green fire – green as the fire of green life itself! Corpuscular, spun of uncounted rushing, dazzling atoms the great rays struck across, impinged upon the thousand-foot wheel that crowned the cones; set it whirling.

Over it I saw form a limpid cloud of the brilliant vapors. Whence came these sparkling nebulosities, these mists of light? It was as though the clustered, spinning disks reached into the shadowless air, sucked from it some unseen, rhythmic energy and transformed it into this visible, coruscating flood.

For now it was a flood! Down from the immense wheel came pouring a torrent, a cataract of the green fires. It cascaded over the cones; deluged them; engulfed them.

Beneath that radiant inundation I saw the cones grow! Perceptibly their volume increased – as though they gorged themselves upon the light. No – it was as though the nitid corpuscles flew to them, coalesced and built themselves into their structure! Out and further out upon the base of crystal they crept! And higher and higher soared their tips, thrusting, ever thrusting upward toward the whirling wheel that fed them!

Now from the Keeper’s motionless planes writhed the Keeper’s tangle of tentacles, uncoiling eagerly, avidly, through the twenty feet of space between their source and the enigmatic mechanism they manipulated. The crater’s disks tilted downward. Into the vast hollow shot their jets of green radiance, drenching the Metal Hordes, splashing from the polished walls wherever the Metal Hordes had left those living walls exposed!

All about us was a trembling, an accelerating pulse of life! Colossal, rhythmic, vital – quicker, ever more powerfully that pulse throbbed! A prodigious vibration monstrously alive!

“Feeding!” whispered Drake. “Feeding! All the City – feeding on the sun!”

Faster danced the radiant beams. The crater was a cauldron of green coruscating fires through which the conical rays angled and interwove, crossed and mingled. And where they mingled, where they crossed, flamed out suddenly immense rutilant and rayless orbs; palpitant for an instant, then dissolving in spiraling, feathery spray of pallid emerald incandescences.

Stronger and stronger beat the City’s pulse of returning life!

A jetting stream struck squarely upon the Metal Emperor. Instantly, out blazed his splendors, effulgent, transplendent – jubilant! His golden zodiac, no longer tarnished and dull, ran with sun flames; the wondrous rose was a racing, lambent miracle. Up snapped the Keeper; towered behind him, all flickering scarlets and leaping yellows – no longer wrathful nor sullen!

The place dripped lambency; was filling like a chrism with radiance. Us, too, the sparkling mists bathed, the rays struck. I was conscious of a curiously wild exhilaration; a quickening of the pulse; an abnormally rapid breathing. I stooped to touch Drake; sparks leaped from my outstretched fingers, great green sparks that crackled as they impacted upon him. He gave them no heed; but stared with fascinated eyes out upon the crater.

Now from every side broke a tempest of gem fires. From every girder and column, from every arras, pendent and looping, burst diamond glitterings, ruby luminescences, lanced flames of molten emerald and sapphire, flashings of amethyst and opal, meteoric iridescences, dazzling spectrums.

The hollow was a cave of some Aladdin of the Titans ablaze with enchanted hoards! It was a place of gems ensorcelled, gems in which imprisoned hosts of the Jinns of Light beat sparkling against their crystal walls to escape!

I thrust the fantasies from me. Fantastic enough was this reality – globe and pyramid and cube of the Metal People opening wide, bathing in, drinking from the virescent, radiant maelstrom that faster and ever faster swirled about them.

“Feeding!” It was Drake’s awed voice. “Feeding on the sun! Feeding on a wave of that flood of force the shaft from the Cones stirred up on the sun spot and sent roaring out into space! It’s bathing Saturn by now—”

He cut the sentence short. The circling shields were raising themselves, lifting themselves higher above the crater-lip. Into the crowded cylinder came now only the rays from the high circlets, the streams from the huge wheel above the still growing cones.

Up and up the shields rose by what mechanism raised I could not see. Their motion ceased; in all their thousands they turned. Over the City’s top and out into the oval valley they poured – their torrents of light; flooding it, deluging it even as they had this pit that was the City’s heart.

Feeding, I knew, those other Metal Hordes without!

And as though in answer, sweeping down upon us through the circle of open sky, 3 clamor raced; thundering clangor of the forges of a universe; war drums of a thousand worlds marching to battle through space!

“If we’d but known!” Drake’s shouting came to me, thin and unreal through the tumult. “It’s what Ventnor meant! If we had got down there when they were so weak – if we could have handled the Keeper – we could have smashed that plate that works the Cones! We could have killed ’em!”

“There are other Cones,” I shrieked back. “The one that Norhala took us to. They’re probably scattered all over!”

“Doesn’t matter,” he yelled. “This is the master machine! It’s what Ventnor meant when he said to strike through the sun! And we lost the chance!”

Louder grew the clamorous hurricane without; and now within began its mate. Through the scintillant vapors flashed linked tempests of the lightning levins. Bolt upon javelin bolt they flew and ever more thickly; lightnings green as the mists them selves; lightning bolts of destroying violets, searing scarlets; tearing chains of withering yellows, globes of exploding multi-colored electric incandescences!

Out from the star shapes were hurtled the bolts of emerald and of purple! Out from the crosses whirled the linked chains of saffron and scarlet flame! Forth from the disks flew the blasting globes! The crater was threaded with their lightnings – the lightnings of the Metal People – embroidered with them, was a Pit woven with vast and changing patterns of electric flame!

What was it Norhala had said when Ventnor was stricken? That – they – had thought his rifle flashes the – fire play! This, then, was what she had meant! This it was that was the – Fire Play of the Metal People! This tornado, this avalanche of the lightnings!

And what was it that Drake had said? That if but we could have known we could Lave destroyed these – Things! Destroyed – Them? Things that could thrust their will and power up through ninety million miles of space and suck from the surf the honey of power! Drain it and hive it within these mountains of the cones!

Destroy Things that could feed their own life into a machine to draw back from the sun a greater life – Things that could forge of their strength a spear which, piercing the side of the sun, sent gushing back upon them a tenfold, nay, a thousandfold strength!

Destroy this City that was one vast and living magnet drawing to itself, feeding upon, the magnetic life of earth and sun! The clamor had grown stupendous, destroying – like armored Gods roaring at sword play in a hundred Valhallas; like the war drums of battling universe; like the smitings of warring suns!

And all the City was throbbing, beating with a gigantic pulse of life – was fed and drunken with life! I felt that pulsing become my own; I echoed to it; throbbed in unison. I saw that I was outlined in flame; that around me a radiant nimbus was growing!

More and more brilliantly it gleamed; shot out in mitrailleuse projectillings of arrowed fires! To me came great desire to follow those flames – to hurl myself after them into the chaos of lightning and sound the crater had become!

Through that chaos I thought I saw Norhala float – clothed in shouting, flailing fires! I strove to call out to her. By me slipped the body of Drake; lay flaming at my feet upon the narrow ledge!

There was a roaring within my head – louder, far louder, than that which beat against my ears. Something was drawing me forth; drawing me out of my body into unimaginable depths of blackness! Something was hurling me out into those cold depths of space that alone could darken the fires that encircled rue – the fires of which I was becoming a part!

I felt myself leap outward – outward and outward – into – oblivion!

— XXXII —

BACK FROM OBLIVION

I was immeasurable ages deep within infinity. I was speeding out of the blind heart of oblivion. Aeons upon aeons I had been flashing from it – out toward light. And for other aeons upon aeons I must speed on before I could reach light’s faintest borders. A solitary, sentient atom I clove the silent, illimitable depths.

How long I had been wrapped in that blind, borderless heart I did not know – for innumerable centuries, countless ages; suns had been born, life had climbed out of the primeval chaos of their circling worlds, had reached its apex and fallen back; the worlds had died; the suns that had given them birth had blackened; and other suns, other worlds had been born. Still steadily I sped – on toward the light; that light still immeasurable aeons away.

Through the illimitable I sped. Aeons far from me I knew were the nearest surges of the star seas, breaking upon the timeless, ultimate verge through which I flew. With in the star seas spun the loom of Fate; it was toward its weaving that I sped, lusting to be made incorporate again in its pattern, to join my fellows, to be woven with them in that web of life aeons and aeons away from this nothingness through which I flew.

Aeons beneath me I seemed to see that loom at work – weaving the nebulae, the suns, the planets, the lives of man and beast, plant and metal and rock. Aeons below me the loom of Fate whirred on.

For eternities I flew; a mote within the blind blackness, wresting with runes that must be read, darting toward that light by which only might they be deciphered. The blackness lessened. A sound came to me – a keen, strange sound, as though it was Creation made audible! In it seemed to ring as one both birth song and dirge of things create; evil and good were wed within that single note, beauty and ill, rule and the inchoate.

I knew it for the voice of this vast loom. The blackness faded and was gone. Within a pulsing sea of light I raced – a cosmic spark enmeshed in splendors, cradled in might. Closer sounded the loom toward which I winged, passionate for its weaving.

Around me the suns were hived in humming hordes. The stars like cresset flares in some vast close encompassed and dropped past me; far behind they shone flickering in flight abysmal. Into the loom I passed, became a shining thread in its weavings.

I had reached my goal; had threaded the aeons of blackness; had come back from the blind heart of oblivion. There was something I must do; something I must awaken; an inert leaden mass that I must reanimate, must leaven into lightness. It was – myself! The mechanism through which I must work; that which gave me power of expression in the world I knew; my body!

Within that inertness I seemed to dart, a sentient, tiny flame, throbbing here, pulsing there. The mass that was my body began to stir.

There were splitting agonies of awakening – anguished rackings of movement, hot crucifixions of physical reply! Into those ecstasies of torment I blended!

Wearily I opened my eyes; moved as painfully and as spent as though I had in very deed just made that dreadful journey. Somewhat in detail I have recited that travail because of its value as an unusual example of the dream faculty of the subconsciousness; its curious habit of endeavoring to explain by, more or less fantastic visions the awakening sensations of the consciousness.

Or had it been more than that?

Stiffly, painfully I stirred. I was lying upon my back; high above was the tremendous circle of sky, ringed with the hosts of feeding shields. But the shields now were wanly gleaming and the sky was the sky of night!

Night? How long had I lain here? And where was Drake? I struggled to rise.

“Steady, old man,” his voice came from beside me. “Steady – and quiet. How are you feeling?” he whispered.

“Badly battered,” I groaned. “What happened?”

“We weren’t used to the show,” he muttered, grimly. “We got all fed up at the orgy. Too much magnetism – we had a sudden and violent attack of electrical indigestion. Sh-h – look ahead of you!”

Gingerly I turned. I had been lying, I now saw, head toward and prone at the base of one of the crater’s walls. As my gaze swept away I noted with a curious relief, that the tiny eye-points were no longer sparkling with their enigmatic life, that they were dulled and dim once more. Before me, glimmering pallidly, bristled the mount of the cones. Around its crystal base glittered immense egg-shaped diamond incandescences. They were both rayless and strangely – lightless; they threw no shadows nor did their lambency lessen the dimness. Beside each of these curious luminosities stood one of the sullen fired, cruciform shapes – the Things that now I knew for the opened cubes.

They were smaller than the Keeper, indeed less than half his height. They were ranged in an almost unbroken crescent around the visible arc of the immense pedestal – and now I saw that the lights were a few feet closer to that pedestal than they. Egg-shaped as I have said, the wider end was undermost, resting in a broad cup up held by a slender pedicle silvery-gray and metallic.

“Been watching them for a long time,” muttered Drake. “Saw you were alive all right. Was afraid to wake you.

“They’re building out the base. The Cones got so big they have to give them more room.”

“Magnetism,” I whispered. “Electricity – they drew them down from the sun spot. And they were more than that – I saw the Cones grow under it. It fed them as it fed the Hordes – but the Cones grew.

“It was as though the shields and the Cones turned pure energy into substance. And if we hadn’t been pretty thoroughly magnetized to start with it would have done for us.”

He nodded. Absorbed, we watched the operation going on in front of us. The cross shapes had bent, hinging above the transverse arms. They bowed in absolute unison as at some signal. Down from the horizontal plane of each whipped the long and writhing tentacles.

At the foot of every one I could now perceive a heap of some faintly glistening material. The tendrils coiled among this, then drew up something that looked like a thick rod of crystal. The bent planes straightened; simultaneously they thrust the crystaline bars toward the incandescences.

There came a curious, brittle hissing. The ends of the rods began to dissolve into dazzling, diamond rain, atomically minute, that passing through the egg-shaped lights poured upon the periphery of the pedestal. Rapidly the bars melted. Heat there must be in these lights, terrific heat – yet the Keeper’s workers seemed impervious to it!

As the ends of the bars radiated into the annealing mist I saw the tentacles creep close and ever closer to the rayless flame through which the mist flew. And at the last, as the ultimate atoms drove through, the holding tendrils were thrust almost within it; touched it, certainly.

A score of times they repeated this process while we watched. Unaware of us they seemed, or, if aware then indifferent. More rapid became their movements, the glassy ingots streaming through the floating braziers with hardly a pause in their passing.

Abruptly, as though switched, the incandescences lessened into candle-points; instantly, as at a signal, the crescent of crosses closed into a crescent of cubes.

Motionless they stood, huge blocks blackened against the dim glowing of the cones – sentient monoliths; a Druid curve; an arc of a metal Stonehenge. And as at dusk and dawn the great menhir of Stonehenge fill with a mysterious, granitic life, seem to be praying priests of stone, so about these gathered hierophantic illusion.

They quivered; the slender pedicles cupping, the waned lights swayed; the lights lifted and soared, upright, to their backs.

Two by two with measured pace, solemnly, the cubes glided off into the encircling darkness. As they swept away there streamed behind them other scores not until then visible to us, joining pair by pair from hidden arcs.

Into the secret shadows they flowed, two by two, each bearing over it the slim shaft holding the serene flame. Grotesquely were they like a column of monks marching with dimmed flambeaux of their worship. Angled metal monks of some God of metal, carrying tapers of electric fire, withdrawing slowly from a Holy of Holies whose metallically divine Occupant knew nothing of man – nor cared to know!

Grotesque – yes! But would that I had the power to crystallize in words the underlying, alien terror every movement of the Metal Monster when disintegrate, its every manifestation when combined, evoked; the incredulous, crepitous amaze lurking always close behind the threshold of the mind; the never lifting, thin-shuddering shadow!

Metal boxes I wrote a while ago – and with a certain revulsion at the superficiality. Now it came to me that I had been more subtly accurate then than I had realized. Is there not a legend of a box given by jealous Gods to a woman named Pandora – given in revenge for Prometheus’s theft of fire for humanity?

The Gods that packed Pandora’s coffer with calamities did so with full knowledge of, with lust for reprisal upon, humanity! The Metal Monster, I know now, had no more thought for us mortals, no more care for or consciousness of us than a man has for the ant-heap he treads upon, the cobweb through which he brushes.

Therein lay the secret soul of our terror. If one destroys us for hate – be it fellow man, devil, or God – there is at the least the satisfaction of knowing that we have been a realized entity. But if we are destroyed indifferently, carelessly, as a man – again I use the simile – treads upon an ant hill, stalks through a cobweb? Ah – there dwelt the horror!

Not even the Metal Emperor’s splendors could hide this blind and cosmic callousness. Packed within these mobile, thinking and obedient hollow cells that made up the Monster was disaster cataclysmic! Disaster? That which would rush out of them into the world once they opened upon it was not disaster!

It was annihilation!

Through my mind something of all this passed as we waited for that weird procession to disappear – nor was there need for either of us to speak upon that which we must do when it had vanished.

Smaller, dimmer waned the lights – they were gone! For perhaps two-score heartbeats we crouched, motionless. Nothing stirred; there was no sound. Without speaking we arose; crept together over the smooth floor toward the cones, full half a mile away.

As we crossed I saw that the pave, like the walls, was built of the bodies of the Metal People; and, like the walls, they were dormant, filmed eyes oblivious to our passing. Closer we crept – were only a scant score of rods from that colossal mechanism. I noted that the crystal foundation was set low; was not more than four feet above the floor. The sturdy, dwarfed pilasters supporting it thrust up in crowded copses, merging through distance into apparent solidity.

Now, too, I realized, as I had not when looking down from above, how stupendous the structure rising from the crystal foundation really was. A full mile in diameter the base must have been – yet not a yard in thickness!

I began to wonder how so thin a support could bear the mount bristling above it – then remembered what it was that at first had flown from them, shrinking them, and at last had fed and swelled them.

Light! Weightless magnetic atoms; swarms of electric ions; the misty breath of the infinite energy breathing upon, condensing upon, them! Could it be that the Cones for all their apparent mass had little, if any, weight? Like ringed Saturn, thousands of times Earth’s bulk, flaunting itself in the Heavens – yet if transported to our world so light that rings and all it would float like a bubble upon our oceans? The cones towered above me – close, so close!

The cones were weightless! How I knew I cannot say – but now, almost touching them, I did know. Nebulous, yet solid, were they; compact, yet tenuous, dense and unsubstantial. Again the thought came to me – they were force made visible; energy made concentrate into matter.

— XXXIII —

PHANTASMAGORIE METALLIQUE

We skirted, seeking for the tablet over which the Keeper had hovered; the mechanism which, under his tentacles, had shifted the circling shields, thrust the spear of green fire into the side of the wounded sun. Hesitantly I touched the crystal base; the edge was warm, but whether this warmth came from the dazzling rain which we had just watched built it outward or whether it was a property inherent with the substance itself I do not know.

Certainly there was no mark upon it to show where the molten mists had fallen. It was diamond hard and smooth. The nearest cones were but a scant nine feet from its rim.

Suddenly we saw the tablet; stood beside it. The shape of a great T, glimmering with a faint and limpid violent phosphorescence, it might have been, in shape and size, the palely shining shadow of the Keeper. It stood a foot above the floor, and had apparently no connection With the cones.

It was made of thousands of close-packed tiny octagonal rods of some of which the tops were cupped, of others pointed; none was more than half an inch in width. There was about it a suggestion of wedded crystal and metal as about its burden was the suggestion of mated energy and matter.

The rods were movable; they formed a keyboard unimaginably complex: a keyboard whose infinite combinations were like a Fourth Dimensional chess game. I saw that only the swarms of tentacles that were the Keeper’s hands and these only could be masters of its incredible intricacies. No Disk – not even the Emperor, no Star shape could play upon this, draw forth its chords of power!

But why? Why had it been so made that sullen flaming Cross alone could release its hidden meanings, make articulate its interwoven octaves? And how were its messages conveyed? Up to its bases pressed the dormant cubes – that under it they lay as well I did not doubt.

There was no visible copula of the tablet with the cones; no antennae between it and the circled shields. Could it be that the impulses released by the Keepers coilings passed through the Metal People of the pave on to the upthrust Metal People of the crater rim who held the shields? That was unthinkable – unthinkable because if so this mechanism was superfluous!

The swift response to the communal will that we had observed showed that the Metal Monster needed nothing of this kind for transmission of the thought of any of its units. There was some gap here – a gap that the grouped consciousness could not bridge without other means. Clearly that was true – else why the tablet, why the Keeper’s travail?

Was each of these tiny rods a mechanism akin, in a fashion, to the sending keys of the wireless; were they transmitters of subtle energy in which was enfolded command? Spellers out of a super-Morse carrying to each responsive cell of the Metal Monster the bidding of those higher units which were to It as the brain cells are to us? That, advanced as the knowledge it implied might be, was closer to the heart of the possible.

I bent, determined, despite the well-nigh unconquerable shrinking I felt, to touch, to move the tablet’s rods.

A flickering shadow fell upon me: a flock of pulsating ochreous and scarlet shadows – The Keeper glowed above us!

In a life that has had its share of dangers, its need for quick decision, I recognize that few indeed of my reactions to peril have been more than purely instinctive; no more consciously courageous nor intellectually dissociate from the activating stimulus than the shrinking of the burned ha from the brand, the will-to-live dictated rush of the cornered animal upon the thing menacing it. One such higher functioning was when I followed Larry O’Keefe and Lakla, the Handmaiden, out to what we believed soul-destroying death in a place as strange as this; [13] another was now. Deliberately, detachedly, I studied the angrily flaming Shape.

Compared to it we were as a pair of Hop-’o-my-Thumbs to the Giant; had it been man-shaped we would have come less than a third way up to its knees. I focused my attention upon the twenty-foot-wide square that was the Keeper’s foot. Its surface was jewel smooth – hyaline – yet beneath it was a suggestion of granulation, of clam-packed, innumerable, microscopic crystals.

Within these grains whose existence was more sensed than seen glowed dull red light, smoky and sullen. At each end of the square, close to the bottom, was a diamond shaped lozenge, cabochon, perhaps a yard in width. These were dim yellow, translucent, with no suggestion of the underlying crystallization. Sense organs I set them down to be – similar to the great ovals with in the Emperor’s golden zone.

My gaze traveled up to the transverse arms. They stretched sixty feet from tip to tip. At each tip were two more of the diamond figures, not dull but burning angrily with orange-and-scarlet luster. In the center of the beam was something that might have been a smoldering rubrous reflection of the Emperor’s pulsing multi-colored rose had each of the petals of the latter been clipped and squared.

It deepened toward its heart into a singular pattern of vermillion latticings. Into the entire figure ran numerous tiny rivulets of angry crimson and orange light, angling in interwoven patterns with never a curve nor arching.

Set at intervals between them were what looked like octagonal rosettes filled with slender silvery flutings, wan striations – like – it came to me – immense chrysanthemum buds, half opened, and carved in gray jade.

Above towered the gigantic vertical beam. Toward its top I glimpsed a huge square of flaring crimsons and bright topaz; two other diamonds stared down upon us from just beneath it – like eyes. And over all its height the striated octagons clustered.

I felt myself lifted, floated upward; – Drake’s hand shot out, clung to me as together we drifted up the living wall. Opposite the latticed heart of the square petaled rose our flight was checked. There for an instant we hung. Then the octagonal symbols stirred, unfolded like buds – They were the nests of the Keeper’s tentacles, and out from them the whip-like tendrils uncoiled, shot out and writhed around us.

Frantically my skin flinched from their touch; my body, held in the unseen grip, was motionless. Yet when they touched their contact was not unpleasant. Like flexible strands of glass they were; their smooth tips questioned us, passing through our hair, searching our faces, writhing over our clothing.

There was a pulse in the great clipped rose, a rhythmic throbbing of vermillion fire that ran into it from the angled veins, beat through the latticed nucleus and throbbed back whence it had come. The huge, high square of scarlet and yellow was liquid flame; the diamond organs beneath it seemed to smoke, to send out swirls of orange red vapor.

Holding us so the Keeper contemplated us!

The rhythm of the squared rose became the rhythm of my own mind. But here was none of the vast, serene and elemental calm that Ruth had described as emanating from the Metal Emperor. Powerful it was, without doubt, but in it were undertones of rage, of impatience, overtones of revolt, something incomplete and struggling. With in the disharmonies I seemed to sense a fettered force striving for freedom; energy battling against itself!

Greater grew the swarms of the tentacles, winding about us like slender strands of glass, covering our faces, making breathing more and more difficult. There was a coil of them around my throat and tightening – tightening!

I heard Drake gasping, laboring for breath. I could not turn my head toward him, could not speak! Was this then to be our end?

The strangling clutch relaxed, the mass of tentacles lessened. I was conscious of a surge of anger through the cruciform Thing that held us.

Its sullen fires blazed. I was aware of another light beating pas us – beating down the Keeper’s flames. The hosts of tendrils drew back from me. I felt myself picked from the unseen grasp, whirled in air and drawn away. Drake beside me, I hung now before the Shining Disk – the Metal Emperor! He it was who had plucked us from the Keeper – and even as I swung I saw the Keeper’s multitudinous, serpentine arms surge out toward us angrily and then sullenly, slowly draw back into their nests!

And out of the Disk, clothing me, permeating me, came an immense tranquility, a muting of all human thought, all human endeavor, an unthinkable, cosmic calm into which all that was human of me seemed to be sinking, drowning as in a fathomless abyss! I struggled against it, desperately, striving in study of the Disk to erect a barrier of preoccupation against the power pouring from it.

A dozen feet away from us the sapphire ovals centered upon us their regard. Limpid they were, pellucid as the gems whose giant replicas they seemed to be. The surface of the Disk ringed about by the aureate zodiac in which the nine ovals shone was a maze of geometric symbols traced in lines of living gem fires; infinitely complex those patterns and infinitely beautiful; an infinite number of symmetric forms in which I seemed to trace all the ordered crystalline wonders of the snowflakes, the groupings of all crystalline patternings, the soul of ordered beauty that are the marvels of the Radiolaria, Nature’s own miraculous book of the soul of mathematical beauty. The flashing petaled heart was woven of living rainbows of cold flame.

Silently we floated there while the Disk – looked – at us. And as though I had been not an actor but an observer, the weird picture of it all came to me – two men swinging like motes in mid air, on one side of the flickering scarlet and orange Cruciform shape, on the other side the radiant Disk, behind the two manikins the pallid Mount of the bristling cones; and high above the wan circle of the shields!

There was a ringing about us – an elfin chiming, sweet and crystalline. It came from the cones – and strangely was it their vocal synthesis, their voice! Into the vast circle of sky pierced a lance of green fire; swift in its wake uprose others.

We slid gently down, stood swaying at the Disk’s base. The Keeper bent, angled. Again the planes above the supporting square hovered over the tablet; I saw the tendrils sweep down, push here and there, playing upon the rods some unknown symphony of power.

Thicker pulsed the lances of the aurora; changed to vast billowing curtains. The faceted wheel at the top of the central spire of the cones swung upward; a light began to stream from the cones themselves – no pillar now but a vast circle that shot whirling into the heavens like a noose.

And like a noose it caught the aurora, snared it! Into it the coruscating mists of mysterious flame swirled, lost their colors, became a torrent of light flying down through the ring as though through a funnel top.

Down poured the radiant corpuscles, bathing the cones. They did not glow as they had beneath the flood from the shields, and if they grew it was too slowly for me to see; the shields were motionless. Now here, now there, I saw other rings whirl up – smaller mouths of lesser cones hidden within the body of the Metal Monster, I knew, sucking down this magnetic flux, these countless ions gushing forth from the sun.

Then as when first we had seen the phenomenon in the blue valley, the ring vanished, hidden by a fog of coruscations – as though the force streaming through the rings became diffused after it had been caught. And now I wondered whether the sea of light into which we had plunged when entering the valley had been formed of these same captured ions – a reservoir for the night feeding of the City and its disintegrate units?

Crouching, forgetful of our juxtaposition to these two unhuman, anomalous Things, we watched the play of the tentacles upon the upthrust rods.

But if we forgot, we were not forgotten! The Emperor slipped nearer; seemed to contemplate us – quizzically, amused; as a man would look down upon some curious and interesting insect, a puppy, a kitten! I sensed this amusement in the Disk’s regard even as I had sensed its soul of awful tranquility; as we had sensed the playful malice in the eye stars of the living corridor, the curiosity in the column that had dropped us into the valley!

I felt a push – a push that was filled with a colossal, glittering playfulness! Under it I went spinning away for yards – saw Drake twirl close behind me. The force, whatever it was, swept out from the Emperor; in it was no slightest hint of anger or of malice, no slightest shadow of the sinister!

It was as though one would blow away a feather; urge gently some little lesser thing away!

The Disk watched our whirlings – there was a sparkling, jeweled laughter in its pulsing fires!

Again came the push – farther yet we spun. Suddenly before us, across the pave, shone out a twinkling trail – the wakened eyes of the cubes that formed it, marking out a pathway for us to follow!

Immediately upon their gleaming forth I saw the Emperor turn – his immense, oval, metallic back now black against the radiance of the cones!

Up from the narrow gleaming path – a path opened by and obeying command I knew – there lifted the hosts of tiny unseen hands, the sentient currents of magnetic force that were the fingers and arms of the Metal Hordes. They held us, thrust us along, passed us forward! Faster and faster we moved, speeding on the wake of the long-vanished metal monks. I turned my head – the cones were already far away. Over the tablet of limpid violet phosphorescence still hovered the planes of the Keeper; and still was the oval of the Emperor black against the radiance.

But the twinkling, sparkling path between us and them was gone – was fading out close behind us as we swept onward!

Faster and faster grew our pace. The cylindrical wall loomed close. A high oblong portal showed within it. Into this we were carried. Before us stretched a corridor precisely similar to that which, closing upon us, had forced us completely out into the hall.

Unlike that passage, its floor lifted steeply – a smooth and shining slide up which no man could climb! A shaft, indeed, which thrust upward straight as an arrow at an angle of at least thirty degrees and whose end or turning we could not see. Up and up it cleared its way through the City – through the Metal Monster – closed only by the inability of the eye to pierce the faint luminosity that thickened by distance became impenetrable.

For an instant we hovered upon its threshold. But the impulse, the command, that had carried us thus far was not to stop here. Into it and up it we were thrust, our feet barely touching the glimmering surface; lifted by the force that emanated from its floor, carried on by the force that pressed out from the sides.

Up and up we went – scores of feet – hundreds—

— XXXIV —

THE ENSORCELLED CHAMBER

“Goodwin!” Drake broke the silence; desperately he was striving to keep his fear out of his voice. “Goodwin – this isn’t the way to get out. We’re going up – farther away all the time from the – the gates!”

“What can we do?” My anxiety was no less than his, but my realization of our helplessness was complete.

“If we only knew how to talk to these Things,” he said. “If we could only have let the Disk know we wanted to get out – damn it, Goodwin, it would have helped us!”

Grotesque as the idea sounded, I felt that he spoke truth. The Emperor meant no harm to us; in fact in speeding us away, I was not at all sure that he had not deliberately wished us well – there was that about the Keeper—

“Pushed us off as though we were children – or the cat,” Drake muttered. “Shooed us off as though it were saying ‘Run along now and play – or you may get hurt!”

In his apparently trivial phrases I caught his realization of the same grim, intolerable, far from trivial helplessness, humiliating helplessness, of which I was all too conscious.

Still up we sped along the shaft; a thousand feet, two thousand feet I knew we must now be above the level of the valley!

“We’ve got to get back to Ruth! Goodwin – what will she be thinking? Goodwin – it’s night! And what may be happening – what may have happened to her?”

“Drake, boy—” I dropped into his own colloquialism – “we’re up against it. We can’t help it. And remember – she’s there in Norhala’s home. I don’t believe, I honestly don’t believe, Dick, that there’s any danger as long as she remains there. And Ventnor ties her fast.”

“That’s true,” he said, more hopefully. “That’s true – and probably Norhala is with her.”

“I don’t doubt it,” I said cheerfully. An inspiration came to me – I half believed it myself. “And another thing. There’s not an action here that’s purposeless. We’re being driven on by the command of that Thing we call the Metal Emperor. It means us no harm. Maybe – maybe this is the way out.”

“Maybe so.” He shook his head doubtfully. “But I’m not sure. Maybe that long push was just to get us away from there. And it strikes me that the impulse has begun to weaken. We’re not going anywhere near as fast as we were.”

I started; I had not realized it, but our speed was slackening. I looked back – hundreds of feet behind us fell the slide. An unpleasant chill went through me – should the magnetic grip upon us relax, withdraw, nothing could stop us from falling back along that incline to be broken like eggs at its end; that our breaths would be snuffed out by the terrific descent long before we reached that end was scant comfort.

“There are other passages opening up along this shaft,” Drake said. “I’m not for trusting the Emperor too far – he has other things on his metallic mind, you know. The next one we get to, let’s try to slip into – if we can.”

I had noticed; there had been openings along the ascending shaft; corridors running apparently transversely to its angled way.

Slower and slower became our pace. A hundred yards above I glimpsed one of the apertures. Could we reach it? Slower and slower we arose; nearer it came, nearer – our feet began to slip backward along the steep way! Now the gap was but a yard off – but we were motionless – were tottering!

Drake’s arms wrapped round me. With a tremendous effort he hurled me into the portal. I dropped at its edge, writhed swiftly around, saw him slipping, slipping down – thrust my hands out to him. He caught them! There came a wrench that tortured my arm sockets as though racked. But he held!

Slowly I writhed back into the passage, dragging up his almost dead weight. His head appeared, his shoulders; there was a convulsion of the long body and he lay before me.

“Thanks, Professor,” he said, panting. “Thanks, very much – I won’t forget that, believe me.”

“If you hadn’t thrown me in, I couldn’t have helped you,” I answered. “We are quits. Do not remember it.”

“You mean forget it,” he gasped. “You don’t just get the slant, old boy – but believe me again, I won’t forget it!”

For a minute or two we lay, flat upon our backs, resting. I sat up. The passage was broad, silent; apparently as endless as that from which we had just escaped.

Along it, above us, under us, the crystal line eyes were dim. It showed no sign of movement – yet had it done so there was nothing we could do save drop down the annihilating slant. Drake arose.

“I’m hungry,” he said, “and I’m thirsty. I move that we eat and drink and approximately be merry.”

He slung aside the haversack. From it we took food; from the canteens we drank. We did not talk. Each knew what the other was thinking; infrequently, and thank the eternal law that some call God that they are infrequent, come crises in which speech seems not only petty but when against it the mind rebels as a nauseous thing.

This was such a time. At last I drew myself to my feet.

“Let’s be going,” I said.

The corridor stretched straight before us; along it we paced. How far we walked I do not know; mile upon mile, it seemed. It broadened abruptly; opened into a vast hall.

And this hall was filled with the Metal Hordes – was a gigantic workshop of them. In every shape, in every form, they seethed and toiled about it. Upon its floor were heaps of shining ores, mounds of flashing gems, piles of ingots, metallic and crystalline. High and low throughout flamed the egg-shaped incandescences, floating furnaces both great and small.

Before one of these forges, close to us, stood a Metal Thing. Its body was a twelve-foot column of smaller cubes. Upon the top was a hollow square formed of even lesser blocks – blocks hardly larger than the Little Things themselves. In the center of the open rectangle was another shaft, its top a two-foot square plate formed of a single cube. From the sides of the hollow square sprang long arms of spheres, each tipped by a tetrahedron. They moved freely, slipping about upon their curved points of contact and like a dozen little thinking hammers, the pyramid points at their ends beat down upon as many thimble shaped objects which they thrust alternately into the unwinking brazier then laid upon the central block to shape.

A goblin workman the Thing seemed, standing there, so intent upon and so busy with its forgings.

There were scores of these animate machines; they paid no slightest heed to us as we slipped by them, clinging as closely to the wall of the immense workshop as we could.

We passed a company of other Shapes which stood two by two and close together, their tops wide spinning wheels through which the tendrils of an opened globe fed translucent, colorless ingots – the substance it seemed to me of which Norhala’s shadowy walls were made, the crystal of which the bars that built out the base of the Cones were formed.

The ingots passed between the whirling faces; emerged from them as slender, long cylinders; were seized as they slipped down by a crouching block, whose place as it glided away was instantly taken by another. In many bewildering forms, intent upon unknown activities directed toward unguessable ends, the composite, animate mechanisms labored. And all the place was filled with a goblin bustle, trollish racketings, ringing of gnomish anvils, clanging of kobold forges – a clamorous cavern filled with metal Nibelungens!

We came to the opening of another pas sage, a doorway piercing the walls of the workshop. Its incline, though steep, was not dangerous.

Into it we stepped; climbed onward it seemed interminably. Far ahead of us at last appeared the outline -of its further entrance, silhouetted against and filled with a brighter luminosity. We drew near; stopped cautiously at its threshold, peering out.

Well it was that we had hesitated! Before us was open space – an abyss in the body of the Metal Monster! The corridor opened into it like a window. Thrusting out our heads, we saw an unbroken wall both above and below. Half a mile away was its opposite side. Over this pit was the misty sky and not more than a thousand feet above and black against the heavens was the lip of it – the cornices of this chasm within the City.

Far, far beneath us we watched the Hordes throw themselves across the abyss in webs of curving arches and girder straight bridges; gigantic we knew these spans must be yet dwarfed to slender foot ways by distance. Over them moved hurrying companies; from them came flashings, glitterings – prismatic, sun golden; plutonic scarlets, molten blues; javelins of colored light piercing upward from unfolded cubes and globes and pyramids crossing them or from busy bearers of the shining fruits of the mysterious workshops.

And as they passed the bridges swung up, coiled and thrust themselves from sight through openings that closed behind them. Ever, as they passed, close on their going whipped out other spans so that always across that abyss a sentient, shifting web was hung!

We drew back, stared into each other’s white face. Panic swept through me, in quick, alternate pulse of ice and fire. For crushingly, no longer to be denied, came certainty that we were lost within the mazes of this incredible City – lost in the body of the Metal Monster which that City was! There was a sick despair in my heart as we turned and slowly made our way back along the sloping corridor.

A hundred yards, perhaps, we had gone in silence before we stopped, gazing stupidly at an opening in the wall beside us. The portal had not been there when we had passed – of that I was certain.

“It’s opened since we went by,” whispered Drake.

We peered through it. The passage was narrow; its pave led downward. For a moment we hesitated, the same foreboding in both our minds. And yet – among the perils that crowded in upon us what choice had we? There could be no more danger there than here.

Both ways were – alive, both obedient to impulses over which we had no more control and no more way of predeterrnining than mice in some complex, man-made trap. Furthermore, this shaft also ran downward, and although its pitch was less and it did not therefore drop as quickly toward that level we sought and wherein lay the openings of escape into the outer valley, it fell at right angles to the corridor through which we had come. We knew that to retrace our steps would but take us back to the forges and thence to the hall of the cones and the certain peril waiting for us there.

We stepped into this opened way. For a little distance it ran straightly, then turned and sloped gently upward; and a little distance more we climbed. Then suddenly, not a hundred yards from us, gushed out into it a flood of soft radiance, opalescent, filled with nacreous glimmerings and rosy shadows of light, pearl tinted.

It was as though a door had opened into some world of luminescence. From it the lambent torrent poured; billowed down upon us. In its wake came music – if mu! sic the mighty harmonies, the sonorous chords, the crystalline themes and the linked chaplet of notes that were like spiralings of tiny golden star bells could be named.

Toward source of light and sound we moved, nor could we have halted nor with drawn had we willed; the radiance drew us to it as the sun the water drop, and irresistibly the sweet, unearthly music called. Closer we came – it was a narrow alcove from which sound and light poured – into it we crept – and went no further!

We peered into a vast and columnless vault, a limitless temple of light. High up in it, strewn manifold, danced and shone soft orbs like tender suns. No pale gilt luminaries of frozen rays were these. Effulgent, jubilant, they flamed – orbs red as the wine of rubies the Djinns of Al Shiraz press from his enchanted vineyards of jewels, twin orbs rosy white as breasts of pampered Babylonian maids, orbs of pulsing opalescences and orbs of the murmuring green of bursting buds of spring, crocused orbs and orbs of royal coral, suns that throbbed with singing rays of wedded rose and pearl and of sapphires and topazes amorous; orbs born of cool virginal dawns and of imperial sunsets and orbs that were the tuliped fruit of mating rainbows of fire.

They danced, these countless aureoles; they swung and threaded in radiant choral patterns, in linked harmonics of light. And as they danced their gay rays caressed and bathed myriads of the Metal Folk open beneath them. Under the rays the jewel fires of disk and star and cross leaped and pulsed, and kept dancing to the same bright rhythm!

We sought the source of the music – a tremendous thing of shimmering crystal pipes like some colossal organ. Out of the radiance around it great flames gathered, shook into sight with streamings and pennonings, in bannerets and bandrols, leaped upon the crystal pipes, and merged within them.

And as the pipes drank them, the flames changed into sound! Throbbing bass viols of roaring vernal winds, diapasons of waterfall and torrents – these had been flames of emerald; flaming trumpetings of desire that had been great streamers of scarlet – rose flames that had dissolved into echoes of fulfillment; diamond burgeonings that melted into silver symphonies like mist entangled Pleides transmuted into melodies; chameleon harmonies to which the strange suns danced!

And now I saw – realizing with a clutch of indescribable awe, with a sense of inexplicable profanation the secret of this ensorcelled chamber!

Within every pulsing rose of irised fire that was the heart of a disk, from every rubrous, clipped rose of a cross, and from every rayed purple petaling of a star there nestled a tiny disk, a tiny cross, a tiny star, luminous and symboled even as those that cradled them!

The Metal babes budding like crystals from hearts of radiance beneath the play of jocund orbs! Incredible blossomings of crystal and of metal whose lullabies and cradle songs were singing symphonies of flame!

It was the birth chamber of the City! The womb of the Metal Monster!

Abruptly the walls of the niche sparkled out, the glittering eye points regarding us with a most disquieting suggestion of sentinels who, slumbering, had been caught unaware, and now awakening challenged us menacingly! Swiftly the niche closed – so swiftly that barely had we time to spring over its threshold into the corridor.

The corridor was awake – threateningly alive! There was none of the twinkling, playful malice in the points now; they glared! Their power darted out; gripped us; thrust us violently onward.

Up it swept us and on. Far away a square of light appeared, grew quickly larger. Framed in it was the amethystine burning of the great ring that girdled the encircling cliffs.

I turned my head – behind us the corridor was closing!

Now the opening was so close that through it I could see the vast panorama of the valley! us; pushed us on. We thrust ourselves against it, despairingly. As well might flies have tried to press back a moving mountain.

Resistlessly, inexorably we were pressed forward. Now we cowered within a yard deep niche; now we trembled upon a foot wide ledge!

Shuddering, gasping, we glared down the sheer drop of the City’s wall. The smooth and glimmering scarp fell thousands of feet straight to the valley floor. And there were no merciful mists to hide what awaited us there; no mists anywhere. In that brief, agonized glance every detail of the Pit was disclosed with an abnormal clarity.

We tottered on the brink. The ledge melted.

Down, down we plunged, locked in each other’s arms, hurtling to the shattering death so far below!

— XXXV —

THE TREACHERY OF YURUK

Was it true that Time is within ourselves – that like Space, its twin, it is only a self-created illusion of the human mind? There are hours that flash by on hummingbird wings; there are seconds that shuffle on shod in leaden shoes.

Was it true that when death faces us the consciousness finds power through its will to live to conquer the illusion – to prolong Time? That recoiling from oblivion we can recreate in a fractional moment whole years gone past, years yet to come – striving to lengthen our existence, stretching out our apperception beyond the phantom boundaries, overdrawing upon a Barmecide deposit of minutes, staking fresh claims upon a mirage?

How else explain the seeming slowness with which we were falling – the seeming leisureliness with which the wall drifted up past us?

And was this punishment – a sentence meted out for profaning with our eyes a forbidden place; a penalty for touching with our gaze the ark of the Metal Tribes – their holy of holies – the budding place of the Metal Babes?

The valley was swinging – swinging in slow broad curves; was oscillating dizzily!

Slowly the colossal wall slipped upward!

Realization swept me; left me mazed, only half believing! This was no illusion. After that first swift plunge our fall had been checked! We were swinging – not the valley!

Deliberately, in wide arcs like pendulums, we were swinging across the City’s scarp; three feet out from it, and as we swung, sinking.

And now I saw the countless eyes of the watching wall again were twinkling, regarding us with an impish mockery.

It was the grip of the living wall that held us; that rocked us from side to side as though giving greater breadths of it chance to behold us; that was dropping us gently, carefully, to the valley floor now a scant two thousand feet below!

A storm of rage, of intensest resentment swept me; as once before, any gratitude I should have felt for escape was submerged in the utter humiliation with which it was charged.

Why, if we had sinned, had not execution been done – decently, with respect for us as thinking things! Why, it we had not sinned, had we been thrust so cruelly out to apparent annihilation? Had it all been a jest of the Metal Monster?

Why now dangle us thus – like frightened puppies swung by thoughtless children down the facade of a sky-scraper? Was this another jest? Or were we to be lured with false hope of safety only to be more cruelly slain at the end? What relish for all this could exist in this monstrous mass – a mass to which we were as pebbles to a mountain?

The questions raced. Blindly wrathful, with an effort difficult as though we were in water, I broke Drake’s clasp; shook my lists at the twinkling wall, strove to kick and smite it like an angry child, cursed it – not childishly! Dared it to hurl me down to death!

My passion passed, left me trembling. I felt Drake’s hand touch mine in encouragement.

“Steady,” he said. “Steady, old boy! It’s no use. Thank God we’re out of it. Steady! Look down.”

Hot with shame for my outburst, weak from its violence, I obeyed. Not more than a thousand feet away was the valley floor. Thronging about where we must at last touch, clustered and seething, was a multitude of the Metal Things. They seemed to be looking up at us, watching, waiting for us.

“Reception committee!” muttered Drake grimly.

I glanced away; over the valley. It was luminously clear; yet the sky was overcast, no stars showing. The light was no stronger than that of the moon at full, but it held a quality unfamiliar to me. It cast no shadows; though soft it was piercing, revealing all it bathed with the distinctness of bright sunshine. The illumination came, I thought, from the encircling veils falling from the band of amethyst.

And, as I peered, out of the veils and far away sped a violet spark. With meteor speed it flew toward us. Close to the base of the vast facade and perhaps half a mile away it landed with a flashing of blue incandescence – I knew it for one of the Flying Things, the Mark Makers – one of the incredible messengers.

Close upon its fall came increase in the turmoil of the crowding throng awaiting us. Came, too, an abrupt change in our own motion. The long arcs lessened; more swiftly we were dropped.

Far away in the direction from which the Flying Thing had flown I sensed another movement; something coming that carried with it subtle suggestion of unlikeness to all the other incessant, linked movement over the pit. Closer it drew. What was it?

“Norhala!” gasped Drake.

It was Norhala! Robed in her silken amber swathings, red-copper hair streaming, its strands woven with elfin sparklings, she was racing toward the City like some lovely witch, riding upon the back of a steed of huge cubes!

Nearer she raced. More direct became our fall. Now we were dropping as though at the end of an unreeling plummet cord; the floor of the valley was no more than two hundred feet below.

“Norhala!” we shouted; and again and again – “Norhala!”

Before our cries could have reached her the cubes swerved; came to a halt beneath us. Through the hundred feet of space between I caught the brilliancy of the weird constellations in Norhala’s great eyes – saw with a vague but no less dire foreboding that on her face dwelt a terrifying, a blasting wrath

About her surged and slithered and rubbed the Things – grotesquely catlike. She paid no heed – staring up at us as we fell. In my heart the foreboding of dire happening grew.

As softly as though by the hand of a giant of cloud we were lifted out from the wall; were set with no perceptible shock beside her on the back of the cube!

“Norhala—” I stopped. For this was no Norhala whom we had known! Gone was all calm, vanished every trace of unearthly tranquility. It was a Norhala awakened at last – all human!

Yet in the still, the dreadful rage that filled her I sensed a force, an intensity, more than human! Over the blazing eyes the brows were knit in a rigid, golden bar; the delicate nostrils were pinched; the sweet red mouth was white and merciless. It was as though in its long sleep her human self had gathered more than human strength, and that now, awakened and unleashed, the violence of its rage touched the vibrant zenith of that sphere of which her quiet had been the nadir.

She was an urn filled and flaming with the fires of the Gods of wrath! What was it that had awakened her – what in awakening had changed the in-pouring consciousness into this flood of fury? Stronger the foreboding gripped me.

“Norhala!” My voice was shaking. “Those we left—”

“They are gone!” The golden voice was octaves deeper, vibrant, throbbing with that muffled, menacing note that must have pulsed from the golden tambours that summoned to battle Timur’s fierce hordes. “They were – taken!”

“Taken! By who?” I gasped. “Taken by what – these?” I swept my hands out toward the Metal Things milling around us.

“No! These are mine! These are they who obey me!” The golden voice now shrilled with her passion. “Taken by – men!”

Drake had read my face although he could not understand our words.

“Ruth—” he groaned.

“Taken,” I said. “Both Ruth and Ventnor. Taken by the armored men – the men of Cherkis!”

“Cherkis!” She had caught the word. “Yes – Cherkis! And now he and all his men – and all his women – and every living thing he rules shall pay! And fear not – you two. For I, Norhala, will bring back my own.

“Woe, woe to you, Cherkis, and to all of yours! For I, Norhala, am awake, and I, Norhala, remember! Woe to you, Cherkis, woe – for now all ends for you!

“Not by the gods of my mother who turned their strength against her do I promise this. I, Norhala, have no need of them – I, Norhala, who have strength greater than they. And would I could crush those gods as I shall crush you, Cherkis – and every living thing of yours! Yea – and every unliving thing as well!”

Not halting now was Norhala’s speech; it poured from the ruthless lips – flamingly.

“We go,” she cried. “And something of vengeance I have saved fer you – as is your right!”

She tossed her arms high; stamped upon the back of the Metal Thing that held us. It quivered and sped away. Swiftly dwindled the City’s bulk; fast faded its glimmering watchful face:

Not toward the veils of light but out over the plain we flew. Above us, crouching against the blast of our going, streamed like a silken banner Norhala’s flaming tresses, gemmed with witch lights and threaded with flashing strands of beaded jewel fire.

Far out now we were, the City, far away. The cube slowed. Norhala threw high her head. From the arched, exquisite throat pealed a trumpet call – golden, summoning, imperious. Thrice it rang forth – and all the surrounding valley seemed to halt and listen!

Followed upon its ending a chanting as goldenly sonorous. Wild, peremptory, triumphant – it was like a mustering shouting to adventurous stars, buglings to buccaneering winds, cadenced beckonings to restless ranks of viking waves, signaling to all the corsairs and picaroons of the elemental!

A cosmic call to loot!

Under that lawless roulade the gigantic block upon which we rode quivered; I myself felt a thousand needle-pointed roving arrows prick me, urging me on to some jubilant, reckless orgy of destruction! Obeying that summoning there swirled to us cube and globe and pyramid by the score – by the hundreds! They swept into our wake and followed – lifting up behind us, an ever rising sea.

Higher and higher arose the metal wave mounting, ever mounting as other score upon score leaped upon it, rushed up it and swelled its crest. And soon so great it was that it shadowed us, hung over us!

The cubes we rode angled in their course; raced now with ever-increasing speed toward the spangled curtains. Still Norhala’s golden chant lured; higher and ever higher reached the following wave. Now we were rising upon a steep slope; now the amethystine, gleaming ring was almost overhead.

Norhala’s song ceased. One breathless, soundless moment and we had pierced the veils. A globule of sapphire shone afar.

US. the elfin bubble of her home. We neared it.

Heart leaping, I saw three ponies, high and empty saddles turquoise studded, lift their heads from their roadway browsing. For a breath they stood, stiff with paralyzing terror; then whimpering in panic raced away.

We were at Norhala’s door; were lifted down; stood close to its threshold. Slaves to a single thought, Drake and I sprang to enter.

“Wait!” Norhala’s white hands caught “There is peril there – without me! Me you must – follow!”

We stared at her. Upon the exquisite face was no unshadowing of wrath, no diminishing of rage, no weakening of dreadful determination. The star-flecked eyes were not upon us; they looked over and beyond – coldly, calculatingly.

“Not enough,” I heard her whisper. “Not enough – for that which I will do.”

We turned, following her gaze. A hundred feet on high, stretching nearly across the gorge, an incredible curtain was flung. Over its folds was movement – arms of spinning globes that thrust forth like paws and down upon which leaped pyramid upon pyramid stiffening as they clung like bristling spikes of hair; great bars of clicking cubes that threw themselves from the shuttering – shook and withdrew. The curtain was a ferment – shifting, mercurial; it throbbed with desire, palpitated with eagerness!

“Not enough!” murmured Norhala. Her lips parted; from them came another trumpeting – tyrannic, arrogant and clangorous. Under it the curtaining writhed – out from it spurted thin cascades of cubes. They swarmed up into tall pillars that shook and swayed, gyrated and geniculated—

With blinding flash upon flash the sapphire incandescences struck forth at their feet. A score of flaming columned shapes leaped up and curved in meteor flight over the tumultuous curtain. Streaming with violet fires they shot back to the valley of the City.

“Hai!” shouted Norhala as they flew. “Hai!”

Up darted her arms; the starry galaxies of her eyes danced madly, shot forth visible rays. The mighty curtain of the Metal Things pulsed and throbbed; its units interweaving – block and globe and pyramid of which it was woven, each seeming to strain at leash.

“Come!” cried Norhala – and led the way through the portal.

Close behind her we pressed. I stumbled, nearly fell, over a brown-faced, leather-cuirassed body that lay half over, legs barring the threshold. Contemptuously Norhala stepped over it. We were within that chamber of the pool. About it lay a fair dozen of the armored men. Ruth’s defense, I thought with a grim delight, had been most excellent – those who had taken her and Ventnor had not done so without paying full toll.

A violet flashing drew my eyes away. Close to the pool wherein we had first seen the white miracle of Norhala’s body, two immense, purple fired stars blazed. Between them, like a suppliant cast from black iron, was Yuruk!

Poised upon their nether tips the stars guarded him. Head touching his knees, eyes hidden within his folded arms, the black eunuch crouched.

There was an unearthly mercilessness in Norhala’s voice.

The eunuch raised his head; slowly, fearfully.

“Goddess!” he whispered. “Goddess! Mercy!”

“I saved him,” she turned to us, “for you to slay! He it was who brought those who took the maid who was mine and the helpless one that she loved. Now you slay him!”

Drake understood – his hand twitched down to his pistol, drew it. His face deadly, he leveled the gun at the black eunuch. Yuruk saw it – shrieked and cowered. Norhala laughed – sweetly, ruthlessly.

“He, dies before the stroke falls,” she said. “He dies doubly therefore – :and that is well.”

Drake slowly lowered the automatic; turned to me.

“I can’t,” he whispered slowly. “I can’t – do it. I want to kill him – and I can’t!”

“Masters!” Upon his knees the eunuch writhed toward us. “Masters – I meant no wrong. What I did was for love of the Goddess. Years upon years have I served her. And her mother before her – and her mother’s mother!

“I thought if the maid and the blasted one were gone, that you would follow. Then I would be alone with the Goddess once more. Cherkis will not slay them – and Cherkis will welcome you and give the maid and the blasted one back to you for the arts that you can teach him.

“Mercy, Masters, I meant no harm – bid the Goddess be merciful!”

PART SEVEN

NO SUMMARY PROVIDED

— XXXVI —

NORHALA VOWS

The ebon pools of eyes were clarified of their ancient shadows by his terror; age was wiped from them by fear, even as it was wiped from his face. The wrinkles were gone. Appallingly youthful, the face of Yuruk prayed to us.

“What I did – I did for worship of her,” he moaned.

“Slay him,” said Norhala. “Slay him – one or both of you. It is your right.”

“I can’t,” Drake half sobbed. “Goodwin – I can’t. It’s murder.”

“Why do you wait?” she asked. “Time presses, and even now we should be on the way. When so many are so soon to die, why tarry over one? Slay him!”

“Norhala,” I answered, “we cannot slay him so. When we kill, we kill in fair fight – hand to hand. The maid we both love has gone, taken with her brother. It will not bring her back if we murder him through whom she was taken. We would punish him – yes; but slay him we cannot. And we would be after the maid and her brother quickly.”

A moment she looked at us, perplexity shading the high and steady anger.

“As you will,” she said at last; then added, half sarcastically: “Perhaps it is because I who am now awake have slept so long that I cannot understand you. But Yuruk has disobeyed me. That of mine which I committed to his care he has given to the enemies of me and those who were mine. It matters nothing to me what you would do. Matters to me only what I will to do.”

She pointed to the dead.

“Yuruk “ – the golden voice was cold – “gather up these carrion and pile them together.”

The eunuch arose, stole out fearfully from between the two stars; they did not move, shining imperturbably. He slithered to body after body, dragging them one after the other to the center of the chamber, lifting them and forming of them a heap. One there was who was not dead. His eyes opened as the eunuch seized him, the blackened mouth moved.

“Water!” he begged. “Give me drink. I burn!”

I felt a thrill of pity; lifted my canteen and walked toward him.

“You of the beard,” the merciless chime rang out, “he shall have no water. Drink he shall have, and soon – drink of fire!”

The soldier’s fevered eyes rolled toward her, saw and read aright the ruthlessness in the beautiful face.

“Sorceress!” he groaned. “Cursed spawn of Ahriman!” He spat at her. The black talons of Yuruk stretched around his throat.

“Son of unclean dogs!” he whined. “You dare blaspheme the Goddess!”

He snapped the soldier’s neck as though it had been a rotten twig.

-At the callous cruelty I stood for an instant petrified; I heard Drake swear wildly, saw his pistol flash up.

Norhala struck down his arm.

“Your chance has passed,” she said. “And not for that shall you slay him.”

And now Yuruk had cast that body upon the others; the pile was complete.

“Mount!” commanded Norhala, and pointed. He cast himself at her feet, writhing, moaning, imploring. She looked at one of the great Shapes; something of command passed from her, something it understood plainly.

The star slipped forward – there was an almost imperceptible movement of its side points. The twitching form of the black seemed to leap up from the floor, to throw itself like a bag upon the mound of the dead!

Norhala threw up her hands. Out of the violet ovals beneath the upper tips of the Things spurted streams of blue flame! They fell upon Yuruk and splashed over him upon the heap of the slain. In the mound was a dreadful movement, a contortion; the bodies stiffened, seemed to try to rise, to push away – dead nerves and muscles responding to the blasting energy passing through them.

Out from the stars rained bolt upon bolt! In the chamber was the sound of thunder, crackling like broken glass! The bodies flamed, crumbled. There was a little smoke – nauseous, feebly protesting, beaten out by the consuming fires almost before it could rise.

Where had been the heap of slain capped by the black eunuch there was but a little whirling cloud of sad gray dust. Caught by a passing draft, it eddied, slipped over the floor, vanished through the doorway! Motionless stood the blasting stars, contemplating us. Motionless stood Norhala, her wrath no whit abated by the ghastly sacrifice. And paralyzed by what we had beheld, motionless stood we.

“Listen,” she spoke abruptly. “You two who love the maid! What you have seen is nothing to that which you shall see – a wisp of mist to the storm-cloud, a falling leaf to a forest stripping bare beneath the tempest!”

“Norhala “ – I found speech – “can you tell us when it was that the maid was captured?”

It had come to me that perhaps there was still time to overtake the abductors before Ruth was thrust into the worse peril waiting where she was being carried. Crossed this thought another – puzzling, baffling. The cliffs dead Yuruk had pointed out to me as those through which the hidden way passed were, I had estimated then, at least twenty miles away. And how long was the pass, the tunnel, through them? And then how far this place of the armored men? It had been past dawn when Drake had frightened the black eunuch with his pistol. It was not yet dawn now. How could Yuruk have made his way to the Persians so swiftly – how could they so swiftly have returned?

Amazingly she answered the spoken question and the unspoken.

“They came long before dusk,” she said. “By the night before Yuruk had won to Ruszark, the city of Cherkis; and long before dawn they were on their way hither. This the black dog I slew told me!”

“But Yuruk was with us here at dawn of yesterday,” I gasped.

“A night has passed since then,” she said, “and lo! another night is almost gone.”

Stunned, I considered this. If this were true – and not for an instant did I doubt her truth – then not for a few hours had we lain there at the foot of the living wall in the Hall of the Cones – but for the balance of that day and that night, and another day and part of still another night.

“What does she say?” Drake stared anxiously into my whitened face.

I told him. His eyes widened incredulously. “Yes.” Norhala spoke again. “The dusk before the last dusk that has passed I returned to my house. The, maid was there and sorrowing. She told me you had gone into the valley, prayed me to help you and to bring you back. I comforted her, and something of – the peace – I gave her; but not all, for she fought against it. A little we played together, and I left her sleeping. I sought you and found you also sleeping. I knew no harm would come to you, and I went my ways – and forgot you. Then came I here again, to find Yuruk and these the maid had slain.”

The great eyes flashed.

“Now do I honor the maid for the battle that she did,” she said, “though how she slew so many strong men I know not. My heart goes out to her. And therefore when I bring her back she shall no more be plaything to Norhala, but sister. And with you it shall be as she wills. And woe to those who have taken her!”

She paused, listening. From without came a rising storm of thin wailings, insistent and eager.

“But I have an older vengeance than this to take,” the golden voice tolled somberly. “Long have I forgotten – and shame I feel that I had forgot. So long have I forgotten all hatreds, all lusts, all cruelty – among – these—” She thrust a hand forth toward the hidden valley. “Forgot – dwelling in the great harmonies. Save for you and what has befallen, I would never have stirred from them, I think. But now awakened, I take that vengeance. After it is done “ – she paused – “after it is over I shall go back again. For this awakening has in it nothing of the ordered joy I love – it is a fierce and slaying fire. I shall go back—”

The shadow of her far dreaming flitted over, softened the angry brilliancy of her eyes.

“Listen, you two!” The shadow of dream fled. “Those that I am about to slay are evil – evil are they all, men and women. Long have they been so – yea, for cycles of suns. And their children grow like them – or if they be gentle and with love for peace they are slain or die of heartbreak. All this my mother told me long ago. So no more children shall be born from them either to suffer or to grow evil.”

Again she paused, nor did we interrupt her musing.

“My father ruled Ruszark,” she said at last. “Rustum he was named, of the seed of Rustum the Hero even as was my mother. They were gentle and good, and it was their ancestors who built Ruszark when, fleeing from the might of Iskander, they were sealed in the hidden valley by the falling mountain. Then there sprang from one of the families of the nobles, Cherkis Evil, evil was he, and as he grew he lusted for rule. On a night of terror he fell upon those who loved my father and slew; and barely had my father time to fly from the city with my mother, still but a bride, and a handful of those loyal to him. They found by chance the way to this place, hiding in the cleft which is its portal. They came, and they were taken by – Those who are now my people. Then my mother, who was very beautiful, was lifted before Him who rules here and she found favor in his sight and he had built for her this house, which now is mine.

“And in time I was born – but not in this house! Nay – in a secret place of light where, too, are born my people!”

She was silent.

I shot a glance at Drake.

The secret place of light – was it not that vast vault of mystery, of dancing orbs and flames transmuted into music into which we had peered and for which sacrilege, I had thought, had been thrust from the City? And did in this lie the explanation of her strangenesses? Had she there sucked in with her mother’s milk the enigmatic life of the Metal Hordes, been transformed into half human changeling, become true kin to them? What else could explain—

“My mother showed me Ruszark,” her voice, taking up once more her tale, checked my thoughts. “Once when I was little, she and my father bore me through the forest and through the hidden way. I looked upon Ruszark – a great city it is and populous, and a caldron of cruelty and of evil.

“Not like me were my father and mother. They longed for their kind and sought ever for means to regain their place among them. There came a time when my father, driven by this longing, ventured forth to Ruszark, seeking friends to help him regain that place – for these who obey me obeyed not him as they obey me; nor would he have marched them – as I shall – upon Ruszark if they had.

“Cherkis caught him. And Cherkis waited, knowing well that my mother would follow. For Cherkis knew not where to seek her, nor where they had lain hid, for between his city and here the mountains are great, unscalable, and the way through them is cunningly hidden; by chance alone did my mother’s mother and those who fled with her discover it. And though they tortured him, my father would not tell. And after a while forthwith those who still remained of hers stole out with my mother to find him. They left me here with Yuruk. And Cherkis caught my mother!”

The proud breasts heaved, the eyes shot forth visible flames.

“My father was flayed alive and crucified,” she cried. “His skin they nailed to the City’s gates. And when Cherkis had had his will with my mother he threw her to his soldiers for their sport!

“All of those who went with them he tortured and slew – and he and his laughed at their torment. But one there was who escaped and told me – me who was little more then than a budding maid. He called on me to bring vengeance – and he died. A year passed – and I am not like my mother and my father – and I forgot – dwelling here in the great tranquilities, barred from and having no thought for men and their ways!

“Aie, aie!” she cried; “woe to me that I could forget! But now I shall take my vengeance – I, Norhala, will stamp them flat – Cherkis and his city of Ruszark and everything it holds! I, Norhala, and my servants shall stamp them into the rock of their valley so that none shall know that they have been! And would that I could meet their Gods with all their powers that I might break them too, and stamp them into the rock under the feet of my servants!”

She threw out white arms, in a fury. Why had Yuruk lied to me? I wondered as I watched her. The Disk had not slain her mother. Of course! He had lied to play upon our terrors; had lied to frighten us away. How much truth had been in the rest of his tale?

The wailings were rising in a sustained crescendo. One of the slaying stars slipped over the chamber floor, folded its points and glided out of the door. “Come!” commanded Norhala, and led the way. The second star closed, followed us. We stepped over the threshold.

For one astounded, breathless moment we paused. In front of us reared a monster – a colossal, headless Sphinx! Like forelegs and paws, a ridge of pointed cubes and globes thrust against each side of the cañon walls. Between them for two hundred feet on high stretched the breast.

And this was a shifting, weaving mass of the Metal Things; they formed into gigantic cuirasses, giant bucklers, corselets of living mail! From them as they moved – nay, from all the monster – came the wailings. Like a headless Sphynx it crouched – and as we stood it surged forward as though it sprang a step to greet us!

“Hai!” shouted Norhala, battle buglings ringing through the golden voice. “Hai! my companies!”

Out from the summit of the breast shot a tremendous trunk of cubes and spinning globes. And like a trunk it nuzzled us, caught us up, swept us to the crest. An instant I tottered dizzily; was held; stood beside Norhala upon a little, level twinkling eyed platform; upon her other side swayed Drake.

Now through the monster I felt a throbbing, an eager and impatient pulse. I turned my head. Still like some huge and grotesque beast the back of the clustered Things ran for half a mile at least behind, tapering to a dragon tail that coiled and twisted another full mile toward the Pit. And from this back uprose and fell immense spiked and fan-shaped ruffs, thickets of spikes, whipping knouts of bristling tentacles, fanged crests! They thrust and waved, whipped and fell constantly; and constantly the great tail lashed and snapped, fantastic, long, living! “Hai!” shouted Norhala once more. From her lifted throat came again the golden chanting – but now a relentless, ruthless song of slaughter!

Up reared the monstrous bulk. Into it ran the dragon tail. Into it poured the fanged and bristling back.

Up, up – we were thrust – three hundred feet, four hundred, five hundred! Over the blue globe of Norhala’s house bent a gigantic leg. Spider-like out from each side of the monster thrust half a score of others.

Overhead the dawn began to break. Through it with ever increasing speed we moved, straight to the line of cliffs behind which lay the city of the armored men – and Ruth and Ventnor.

— XXXVII —

RUSZARK

Smoothly moved the colossal Shape; on it we rode as easily as though cradled. It did not glide – it strode! The columned legs raised themselves, bending from a thousand joints The pedestals of the feet, huge and massive as foundations for sixteen-inch guns, fell with machine-like precision, stamping gigantically.

Under their tread the trees of the forest snapped, were crushed like straw beneath the pads of a mastodon. From far below came the sound of their crashing. The thick forest checked the progress of the Shape less than tall grass would that of a man.

Behind us our trail was marked by deep, black pits in the forest’s green, clean cut and great as the Mark upon the poppied valley. They were the footprints of the Thing that carried us.

The wind streamed and whistled. A flock of the willow warblers arose, swirled about us with manifold beating of little frightened wings. Norhala’s face softened, her eyes smiled.

“Go – foolish little ones,” she cried, and waved her arms. They flew away, scolding.

A lammergeier swooped down on wide funereal wings; it peered at us; darted away toward the cliffs.

“There will be no carrion there for you, black eater of the dead, when I am through,” I heard Norhala whisper, eyes again somber.

Steadily grew the dawn light; from Norhala’s lips came again the chanting. And now that paean, the reckless pulse of the monster we rode, began to creep through my own veins. Into Drake’s too, I knew, for his head was held high and his eyes were clear and bright as hers who sang.

The jubilant pulse streamed up through the hands that held us, throbbed through us. The pulse of the Thing – sang!

Closer and closer grew the cliffs. Down and crashing down fell the trees, the noise of their fall accompanying the battle chant of the Valkyr beside me like wild harp chords of storm-lashed surf. Up to the precipices the forest rolled, unbroken. Now the cliffs loomed overhead. The dawn had passed. It was full day.

Cutting up through the towering granite scarps was a rift. In it the black shadows clustered thickly. Straight toward that cleft we sped. As we drew near, the crest of the Shape began swiftly to lower. Donn we sank and down – a hundred feet, two hundred; now we were not more than two score yards above the tree tops.

Out shot a neck, a tremendous serpent body. Crested it was with pyramids; crested with them too was its immense head. Thickly the head bristled with them, poised motionless upon spinning globes as huge as they. For hundreds of feet that incredible neck stretched ahead of us and for twice as far behind a monstrous, lizard-shaped body writhed. i

We rode now upon a serpent, a glittering blue metal dragon, spiked and knobbed and scaled! It was the weird steed of Norhala flattening, thrusting out to pierce the rift!

And still as when it had reared on high beat through it the wild, triumphant, questing pulse. Still rang out Norhala’s golden chanting.

The trees parted and fell upon each side of us as though we were some monster of the sea and they the waves we cleft!

The rift enclosed us. Lower we dropped; were not more than fifty feet above its floor. The Thing upon which we rode was a tor rent roaring through it. A deeper blackness enclosed us – a tunneling.

Through that we flowed. Out of it we darted into a widening filled with wan light drifting down through a pinnacle fanged mouth miles on high. Again the cleft shrunk. A thousand feet ahead was a crack, a narrowing of the cleft so small that hardly could a man pass through it.

Abruptly the metal dragon halted.

Norhala’s chanting changed; became again the arrogant clarioning. And close below us the huge neck split! It came to me then that it was as though Norhala were the over spirit of this chimera – as though it caught and understood and obeyed each quick thought of hers.

As though, indeed, she were a part of it – as it was in reality a part of that infinitely greater Thing, crouching there in its lair of the Pit – the Metal Monster that had lent this living part of itself to her for a steed, a champion! Little time had I to consider such matters;

Up thrust the Shape before us. Into it raced and spun Things angled, Things curved and Things squared. It gathered itself into a Titanic pillar out of which, instantly, thrust scores of arms.

Over them great globes raced; after these flew other scores of huge pyramids, none less than ten feet in height, the mass of them twenty and thirty. The manifold arms grew rigid. Quiet for a moment, a Titanic metal Briareous, it stood.

Then at the tips of the arms the globes began to spin – faster, faster. Upon them I saw the hosts of the pyramids open – as one into a host of stars. The cleft leaped out in a flood of violet light.

Now for another instant the stars which had been motionless, poised upon the whirling spheres, joined in their mad spinning. Cyclopean pin wheels they turned; again as one they ceased. More brilliant now was their light, dazzling; as though in their whirling they had gathered greater force!

Under me I felt the split Thing quiver – pant – with eagerness.

From the stars came a hurricane of lightnings! A cataract of electric flame poured into the crack, splashed and guttered down the granite walls. We were blinded by it; were deafened with thunders.

The face of the precipice smoked and split; was whirled away in clouds of dust!

The crack widened – widened as a gulley in a sand bank does when a swift stream rushes through it. Lightnings these were – and more than lightnings; lightnings keyed up to an invincible annihilating weapon that could rend and split and crumble to atoms the living granite!

Steadily the cleft expanded. As its walls melted away the Blasting Thing advanced, spurting into it the flaming torrents. Behind it we crept. The dust of the shattered rocks swirled up toward us like angry ghosts – before they reached us they were blown away as though by strong winds streaming from beneath us.

On we went, blinded, deafened. Interminably, it seemed, poured forth the hurricanes of blue fire; interminably the thunder bellowed.

There came a louder clamor – volcanic, chaotic, dulling the thunders! The sides of the cleft quivered, bent outward. With the roar of falling worlds they split; crashed down! Bright daylight poured in upon us, a flood of light toward which the billows of dust rushed as though seeking escape; out it poured like the smoke of ten thousand cannon.

And the Blasting Thing shook – as though with laughter!

The stars closed. Back into the Shape ran globe and pyramid. It slid toward us – joined the body from which it had broken away. Through all the mass ran a wave of jubilation, a pulse of mirth – a colossal, metallic – silent – roar of laughter!

We glided forward – out of the cleft. There was a burst of sunlight, strangely yellow after that incessant violent volleying. I felt a shifting movement.

Up and up we were thrust. Dazed, I looked behind me. In the face of a sky-climbing wall of rock, smoked a wide chasm! Out of it the billowing clouds of dust still streamed, pursuing, threatening us. The whole granite barrier quivered with agony. Higher we rose and higher.

“Look!” whispered Drake, and whirled me round.

Less than five miles away was the place of the armored men – Ruszark, the City of Cherkis. It was like some ancient city come into life out of long dead centuries; a page restored from once conquering Persia’s crumbled book; a city of the Chosroes transported by Jinns into our own time.

Built around and upon a low mount, it stood within a valley but little larger than the Pit. The plain was level, as though once it had been the floor of some primeval lake; the hill of the City was its only elevation.

Beyond, I caught the glinting of a narrow stream, meandering. The valley was ringed with precipitous cliffs falling sheer to its floor.

Slowly we advanced.

The city was almost square, guarded by double walls of hewn stone. The first raised itself a hundred feet on high, turreted and parapeted and pierced with gates. Perhaps a quarter of a mile behind it the second fortifications thrust up.

The city itself I estimated covered about twenty square miles. It ran upward in broad terraces. It was very fair, decked with blossoming gardens and green groves. Among the clustering granite houses, red and yellow roofed, thrust skyward tall spires and towers. Upon the mount’s top was a broad, flat plaza on which were great buildings, marble white and golden roofed; temples I thought, or palaces, or both.

Running to the city out of the grain fields and steads that surrounded it, were scores of little figures, ratlike. Here and there among them I glimpsed horsemen, arms and armor glittering. All were racing to the gates and the shelter of the battlements.

Nearer we drew. From the walls came now a faint sound of gongs, of drums, of shrill, flute-like pipings. Upon them I could see hosts gathering; hosts of swarming little figures whose bodies glistened, from above whom came gleamings – the light striking upon their helms, their spear and javelin tips.

“Ruszark!” breathed Norhala, eyes wide, red lips cruelly smiling. “Lo – I am before your gates. Lo – I am here – and was there ever joy like this!”

The constellations in her eyes blazed. Beautiful, beautiful was Norhala – as Isis punishing Typhon for the murder of Osiris; as avenging Diana; shining from her something of the spirit of all wrathful Goddesses.

The flaming hair whirled and snapped. From all her sweet body came white-hot furious force, the withering perfume of destruction! She pressed against me, and I trembled at the contact.

Lawless, wild imaginings ran through me. Life, human life, dwindled. The City seemed but a thing of toys. On – let us crush it! On – on!

Again the monster shook beneath us. Faster we moved. Louder grew the clangor of the drums, the gongs, the pipes. Nearer came the walls; and ever more crowded with the swarming human ants that manned them.

We were close upon the heels of the last fleeing stragglers. The Thing slackened in its stride; waited patiently until they were close to the gates. Before they could reach them I heard the brazen clanging of their valves. Those shut out beat frenziedly upon them; dragged themselves close to the base of the battlements, cowered there or crept along them seeking some hole in which to hide.

With a slow lowering of its height the Thing advanced. Now its form was that of a spindle a full mile in length on whose bulging center we three stood.

A hundred feet from the outer wall we halted. We looked down upon it not more than fifty feet above its broad top. From that vantage-point I could see hundreds of the soldiers crouching behind the parapets, companies of archers with great bows poised, arrows at their cheeks, scores of leather jerkined men with stands of javelins at their right hands, spearsmen and men with long, thonged slings.

Set at intervals were squat, powerful engines of wood and metal beside which were heaps of huge, rounded boulders. Catapults I knew them to be; around each swarmed a knot of soldiers, fixing the great stones in place, drawing back the thick ropes that, loosened, would hurl forth the projectiles. From each side came other men, dragging more of these balusters; assembling a battery against the prodigious, gleaming monster that menaced their city.

Between outer wall and inner battlements galloped squadrons of mounted men. Upon this inner wall the soldiers clustered thickly as on that between us and it, preparing as actively for its defense.

The city seethed. Up from it arose a humming, a buzzing, as of some immense angry hive.

Involuntarily I visualized the spectacle we must present to those who looked upon us – this huge incredible Shape of metal alive with quicksilver shiftings, this – as it must have seemed to them – hellish mechanism of war captained by a sorceress and her two familiars in form of men. There came to me dreadful visions of such a monster looking down upon the peace-reared battlements of New York – the panic rush of thousands away from it.

There was a blaring of trumpets. Up on the parapet leaped a man clad all in gleaming red armor. From head to feet the close linked scales covered him. Within a hood shaped somewhat like the tight-fitting head coverings of the Crusaders a pallid, cruel face looked out upon us; in the fierce black eyes was no trace of fear.

Evil as Norhala had said these people of Ruszark were wicked and cruel – they were no cowards, no!

The red armored man threw up a hand.

“Who are you?” he shouted. “Who are you three, you three who come driving down upon Ruszark through the rocks? We have no quarrel with you?”

“I seek a maid and a man,” cried Norhala. “A maid and a sick man your thieves took from me. Bring them forth!”

“Seek elsewhere for them then,” he answered. “They are not here. Turn now and seek elsewhere. Go quickly, lest I loose our might upon you and you go never!”

Mockingly rang her laughter – and under its lash the black eyes grew fiercer, the cruelty on the white face darkened.

“Little man whose words are so big! Fly who thunders! What are you called, little man?”

Her raillery bit deep – but its menace, its sinisterness passed unheeded in the rage it called forth.

“I am Kulun,” shouted the man in scarlet armor. “Kulun, the son of Cherkis the Mighty, and captain of his hosts. Kulun – who will cast your skin under my mares in stall for them to trample and thrust your red flayed body upon a pole in the grain fields to frighten away the crows! Does that answer you?”

Her laughter ceased; her eyes dwelt upon him – filled with an infernal joy.

“The son of Cherkis!” I heard her murmur. “He has a son – to slay!”

There was a sneer on his wicked face; clearly he thought her awed. Quick was his disillusionment.

“Listen, Kulun,” she cried. “I am Norhala – daughter of another Norhala and of Rustum, whom Cherkis tortured and slew! Now go, you lying spawn of unclean toads – go and tell your father that I, Norhala, am at his gates! And bring back with you the maid and man! Go, I say!”

— XXXVIII —

CHERKIS

There was stark amazement on Kulun’s face; and fear now enough. Swiftly he dropped from the parapet among his men. There came one loud trumpet blast.

Out from the battlements poured a storm of arrows, a cloud of javelins! The squat catapults leaped forward. From them came a hail of boulders! Before that onrushing tempest of death I flinched, cowered.

I heard Norhala’s golden laughter and before they could reach us arrow and javelin and boulder were checked as though myriads of hands had reached out from the Thing under us and caught them! Down they fell!

Forth from the great spindle shot a gigantic arm, hammer tipped with cubes. It struck the wall close to where the scarlet armored Kulun had dropped.

Under its blow the stones crumbled, fell crashing! With the fragments fell soldiers, writhing as they dropped; were buried beneath them. A hundred feet in width a breach gaped in the battlements. Out shot the arm again; hooked its hammer tip over the parapet, tore away a stretch of the breastwork as though it had been cardboard. Beside the breach an expanse of the broad flat top lay open like a wide plat form! The arm withdrew.

Out from the whole length of the spindle thrust other arms, hammer tipped, held high aloft, menacing! From all the length of the wall arose panic outcry. Abruptly the storm of arrows ended; the catapults were still. Again the trumpets sounded; the crying ceased. Down fell a silence, terrified, stifling!

Kulun stepped forth again, both hands held high. Gone was his arrogance. “A parley,” he shouted, and there was tremor in his voice. “A parley, Norhala. If we give you the maid and man, will you go?”

“Go get them,” she answered. “And take with you this my command to Cherkis – that he return with the two!” For an instant Kulun hesitated. Up thrust the dreadful arms, poised themselves to strike.

“It shall be so!” he shouted. “I carry your command!”

He leaped back, his red mail flashed toward a turret that held, I supposed, a stair way. He was lost to sight. In silence we waited.

On the further side of the city I glimpsed movement. Little troops of mounted men, pony drawn wains, knots of running figures were fleeing from the city through the opposite gates. Norhala saw them too. With that incomprehensible, instant obedience to her unspoken thought a mass of the Metal Things separated from us; whirled up into a dozen of those obelisked forms I had seen march from the cat eyes of the City of the Pit!

In but a breath, it seemed, their columns were far off, herding back the fugitives!

They did not touch them, did not offer to harm them – only, grotesquely like dogs heading off and corralling frightened sheep, they circled and darted. Back came rushing those they herded.

From the watching terraces and walls arose shrill cries of terror, a wailing. Far away the obelisks met, pirouetted, melted into one thick column. Towering, motionless as we it stood, guarding the further gates.

There was a stir upon the wall, a flashing of spears, of drawn blades. Two litters closed with curtainings, surrounded by triple rows of swordsmen fully armored, carrying small shields and led by Kulun, were being borne to the torn battlement.

Their half-naked bearers stopped well within the platform and gently lowered their burdens. The leader of those around the second litter drew aside its covering, spoke. Out stepped Ruth and after her – Ventnor!

“Martin!” I could not keep back the cry; heard mingle with it Drake’s own cry to Ruth. Ventnor raised his hand in greeting; I thought he smiled. The cubes on which we stood shot forward; stopped within fifty feet of them. Instantly the guard of swordsmen raised their blades, held them over the pair as though waiting the signal to strike.

And now I saw that Ruth was not clad as she had been when we had left her. She stood in scanty kirtle that came scarcely to her knees, her shoulders were bare, her curly brown hair unbound and tangled. Her face was set with wrath hardly less than that which beat from Norhala. On Ventnor’s forehead was a blood red scar, a line that ran from temple to temple like a brand!

The curtains of the first litter quivered; behind them someone spoke. That in which Ruth and Ventnor had ridden was drawn swiftly away. The knot of swordsmen drew back.

Into their places sprang and knelt a dozen archers. They ringed the two, bows drawn taut, arrows in place and pointing straight to their hearts!

Out of the litter rolled a giant of a man. Seven feet he must have been in height; over the huge shoulders, the barreled chest and the bloated abdomen hung a purple cloak glittering with gems; through the thick and grizzled hair passed a flashing circlet of jewels.

The scarlet armored Kulun beside him, swordsmen guarding them, he walked to the verge of the torn gap in the wall. He peered down it, glanced imperturbably at the upraised, hammer-handed arms still threatening; examined again the breach. Then with Kulun he strode over to the very edge of the broken battlement and stood, head thrust a little forward, studying us in silence.

“Cherkis!” whispered Norhala – the whisper was a hymn to Nemesis! I felt her body quiver from head to foot.

A wave of hatred, a hot desire to slay, passed through me as I scanned the face staring at us. It was a great gross mask of evil, of cold cruelty and of callous lusts. Unwinking, icily malignant, black slits of eyes glared at us between pouches that held them half closed. Heavy jowls hung pendulous, dragging down the corners of the thick lipped, brutal mouth into a deep graven, unchanging sneer.

The face was the lair of every beast of sensuality; it was ravened with cynic wickednesses. As he gazed upon Norhala a flicker of lust shot like a licking tongue through his eyes; his lips writhed, vulpinely. Yet from him pulsed power; sinister, instinct with evil, concentrate with cruelty – but power indomitable. Such was Cherkis, descendant perhaps of that Xerxes the Conqueror who three millennia gone ruled the known world.

It was Norhala who broke the silence.

“Tcherak! Greeting – Cherkis!” There was merciless mirth in the buglings of her voice. “Lo, I did but knock so gently; at your gates and you hastened to welcome me! Greetings – gross swine, spittle of the toads, fat slug beneath my sandals!”

He passed the insults by, unmoved – although I heard a murmuring go up from those near and Kulun’s hard eyes blazed.

“We will bargain, Norhala,” he answered calmly; the voice was deep, filled with sinister strength.

“Bargain!” she laughed. “What have you with which to bargain, Cherkis? Does the rat bargain with the tigress? And you, toad, have nothing.” He shook his head.

“I have these.” He waved a hand toward Ruth and her brother. “Me you may slay – and mayhap many of mine. But before you can move to slay my archers shall feather their hearts like the birds.”

“God!” muttered Drake. “He can do it!”

She considered him, no longer mocking.

“Two of mine you slew long since, Cherkis,” she said slowly. “Therefore it is I am here.”

“I know,” he nodded heavily. “Yet that is neither here nor there now, Norhala. That was long since, and I have learned much during the years. I would have killed you too, Norhala, could I have found you. But now I would not do as then – quite differently would I do, Norhala; for I have learned much since then. I am sorry that those you loved died as they did. I am in truth sorry!”

There was a curious – lurking – sardonicism in the words, an undertone of mockery. Was what he really meant that in those years he had learned to inflict greater agonies, more exquisite tortures? If so, Norhala apparently did not sense that interpretation. Indeed, she seemed to be interested, her wrath abating.

“No,” the hoarse voice rumbled dispassionately. “None of that is important now. You would have this man and girl. I hold them. They die at my nod. They die if you stir a hand’s breadth toward me. If they die, I prevail against you – for I have cheated you of what you desire. I win, Norhala, even though you slay me. That is all that now is important.”

There was doubt upon Norhala’s face; I caught a quick gleam of contemptuous triumph glint through the depths of the evil eyes.

“Empty will be your victory over me, Norhala,” he said; then waited.

“What is your bargain?” she spoke hesitatingly; with a sinking of my heart I heard the doubt tremble in her throat.

“If you will go without further knocking upon my gates—” there was a satiric grimness in the phrase – “go when you have been given them, and pledge yourself never to return – you shall have them. If you will not, then they die.”

“But what security, what hostages, do you ask?” Her eyes were troubled. “I cannot swear by your Gods, Cherkis, for they are not my Gods – and in truth I, Norhala, have no Gods. Why should I not say yes and take the two, then fall upon you and destroy – as you would do in my place, old wolf?”

“Norhala,” he answered, “I ask nothing but your word. Do I not know those who bore you and the line from which they sprung? Was not always the word they gave kept till death – unbroken, inviolable? No need for vows to Gods between you and me. Your word is holier than they – O glorious daughter of kings, princess royal!”

The great voice was harshly caressing; not obsequious, but as though he gave her as an equal her rightful honor. Her face softened; she considered him from eyes far less hostile. A wholesome respect for this gross tyrant’s mentality came to me; it did not temper, it heightened, the repulsion I felt for him. But now I recognized the subtlety of his attack; realized that unerringly he had taken the only means by which he could have gained a hearing; have temporized. Could he win her with his guile?

“Is it not true?” There was a leonine purring in the question.

“It is true!” she answered proudly. “Though why you should dwell upon this, Cherkis, whose word is steadfast as the running stream and whose promises are as lasting as its bubbles – why you should dwell on this I do not know.”

“I have changed greatly, Princess, in the years since my great wickedness; I have learned much. He who speaks to you now is not he you were taught – and taught justly then – to hate.”

Could she not realize this Satanic unctuousness, this Machiavellian humbleness, this Judas hypocrisy? It was plain to me.

“You may speak truth! Certainly you are not as I have pictured you.” It was as though she were more than half convinced. “In this at least you do speak truth – that if I promise I go and molest you no more.”

“Why go at all, Princess?” Quietly he asked the amazing question – then drew himself to his full height, threw wide his arms.

“Princess?” the great voice rumbled forth. “Nay – Queen! Why leave us again – Norhala the Queen? Are we not of your people? Am I not of your kin? Join your power with ours. What that war engine you ride may be, how built, I know not. But this I do know – that with our strengths joined we two can go forth from here where I have dwelt so long, go forth into the forgotten world, eat its cities and rule!

“You shall teach our people to make these engines, Norhala, and we will make many of them! Queen Norhala – you shall wed my son Kulun, he who stands beside me. And while I live you shall rule with me, rule equally. And when I die you and Kulun shall rule.

“Thus shall our two royal lines be made one, the old feud wiped out, the long score be settled. Queen – wherever it is you dwell, it comes to me that you have few of men. Queen – you need men, many men and strong to follow you, men to gather the harvests of your power, men to bring to you the fruit of your smallest wish – young men and vigorous to amuse you!

“Let the past be forgotten – I too have wrongs to forget, O Queen! Come to us, Great One, with your power and your beauty! Teach us! Lead us! Return and throned above your people rule the world!”

He ceased. Over the battlements, over all the city, dropped a vast expectant silence – as though the city knew its fate was hanging upon the balance. Through my veins ran prickling terror. Not this hidden city, not its forgotten people; not us four from the outer world concerned me – what lay upon the scales was the fate of the whole outer world, the destinies of humanity.

With these fierce legions behind her and the Things – these warriors without ruth or stay, these living mechanisms of inhuman powers – what in that outer world of ours could withstand Norhala? Reason whispered to me – the Metal Emperor, the sullen-fired Keeper, the cones, all the vast phantasmagoria that was the Metal Monster itself, the incredible colossal Enigma upon one of whose puniest, borrowed claws we stood – could Norhala bring It to heel, obedient to her whistle? Not for a moment could I believe it. And yet—

“No! No!” It was Ruth crying. “Do not trust him, Norhala! It’s a trap! He shamed me – he tortured—”

Cherkis half turned; before he swung about I saw a hell shadow darken his face. Ventnor’s hand thrust out, covered Ruth’s mouth, choked her crying.

“Your son—” Norhala spoke swiftly; back flashed the cruel face of Cherkis, devouring her with his eyes. “Your son – and Queenship_here – and Empire of the World!” Her voice was rapt, thrilled. “All this you offer? Me – Norhala?”

“This and more!” The huge bulk of his body quivered with eagerness. “If it be your wish, O Queen, I, Cherkis, will step down from the throne for you and sit beneath your right hand, eager to do your bidding!”

A moment she studied him.

“Norhala,” I whispered, “do not do this thing. – He thinks to gain your secrets.” Her hand dropped, caught me by the wrist, pressed it fiercely.

“Let my bridegroom stand forth that I may look upon him,” called Norhala. Visibly Cherkis relaxed, as though a strain had been withdrawn. Between him and his crimson-clad son flashed a glance, demoniacally exultant; it was as though a. triumphant devil sped from them into each other’s eyes.

I saw Ruth shrink into Ventnor’s arms. Up from the wall rose a jubilant shouting, was caught by the inner battlements, passed on to the crowded terraces. Ruszark rejoiced!

“Take Kulun.” It was Drake, pistol drawn and whispering across to me. “I’ll handle Cherkis. And shoot straight!”

— XXXIX —

THE VENGEANCE
OF NORHALA!

Norhala’s hand that had gone from my wrist dropped down again, held it; I glimpsed the other fall upon Drake’s.

Kulun loosed his hood, let it fall about his shoulders, with a smirk upon his cruel face he stepped forward, held out his arms to Norhala.

“A strong man!” she cried approvingly. “Hail – my bridegroom! But stay – stand back a moment. Stand beside that man for whom I came to Ruszark. I would see you together!”

The smirk fled from Kulun, his face darkened. But Cherkis smiled with evil understanding, shrugged his shoulders and whispered to him. Sullenly Kulun stepped back. The ring of archers lowered their bows; they leaped to their feet and stood aside to let him pass.

Quick as a serpent’s tongue a pyramid-tipped tentacle flicked out beneath us. It darted through the broken circle of the bowmen. It licked up Ruth and Ventnor and – Kulun!

Swiftly as it had shot forth it returned, coiled, and dropped those two I loved – their eyes tight closed, their bodies quivering – at Norhala’s sandals. It flashed back on high with the scarlet length of Cherkis’s son sprawled along its angled end!

The great body of Cherkis seemed to wither. Up from all the wall went a tempestuous sigh of horror. Out rang the merciless chimes of Norhala’s laughter.

“Tchai!” she cried. “Tchai! Fat fool there! Tchai – you Cherkis! Toad whose wits have sickened with your years!

“Did you think to catch me, Norhala, in your filthy web? Princess! Queen! Empress of Earth! Ho – old fox I have outplayed and beaten, what now have you to trade with Norhala?”

Mouth sagging open, eyes glaring, the tyrant slowly raised his arms – a suppliant.

“You would have back the bridegroom you gave me?” she laughed. “Take him, then!”

Down swayed the metal arm that held Kulun. And glad, glad was I that Ruth’s eyes were closed against Drake’s breast. For the arm dropped Cherkis’s son at Cherkis’s feet; and as though Kulun had been a grape – it crushed him!

Before those who had seen could stir from their stupor the tentacle hovered over Cherkis, glaring down at the horror that had been his son. It did not strike him – it drew him up to it as a magnet draws a pin! And as the pin swings from the magnet when held suspended by the head, so swung the great body of Cherkis from the underside of the pyramid that held him. Hanging so he was carried toward us, came to a stop not ten feet from us—

Weird, weird beyond all telling was that scene – and would I had the power to make you who read see it as we did. The animate, living Shape of metal on which we stood, with its forest of hammer-handed arms raised menacingly along all its mile of spindled length – the great walls glistening with the armored hosts – the terraces of that fair and ancient city, their gardens and green groves and clustering red and yellow-roofed houses and temples and palaces – the swinging gross body of Cherkis in the clutch of the unseen magnetic grip of the grotesque tentacle, his grizzled hair touching the side of the pyramid that held him, his arms half outstretched, the gemmed cloak flapping like the wings of a jeweled bat, his white, malignant face in which the evil eyes were burning slits flaming hell’s own blackest hatred – beyond the city, from which pulsed almost visibly a vast and hopeless horror, the watching column – and over all this the palely radiant white sky under whose light the encircling cliffs were tremendous stony palettes splashed with a hundred pigments.

Norhala’s laughter had ceased. Somberly she looked upon Cherkis, into the devil fire of his eyes. Yet quiet as she was I sensed behind that exquisite cold face the gathering of the lightnings.

“Cherkis!” she half whispered. “Now comes the end for you – and for all that is yours. Until the end’s end you shall see!”

The hanging body was thrust forward a yard; was thrust up; was brought down upon its feet on the upper plane of the prostrate pyramid tipping the metal arm that held him. For an instant he strove to escape, to break from what must have been to him an incredible restraint: I think he meant to hurl himself down upon Norhala, to kill her before he himself was slain.

If so, after that one frenzied effort he realized the futility, for with a certain dignity he drew himself upright, turned his eyes toward his city.

Over that city a dreadful silence hung. It was as though it cowered, hid its face, was afraid to breathe.

“The end!” murmured Norhala.

There was a quick trembling through the Metal Thing. Down swung its forest of sledges. Beneath the blow down fell the smitten walls, shattered and crumbling, and with it glittering like shining flies in a dust storm fell the armored men. Through that mile-wide breach and up to the inner barrier I glimpsed confusion chaotic. And again I say it – they were no cowards, those men of Cherkis. From the inner battlements flew clouds of arrows, of huge stones – as uselessly as before.

Then out from opened gates poured regiments of horsemen, brandishing javelins and great maces, and shouting fiercely as they drove down upon each end of the Metal Shape. Under cover of their attack I saw cloaked riders spurring their ponies across the plain to shelter of the cliff walls, to the chance of hiding-places within them. Women and men of the rich, the powerful, I knew, flying for safety; after them ran and scattered through the fields of grain a multitude on foot.

The ends of the spindle drew back before the horsemen’s charge, broadening as they went – like the heads of monstrous cobras withdrawing into their hoods. Abruptly, with a lightning velocity, these broadenings expanded into immense lunettes, two tremendous curving and crablike claws! Their tips flung themselves past the racing troops; then like gigantic pincers began to contract.

Of no avail now was it for the horsemen to halt dragging their mounts on their haunches, or to turn to fly. The ends of the lunettes had met, the pincer tips had closed. The mounted men were trapped within half-mile-wide circles. And in upon man and horse their living walls marched! Within those enclosures of the doomed began a frantic milling – I shut my eyes.

There was a dreadful screaming of horses, a shrieking of men. Then silence.

Shuddering, I looked. Where the mounted men had been was – nothing! Nothing? There were two great circular spaces whose floors were glistening, wetly red. Fragment of man or horse – there was none. They had been crushed into – what was it Norhala had promised – had been stamped into the rock beneath the feet of her – servants!

Sick, I looked away – stared at a Thing that writhed and undulated over the plain; a prodigious serpentine Shape of cubes and spheres linked and studded thick with the spikes of the pyramids! Through the fields, over the plain its incredible coils flashed.

Playfully it sped and twisted among the fugitives, crushing them, tossing them aside broken, gliding over them. Some there were who hurled themselves upon it in impotent despair, some who knelt before it, praying. On rolled the metal convolutions, inexorable.

Within my vision’s range there were no more fugitives! Around a corner of the broken battlements raced the serpent Shape. Where it had writhed was now no waving grain, no trees, no green thing. There was only smooth rock upon which here and there red smears glistened wetly.

Afar there was a crying, in its wake a rumbling. It was the column, it came to me, at work upon the further battlements. As though the sound had been a signal the spindle trembled; up we were thrust another hundred feet or more. Back dropped the host of brandished arms, threaded themselves into the parent bulk.

Right and left of us the spindle split into scores of fissures. Between these fissures the Metal Things that made up each now dissociate and shapeless mass geysered; block and sphere and tetrahedron spike spun and swirled. There was an instant of formlessness.

Then right and left of us stood scores of giant, grotesque warriors! Their crests were full fifty feet below our living platform. They stood upon six immense, columnar stilts. These sextuple legs supported a hundred feet above their bases a huge and globular body formed of clusters of the spheres. Out from each of these bodies that were at one and the same time trunks and heads, sprang half a score of colossal arms shaped like flails, like spike-studded girders, Titanic battle maces, Cyclopean sledges! From legs and trunks and arms the tiny eyes of the Metal Hordes flashed, exulting!

There came from them, from the Thing we rode as well, a chorus of thin and eager wailings like hounds at cry; pulsed through all that battle-line a jubilant throbbing – with a rhythmic, jocund stride they leaped upon the city!

Under the mallets of the smiting arms the inner battlements fell as under the hammers of a thousand metal Thors. Over their fragments and the armored men who fell with them strode the Things, grinding stone and man together as we passed.

All of the terraced city except the side hidden by the mount lay open to my gaze. In that brief moment of pause I saw crazed crowds battling in narrow streets, tramp ling over mounds of the fallen, surging over barricades of bodies, clawing and tearing at each other in their flight from the nightmare invaders.

There was a wide, stepped street of gleaming white stone that climbed like an immense stairway straight up the slope to that broad plaza at the top where clustered the great temples and palaces – the Acropolis of the city. Into it the streets of the terraces flowed, each pouring out upon it a. living torrent tumultuous with tuliped, sparkling little waves, the gay coverings and the arms and armor of Ruszark’s desperate thousands seeking safety at the shrines of their gods.

Here great carven arches arose; there slender, exquisite towers capped with red gold – there was a street of colossal statues, another over which dozens of graceful, fretted, mysterious bridges threw their spans from feathery billows of flowering trees; there were gardens gay with blossoms in which fountains sparkled, green groves; thousands upon thousands of bright multi-colored pennants, banners, fluttered – a fair, a lovely city was Cherkis’s stronghold of Ruszark!

Its beauty filled the eyes; out from it streamed the fragrance of its gardens – the voice of its agony was that of the souls in Dis, that black and flaming city of the lost that Dante saw.

The row of destroying shapes lengthened, each huge warrior of metal drawing far apart from its mates. They flexed their manifold arms, shadow boxed – grotesquely, dreadfully.

Down struck the flails, the sledges. Beneath the blows the buildings burst like eggshells, their fragments burying the throngs fighting for escape in the thorough fares that threaded them. Over their ruins we moved.

Down and ever down crashed the awful sledges. And ever under them the city crumbled. There was a spider Shape that crawled up the wide stairway hammering into the stone those who tried to flee before it.

Stride by stride the Destroying Things ate up the city!

Swift upon the first great shock of horror, the agonized revulsion against this slaughter, a sense of unreality numbed me. Or rather was it a film upon my consciousness through which could not pierce realization that these who died were men and women and their children, nor that this which was being annihilated was the work of human hands.

I felt neither wrath nor pity. Through me began to beat a jubilant roaring pulse – as though I were a shouting corpuscle of the rushing hurricane, as though I were one of the hosts of smiting spirits of the bellowing typhoon. Through this stole another thought – vague, unfamiliar, yet seemingly of truth’s own essence. Why, I wondered, had I never recognized this before? Why had I never known – That these green forms called trees were but ugly, unsymmetrical excrescences? That these high projections of towers, these buildings were – deformities? That these four-pronged, moving little shapes that screamed and ran were – hideous?

They must be wiped out! All this misshapen, jumbled, inharmonious ugliness must be wiped out! It must be ground down to smooth unbroken planes, harmonious curvings, shapeliness – harmonies of arc and line and angle!

Something deep within me fought to speak – fought to tell me that this thought was not human thought, not my thought – that it was the reflected thought of the Metal Things!

It told me – and fiercely it struggled to make me realize what it was that it told. Its insistence was borne upon little despairing, rhythmic beatings – throbbings that were like the muffled sobbings of the drums of grief the Marquesans beat only for the passing into death of a virgin princess, Louder, closer came the throbbing; clearer with it my perception of the inhumanness of my thought.

The drum beat tapped at my humanity, became a dolorous knocking at my heart!

It was the sobbing of Cherkis!

The gross face was shrunken, the cheeks sagging in folds of woe; cruelty and wickedness were wiped from it; the evil in the eyes had been washed out by tears. Eyes streaming, bull throat and barrel chest racked by his sobbing, he watched the passing of his people and his city.

And relentlessly, coldly, Norhala watched him – as though loath to lose the faintest shadow of his agony.

Now I saw we were close to the top of the mount. Packed between us and the immense white structures that crowned it, were thousands of the people. They fell on their knees before us, prayed to us. They tore at each other, striving to hide themselves from us in the mass that was themselves. They beat against the barred doors of the sanctuaries; they climbed the pillars; they swarmed over the golden roofs. There was a moment of chaos – a chaos of which we were the heart. Then temple and palace cracked, burst; were shattered; fell. I caught glimpses of gleaming sculptures, glitterings of gold and of silver, flashing of gems, shimmering of gorgeous draperies – under them a weltering of men and women. We closed down upon them – over them!

The dreadful sobbing ceased. I saw the head of Cherkis swing heavily upon a shoulder; the eyes closed.

The Destroying Things touched. Their flailing arms coiled back, withdrew into their bodies. They joined, forming for an instant a tremendous hollow pillar far down in whose center we stood. They parted; shifted in shape; rolled down the mount over the ruins like a widening wave – crushing stone and human fragments as they passed.

Afar away I saw the gleaming serpent still at play – still writhing among, still obliterating the few score scattered fugitives that some way, some how, had slipped by the Destroying Things.

We halted. For one long moment Norhala looked upon the drooping body of him upon whom she had let fall this mighty vengeance.

Then the metal arm that held Cherkis whirled. Thrown from it, the cloaked form flew like a great blue bat; fell upon the flattened mound that had once been the proud crown of his city. A blue blot upon desolation the broken body of Cherkis lay. A black speck appeared high in the sky; grew fast – the lammergeier!

“I have left carrion for you – after all!” cried Norhala.

With an ebon swirling of wings the vulture dropped beside the blue heap – thrust in it its beak!

— XL —

“THE DRUMS OF DESTINY!”

Slowly we descended that mount of desolation; lingeringly, as though the brooding eyes of Norhala were not yet sated with destruction. Of human life, of green life, of life of any kind there was none. Man and tree, woman and flower, babe and bud, palace, temple and home – Norhala had stamped flat! She had crushed them within the rock – even as she had promised!

The tremendous tragedy had absorbed my every faculty; I had had no time to think of my companions; I had forgotten them. Now in the painful surges of awakening realization, of full human understanding of that unhuman annihilation with all that lurked within it of colossal menace to our own world, our own race, I turned to them for strength. Faintly I wondered again at Ruth’s scantiness of garb, her more than half nudity; dwelt curiously upon the red brand across Ventnor’s forehead.

In his eyes and in Drake’s I saw reflected the horror I knew was in my own. But in the eyes of Ruth was none of this – sternly, coldly triumphant, indifferent to its piteousness as Norhala herself she scanned the waste that less than an hour since had been a place of living beauty.

I felt a shock of repulsion. After all those who had been destroyed so ruthlessly could not all have been wholly evil. Yet mother and blossoming maid, youth and oldster, all the pageant of humanity within the great walls were now but lines within the stone. According to their different lights, it came to me, there had been in Ruszark no greater number of the wicked than one could find in any great city of our own civilization.

From Norhala, of course, I looked for no perception of any of this. But from Ruth—

My reaction grew; the pity long with held racing through me linked with a burning anger, a hatred for this woman who had been the directing soul of that catastrophe.

My gaze fell again upon the red brand. I saw that it was a deep indentation as though a thong had been twisted around Ventnor’s head, biting to the bone. There was dried blood on the edges, a double ring of swollen white flesh rimming the cincture. It was the mark of – torture!

“Martin!” I cried. “That ring? What did they do to you?”

“They wakened me with that,” he answered quietly. “I suppose I ought to be grateful – although their intentions were not exactly – therapeutic—”

“They tortured him!” Ruth’s voice was tense, bitter; she spoke in Persian – for Norhala’s benefit I thought then, not guessing the deeper reason. “They tortured him. They gave him agony until he – returned! And they promised him other agonies that would make him pray long for death.

“And me – me” she raised little clenched hands – “me they stripped like a slave! They led me through the city and the people mocked me. They took me before that swine Norhala has punished – and stripped me before him – like a slave! Before my eyes they tortured my brother! Norhala – they were evil, all evil! Norhala – you did well to slay them!”

She caught the woman’s hands, pressed close to her. Long Norhala gazed at her; from great gray eyes in which the wrath was dying, into which the old tranquility, the old serenity was flowing. And when she spoke the golden voice held more than returning echoes of the far-away, faint chimings.

“It is done,” she said. “And it was well done – sister! Now you and I shall dwell together in the peace – sister! Or if there be those in the world from which you came that you would have slain, then you and I shall go forth with our companies and stamp them out – even as I did these!”

My heart stopped beating – for from the depths of Ruth’s eyes shining shadows were rising, wraiths answering Norhala’s calling; and, as they rose, steadily they drew life from the clear radiance summoning them – drew closer to the semblance of that tranquil spirit which her vengeance had banished but that had now returned to its twin thrones of Norhala’s eyes.

And at last it was twin sister of Norhala who looked upon her from the face of Ruth! The white arms of the woman encircled her; the glorious head bent over her; flaming tresses mingled with tender brown curls.

“Sister,” she whispered. “Little sister! These men you shall have as long as it pleases you – to do with as you will. Or if it is your wish they shall go back to their world and I will guard them to its gates.

“But you and I, little sister, will dwell together – in the vastnesses – in the peace. Shall it not be so?”

With no faltering, with no glance toward us three – lover, brother, old friend – Ruth crept closer to her, rested her head upon the virginal, royal breasts.

“It shall be so!” she murmured. “Sister – it shall be so. Norhala – I am tired! Norhala – I have seen enough of men!”

An ecstasy of tenderness, a flame of unearthly rapture, trembled over the woman’s wondrous face. Hungrily, defiantly, she pressed the girl to her; the stars in the lucid heavens of her eyes were soft and gentle and caressing.

“Ruth!” cried Drake – and sprang toward them. She paid no heed; and even as he leaped he was caught, whirled back against us.

“Wait!” said Ventnor, and caught him by the arm as wrathfully, blindedly, he strove against the force that held him. “Wait! No use – now!”

There was a curious understanding in his voice – a curious sympathy, too, in the patient, untroubled gaze that dwelt upon his sister and this weirdly exquisite one who held her.

“Wait!” exclaimed Drake. “Wait – hell! The damned witch is stealing her away from us!”

Again he threw himself forward; recoiled as though swept back by an invisible arm; fell against us and was clasped and held by Ventnor. And as he struggled the Thing we rode halted. Like metal waves back into it rushed the enigmatic billows that had washed over the fragments of the city. We were lifted – rode high; between us and the woman and girl, a cleft appeared; it widened into a rift. It was as though Norhala had decreed it as a symbol of this her second victory – or had set it between us as a barrier. Wider grew the rift. Save for the bridge of our voices it separated us from Ruth as though she had stood upon another world.

Higher we rose; the three of us now upon the flat top of a tower upon whose counterpart fifty feet away and facing the homeward path, Ruth and Norhala stood with white arms interlaced.

The serpent shape flashed toward us; it vanished beneath, merging, I knew, into the waiting Thing.

Then slowly the Thing began to move; quietly it glided to the chasm it had blasted in the cliff wall. The shadow of those walls fell upon us. As one we looked back; as one we searched out the patch of blue with the black blot at its breast.

We found it; the precipices hid it. Silently we streamed through the chasm, through the cañon and the tunnel – speaking no word, Drake’s eyes fixed with bitter hatred upon Norhala, Ventnor brooding upon her always with that enigmatic sympathy. We passed between the walls of the further cleft; stood for an instant at the brink of the green forest. There came to us as though from immeasurable distances a faint, sustained thrumming – like the beating of countless muffled drums. The Thing that carried us trembled – the sound died away. The Thing quieted; it began its steady, effortless striding through the crowding trees – but now with none of that speed with which it had come, spurred forward by Norhala’s awakened hate.

Ventnor stirred; broke the silence. And now I saw how wasted was his body, how sharpened his face; almost ethereal; purged not only by suffering but by, it came to, me, some strange, new knowledge.

“No use, Drake,” he said dreamily. “All this is now on the knees of the gods. And whether those gods be humanity’s or whether they be – Gods of Metal – I do not know.

“But this I do know – only one way or another can the balance fall; and if it be one way, then you and we shall have Ruth back. And if it falls the other way – then there will be little need for us to care. For man will be done!”

“Martin! What do you mean?”

“It is the crisis,” he answered. “We can do nothing, Goodwin – nothing. Whatever it is that is to be steps forth now from the womb of Destiny.” Again there came that distant rolling – louder, now. Again the Thing trembled.

“The drums,” whispered Ventnor. “The drums of destiny! What is it they are heralding? A new birth of Earth and the passing of man? A new child to whom shall be given dominion – nay, to whom has been given dominion? Or is it – taps – for Them?”

The drumming died as I listened – fearfully. About us was only the swishing, the sighing of the falling trees beneath the tread of the Thing. Motionless stood Norhala; motionless Ruth.

“Martin!” I cried once more, a dreadful doubt upon me; I searched his face for sign of weakened sanity. “Martin – what do you mean?”

“Whence did – They – come?” His voice was clear and calm, the eyes beneath the red brand clear and quiet, too. “Whence did They come – these Things that carry us; that strode like destroying angels over Cherkis’s city? Are they spawn of Earth – as we are? Or are they foster children – changelings from another star?

“These creatures that when many still are one – that when one still are many! Whence did They come? What are They?”

He looked down upon the cubes that held us; their hosts of tiny eyes shone up at him, enigmatically – as though they had heard and understood.

“I do not forget,” he said. “At least not all do I forget of what I saw during that time when I seemed an atom outside space – as I told you, or think I told you, speaking with unthinkable effort through lips that seemed eternities away from me, the atom, who strove to open them.

“There were three – visions, revelations – I know not what to call them. And though each seemed equally real, of two of them, only one, I think, can be true; and of the third – that may some time be true but surely is not yet.”

— XLI —

THE GATHERING STORM

Through the air came a louder drum roll – in it something ominous, something sinister. It swelled to a crescendo; abruptly ceased. And now I saw Norhala raise her head; listen.

“I saw a world, a vast world, Goodwin, marching stately through space. It was no globe – it was a world of many facets, of smooth and polished planes; a huge blue jewel world, dimly luminous; a crystal world cut out from aether! A geometric thought of the Great Cause, of God if you will, made material! It was airless, waterless, sunless.

“I seemed to draw closer to it. And then I saw that over every facet patterns were traced; gigantic symmetrical designs; mathematical hieroglyphs. In them I read unthinkable calculations, formulas of inter-woven universes, arithmetical progressions of armies of stars, pandects [laws] of the motions of the suns. In the patterns was an appalling harmony – as though all the laws from those which guide the atom to those which direct the cosmos were there resolved into completeness – totaled!

“The faceted world was like a cosmic abacist, tallying as it marched the errors of the infinite.

“The patterned symbols constantly changed form. I drew nearer – the symbols were alive! They were, in untold numbers – These!”

He pointed to the Thing that bore us.

“I was swept back; looked again upon it from afar. And a fantastic notion came. to me – fantasy it was, of course, yet built, I know, around a nucleus of strange truth. It was” – his tone was half whimsical, half apologetic – “it was that this jeweled world was ridden by some mathematical god, driving it through space, noting occasionally with amused tolerance the very bad arithmetic of another Deity the reverse of mathematical – a more or less haphazard Deity, the god, in fact, of us and the things we call living.

“It had no mission; it wasn’t at all out to do any reforming; it wasn’t in the least concerned in rectifying any of the inaccuracies of the Other. Only now and then it took note of the deplorable differences between the worlds it saw and its own impeccably ordered and tidy temple with its equally tidy servitors.

“Just an itinerant demiurge of super geometry riding along through space on its perfectly summed-up world; master of all celestial mechanics; its people independent of all that complex chemistry and labor for equilibrium by which we live; needing neither air nor water, heeding neither heat nor cold; fed with the magnetism of interstellar spam and stopping now and then to banquet off the energy of some great sun.”

A thrill of amazement passed through me; fantasy all this might be but – how, if so, had he gotten that last thought? He had not seen, as we had, the orgy in the Hall of the Cones, the prodigious feeding of the Metal Monster upon our sun!

“That passed,” he went on, unnoticing. “I saw vast caverns filled with the Things; working, growing, multiplying. In caverns of our Earth – the fruit of some unguessed womb? I do not know.

“But in those caverns, under countless orbs of many colored light—” again the thrill of amaze shook me – “they grew. It came to me that they were reaching out toward sunlight and the open. They burst into it – into yellow, glowing sunlight. Ours? I do not know. And that picture passed.”

His voice deepened.

“There came a third vision. I saw our Earth – I knew, Goodwin, indisputably, unmistakably that it was our earth. But its rolling hills were leveled, its mountains were ground and shaped into cold and polished symbols – geometric, fashioned!

“The seas were fettered, gleaming like immense jewels in patterned settings of crystal shores. The very Polar ice was chiseled! On the ordered plains were traced the hieroglyphs of the faceted world! And on all Earth, Goodwin, there was no green life, no city, no trace of man! On this Earth that had been ours were only – These!”

“Good God!” I whispered.

“Visioning!” he said. “Don’t think that I accept them in their entirety. Part truth, part illusion – the groping mind dazzled with light of unfamiliar truths and making pictures from half light and whole shadow to help it understand.

“But still – some truth in them. How much I do not know. But this I do know – that last vision was of a cataclysm whose beginnings we face now – this very instant!”

A picture flashed behind my own eyes – of the walled city, its thronging people, its groves and gardens, its science and its art; of the Destroying Shapes trampling it flat – and then the dreadful, desolate mount! And suddenly I saw that mount as Earth – the city as Earth’s cities – its gardens and groves as Earth’s fields and forests – and the vanished people of Cherkis seemed to expand into all humanity!

“But Martin,” I stammered, fighting against choking, intolerable terror, “there was something else. Something of the Keeper of the Cones and of our striking through the sun to destroy the Things – something of them being governed by the same laws that govern us and that if they broke them they must fall! A hope – a promise, that they would not conquer!”

“I do remember,” he replied, “but not clearly. There was something – a shadow upon them, a menace. It was a shadow that seemed to be born of our own world – some threatening spirit of earth hovering over them.

“I cannot remember; it eludes me. Yet it is because I remember but a little of it that I say those drums may not be – taps – for us but for the Things.”

As though his words had been a cue the sounds again burst forth – no longer muffled nor faint. They roared; they seemed to pelt through air and drop upon us; they beat about our ears with thunderous tattoo like covered caverns drummed upon by Titans with trunks of great trees.

The drumming did not die; it grew louder, more vehement; defiant and deafening. Within the Thing under us a mighty pulse began to throb, accelerating rapidly to the rhythm of that clamorous roll.

I saw Norhala draw herself up, sharply; stand listening and alert. Under me the throbbing turned to an uneasy churning, a ferment.

“Drums?” muttered Drake. “They’re no drums! It’s drum fire. It’s like a dozen Marnes, a dozen Verduns. But where could batteries like those come from?”

“Drums!” whispered Ventnor. “They are drums! The drums of Destiny!”

Louder the roaring grew. Now it was a tremendous, rhythmic cannonading. The Thing halted. The tower that upheld Ruth and Norhala swayed, bent over the gap between us, touched the top on which we rode. Gently the two were plucked up; swiftly they were set beside us!

Came a shrill, keen wailing – louder than ever I had heard before. There was an earthquake trembling; a maelstrom swirling in which we spun; a swift sinking.

The Thing split in two! Up before us rose a stupendous, stepped pyramid; little smaller it was than that which Cheops built to throw its shadows across holy Nile. Into it streamed, over it clicked, score upon score of cubes, building it higher and higher. It lurched forward – away from us!

From Norhala came a single cry – resonant, blaring like a wrathful, golden trumpet. The speeding shape halted, hesitated; it seemed about to return. Crashed down upon us an abrupt crescendo of the distant drumming; peremptory, commanding. The shape darted forward; raced away crushing to straw the trees beneath it in a full quarter-mile-wide swath.

Great gray eyes wide, filled with incredulous wonder, stunned disbelief, Norhala for an instant faltered. Then out of her white throat, through her red lips pelted a tempest of staccato buglings. Under them what was left of the Thing leaped, tore on. Norhala’s flaming hair crackled and streamed; about her body of milk of pearl – about Ruth’s creamy skin – a radiant nimbus began to glow.

In the distance I saw a sapphire spark; knew it for Norhala’s home. Not far from it now was the rushing pyramid – and it came to me that within that shape was strangely neither globe nor pyramid. Nor except for the trembling cubes that made the platform on which we stood, did the shrunken Thing carrying us hold any unit of the Metal Monster save its spheres and tetrahedrons – at least within its visible bulk!

The sapphire spark had grown to a glimmering azure marble. Steadily we gained upon the pyramid. Never for an instant ceased that scourging hail of notes from Norhala – never for an instant lessened the drumming clamor that seemed to try to smother them. The sapphire marble became a sapphire ball, a great globe. I saw the Thing we sought to join lift itself into a prodigious pillar; the pillar’s base thrust forth stilts; upon them the Thing stepped over the blue dome of Norhala’s house!

The blue bubble was close; now it curved below us. Gently we were lifted down; were set before its portal. I looked up at the bulk that had carried us.

I had been right – built it was only of globe and pyramid; an inconceivably grotesque shape, tall as Times Tower, it hung over us. Out from its base swirled a half score of spheres, a half-dozen pyramids. Throughout the towering Shape was awful movement; its units writhed in it. Then it was lost to sight in the mists through which the Thing we had pursued had gone.

In Norhala’s face as she watched it go was a dismay, a poignant uncertainty, that held in it something indescribably pitiful.

“I am afraid!” I heard her whisper. She tightened her grasp upon dreaming Ruth; motioned us to go within.

We passed, silently; behind us she came, followed by three of the great globes, by a pair of her tetrahedrons.

Beside a pile of the silken stuffs she halted. The girl’s eyes dwelt upon hers trustfully.

“I am afraid!” whispered Norhala again. “Afraid – for you!”

Tenderly she looked down upon her, the galaxies of stars in her eyes all soft and tremulous. “I am afraid, little sister,” she whispered for the third time. “Not yet I know can you go as I do – among the fires.” She hesitated. “Rest here until I return. I shall leave these to guard and obey you.” She motioned to the five shapes. They ranged themselves about Ruth. Norhala kissed her upon both brown eyes.

“Sleep till I return!” she murmured.

She swept from the chamber – with never a glance for us three. I heard a little wailing chorus without, fast dying into silence. Spheres and pyramids twinkled at us, guarding the silken pile whereon Ruth lay asleep – like some enchanted princess. Beat down upon the blue globe like hollow metal worlds, beaten and shrieking!

The drums of Destiny!

The drums of Doom?

Beating taps for the world of men?

Or for the Metal Monster?

PART EIGHT

NO SUMMARY PROVIDED

— XLII —

THE FRENZY OF RUTH

For many minutes we stood silent, in the shadowy chamber, listening, each absorbed in his own thoughts. The thunderous drumming was continuous; sometimes it faded into a background for clattering storms as of thousands of machine guns, thousands of riveters at work at once upon a thousand metal frameworks; some times it was nearly submerged beneath splitting crashes as of meeting meteors of hollow steel.

But always the drumming persisted, rhythmic, thunderous – as Drake had said, a true drum-fire of a dozen Marnes, a dozen Verduns. Through it all Ruth slept, undisturbed, cheek pillowed on one rounded arm, the two great pyramids erect behind her, watchful; a globe at her feet, a globe at her head, the third sphere poised between her and us, and, like the pyramids – watchful.

What was happening out there – over the edge of the cañon, beyond the portal of the cliffs, behind the veils, in the Pit of the Metal Monster? What was the message of the roaring drums? What the rede of their clamorous runes?

Ventnor stepped by the sentinel globe, bent over the tranced girl. Sphere nor pointed pair stirred; only they watched him – like a palpable thing – one felt their watchfulness. He listened to her heart, caught up a wrist, took note of her pulse of life. He drew a deep breath, stood upright, nodded reassuringly. Abruptly Drake turned, walked out through the open portal, his strain and a very deep anxiety written plain in deep lines that ran from nostrils to firm young mouth.

“Just went out to look for the pony,” he muttered when he returned. “It’s safe. I was afraid it had been stepped on. It’s getting dusk. There’s a big light down the cañon – over in the valley.”

Ventnor drew back past the globe; rejoined us.

The blue bower trembled under a gust of sound. Ruth stirred; her brows knitted; her hands clenched. The sphere that stood before her spun on its axis, swept up to the globe at her head, glided from it to the globe at her feet – as though whispering. Ruth moaned – her body bent upright, swayed rigidly. Her eyes opened; they stared through us as though upon some dreadful vision; and strangely was it as though she were seeing with anothers eyes, were reflecting another’s suffering. “The globes at her feet and at her head swirled out, clustered against the third sphere – three weird shapes in silent consultation. On Ventnor’s face I saw pity – and a vast relief! With shocked amaze I realized that Ruth’s agony – for in agony she clearly was – was calling forth in him elation! He spoke – and I knew why.

“Norhala!” he whispered. “She is seeing with Norhala’s eyes – feeling what Norhala feels! It’s not going well with – That – out there! If we dared leave Ruth – could only see—”

Ruth leaped to her feet; cried out – a golden bugling that might have been Norhala’s own wrathful trumpet notes! Instantly the two pyramids flamed open, became two gleaming stars that bathed her in violet radiance. Beneath their upper tips I saw the blasting ovals glitter – menacingly! The girl glared at us – more brilliant grew the glittering ovals as though their lightnings trembled on their lips.

“Ruth!” called Ventnor in an appealing zone.

A shadow softened the intolerable, hard brilliancy of the brown eyes. In them something struggled to arise, fighting its way to the surface like some drowning human thing.

It sank back – upon her face dropped a cloud of heartbreak, appalling woe: the despair of a soul that, having withdrawn all faith in its own kind to rest all faith, as it thought, on angels – sees that faith betrayed.

There stared upon us a stripped spirit, naked and hopeless and terrible!

Despairing, raging, she screamed once more. The central globe swam to her; it raised her upon its back; glided to the doorway. Upon it she stood poised like some youthful, anguished Victory – a Victory who faced and knew she faced destroying defeat; poised upon that enigmatic orb on bare slender feet, one sweet breast bare, hands upraised, virginally archaic, nothing about her of the Ruth we knew.

“Ruth!” cried Drake; despair as great as that upon her face was in his voice. He sprang before the globe that held her; barred its way.

For an instant the Thing paused – and in that instant the human soul of the girl rushed back.

“No!” she cried. “No!”

A weird call issued from the white lips – stumbling, uncertain, as though she who sent it forth herself wondered whence it sprang. Abruptly the angry stars closed The three globes spun – doubting, puzzled! Again she called – now a tremulous, halting cadence. She was lifted; dropped gently to her feet.

For an instant globes and pyramids whirled and danced before her – then sped away through the portal. Panting, torn by two clashing spirits, Ruth swayed, sobbing. As though drawn, she ran to the doorway, fled through it. As one we sprang after her. Rods ahead her white body flashed, speeding toward the Pit. Like fleet-footed Atalanta she fled – and far, far behind us was the blue bower, the misty barrier of the veils close, when Drake with a last desperate burst reached her side, gripped her. Down the two fell, rolling upon the smooth roadway; Silently she fought, biting, tearing at Drake, struggling to escape.

“Quick!” gasped Ventnor, stretching out to me an arm. “Cut off the sleeve. Quick!”

Unquestioning, I drew my knife, ripped the garment at the shoulder. He snatched the sleeve, knelt at Ruth’s head; rapidly he crumpled an end, thrust it roughly into her mouth: tied it fast, gagging her.

“Hold her!” he ordered Drake: and with a sob of relief sprang up. The girl’s eyes blazed at him, filled with an intense hate!

“Cut that other sleeve,” he said; and when I had done so, knelt again, pinned Ruth down with a knee at her throat, turned her over and knotted her hands behind her. She ceased struggling; gently now he drew up the curly head, swung her upon her back.

“Hold her feet!” He nodded to Drake, who caught the slender bare ankles in his hands.

She lay there, helpless, being unable to use hands or feet.

“Too little Ruth, and too much Norhala!” said Ventnor, looking up at me. “If she’d only thought to cry out! She could have brought a regiment of those Things down to blast us. And would – if she had thought! That’s why I gagged her. We don’t dare trust to Ruth coming back – and you don’t think that is Ruth, do you?”

He pointed to the pallid face glaring at him, the eyes from which cold fires flamed.

“No, you don’t!” He thrust out a foot, caught Drake by the shoulder, sent him spinning a dozen feet away. “Damn it, Drake – don’t you understand!” For suddenly Ruth’s eyes had softened; she had turned them on Dick pitifully, appealingly – and he had loosed her ankles, had leaned forward as though to draw away the band that covered the lips!

“Your gun,” whispered Ventnor to me; before I could move he had snatched the automatic from my holster; had covered Drake with it.

“Dick,” he said, “stand where you are. If you take another step toward this girl I’ll shoot you – by God, I will!”

Drake halted, shocked amazement in his face; I myself felt resentful, wondering at his outburst.

“But it’s hurting her,” he muttered, staggering to his feet; Ruth’s eyes, soft and pleading, still dwelt upon him.

“Hurting her!” exclaimed Ventnor. “Man – she’s my sister! I know what I’m doing. Can’t you see? Can’t you see how little of Ruth is in that body there – how little of the girl you love? How or why I don’t know – but that it is so I do know. Drake – have you forgotten how Norhala beguiled Cherkis? I want my sister back. I’m helping her to get back. Now let be! I know what I’m doing. Look at her.”

We looked. In the face that glared up at Ventnor was nothing of Ruth – even as he had said. There was the same cold, awesome wrath that had rested upon Norhala as she watched Cherkis weep over the eating up of his city. Swiftly came a change – like the sudden smoothing out of the rushing waves of a hill-locked, wind-lashed lake.

The face was again Ruth’s face – and Ruth’s alone; the eyes were Ruth’s eyes – supplicating, adjuring.

“Ruth!” Ventnor cried. “While you can hear – am I not right?”

She nodded vigorously, sternly; she was lost, hidden once more.

“You see!” He turned to us grimly. We had seen; we bowed our heads.

A shattering shaft of light flashed upon the veils; almost pierced them. An avalanche of sound passed high above us. Yet now I noted that where we stood the clamor was lessened, muffled. Of course, it came to me, it was the veils; I wondered why – for whatever the quality of the radiant mists, their purpose certainly had to do with concentration of the magnetic flux.

The deadening of noise must be accidental, could have nothing to do with their actual use; for sound is an air vibration solely. No – it must be a secondary effect. The Metal Monster was as heedless of clamor as it was of heat or cold or—

“We’ve got to see!” Ventnor broke the chain of thought. “We’ve got to get through and see what’s happening. Win or lose – we’ve got to know!”

“Cut off your sleeve, as I did,” he motioned to Drake. “Tie her ankles. We’ll carry her.”

Quickly it was done. Ruth’s light body swinging between brother and lover, we moved forward toward the mists. We passed into them; we crept cautiously through their dead silences.

Passed out and fell back into them from a searing chaos of light, a chaotic tumult. From the slackened grip of Ventnor and Drake the body of Ruth dropped while we three stood blinded, deafened, fighting for recovery. Ruth twisted, rolled toward the brink; Ventnor threw himself upon her, held her fast.

— XLIII —

ARMAGEDDON
METALLIQUE

Dragging her, crawling on our knees, we crept forward; we stopped when the thinning of the mists permitted us to see through them yet still interposed a curtaining which, though tenuous, dimmed the intolerable brilliancy that filled the Pit, muffled its din to a degree we could bear.

I peered through them – and nerve and muscle were locked in the grip of paralyzing awe. I felt then as one would feel set close to warring regiments of stars, made witness to the death-throes of a universe, or swept through space and held above the whirling coils of Andromeda’s nebula to watch its birth agonies of nascent suns.

These are no figures of speech, no hyperboles – speck as our whole planet would be in Andromeda’s vast loom, pin-prick as was the Pit to the craters of our own sun, with in the cliff-cupped walls of the valley was a tangible, struggling living force akin to that which dwells within the nebula and the star; a cosmic spirit transcending all dimensions and thrusting its confines out into the infinite; a sentient emanation of the infinite itself.

Nor was its voice less unearthly. It used the shell of the earth valley for its trumpetings, its clangors – but as one hears in the murmurings of the fluted conch the great voice of ocean, its whispering and its roarings, so here in the clamorous shell of the Pit echoed the tremendous voices of that illimitable sea which laps the shores of the countless suns.

I looked upon a mighty whirlpool miles upon miles wide. It whirled with surges whose racing crests were smiting incandescences; it was threaded with a spindrift of lightnings; it was trodden by dervish mists of molten flame thrust through with forests of lances of living light. It cast a candent spray high to the heavens.

Over it the heavens glittered as though they were a shield held by fearful gods. Through the maelstrom staggered a mountainous bulk; a gleaming leviathan of pale blue metal caught in the swirling tide of some incredible volcano; a huge ark of metal breasting a deluge of flame.

And the drumming we had heard as of hollow beaten metal worlds, the shouting tempests of cannonading stars, was the breaking of these incandescent crests, the falling of the lightning spindrift, the rhythmic impact of the lanced rays upon the glimmering mountain that reeled and trembled as they struck it.

The reeling mountain, the struggling leviathan, was – the City!

It was the mass of the Metal Monster itself, guarded by, stormed by, its own legions that, though separate from it, were still as much of it as were the cells that formed the skin of its walls, its carapace! It was the Metal Monster tearing, tending, fighting for, battling against – itself!

Mile high as when I had first beheld it was the inexplicable body that held the great heart of the cones into which had been drawn the magnetic cataracts from our sun; that held too the smaller hearts of the lesser cones, the workshops, the birth chamber and manifold other mysteries unguessed and unseen. By a full fourth had its base been shrunken.

Ranged in double line along the side turned toward us were hundreds of dread forms – Shapes that in their immensity bore down upon, oppressed with a nightmare weight, the consciousness.

Rectangular, upon their outlines no spike of pyramid, no curve of globe showing, uncompromisingly ponderous, they upthrust. Upon the tops of the first rank were enormous masses, sledge shaped – like those metal fists that had battered down the walls of Cherkis’s city, but to them as the human hand is to the paw of the dinosaur.

They were as though the great tower of the Woolworth Building in New York should be drawn up to twice its height, be widened by a half, be multiplied by hundreds, and then upon their tops be impaled horizontally as hammer heads armies of towers tall as the Singer Building!

Conceive this – conceive these Shapes as animate and flexible; beating down with their prodigious mallets, smashing from side to side as though the tremendous pillars that held them were thousand jointed up right pistons; that as closely as I can present it in images of things we know is the picture of the Hammering Things!

Behind them stood a second row, high as they and as angular. From them extended scores of girdered arms. These were thickly studded with the flaming cruciform shapes, the opened cubes gleaming with their angry flares of reds and smoky yellows. From the tentacles of many swung immense shields like those which ringed the hall of the great cones.

And as the sledges beat, ever over their bent heads poured from the crosses a flood of crimson lightnings. Out of the concave depths of the shields whipped lashes of blinding flame. With ropes of fire they knouted the Things the sledges struck, the sullen crimson levins blasted.

Now I could see the Shapes that attacked. Grotesque; spined and tusked, spiked and antlered, wenned and breasted; as chimerically angled, cusped and cornute as though they were the superangled, supercornute Gods of the cusped and angled Gods of the Javanese, they strove against the sledge-headed and smiting, the multi-armed and blasting square towers. High as them, as huge as they, incomparably fantastic, in dozens of shifting forms they battled.

More than a mile from the stumbling City stood ranged like sharpshooters a host of solid, bristling legged Eiffel Towers. Upon their tops spun scintillant gigantic wheels. Out of the centers of these wheels shot the radiant lances, hosts of spears of intensest violet light. The radiance they volleyed was not continuous; it was broken, so that the javelined rays shot out in rhythmic flights, each flying fast upon the shafts of the others.

It was their impact that sent forth the thunderous drumming. They struck and splintered against the walls, dropping from them in great gouts of molten flame. It was as though before they broke they pierced and the wall, the Monster’s side, bled fire!

With the crashing of broadsides of massed batteries the sledges smashed down upon the bristling attackers. Under the awful impact globes and pyramids were shattered into hundreds of coruscating fragments, rocket bursts of blue and azure and violet flame, flames rainbowed and irised.

The hammer ends split, flew apart, were scattered, were falling showers of sulphurous yellow and scarlet meteors. But ever other cubes swarmed out and repaired the broken smiting tips. And always where a tusked and cornute shape had been battered down, disintegrated, another arose as huge and as formidable, pouring forth upon the squared tower it fought its lightnings, tearing at it with colossal spiked and hooked claws, beating it with incredible spiked and globular fists that were like the clenched hands of some metal Atlas.

As the striving Shapes swayed and wrestled, gave way or thrust forward, staggered or fell, the bulk of the Monster stumbled and swayed, advanced and retreated – an unearthly motion wedded to an amorphous immensity that flooded the watching consciousness with a deathly nausea.

Unceasingly the hail of radiant lances poured from the spinning wheels, falling upon Towered Shapes and City’s wall alike. There arose a prodigious wailing, an unearthly thin screaming. About the bases of the defenders flashed blinding bursts of incandescence – like those which had heralded the flight of the Flying Thing drop ping before Norhala’s house.

Unlike them they held no dazzling sapphire brilliancies; they were ochreous, suffused with raging vermillion. Nevertheless they were factors of that same inexplicable action – for from the fountains of gushing light leaped thousands of gigantic square pillars; unimaginable projectiles hurled from the flaming mouths of earth-hidden, titanic mortars!

They soared high, swerved and swooped upon the lance-throwers! Beneath their onslaught those chimerae tottered. I saw living projectiles and living target fuse where they met – melt and weld in jets of lightnings.

But not all. There were those that tore great gaps in the horned giants – wounds that instantly were healed with globes and pyramids seething out from the Cyclopean trunk. Ever the incredible projectiles flashed and flew as though from some inexhaustible store; ever uprose that prodigious barrage against the smiting rays!

Now to check them, there soared from the ranks of the besiegers clouds of countless horned dragons, immense cylinders of clustered cubes studded with the clinging tetrahedrons. They struck the cubed projectiles head on; aimed themselves to meet them!

Bristling dragon and hurtling pillar struck and fused or burst with an intolerable blazing. They fell – cube and sphere and pyramid – some half opened, some fully, in a rain of disks, of stars, huge flaming crosses; a storm of unimaginable pyrotechnics!

Now I became conscious that within the City – within the body of the Metal Monster – there raged a strife colossal as this without. From it came a vast volcanic roaring. Up from its top shot tortured flames, cascades and fountains of frenzied Things that looped and struggled, writhed over its edge, hurled themselves back; battling chimerae which against the glittering heavens traced luminous symbols of agony.

Shrilled a stronger wailing. Up from behind the ray-hurling Towers shot hosts of globes. Thousands of palely azure, metal moons they soared; warrior moons charging in meteor rush and streaming with fluttering battle pennons of violet flame. High they flew; they curved over the mile high back of the Monster; they dropped upon it.

Arose to meet them immense columns of the cubes; battered against the spheres; swept them over and down into the depths. Hundreds fell, broken – but thousands held their place. I saw them twine about the pillars – writhing columns of interlaced cubes and globes straining like monstrous serpents while all along their coils the open disks and crosses smote with the scimitars of their lightnings!

In the wall of the City appeared a shining crack; from top to bottom it ran; it widened into a rift from which a flood of radiance gushed. Out of this rift poured a thousand-foot-high torrent of horned globes.

Only for an instant they flowed. The rift closed upon them, catching those still emerging in a colossal vise. It crunched them! Plain through the turmoil came a dreadful – bursting – roar.

Down from the closing jaws of the vise dripped a stream of nitid fragments that flashed and flickered – and died! And now in the wall was no trace of breach!

A hurricane of radiant lances swept it. Under them a mile-wide section of the living scarp split away; dropped like an avalanche. Its fall revealed great spaces, huge vaults and chambers filled with warring lightnings – out from them came roaring, bellowing thunders. Swiftly from each side of the gap a metal curtaining of the cubes joined. Again the wall was whole!

I turned my stunned gaze from the City – swept it over the valley. Everywhere, in towers, in writhing coils, in whipping flails, in waves that smote and crashed, in countless forms and combinations the Metal, Hordes battled. Here were pillars against which metal billows rushed and were bro ken; there were metal comets that crashed high above the mad turmoil.

From streaming silent veil to veil – north and south, east and west the Monster slew itself beneath its racing, flaming banners, the tempests of its lightnings!

The tortured hulk of the City lurched; it swept toward us. Before it blotted out from our eyes the Pit I noted that the crystal spans upon the river of jade were gone; that the wondrous jeweled ribbons of its banks were broken.

Closer came the reeling City! With trembling hands I fumbled for my lenses, focused them upon it. Now I saw that where the radiant lances struck they – killed! The blocks blackened under them, became lusterless; the sparkling of the tiny eyes – went out; the metal carapaces crumbled!

Closer came the City – the Monster; shuddering, I lowered the glasses that it might not seem so near.

Down dropped the bristling Shapes that wrestled with the squared Towers. They rose again in a single monstrous wave that rushed to overwhelm them. Before they could strike the City had swept closer; had hidden them from me.

Again I raised the glasses. They brought the metal scarp not fifty feet away – within it the hosts of tiny eyes glittered, no longer mocking nor malicious, but insane!

Nearer drew the Monster – nearer.

A thousand feet away it checked its movement, seemed to draw itself together. Then like the roar of a falling world that whole side facing us slid down to the valley’s floor!

— XLIV —

THE PASSING OF NORHALA

Hundreds of feet through must have been the fallen mass – within it who knows what chambers filled with mysteries? Yes, thousands of feet thick it must have been, for the débris of it splintered and splashed to the very edge of the ledge on which we crouched; heaped it with dimming fragments of the bodies that had formed it.

We looked into a thousand vaults, a thousand spaces. There came another avalanche roaring—

Before us opened the crater of the cones!

Through the torn gap I saw them, clustering undisturbed about the base of that one slender, coroneted and star pointing spire, rising serene and unshaken from a hell of lightnings. But the shields that had rimmed the crater were gone.

From my hand Ventnor snatched the glasses, leveled and held them long to his eyes.

“God!” He thrust them back to me. “Look!”

Through the lenses the great hall leaped into full view apparently only a few yards away. It was a caldron of chameleon flame. It seethed with the Hordes battling over the remaining walls and the floor. But around the crystal base of the cones was an open zone into which none broke.

In that wide ring, girdling the shimmering fantasy like a circled sanctuary, were but three forms. One was the wondrous Disk of jeweled fires I have called the Metal Emperor; the second was the sullen-fired cruciform of the Keeper. The third was Norhala!

She stood at the side of that weird master of hers – or was it after all the servant?

Between them and the Keeper’s planes gleamed the gigantic T-shaped tablet of countless rods which controlled the activities of the cones; that had controlled the shifting of the vanished shields; that manipulated too, perhaps, the energies of whatever similar but smaller cornate ganglia were scattered throughout the City and one of which we had beheld when the Emperor’s guards had blasted Ventnor.

Plain was Norhala in the lenses – so close that almost, it seemed, I could reach out and touch her. The flaming hair streamed and billowed above her glorious head like a banner of molten floss of coppery gold; her face of more than human beauty was a mask of wrath and despair; her great eyes blazed upon the Keeper; her exquisite body was bare, stripped of every shred of silken covering.

From streaming tresses to white feet an oval of pulsing golden light nimbused her. Maiden Isis, virgin Astarte – she stood there, held in the grip of the Disk – like a goddess betrayed and hopeless yet thirsting for vengeance!

For all their stillness, their immobility, it came to me that Emperor and Keeper were at grapple, locked in death grip; the realization was as definite as though, like Ruth, I thought with Norhala’s mind, saw with her eyes. Clearly too it came to me that in this contest between the two was epitomized all the vast conflict that raged around them; that in it was fast ripening that fruit of destiny of which Ventnor had spoken, and that here in the Hall of the Cones would be settled – and soon – the fate not only of Disk and Cross, but of humanity.

But with what unknown powers was that duel being fought? They cast no lightnings; they battled with no visible weapons. Only the great planes of the inverted cruciform Shape smoked and smoldered with their sullen flares of ochres and of scarlets; while over all the face of the Disk its cold and irised fires, raced and shone, beating with a rhythm incredibly rapid; its core of incandescent ruby blazed, its sapphire ovals were cabochoned pools of living, lucent radiance!

There was a splitting roar that arose above all the clamor, deafening us even in the shelter of the silent veils. On each side of the crater, whole masses of the City dropped away. Fleetingly I was aware of scores of smaller pits in which uprose lesser replicas of the Coned Mount, lesser reservoirs of the Monster’s force.

Neither the Emperor nor the Keeper moved, both seemingly indifferent to the catastrophe fast developing around them. Now I strained forward, to the very thinnest edge of the curtainings. For between the Disk and Cross began to form a fine black mist. It was transparent; seemed spun of minute translucent ebon corpuscles. It hung like a black cloud suspended by unseen hands. It shook and wavered now toward the Disk, now toward the Cross. I sensed a keying up of force within the two; knew that each was striving to cast like a net that hanging mist upon the other.

Abruptly the Emperor flashed forth, blindingly. As though caught upon a blast, the black shroud flew toward the Keeper – enveloped it! And as the mist covered and clung I saw the sulphurous and crimson flares dim. They were snuffed out! The Keeper fell!

Upon Norhala’s face flamed wild triumph, banishing the despair. The outstretched planes of the Cross swept up as though in torment. For an instant its fires flared and licked through the clinging blackness; it writhed half upright, threw itself forward, crashed down prostrate upon the enigmatic tablet which only its tentacles could manipulate.

From Norhala’s face the triumph fled. On its heels rushed stark, incredulous horror.

The Mount of the Cones shuddered. From it came a single mighty throb of force – like a prodigious heartbeat. Under that pulse of power the Emperor staggered, spun – and, spinning, swept Norhala from her feet, swung her close to its flashing rose!

Pulsed a second throb from the cones, and mightier.

A spasm shook the Disk – a paroxysm. Its fires faded; they flared out again, bathing the floating, unearthly figure of Norhala with their iridescences. I saw her body writhe – as though it shared the agony of the Shape that held her. Her head twisted; the great eyes, pools of uncomprehending, unbelieving horror, stared into mine—

With a spasmodic, infinitely dreadful movement the Disk closed – and closed upon her!

Norhala was gone – was shut within it! Crushed to the pent fires of its crystal heart!

I heard a sobbing, agonized choking – knew it was I who sobbed. Against me I felt Ruth’s body strike, bend in a convulsive arc, drop inert.

The slender steeple of the cones drooped, sending its faceted coronet shattering to the floor. The Mount melted! Beneath the flooding radiance sprawled Keeper and the great inert Globe that was the Goddess woman’s sepulcher.

The crater filled with the pallid luminescence. Faster and ever faster it poured down into the Pit. And from all the lesser craters of the smaller cones swept silent cataracts of the same pale radiance. The City began to crumble – the Monster to fall!

Like pent-up waters rushing through a broken dam the gleaming deluge swept over the valley; gushing in steady torrents from the breaking mass. Over the valley fell a vast silence. The lightnings ceased. The Metal Hordes stood rigid, the shining flood lapping at their bases, rising swiftly ever higher.

Now from the sinking City swarmed multitudes of its weird luminaries. Out they trooped, swirling from every rent and gap – orbs scarlet and sapphire, ruby orbs, orbs tuliped and irised – the jocund suns of the birth chamber and side by side with them hosts of the frozen, pale gilt, stiff-rayed suns! Thousands upon thousands they marched forth and poised themselves solemnly over all the Pit that now was a fast rising lake of yellow froth of sun flame!

Yes, they swept forth in squadrons, in companies, in regiments, those mysterious orbs. They floated over all the valley; they separated and swung motionless above it as though they were mysterious multiple souls of fire brooding over the dying shell that had held them! Beneath, thrusting up from the lambent lake like grotesque towers of some drowned fantastic metropolis, the great Shapes stood, black against its glowing.

What had been the City – that which had been the bulk of the Monster – was now only a vast and shapeless hill from which streamed the silent torrents of that released, unknown force which, concentrate and bound, had been the cones. As though it was the Monster’s shining life-blood it poured, raising ever higher in its swift flooding the level of radiant lake. Lower and lower sank the immense bulk; squattered and spread, ever lowering – about its helpless, patient crouching something ineffably piteous, something indescribably, cosmically tragic!

Abruptly the watching orbs shook under a hail of sparkling atoms streaming down from the glittering sky; raining upon the lambent lake. So thick they fell that now the brooding luminaries were dim aureoles within them. The veils in which we lay shook; began to pulsate.

From the pit came a blinding, insupportable brilliancy. From every rigid tower gleamed out jeweled fires; their clinging units opening into blazing star and disk and cross. The City was a hill of living gems over which flowed torrents of pale molten gold. The Pit blazed.

There followed an appalling tensity; a prodigious gathering of force; a panic stirring concentration of energy. Thicker fell the clouds of sparkling atoms – higher arose the yellow flood!

Ventnor cried out. I could not hear him, but I read his purpose – and so did Drake. Up on his broad shoulders he swung Ruth as though she had been a child. Back through the throbbing veils we ran; passed out of them.

“Back!” shouted Ventnor. “Back as far as you can!”

On we raced; we reached the gateway of the cliffs; we dashed on and on – up the shining roadway toward the blue globe now a scant mile before us; ran sobbing, panting – ran, we knew, for our lives.

Out of the Pit came a sound – I cannot describe it! An unutterably desolate, dreadful wail of despair. It shuddered past us like the groaning of a broken-hearted star – anguished and awesome.

It died. There rushed upon us a sea of that incredible loneliness, that longing for extinction that had assailed us in the haunted hollow where first we had seen Norhala. But its billows were resistless, invincible!

Beneath them we fell; were torn by avid desire for swift death!

Dimly, through fainting eyes, I saw a dazzling brilliancy fill the sky; heard with dying ears a chaotic, blasting roar. A wave of air thicker than water caught us up, hurled us hundreds of yards forward. It dropped us; in its wake rushed another wave, withering, scorching.

It raced over us. Scorching though it was, within its heat was energizing, revivifying force; something that slew the deadly despair and fed the fading fires of life.

I staggered to my feet; looked back. The veils were gone! The precipice walled gate way they had curtained was filled with a Plutonic glare as though it opened into the incandescent heart of a volcano!

A hand clutched my shoulder, spun me around. It was Ventnor. He pointed to the sapphire house, started to run to it. Far ahead I saw Drake, the body of the girl clasped to his breast. The heat became blasting, insupportable; my laboring lungs shriveled in the air they breathed.

Over the sky above the canyon streaked a serpentine chain of lightnings. A sudden cyclonic gust swept the cleft, whirling us like leaves toward the Pit.

I threw myself upon my face, clutching at the smooth rock. A volley of thunder burst – but not the thunder of the Metal Monster or its Hordes; no, the bellowing of the levins of our own earth! And the wind was cold; it bathed the burning skin; laved the fevered lungs.

Again the sky was split by the lightnings. And roaring down from it in solid sheets came the rain!

From the Pit arose a hissing as though within it raged Babylonian Tiamat, Mother of Chaos, serpent dweller in the void; Midgard snake of the ancient Norse holding in her coils the world!

Buffeted by wind, beaten down by rain, clinging to each other like drowning men, Ventnor and I pushed on to the elfin globe. The light was dying fast. By it we saw Drake pass within the portal with his bur den. out; blackness clasped us. Guided by the lightnings, we beat our way to the door; passed through it.

In the electric glare we saw Drake bending over Ruth. In it I saw a slide draw over the open portal through which shrieked the wind, streamed the rain! As though its crystal panel was moved by unseen, gentle hands, the portal was closed; the tempest shut out!

We dropped beside Ruth upon a pile of silken stuffs – awed, marveling, trembling with a mingled agony of pity and – thanks giving!

For we knew – each of us knew with an absolute definiteness as we crouched there among the racing, dancing black and silver shadows with which the lightnings filled the blue globe – that the Metal Monster was dead!

With all its pomp and power, all its beauty and its terror, its colossal indifference to man and its colossal menace to him, its arts and sciences and unhuman wisdom, its mysteries and its grandeurs – the Thing was dead! Slain by itself!

— XLV —

BURNED OUT

Ruth sighed and stirred. By the glare of the lightnings, now almost continuous, we saw that her rigidity, and in fact all the puzzling cataleptic symptoms, had disappeared. Her limbs relaxed, her skin faintly flushed, she lay in deepest but natural slumber undisturbed by the incessant cannonading of the thunder under which the walls of the blue globe shuddered. Ventnor passed through the curtains of the central hall; he returned with one of Norhala’s cloaks; covered the girl with it.

An overwhelming sleepiness took possession of me, a weariness ineffable. Nerve and brain and muscle suddenly relaxed, went slack and numb. Without a struggle I surrendered to an overpowering stupor and cradled deep in its heart ceased consciously to be.

•   •   •

When my eyes unclosed the chamber of the moon-stone walls was filled with a silvery, crepuscular light. I heard the murmuring and laughing of running water, the play, I lazily realized, of the fountained pool.

I lay for whole minutes unthinking, luxuriating in the sense of tension gone and of security; lay steeped in the aftermath of complete rest. Memory flooded me. Quietly I sat up; Ruth still slept, breathing peacefully beneath the cloak, one white arm stretched over the shoulder of Drake – as though in her sleep she had drawn close to him.

At her feet lay Ventnor, as deep in slumber as they. I arose and tiptoed over to the closed door. Searching, I found its key; a cupped indentation upon which I pressed.

The crystalline panel slipped back; it was moved, I suppose, by some mechanism of counterbalances responding to the weight of the hand. It must have been some vibration of the thunder which had loosed that mechanism and had closed the panel upon the heels of our entrance – so I thought – then seeing again in memory that uncanny, deliberate shutting was not all convinced that it had been the thunder!

I looked out. How many hours the sun had been up there was no means of knowing. The sky was low and slaty gray; a fine rain was falling. I stepped out. The garden of Norhala was a wreckage of up rooted and splintered trees and torn masses of what had been blossoming verdure.

The gateway of the precipices beyond which lay the Pit was hidden in the webs of the rain. Long I gazed down the cañon – and longingly; striving to picture what the Pit now held; eager to read the riddles of the night.

There came from the valley no sound, no movement, no light.

I re-entered the blue globe and paused on the threshold – staring into the wide and wondering eyes of Ruth bolt upright in her silken bed with Norhala’s cloak clutched to her chin like a suddenly awakened and startled child. As she glimpsed me she stretched out her hand. Drake, wide awake on the instant, leaped to his feet, his hand jumping to his pistol.

“Dick!” cried Ruth, her voice tremulous, sweet.

He swung about, looked deep into the clear and fearless brown eyes in which – with leaping heart I realized it – was throned only that spirit which was Ruth’s and Ruth’s alone; Ruth’s clear unshadowed eyes glad and shy and soft with – love!

“Dick!” she whispered, and held soft arms out to him. The cloak fell from her. He swung her up. Their lips met.

Upon them, embraced, the wakening eyes of Ventnor dwelt; they filled with relief and joy, nor was there lacking in them a certain amusement.

She drew from Drake’s arms, pushed him from her, stood for a moment shakily, with covered eyes.

“Ruth!” called Ventnor softly.

“Oh!” she cried. “Oh, Martin – I forgot—” She ran to him, held him tight, face hidden in his breast. His hand rested on the clustering brown curls, tenderly.

“Martin.” She raised her face to him. “Martin, it’s gone! The taint, I mean. I’m – me again! All me! What happened? Where’s Norhala?”

I started. Did she not know? Of course, lying bound as she had in the vanished veils, she could have seen nothing of the stupendous tragedy enacted beyond them – but had not Ventnor said that possessed by the inexplicable obsession evoked by the weird woman Ruth had seen with her eyes, thought with her mind?

And had there not been evidence that in her body had been echoed the torments of Norhala’s? Had she forgotten? I started to speak – was checked by Ventnor’s swift, warning glance.

“She’s – over in the Pit,” he answered her quietly. “But do you remember nothing, little sister?”

“There’s something in my mind that’s been rubbed out,” she replied quaintly. “I remember the City of Cherkis – and your torture, Martin – and mine—”

Her face whitened; Ventnor’s brow contracted anxiously. I knew for what he watched – but Ruth’s shamed face was all human; on it was no shadow nor trace of that alien soul which so few hours since had threatened us.

“Yes,” she nodded, “I remember that. And I remember how Norhala repaid them. I remember that I was glad, wickedly, fiercely glad, and then I was tired – so tired! And then – I come to the rubbed out place,” she ended perplexedly.

Deliberately, almost banal had I not realized his purpose, he changed the subject He held her from him at arm’s length.

“Ruth!” he exclaimed half mockingly, half-reprovingly. “Don’t you think your morning negligee is just a little scanty even for this God-forsaken corner of earth?”

Lips parted in sheer astonishment, she looked at him. Then her eyes dropped to her bare feet, her dimpled knees. She clasped her arms across her breasts; rosy red turned all her fair skin.

“Oh!” she gasped. “Oh!” And hid from Drake and me behind the tall figure of her brother.

Laughing, I walked over to the pile of silken stuffs, took the cloak and tossed it to her. Ventnor pointed to the saddlebags.

“You’ve another outfit there, Ruth,” he said. “We’ll take a turn through the place. Call us when you’re ready. We’ll get something to eat and go see what’s happening – out there.”

She nodded. We passed through the curtains and out of the hall into the chamber that had been Norhala’s. There we halted, Drake eying Martin with a certain embarrassment. The older man thrust out his hand to him.

“I knew it, Drake,” he said. “Ruth told me all about it when Cherkis had us. And I’m glad, boy. I’m very glad. It’s time she was having a home of her own and not running around the lost places with me. This has taught me that. I’ll miss her – miss her damnably, of course. But I’m glad, boy – glad!”

There was a little silence while each looked deep into each other’s hearts. Then Ventnor dropped Dick’s hand.

“And that’s all of that,” he said. “The problem before us is – how are we going to get back home?”

“The – Thing – is dead!” I spoke from an absolute conviction that surprised me, based as it was upon no really tangible, known evidence.

“I think so,” he said. “No – I know so, even as do you, Goodwin. Yet even if we can pass over its body, how can we climb out of its lair? That slide down which we rode with Norhala is unclimbable. The walls are unscalable. And there is that chasm – she – spanned for us. How can we cross that? And do you forget that the tunnel to the ruins was sealed? There remains of possible roads the way through the forest to what was the City of Cherkis. Frankly I am loath to take it.

“I am not at all sure that all the armored men were slain – that some few may not have escaped and be lurking there. It would be short shrift for us if we fell into their hands now, Goodwin.”

“And I’m not sure of that,” objected Drake. “I think their pep and push must be pretty thoroughly knocked out – if any do remain. I think if they saw us coming they’d beat it so fast that they’d smoke with the friction.”

“There’s something to that.” Ventnor smiled. “Still I’m not keen on taking the chance. At any rate, the first thing to do is to see what happened down there in the Pit. Perhaps we’ll have some other idea after that.”

“I know what happened there,” announced Drake surprisingly. “It was a short circuit!”

We gaped at him, mystified.

“A short circuit?” hazarded Ventnor at last.

“Burned out!” said Drake. “Every damned one of them – burned out. What were they, after all? A lot of living dynamos! Dynamotors – rather! And all of a sudden they had too much juice turned on. Bang went their insulations – whatever they were.

“Bang went they. Burned out – short circuited! I don’t pretend to know why or how. Nonsense! I do know. The cones were some kind of immensely concentrated force – electric, magnetic; either or both and more. I myself believe that they were probably solid – in a way of speaking – coronium!

“If about twenty of the greatest scientists the world has ever known are right, coronium is – well, call it curdled energy! The electric potentiality of Niagara in a pin point of dust of yellow fire. All right – they or It, lost control. Every pin point swelled out into a Niagara! And as it did so, it expanded from a controlled dust dot to an uncontrolled cataract – in other words, its energy was unleashed and undammed.

“Very well – what followed? What had to follow? Every living battery of block and globe and spike was supercharged; went – blooey! That valley must have been some sweet little volcano while that short-circuiting was going on! All right – let’s go down and see what it did to your unclimbable slide and unscalable walls, Ventnor. I’m not so sure we won’t be able to get out that way.”

“Come on; everything’s ready,” Ruth was calling; her summoning blocked any objection we might have raised to Drake’s argument.

It was no dryad, no distressed pagan-clad maid we saw as we passed back into the room of the pool. In knickerbockers and short skirt, prim and self-possessed, rebellious curls held severely in place by close fitting cap and slender feet stoutly shod, Ruth hovered over the steaming kettle swung above the spirit lamp.

And she was very silent as we hastily broke fast. Nor when we had finished did she go to Drake. She clung close to her brother and beside him, as, Dick striding at my elbow, we set forth at last down the roadway, through the rain, toward the ledge between the cliffs where the veils had shimmered.

Hotter and hotter it grew as we advanced; the air steamed like a Turkish bath. The mists clustered so thickly that at last we groped forward step by step, holding to each other. The wet heat became suffocating.

“No use,” gasped Ventnor. “We couldn’t see. We’ll have to turn back.”

“Burned out!” said Dick. “Didn’t I tell you? The whole valley must have been a volcano. And with that deluge of rain falling in it – why wouldn’t there be a fog? It’s why there is a fog. We’ll have to wait until it clears.”

We turned; stumbled back to visibility; trudged in retreat to the blue globe.

All that day the rain fell. Throughout the few remaining hours of daylight we wandered over the house of Norhala, examining its most interesting contents, or sat theorizing, discussing all phases of the phenomena we had witnessed; held back from definite conclusions as to their end, of course, by our uncertainty of what it was actually that lay within the Pit.

We told Ruth what had occurred between that time she had thrown in her lot with Norhala until with her in the arms of Drake we had fled from the fiery opening of the Monster and its Hordes – that sun burst of jeweled incandescence between the down thrust of the flood of radiant corpuscles, the upthrust of the shining lake.

We told her of the enigmatic struggle between the glorious Disk and the sullenly flaming Thing I have called the Keeper.

We told her of the entombment of Norhala!

When she heard that she dropped her head upon her arms and wept.

“She was sweet,” she sobbed; “she was lovely; and she was beautiful. And dearly she loved me. I know she loved me! Oh, I know that we and ours and that which was hers could not share the world together. But it comes to me that Earth field would have been a garden more beautiful and far, far less poisonous with those that were Norhala’s than it is with us and ours!”

Weeping, she withdrew from us, passed through the curtainings, going we knew to Norhala’s chamber.

It was a strange thing indeed that she had said, I thought, watching her go. That the garden of the world would be far less poisonous blossoming with the Things of wedded crystal and metal and magnetic fires than fertile as now with us of flesh and blood and bone! To me came appreciations of the harmonies of the Things, their order – involuntarily, like a black shadow, darkened realization of struggling human apperceptions of the geometric energies, the miraculous coordination whether united within the bulk of the Metal Monster or activating apart from it either in units or in aggregations – and whether unit or aggregation still as much a part of the whole as those clustering to form the major mass.

Mingled with those perceptions were others of humanity – disharmonious, incoordinate, ever struggling, ever striving to destroy itself, unit against unit and government against government; humanity whose whites and blacks, browns and yellows and reds were less unlike than were pyramids to spheres, or spheres to cubes.

There was a plaintive whinnying at the open door. A long and hairy face, a pair of patient, inquiring eyes looked in. It was a pony! For a moment it regarded us – and then trotted trustfully through; ambled up to us; poked its head against my side. It had been ridden by one of the Persians whom Ruth had killed, for under it, slipped from the girths, a saddle dangled. And its owner had been kind to it – we knew that from its lack of fear for us. Driven by the tempest of the night before, it had been led back by instinct to the protection of man.

“Some luck!” breathed Drake.

He busied himself with the pony, stripping away the hanging saddle, grooming it.

— XLVI —

SLAG

That night we slept well. Awakening, we found that the storm had grown violent again; the wind roaring and the rain falling in such volumes that it was impossible to make our way to the Pit. Twice, as a matter of fact, we tried; but the smooth roadway was a torrent, and, drenched even through our oils to the skin, we at last abandoned the attempt. Ruth and Drake drifted away together among the other chambers of the globe: they were absorbed in themselves, and, understanding, we did not thrust ourselves upon them. All the day the torrents fell.

We sat down that night to what was well nigh the last of Ventnor’s stores. Ruth’s eyes were sparkling, she herself pulsing with life. Seemingly she had forgotten Norhala; she spoke no more of her, at least.

“Martin,” she said, “can’t we start home tomorrow? I want to get away. I want to get back to our own world.”

“As soon as the storm ceases, Ruth,” he answered, “we start. Little sister – I too want you to get back quickly.”

The next morning the storm had gone. We wakened soon after dawn into clear and brilliant light. We had a silent and hurried breakfast. The saddlebags were packed and strapped upon the pony. With in them were what we could carry of souvenirs, exhibits, from Norhala’s home – a suit of the lacquered armor, a pair of cloaks and sandals, the jeweled combs. Ruth and Drake at the side of the pony, Martin and I leading, we set forth toward the Pit.

“We’ll probably have to come back, Walter,” he said. “I don’t believe the place is passable.”

I pointed – we were then just over the threshold of the elfin globe. Where the veils had stretched between the perpendicular pillars of the cliffs was now a wide and ragged-edged opening.

The roadway which had run so smoothly through the scarps was blocked by a thousand foot barrier! Over it, beyond it, I could see through the crystalline clarity of the air the opposing walls.

“We can climb it!” said Ventnor. We passed on. We reached the base of the barrier. An avalanche had dropped there; the barricade was the débris of the torn cliffs; their dust, their pebbles, their boulders. We toiled up; we reached the crest; we looked down upon the valley.

When first we had seen it, we had gazed upon a sea of radiance pierced with lanced forests, swept with gigantic gonfalons of mists of flame; we had seen it emptied of its fiery mists – a vast slate covered with the chirography of a mathematical God; we had seen it filled with the symboling of the Metal Hordes and dominated by the colossal integrate hieroglyph of the City – the Metal Monster; we had seen it as a radiant lake over which brooded weird suns; a lake of yellow flame froth upon which a sparkling hail fell, within which reared islanded towers and a drowning mount running with cataracts of sun fires; here we had watched a Goddess woman, a being half of earth, half of the unknown immured within a living tomb – a dying tomb – of flaming mysteries; had seen a cross-shaped metal Satan, a sullen flaming crystal Judas betray – itself!

Where we had peered into the unfathomable, had glimpsed the infinite, had heard and had seen the inexplicable, was—

Slag!

The amethystine ring from which had streamed the circling veils was cracked and blackened; like a seam of coal it stretched around the Pit – a crown of mourning! The veils were gone! The floor of the valley was fissured and blackened; its patterns, its writings burned away. As far as we could see stretched a sea of slag – coal black, vitrified and dead!

Here and there black hillocks sprawled; huge pillars arose, bent and twisted as though they had been jettings of lava cooled into rigidity before they could sink back or break. These shapes clustered most thickly around an immense calcified mound. They were what were left of the battling Hordes and the mound was what had been the living City, the Metal Monster!

Somewhere there rested the ashes of Norhala, sealed by fire in the urn of the Emperor!

From side to side of the Pit in broken beaches, in waves and hummocks, in blackened, distorted tusks and warped towerings, reaching with a hideous pathos in thousands of forms toward the charred mound, was naught but – slag!

From rifts and hollows still filled with water little wreaths of steam drifted. In those futile wraiths of vapor was all that remained of the might of the Metal Thing.

Catastrophe I had expected, tragedy I knew we would find – but I had looked for nothing so repellent, so filled with the abomination of desolation, so frightful as was this.

“Norhala!” sobbed Ruth.

“Burned out!” muttered Drake. “Short circuited and burned out! Like a dynamo – like an electric light!”

“Destiny!” said Ventnor. “Destiny! Not yet was the hour struck for man to relinquish his sovereignty over this world. Destiny!”

We began to pick our way down the heaped debris and out upon the plain. For all that day and part of another we searched for an opening out of the Pit.

Everywhere was the incredible calcification. The surfaces that had been the smooth metallic carapaces with the tiny eyes deep within them, crumbled beneath the lightest blow. Not long would it be, I knew, until under wind and rain they dissolved into dust and mud.

And it grew increasingly obvious that Drake’s theory of the destruction was correct. The Monster had been one prodigious magnet – or, rather, a prodigious dynamo. By magnetism, by electricity, it had lived and had been activated. Whatever the force of which the cones were built and that I have likened to energy-made material, it was certainly akin to the electro magnetic energies.

When, in the cataclysm, that force was diffused, it drew to itself those floods of atmospheric electricity that we had seen as the storm of sparkling corpuscles. There had been created – and the scientific proofs of this would take up far more space than I can here afford to give it – there had been created, I say, a magnetic field of incredible intensity; had been concentrated in electric charge of inconceivable magnitude.

Discharging, it had blasted the Monster – short-circuited it, burned it out, even as Drake had said. But what was it that had led up to the cataclysm? What was it that had turned the Metal Thing upon itself? What disharmony had crept into that supernal order to set in motion the machinery of disintegration?

We could only conjecture. The cruciform Shape I have named the Keeper was the agent of the destruction – of that there could be no doubt. In the enigmatic organism which when many still was one and which retaining its integrity as a whole could dissociate manifold parts and still as a whole maintain an unseen contact and direction over them through miles of space, the Keeper had its place, its work, its duties.

So too had that wondrous Disk whose visible and concentrate power, whose manifest leadership, had made me name it – Emperor. And had not Norhala called the Disk – Ruler?

What were the responsibilities of this twain to the mass of the organism of which they were such important units? What were the laws they administered, the laws they must obey? Something certainly of that mysterious law which Maeterlinck has called the Spirit of the Hive – and something infinitely greater, like that which governs the swarming sun bees of Hercule’s clustered orbs.

Had there evolved within the Keeper of the Cones – guardian and engineer as it was of the mechanisms-ambition? Had there risen within it a determination to wrest power from the Disk, to take its place as Dictator, as Ruler?

How else explain that conflict I had sensed when the Emperor had plucked Drake and me from the Keeper’s grip the night following the orgy of the feeding? How else explain that duel in the shattered Hall of the Cones whose end had been the signal for the final cataclysm? How else explain the alinement of the cubes behind the Keeper against the globes and pyramids remaining loyal to the will of the Disk?

We discussed this long, Ventnor and I.

“This world,” he mused, “is a place of struggle. Air and sea and land and all things that dwell within and on them must battle for life. Earth not Mars is the planet of war. I have a theory” – he hesitated – “call it fanciful, metaphysical if you will; but the magnetic currents which are the nerve force of this globe of ours were what fed – the Things.

“Within those currents is the spirit of earth. And for five years they have been supercharged with strife, with hatreds, massed ambitions, warfare. Were these dis harmonies drawn in by – the Things as they fed? Did it happen that the Keeper was – tuned to them; that it absorbed and responded to them, growing ever more sensitive to these forces – that it reflected humanity!”

“Who knows; Goodwin – who can tell? Was it that or was it the sprouting of seeds long dormant – ripening as do those of babyhood into the thoughts and actions of maturity?”

Enigma, unless the explanations I have hazarded be accepted, must remain the impelling cause of that monstrous suicide. Complete enigma, save for inconclusive theories, must remain the question of the Monster’s origin. Whether it had come from the ordered star of Ventnor’s vision; whether it was, as his second vision seemed to hint, a child of a secret caverned womb of earth; when it had come forth if the latter, how boarding this planet if from the star; why long ere this it had not swung out to conquer and to level to its will of metal and of crystal and of living fires this world of ours – to all these we could find no answers. If answers there were, they were lost forever in the slag we trod.

It was afternoon of the second day that we found a rift in the blasted wall of the valley. We decided to try it. We had not dared to take the road by which Norhala had led us into the City.

The giant slide was broken and climbable. But even if we could have passed safely through the tunnel of the abyss there still was left the chasm over which we could have thrown no bridge. If we could have bridged it still at that road’s end was the cliff whose shaft Norhala had sealed with her lightnings!

So we entered the rift. And it was with in it that there materialized the last of the inexplicable phenomena from which, we thought, we had escaped; a phenomenon peculiarly distressing to me, singled out through, I suppose, some idiosyncrasy of my bodily chemistry to bear its brunt. We had gone with great difficulty perhaps six miles along the bed of the cleft which was littered with boulders and extremely dangerous. For the last hour I had been experiencing a mystifying, a steadily increasing and handicapping drag.

It was exactly as though I walked against the flow of an invisible current that strove to carry me back toward the Pit. The cañon ran roughly south by east. The unseen torrent ran up it. I had dropped back behind the others and I noted that nothing seemed to be amiss with them; they went on picking their way along the rift’s strewn floor.

A nightmare terror began to grip me. The force became stronger; I breasted myself against it; I strained, arms outstretched against it, struggling to keep my feet. And at last, panic overcoming me, I cried out to them for help. The three turned, came running to me.

Before they reached me I felt the pushing force lessen; within me was curious tingling concentration – electric. The tingling drew up to my arms, through them to my hands. Then with an audible crackling a tiny globe of green fire melted from my fingertips, hovered a moment, and with lightning swiftness darted back through the cañon toward the dead Monster’s blackened lair!

Wondering, amazed, Ventnor and Ruth and Drake gazed upon me. Appalled I stared at them. I dropped my arms; all tension, all resistance, was gone.

I walked forward. There was now no torrent, no unseen, terrifying clog upon the least of my movements.

And till now this phenomenon has persisted, although steadily lessening. Day by day, in the late afternoon, I begin to feel the pull of the streaming current, dragging me toward the northwest straight as a compass needle points to the magnetic pole.

But I understand what it is now, and I am no longer afraid. Dwelling in that prodigious field of force that surrounded the Metal Things, we were all of us, of course, magnetized to an incredible degree.

Through, as I have said, some peculiar idiosyncrasy I must have become super-sensitive to the magnetic flux.

We know that in late afternoon – though why none knows – there is an abrupt increase in force of the magnetic streams between Earth’s magnetic poles. When that increase occurs I respond to it as a nail does to a magnet.

I store, it seems, static electricity; become in a way of speaking a Leyden jar of flesh and blood. The tension changes and the force I have stored appears as the corpuscles of electric fire.

Why they do not instantly leap forth and disappear as in the usual discharge of static I do not know. I only know that the mark of the Metal Thing is on me and that happens does happen.

It imposes certain limitations upon me not at all pleasant. I can carry no watch; I can go close to no delicate instruments; I am barred while it lasts from my laboratory.

It will pass, I know. But it is not – pleasant; no!

Of our wanderings thereafter I need not write. From the rift we emerged into a maze of valleys, and after a month in that wilderness, living upon what game we could shoot, we found a road that led us into Gyantse.

In another six weeks we were home in America.

My story, is finished.

There in the Trans-Himalayan wilderness is the wondrous blue globe that was the weird home of the lightning witch – and looking back I know now she could not have been all woman. There is the vast pit with its coronet of fantastic peaks; its symboled, calcined floor and the crumbling body of the inexplicable, the incredible Thing which, alive, was the very shadow of extinction; annihilation, hovering to hurl itself upon humanity!

That shadow is gone; that pall withdrawn!

But to me – to each of us four who saw those phenomena – their lesson remains, ineradicable: giving a new strength and purpose to us, teaching us a new humility.

For in that vast crucible of life of which we are so small a part what other Shapes may even now be rising from its ferment to submerge us?

In that vast reservoir of force that is the mystery-filled infinite through which we roll what other shadows may be speeding upon us?

Who knows?

By a hair’s breadth, and through no wisdom of man, humanity this time has escaped.

Can humanity escape again?

Who knows?

— THE END —

FOOTNOTES

[01]  See “The Moon Pool,” All-Story Weekly, June 22, 1918, and “The Conquest of the Moon Pool,” All-Story Weekly, February 15-March 22, 1919.

[02]  Note – Gauss has estimated that our planet is in reality a vast magnet whose enormous power is equal to 8,464 billions of steel bars, each weighing a pound and magnetized to saturation – W. T. G.

[03]  Reported by the Franciscan Mission to Tibet in the early eighteenth century – W. T. G.

[04]  And in this is the explanation, I think, of why the mind that lacks the creative element of imagination strives always so fiercely and bitterly against the imaginative. The imaginative mind is the finder of new paths, the pioneer, the seeker; the unimaginative is the developer, the consolidator of the new worlds found by its opposite. There would be no progress without the creative, imaginative mind; there would, possibly, be no practical results from the discoveries of the advanced intelligence without the methodical plodding activities of its duller brother. One supplements the other – but with this difference; the creative intellect is independent of its stolid kin, while the latter is dependent upon it for any advances in knowledge it may enjoy. The unimaginative mind betrays itself by its love for old saws and proverbs, its clinging to the obvious and the known – which, by the way, it never can realize was but yesterday neither the obvious nor the known. It resents the “different” because it has not the ability to adjust itself quickly to new conditions or new points of view. It creates nothing, contributes nothing to human progress, looks with suspicion upon the slightest deviation from the commonplace, persecutes or ridicules and sometimes crucifies those who try to lift it from its slough. Yet it is, I suppose, as necessary to the human ferment as the dregs are to the wine. – W. T. G.

[05]  It is not my intention to reproduce in full this discussion of ours by which we sought to clarify our minds and to construct from the unfamiliar a foundation of the known from which to proceed. Yet, I do feel it essential to apprise the reader of the gist of it for the better understanding of the continuation of this narrative. For those who have sufficient curiosity to pursue this fascinating subject of the sensitivity of metal I advise them to read the reports of Professor Ralph S. Lillie, of Clark University, upon his experiments. They can be found in his printed papers. Le Bon, in his “Evolution of Matter,” Chapter 11, writing on the same subject, says:

“Endorsed with an unconscious sensibility greater than the conscious sensibility of any living being. This is why such an expression as the life of matter, utterly meaningless twenty-five years ago, has come into common use. The study yields ever-increasing proofs that it has properties which were formerly deemed the exclusive appanage of living beings.“

[06]  Professor Jacques Loeb, of the Rockefeller Institute, New York. “The Mechanistic Conception of Life.” His theory is that every action and impulse, physical or mental of every living thing is only a blind, mechanical response to some external stimulus or stimuli, exactly as Drake put it, like the rush of filings toward a magnet – W. T. G.

[07]  All motion is relative; its one varying factor being time. The snail and the express train are one and the same so far as their motion is concerned. The force of gravitation is constantly at work striving to keep each inert. Their progress, like ours, is a series of successive breakings away from gravitational force and the rate of progress is in the direct ratio of the time taken to effect these contact breakings. Gravitation, according to the newest and best scientific thought, is an energy which works entirely independent of time. It takes light one second to travel one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles. The birth of a baby on earth is instantaneously recorded by gravitational changes in the farthest stars! – W. T. G.

[08]  J. W. Gregory, F.R.S., D.Sc., professor of geology at the University of Glasgow. This is the concept that on the muddy shallows of the young world the development of life may have been affected by two stages. First, the formation of a complex jelly – Protobion – mainly composed of carbonaceous compounds which would be formed of the various constituents existing in the primeval atmosphere; second, the development of a catalyzer – literally an exploder – which would give this jelly the power to break up various available compounds for food; and their reduction would endow the jelly with a supply of internal energy which in time set in motion the forces which built out of it humanity and all living things and all the strangely – to us – shaped ancestors of us and all livings things. The original difference between organic and inorganic matter, says Gregory in his “The Making of the Earth.” p. 228, was perhaps only one of chemical composition. He points out that the earliest forms of life – as we know life – lived under such conditions that only three processes were essential to their existence: i.e., the absorption of material as food and the rejection of the waste products; second, the power of absorbing from food a supply of energy and the power to do work; third, the capacity to continue the two operations and to transmit the power to do them to the separate parts of the mass after its increase in bulk has rendered division necessary. “All three processes that are essential to the simplest form of living matter are also shared by the crystals,” he concludes – p. 227, Ibid.

I earnestly wish that three classes of my readers – those who finding it impossible to accept the verity of my narrative are still interested in its probability; those who accepting it desire to know more of the proved scientific factors involved; and those who in doubt of its truth are desirous of satisfying themselves as to the accuracy of its references – would read before going farther with me Chapter XIII of Gregory’s “The Making of the Earth,” Chapter III of Le Bon’s “Evolution of Matter,” and Professor Ellsworth Huntington’s, of Yale, “World Power and Evolution,” chapter “The Voyage of Evolution.”

The mysterious force of life once having become a part of any group of matter, once having given it impetus, who shall say where that evolution so begun must cease? The Metal People were crystalline_ developments of those crystal forms which, whether they originated on this earth or another, shared, as Gregory puts it, the first three essential processes of living matter. I write this although it is in advance of my narrative, and being so is in the fictional sense an error. But this narrative is not fiction – W. T. G.

[09]  Le Bon – I quote again from his “Evolution of Matter,” says: “The crystal undergoes like the animal or the plant, a progressive evolution before attaining its final form. Again, like the animal or the plant, the crystal mutilated can repair its mutilation. The crystal in reality is the final stage of a particular form of life.”

But I say – who can write “finis” to any form of life?

“During its infancy,” Le Bon writes further, “the future crystal behaves like a human being. It represents tissue in course of evolution. It is an organized being undergoing a series of transformation of which the final stage is the crystalline form as the oak is the final stage of evolution of the acorn. There is hardly in nature anything but the crystal which possesses a truly stable and definite form. The crystal forms a being intermediate between brute and living forms, and placed nearer to the latter than the former. It possesses in common with living beings certain definite qualities and in particular something singularly numbing ancestral life. The crystalline germs we introduce into a solution to crystallize. It seems to hint at a whole series of earlier lives. They recall the germs of living beings – that is to say – the spermatozoa which comprise the whole sum of the successive forms of the life of a race, and contain, not withstanding their insignificant size, all the details of the successive transformations which the living being exhibit before arriving at the adult stage.

“All the facts of this order,” concludes Le Bon, “belong to the category of unexplained phenomena of which nature is full and which become more numerous as soon as we penetrate into unexplored regions.”

I must repeat that the Metal People were being made up of myriads of tiny specialized crystals as the living being is made up of myriads of tiny specialized cells. – W. T. G.

[10]  Professor Svante Arrhenius’s theory of propagation of life by means of minute spores carried through space. See his “Worlds in the Making.” – W. T. G.

[11]  Gymnotus electricus; its electrical organs are modifications of the lateral muscles supplied with numerous branches from the spinal nerves and extending the whole length of the tail. The posterior end of the organ is positive, the anterior negative. of three feet and the thickness of a man’s thigh. It frequents the marshes of Brazil and the Guianas. I have seen one of these creatures stun, successively, six mules before it could be handled. – W. T. G.

[12]  Of an amazingly analogous phenomena William Beebe has written: “Of that house every rafter, beam, stringer, and window-frame, door-frame, hallway, room, ceiling, wall and door, foundation and superstructure and roof, all were ants – living, motionless ants, distorted by stress, crowded into the dense walls, spread out to widest stretch across the the spaces. I had thought it marvelous when I saw them arrange themselves as bridges, walks, hand-rail, buttresses and sign-boards along the columns; but this new absorption of environment, this usurpation of wood and stone, this insinuation of themselves into the province of the inorganic world, was almost too astounding to credit.” Nor, I may add, are the variations of shape, the grotesqueries of outline of these ants when observed under the glass less astonishing than were the transformations of what for want of better name I call the Metal Folk. For further information upon this subject see this distinguished observer’s article in the Atlantic Monthly for October, 1919. – W. T. G.

[13]  See “The Moon Pool,” and “The Conquest of the Moon Pool.”

Argosy All-Story Weekly, 7 Aug–25 Sep 1920

THE  FACE
IN  THE  ABYSS

PUBLISHER’S INTRODUCTION

THE FACE IN THE ABYSS
– A NOVELETTE—
COMPLETE IN THIS ISSUE

And now the readers of Argosy-AllStory Weekly come once again to their old favorite, A. Merritt, who flashed like a shooting star across the pages of All-Story Weekly in the issues of June 22, 1918, and from February 1, to March 22, 1919, illuminating that most classically fantastic of all stories, THE MOON POOL, which was afterward brought out in book form and accepted in England, France, and America as equal to the best imaginative work of H. G. Wells or that older master, the late Jules Verne; after which he rose to greater heights in his serial that appeared under the title of THE METAL MONSTER.

In these two works Merritt struck an entirely new note, rich in imagination, the wondrous possibilities of science, and the fine balance of human interest and narrative charm. In every chapter he struck the cosmic chords of superlative invention. Letters from all over the world asking for further work from the pen of Merritt came to this office.

He has recently been induced, or, to be perfectly frank, he has again taken up his pen of his own volition and made another contribution entitled THE FACE IN THE ABYSS, which is published in this issue in full on the pages which follow.

We know of no more kaleidoscopic imagination among living writers. Merritt possesses not only a transcendental vision but the power to put in words the scenes that unfold and come full-winged shimmering with light from the cathedral of his mind.

— I —

OUT OF
THE HAUNTED HILLS

It has been just three years since I met Nicholas Graydon in the little Andean village of Chupan, high on the eastern slopes of the Peruvian uplands. I had stopped there to renew my supplies, expecting to stay not more than a day or two. But after my arrieros [pack-men] had unlimbered my luggage from the two burros, and I entered the unusually clean and commodious posada, [inn] its keeper told me that another North American was stopping there.

He would be very glad to see me, said the innkeeper, since he was very ill and there was no other Americanos in the hamlet. Yes, he was so ill that he was, to tell me all the truth, certain to die, and it would beyond doubt comfort him much to have a fellow countryman with him when that sad moment came. That is, he added, if he were able to recognize a fellow countryman, since all the time the señor had been at the posada he had been out of his mind with fever, and would probably pass away so.

Then with a curiously intense anxiety he implored me to stay on until death did come; a matter, he assured me, that could be one of only a few days – maybe hours.

I bluntly asked him whether his desire for me to remain was through solicitude for my ailing countryman or through fear for himself. And after a little hesitation he answered that it was both. The señor had come to the village a week before, with one burro and neither guides nor arrieros. He had been very weak, as though from privations and long journeying. But weaker far from a wound on his neck which had become badly infected. The wound seemed to have been made by either an arrow or a spear. The señor had been taken care of as well as the limited knowledge of the cura and himself permitted. His burro had been looked after and his saddlebags kept scrupulously closed. But I could understand that questions might be raised after the señor’s death. If I remained I could report to the authorities that everything possible had been done for the señor’s comfort and testify that none in Chupan was responsible for his injuries.

This did not sound very convincing to me, and I said so. Then the worthy innkeeper revealed what actually was in his mind. The señor, he said, had spoken in his ravings, of dreadful things, things both accursed and devilish. What were they? Well – he crossed himself – if I remained I would no doubt hear for myself. But they had even greatly disturbed the good cura, despite that he was under the direct protection of God. The señor had come, so his ravings indicated, from a haunted place – no less a place, the innkeeper whispered crossing himself again, than the shunned Cordillera de Carabaya, which every one knew was filled with evil spirits. Yes, evil spirits which would not lightly give up anyone who had once been in their power!

And, in fine, the idea seemed to be that some of these demons of the Cordillera – about which, as a matter of fact, I had heard some strange tales – might come at any time for the sick man. If they did, they would be more apt to wreak their fury on one of the señor’s own countrymen – especially if he was in the same room. The keeper of the posada did not put it that way, of course; he said that one of his own people was better qualified to protect the señor in such case than any strangers were. Nevertheless the theory plainly was that if I stayed I would act as a lightning rod for any levin [thunderbolt] of hell that might strike!

I went to the room of the sick man. At first glance I could see that here was no anderine, no mountain vagabond. Neither fever nor scrub beard could hide the fineness, the sensitivity, the intelligence of the face on which I looked. He was, I judged, about thirty, and he was in ill case indeed. His temperature showed 105 point 6. At the moment he was in delirium.

My first shock of surprise came when I examined his wound. It seemed to me more like the stab of some great bird beak than the work of spear or arrow. It was a puncture – or better, perhaps, a punch – clear through the muscles of the back and left shoulder and base of the neck. It had missed the arteries of the last by the narrowest of margins. I knew of no bird which could make such a wound as this, yet the closer I looked and probed the more sure I was that it had been inflicted by no weapon of man.

That night, after I had arranged my own matters and had him sleeping under a hypodermic, I opened up his saddlebags. Papers in them showed his name to be Nicholas Graydon, a mining engineer, a graduate of the Harvard School of Mines, his birthplace, Philadelphia. There was a diary that revealed so much of him truly likable that had I not already made up my mind to stop on with him it would have impelled me to do so. Its last entry was about a month before and ran:

Two weeks now since our arrieros deserted us, and we seem to be pretty thoroughly lost. Effects upon the three are curious. Sterrett manages to keep himself evenly drunk all the time. That spare burro of his must be loaded with nothing but that Indian hell-brew. Dancre is moody and sullen. Soames seems to have developed a morbid suspicion of all of us. Strange how the wilderness, the jungle, the desert, bring out the latent man in all of us. In Quito none of the three was half bad. But now – well, the luckiest thing for me will be for us to find no treasure. If we do, my throat will probably be the first to be

Further down in the bag were two parcels, each most carefully and securely wrapped. Opening the first I found a long black feather oddly marked with white. I did not recognize the plume as belonging to any bird I knew. Its shaft was inlaid with little bands of gold, altogether a curiously delicate bit of goldsmith’s work.

But the contents of the second package made me gasp with amazement. It was a golden bracelet, clearly exceedingly ancient, the band an inch broad and expanding into an oval disk perhaps three inches long by two wide. That disk held in high relief the most extraordinary bit of carving I had ever seen. Four monsters held on uplifted paws, a bowl on which lay coiled a serpent with a woman’s face and woman’s breasts. Nor had I ever beheld such suggestion of united wisdom and weirdness as the maker had stamped upon the snake woman’s face.

Yet it was not that which called forth the full measure of my wonder; no. There are certain pictures, certain sculptures, certain works of art which carry to their beholders conviction that no fantasy, no imagination, went into their making and that they are careful, accurate copies of something seen by those who made them. This bit of golden carving carried that conviction.

The four monsters which held up the snake woman were – dinosaurs!

There was no mistaking them. I had examined too many of the reconstructions made by scientists from the fossil bones of these gigantic, monstrous reptilian creatures to be in error. But these giants were supposed to have died off millions of years before man first appeared on earth! Yet here they were, carved with such fidelity to detail, such impress of photographic accuracy, that it was impossible to believe that the ancient goldsmith who made this thing had not had before him living models!

Marveling, I held the bracelet closer to the light and as I did so I thought I heard far away in the blackness of the mountains and high in air a sound like a tiny bugle. In that note was something profoundly, alienly weird. I went to the window and listened, but the sound did not come again. I turned to find the eyes of Graydon opened and regarding me. For a moment he had slipped from the thrall of the fever – and the thought came to me that it had been that elfin bugling which had awakened him.

It was six weeks before I had Graydon well out of danger. And in that time he had told me bit by bit that well nigh incredible experience of his in the haunted hills of the Cordillera de Carabaya and what it was that had sent him so far down into the valley of the shadow.

Three years it has been since then. Three years and I have heard nothing of him. Three years and he has not returned from his journey back to the Cordillera de Carabaya where he went to seek mystery, ancient beyond all memory of man, he believed was hidden there. But more than that – to seek Suarra.

“If you don’t hear from me in three years, tell the story and let the people who knew me know what became of me,” he said, as I left him at the beginning of that strange trail he had determined to retrace.

And so I tell it, reconstructing it from his reticences as well as his confidences, since only so may a full measure of judgment of that story be gained.

— II —

SUARRA
OF THE GOLDEN SPEARS

Graydon had run into Sterrett in Quito. Or, rather, Sterrett sought him out there. Graydon had often heard of the giant West Coast adventurer, but their trails had never crossed. It was with a lively curiosity, then, that he opened the door of his room to this

And he had rather liked Sterrett. There was a bluff directness about the big man that made him overlook a certain cruelty of eye and a touch of brutality about mouth and jaw.

Sterrett came to the point at once. Graydon had no doubt heard the story of the treasure train which had been bringing to Pizarro the ransom of the Inca Atahualpa? And learning of the murder of that monarch had turned back and buried that treasure somewhere in the Peruvian wilderness? Graydon had heard of it, hundreds of times. And, like every other adventurer in the Andes, spent a little time himself searching for those countless millions in jewels and gold.

Sterrett nodded.

“I know how to find it,” he said.

And Graydon had laughed. How many had told him that they, too, knew where lay hidden the hoard of Atahualpa the Inca!

But in the end Sterrett convinced him; convinced him at least that there was something more solid than usual in his story, something decidedly worth looking into.

There would be two others in the expedition, Sterrett told him, both men long associated with him. One was Dancre, a Frenchman, the other an American named Soames. These two had been with Sterrett when he had got hold of the old parchment with its alleged map of the treasure trail, and with its carefully drawn signs that purported to be copies of’ those along that trail; signs cut by its makers to guide those who one day, when the Spaniard was gone, would set out to recover the hidden hoard.

Graydon asked why they wanted him. Sterrett bluntly enough told him – because he was an American; because they knew he could be trusted; because he could afford to pay half the expenses of the expedition. He, Dancre and Soames would pay the other half. They would all share equally if the treasure was found. Still another reason, Graydon was a mining engineer and his special knowledge might be essential when it came to recovering the stuff. Furthermore, if the treasure was not found, the region where they were going was full of minerals. He might make some valuable discoveries. In which event all would share equally as before.

There were no calls on Graydon at the time. It was true that he could well afford the cost. At the worst there would be adventure and some pleasant excitement. He met Dancre and Soames, the first a cynical, but amusing little bunch of wires and nerves, the second a lanky, saturnine, hard-bitten Yankee. They had gone down by rail to Cerro de Pasco for their outfit, that being the town of any size closest to where, according to the map, their trail into the wilderness began. A week later, with eight burros and six arrieros or packmen, they were well within the welter of peaks through which the old map indicated their road lay.

They found the signs cut in the rocks exactly as the parchment had promised. Gay, spirits high with anticipation, three of them at least spending in advance their share of the treasure, they followed the symbols. Steadily they were led into the uncharted wilderness.

At last the arrieros began to murmur. They were approaching, they said, a region that was accursed, the Cordillera de Carabaya, where demons dwelt and only fierce Aymaras, their servants, lived. Promises of more money, threats, pleadings, took them along a little farther.

Then one morning the four awoke to find the arrieros gone – and with them half the burros and a portion of their supplies.

They pressed on. Then suddenly, the signs had failed them. Either they had lost the trail, or there were no more carven symbols and the parchment which had led them truthfully so far had lied at the last. Or was it possible that the signs had been obliterated – cut away?

The country into which they had penetrated was a strangely deserted one. They saw no sign of Indians – had seen none indeed since when, more than a week before, they had stopped at a Quicha village and Sterrett had got mad drunk on that fiery spirit the Quichas distill. Food, too, was curiously hard to find, there were few animals and fewer birds.

But worst of all was the change that had come over his companions. As high as they had been lifted by their certainty of success, just so deep were they now cast into despair. The wilderness, the loneliness of it, their disappointment, had brought out the real man that lies hidden beneath the veneer we all of us carry. Sterrett kept himself at a steady level of drunkenness, alternately quarrelsome and noisy or sunk in a sullen mood of brooding, brutal rage. Dancre had become silent and irritable. Soames seemed to have reached the conclusion that Graydon, Sterrett and the Frenchman had combined against him; that they had either deliberately missed the trail or had erased the signs. Only when the two of them joined Sterrett and drank with him the Quicha hell-brew did either of them relax. At such times Graydon had the uneasy feeling that they were holding the failure against him and that his life might be hanging on a thin thread.

On the day that his adventure really began – that strange adventure to which all that had passed before had been prelude – Graydon was coming back to the camp. He had been hunting since morning. Dancre and Soames had gone off together on another desperate search for the missing symbols that would lead them to the treasure trail again.

Cut off in mid-flight, the girl’s cry came to him as the answer to all his apprehensions; materialization of the menace toward which his vague fears had been groping ever since he had left Sterrett alone at the camp hours ago. He had sensed some culminating misfortune close – and here it was! He knew it; how, he did not stop himself to ask; he was sure. He broke into a run, stumbling up the slope to the group of gray green algarroba trees where the tent was pitched.

What had the drunken fool done? Graydon had warned them all that their situation was perilous; that if Indians came they must try to make friends with them – that they must be superlatively careful in their treatment of any Indian women.

He reached the algarrobas; crashed through the light undergrowth to the little clearing. Why didn’t the girl cry out again, he wondered. There was a sickness at his heart. A low chuckle reached him, thick, satyr toned. Then Sterrett’s voice, cruel, mocking!

“No more fight in you, eh? Well, which’ll it be, pretty lady – the way to the gold or you? And by Heaven – I guess it’ll be you – first!”

For an instant Graydon paused. He saw that Sterrett, half crouching, was holding the girl bow fashion over one knee. A thick arm was clinched about her neck, the fingers clutching her mouth brutally, silencing her; his right hand fettered her slender wrists; her knees were caught in the vise of his bent right leg.

She was helpless, but as Graydon sprang forward he caught a flash of wide black eyes, wrath filled and defiant, staring fearlessly into those leering so close.

He caught Sterrett by the hair, locked an arm under his chin, drawing his head sharply back.

“Drop her!” he ordered. “Drop her – quick!”

Sterrett hurled himself to his feet, dropping the girl as he rose.

“What the hell are you butting in for?” he snarled. His hand struck down toward his pistol. But even while the fingers were tightening around the butt, Graydon’s fist shot out and caught him on the point of the hairy jaw. The clutching fingers loosened, the half drawn pistol slipped to the ground, the great body quivered and toppled over. Long before it fell the girl had leaped up and away.

Graydon did not look after her. She had gone no doubt to bring down upon them her people, some tribe of those fierce Aymaras that even the Incas of old had never quite conquered and who would avenge her – in ways that Graydon did not like to visualize.

He bent down over Sterrett. His heart was beating; feebly it was true – but beating. The reek of drink was sickening. Graydon’s hand touched the fallen pistol. He picked it up and looked speculatively at the fallen man’s rifle. Sterrett, between the blow and the drink, would probably be out of the running for hours. He wished that Dancre and Soames would get back soon to camp. The three of them could put up a good fight at any rate; might even have a chance for escape. So ran his thoughts. But Dancre and Soames would have to return quickly. The girl would soon be there – with the avengers; no doubt at this very moment she was telling them of her wrongs. He turned—

She stood there; looking at him!

And drinking in her loveliness, Graydon forgot the man at his feet; forgot all, and was content to let his soul sit undisturbed within his eyes and take its delight to her.

Her skin was palest ivory. It gleamed translucent through the rents of the soft amber fabric like the thickest silk that swathed her. Her eyes were deep velvety pools, oval, a little tilted; Egyptian in the wide midnight of their irises. But the features were classic, cameo; the nose small and straight, the brows level and black, almost meeting above it! And her hair was cloudy jet, misty and shadowed, and a narrow fillet of gold bound the broad, low forehead. In it like a diamond were entwined the sable and silver feathers of the caraquenque, that bird whose plumage in lost centuries was sacred to the princesses of the Incas alone. Above her dimpled elbows golden bracelets twined, reaching to the slender shoulders. The little, high arched feet were shod with high buskins of deerskin.

She was light and slender as the Willow Maid who waits on Kwannon when she passes into the World of Trees to pour into them new fire of green life – and like the Willow Maid green fire of tree and jungle and flame of woman gleamed within her.

Nothing so exquisite, so beautiful had ever Graydon beheld. Here was no Aymara, no daughter of any tribe of the Cordilleras, no descendant of Incas. Nor was she Spanish. There were bruises on her cheeks – the marks of Sterrett’s cruel fingers. Her long, slim hands touched them. The red lips opened. She spoke – in the Aymara tongue.

“Is he dead?” she asked – her voice was low, a faint chime as of little bells ringing through it.

“No,” Graydon answered.

In the depths of the midnight eyes a small hot flame flared; he could have sworn it was of gladness; it vanished as swiftly as it had come.

“That is well,” she said. “I would not have him die—” the voice become meditative – “so!”

“Who are you?” Graydon asked wonderingly. She looked at him for a long moment, enigmatically.

“Call me – Suarra,” she answered at last.

Sterrett stirred; groaned. The girl gazed down upon him. The slim hand touched once more the bruises on her cheek.

“He is very strong,” she murmured.

Graydon thought there was admiration in the voice; wondered whether all that delectable beauty was after all but a mask for primitive woman, worshiping brute strength; looked into the eyes scanning Sterrett’s bulk, noted the curious speculation within them, and knew that whatever the reason for her comment it was not that which his fleeting thought had whispered. She looked at him, questioningly.

“Are you his enemy?” she asked.

“No,” said Graydon, “we travel together.”

“Then why,” she pointed to the outstretched figure, “why did you do this to him? Why did you not let him have his way with me?”

Graydon flushed, uncomfortably. The question, with all its subtle implications, cut. What kind of a beast did she think him? His defense of her had been elementary – as well be asked to explain why he did not stand by and watch idly while a child was being murdered!

“What do you think I am?” His voice shook with half shamed wrath. “No man stands by and lets a thing like that go on.”

She looked at him, curiously; but her eyes had softened.

“No?” she asked. “No man does? Then what is he?”

Graydon found no answer. She took a step closer to him, her slim fingers again touching the bruises on her cheek.

“Do you not wonder,” she said – “now do you not wonder why I do not call my people to deal him the punishment he has earned?”

“I do wonder,” Graydon’s perplexity was frank. “I wonder indeed. Why do you not call them – if they are close enough to hear?”

“And what would you do were they to come?” she whispered.

“I would not let them have him – alive,” he answered. “Nor me!”

“Perhaps,” she said, slowly, “perhaps – knowing that – is why – I do not call them!”

Suddenly she smiled upon him – and it was as though a draft of wild sweet wine had been lifted to his lips. He took a swift step toward her. She drew up to her slim lithe height, thrust out a warning hand.

“I am – Suarra,” she said; then, “and I am – Death!”

And odd chill passed through Graydon. Again he realized the unfamiliar, the alien beauty of her. Was there truth after all in those legends of the haunted Cordillera? He had never doubted that there was something behind the terror of the Indians, the desertion of the arrieros. Was she one of its spirits, its – demons? For an instant the fantasy seemed no fantasy. Then reason returned. This girl a demon! He laughed.

She frowned at that laughter.

“Do not laugh,” she said. “The death I mean is not such as you who live beyond the high rim of our land may know. It is death that blots out not alone the body, but that lord whose castle is the body; that which looks out through the windows of your eyes – that presence, that flame, you believe can never die. That, too, our death blots out; makes as though it never had been. Or letting it live, changes it in – dreadful – ways. Yet, because you came to me in my need – nay, more because of something I sense within you – something that calls out to me and to which I must listen and do desire to listen – because of this I would not have that death come to you.”

Strange as were her words, Graydon hardly heard them; certainly did not then realize fully their meaning, lost still as he was in wonder.

What was this girl doing here in these wild mountains with her bracelets of gold and the royal Inca feathers on her lovely little head? No demon of the wilderness, she! Absurd! She was living, desirable, all human.

Yet she was of no race he knew. Despite the caraquenque plumes – not of the Incas.

But she was of pure blood – the blood of kings. Yes, that was it – a princess of some proud empire, immemoriably ancient, long lost! But what empire?

“How you came by the watchers, I do not know. How you passed unseen by them I do not know. Nor how you came so far within this forbidden land. Tell me,” her voice was imperious, “why came you here at all?”

Graydon stirred. It was a command.

“We came from afar,” he said, “on the track of a great treasure of gold and gems; the treasure of Atahualpa, the Inca. There were certain signs that led us. They brought us here. And here we lost them. And found soon that we, too, .were lost.”

“Atahualpa,” she nodded. “Yes, his people did come here. We took them – and their treasure!”

Graydon stared at her, jaw dropping in amazement.

“You – you took them – and the treasure!” he gasped.

“Yes,” she nodded, indifferently, “it lies somewhere in one of the thirteen caves. It was nothing to us – to us of Yu-Atlanchi where treasures are as the sands in the stream bed. A grain of sand, it was, among many.’ But the people of Atahualpa were welcome – since we needed new folks to care for the Xinli and to feed the wisdom of the Snake Mother.”

“The Snake Mother!” exclaimed Graydon.

The girl touched the bracelet on her right arm. And Graydon, looking close, saw that this bracelet held a disk on which was carved a serpent with a woman’s head and woman’s breasts and arms. It lay coiled upon a great dish held high on the paws of four animals. The shapes of these did not at once register upon his consciousness – so absorbed was he in his study of that coiled figure.

And now he saw that this face was not really that of a woman. It was reptilian. But so strongly had the maker feminized it, so great was the suggestion of womanhood modeled into every line of it, that constantly the eyes saw it as woman, forgetting all that was of the serpent.

Her eyes were of some small, glittering, intensely purple stone. And as Graydon looked he felt that those eyes were alive – that far, far away some living thing was looking at him through them. That they were, in fact, prolongations of someone’s – some thing’s – vision!

And suddenly the figure seemed to swell, the coils to move, the eyes come closer.

He tore his gaze away; drew back, dizzily.

The girl was touching one of the animals that held up the bowl or shield or whatever it was that held the snake woman.

“The Xinli,” she said.

Graydon looked; looked and felt increase of bewilderment. For he knew what those animals were. And, knowing, knew that he looked upon the incredible.

They were dinosaurs! Those gigantic, monstrous grotesques that ruled earth millions upon millions of years ago, and but for whose extinction, so he had been taught, man could never have developed.

Who in this Andean wilderness could know or could have known the dinosaur? Who here could have carved, the monsters with such life-like detail as these possessed? Why, it was only yesterday that science had learned what really were their huge bones, buried so long that the rocks had molded themselves around them in adamantine matrix. And laboriously, with every modern resource still haltingly and laboriously, science had set those bones together as a perplexed child a picture puzzle, and timidly put forth what it believed to be reconstructions of these long vanished chimeras of earth’s nightmare youth.

Yet here, far from all science it must surely be, someone had modeled those same monsters for a woman’s bracelet. Why then, it followed that whoever had done this must have had before him the living forms from which to work. Or, if not, copies of those forms set down accurately by ancient men who had seen them. And either or both these things were incredible.

What were these people to whom this girl belonged? People who – what was it she had said – could blot out both body and soul or change the soul to some dreadful thing? There had been a name—

Yu-Atlanchi.

“Suarra,” he said, “where is Yu-Atlanchi? Is it this place where we are now?”

“This,” she laughed. “No! Yu-Atlanchi is the ancient land. The hidden land where the Five Lords and the Lord of Lords once ruled, and where now rules only the Lord of Fate and the Lord of Folly and the Snake Mother! This place Yu-Atlanchi !” again she laughed. “Now and then we hunt here – with the Xinli and the – the—” she hesitated, looking at him oddly; then went on. “So it was that he,” she pointed to Sterrett, “caught me. I was hunting. I had slipped away from my – my—” again she hesitated, as oddly as before – “my followers, for sometimes I would hunt alone, wander alone. I came through these trees and saw your tetuane, your lodge. I came face to face with – him. And I was amazed – too amazed to strike with one of these.” She pointed to a low knoll a few feet away – “so, before I could conquer that amaze he seized me, choked me. And then you came.”

Graydon stared at the place where she had pointed. There upon the ground lay three slender shining spears. Their slim shafts were of gold; the arrow shaped heads of two of them were of fine opal.

But the third – the third was a single emerald, translucent and flawless, all of six inches long and three at its widest and ground to keenest point and cutting edge!

There it lay, a priceless jewel tipping a spear of gold – and a swift panic shook Graydon. He had forgotten Soames and Dancre! Suppose they should return while this girl was there! This girl with her ornaments of gold, her gem tipped golden spears, and her – beauty! Well, he knew what they could do. And while now be knew, too, how with all his wit and strength he would fight for her. Still they were two and armed and cunning, and he only one.

Suddenly he discounted all that tale of hers of a hidden land with its Lords and Snake Mother and its people who dealt out mysterious unfamiliar deaths. If this were all so, why had she come alone into the algarrobas? Why was she still alone? As suddenly he saw her only a girl, speaking fantasy, and helpless.

“Suarra,” he said, “you must go and go quickly. This man and I are not all. .There are two more and even now they may be close. Take your spears, and go quickly. Else I may not be able to save you.”

“You think I am—” she began.

“I tell you to go,” he answered. “Whoever you are, whatever you are, go now and keep away from this place. Tomorrow I will try to lead them back. If you have people to fight for you – well, let them come and fight if you so desire. But take this instant your spears and go.”

She crossed to the little knoll and slowly picked them up. She held one out to him, the one that bore the emerald point.

“This,” she said, “to remember – Suarra.”

“No,” he thrust it back. “No!”

Once the others saw that jewel never, he knew, would he be able to start them on the back trail – if they could find it. Sterrett had seen it, of course, but that was not like having it in the camp, a constant reminder to Soames and Dancre of what might be unlimited riches within their reach. And he might be able to convince those others that Sterrett’s story was but a drunken dream.

The girl regarded him meditatively, a quickened interest in the velvety eyes. She slipped the golden bracelets from her arms, held them out to him with the three spears.

“Will you take all of them – and leave your comrades?” she asked. “Here are gold and gems. They are treasures. They are what you have been seeking. Take them. Take them and go, leaving that man there and those other two. Consent – and I will not only give you these, but show you a way out of this forbidden land.”

For a moment Graydon hesitated. The great emerald alone was worth a fortune. What loyalty did he owe after all, to Sterrett and Soames and Dancre? And Sterrett had brought this thing upon himself.

Nevertheless – they were his comrades. Open eyed he had gone into this venture with them.

He had a swift vision of himself skulking away with this glittering, golden booty, creeping off to safety while he left them, unwarned, unprepared to meet – what? Peril, certainly; nay, almost as certainly – death. For whatever the present danger of this girl might be at the hands of his comrades, subconsciously Graydon knew that it must be but a brief one; that she could not be all alone; that although through some chance she had strayed upon the camp, somewhere close were those who would seek for her when they missed her. That somewhere were forces on which she could call and against which it was unlikely three men, even well armed as they were, could prevail.

Very definitely he did not like that picture of himself skulking away from the peril, whatever it might be.

“No,” he said. “These men are of my race, my comrades. Whatever is to come – I will meet it with them and help them fight it. Now go.”

“Yet you would have fought them for my sake – indeed did fight,” she said, as though perplexed. “Why then do you cling to them when you can save yourself; go free, with treasure? And why, if you will not do this, do you let me go, knowing that if you kept me prisoner, or – slew me, I could not bring my people down upon you?”

Graydon laughed.

“I couldn’t let them hurt you, of course,” he said, “and I’m afraid to make you prisoner, because I might not be able to keep you free from hurt. And I won’t run away. So talk no more, but go – go!”

She thrust the gleaming spears into the ground, slipped the golden bracelets back on her arms, held white hands out to him.

“Now,” she cried, “now, by the Wisdom of the Snake Mother, by the Five Lords and by the Lord of Lords, I will save you if I can. All that I have tempted you with was but to test that truth which I had hoped was in you and now know is within you. Now you may not go back – nor may they. Here is Yu-Atlanchi and Yu-Atlanchi’s power. Into that power you have strayed. Nor have those who have ever so strayed ever escaped. Yet you I will save – if I can!”

Before he could answer her he heard a horn sound; far away and high in air it seemed. Faintly it was answered by others closer by; mellow, questing notes – yet with weirldy alien beat in them that subtly checked the pulse of Gray don’s heart!

“They come,” she said. “My followers! Light your fire tonight. Sleep without fear. But do not wander beyond these trees!”

“Suarra—” he cried.

“Silence now,” she warned. “Silence – until I am gone!”

The mellow horns sounded closer. She sprang from his side; darted through the

From the little ridge above the camp he heard her voice raised in one clear, ringing shout. There was a tumult of the horns about her – elfinly troubling. Then silence.

Graydon stood listening. The sun touched the high snowfields of the majestic peaks toward which he faced; touched them and turned them into robes of molten gold. The amethyst shadows that draped their sides thickened, wavered and marched swiftly forward.

Still he listened, scarce breathing.

Far, far away the horns sounded again; faint echoings of the tumult that had swept about Suarra – faint, faint and faerie sweet.

The sun dropped behind the peaks; the edges of their frozen mantles glittered as though sewn with diamonds; darkened into a fringe of gleaming rubies. The golden fields dulled, grew amber and then blushed forth a glowing rose. They changed to pearl and faded into a ghostly silver, shining like cloud wraiths in the highest heavens. Down upon the algarroba clump the quick Andean dusk fell.

And not till then did Graydon, shivering with sudden, inexplicable dread, realize that beyond the calling horns and the girl’s clear shouting he had heard no other sound – no noise either of man or beast, no sweeping through of brush or grass, no fall of running feet nor clamor of the chase.

Nothing but that mellow chorus of the horns!

From infinite distances, it seemed to him, he heard one single note, sustained and insistent. It detached itself from the silence. It swept toward him with the speed of light. It circled overhead, hovered and darted; arose and sped away; a winged sound bearing some message, carrying some warning – where?

— III —

THE EYES
OF THE SNAKE MOTHER

Graydon turned back. He bent over Sterrett who had drifted out of the paralysis of the blow into a drunken stupor. There were deep scratches on the giant’s cheeks – the marks of Suarra’s nails. The jaw was badly swollen where he had hit it. Graydon dragged him over to the tent, thrust a knapsack under his head and threw a blanket over him. Then he went out and built up the fire.

Hardly had be begun to prepare the supper when he heard a trampling through the underbrush. Soon Soames and Dancre came up through the trees.

“Find any signs?” he asked them. “Signs? Hell – no!” snarled the New Englander. “Say, Graydon, did you hear something like a lot of horns? Damned queer horns, too. They seemed to be over here.”

Graydon nodded, abstractedly. Abruptly he realized that he must tell these men what had happened, must warn them and urge them to prepare for defense. But how much should he tell?

All?

Tell them of Suarra’s beauty, of her golden ornaments and her gem-tipped spears of gold? Tell them what she had said of Atahualpa’s treasure and of that ancient Yu-Atlanchi where priceless gems were “thick as the sands upon the bed of a stream?”

Well he knew that if he did there would be no further reasoning with them; that they would go berserk with greed. Yet something of it he must tell them if they were to be ready for that assault which he was certain would come with the dawn.

And of Suarra they would learn soon enough from Sterrett when he awakened.

He heard an exclamation from Dancre who had passed on into the tent; heard him come out; stood up and faced the wiry little Frenchman.

“What’s the matter wit’ Sterrett, eh?” Dancre snapped. “First I thought he’s drunk. Then I see he’s scratched like wild cat and wit’ a lump on his jaw as big as one orange. What you do to Sterrett, eh?”

Graydon had made up his mind; was ready to answer.

“Dancre,” he said, “Soames – we’re in a bad box. I came in from hunting less than an hour ago and found Sterrett wrestling with a girl. That’s bad medicine down here – the worst, and you two know it. I had to knock Sterrett out before I could get the girl away from him. Her people will probably be after us in the morning. There’s no use trying to get away. They’ll soon enough find us in this wilderness of which we know nothing and they presumably know all. This place is as good as any other to meet them. And it’s a better place than any if we have to fight. We’d better, spend the night getting it ready so we can put up a good one, if we have to.”

“A girl, eh?” said Dancre. “What she look like? Where she come from? How she get away?”

Graydon choose the last question to answer.

“I let her go,” he said.

“You let her go!” snarled Soames. “What the hell did you do that for, man? Why didn’t you tie her up? We could have held her as a hostage, Graydon – had something to do some trading with when her damned bunch of Indians came.”

“She wasn’t an Indian, Soames,” began Graydon, then hesitated.

“You mean she was white – Spanish?” broke in Dancre, incredulously.

“No, not Spanish either. She was white. Yes, white as any of us. I don’t know what she was,” answered Graydon.

The pair stared at him, then at each other.

“There’s something damned funny about this,” growled Soames, at last. “But what I want to know is why you let her go, whatever the hell she was?”

“Because I thought we’d have a better chance if I did than if I didn’t.” Graydon’s own wrath was rising. “I want to tell you two that we’re up against something mighty bad; something none of us knows anything about. And we’ve got just one chance of getting out of the mess. If I’d kept her here we wouldn’t have even that chance.”

He halted. Dancre had stooped; had picked up something from the ground, something that gleamed yellow in the firelight. And now the Frenchman nudged the lank New Englander.

“Somet’ing funny is right, Soames,” he said. “Look at this.”

He handed the gleaming object over. Graydon saw that it was a thin golden bracelet, and as Soames turned it over in his hand he caught the green glitter of emeralds. It had been tom from Suarra’s arm, he realized, in her struggle with Sterrett.

“Yes, somet’ing funny!”, repeated Dancre. He glared at Graydon venomously, through slitted lids. “What that girl give you to let her go, Graydon, eh?” he spat. “What she tell you, eh?”

Soames’s hand dropped to his automatic.

“She gave me nothing, I took nothing,” answered Graydon.

“I t’ink you damned liar!” said Dancre, viciously. “We get Sterrett awake,” he turned to Soames. “We get him awake quick. I t’ink he tell us more about this, oui. A girl who wears stuff like this – and he lets her go! Lets her go when he knows there must be more where this come from, eh, Soames. Damned funny is right, eh? Come, now, we see what Sterrett tell us.”

Graydon watched them go into the tent. Soon Soames come out, went to a spring that bubbled up from among the trees; returned, with water.

Well, let them waken Sterrett; let him tell them whatever he would. They would not kill him that night, of that he was sure. They believed that he knew too much. And in the morning—

What was hidden in the morning for them all?

That even now they were prisoners, Graydon did not doubt. Suarra’s warning not to leave the camp had been too explicit. And since that tumult of the elfin horns, her swift vanishing and the silence that had followed he had no longer doubt that they had strayed as she had said within the grasp of some power, formidable as it was mysterious.

The silence? Suddenly it came to him that the night had become strangely still. There was no sound either of insect or bird nor any stirring of the familiar after-twilight life of the wilderness.

The camp was ringed with silence!

He strode away, through the algarroba clump. There was a scant score of the trees. They stood up like a little leafy island peak within the brush covered savannah. They were great trees, every one of them, and set with a curious regularity as though they had not sprung up by chance; as though indeed they had been carefully planted.

Graydon reached the last of them, rested a hand against the bole that looked like myriads of tiny grubs turned to soft brown wood. He peered out. The slope that lay before him was flooded with moonlight; the yellow blooms of the chilca shrubs that pressed to the very feet of the trees shone wanly in the silver flood. The faintly aromatic fragrance of the quenuar stole around him. Movement or sign of life there was

And yet—

The spaces seemed filled with watchers; he felt their gaze upon him; knew with an absolute certainty that some hidden host girdled the camp. He scanned every bush and shadow; saw nothing. Nevertheless the certainty of a hidden, unseen multitude persisted. A wave of nervous irritation passed through him. He would force them, whatever they were, to show themselves.

He stepped boldly into the full moonlight.

On the instant the silence intensified; seemed to draw taut; to lift itself up whole octaves of stillnesses; to become alert, expectant – as though poised to spring upon him should he take one step further!

A coldness wrapped him, a shudder shook him. He drew swiftly back to the shadow of the trees; stood there, his heart beating furiously. The silence lost its poignancy, dropped back upon its haunches – but watchful and alert!

What had frightened him? What was there in that tightening of the stillness that had touched him with finger of night

Trembling, he groped back, foot by foot, afraid to turn his back to the silence. Behind him the fire flared. And suddenly his fear dropped from him.

His reaction from the panic was a heady recklessness. He threw a log upon the fire and laughed as the sparks shot up among the leaves. Soames, coming out of the tent for more water, stopped as he heard that laughter and scowled at him malevolently.

“Laugh,” he said. “Laugh while you can – you damned traitor. You’ll laugh on the other side of your mouth when we get Sterrett up and he tells us what he knows.”

“That was a sound sleep I gave him, anyway,” jeered Graydon.

“There are sounder sleeps! Don’t forget it.” It was Dancre’s voice, cold and menacing from within the tent. He heard Sterrett groan.

Graydon turned his back to the tent and deliberately faced that silence from which he had just fled. How long he sat thus he did not know. It could not have been for long. But all at once he was aware that he was staring straight into two little points of vivid light that seemed at once far, far away and very close. They were odd, he thought. What was it so odd about them? Was it their color? They were purple, a curiously intense purple. As he stared, it seemed to him that they grew larger, but the puzzling double aspect of distance and nearness did not alter.

It was very curious, he thought. He had seen two eyes – yes, they were eyes – of that peculiar purple somewhere, not long ago. But he could not remember just where – there was a drowsiness clouding his thought. He would look at them no more. He raised his gaze, slowly and with perceptible effort, to the leafy screen above him. Unwinkingly the brilliant orbs stared back at him from it. He forced his gaze downward. There, too, they were.

And now he knew them – the eyes that had glittered from Suarra’s bracelet of the dinosaurs! The eyes of that mingled serpent and woman she had called the Snake Mother!

They were drawing him – drawing him—

He realized that his lids had closed; yet, closing, they had not shut out the globes of vivid purple. His lethargy increased, but it was of the body, not of the mind. All his consciousness had concentrated, been gathered, into the focus of the weird, invading eyes.

Abruptly they retreated. And like line streaming out of a reel, the consciousness of Graydon streamed out of him and after them – out of his body, out of the camp, through the grove and out into the land beyond!

It seemed to him that he passed swiftly over the moonlit wastes. They flashed beneath him, unrolling like panorama under racing plane. Ahead of him frowned a black barrier. It shrouded him and was gone. He had a glimpse of a wide circular valley rimmed by sky-piercing peaks; towering scarps of rock. There was the silver glint of a lake, the liquid silver of a mighty torrent pouring out of the heart of a precipice. He caught wheeling sight of carved colossi, gigantic shapes that sat bathed in the milky flood of the moon guarding each the mouth of a cavern.

A city rushed up to meet him, a city ruby roofed and opal turreted and fantastic as though built by jinn out of the stuff of dreams.

And then it seemed to him that he came to rest within a vast and columned hall from whose high roof fell beams of soft and dimly azure light. High arose those columns, unfolding far above into wide wondrous petalings of opal and of emerald and turquoise flecked with gold.

Before him were the eyes that in this dream – if dream it were – had drawn him to this place. And as the consciousness which was he and yet had, he knew, neither visible shape nor shadow, beheld it recoiled, filled with terror of the unknown; struggled to make its way back to the body from which it had been lured; fluttered like a serpent trapped bird; at last, like the bird, gave itself up to the serpent fascination.

For Graydon looked upon – the Snake Mother!

She lay just beyond the lip of a wide alcove set high above the pillared floor. Between her and him the azure beams fell, curtaining the great niche with a misty radiance that half-shadowed, half-revealed her.

Her face was ageless, neither young nor old; it came to him that it was free from time forever, free from the etching acid of the years. She might have been born yesterday or a million years agone. Her eyes, set wide apart, were round and luminous; they were living jewels filled with purple fires. Above them rose her forehead, wide and high and sloping sharply back. The nose was long and delicate, the nostrils dilated; the chin small and pointed.

The mouth was small, too, and heart shaped and the lips a scarlet flame.

Down her narrow childlike shoulders flowed hair that gleamed like spun silver. The shining argent strands arrow-headed into a point upon her forehead; coiffed, they gave to her face that same heart shape in which her lips were molded, a heart of which the chin was the tip.

She had high little breasts, uptilted. And face and neck, shoulders and breasts were the hue of pearls suffused faintly with rose; and like rosy pearls they glistened.

Below her breasts began her – coils!

Mistily Graydon saw them, half buried in a nest of silken cushions – thick coils and many, circle upon circle of them, covered with great heart shaped scales; glimmering and palely gleaming; each scale as exquisitely wrought as though by elfin jeweler; each opaline, nacreous; mother-of-pearl.

Her pointed chin was cupped in hands tiny as a baby’s; like a babe’s were her slender arms, their dimpled elbows resting on her topmost coil.

And on that face which was neither woman’s nor serpent’s but subtly both – and more, far more than either – on that ageless face sat side by side and hand in hand a spirit of wisdom that was awesome and a spirit weary beyond thought!

Graydon forgot his terror. He paid homage to her beauty; for beautiful she was though terrible – this serpent woman with’ hair of spun silver, her face and breasts of rosy pearls, her jeweled and shimmering coils, her eyes of purple fire and her lips of living flame. A lesser homage he paid her wisdom. And he pitied her for her burden of weariness.

Fear of her he had none.

Instantly he knew that she had read all his thought; knew, too, that he had pleased her. The scarlet lips half parted in a smile – almost she preened herself! A slender red and pointed tongue flicked out and touched her scarlet lips. The tiny hands fell; she raised her head; up from her circled coils lifted and swayed a pearled pillar bearing that head aloft, slowly, sinuously, foot by foot until it paused twice the height of a tall man above the floor, twisting, it turned its face to the alcove.

Graydon, following the movement, saw that the alcove was tenanted. Within it was a throne – a throne that was as though carved from the heart of a colossal sapphire. It was oval, ten feet or more in height, and hollowed like a shrine. It rested upon or was set within the cupped end of a thick pillar of some substance resembling milky rock crystal. It was empty, so far as he could see, but around it clung a faint radiance. At its foot were five lesser thrones, low and with broad table-like seats. They were arranged in a semicircle. The throne at the right end of this semicircle was red as though carved from ruby; the throne at the left was black as though cut from jet; the three central thrones were red gold.

Black throne and ruby throne and middle throne of red gold were empty. In each of the other two a figure sat, cross-legged and squatting and swathed from feet to chin in silken robes of blue and gold. Incredibly old were the faces of the pair, the stamp of lost aeons deep upon them – except their eyes.

Their eyes were young; as incredibly young as their settings were ancient. And incredibly – alive! And those vital, youthful eyes were reading him; the minds behind them were weighing him; judging him. Judging him – with what purpose?

Floated through Graydon’s mind – or Whatever it was of him that hovered there in dream or in spell or in obedience to laws unknown to the science of his world – the memory of Suarra’s vow. By the Wisdom of the Snake Mother, and by the Five Lords and by the Lord of Lords she had sworn to save him if she could.

Why – these must be they, the two Lords she had told him still lived in Yu-Atlanchi! Certainly there was the Snake Mother. And that sapphire throne of luminous mystery must be the seat of the Lord of Lords – whatever he might be.

That fantastic city that had raced upward to enfold him was – Yu-Atlanchi!

Yu-Atlanchi! Where death – where death—

The Snake Mother had turned her head; the eyes of the two Lords no longer dwelt on his. They were looking, the three of them, beyond him. The serpent woman was speaking. He heard her voice like faint, far off music. Graydon thought that he glanced behind him.

He saw – Suarra.

So close to him she stood that he could have touched her with his hand. Slender feet bare, her cloudy hair unbound, clothed only in a single scanty robe that hid no curve nor lithesome line of her, no ornament but the bracelet of the dinosaurs, she stood. If she saw him, she gave no sign.

And it came to him that she did not see him; did not know that he was there!

On her face was the light of a great gladness – as of one who has made a prayer and knows that prayer has been granted. He reached out a hand to touch her; make her aware of him. He felt nothing, nor did she move—

And suddenly he realized once more that he had no hands!

As he labored to understand this, he saw the Snake Mother’s swaying column grow rigid, her purple eyes fix themselves upon some point, it seemed, far, far beyond the walls of that mysterious temple.

Swift as a blow they returned to him. They smote him; they hurled him away. The hall disintegrated, vanished. He had vertiginous sensation of nightmare speed, as though the earth had spun from under him and let him drop through space. The flight ended; a shock ran through him.

Dazed, he raised his lids. He lay beside the crackling camp fire. And half way between him and the tent was Sterrett charging down on him like a madman and bellowing red rage and vengeance as he

Graydon leaped to his feet, but before he could guard himself the giant was upon him. The next moment he was down, overborne by sheer weight. The big adventurer crunched a knee into his arm and gripped his throat. Sterrett’s bloodshot eyes blazed into his, his teeth were bared as though to rend him.

“Let her go, did you!” he roared. “Knocked me out and then let her go! Well, damn you, Graydon, here’s where you go, too!”

Frantically Graydon tried to break that grip on his throat. His lungs labored; there was a deafening roaring in his ears; flecks of crimson began to dance across his vision. Sterrett was strangling him. Through fast dimming sight he saw two black shadows leap through the firelight glare and throw themselves on his strangler; clutch the slaying hands.

The fingers relaxed. Graydon, drawing in great sobbing breaths, staggered up. A dozen paces away stood Sterrett, still cursing him, vilely; quivering; straining to leap again upon him. Dancre, arms around his knees, was hanging to him like a little terrier. Beside him was Soames, the barrel of his automatic pressed against the giant’s stomach.

“Why don’t you let me kill him,” raved Sterrett. “Didn’t I tell you the wench had enough on her to set us up the rest of our lives? Didn’t I tell you she had an emerald that would have made us all rich? And there’s more where that one came from. And he let her go! Let her go, the—”

Again his curses flowed.

“Now look here, Sterrett,” Soames’s voice was deliberate, cold. “You be quiet or I’ll do for you. We ain’t goin’ to let this thing get by us, me and Dancre. We ain’t goin’ to let this double-crossing whelp do us, and we ain’t goin’ to let you spill the beans by killing him. We’ve struck something big. All right, we’re goin’ to cash in on it. We’re goin’ to sit down peaceable and Mr. Graydon is goin’ to tell us what happened after he put you out, what dicker he made with the girl and all of that. If he won’t do it peaceable, then Mr. Graydon is goin’ to have things done to him that’ll make him give up. That’s all. Danc’, let go his legs. Sterrett, if you kick up any more trouble until I give the word I’m goin’ to shoot you. From now on I boss this crowd – me and Danc’. You get me, Sterrett?”

Graydon, head once more clear, slid a cautious hand down toward his pistol holster. It was empty. Soames grinned, sardonically.

“We got it, Graydon,” he said. “Yours, too, Sterrett. Fair enough. Sit down everybody.”

He squatted by the fire, still keeping Sterrett covered. And after a moment the latter, grumbling, followed suit. Dancre dropped beside him.

“Come over here, Mr. Graydon,” snarled Soames. “Come over and cough up. What’re you holdin’ out on us? Did you make a date with her to meet you after you got rid of us? If so, where is it – because we’ll all go together.”

“Where’d you hide those gold spears?” growled Sterrett. “You never let her get away with them, that’s sure.”

“Shut up, Sterrett,” ordered Soames. “I’m holdin’ this inquest. Still – there’s something in that. Was that it, Graydon? Did she give you the spears and her jewelry to let her go?”

“I’ve told you,” answered Graydon. “I asked for nothing, but I took nothing. Sterrett’s drunken folly had put us all in jeopardy. Letting the girl go free was the first vital step toward our own safety. I thought it was the best thing to do. I still think so.”

“Yes?” sneered the lank New Englander, “is that so? Well, I’ll tell you, Graydon, if she’d been an Indian maybe I’d agree with you. But not when she was the kind of lady Sterrett says she was. No sir, it ain’t natural. You know damned well that if you’d been straight you’d have kept her here till Danc’ and I got back. Then we could all have got together and figured what was the best thing to do. Hold her until her folks came along and paid up to get her back undamaged. Or give her the third degree till she gave up where all that gold and stuff she was carrying came from. That’s what you would have done, Mr. Graydon, if you weren’t a dirty, lyin’, double-crossin’ hound.”

Graydon’s temper awakened under the insult, his anger flared up.

. “All right, Soames,” he said. “I’ll tell you. What I’ve said about freeing her for our own safety is true. But outside of that I would as soon have thought of trusting a child to a bunch of hyenas as I would of trusting that girl to you three. I let her go a damned sight more for her sake than I did for our own. Does that satisfy you?”

“Aha!” jeered Dancre. “Now I see. Here is this strange lady of so much wealth and beauty. She is too pure and good for us to behold. He tell her so and bids her fly. ‘My hero,’ she say, ‘take all I have and give up this bad company.’ ‘No, no,’ he tell her, t’inking all the time if he play his cards right he get much more, and us out of the way so he need not divide, ‘no, no,’ he tell her. ‘But long as these bad men stay here you will not be safe.’ ‘My hero,’ say she, ‘I will go and bring back my family and they shall dispose of your bad company. But you they shall reward, my hero, out!’ Aha, so that is what it was!”

Graydon flushed; the little Frenchman’s malicious travesty shot uncomfortably close. After all, Suarra’s unsought promise to save him if she could might be construed as Dancre had suggested. What if he told them that he had warned her that whatever the fate in store for them he was determined to share it and that he would stand by them to the last? They would not believe him.

Soames had been watching him closely.

“By God, Danc’, he said. “I guess you’ve hit it. He changed color. He’s sold us out!”

For a moment he raised his automatic, held it on Graydon. Sterrett touched his hand.

“Don’t shoot him, Soames,” he begged. “Give him to me. I want to break his neck.”

Soames pushed him away, lowered the gun.

“No,” he said, deliberately. “This is too big a thing to let slip by bein’ too quick on the trigger. If your dope is right, Danc’, and I guess it is, the lady was mighty grateful. All right – we ain’t got her, but he have got him. As I figure it, bein’ grateful, she won’t want him to get killed. Well, we’ll trade him for what they got that we want. Tie him up!”

He pointed the pistol at Graydon, Sterrett and Dancre went into the tent, returned with ropes from the pack saddles. Unresisting, Graydon let them bind his wrists. They pushed him over to one of the trees and sat him on the ground with his back against its bole. They passed a rope under his arms and hitched it securely around the trunk. Then they tied his feet,

“Now,” said Soames, “if her gang show up in the morning, we’ll let ’em see you and find out how much you’re worth. They won’t rush us; there’s bound to be a palaver. And if they don’t come to terms, well, Graydon, the first bullet out of this gun goes through your guts. That’ll give you time to see what goes on before you die!”

Graydon did not answer him. Nothing that he might say, he knew, would change them from their purpose. He closed his eyes, reviewing that strange dream of his – for dream he now believed it, thrust back among the realities of the camp. A dream borne of Suarra’s words and that weird bracelet of the dinosaurs from which gleamed the purple orbs of the serpent woman.

Once or twice he opened his eyes and looked at the others. They sat beside the fire, heads close together, talking in whispers, their faces tense, and eyes a-glitter with greed, feverish with the gold lust.

And after a while Graydon’s head dropped forward. He slept.

— IV —

THE WHITE LLAMA

It was dawn when Graydon awakened. Someone had thrown a blanket over him during the night, but he was, nevertheless, cold and stiff. He drew his legs up and down painfully, trying to start the sluggish blood. He heard the others stirring in the tent. He wondered which of them had thought of the blanket, and why he had been moved to that kindness.

Sterrett lifted the tent flap, passed by him without a word and went on to the spring. Graydon heard him drinking, thirstily. He returned and busied himself about the fire. There was an oddly furtive air about the big man. Now and then he looked at the prisoner, but with neither anger nor resentment. Rather were his glances apologetic, ingratiating. He slipped at last to the tent, listened, then trod softly over to Graydon.

“Sorry about this,” he muttered. “But I can’t do anything with Soames or Dancre. Had a hard time persuading ’em even to let you have that blanket. Here, take a drink of this.”

He pressed a flask to Graydon’s lips. He took a liberal swallow; it warmed him.

“Sh-h,” warned Sterrett. “Don’t bear any grudge. Drunk last night. I’ll help you—” He broke off, abruptly; busied himself with the burning logs. Out of the tent came Soames. He scanned Sterrett suspiciously, then strode over to Graydon.

“I’m goin’ to give you one last chance, Graydon,” he began without preliminary. “Come through clean with us on your dicker with the girl and we’ll take you back with us and all work together and all share together. You had the edge on us yesterday and I don’t know that I blame you. But it’s three to one now and the plain truth is you can’t get away with it. So why not be reasonable?”

“What’s the use of going over all that again, Soames?” Graydon asked wearily. “I’ve told you everything. If you’re wise, you’ll let me loose, give me my guns and I’ll fight for you when the trouble comes. For trouble is coming man, sure – big trouble.”

“Yeh?” snarled the New Englander. “Tryin’ to scare us, are you? All right – there’s a nice little trick of drivin’ a wedge under each of your finger nails and a-keepin’ drivin’ ’em in. It makes ’most anybody talk after a while. And if it don’t there’s the good old fire dodge. Rollin’ your feet up to it, closer and closer and closer. Yes, anybody’ll talk when their toes begin to crisp up and toast.”

Suddenly he bent over and sniffed at Graydon’s lips.

“So that’s it!” he faced Sterrett, tense, gun leveled from his hip pocket straight at the giant. “Been feedin’ him liquor, have you? Been talkin’ to him, have you? After we’d settled it last night that I was to do all the talkin’. All right, that settles you, Sterrett. Dancre! Danc’! Come here, quick!” he roared.

The Frenchman came running out of the tent.

“Tie him up,” Soames nodded toward Sterrett. “Another damned double-crosser in the camp. Gave him liquor. Got their heads together while we were inside. Tie him.”

“But Soames,” the Frenchman was hesitant, “if we have to fight the Indians it is not well to have half of us helpless, no. Perhaps Sterrett he did nothing—”

“If we have to fight, two men will do as well as three,” said Soames. “I ain’t goin’ to let this thing slip through my fingers, Danc’. I don’t think we’ll have to do any fightin’. If they come, I think it’s goin’ to be a tradin’ job. Sterrett’s turnin’ traitor, too. Tie him, I say.”

“Well, I don’t like it—” began Dancre; Soames made an impatient motion with his automatic; the little Frenchman went to the tent, returned with a coil of rope, sidled up to Sterrett.

“Put up your hands,” ordered Soames. Sterrett swung them up. But in mid swing they closed on Dancre, lifted him like a doll and held him between himself and the gaunt New Englander.

“Now shoot, damn you,” he cried, and bore down on Soames, meeting every move of his pistol arm with Dancre’s wriggling body. Then his own right hand swept down to the Frenchman’s belt, drew from the holster his automatic, leveled it over the twisting shoulder at Soames.

“Drop your gun, Yank,” grinned Sterrett triumphantly. “Or shoot if you want. But before your bullet’s half through Dancre here, by Heaven I’ll have you drilled clean!”

There was a momentary, sinister silence. It was broken by a sudden pealing of tiny golden bells. Their chiming cleft through the murk of murder that had fallen on the camp; lightened it; dissolved it as the sunshine does a cloud. Graydon saw Soames’s pistol drop from a hand turned nerveless; saw Sterrett’s iron grip relax and let Dancre fall to the ground; saw the heads of Dancre and Sterrett and Soames stiffen and point to the source of that aureate music like hounds to a huddling covey.

His own eyes followed—

Through the trees, not a hundred yards away, was Suarra!

And there was no warrior host around her. She had brought with her neither avengers nor executioners. With her were but two followers. Yet even at his first glimpse it came to Graydon that if these were servants, they were two strange, strange servants indeed!

A cloak of soft green swathed the girl from neck almost to slender feet. In the misty midnight hair gleamed a coronal of emeralds set in red gold, and bandlets of gold studded with the same virescent gems circled her wrists and ankles. Behind her paced sedately a snow white llama; there was a broad golden collar around its neck from which dropped the strands of golden bells that shook out the tinkling harmonies. Its eyes were blue and between them swayed a pendant of some gem, rosy as the fruit of rubies mated to white pearls. From each of its silvery silken sides a pannier hung, woven, it seemed, from shining yellow rushes.

And at the snow white llama’s flanks were two figures, bodies covered by voluminous robes whose goods covered their faces. One was draped in darkest blue; he carried a staff of ebony and strode beside the llama somberly, something disconcertingly mathematical in each step he took. The other was draped in yellow; he carried a staff of vermilion and he fluttered and danced beside the beast, taking little steps backward and forward; movements that carried the weird suggestion that his robes clothed not a man but some huge bird.

Save for the tinkling of the bells there was no sound as they came on. Graydon’s three jailers stared at the caravan struck immobile with amazement, incredulous, like dreaming men. Graydon himself strained at his bonds, a sick horror in his heart. Why had Suarra returned deliberately back to this peril? He had warned her; she could not be so innocent as not to know what dangers threatened her at the hands of these men. And why had she come decked out with a queen’s ransom in jewels and gold? Almost it seemed that she had done this deliberately; had deliberately arrayed herself to arouse to the full the very passions from which she had most to fear!

“Dieu!” It was Dancre, whispering. “The emeralds!”

“God – what a girl!” it was Sterrett, muttering; his thick nostrils distended, a red flicker in his eyes.

Only Soames said nothing, perplexity, suspicion struggling through the blank astonishment on his bleak and crafty face. Nor did he speak as the girl and her attendants halted close beside him. But the doubt, the suspicion, in his eyes grew as he scanned her and the hooded pair, then sent his gaze along the path up which they had come searching every tree, every bush. There was no sign of movement there, no sound.

“Suarra!” cried Graydon, despairingly, “Suarra, why did you came back?”

Quietly, she stepped over to him, drew a dagger from beneath her cloak, cut the thong that bound him to the tree, slipped the blade under the. cords about his wrists and ankles; freed him. He staggered to his feet.

“Was it not well for you that I did come?” she asked sweetly.

Before he could answer, Soames strode forward. And Graydon saw that he had come to some decision, had resolved upon some course of action. He made a low, awkward, half mocking, half respectful bow to the girl; then spoke to Graydon.

“All right,” he said, “you can stay loose – as long as you do what I want you to. The girl’s back and that’s the main thing. She seems to favor you quite a lot, Graydon – an’ maybe that’s goin’ to be damned useful. I reckon that gives us a way to persuade her to talk if how happens it she turns quiet like when I get to askin’ her certain things – like where those emeralds come from an’ how to get there an’ the likes of that. Yes, sir, and you favor her. That’s useful too. I reckon you won’t want to be tied up an’ watch certain things happen to her, eh—” he leered at Graydon who curbed with difficulty the impulse to send his fist crashing into the cynical face. “But there’s just one thing you’ve got to do if you want things to go along peaceable,” Soames continued. “Don’t do any talkin’ to her when I ain’t close by. Remember, I know the Aymara as well as you do. And I want to be right alongside listenin’ in all the time, do you see? That’s all.”

He turned to Suarra, bowed once more.

“Your visit has brought great happiness, maiden,” he spoke in the Aymara. “It will not be a short one, if we have our way – and I think we will have our way—” there was covert, but unmistakable menace in the phrase, yet if she noted it she gave no heed. “You are strange to us, as we must be to you. There is much for us each to learn, one of the other.”

“That is true, stranger,” she answered, tranquilly. “I think though that your desire to learn of me is much greater than mine to learn of you – since, as you surely know, I have had one not too pleasant lesson.” She glanced at Sterrett.

“The lessons, sister,” he told her bluntly, indeed brutally, “shall be pleasant or – not pleasant even as you choose to teach us or not to teach us – what we would learn.”

This time there was no mistaking the covert menace in the words, nor did Suarra again let it pass. Her eyes blazed sudden wrath.

“Better not to threaten,” she warned, her proud little head thrown haughtily back. “I, Suarra, am not used to threats – and if you will take my counsel you will keep them to yourself hereafter.”

“Yes, is that so?” Soames took a step toward her, face grown grim and ugly; instantly Graydon thrust himself between him and the girl. There came a curious, dry chuckling from the hooded figure in yellow. Suarra started; her wrath, her hauteur vanished; she became once more naive, friendly. She pushed Graydon

“I was hasty,” she said to Soames. “Nevertheless it is never wise to threaten unless you know the strength of what it is you menace. And remember, of me you know nothing. Yet I know all that you wish to learn. You wish to know how I came by this – and this – and this—” she touched her coronal, her bracelet, her anklets. “You wish to know where they came from, and if there are more of them there, and if so how you may possess yourself of as much as you can carry away. Well, you shall know all that. I have come to tell you.”

At this astonishing announcement, apparently so frank and open, all the doubt and suspicion returned to Soames. Again his gaze narrowed and searched the trail up which Suarra and her caravan had come. It returned and rested on the girl; then scrutinized the two servitors who, Graydon now realized, had stood like images ever since that caravan had come to rest within the camp; motionless, and except for that one dry, admonitory chuckling, soundless.

And as he stood thus, considering, Dancre came up and gripped his arm.

“Soames,” he said, and his voice and his hand were both shaking, “the baskets on the llama! They’re not rushes – they’re gold, pure gold, pure soft gold, woven like straw! Dieu, Soames, what have we struck!”

Soames’s eyes glittered.

“Better go over and watch where they came up, Danc’,” he answered. “I don’t quite get this. It looks too cursed easy to be right. Take your rifle and squint out from the edge of the trees while I try to get down to what’s what.”

As though she had understood the words, Suarra struck in:

“There is nothing to fear. No harm will come to you from me. If there is any evil in store for you, you yourselves shall summon it – not us. I have come to show you the way to treasure. Only that. Come with me and you shall see where jewels like these” – she touched the gems meshed in her hair – “grow like flowers in a garden. You shall see the gold come streaming forth, living, from—” she hesitated; then went on – “come streaming forth like water. You may bathe in that stream, drink from it if you will, carry away all that you can bear. Or if it causes you too much sorrow to leave it, why – you may stay with, it forever; nay, become a part of it, even. Men of gold!”

She laughed; turned from them; walked toward the llama.

The men stared at her and at each other; on the faces of three, greed and suspicion; bewilderment on Graydon’s, for beneath the mockery of those last words he had sensed the pulse of the sinister.

“It is a long journey,” she faced them, one hand on the llama’s head. “You are strangers here; indeed, my guests – in a sense. Therefore a little I have brought for your entertainment before we start.”

She began to unbuckle the panniers. And Graydon was again aware that these two attendants of hers were strange servants – if servants, again, they were. They made no move to help her. Silent they still stood, motionless, faces covered. In their immobility he felt something implacable, ominous, dread. A little shiver shook him.

He stepped forward to help the girl. She smiled up at him, half shyly. In the midnight depths of her eyes was a glow warmer far than friendliness; his hands leaped to touch hers.

Instantly Soames stepped between them.

“Better remember what I told you,” he snapped; then ran his hand over the side of the pannier. And Graydon realized that Dancre had spoken truth. The panniers were of gold; soft gold, gold that had been shaped into willow-like withes and plaited.

“Help me,” came Suarra’s voice. Graydon lifted the basket and set it down beside her. She slipped a hasp; bent back the soft metal withes; drew out a shimmering packet. She shook it and it floated out on the dawn wind, a cloth of silver. She let it float to the ground where it lay like a great web of gossamer spun by silver spiders.

Then from the hamper she brought forth cups of gold and deep, boat shaped golden dishes, two tall ewers whose handles were slender carved dragons, their scales made, it seemed, from molten rubies. After them small golden withed baskets. She set the silver cloth with the dishes and the cups, she opened the little baskets. In them were unfamiliar, fragrant fruits and loaves and oddly colored cakes. All these Suarra placed upon the plates. She dropped to her knees at the head of the cloth, took up one of the ewers, snapped open its lid and from it poured into the cups clear amber wine.

She raised her eyes to them; waved a white hand, graciously.

“Sit,” she said. “Eat and drink.”

She beckoned to Graydon; pointed to the place beside her. Silently, gaze fixed on the glittering hoard, Sterrett and Dancre and Soames squatted before the other plates. Soames thrust out a hand, took up one of these and weighed it, scattering what it held upon the ground.

“Gold!” he breathed.

Sterrett laughed, crazily; raised his wine filled goblet to his lips.

“Wait!” Dancre caught his wrist. “Eat and drink, she said, eh? Eat, drink and be merry – for tomorrow we die, eh – is that it, Soames?” |

The New Englander started, face once more dark with doubt.

“You think it’s poisoned?” he snarled.

“Maybe so – maybe no,” the little Frenchman shrugged. “But I think it better we say ‘After you’ to her.”

“They are afraid. They think it is – that you have—” Graydon stumbled.

“That I have put sleep) – or death in it?” Suarra smiled. “And you?” she asked.

For answer Graydon raised his cup and drank it. For a moment she contemplated him, approval in her gaze.

“Yet it is natural,” she turned to Soames. “Yes, it is natural that you three should fear this, since, is it not so – it is what you would do if you were we and we were you? But you are wrong. I tell you again that you have nothing to fear from me – who come only to show you a way. I tell you again that what there is to fear as we go on that way is that which is in yourselves.”

She poured wine into her own cup, drank it; broke off a bit of Sterrett’s bread and ate it; took a cake from Dancre’s plate and ate that, set white teeth in one of the fragrant fruits.

“Are you satisfied,” she asked them. “Oh, be very sure that if it were in my wish to bring death to you it would be in no such form as this.”

For a moment Soames glared at her. Then he sprang to his feet, strode over to the hooded, watching figures and snatched aside the cowl of the blue robed one. Graydon with a cry of anger leaped up and after him – then stood, turned to stone.

For the face that Soames had unmasked was like old ivory and it was seamed with a million lines; a face stamped with unbelievable antiquity, but whose eyes were bright and as incredibly youthful as their setting was ancient—

The face of one of those two draped figures that had crouched up on the thrones in that mystic temple of his dream!

The face of one of those mysterious Lords who with that being of coiled beauty Suarra had named the Snake Mother, had listened to, and as he then had thought had granted, Suarra’s unknown prayer!

A dozen heartbeats it may be the gaunt New Englander stared into that inscrutable, ancient face and its unwinking brilliant eyes. Then he let the hood drop and walked slowly back to the silver cloth. And as he passed him, Graydon saw that his face was white and his gaze was fixed as though he had looked into some unnamable terror. And as he threw himself down at his place and raised his wine cup to his lips, his hand was shaking.

The spell that had held Graydon relaxed. He looked at the black robed figure; it stood as before, motionless and silent. He dropped beside Suarra. Soames, hand still shaking, held out to her his empty goblet. She filled it; he drained it and she filled it again. And Graydon saw now that Sterrett’s ruddy color had fled and that Dancre’s lips were twitching and had grown gray.

What was it that they had seen in that seamed, ivory face that had been invisible to him? What warning? What vision of horror?

They drank thirstily of the wine. And soon it had taken effect; had banished their terror – whatever it had been. They ate hungrily of the loaves, the little cakes, the fruit. At last the plates were empty – the tall ewer, too.

“And now,” Suarra arose, “it is time for us to go – if you desire still to be led to that treasure house of which I have told

“We’re going, sister, never fear,” Soames grinned half drunkenly, and lurched to his feet. “Danc’, stay right here and watch things. Come on Sterrett,” he slapped the giant on the back, all distrust, for the moment at least, vanished. “Come on, Graydon, let bygones be bygones.”

Sterrett laughed vacantly, scrambled up and linked his arms in the New Englander’s. Together they made their way to the tent. Dancre, rifle ready, settled down on a boulder just beyond the fire and began his watch.

Graydon lingered behind. Soames had forgotten him, for a little time at least; he meant to make the best of that time with this strange maid whose beauty and sweetness had netted heart and brain as no other woman ever had. He came close to her, so close that the subtle fragrance of her cloudy hair rocked his heart, so close that her shoulder touching his sent through him little racing, maddening flames.

“Suarra—” he began, hoarsely. Swiftly she turned and silenced him with slender fingers on his lips.

“Not now,” she whispered. “You must not tell me what is in your heart – O man to whom my own heart is eager to speak. Not now – nor, it may be, ever—” there was sorrow in her eyes, longing, too; quickly she veiled them – “I promised you that I would save you – if I could. And of that vow was born another promise—” her glance sought the two silent, quiet shapes in blue and in yellow, meaningly. “So speak to me not again,” she went on hurriedly, “or if you must – let it be of commonplace things, not of that which is in your heart – or mine!”

Stupidly he looked at her. What did she mean by a promise born of that she had made to him? A vow to these – Lords; to the mystery of the serpent’s coils and woman’s face and breasts – the Snake Mother? A vow in exchange for his life? Had they seen deeper into her heart than he and found there in very truth what he had half dreamed might be? Had she vowed to them to hold him apart from her if they would grant him protection, his comrades too – if they would have it?

Suddenly it came to him that for him, at least, the life she would save by such a barter would not be worth living.

She was packing away the golden cups and dishes. Mechanically he set about helping her. And, save for what he handled, he thought with grim humor, this was a commonplace thing enough surely to satisfy her. She accepted his aid without comment, looked at him no more. And after a while the fever in his blood cooled, his hot revolt crystallized into cold determination. For the moment he would accept the situation. He would let matters develop. His time would come. He could afford to wait.

Without a word when the last shining cup was in the pannier and the mouth of the latter closed he turned and strode to the tent to get together his duffle, pack his burro. The voices of Sterrett and Soames came to him; he hesitated; listened.

“What it was when I looked into his damned wrinkled old face I don’t know,” he heard Soames say. “But something came over me, Sterrett. I can’t remember – only that it was like looking over the edge of the world into hell!”

“I know,” Sterrett’s voice was “I felt the same way.”

“Hypnotism,” said Soames, “that’s what it was. The Indian priests down here know how to work it. But he won’t catch me again with that trick. I’ll shoot. You can’t hypnotize a gun, Sterrett.”

“But they’re not Indians, Soames,” came Sterrett’s voice. “They’re whiter than you and me. What are they? And the girl – God—”

“What they are we’ll find out, never fear,” grunted the New Englander. “To hell with the girl – take her if you can get her. But I’d go through a dozen hells to get to the place where that stuff they’re carryin’ samples of comes from. Man – with what we could carry out on the burros and the llama and come back for – man, we could buy the world!”

“Yes – unless there’s a trap somewhere,” said Sterrett, dubiously.

“We’ve got the cards in our hands,” plainly the drink was wearing off Soames, all his old confidence and cunning were returning. “Hell – what’s against us? Two old men and a girl. Now I’ll tell you what I think. I don’t know who or what they are, but whoever or whatever, you can bet there ain’t many of ’em. If there was, they’d be landin’ on us hard. No – they’re damned anxious to get us away and they’re willin’ to let us get out with what we can to get us away. Poor boobs – they think if they give us what we want now we’ll slip right off and never come back. And as for what they are, well, I’ll tell you what I think – half-breeds. The Spanish were down here; maybe they bred in with the Incas. There’s probably about a handful left. They know we could wipe ’em out in no time. They want to get rid of us, quick and cheap as possible. And the three of us could wipe ’em out.”

“Three of us?” asked Sterrett. “Four you mean. There’s Graydon.”

“Graydon don’t count – the damned crook. Thought he’d sold us out, didn’t he? All right – we’ll fix Mr. Graydon when the time comes. Just now he’s useful to us on account of the girl. She’s stuck on him. But when the time comes to divide – there’ll only be three of us. And there’ll only be two of us – if you do anything like you did this morning.”

“Cut that out, Soames,” growled the giant. “I told you it was the drink. I’m through with that now that we’ve seen this stuff. I’m with you to the limit. Do what you want with Graydon. But save the girl for me. I’d be willing to make a bargain with you on that – give up a part of my share.”

“Oh, hell,” drawled Soames. “We’ve been together a good many years, Bill. There’s enough and plenty for the three of us. You can have the girl for nothing.”

Little flecks of red danced before Graydon’s eyes. With his hand stretched to tear open the tent flap and grapple with these two who could talk so callously and evilly of Suarra’s disposal, he checked himself. That was no way to help her. Unarmed, what could he do against these armed adventurers? Nothing. Some way he must get back his own weapons. And the danger was not imminent – they would do nothing before they reached that place of treasure to which Suarra had promised to lead them.

There had been much of reason in Soames’s explanation of the mystery.

That vision of his – what was it after all but an illusion? He remembered the sensation that had caught him when he had first seen those brilliant purple jewels in Suarra’s bracelet; the feeling that he looked along them for great distances back to actual eyes of which the purple jewels were but prolongations. That vision of his – was it not but a dream induced by those jewels? A fantasy of the subconsciousness whipped out of it by some hypnotic quality they possessed? Science, he knew, admits that some gems hold this quality – though why they do science cannot tell. Dimly he remembered that he had once read a learned article that had tried to explain the power – something about the magnetic force in light, a force within those vibrations we call color; something about this force being taken up by the curious mechanism of rods and cones in the retina which flashes the sensations we call color along the optic nerves to the brain.

These flashes, he recalled the article had said, were actual though minute discharges of electricity. And since the optic nerves are not in reality nerves at all, but prolongations of the brain, this unknown force within the gems impinged directly upon the brain, stimulating some cells, depressing others, affecting memory and judgment, creating visions, disturbing all that secret world until the consciousness became dazzled, bewildered, unable to distinguish between reality and illusion.

So much for his vision. That the face of the figure in blue seemed to be one of those Lords he had seen in that vision – well, was not that but another illusion?

Soames might well be right, too, he thought, in his interpretation of Suarra’s visit to the camp. If she had power behind her would she not have brought it? \Was it not more reasonable to accept the New Englander’s version of the thing?

And if that were so, then Suarra was but a girl with only two old men to help her – for he had no doubt that the figure in yellow like that in blue was an old man too.

And all that meant that he, Graydon, was all of strength that Suarra could really count on to protect her.

He had spun his web of reasoning with the swiftness of a dream. When he had arrived at its last strand he 3tole silently back a score of paces; waited for a moment or two; then went noisily to the tent. For the first time in many hours he felt in full command of himself; thought he saw his way clear before him. Faintly he recognized that he had glossed over, set aside arbitrarily, many things. No matter – it was good to get his feet on earth again, to brush aside all these cobwebs of mystery, to take the common sense view. It was good and it was – safer.

He thrust aside the tent flap and entered.

“Been a long while comin’,” snarled Soames, again his old, suspicious self. “Been talkin’ – after what I told you?”

“Not a word,” answered Graydon cheerfully. He busied himself with his belongings. “By the way, Soames,” he said casually, “don’t you think it’s time to stop this nonsense and give me back my guns?”

Soames made no answer; went on with his hasty packing.

“Oh, all right then,” Graydon went on. “I only thought that they would come in handy when the pinch comes. But if you want me to look on while you do the scrapping – well, I don’t mind.”

“You’d better mind.” Soames did not turn around, but his voice was deadly. “You’d better mind, Graydon. If a pinch comes – we’re takin’ no chances of a bullet in our backs. That’s why you got no guns. And if the pinch does come – well, we’ll take no chances on you anyway. Do you get me?”

Graydon shrugged his shoulders. In silence the packing was completed; the tent struck; the burros loaded.

Suarra stood awaiting them at the side of the white llama. Soames walked up to her, drew from its holster his automatic, balanced it in outstretched hand.

“You know what this is?” he asked her.

“Why, yes,” she answered. “It is the death weapon of your kind.”

“Right,” said Soames. “And it deals death quickly, quicker than spears or arrows.” He raised his voice so there could be no doubt that blue cowl and yellow cowl must also hear. “Now, sister, I and these two men here,” he indicated Sterrett and Dancre, “carry these and others still more deadly. This man’s weapons we have taken from him,” he pointed to Graydon. “Your words may be clearest truth. I hope they are – for your sake and this man’s and the two who came with you – him and him—” he wagged a long finger at Graydon, at blue cowl, at yellow cowl. “Quick death! We’ll get them out of the way first. And we’ll attend to you later – as it seems best to me.”

He scanned her through slitted eyes that gleamed coldly.

“You understand me?” he asked, and grinned like a hungry wolf.

“I understand,” Suarra’s eyes and face were calm, but there was more than a touch of scorn in her golden voice. “You need fear nothing from us.”

“We don’t,” said Soames. “But you have much to fear – from us.”

Another moment he regarded her, menacingly; then shoved his pistol back into its holster.

“Go first,” he ordered. “Your two attendants behind you. And then you,” he pointed to Graydon. “We three march in the rear – with guns ready.”

Without a word Suarra swung away at the white llama’s head; behind her paced blue cowl and yellow. And a dozen paces behind them walked Graydon. Behind the file of burros strode giant Sterrett, lank Soames, little Dancre – rifles ready, eyes watchful.

And so they passed through the giant algarrobas; out into the oddly park-like spaces beyond.

— V —

THE THING THAT FLED

They had traveled over the savanna for perhaps an hour when Suarra abruptly turned to the left, entering the forest that covered the flanks of a great mountain. Soon the trees closed in on them. Graydon could see no trail, yet the girl went on surely, without pause. He knew there must be signs to guide her since her course took them now to one side, now to another; once he was certain that they had almost circled. Yes, trail there must be – unless Suarra was purposely trying to confuse them to prevent them from return. He could see nothing around him but the immense tree trunks, while the thick roof of leaves shut out all sight of the sun and so hid this means of discovering direction.

Another hour went by and the way began to climb, the shade to grow denser. Deeper it became and deeper until the girl was but a flitting shadow. Blue robe he could hardly see at all, but yellow robe stood out sharply, his bird suggestion suddenly accentuated – as though he had been a monstrous yellow parrot.

Once or twice Graydon had glanced at the three men behind him. The darkness was making them more and more uneasy. They walked close together, eyes and ears obviously strained to catch first faint stirrings of ambush. And now, as the green gloom grew denser still, Soames strode forward and curtly ordered him to join Dancre and Sterrett. For an instant he hesitated; read murder in the New Englander’s eyes; realized the futility of resistance and dropped back. Soames pressed forward until he was close behind blue cowl and yellow. They did not turn their heads nor did the girl.

Dancre motioned him in between himself and Sterrett, grinning wickedly.

“Soames has changed his plan,” he whispered. “If there is trouble he shoot the old devils – quick. He keep the girl to make trade wit’ her people. He keep you to make trade wit’ the girl. Eh?”

Graydon did not answer. He had already realized what the maneuver meant. But a wave of jubilation swept over him. When the Frenchman had pressed close to him he had felt an automatic in his side pocket. If an attack did come, he thought, he would leap upon Dancre, snatch the pistol and gain for himself at least a fighting chance. He kept as close to him as he dared without arousing suspicion.

Darker grew the woods until the figures in front of him were only a moving blue. Then swiftly the gloom began to lighten. It came to him that they had been passing through some ravine, some gorge whose unseen walls had been pressing in upon them and that had now begun to retreat.

A few minutes longer and he knew he was right. Ahead of them loomed a prodigious doorway, a cleft whose sides readied up for thousands of feet. Beyond was a flood of sunshine, dazzling. Suarra stopped at the rocky threshold with a gesture of warning; peered through; beckoned them

Blinking, Graydon walked through the portal. Behind and on each side towered the mountain. He looked out over a broad grass covered plain strewn with huge, isolated rocks rising from the green like menhirs of the Druids. There were no trees. The plain was dish shaped; an enormous oval as symmetrical as though it had been molded by the thumb of Cyclopean potter. Straight across it, five miles or more away, the forests began again. They clothed the base of another gigantic mountain whose walls arose perpendicularly a mile at least in air. The smooth scarps described, he saw, an arc of a tremendous circle – as round as Fujiyama’s sacred cone, but hundreds of times its girth.

Rushed back on Graydon the picture of that hidden circular valley with its wheeling, moon-bathed colossi and uprushing city of djinns into which last night he had dreamed the purple eyes of the Snake Mother had drawn him! Had it after all been no dream, but true vision? Were these rounded precipices the outer shell of that incredible place?

Suarra’s story – true?

Shaken, he glanced toward her. She stood a dozen paces away, hand on the white llama’s neck and gazing intently over the plain. There was anxiety in her gaze – but there was none in the attitude of those two strange servitors of hers. As silent, as unconcerned, as detached as ever, they seemed to await the girl’s next move.

And now Graydon noted that they were on a wide ledge that bordered this vast oval bowl. This shelf was a full hundred feet higher than the bottom of the valley whose sides sloped up to it like the sides of a saucer. And, again carrying out that suggestion of huge dish, the ledge jutted out like a rim. He guessed that there was a concavity under his feet, and that if one should fall over the side it would be well nigh impossible to climb back because of that overhang. The surface was about twelve feet wide, and more like road carefully leveled by human hands than work of nature. Its nearer boundary was a tree covered wall of rock; unscalable. On one side the curving bowl of the valley with its weird monoliths and the circular scarp of the mysterious mountain; on the other the wooded cliffs.

There was a stirring in the undergrowth where the trees ended their abrupt descent. A goat-like animal slipped out of the covert and paused, head high, nostrils testing the air.

“Meat!” exclaimed Sterrett. His rifle cracked. The beast sank to the path, twitched and lay still. Suarra leaped from the llama’s side and faced the giant, eyes blazing wrath and behind that anger, or so it seemed to Graydon, fear.

“Fool!” she cried, and stamped her foot. “You fool! Get back to the cleft. Quick! All of you.”

She ran to the llama; caught it by the bridle; drove it, the burros and the four men back to the shelter of the ravine mouth.

“You—” she spoke to Soames, “if you desire to reach that gold for which you thirst, see that this man uses no more that death weapon of his while we are on this path. Nor any of you. Now stay here – and be quiet until I bid you come forth.”

She did not wait for reply. She ran to the cleft’s opening and Graydon followed. She paused there, scanning the distant forest edge. And once more – and with greater force than ever before – the tranquility, the inhuman immobility, the indifference of those two enigmatic servitors assailed him.

They had not moved from the path. Suarra took a step toward them, and half held out helpless, beseeching hands. They made no movement – and with a little helpless sigh she dropped her hands and resumed her scrutiny of the plain.

There flickered through Graydon a thought, a vague realization. In these two cloaked and hooded figures dwelt – power. He had not been wrong in recognizing them as the Two Lords of the luminous temple. But the power they owned would not be spent to save him or the three from any consequences of their own acts, would not be interposed between any peril that they themselves should invite;

Yes, that was it! There had been some vow – some bargain – even as Suarra had said. She had promised to save him, Graydon – if she could. She had promised the others treasure and freedom – if they could win them. Very well – the hooded pair would not interfere. But neither would they help. They were judges, watching a game. They had given Suarra permission to play that game – but left the playing of it rigidly up to her.

That nevertheless they would protect her he also believed. And with that conviction a great burden lifted from his mind. Her anxiety now he understood. It was not for herself, but for – him!

“Suarra,” he whispered. She did not turn her head, but she quivered at his voice.

“Go back,” she said. “Those for whom I watch have sharp eyes. Stay with the others—”

Suddenly he could have sworn that he heard the whirling beat of great wings over her head. He saw – nothing. Yet she lifted her arms in an oddly summoning gesture, spoke in words whose sounds were strange to him, all alien liquid labials and soft sibilants. Once more he heard the wing beats and then not far away but faint, so faint, a note of the elfin horn!

She dropped her arms, motioned him back to the others. From the dimness of the cleft he watched her. Slow minutes passed. Again he heard the horn note, the faint whirring as of swiftly beating pinions above her. And again could see nothing!

But as though she had received some message Suarra turned, the anxiety, the trouble gone from her face. She beckoned.

“Come out,” she said. “None has heard. We can be on our way. But remember what I have said. Not a second time may you escape.”

She marched on with the llama. When she reached the animal that had fallen to Sterrett’s aim she paused.

“Take that,” she ordered. “Throw it back among the trees as far as you can from this path.”

“Hell, Soames,” cried Sterrett. “Don’t fall for that. It’s good meat. I’ll slip it in on one of the burros.”

But Soames was staring at the girl.

“Afraid something’ll track us by it?” he asked. She nodded. Some of the cynic evil fled from the New Englander’s face.

“She’s right,” he spoke curtly to Sterrett. “Pick it up and throw it away. And do as she says. I think she’s goin’ to play square with us. No more shootin’, d’you hear?”

Sterrett picked up the little animal and hurled it viciously among the trees.

The caravan set forth along the rimlike way. Noon came and in another ravine that opened upon the strange road they snatched from saddle bags a hasty lunch. They did not waste time in unpacking the burros. There was a little brook singing in the pass and from it they refilled their canteens, then watered the animals. This time Suarra did not join them, sitting aloof with blue cowl and yellow.

By mid-afternoon they were nearing the northern end of the bowl. All through the day the circular mountain across the plain had unrolled its vast arc of cliff. And through the day Suarra’s watch of its forest clothed base had never slackened. A wind had arisen, sweeping toward them from those wooded slopes, bending the tall heads of the grass so far below them.

Suddenly, deep within that wind, Graydon heard a faint, far off clamor, an eerie hissing, shrill and avid, as of some onrushing army of snakes. The girl heard it too, for she halted and stood tense, face turned toward the sounds. They came again – and louder. And now her face whitened, but her voice when she spoke was steady.

“Danger is abroad,” she said. “Deadly danger for you. It may pass and – it may not. Until we know what to expect you must hide. Take your animals and tether them in the underbrush there.” She pointed to the mountainside which here was broken enough for cover. “The four of you take trees and hide behind them. Tie the mouths of your animals that they may make no noise.”

“So?” snarled Soames. “So here’s the trap, is it? All right, sister, you know what I told you. We’ll go into the trees, but – you go with us where we can keep our hands on you.”

“I will go with you,” she answered indifferently. “If those who come have not been summoned by the noise of that fool’s death weapon” – she pointed at Sterrett – “you can be saved. If they have been summoned by it – none can save you.”

Soames glared at her, then turned abruptly.

“Danc’,” he ordered, “Sterrett – get the burros in. And Graydon – you’ll stay with the burros and see they make no noise. We’ll be right close – with the guns – and we’ll have the girl – don’t forget that.”

Again the wind shrilled with the hissing.

“Be quick,” cried Suarra.

Swiftly they hid themselves. When trees and underbrush had closed in upon them, it flashed on Graydon, crouching behind the burros, that he had not seen the two cloaked familiars of Suarra join the hurried retreat and seek the shelter of the woods. He was at the edge of the path and cautiously he parted the bushes; peered through.

The two were not upon the rim!

Simultaneously, the same thought had come to Dancre. His voice came from a nearby bole.

“Soames – where those two old devils wit’ the girl go?”

“Where’d they go?” Soames repeated blankly. “Why, they came in with us, of course.”

“I did not see them,” persisted Dancre. “I t’ink not, Soames. If they did – then Where are they?”

“You see those two fellows out on the path, Graydon,?” called Soames, anxiety in his tones.

“No,” answered Graydon curtly.

Soames cursed wickedly.

“So that’s the game, eh?” he grunted. “It’s a trap! And they’ve cut out and run to bring ’em here!”

He dropped into the Aymara and spoke to Suarra.

“You know where those men of yours are?” he asked menacingly.

Graydon heard her laugh and knew that she was close beside the New Englander with Dancre and Sterrett flanking her.

“They come and go as they will,” she answered serenely.

“They’ll come and go as I will,” he snarled. “Gall them.”

“I call them,” again Suarra laughed. “Why, they do not my bidding. Nay – I must do theirs—”

“Don’t do that, Soames!” Dancre’s cry was sharp, and Graydon knew that Soames must have made some threatening movement. “If they’re gone, you cannot bring them back. We have the girl. Stop, I say!”

Graydon jumped to his feet. Bullets or no bullets, he would fight for her. As he poised to leap a sudden gust of wind tore at the trees. It brought with it a burst of the weird hissing, closer, strident, in it a devilish undertone that filled him with unfamiliar nightmarish terror.

Instantly came Suarra’s voice.

“Down! Down – Graydon!”

Then Dancre’s, quivering Graydon knew, with the same fear that had gripped

“Down! Soames won’t hurt her. For God’s sake, hide yourself, Graydon, till we know what’s coming!”

Graydon turned; looked out over the plain before he sank again behind the burros. And at that moment, from the forests which at this point of the narrowing bowl were not more than half a mile away, he saw dart out a streak of vivid scarlet. It hurled itself into the grass and scuttled with incredible speed straight toward one of the monoliths that stood, black and sheer a good three quarters of the distance across the dish shaped valley and its top fifty feet or more above the green. From Graydon’s own height he could see the scarlet thing’s swift rush through the grasses. As he sank down it came to him that whatever it was, it must be of an amazing length to be visible so plainly at that distance. And what was it? It ran like some gigantic insect!

He parted the bushes, peered out again. The scarlet thing had reached the monolith’s base. And as he watched, it raised itself against the rock and swarmed up its side to the top. At the edge it paused, seemed to raise its head cautiously and scan the forest from which it had come.

The air was clear, and against the black background of the stone, the vividly colored body stood out. Graydon traced six long, slender legs by which it clung to the rocky surface. There was something about the body that was monstrous, strangely revolting. In its listening, reconnoitering attitude and the shape of its head was something more monstrous still, since it carried with it a vague, incredible suggestion of humanness.

Suddenly the scarlet shape slipped down the rock breast and raced with that same amazing speed through the grasses toward where Graydon watched. An instant later there burst out of the forest what at first glance he took for a pack of immense hunting dogs – then realized that whatever they might be, dogs they certainly were not. They came forward in great leaps that reminded him of the motion of kangaroos. And as they leaped they glittered in the sun with flashes of green and blue as though armored in mail made of emeralds and sapphires.

Nor did ever dogs give tongue as they did. They hissed as they ran, shrilly, stridently, the devilish undertones accentuated – a monstrous, ear piercing sibilation that drowned all other sounds and struck across the nerves with fingers of unfamiliar primeval terror.

The scarlet thing darted to right, to left, frantically; then crouched at the base of another monolith, motionless.

And now, out of the forest, burst another shape. Like the questing creatures, this glittered too but with sparkles of black as though its body was cased in polished jet. Its bulk was that of a giant draft horse, but its neck was long and reptilian. At the base of that neck, astride it, he saw plainly the figure of – a man!

A dozen leaps and it was close behind the glittering pack, now nosing and circling between the first monolith and the woods.

“The Xinli,” came Suarra’s voice from above him.

The Xinli? It was the name she had given the beasts of the bracelet that held in their paws the disk of the Snake Mother!

The dinosaurs!

His own burro lay close beside him. With trembling hand he reached into a saddlebag and drew out his field glasses. He focused them upon the pack. They swam mistily in the lenses, then sharpened into clear outline. Directly in his line of vision, in the center of the lens, was one of the creatures that had come to gaze, that stood rigidly, its side toward him, pointing like a hunting dog. The excellent glasses brought it so closely to him that he could stretch out a hand it seemed, and touch it.

And it was – a dinosaur!

Dwarfed to the size of a Great Dane dog, still there was no mistaking its breed – one of those leaping, upright-walking monstrous lizards that millions of years ago had ruled earth and without whose extinction, so science taught, man never have arisen ages later to take possession of this planet. Graydon could see its blunt and spade shaped tail which, with its powerful, pillar-like hind legs, made the tripod upon which it squatted. Its body was nearly erect. It had two forelegs or arms, absurdly short, but muscled as powerfully as those upon which it sat. It held these half curved as though about to clutch. And at their ends were – not paws; no – but broad hands, each ending in four merciless talons, of which one thrust outward like a huge thumb and each of them armed with chisel-like claws, whose edges, he knew, were sharp as scimitars.

What he had taken for mail of sapphire and emerald were the scales of this dwarfed dinosaur. They overlapped one another like the scales upon an armadillo and it was from their burnished blue and green surfaces and edges that the sun rays struck out the jewel glints.

The creature turned its head upon its short, bull-like neck; it seemed to stare straight at Graydon. He glimpsed little fiery red eyes set in a sloping, bony arch of narrow forehead. Its muzzle was shaped like that of a crocodile, but smaller; truncated. Its jaws were closely studded with long, white and pointed fangs. The jaws slavered.

In a split second of time the mind of Graydon took in these details. Then beside the pointing dinosaur leaped the beast of the rider. Swiftly his eyes took it in – true dinosaur this one, too, but ebon scaled, longer tailed, the hind legs more slender and its neck a cylindrical rod five times thicker than the central coil of the giant boa. His eyes flashed from it to the rider.

Instantly Graydon knew him for a man of Suarra’s own race – whatever that might be. There was the same ivory whiteness of skin, the same more than classic regularity of feature. The face, like hers, was beautiful, but on it was stamped an inhuman pride and a relentless, indifferent cruelty – equally as inhuman. He wore a close fitting suit of green that clung to him like a glove. His hair was a shining golden that gleamed in the sun with almost the brilliancy of the hunting dinosaurs’ scales. He sat upon a light saddle fastened to the neck of his incredible steed just where the shoulders met it. There were heavy reins that ran to the mouth of the snake-slender, snake-long head of the jetty dinosaur.

Graydon’s glasses dropped from a nerveless hand. What manner of people were these who hunted with dinosaurs for dogs and a dinosaur for steed!

His eyes fell to the base of the monolith where had crouched the scarlet thing. It was no longer there. He caught a gleam of Crimson in the high grass not a thousand feet from him where he watched. Cautiously the thing was creeping on and on toward the rim. He wondered whether those spider legs could climb it, carry it over the out-jutting of the ledge? He shuddered. A deeper dread grew. Could the dinosaur pack scramble or leap over that edge in pursuit? If so—

There came a shrieking clamor like a thousand fumaroles out of which hissed the hate of hell. The pack had found the scent and were leaping down in a glittering green and blue wave.

As they raced the scarlet thing itself leaped up out of the grasses not a hundred yards away.

And Graydon glared at it with a numbing, sick horror at his heart. He heard behind him an incredulous oath from Soames; heard Dancre groan with, he knew, the same horror that held him.

The scarlet thing swayed upon two long and slender legs, its head a full fifteen feet above the ground. High on these stilts of legs was its body, almost round and no larger them a child’s. From its shoulders waved four arms, as long and as slender as the legs, eight feet or more in length. They were human arms – but human arms that had been stretched like rubber to thrice their normal length. The hands – or claws – were gleaming white. Body, arms, and legs were covered with a glistening, scarlet silken down.

The head was a human head!

A man’s head and a man’s face, brown skinned, hawk nosed, the forehead broad and intelligent, the eyes inordinately large, unwinking and filled with soul destroying terror.

A man spider!

A man who by some infernal art had been remodeled into the mechanical semblance of the spinning Arachnids, without the stamp of his essential human origin having been wiped away in the process!

Only for a moment the man-spider stood thus revealed. The pack was rushing down upon it like a cloud of dragons. It screamed, one shrill, high pitched, note that wailed like the voice of ultimate agony above the hissing clamor of the pack. It hurled itself, a thunderbolt of scarlet fear, straight toward the rim.

Beneath him, Graydon heard the sounds Of frantic scrambling and a scratching. Two hands a full foot long, pallidly shining, shot over the rim of the ledge, gripping it with long fingers that were like blunt needles of bone, horn covered. They clutched and shot forward, behind them a length of spindling scarlet-downed arm.

It was the man-spider, drawing himself over – and the wave of dinosaurs was now almost at the spot from which it had hurled itself at the ledge!

The spell of terror upon Graydon broke.

“A gun,” he gasped. “For God’s sake, Soames, throw me a gun!”

Against his will, his gaze swept back to those weird, Clutching hands. He thought he saw a rod dart out of the air and touch them – the long blue rod he had last seen carried by Suarra’s hooded attendant in blue.

Whether he saw it, whether he did not, the needle-fingered claws opened convulsively; released their hold; slid off.

Glittering pack and ebon dinosaur steed alike were hidden from him by the overhang of the shelf-like road. But up from that hidden slope came a fiendish, triumphant screaming. An instant later and out into the range of his sight bounded the great black dinosaur, its golden haired rider shouting; behind it leaped the jewel scaled horde. They crossed the plain like a thunder cloud pursued by emerald and sapphire lightnings. They passed into the forest and were gone.

“That danger is over,” he heard Suarra say coolly. “Come. We must go on more quickly now.”

She stepped out of the tree shadows and came tranquilly to him. Soames and Dancre and Sterrett, white faced and shaking, huddled close behind her. Graydon arose; managed to muster something of his old reckless air. She smiled at him, that half shy approval of him again in her eyes.

“It was just a weaver,” she said gently. “We have many such. He tried to escape – or maybe Lantlu opened the door that he might try to escape, so he could hunt him. Lantlu loves to hunt with the Xinli. Or it may be that his weaving went wrong and this was his punishment. At any rate, it is fortunate that he did not gain this road, since if he had, the Xinli and Lantlu would surely have followed. And then—”

She did not end the sentence, but the shrug of her shoulders was eloquent.

“Just a weaver!” Soames broke in, hoarsely. “What do you mean? God in heaven, it had a man’s head!

“It was a man!” gasped Dancre.

“No,” she paid no heed to him, speaking still to Graydon. “No – it was no man. At least no man as you are. Long, long ago, it is true, his ancestors were men like you. But not he. He was just – a weaver.”

She stepped out upon the path. And Graydon, following, saw waiting there, as quietly, as silently, as tranquilly as though they had not stirred since first he and his companions had fled – the blue cowled and yellow cowled familiars of Suarra. Immobile, they waited while she led forth the white llama. And as she passed Graydon she whispered to him.

“The weaver had no soul. Yu-Atlanchi fashioned him as he was. But remember him – Graydon – when you come to our journey’s end!”

She took her place at the head of the little caravan. Blue cowl and yellow paced behind her. Soames touched Graydon,, woke him from the stark amaze into which; those last words of hers had thrown him.

“Take your old place,” said Soames. “We’ll follow. Later – we want to talk to you, Graydon. Maybe you can get your guns back – if you’re reasonable.”

Suarra turned.

“Hurry,” she urged; “the sun sinks and we must go quickly. Before tomorrow’s noon you shall see your garden of jewels and the living gold streaming for you to do with it – or the gold to do with you – as you yourselves shall will it.”

They set forth along the rimmed trail.

The plain was silent, deserted. From the far forests came no sound. Graydon, as he walked, strove to fit together in his mind all that swift tragedy he had just beheld and what the girl had told him. A weaver she had called the scarlet thing – and soulless and no man. Once more she had warned him of the power of that hidden, mysterious Yu-Atlanchi. What was it she had told him once before of that power? That it slew souls – or changed them!

A weaver? A man-spider who was soulless but whose ancestors ages ago had been men like himself – so she had said. Did she mean that in that place she called Yu-Atlanchi dwelt those who could reshape not only that unseen dweller in our bodies that we name the soul, but change at will the house of the soul?

A weaver? A spider-man whose arms and legs were slender and long and spider-like – whose hands were like horn-covered needles of bone – whose body was like the round ball of a spider!

And she had said that the scarlet thing might have offended Lantlu by its weaving. Lantlu? The rider of the jetty dinosaur, of course.

A weaver! A picture flashed in his brain, clean cut as though his eyes beheld it. A picture of the scarlet thing in a great web, moving over it with his long and slender legs, clicking his needled hands, a human brain in a superspider’s body, weaving, weaving – the very clothing that Suarra herself wore.

A vast hall of giant webs, each with its weaver – man headed, man faced, spider bodied!

Was that true picturing? Suddenly he was sure of it. Nor was it impossible. He knew that Roux, that great French scientist, had taken the eggs of frogs and by manipulating them had produced giant frogs and dwarfs, frogs with two heads and one body, frogs with one head and eight legs, three headed frogs with legs like centipedes.

And other monsters still he had molded from the very stuff of life – monstrous things that were like nothing this earth had ever seen, nightmare things that he had been forced to slay – and quickly.

If Roux had done all this – and he had done it, Graydon knew – then was it not possible for greater scientists to take men and women and by similar means breed – such creatures as the scarlet thing? A man-spider?

Nature herself had given the French scientist the hint upon which his experiments had been based. Nature herself produced from time to time such abnormalities – human monsters marked outwardly and inwardly with the stigmata of the beast, the fish – even of the insect.

In man’s long ascent from the speck of primeval jelly on the shallow shores of the first seas, he had worn myriad shapes. And as he moved higher from one shape to another his cousins kept them, becoming during the ages the fish he caught today, the horses he rode, the apes he brought from the jungles to amuse him in his cages. Even the spiders that spun in his gardens, the scorpion that scuttled from the tread of his feet, were abysmally distant blood brothers of his, sprung from the ancient Trilobite that in its turn had sprung from forms through which what was to be at last man himself had come.

Yes, had not all life on earth a common origin? Divergent now and myriad formed – man and beast, fish and serpent, lizard and bird, ant and bee and spider – all had once been in those little specks of jelly adrift in the shallow littorals of seas of an earth still warm and pulsating with the first throbs of life. Protalbion, he remembered Gregory of Edinburgh had named it – the first stuff of life from which all life was to emerge.

Could the germs of all those shapes that he had worn in his progress to humanity be dormant in man? Waiting for some master hand of science to awaken them, and having awakened, blend them with the shape of man?

Yes! Nature had produced such monstrosities, and unless these shapes had lain dormant and been capable of awakening, even Nature could not have accomplished it. For even Nature cannot build something out of nothing. Roux had studied that work of hers, dipped down into the crucible of birth and molded there his monsters from these dormant forms, even as had Nature.

Might it not be then that in Yu-Atlanchi dwelt those who knew so well the secrets of evolution that in the laboratories of birth they could create men and women things of any shape desired?

A loom is but a dead machine on which fingers work more or less clumsily. The spider is both machine and living artisan, spinning, weaving, more surely, more exquisitely than could any dead mechanism worked by man. Who had approached the delicacy, the beauty, of the spider’s web?

Suddenly Graydon seemed to look into a whole new world of appalling grotesquerie – soulless spider men and spider women spread out over great webs and weaving with needled fingers wondrous fabrics; gigantic soulless ant men and ant women digging, burrowing, mazes of subterranean passages, conduits, cloaca for those who had wrought them into being; strange soulless amphibian folk busy about that lake that in his vision had circled up to him before he glimpsed the djinn city.

Phantasmagoria of humanity twinned with Nature’s perfect machines while still plastic in the egg!

Came to him remembrance of Suarra’s warning of what might await him at journey’s end. Had she meant to prepare him for change like this?

Shuddering, he thrust away that nightmare vision!

— VI —

THE ELFIN HORNS

The sun was halfway down the west when they reached the far end of the plain. Here another ravine cut through the rocky wall, and into it they filed. The trees closed in behind them, shutting out all sight of the bowl and the great circular mountain.

The new trail ran always upward, although at an almost imperceptible grade. Once, looking backward through a rift in the trees, Graydon caught a glimpse of the grassy slopes far beneath. For the rest the tree screened, tree bordered way gave no hint of what lay ahead.

It was close to dusk when they passed out of the trees once more and stood at the edge of a little moor. A barren it was indeed, more than a moor. Its floor was clean white sand and dotted with hillocks, mounds flat topped as though swept by constant brooms of wind. Upon the rounded slopes of these mounds a tall grass grew sparsely. The mounds arose about a hundred feet apart with curious regularity; almost, the fancy came to him, as though they were graves in a cemetery of giants. The little barren covered, he estimated roughly, about five acres. Around its sides the forest clustered. Near by he heard the gurgling of a brook.

Straight across the sands Suarra led them until she had reached a mound close to the center of the barren. Here she halted.

“You will camp here,” she said. “Water is close by for you and your animals. You may light a fire. And sleep without fear. By dawn we must be away.”

She turned and walked toward another knoll a hundred feet or more away. The white llama followed her. Behind it stalked the silent pair. Graydon had expected Soames to halt her, but he did not. Instead his eyes flashed some crafty message to Dancre and Sterrett. It seemed to Graydon that they were pleased that the girl was not to share their camp; that they welcomed the distance she had put between them.

And their manner to him had changed. They were comradely once more.

“Mind taking the burros over to water?” asked Soames. “We’ll get the fire going and chow ready.”

He nodded and led the little beasts over to the noisy stream. Taking them back after they had drunk their fill he looked over at the mound to which Suarra had gone. There at its base stood a small square tent, glimmering in the twilight like silk and fastened to the ground at each corner by a golden peg. Tethered close to it was the white llama, placidly munching grass and grain. Its hampers of woven golden withes were gone. Nor was Suarra or the hooded men visible. They were in the little tent, he supposed, whence they had carried the precious cargo off the llama.

At his own hillock a fire was crackling and supper being prepared. Sterrett jerked a thumb over toward the little tent.

“Got it out of the saddlebags,” he said. “Looked like a folded up umbrella’ and went up like one. Who’d ever think to find anything like that in this wilderness!”

“Lots of things I t’ink in those saddlebags we have not yet seen maybe,” whispered Dancre, an eager, covetous light in his eyes.

“You bet,” said Soames. “And the loot we have seen’s enough to set us all up for life, eh, Graydon?”

“She has promised you much more,” answered Graydon. There was an undercurrent of sinister meaning in the New Englander’s voice that troubled him.

“Yeah,” said Soames, absently. “Yeah. I guess so. But – well, let’s eat.”

The four sat around the burning sticks as they had done many nights before his quarrel with Sterrett. And to Graydon’s perplexity they ignored that weird tragedy of the plain. They pushed it aside, passed it by, seemed to avoid it. Their talk was all of treasure – and of what they would do with it when out of these mountains and back in their own world. Piece by piece they went over the golden hoard in the white llama’s packs; gloatingly they discussed Suarra’s emeralds and their worth.

“Hell! With just those emeralds none of us’d have to worry!” exclaimed Sterrett.

Graydon listened to them with increasing disquiet. They were mad with the gold lust – but there was something more behind their studied avoidance of the dragging down of the scarlet thing by the dinosaurs, this constant reference to the llama’s treasure, the harking back to what ease and comfort and luxury it would bring them all; something lurking, unsaid in the minds of the three of them of which all this was but the preliminary.

At last Soames looked at his watch.

“Nearly eight,” he said, abruptly. “Dawn breaks about five. Time to talk turkey. Graydon, come up close.”

Graydon obeyed, wondering. The four drew into a cluster in the shelter of the knoll. From where they crouched Suarra’s tent was hidden – as they were hidden to any watchers in that little silken pavilion looking now like a great golden moth at rest under the moonlight.

“Graydon,” began the New Englander, “we’ve made up our minds on this thing. We’re goin’ to do it a little different. We’re willin’ and glad to let bygones be bygones. Hell! Here we are, four white men in a bunch of God knows what. White men ought to stick together. Ain’t that so?”

Graydon nodded, waiting.

“All right,” went on Soames. “Now here’s the situation. I don’t deny we’re up against somethin’ I don’t know much about. We ain’t equipped to go up against anything like that pack of hissin’ devils we saw today. But – we can come back!”

Again Graydon nodded. They had decided then to go no farther. The lesson of the afternoon had not been lost. Soames would ask Suarra to lead them out of the haunted Cordillera. As for coming back – that was another matter. He would return. But he would come, back alone – seek Suarra. Since well he knew no mysterious peril either to life or soul could keep him from her. But first he must see these men safe, wipe off the debt that he believed as one man of his race to another he owed them. He was glad – but the gladness was tempered with sudden doubt. Could the game be finished thus? Would Suarra and that pair of strange old men let them – go?

Soames’s next words brought him back to reality.

“There’s enough stuff on that llama and the girl to set us all up right, yeah. But there’s also enough to finance the greatest little expedition that ever struck the trail for treasure,” he was saying. “And that’s what we plan doin’, Graydon. Get those hampers and all that’s in ’em. Get the stuff on the girl. Beat it. An’ come back. I’ll bet those hissin’ devils wouldn’t stand up long under a couple of machine guns and some gas bombs! And when the smoke’s cleared away we can lift all we want and go back and sit on the top of the world. What you say to that?”

Graydon fenced.

“How will you get it?” he asked. “How will you get away with it?”

“Easy,” Soames bent his head closer. “We got it all planned. There ain’t any watch bein’ kept in that tent, you can bet on that. They’re too sure of us. All right, if your with us, we’ll just slip quietly down there. Sterrett and Danc’ they’ll take care of the old devils. No shootin’. Just slip their knives into their ribs. Me and you’ll attend to the girl. We won’t hurt her. Just tie her up and gag her. Then we’ll stow the stuff on a couple of the burros, get rid of the rest and that damned white beast and beat it quick.”

“Beat it where?” asked Graydon, striving to cover the hot anger that welled up in him. He slipped a little closer to Dancre, hand alert to seize the automatic in his pocket.

“We’ll get out,” replied Soames, confidently. “I’ve been figurin’ out where we are and I saw a peak to the west there both Sterrett and me recognized. Looked like pretty open forest country between us, too. Once we’re there I know where we are. And travelin’ light and all night we can be well on our way to it by this time tomorrow.”

Graydon thrust out a cautious hand, touched Dancre’s pocket. The automatic was still there. He would try one last appeal – to fear.

“But, Soames,” he urged. “There would be pursuit. What would we do with those brutes you saw today on our track. Why, man, they’d be after us in no time. You can’t get away with anything like that.”

Instantly he realized the weakness of that argument.

“Not a bit of it,” Soames grinned evilly. “That’s just the point. Nobody’s worryin’ about that girl. Nobody knows where she is. She was damned anxious not to be seen this afternoon. No, Graydon, I figure she slipped away from her folks to help you out. I take my hat off to you – you got her sure hooked. Nobody knows where she is, and she don’t want nobody to know where she is. The only ones that might raise trouble is the two old devils. And a quick knife in their ribs’ll put them out of the runnin’ soon enough. Then there’s only the girl. She’ll be damned glad to show us the way out if chance we do get lost again. But me and Sterrett know that peak. We’ll carry her along and when we get where we know we are we’ll turn her loose to go home. None the worse off, eh, boys?”

Sterrett and Dancre nodded.

Graydon seemed to consider, fighting still for time. He knew exactly what was in Soames’s mind – to use him in the cold blooded murder the three had planned and, once beyond the reach of pursuit, to murder him, too. Nor would they ever allow Suarra to return to tell what they had done. She too, would be slain – after they had done as they willed with her.

“Come on, Graydon,” whispered Soames impatiently. “It’s a good scheme and we can work it. Are you with us? If you ain’t – well—”

His knife glittered in his hand. Simultaneously, Sterrett and Dancre pressed close to him, knife too, in readiness, awaiting his answer.

Their movement had given him the one advantage he needed. He swept his hand down into the Frenchman’s pocket, drew out the gun and as he did so, landed a sidewise kick that caught Sterrett squarely in the groin. The giant reeled back.

But before Graydon could cover Soames, Dancre’s arms were around his knees, his feet torn from beneath him.

“Suar—” Graydon cried before he was down. At least his shout might waken and warn her. The cry was choked in mid-utterance. Soames’s bony hand was at his throat. Down they cradled together.

Graydon reached up, tried to break the strangling clutch. It gave a little, enough to let him gasp in one breath. Instantly he dropped his hold on the New Englander’s wrists, hooked the fingers of one hand in the corner of his mouth, pulling with all his strength. There was a sputtering curse from Soames and his hands let go. Graydon tried to spring to his feet, but one arm of the gaunt man slipped over the back of his head held his neck in the vise of bent elbow against his shoulder.

“Knife him, Danc’,” growled Soames.

Graydon suddenly twisted, bringing the New Englander on top of him. He was only in time, for as he did so he saw Dancre strike, the blade barely missing Soames. The latter locked his legs around his, tried to jerk him over in range of the little Frenchman. Graydon sank his teeth in the shoulder so close to him. Soames roared with pain and wrath; threshed and rolled, trying to shake off the agonizing grip. Around them danced Dancre, awaiting a chance to thrust.

There came a bellow from Sterrett:

“The llama! It’s running away! The

Involuntarily, Graydon loosed his jaws. Soames sprang to his feet. Graydon followed on the instant, shoulder up to meet the blow he expected from Dancre.

“Look, Soames, look!” the little Frenchman was pointing. “They have put the hampers back and turned him loose. There he goes – wit’ the gold – wit’ the jewels!”

Graydon followed the pointing finger. The moon had gathered strength and under its flood the white sands had turned into a silver lake in which the tufted hillocks stood up like tiny islands. Golden hampers on its sides, the llama was flitting across that lake of silver a hundred paces away and headed, apparently, for the trail along which they had come.

“Stop it!” shouted Soames, all else forgotten. “After it, Sterrett! That way, Danc’! I’ll head it off!”

They raced out over the shining barren. The llama changed its pace; trotted leisurely to one of the mounds and bounded up to its top.

“Close in! We’ve got it now,” he heard Soames cry. The three ran to the hillock on which the white beast stood looking calmly around. They swarmed up the mound from three sidles. Soames and Sterrett he could see; Dancre was hidden by the slope.

As their feet touched the sparse grass a mellow sound rang out, one of those elfin horns Graydon had heard chorusing so joyously about Suarra that first day. It was answered by others, close, all about. Again the single note. And then the answering chorus swirled toward the hillock of the llama, hovered over it and darted like a shower of winged sounds upon it.

He saw Sterrett stagger as though under some swift shock; whirl knotted arms around him as though to ward off attack!

A moment the giant stood thus, flailing with his arms. Then he cast himself to the ground and rolled down to the sands. Instantly the notes of the elfin horns seemed to swarm away from him, to concentrate around Soames. He had staggered, too, under the unseen attack. But he had thrown himself face downward on the slope of the mound and was doggedly crawling to its top. He held one arm shielding his face.

But shielding against what?

All that Graydon could see was the hillock top, and on it the llama bathed in the moonlight, the giant prone at the foot of the mound and Soames now nearly at its crest. And the horn sounds were ringing, scores upon scores of them, like the horns of a fairy hunt. But what it was that made those sounds he could not see. They were not visible; they cast no shadow.

Yet once he thought he heard a whirring as of hundreds of feathery wings.

Soames had reached the edge of the mound’s flat summit. The llama bent its head, contemplating him. Then as he scrambled over that edge, thrust out a hand to grasp its bridle, it flicked about, sprang to the opposite side and leaped down to the sands.

And all that time the clamor of the elfin horns about Soames had never stilled. Graydon saw him wince, strike out, bend his head and guard his eyes as though from a shower of blows. Still he could see nothing. Whatever that attack of the invisible, it did not daunt the New Englander. He sprang across the mound and slid down its side close behind the llama. As he touched the ground Sterrett arose slowly to his feet. The giant stood swaying, half drunkenly, dazed.

The horn notes ceased, abruptly, as though they had been candlelights blown out by a sudden blast.

Dancre came running around the slope of the hillock. The three stood for a second or two, arguing, gesticulating. And Graydon saw that their shirts were ragged and torn and, as Soames shifted and the moonlight fell upon him, that his face was streaked with blood.

The llama was walking leisurely across the sands, as slowly as though it were tempting them to further pursuit. Strange, too, he thought, how its shape seemed now to stand forth sharply and now to fade almost to a ghostly tenuity. And when it reappeared it was as though the moonbeams thickened, whirled and wove swiftly and spun it from themselves. The llama faded – and then grew again on the silvery warp and woof of the rays like a pattern on an enchanted loom.

Sterrett’s hand swept down to his belt. Before he could cover the white beast with the automatic Soames caught his wrist. The New Englander spoke fiercely, wrathfully. Graydon knew that he was warning the giant of the danger of the pistol crack; urging silence.

Then the three scattered, Dancre and Sterrett to the left and right to flank the llama, Soames approaching it with what speed he might without startling it into a run. As he neared it, the animal broke into a gentle lope, heading for another hillock. And, as before, it bounded up through the sparse grass to the top. The three pursued, but as their feet touched the base of the mound once more the mellow horn sounded – menacingly, mockingly. They hesitated. And then Sterrett, breaking from Soames’s control, lifted his pistol and fired. The silver llama fell.

“The fool! The damned fool!” groaned Graydon.

The stunned silence that had followed on the heels of the pistol shot was broken by a hurricane of the elfin horns. They swept down upon the three like a tempest. Dancre shrieked and ran toward the camp fire, beating the air wildly as he came. Halfway he fell, writhed and lay still. And Soames and the giant – they, too, were buffeting the air with great blows, ducking, dodging. The elfin horns were now a ringing, raging tumult – death in their notes!

Sterrett dropped to his knees, arose and lurched away. He fell again close to Dancre’s body, covered his head with a last despairing gesture and lay – as still as the little Frenchman. And now Soames went down, fighting to the last.

There on the sands lay the three of them, motionless, struck down by the invisible!

Graydon shook himself into action; leaped forward. He felt a touch upon his shoulder; a tingling numbness ran through every muscle. With difficulty he turned his head. Beside him was the old man in the blue robe, and it had been the touch of his staff that had sent the paralysis through Graydon. The picture of the clutching talons of the spider-man upon the edge of the rimmed road flashed before him. That same rod had then, as he had thought, sent the weird weaver to its death.

Simultaneously, as though at some command, the clamor of the elfin horns lifted from the sands, swirled upward and hung high in air – whimpering, whining, protesting.

He felt a soft hand close around his wrist. Suarra’s hand. Again he forced his reluctant head to turn. She was at his right – and pointing.

On the top of the hillock the white llama was struggling to its feet. A band of crimson ran across its silvery flank, the mark of Sterrett’s bullet. The animal swayed for a moment, then limped down the hill.

As it passed Soames it nosed him. The New Englander’s head lifted. He tried to rise; fell back. Then with eyes fastened upon the golden panniers he squirmed up on hands and knees and began to crawl on the white llama’s tracks.

The beast went slowly, stiffly. It came to Sterrett’s body and paused again. And Sterrett’s massive head lifted, and he tried to rise, and, failing even as had Soames, began, like him, to crawl behind the animal.

The white llama passed Dancre. He stirred and moved and followed it on knees and hands.

Over the moon soaked sands, back to the camp they trailed – the limping llama, with the blood dripping drop by drop from its wounded side. Behind it three crawling men, their haggard, burning eyes riveted upon the golden withed panniers, three men who crawled, gasping like fish drawn up to shore. Three broken men, from whose drawn faces glared that soul of greed which was all that gave them strength to drag their bodies over the sands.

— VII —

“COME BACK — GRAYDON!”

Now llama and crawling men had reached the camp. The elfin horn notes were still. Graydon’s muscles suddenly relaxed; power of movement returned to him.

With a little cry of pity Suarra ran to the white llama’s side; caressed it, strove to stanch its blood.

Graydon bent down over the three men. They had collapsed as they had come within the circle of the camp fire. They lay now, huddled, breathing heavily, eyes fast closed. Their clothes had been ripped to ribbons.

And over all their faces, their breasts, their bodies, were scores of small punctures, not deep, their edges clean cut, as though they had been pecked out. Some were still bleeding; in others the blood had dried.

He ran to the rushing brook. Suarra was beside her tent, the llama’s head in her arms. He stopped, unbuckled the panniers; let them slip away; probed the animal’s wound. The bullet had plowed through the upper left flank without touching the bone, and had come out. He went back to his own camp, drew forth from his bags some medical supplies, returned and bathed and dressed the wound as best he could. He did it all silently, and Suarra was silent, too.

Her eyes were eloquent enough.

This finished, he went again to the other camp. The three men were lying as he left them. They seemed to be in a stupor. He washed their faces of the blood, bathed their stained bodies. He spread blankets and dragged the three up on them. They did not awaken. He wondered at their sleep – or was it coma?

The strange punctures were bad enough, of course, yet it did not seem to him that these could account for the condition of the men. Certainly they had not lost enough blood to cause unconsciousness. Nor had any arteries been opened, nor was one of the wounds deep enough to have disturbed any vital organ.

He gave up conjecturing, wearily. After all, what was it but one more of the mysteries among which he had been moving. And he had done all he could for the three of them.

Graydon walked away from the fire, threw himself down on the edge of the white sands. There was a foreboding upon him, a sense of doom.

And as he sat there, fighting against the blackness gathering around his spirit, he heard light footsteps and Suarra sank beside him. Her cloudy hair caressed his cheek, her rounded shoulder touched his own. His hand dropped upon hers, covering it. And after a shy moment her fingers moved, then interlaced with his.

“It is the last night – Graydon,” she whispered, tremulously. “The last night! And so – they – have let me talk with you a while.”

“No!” he caught her to him – fiercely. “There is nothing that can keep me from you now, Suarra, except – death.”

“Yes,” she said, and thrust him gently away. “Yes – it is the last night. There was a promise – Graydon. A promise that I made. I said that I would save you if I could. I asked the Two Lords. They were amused. They told me that if you could conquer the Face you would be allowed to go. I told them that you would conquer it. And I promised them that after that you would go. And they were more amused, asking me what manner of man you were who had made me believe you could conquer the Face.”

“The Face?” questioned Graydon.

“The great Face,” she said. “The Face in the Abyss. But of that I may say no more. You must – meet it.”

“And these men, too?” he asked. “The men who lie there?”

“They are as already dead,” she answered, indifferently. “Dead – and worse. They are already eaten!”

“Eaten!” he cried incredulously.

“Eaten,” she repeated. “Eaten – body and soul!”

For a moment she was silent.

“I do not think,” she began again. “I did not really think – that even you could conquer the Face. So I went to the Snake Mother – and she, too, laughed. But at the end, as woman to woman – since, after all, she is woman – she promised me to aid you. And then I knew you would be saved, since the Snake Mother far excels the Two Lords in craft and guile. And she promised me – as woman to woman. The Two Lords know nothing of that,” she added naively.

Of this, Graydon, remembering the youthful eyes in the old, old faces that had weighed him in the temple of the shifting rays, had his doubts.

“So,” she said, “was the bargain made. And so its terms must be fulfilled. You shall escape the Face – Graydon. But you must go.”

To that he answered nothing. And after another silence she spoke again, wistfully:

“Is there any maid who loves you – or whom you love – in your own land, Graydon?”

“There is none, Suarra,” he answered.

“I believe you,” she said simply. “And I would go away with you – if I might. But – they – would not allow it. And if I tried – they would slay you. Yes, even if we should escape – they – would slay you and bring me back. So it cannot be.”

He thrilled to that, innocently self-revelant as it was.

“I am weary of Yu-Atlanchi,” she went on somberly. “Yes, I am weary of its ancient wisdom and of its treasures and its people who are eternal – eternal at least as the world. I am one of them – and yet I long to go out into the new world – the world where there are babes, and many of them, and the laughter of children, and where life streams passionately, strong and shouting and swiftly – even though it is through the opened doors of Death that it flows. In Yu-Atlanchi those doors are closed – except to those who choose to open them. And life is a still stream, without movement. And there are few babes – and of the laughter of children – little.”

“What are your people, Suarra?” he asked.

“The ancient people,” she told him. “The most ancient. Ages upon ages ago they came down from the north where they had dwelt for other ages still. They were driven away by the great cold. One day the earth rocked and swung. It was then the great cold came down and the darkness and icy tempests and even the warm seas began to freeze. Their cities, so the legends run, are hidden now under mountains of ice. They journeyed south in their ships, bearing with them the Serpent people who had taught them most of their wisdom – and the Snake Mother is the last daughter of that people. They came to rest here. At that time the sea was close and the mountains had not yet been born. They found here hordes of the Xinli. They were larger, far larger than now. My people subdued them and tamed and bred them to their uses. And here for another age they practiced their arts and their wisdom – and learned more.

“Then there were great earth shakings and the mountains began to lift. Although all their wisdom was not great enough to keep the mountains from being born, it could control their growth around that ancient city, and its plain that were Yu-Atlanchi. Slowly, steadily through another age the mountains arose. Until at last they girdled Yu-Atlanchi like a vast wall – a wall that could never be scaled. Nor did my people care; indeed, it gladdened them, since by then they had closed the doors of death and cared no more to go into the outer world. And so they have dwelt – for other ages more.”

Again she was silent, musing. Graydon struggled against his incredulity. A people who had conquered death? A people so old that their birthplace was buried deep beneath eternal ice? And yet, as to the last, at least – why not? Did not science teach that the frozen poles had once basked beneath a tropical sun? Expeditions had found at both of them the fossil forms of gigantic palms, strange animals, a flora and a fauna that could only have lived under tropical conditions.

And did not science believe that long, long ago the earth had tipped and that thus the frozen poles had come to be?

An inexplicable irritation filled Mm – instinctive revolt of the young against the very old.

“If your people are so wise,” he questioned, “why do they not come forth and rule this world?”

“But why should they?” she asked in turn. “They have nothing more to learn. If they came forth what could they do but build the rest of the earth into likeness of that part in which they dwell? What use in that, Graydon? None. So they let the years stream by while they dream – the most of them. For they have conquered dream. Through dream they create their own worlds; do therein as they will; live life upon life as they will it. In their dreams they shape world upon world upon world – and each of their worlds is a real world to them. And so they let the years stream by while they live in dream! Why should they go out into this one world when they can create myriads of their own at will?”

Again she was silent.

“But they are barren – the dream makers,” she whispered. “Barren! That is why there are few babes and little laughter of children in Yu-Atlanchi. Why should they mate with their kind – these women and men who have lived so long that they have grown weary of all their kind can give them? Why should they mate with their kind when they can create new lovers in dream, new loves and hates! Yea, new emotions, and forms utterly unknown to earth, each as he or she may will. And so they are – barren. Not alone the doors of death, but the doors of life are closed to them – the dream makers!”

“But you—” he began.

“I?” She turned a wistful face to him.

“Did I not say that when they closed the doors of death the doors of life closed, too. For these are not really two, but only the two sides of the one door. Some there are always who elect to keep that door open, to live the life that is their own, to have no dealing with – dreams. My father and mother were of these. They took the hazard of death that they might love—

“Ancient arts – ancient wisdom,” she went on. “Wisdom that perhaps you have rediscovered and call new. Wisdom you yet may gain. Wisdom that may never be yours – and thank whatever gods you worship that you have not; pray to them that you never may have.

“Such wisdom as shaped the – weaver?” he asked.

“That! He was child’s play,” she answered. “A useful toy. There are far, far stranger things than the weaver in Yu-Atlanchi, Graydon.”

“Suarra,” he asked abruptly. “Why do you want to save me?”

A moment she hesitated; then:

“Because you make me feel as I have never felt before!” she whispered slowly. “Because you make me happy – because you make me sorrowful. When I think of you it is like warm wine in my veins. I want both to sing- – and to weep. I want your touch – to be close to you. When you go – the world will be darkened – life will be drab.”

“Suarra!” he cried – and drew her, unresisting now, to him. His lips sought hers and her lips clung to his. A flame leaped through him. She quivered in his arms; was still.

“I will come back,” he whispered. “I will come back, Suarra!”

“Come!” she sobbed. “Come back – Graydon!”

She thrust him from her – leaped to her feet.

“No! No!” she cried. “No – Graydon. I am wicked! No – it would be death for you!”

“As God lives, Suarra,” he said, “I will come back to you!”

She trembled; leaned forward, pressed her lips to his, slipped through his arms and ran to the silken pavilion. For an instant she paused there – stretched wistful arms to him; entered and was hidden within its folds.

There seemed to come to him, faintly, heard only by heart—

“Come back! Come back to me!”

He threw himself down where their hands had clasped – where their lips had met. Hour after hour he lay there – thinking, thinking. His head dropped forward at last.

He carried her into his dreams.

— VIII —

THE FACE IN THE ABYSS

The white sands of the barren were wan in the first gleaming of the dawn when Graydon awakened. He arose with the thought of Suarra warm around his heart. Chilling that warmth, swift upon him like a pall fell that bleak consciousness of doom against which he had struggled before he slept; and bleaker, heavier now; not to be denied.

A wind was sweeping down from the heights. Beneath it he shivered. He walked to the hidden brook; doffed clothing; dipped beneath its icy flow. Strength poured back into him at the touch of the chill current.

Returning, he saw Suarra, less than half clad, slipping out of the silken tent. Clearly, she too, was bound for the brook. He waved a hand. She smiled; then long silken lashes covered the midnight eyes; rose-pearl grew her face, her throat, her breasts. She slipped back behind the silken folds.

He turned his head from her; passed on to the camp.

He looked down upon the three – gaunt Soames, little Dancre, giant Sterrett. He stooped and plucked from Soames’s belt an automatic – his own. He satisfied himself that it was properly loaded, and thrust it into his pocket. Under Soames’s left arm pit was another. He took it out and put it in the holster from which he had withdrawn his. He slipped into Sterrett’s a new magazine of cartridges. Dancre’s gun was ready for use.

“They’ll have their chance, anyway,” he said to himself.

He stood over them for a moment; scanned them. The scores of tiny punctures had closed. Their breathing was normal. They seemed to be asleep. And yet – they looked like dead men. Like dead men, livid and wan and bloodless as the pallid sands beneath the growing dawn.

Graydon shuddered; turned his back upon them.

He made coffee; threw together a breakfast; went back to rouse the three. He found Soames sitting up, looking around him, dazedly.

“Come get something to eat, Soames,” he said, and gently, for there was a helplessness about the gaunt man that roused his pity – black-hearted even as the New Englander had shown himself. Soames looked at him, blankly; then stumbled up and stood staring, as though waiting further command. Graydon leaned down and shook Sterrett by the shoulder. The giant mumbled, opened dull eyes; lurched to his feet. Dancre awakened, whimpering.

As they stood before him – gaunt man, little man, giant – a wonder, a fearful wonder, seized him. For these were not the men he had known. No! What was it that had changed these men so, sapped the life from them until they seemed, even as Suarra had said, already dead?

A verse from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner rang in his ears—

“They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose,

Nor spake, nor moved their eyes;

It had been strange, even in a dream,

To have seen those dead men rise.”

Shuddering again, he led the way to the fire. They followed him, stiffly, mechanically, like automatons. And like automatons they took the steaming coffee from him and drank it; the food and swallowed it. Their eyes, blank, devoid of all expression, followed his every movement.

Graydon studied them, the fear filled wonder growing. They seemed to hear nothing, see nothing – save for their recognition of himself – to be cut off from all the world. Suddenly he became conscious of others near him; turned his head and saw close behind him Suarra and the hooded pair. The eyes of Soames, of Sterrett and of Dancre turned with his own. And now he knew that not even memory had been left them! Blankly, with no recognition – unseeing – they stared at Suarra.

“It is time to start, Graydon,” she said softly, her own eyes averted from their dead gaze. “We leave the llama here. It cannot walk. Take with you only your own animal, your weapons and what belongs to you. The other animals will stay here.”

He chilled, for under her words he read both sentence of death and of banishment. Death of all of them perhaps – banishment for him even if he escaped death. In his face she read his heart, accurately; tried to soften his sorrow.

“They may escape,” she continued, hastily. “And if they do, the animals will be here awaiting them. And it is well for you to have your own with you, in case – in case—”

She faltered. He shook his head.

“No use, Suarra,” he smiled. “I understand.”

“Oh, trust me, trust me,” she half sobbed. “Do as I say, Graydon.”

He said no more. He unhobbled his burro; fixed the saddlebags; took his own rifle and strapped it to them. He picked up the rifles of the others and put them in their hands. They took them, as mechanically as they had the coffee and the food.

Now blue cowl and yellow swung into the lead, Suarra at their heels.

“Come on, Soames,” he said. “Come, Sterrett. It’s time to start, Dancre.”

Obediently they swung upon the trail, marching side by side – gaunt man at left, giant in the center, little man at right. Like marionettes they marched, obediently, unquestioning, without word. If they knew the llama and its treasures were no longer with them, they gave no sign. If they knew Graydon again carried his guns, they gave no sign either.

Another line of the “Rime” echoed in his memory—

“They raised their limbs like lifeless tools—”

Graydon swung in behind them, the patient burro trotting at his side.

They crossed the white sands, entering a broad way stretching through close growing, enormous trees, as though it had once been a road of stone upon whose long deserted surface the leaves had rotted for centuries; upon which turf had formed, but in which no trees had been able to get root hold. And as they went on, he had evidence that it had been actually such a road, for where there had been washouts the faces of gigantic cut and squared granite blocks were exposed.

For an hour they passed along this ancient buried trail. They emerged from it, abruptly, out upon a broad platform of bare rock. Before them were the walls of a split mountain. Its precipices towered thousands of feet. Between them, like a titanic sword cut, was a rift, a prodigious cleavage which widened as it reached upward as though each side had shrunk away from the splitting blade as it had struck downward. The platform was the threshold of this rift. Fifty feet wide from edge to edge it ran. At each edge stood a small, conical shaped building – temple or guard house – whose crumbling stones were covered with a gray lichen so ancient looking that it might have been withered old Time’s own flower.

The cowled figures neither turned nor stopped. They crossed the threshold between the ruined cones; behind them Suarra; and after her, never hesitating, the stiffly marching three. Then over it went Graydon and the burro.

The way led downward at an angle barely saved from difficult steepness. No trees, no vegetation of any kind, could he see – unless the ancient, gray and dry lichen that covered the road and whispered under their feet could be called vegetation. But it gave resistance, that lichen; made the descent easier. It covered the straight rock walls that arose on each side.

The gorge was dark, as he had expected. The light that fell through its rim thousands of feet overhead was faint. But the gray lichens seemed to take it up and diffuse it. It was no darker than an early northern twilight. Every object was plainly visible.

Down they went and ever down; for half an hour; an hour. Always straight ahead the road stretched, never varying in its width and growing no darker, even the gray lichens lightened it. He estimated its drop was about fifteen feet in the hundred. He looked back and upward along its narrowing vista. They must be, he thought, half a mile or more below the level of the rift threshold.

The road angled. A breast of rock jutted abruptly out of the cliff, stretching from side to side like a barrier. The new road was narrower, barely wide enough for the three marionettes in front to walk on side by side. As they wheeled into it Graydon again felt a pang of pity. They were like doomed men marching to execution; hopeless; helpless and – drugged. Nay – they were men who had once been slain and drawn inexorably on to a second death!

Never speaking, never turning, with mechanical swing of feet, rifles held slack in limp arms, their march was a grotesquerie tinged with horror.

The new road was darker than the old. He had an uneasy feeling that the rocks were closing high over his head; that what they were entering was a tunnel. The gray lichens rapidly dwindled on walls and underfoot. As they dwindled, so did the light.

At last the gray lichens ceased to be. He moved through a half darkness in which barely could he see, save as shadows, those who went before.

And now he was sure that the rocks had closed overhead, burying them. He fought against a choking oppression that came with the knowledge.

And yet – it was not so dark, after all. Strange, he thought, strange that there should be light at all in this covered way – and stranger still was that light itself. It seemed to be in the air – to be of the air. It came neither from walls nor roof. It seemed to filter in, creeping, along the tunnel from some source far ahead. A light that was as though it came from radiant atoms, infinitely small, that shed their rays as they floated slowly by.

Thicker grew these luminous atoms whose radiance only, and not their bodies, could be perceived by the eye. Lighter and lighter grew the way.

Again, and as abruptly as before, it turned.

They stood within a cavern that was like a great square auditorium to some gigantic stage; the interior of a cube of rock whose four sides, whose roof a hundred feet overhead, and whose floor were smooth and straight as though trued by giant spirit level and by plane.

And at his right dropped a vast curtain – a curtain of solid rock lifted a foot above the floor and drawn aside at the far end for a quarter of its sweep. From beneath it and from the side, streamed the radiant atoms whose slow drift down the tunnel had filled it with its ever increasing luminosity.

They streamed from beneath it and around the side, swiftly now, like countless swarms of fireflies, each carrying a lamp of diamond light.

“There” – Suarra pointed to the rocky curtain’s edge – “there lies your way. Beyond it is that place I promised I would show you – the place where the jewels grow like fruit in a garden and the living gold flows forth. Here we will wait you. Now go.”

Long Graydon looked at that curtain and at the streaming radiant atoms pouring from beyond it. Gaunt man, little man, giant man stood, beside him, soulless faces staring at him – awaiting his command, his movement.

In the hooded pair he sensed a cynical amusement – in yellow cowl, at least. For blue cowl seemed but to wait – as though – as though even now he knew what the issue must be. Were they baiting him, he wondered; playing him for their amusement? What would happen if he were to refuse to go farther; refuse to walk around the edge of that lifted curtain; summon the three and march them back to the little camp in the barren? Would they go? Would they be allowed to go?

He looked at Suarra. In her eyes of midnight velvet was sorrow, a sorrow unutterable; despair and agony – and love!

Whatever moved that pair she called the Two Lords – in her, at least, was no cynical gaming with human souls. And he remembered her promise – that he could look upon the Face and conquer it.

Well, he would not retreat now, even if they would let him. He would accept no largess at the hands of this pair who, or so it now seemed to him, looked upon her as a child who must be taught what futile thing it was that she had picked for chosen toy. He would not shame himself – nor her.

“Wait here,” he spoke to the three staring ones. “Wait here – do you understand – Soames – Dancre – Sterrett! Do not move! Wait here until I come back.”

They only stared on at him; unanswering either with tongue or face.

“Stay here!” he repeated sharply.

He walked up to the hooded pair.

“To hell with you!” he said, clearly and as coldly as he felt they themselves might speak were they to open those silent lips of theirs. “Do you understand that? I said to hell with you!”

They did not move. He caught Suarra in his arms; kissed her; suddenly reckless of them. He felt her lips cling to his.

“Remember!” he whispered. “I will come back to you!”

He strode over to the curtain’s edge, swinging his automatic as he went. He strode past the edge and full into the rush of the radiance. For perhaps a dozen heartbeats he stood there, motionless, turned to stone, blank incredulity stamped deep upon his face. And then the revolver dropped from nerveless hand; clattered upon floor of stone.

For Graydon looked into a vast cavern filled with the diamonded atoms, throbbing with a dazzling light that yet was crystalline clear. The cavern was like a gigantic hollow globe that had been cut in two, and one half cast away. It was from its curving walls that the luminosity streamed, and these walls were jetty black and polished like mirrors, and the rays that issued from them seemed to come from infinite depths within them, darting through them with prodigious speed – like rays shot up through inconceivable depths of black water, beneath which in some unknown firmament, blazed a sun of diamond incandescence.

And out of these curving walls, hanging to them like the grapes of precious jewels in the enchanted vineyards of the Paradise of El-Shiraz, like flowers in a garden of the King of the Djinn, grew clustered gems!

Great crystals, cabochon and edged, globular and angled, alive under that jubilant light with the very soul of fire that is the lure of jewel. Rubies that glowed with every rubrous tint from that clear scarlet that is sunlight streaming through the finger tips of delicate maids to deepest sullen reds of bruised hearts; sapphires that shone with blues as rare as that beneath the bluebird’s wings and blues as deep as those which darken beneath the creamy crest of the Gulf Stream’s crisping waves; huge emeralds that gleamed now with the peacock verdancies of tropic shallows, and now were green as the depths of a jungle glade; diamonds that glittered with irised fires or shot forth showers of rainbowed rays; great burning opals; gems burning with amethystine flames; unknown jewels whose unfamiliar beauty checked the heart with wonder.

But it was not the clustered jewels within this chamber of radiance that had released the grip of his hand upon the automatic; turned him into stone.

It was – the Face!

From where he stood, a flight of Cyclopean steps ran down a hundred feet or more into the heart of the cavern. At their left was the semi-globe of gemmed and glittering rock. At their right was – space!

An abyss, whose other side he could not see, but which fell sheer away from the stairway in bottomless depth upon depth.

The Face looked at him from the far side of this cavern. Its eyes were level with his. Bodiless, its chin rested upon the floor a little beyond the last monolithic step. It was carved out of the same black rock as the walls, but within it was no faintest sparkle of the darting luminescences.

It was man’s face and devil’s face in one; Luciferean; arrogant; ruthless. Colossal, thirty yards or more in width from ear to ear, it bent a little over the abyss, as though listening. Upon the broad brow power was throned, an evil and imperial power – power that could have been godlike in beneficence had it so willed, but which had chosen instead the lot of Satan. The nose was harpy curved, vulture bridged and cruel. Merciless was the huge mouth, the lips full and lecherous; the corners cynically drooping.

Upon all its carved features was stamped the very secret soul of humanity’s insatiable, eternal hunger for gold. Greed and avarice were graven there – and spendthrift recklessness and callous waste. It was the golden lust given voice of stone. It promised, it lured, it threatened, it cajoled. And it – summoned!

He looked into the eyes of the Face, a hundred feet above the chin. They were made of pale blue crystals, cold as the glint of the Polar ice. Within them was centered all the Face’s demoniac strength.

And as Graydon glared into their chill depths swift visions passed from them to his own. Ravishing of cities and looting of ships; men drunk with greed wresting great golden nuggets from the breast of earth; men crouching like spiders in the hearts of shining yellow webs and gloating over hordes of golden flies.

He heard the shouts of loot crazed legions sacking golden capitols; the shouting of all Argonauts since first gold and men were born. And he thrilled to their clamor; answered it with shoutings of his own!

Poured into him from the cold eyes other visions – visions of what gold, gold without end, could do for him. Flaming lures of power over men and nations, power limitless and ruthless as that which sat upon the Face’s own brow – fair women – earthly Paradises – Fata Morganas of the senses.

There was a fire in his blood, a Satanic ecstasy, a flaming recklessness.

Why – the Face was not of stone! The eyes were not cold jewels!

The Face was living!

And it was promising him this world and dominion over all this world – if he would but come to it!

He took a step down the stairway.

There came to him Suarra’s heartbroken cry!

It checked him.

He looked again at the colossal Face.

And now he saw that all the darting luminous atoms from the curving walls were concentrated upon it. It threw them back, into the chamber and under and past the curtain of rock, and out into the abyss. And that there was a great circlet of gold around the Face’s brow – a wide, deep crown almost like a cap. From that crown, like drops of yellow blood, great globes of gold fell slowly! They crept sluggishly down the cheeks.

From the eyes ran slowly other huge golden drops – like tears.

And out of each down turned corner of the mouth the gold dripped like slaver!

The drops of golden sweat, the golden tears, the golden slaver rolled and joined a rivulet of gold that crept out from behind the Face, crawled sluggishly to the verge of the abyss and over its lip into the unfathomable depths—

“Look into my eyes! Look into my eyes!”

The command came to him – imperious, not to be disobeyed. It seemed to him that the Face had spoken it. He stared again straight into the cold blue crystals. And forgotten now was its horror. All that he knew was – its promise!

Graydon dropped to the second step, then to the third. He wanted to run on, straight to that gigantic mask of black rock that sweated, wept and slavered gold, take from it what it had offered – give it whatever it should demand in return—

He was thrust aside. Reeled and caught himself at the very edge of the stairway.

Past him rushed the three – gaunt man, giant man and little man.

He caught a glimpse of their faces. There was no blankness in them now, no vagueness. No, they were as men reborn. Their eyes were burning bright. And upon the face of each was set the stamp of the Face – its arrogance, its avarice, its recklessness and its cruelty.

Faster, faster they ran down the steps – rushing to the gigantic Face and what it had promised them. As it had promised – him!

Rage, murderous and confusing, shook him. By Heaven, they couldn’t get away with that! Earth and the dominion of earth! They were his own for the taking. The Face had promised them to him first. He would kill them.

He leaped down behind them;

Something caught his feet, pinioned them, wrapped itself around his knees; brought him to an abrupt halt. He heard a sharp hissing. Raging, cursing, he looked down. Around his ankles, around his knees, were the coils of a white serpent. It bound him tightly, like a rope. Its head was level with his heart and its eyes looked unwinkingly into his.

For a breathless moment revulsion shook him, an instinctive and panic terror. He forgot the Face – forgot the three. The white serpent’s head swayed; then shot forward, its gaze fastened upon something beyond him. Graydon’s gaze followed its own.

He saw – the Snake Mother!

At one and the same time real and unreal, she lay stretched out upon the radiant air, her shining lengths half coiled. She lay within the air directly between him and the Face. He saw her – and yet plainly through her he could see all that weird cavern and all that it held. Her purple eyes were intent upon him.

And instantly his rage and all that fiery poison of golden lust that had poured into him – were wiped away. In their place flowed contrition, shame, a vast thankfulness.

He remembered – Suarra!

Through this phantom of the Snake Mother – if phantom it was – he stared full and fearlessly into the eyes of the Face. And their spell was broken. All that Graydon saw now was its rapacity, its ruthlessness and its horror.

The white serpent loosed its coils; released him! Slipped away. The phantom of the Snake Mother vanished.

Trembling, he looked down the stairway. The three men were at its end. They were running – running toward the Face. In the crystalline luminosity they stood out like moving figures cut from black cardboard. They were flattened by it – three outlines, sharp as silhouettes cut from black paper. Lank and gaunt silhouette, giant silhouette and little one, they ran side by side. And now they were at the point of the huge chin. He watched them pause there for an instant, striking at each other, each trying to push the others away. Then as one, and as though answering some summons irresistible, they began to climb up the cliffed chin of the Face – climbing Graydon knew up to the cold blue eyes and what those eyes had seemed to promise.

Now they were in the full focus of the driving rays, the storm of the luminous atoms. For an instant they stood out, still like three men cut from cardboard a little darker than the black stone.

Then they seemed to gray, their outlines to grow misty – nebulous. They ceased their climbing. They writhed as though in sudden intolerable agony.

They faded out!

Where they had been there hovered for a breath something like three wisps of stained cloud.

The wisps dissolved – like mist.

In their place stood out three glistening droplets of gold!

Sluggishly the three droplets began to roll down the Face. They drew together and became one. They dripped slowly down to the crawling golden stream, were merged with it – were carried to the lip of the abyss—

And over into the gulf!

From high over that gulf came a burst of the elfin horns. And now, in that strange light, Graydon saw at last what it was that sent forth these notes – what it was that had beaten out on the moonlit barren the souls of the three; breaking them; turning them into dead men walking.

Their bodies were serpents, sinuous, writhing and coiling, silver scaled. But they were serpents – winged. They dipped and drifted and eddied on snowy long feathered wings, blanched, phosphorescent plumes fringed like the tails of ghostly Birds of Paradise.

Large and small, some the size of the great python, some no longer than the little fer-de-lance, they writhed and coiled and spun through the sparkling air above the abyss, trumpeting triumphantly, calling to each other with their voices like elfin horns.

Fencing joyously with each other with bills that were like thin, straight swords!

Winged serpents, Paradise plumed, whose bills were sharp rapiers. Winged serpents sending forth their paeans of faery trumpets while that crawling stream of which Soames – Dancre – Sterrett – were now a part dripped, dripped, slowly, so slowly, down into the unfathomable void.

Graydon fell upon the great step, sick in every nerve and fiber of his being. He crept up the next, and the next – rolled over the last, past the edge of the rocky curtain, out of the brilliancy of the diamonded light and the sight of the Face and that trumpet clamor of the flying serpents.

He saw Suarra, flying to him, eyes wild with gladness.

Then he seemed to sink through wave after wave of darkness into oblivion.

— IX —

“I AM GOING BACK TO HER!”

Graydon awakened.

“Suarra! Beloved!” he whispered, and stretched out eager arms. Memory rushed back to him; he leaped to his feet, stared around him. He was in a dim forest glade. Beside him his burro nibbled placidly the grass.

“Suarra!” he cried again loudly.

A figure stirred in the shadow; came toward him. It was an Indian, but one of a type Graydon had never seen before. His features were delicate, fine. He wore a corselet and kilt of padded yellow silk. There was a circlet of gold upon his head and bracelets of the same metal on his upper arms.

The Indian held out a package wrapped in silk. He opened it. Within it was Suarra’s bracelet of the dinosaurs and the caraquenque feather she wore when first he had seen her.

Graydon restored the feather in its covering, thrust it into the pocket over his heart. The bracelet, and why he did it he never knew, he slipped over his own wrist.

He spoke to the Indian in the Aymara. He smiled; shook his head. Nor did he seem to understand any of the half dozen other dialects that Graydon tried. He pointed to the burro and then ahead. Graydon knew that he was telling him that he must go, and that he would show him the way.

They set forth. He tried to etch every foot of the path upon his memory, planning already for return. In a little while they came to the edge of a steep hill. Here the Indian paused, pointing down. Fifty feet or so below him Graydon saw a well marked trail. There was an easy descent, zigzagging down the hillside to it. Again the Indian pointed, and he realized that he was indicating which way to take upon the lower trail.

The Indian stood aside, bowed low and waited for him to pass down with the burro. He began the downward climb. The Indian stood watching him; and as Graydon reached a turn in the trail, he waved his hand in farewell and slipped back into the forest.

Graydon plodded slowly on for perhaps a mile farther. There he waited for an hour. Then he turned resolutely back; retraced his way to the hillside and driving his burro before him, quietly reclimbed it.

In his brain and in his heart were but one thought and one desire – to return to Suarra. No matter what the peril – to go back to her.

He slipped over the edge of the hill and stood there for a moment, listening. He heard nothing. He pushed ahead of the burro; softly bade it follow; strode forward.

Instantly close above his head he heard a horn note sound, menacing, angry, There was a whirring of great wings.

Instinctively he threw up his arm. It was the one upon which he had slipped Suarra’s bracelet. As he raised it, the purple stones that were the eyes of the snake -woman carved upon it, flashed in the sun.

He heard the horn note again, protesting; curiously – startled. There was a whistling flurry in the air close beside him as of some unseen winged creature striving frantically to check its flight.

Something struck the bracelet a glancing blow. He felt another sharp blow against his shoulder. A searing pain darted through the muscles. He felt blood gush from shoulder and neck. The buffet threw him backward. He fell and rolled over the edge of the hill and down its side.

In that fall his head struck a stone, stunning him. When he came to his senses he was lying at the foot of the slope, with the burro standing beside him. He must have lain there unconscious for considerable time, for the stained ground showed that he had lost much blood. The wound was in an awkward place for examination, but so far as he could see it was a clean puncture that had passed like a rapier thrust through the upper shoulder and out at the neck. It must have missed the artery by a hair.

And well he knew what had made that sound. One of the feathered serpents of the abyss.

The cliff or hill marked no doubt the limits of Yu-Atlanchi at that point. Had the strange Indian placed the creature there in anticipation of his return, or had it been one of those “Watchers” of whom Suarra had spoken and this frontier one of its regular points of observation? The latter, he was inclined to think, for the Indian had unquestionably been friendly.

And did not the bracelet and the caraquenque feather show that he had been Suarra’s own messenger?

But Graydon could not go back, into the unknown perils, with such a wound. He must find help. That night the fever took him. The next day he met some friendly Indians. They ministered to him as best they could. But the fever grew worse and the wound a torment. He made up his mind to press on to Chupan, the nearest village where he might find better help than the Indians could give him.

He had stumbled on to Chupan, reached it on his last strength.

Such was Graydon’s story.

If you ask me whether I believe it, or whether I think it the vagaries of a fever-stricken wanderer, I answer – I do believe it. Yes, from the first to the last, I believe it true. For remember, I saw his wound, I saw the bracelet of the dinosaurs and I listened to Graydon in his delirium. A man does not tell precisely the same things in the cool blood of health that he raves of in delirium, not at least if these things are but fancies born of that delirium. He cannot. He forgets.

There was one thing that I found it hard to explain by any normal process.

“You say you saw this – well, Being – you call the Snake Mother as a phantom in that cavern of the Face?” I asked. “But are you sure of that, Graydon? Are you sure that this was not hallucination – or some vision of your fever that you carried into waking?”

“No,” he said. “No. I am very sure. I would not call what I saw a phantom. I only used that word to describe it. It was more – a projection of her image. You forget, don’t you, that other exercise of this inexplicable power of projection the night I was drawn into Yu-Atlanchi by her eyes? Well – of the reality of that first experience there cannot be the slightest doubt. I do not find the other more unbelievable than it.

“The cavern of the Face,” he went on, thoughtfully. “That I think was a laboratory of Nature, a gigantic crucible where under certain rays of light a natural transmutation of one element into another took place.

Within the rock, out of which the Face was carved, was some mineral which under these rays was transformed into gold. A purely chemical process of which our race itself is not far from learning the secret, as you know.

“The Face! I think that it was an afterthought of some genius of Yu-Atlanchi: He had taken the rock, worked upon it and symbolized so accurately man’s universal hunger for gold, that inevitably he who looked upon it responded to its call. The sub-consciousness, the consciousness, too, leaped out in response to what the Face portrayed with such tremendous power. In proportion to the strength of that hunger, so was the strength of the response. Like calls to like the world over.”

“But do you think that Soames and Sterrett and little Dancre really turned into gold?” I asked him.

“Frankly, of that I have my doubts,” he answered. “It looked so. But the whole -scene was so – well, so damnably devilish – that I can’t quite trust to my impressions of that. It is possible that something else occurred. Unquestionably the concentration of the rays on the region about the Face was terrific. Beneath the bombardment of those radiant particles of force – whatever they were – the bodies of the three may simply have disintegrated. The droplets of gold may have been oozing from the rock behind them and their position in the exact place where the three disappeared may also have been only a vivid coincidence.”

“That the flying serpents were visible in that light and not in normal light shows, I should think, that it must have been extraordinarily rich in the ultraviolet vibrations,” I suggested.

He nodded.

“Of course that was it,” he said. “Invisible in day or night light, it took the violet rays to record their outlines. They are probably a development of some form of flying saurian such as the ancient pterodactyls.”

He mused for a moment.

“But they must have possessed a high degree of intelligence,” he went on at last; “those serpents. Intelligence higher even than the dog – intelligence perhaps on a par with that of the elephant. The creature that struck me certainly recognized Suarra’s bracelet. It was that recognition which checked it, I am sure. It tried to stop its thrust, but it was too late to do more than divert it.

“And that is why I think I am going to find her,” he whispered.

“She wanted me to come back. She knew that I would. I think the bracelet is a talisman – or better still, a passport to carry me by the watchers, as she called them. It was not just as a remembrance that she gave it to me. No!”

“I will come back – and with her,” he told me on that day we clasped hands in farewell. I watched him until he and the little burro were hidden by the trees of the trail he must follow until he had reached the frontier of the haunted Cordillera, the gateway of those mysteries with which he had determined to grapple to wrest from them the maid he named Suarra.

But he has not come back.

— THE END —

Argosy All-Story Weekly, 8 Sep 1923

BURN, WITCH, BURN!

PART ONE

First terror, then horror, then diabolical glee marked those victims of a fate unknown to Science.

— I —

THE UNKNOWN DEATH

I am a medical man specializing in neurology and diseases of the brain. My peculiar field is abnormal psychology, and in that field I am recognized as an expert. I am closely connected with two of the foremost hospitals in New York. I have received many honors in this country and abroad, and one of my books upon schizoids – that is, disintegrated, or as it is loosely termed, multiple personalities – is an outstanding reference book for students of this phenomenon.

Lowell is not my real name; it is necessary that I appear in this recital under a pseudonym. Why this should be so will become increasingly apparent as my recital progresses. I call attention to my professional standing only because I wish to show that I was fully competent to observe, and am fully competent to bring clear scientific judgment upon, the occurrences to be set forth. The same necessity which causes me to conceal my name forces me to conceal that of the hospital where some of them took place.

Yet I have the strongest feeling that the facts which in my case-book are grouped under the heading of “The Dolls of Madame Mandilip” should be classified, set down in orderly sequence and made known. I could do this, of course, in a report to one of my medical societies. I am too well aware of the manner with which it would be received by my colleagues, and with what disapproving suspicion they would regard me; so many of the observations run counter to accepted mental pictures of cause and effect.

But may there not be other causes than those we now acknowledge? May there not be a wisdom, a science, immeasurably ancient and lost now to all but a few; a secret knowledge which has been carried down through the ages; not to be judged or measured by the standards of our present beliefs?

Enough of preamble. I begin where the dark wisdom, if that it was, first cast its shadow upon me.

•   •   •

The clock struck one as I walked up the hospital steps. Ordinarily I would have been in bed and asleep, but there was a case in which I was much interested, and Braile, my assistant, had telephoned me of certain developments which I wished to observe. It was a night in early November. I paused for a moment at the top of the steps to look at the brilliancy of the stars. As I did so, an automobile drew up at the entrance to the hospital.

The car was large and luxurious, of foreign make. As I stood, wondering what its arrival at that hour meant, a man slipped out. He looked sharply up and down the deserted street, then threw the door wide open. Another man emerged. The two of them stooped and seemed to be fumbling around inside. They straightened, and then I saw that they had locked their arms about the body of a third. They moved forward, not supporting but carrying this other man. His head hung upon his breast and his body swung limply as though he were only semi-conscious, or wholly unconscious, or dead. A fourth had stepped from the automobile and was following them closely.

As they approached I recognized this man in the rear as Julian Ricori, a notorious underworld chieftain, one of the finished products of the Prohibition law. He had been pointed out to me several times, but even if he had not been the newspapers would have made me familiar with his features and figure. Lean and long, with silvery white hair; always immaculately dressed; a leisured type from his outward seeming, rather than leader of such activities as those with which he was accused. I had been standing in the shadow, unnoticed. I stepped out. Instantly the burdened pair stopped, swiftly as hunting hounds. Their free hands dropped into the pockets of their coats. There was menace in that movement.

“I am Dr. Lowell,” I said hastily. “Connected with the hospital. Come right along.”

They did not answer; their gaze did not waver from me; nor did they move. Ricori stepped in front of them. His hands were also in his pockets. He looked me over, then nodded to the others; I felt the tension relax immediately.

“I know you, doctor,” he said pleasantly, in oddly precise English. “But that was quite a chance you took. If I might advise you, it is not well to move so quickly when those come whom you do not know, and at night – not in this town.”

“But,” I said, “I do know you, Mr. Ricori.”

“Then,” he smiled, faintly, “your judgment was doubly at fault. And my advice doubly pertinent.”

There was an awkward moment of silence. He broke it.

“And being who I am, I shall feel much better inside your doors than outside.”

•   •   •

I opened the doors. The two men passed through them with their burden, and after them Ricori and I. Once within, I gave way to my professional instincts and stepped up to the man the two were carrying. They shot a quick glance at Ricori. He nodded. I raised the man’s head.

A little shock went through me. The man’s eyes were wide open. He was neither dead nor unconscious. But upon his face was the most extraordinary expression of terror I had ever seen in a long experience with sane, insane and borderland cases. It was not undiluted terror. It was mixed with an equally disturbing horror. The eyes, blue and with distended pupils, were like exclamation points to the face. They stared up at me, through me and beyond me. And still they seemed to be looking inward – as though whatever nightmare vision they were seeing was, at the same time, both behind and before them.

“Exactly!” Ricori had been watching me closely. “Dr. Lowell, what could it be that my friend has seen – or has been given – that could make him appear so? I am most anxious to learn. I am willing to spend much money to learn. I wish him cured, yes, – but I will be frank with you, Dr. Lowell. I would give the last penny of what I have for certainty that those who did this to him could not do the same thing to me – could not make me as he is, could not make me see what he is seeing, or make me feel what he is feeling.”

At my signal, orderlies had come up. They took the patient and laid him on a stretcher. By this time the resident physician had appeared. Ricori touched my elbow.

“I know a great deal about you, Dr. Lowell,” he said. “I would like you to take full charge of the case.”

I considered this.

“Could you,” he went on – , “could you drop everything else? Spend every minute on this case? Bring in any others you wish to consul t – don’t think of expense – .”

“A moment, Mr. Ricori,” I broke in. “What you suggest is impossible. I have other patients who cannot be neglected. But I will give all the time I can spare, and so will my assistant, Dr. Braile. And your friend will be constantly under observation here by people who have my complete confidence. If you wish me to take the case under those conditions, I will.”

To that he acquiesced, though I could see he was not entirely satisfied. I had the patient taken to an isolated private room, and then went through the necessary hospital formalities.

Ricori gave the patient’s name as Thomas Peters, asserted that he knew of no close relatives, had himself recorded at Peters’s nearest friend, assumed all responsibility, and taking out a roll of currency skimmed a thousand dollar bill from it, passing it to the desk to defray the “preliminary costs.”

I asked Ricori if he would like to be present at my examination. He said that he would. He spoke to his two men, and they took positions at each side of the hospital doors; on guard. Ricori and I went to the room assigned Peters. The orderlies had stripped him, and he lay upon the adjustable cot, covered by a sheet. Braile, for whom I had sent, was bending over the patient, intent upon his eyes and plainly puzzled. I saw with satisfaction that Nurse Walters, an extraordinarily capable and conscientious young woman, had been assigned to the case. Braile looked up at me. He said:

“Obviously some drug.”

“Maybe,” I answered. “But if so – then a drug I have never encountered. Look at his eyes – .”

I closed Peters’s lids. As soon as I had lifted my fingers they began to rise, slowly, until they were again wide open. Several times I tried to shut them. Always they fluttered open, the terror, the horror in them, undiminished.

I began my examination. The entire body was limp, muscles and joints. It was as flaccid, the simile came to me, as a doll. It was as though every motor nerve had gone out of business. Yet there were none of the familiar symptoms of paralysis. Nor did the body respond to any sensory stimuli, although I struck down into the nerve trunks. The only reaction I could obtain was a slight contraction of the dilated pupils under strongest light.

•   •   •

Hoskins, the pathologist, came in to take his samples for blood tests. When he had drawn what he wanted, I went over the body minutely. I could find not a single puncture, wound, bruise or abrasion. Peters was hairy. With Ricori’s permission I had him shaved clean – chest, shoulders, legs, even the head. I found nothing to indicate that a drug might have been given him by hypodermic I had the stomach emptied and took specimens from the excretory organs, including the skin. I examined the membranes of nose and throat; they seemed healthy and normal, nevertheless I had smears taken from them. The blood pressure was low, the temperature slightly subnormal; but that might mean nothing. I gave an injection of adrenalin. There was absolutely no reaction from it. That might mean much.

“Poor devil,” I said to myself. “I’m going to try to kill that nightmare for you, at any rate.”

I gave him a minimum hypo of morphine. It might have been water for all the good it did. I gave him all I dared. His eyes remained open, terror and horror undiminished. And pulse and respiration unchanged!

Ricori had watched all these operations with intense interest. I had done all I could for the time, and told him so rather reluctantly.

“I can do no more,” I said, “until I receive the reports of the specimens. Frankly, I am at sea. I know of no disease nor drug which would produce conditions such as are present in this case.”

“But Dr. Braile,” he said, “mentioned a drug—”

“A suggestion only,” interposed Braile hastily. “Like Dr. Lowell, I know of no drug which would cause such symptoms.”

Ricori glanced at Peters’s face and shivered.

“Now,” I said, “I must ask you some questions. Has this man been ill? If so, has he been under medical care? If he has not actually been ill, has he spoken of any discomfort? Or have you noticed anything unusual in his manner or behavior?”

“No, to all questions,” he answered. “Peters has been in closest touch with me for the past week. He has not been ailing in the least. Tonight we were talking in my apartment and eating a late and light dinner. He was in high spirits. In the middle of a word, he stopped, half-turned his head as though listening; then slipped from his chair to the floor. When I bent over him he was as you see him now. That was precisely half after midnight. I brought him here at once.”

“Well,” I said, “that at least gives us the exact time of the seizure. There is no use of your remaining, Mr. Ricori, unless you wish.”

He studied his hands a few moments, rubbing the carefully manicured nails.

“Dr. Lowell,” he said at last, “if this man dies without your discovering what killed him, I shall pay you the customary fees and the hospital the customary charges and no more. If he dies and you make this discovery after his death, I will give a hundred thousand dollars to any charity you name. But if you make the discovery before he dies, and restore him to health – I will give you the same sum.”

We stared at him, and then as the significance of this remarkable offer sank in, I found it hard to curb my anger.

“Ricori,” I said, “you and I live in different worlds, therefore I answer you politely although I find it difficult. I will do all in my power to find out what is the matter with your friend and to cure him. I would do that if he and you were paupers. I am interested in him only as a problem which challenges me as a physician. It challenges me so strongly that I expect to devote myself solely to him for an indefinite number of hours. But I am not interested in you in the slightest. Nor in your money. Nor in your offer. Consider it definitely rejected. Do you thoroughly understand that?”

To my astonishment he betrayed no resentment.

“So much so that more than ever I wish you to take full charge,” he said.

“Very well. Now where can I get you if I want to bring you here quickly?”

“With your permission,” he answered, “I should like to have – well, representatives in this room at all times. There will be two of them. If you want me, tell them – and I will soon be here.”

I laughed at that, but he did not.

“You have reminded me,” he said, “that we live in different worlds. You take your precautions to go safely in your world – and I order my life to minimize the perils of mine. Not for a moment would I presume to advise you how to walk among the dangers of your laboratory, Dr. Lowell. I have the counterparts of those dangers. Bene – I guard against them as best I can.”

It was a most irregular request, of course. But I found myself close to liking Ricori just then, and saw clearly his point of view. He knew that and pressed the advantage.

“The men will be no bother,” he said. “They will not interfere in any way with you. They will not speak unless they are spoken to. If what I suspect to be true is true, they will be a protection for you and your aids as well. But they, and those who relieve them, must stay in the room night and day. If Peters is taken from the room they must accompany him – no matter where it is that he is taken.”

“I can arrange it,” I said. Then, at his request, I sent an orderly down to the doors. He returned with one of the men Ricori had left on guard. Ricori whispered to him, and he went out. In a little while two other men came up. In the meantime I had explained the peculiar situation to the resident and the superintendent and secured the necessary permission for their stay. The two men were well dressed and polite, and of a singularly tight lipped and cold eyed alertness. I looked at Ricori and smiled.

“What amuses you, doctor?” he asked.

“I’m thinking that our guests are as expert with a gun as I with a scalpel,” I answered bluntly.

“Your world and mine,” he murmured. One of the men shot a glance at Peters.

“Lord!” he muttered. His face whitened—

The room was a corner one with two windows, one opening out on the Drive, the other on the side street. Besides these there were no outer openings except the door to the hall; the private bathroom being inclosed and having no windows. Ricori and the two inspected the room minutely, keeping away, I noticed, from the windows.

He asked me then if the room could be darkened. Much interested, I nodded.

The lights being turned off, the three went to the windows, opened them and carefully scrutinized the six-story sheer drop to both streets. On the side of the Drive there was nothing but the open space above the park. On the other was a church.

“It is at this side you must watch,” I heard Ricori say; he pointed to the church. “You can turn the lights on now, doctor.”

He started toward the door, then turned and held out his hand. I took it and shook it heartily.

“I’ll do the best I can, Ricori, and I’ll call in the best to help.”

He nodded.

“I have many enemies, Dr. Lowell. Peters was my right hand. If it was one of these enemies who struck him, he did it to weaken me. Or perhaps because he had not the opportunity to strike at me. I look at Peters, and for the first time in my life I, Ricori, am afraid. I have no wish to be the next. I have no wish to – look into hell!”

I grunted at that; he had put so aptly what I had felt and had not formulated into words. He looked sharply at me.

“Taken by the nape of the neck like a puppy and my face thrust through a window of hell!” he said.

He dropped my hand. He started to open the door. He hesitated.

“One thing more. If there should be any telephone calls inquiring as to Peters’s condition, let one of these men, or their reliefs, answer. If any should come in person making inquiry, allow them to come up – but if there are more than one let only one come at a time. If any should appear asserting that they are relatives, again let these men meet and question them.”

By this time I had made up my mind to carry on the matter in what I might call full partnership with this meticulously spoken, meticulously mannered leader of what is termed the underworld. I was not only singularly interested, I was singularly fascinated.

“Ricori,” I held out my hand again, impulsively, “I’ll do all I can for you.”

He gripped my hand, then opened the door of the room. Another pair of the efficient appearing retainers were awaiting him at the threshold. They swung in before and behind him. As he walked away I saw that he was crossing himself, vigorously.

I closed the door and went back into the room. I looked down on Peters.

If I had been religious, I too would have been doing some crossing. The expression on his face had changed. The terror and horror were gone. He still seemed to be looking both beyond me and into himself, but it was a look of evil expectancy – so evil that involuntarily I shot a glance over my shoulder to see what ugly thing might be creeping upon me.

There was nothing. One of Ricori’s gunmen sat in the corner of the window, in the shadow, watching the parapet of the church roof opposite; the other sat stolidly at the door.

Braile and Nurse Walters were at the other side of the bed. Their eyes were fixed with a horrified fascination on Peters’s face. And then I saw Braile turn his head and stare about the room – as I had.

Suddenly Peters’s eyes seemed to focus; to become aware of the three of us; to become aware of the whole room. They flashed with an unholy glee. That glee was not maniacal – it was diabolical. That is the only word for it – diabolical. It was the look of a devil long exiled from his well-beloved hell, and suddenly summoned to return. Or was it like the glee of some devil sent hurtling out of his hell to work his will upon whom he might? Very well do I know how fantastic, how utterly unscientific, are such comparisons. Yet not otherwise can I describe the strange change that occurred.

Then, abruptly as the closing of a camera shutter, that expression fled and the old terror and horror came back. I gave an involuntary gasp of relief, for it was precisely as though some evil presence had withdrawn. The nurse was trembling; Braile said to me in rather a strained voice:

“How about another hypodermic?”

“No,” I said. “I want to study the progress of this – whatever it is. I’m going down to the laboratory. Watch him closely until I return.”

I went down to the laboratory. Hoskins looked up at me.

“Nothing wrong, so far. Remarkable health, I’d say. Of course all I’ve results on are the simpler tests.”

I nodded. I had an uncomfortable feeling that the other tests would show nothing either. And I had been more shaken than I would have cared to confess by those alternations of hellish fear, hellish expectancy and hellish glee in Peters’s face and eyes. The whole case troubled me; gave me a nightmarish feeling of standing outside some door which it was vitally important to open, and to which not only did I have no key but couldn’t find the keyhole. I have found that concentration upon microscopic work often permits me to think more freely upon problems. So I took a few smears of Peters’s blood and began to study them, not with any expectation of finding anything, but in order to relieve the tension from another part of my brain.

I was on my fourth slide when suddenly, with a distinct shock, I realized that I was looking at the incredible. As I perfunctorily moved the slide, a white corpuscle slid into the field of vision. Within that corpuscle was a spark of phosphorescence, shining out like a tiny lamp! I thought at first that it was some effect of the light, but no manipulation of the illumination changed that spark. I rubbed my eyes and looked again. I called Hoskins.

“Tell me if you see something peculiar in there.”

He peered into the microscope; I saw him start, then shift the light as I had.

“What do you see, Hoskins?” He said, still staring through the lens:

“A leukocyte, inside of which is what seems like a globe of phosphorescence. Its glow is neither dimmed when I turn on the full illumination, nor is it increased when I lessen it. In all except the ingested globe the corpuscle seems normal.”

“And all of which,” I said, “is quite impossible.”

“Quite,” he agreed, straightening. “.Yet there it is!”

Hastily, I transferred the slide to the micro-manipulator, hoping to isolate the corpuscle, and set my eyes again to the lens. Luck was with me. I found the corpuscle and touched it with the tip of the manipulating needle. At that instant of contact the corpuscle seemed to burst. The globe of phosphorescence appeared to flatten, and something like a miniature flash of heat-lightning ran over the visible portion of the slide. And that was all – the phosphorescence was gone.

We prepared and examined slide after slide. Twice more we found the lights, and each time with the same result. The bursting corpuscle, the strange flicker of faint luminosity – then nothing.

The laboratory phone rang. Hoskins answered.

“It’s Braile. He wants you – quick.”

“Keep after it Hoskins,” I said, and hastened to Peters’s room. Entering, I saw Nurse Walters, face chalk-white, eyes closed, standing with her back turned to the bed. Braile was leaning over the patient, stethoscope to his heart. I looked at Peters, and stood stock still, something like a touch of unreasoning panic at my own heart.

Upon his face was that look of devilish expectancy, but intensified. As I looked it gave way to the diabolic joy, and that, too, was intensified. The face held it for not many seconds. Back came the expectancy – then on its heels once more the unholy glee. The two expressions alternated, rapidly. They flickered over Peters’s face like – like the flickers of the tiny lights within the corpuscles of his blood – Braile spoke to me through stiff lips: “His heart stopped three minutes ago. He ought to be dead – – yet look—!”

The body of Peters stretched and stiffened. A sound came from his lips – a chuckling sound; low yet singularly penetrating, inhuman, the chattering laughter of a devil. The gunman at the window leaped to his feet, his chair going over with a crash. The laughter choked and died away, and the body of Peters lay limp.

I heard the door open, and Ricori’s voice:

“How is he, Dr. Lowell? I could not sleep—”

He saw Peters’s face.

“Mother of the Savior!” I heard him whisper, and saw him drop to his knees.

I saw him dimly – for I could not take my eyes from Peters’s face. It was the face of a grinning, triumphant fiend – all humanity wiped from it – the face of a demon straight out of some mad medieval painter’s hell. The blue eyes, now utterly malignant, glared at Ricori.

And as I looked, the dead hands moved; slowly the arms bent up from the elbows, the fingers contracting like claws; the dead body itself began to stir beneath the covers—

At that the spell of nightmare dropped from me; for the first time in hours I was on ground that I knew. It was the rigor mortis, the stiffening of death – but setting in more quickly and proceeding at a rate I had never known.

I stepped forward and drew the lids down over the glaring eyes, covering the dreadful face.

I looked at Ricori. He was still on his knees, crossing himself and praying. And kneeling beside him, arm around his shoulders, was Nurse Walters, and she, too, was praying.

Somewhere a clock struck five.

— II —

THE QUESTIONNAIRE

I offered to go home with Ricori, and somewhat to my surprise he accepted with alacrity. The man was pitiably shaken. We rode silently, the tight-lipped gunmen alert. Peters’s face kept floating before me.

I gave Ricori a strong sedative, and left him sleeping, his men on guard. I had told him that I meant to make a complete autopsy.

Returning to the hospital in his car, I found the body of Peters had been taken to the mortuary. Rigor mortis, Braile told me, had been complete in less than an hour – an astonishingly short time. I made the necessary arrangements for the autopsy, and took Braile home with me to snatch a few hours’ sleep. It is difficult to convey by words the peculiarly unpleasant impression the whole occurrence had made upon me. I can only say that I was as grateful for Braile’s company as he seemed to be for mine-

When I awoke the impression still lingered, though not so strongly. It was about two when we began the autopsy. I lifted the sheet from Peters’s body with noticeable hesitation. I stared at his face with amazement. All diabolism had been wiped away. It was serene, unlined – the face of a man who had died peacefully, with no agony either of body or mind. I lifted his hand. It was limp, the whole body flaccid, the rigor gone.

It was then, I think, that I first felt full conviction I was dealing with an entirely new, or at least unknown, agency of death, whether microbic or otherwise.

As a rule, the rigor mortis does not set in until sixteen to twenty-four hours, depending upon the condition of the patient before death, temperature and a dozen other things. Normally, it does not disappear for forty-eight to seventy-two hours. Usually a rapid setting-in of the stiffening means as rapid a disappearance, and vice versa. Diabetics stiffen quicker than others. A swift brain injury, like shooting, is even swifter.

In this case, the rigor had begun instantaneously with death, and must have completed its cycle in the astonishingly short time of less than five hours – for the attendant told me that he had examined the body about ten o’clock and he had thought that stiffening had not yet set in. The face was then as now. He had no knowledge of the case, and had not seen that face as we had when Peters had died.

The results of the autopsy can be told in two sentences. There was no ascertainable reason why Peters should not be alive. And he was dead.

Later, when Hoskins made his reports, both of these utterly conflicting statements continued to be true. There was no reason why Peters should be dead. Yet dead he was. If the enigmatic lights we had observed had anything to do with his death, they left no traces. His organs were perfect, all else as it should have been, indeed an extraordinarily healthy specimen. Nor had Hoskins been able to capture any more of the light-carrying corpuscles after I had left him.

•   •   •

That night I framed a short letter describing briefly the symptoms observed in Peters’s case, not dwelling upon the changes in expression but referring cautiously to “unusual grimaces” and a “look of intense fear.” Braile and I had this manifolded and mailed to every physician in Greater New York. I personally attended to a quiet inquiry to the same effect among the hospitals. The letters asked if the physicians had treated any patients with similar symptoms, and if so to give particulars, names, addresses, occupations and any characteristic interest under seal, of course, of professional confidence. J flattered myself that my reputation was such that none of those who received the questionnaires would think the request actuated either by idle curiosity or slightest unethical motive.

I received in response seven letters and a personal visit from the writer of one of them. Each letter, except one, gave me in various degrees of medical conservatism the information I had asked. After reading them, there was no question that within six months seven persons of oddly dissimilar characteristics and stations in life had died as had Peters.

Chronologically, the cases were as follows:

May 25; Ruth Bailey, spinster; fifty years old; moderately wealthy; Social Register and best of reputation; charitable and devoted to children.

June 20; Patrick McIlraine; bricklayer; wife and two children.

August 1; Anita Green; child of eleven; parents in moderate circumstances and well educated.

August 15; Steve Standish; acrobat; thirty; wife and three children.

August 30; John J. Marshall; sixty; banker; interested in child welfare.

September 10; Phineas Dimott; thirty-five; trapeze performer; wife and small child.

October 12; Hortense Darnley; about thirty; no occupation.

Their addresses, except two, were widely scattered throughout the city.

Each of the letters noted the sudden onset of rigor mortis and its rapid passing. Each of them gave the time of death following the initial seizure as approximately five hours. Five of them referred to the changing expressions which had so troubled me; in the guarded way they did it I read their bewilderment.

“Patient’s eyes remained open,” recorded the physician in charge of spinster Bailey. “Staring, but gave no sign of recognition of surroundings and failed to focus upon or present any evidence of seeing objects held before them. Expression one of intense terror, giving away toward death to others peculiarly disquieting to observer. The latter intensified after death ensued. rigor mortis complete and dissipated within five hours.”

The physician in charge of McIlraine, the bricklayer, had nothing to say about the ante-mortem phenomena, but wrote at some length about the expression of the face after death.

“It had,” he reported, “nothing in common with the staring eyes and gaping mouth of the so-called ‘Hippocratic countenance,’ nor was it in any way the muscular contraction familiarly known as the death grin. There was no suggestion of agony – rather the opposite. I would term the expression one of unusual malice.”

The report of the physician who had attended Standish, the acrobat, was perfunctory, but it mentioned that “after patient had apparently died, singularly disagreeable sounds emanated from his throat.” I wondered whether these had been the same demonic cachinnations that had come from Peters, and if so I could not wonder at all at my correspondent’s reticence concerning them.

I knew the physician who had attended the banker – opinionated, pompous, a perfect doctor of the very rich.

“There can be no mystery as to the cause of death,” he wrote. “It was certainly thrombosis, a clot somewhere in the brain. I attach no importance whatever to the facial grimaces, nor to the time element involved in the rigor. You know, my dear Lowell,” he added, patronizingly, “it is an axiom in forensic medicine that one can prove anything by rigor mortis.”

I would have liked to have replied that when in doubt thrombosis as a diagnosis was equally as useful in covering the ignorance of practitioners, but it would not have punctured his complacency.

The Dimott report was a simple record with no comment whatever upon grimaces or sounds.

But the doctor who had attended little Anita had not been so reticent. “The child,” he wrote, “had been beautiful. She seemed to suffer no pain, but at the onset of the illness I was shocked by the intensity of terror in her fixed gaze. It was like a waking nightmare – for unquestionably she was conscious until death. Morphine in almost lethal dosage produced no change in this symptom, nor did it seem to have any effect upon heart or respiration. Later the terror disappeared, giving way to other emotions which I hesitate to describe in this report, but will do so in person if you desire. The aspect of the child after death was peculiarly disturbing, but again I would rather speak than write of that.”

There was a hastily scrawled postscript; I could see him hesitating, then giving way at last to the necessity of unburdening his mind, dashing off that postscript and rushing the letter away before he could reconsider—

“I have written that the child was conscious until death. What haunts me most is the conviction that she was conscious after physical death! Let me talk to you.”

I nodded with satisfaction. I had not dared to put that observation down in my questionnaire. And if it had been true of the other cases, as I now believed it must have been, all the doctors except Standish’s had shared my conservatism – or timidity. I called little Anita’s physician upon the phone at once. He was strongly perturbed. In every detail his case had paralleled that of Peters. He kept repeating over and over:

“The child was sweet and good as an angel, and she changed into a devil!”

I promised to keep him apprised of any discoveries I might make, and shortly after our conversation received the visit of the young physician who had attended Hortense Darnley. Dr. Y – , as I shall call him, had nothing to add to the medical aspect other than what I already knew, but his talk suggested the first practical line of approach toward the problem. His office was in the apartment house which had been Hortense Darnley’s home. He had been working late, and had been summoned to her apartment about ten o’clock by the woman’s maid, a colored girl. He had found the patient lying upon her bed, and had at once been struck by the expression of terror on her face and the extraordinary limpness of her body. He described her as blond, blue-eyed – “the doll type.”

A man was in the apartment. He had at first evaded giving his name, saying that he was merely a friend. At first glance, Dr. Y – had thought the woman had been subjected to some violence, but examination revealed no bruises or other injuries. The “friend” had told him they had been eating dinner when “Miss Darnley flopped right down on the floor as though all her bones had gone soft, and we couldn’t get anything out of her.” The maid confirmed this.

There was a half-eaten dinner on the table, and both man and servant declared Hortense had been in the best of spirits. There had been no quarrel.

Reluctantly, the “friend” had admitted that the seizure had occurred three hours before, and that they had tried to “bring her about” themselves, calling upon him only when the alternating expressions which I have referred to in the case of Peters began to appear.

As the seizure progressed, the maid had become hysterical with fright and fled. The man was of tougher timber and had remained until the end. He had been much shaken, as had Dr. Y – , by the after-death phenomena. Upon the physician declaring that the case was one for the coroner, he had lost his reticence, volunteering his name as James Martin, and expressing himself as eager for a complete autopsy. He was quite frank as to his reasons. The Darnley woman had been his mistress, and he “had enough trouble without her death pinned to him.” Dr. Y – had gathered that he was an underworld character of some sort, and known to the police.

At any rate, there had been a thorough autopsy. No trace of disease or poison had been found. Beyond a slight valvular trouble of the heart, Hortense Darnley had been perfectly healthy. The verdict had been death by heart disease; but Dr. Y – was perfectly convinced the heart had nothing to do with it.

It was, of course, quite obvious that Hortense Darnley had died from the same cause or agency as had all the others. But to me the outstanding fact was that her apartment had been within a stone’s throw of the address Ricori had given me as that of Peters! Furthermore, Martin was of the same world, if Dr. Y——’s impressions were correct. Here was conceivably a link between two of the cases – missing in the others. I determined to call in Ricori and lay all the cards before him, enlist his aid if possible.

My investigation had consumed about two weeks. During that time I had become well acquainted with Ricori. For one thing, he interested me immensely as a product of present-day conditions; for another, I liked him despite his reputation. He was remarkably well read, of a high grade of totally unmoral intelligence, subtle and superstitious – hi olden time he would probably have been a captain of condottieri, his wits and sword for hire.

I wondered about his antecedents. He had paid me several visits since the death of Peters, and quite plainly liked me. On these visits he was guarded by the tight-lipped man who had watched by the hospital window. This man’s name, I learned, was McCann. He was Ricori’s most trusted bodyguard, apparently wholly devoted to his white-haired chief. He was an interesting character too, and quite approved of me. He was a drawling Southerner who had been, as he put it, “a cow-nurse down Arizona way, and got too popular on the Border.”

“I’m for you, doc,” he told me. “You’re sure good for the boss. Sort of take his mind off business. An’ when I come here I can keep my hands outa my pockets. Any time anybody’s cuttin’ in on your cattle, let me know. I’ll ask the boss for a day off.”

Then he remarked casually that he “could ring a quarter with six holes at a hundred foot range.”

I did not know whether this was meant humorously or seriously. At any rate, Ricori never went anywhere without him, and it showed me how much he had thought of Peters that he had left McCann to guard him.

I told Braile what I was going to do, got in touch with Ricori and asked him to take dinner with Braile and me that night at my house. At seven he arrived, telling his chauffeur to return at ten. We sat at table, with McCann, as usual, on watch in my hall, thrilling, I knew, my two night nurses – I have a small private hospital adjunct – by playing the part of gunman as conceived by the motion pictures.

Dinner over, I dismissed the butler and came to the point. I told Ricori of my questionnaire, remarking that by it I had unearthed seven cases similar to that of Peters.

“You can dismiss from your mind any idea that Peters’s death was due to his connection with you, Ricori,” I said. “With one possible exception, none of the seven persons involved belong to what you have called your world. I f that one exception does touch your sphere of activity, it does not alter the absolute certainty that you are not involved in any way. Did you know, or ever hear of, a woman named Hortense Darnley?”

He shook his head.

“She lived,” I said, “practically opposite the address you gave me for Peters.”

“But Peters did not live at that address.” He smiled, half apologetically. “You see, I did not know you then as well as now.”

That, I admit, set me back somewhat.

“Well,” I went on, “do you know a man named Martin?”

“Yes,” he said, “I do. In fact I know several Martins. Can you describe the one you mean – or do you know his first name?”

“William,” I replied.

Again he shook his head, frowning darkly.

I A 22

“McCann may know,” he said at last. “Will you call him, Dr. Lowell?”

•   •   •

I summoned the butler, and sent for McCann.

“McCann,” asked Ricori, “do you know a woman called Hortense Darnley?”

“Sure,” answered McCann. “A blond doll – she’s ‘Butch’ Martin’s gal. He took her from the Vanities.”

“Did Peters know her?” I asked. “Yeah,” said McCann, “sure he did. She knew Mollie – you know, boss – Peters’s kid sister. Mollie quit the Follies about three years ago and he met Horty at Mollie’s. Horty an’ him were both daffy over Mollie’s kid. He told me so. But Tom was never gay with her, if that’s what you mean.”

I looked sharply at Ricori, remembering distinctly that he had told me Peters had no living relatives. He did not seem in the least disconcerted. “Where’s Martin now, McCann?”

“Up in Canada, the last I heard of him,” answered McCann. “Want me to find out?”

“I’ll let you know later,” said Ricori, and McCann went back to the hall.

“Is Martin one of your friends or foes?” I asked.

“Neither,” he answered.

I sat silent for a few moments, revolving McCann’s surprising information in my mind. The connection that I had vaguely looked for in my assumed proximity of Peters’s and the woman’s dwelling places had been shattered by his betrayal of Ricori’s duplicity. But he had put in its place a stronger link. Hortense Darnley had died October 12 – Peters on November 10. When had Peters last seen the woman? If the mysterious malady was caused by some unknown organism, no one, of course, could tell what its period of incubation might be. Had Peters been infected by her?

“Ricori,” I said, “twice tonight I have learned that you misled me as to Peters. I’m going to forget it, because I don’t believe you’ll do it again. And I’m going to trust you, even to the extent of breaking professional confidence. Read these letters.”

I passed him the answers to my questionnaire. He went over them in silence. When he had finished I recounted all that Dr. Y – had told me of the Darnley case. I told him in detail of the autopsies, including the tiny globes of radiance in the blood of Peters.

At that his face grew white, he crossed himself.

“La strega!” he muttered. “The Witch! The Witch-fire!”

“Nonsense, man!” I said. “Forget your damned superstitions! I want help.”

“You are scientifically ignorant! There are some things, Dr. Lowell—” he began, hotly, then controlled himself.

“What is it you want me to do?”

“First,” I said, “let’s go over these eight cases, analyze them. Braile, have you come to any conclusions?”

“Yes,” Braile answered. “I think the whole eight were murdered!”

— III —

NURSE WALTERS

That Braile had voiced the thought lurking behind my own mind – and without a shred of evidence, so far as I could see, to support it – irritated me.

“You’re a better man than I am, Sherlock Holmes,” I said sarcastically. He flushed, but repeated stubbornly:

“They were murdered.”

“La strega!” whispered Ricori. I glared at him.

“Quit beating around the bush, Braile. What’s your evidence?”

“You were away from Peters almost two hours. I was with him practically from start to finish. As I studied him, I had the feeling that the whole trouble was in the mind – that it was not his body, his nerves, his brain, that refused to function, but his will. Not quite that, either. Put it that his will had ceased to care about the functions of the body – and was centered upon killing it!”

“What you’re outlining now is not murder but suicide. Well, it has been done. I’ve watched a few die because they had lost the will to live—”

“I don’t mean that,” he interrupted. “That’s passive. This is active—”

“Good Lord, Braile!” I was honestly shocked. “Don’t tell me you’re suggesting the whole eight passed out of the picture by willing themselves out of it – and one of them only an eleven-year-old child!”

“I didn’t say that,” he replied. “What I felt was that it was not primarily Peters’s own will doing it, but another’s will which had gripped his, had wound itself around, threaded itself through his will. Another’s will which he could not or did not want to resist – at least toward the end.”

“La maledetta strega!” muttered Ricori again.

I curbed my irritation and sat considering; after all, I had a wholesome respect for Braile. He was too good a man, too sound, for one to ride roughshod over any theory he might voice.

“Have you any idea as to how these murders, if murders they are, were carried out?” I asked, politely.

“Not the slightest,” said Braile.

“Let’s consider the murder theory. Ricori, you have had more experience in this line than we, so listen carefully and forget your witch,” I said, brutally enough. “There are three essential factors to any murder – method, opportunity, motive. Take them in order. First – the method.

“There are three ways a person can be killed by poison or by infection – through the nose, and this includes by gases – through the mouth, and through the skin. There are two or three other avenues. Hamlet’s father, for example, was poisoned, we read, through the ear, although I’ve always had my doubts about that. I think pursuing the hypothesis of murder, we can bar out all approaches except mouth, nose, skin – and, by the last, entrance to the blood can be accomplished by absorption as well as by penetration. Was there any evidence whatever – on the skin, in the membranes of the respiratory channels, in the throat, in the other viscera, stomach, blood, nerves, brain – of anything of the sort?”

“You know there wasn’t,” he answered.

“Quite so. Then except for the problematical lighted corpuscle, there is absolutely no evidence of method. Therefore we have absolutely nothing in essential number one upon which to base a theory of murder. Let’s take number two – opportunity.

“We have a tarnished lady, a racketeer, a respectable spinster, a bricklayer, an eleven-year-old schoolgirl, a banker, an acrobat and a trapeze performer. There, I submit, is about as incongruous a congregation as is possible. So far as we can tell, none of them except conceivably the circus men – and Peters and the Darnley woman – had anything in common.

“How could anyone who had opportunity to come in close enough contact to Peters the racketeer to kill him have equal opportunity to come in similar close contact with Ruth Bailey, the Social Register maiden-lady? How could one who found a way to make contact with banker Marshall come equally close to acrobat Standish? And so on – you perceive the difficulty? To administer whatever it was that caused the deaths – if they were murder – would be no casual matter. It implies a certain degree o f intimacy. You agree?”

“Partly,” he conceded.

“Had they all lived in the same neighborhood, we might assume that they might normally have come within range of the hypothetical killer. But they did not—”

“Pardon me, Dr. Lowell,” Ricori interrupted, “but suppose they had some common interest which brought them within that range.”

“What possible common interest could so divergent a group have had?”

“One common interest is very plainly indicated in these reports and in what McCann told us.”

“What do you mean, Ricori?”

“Babies,” he answered. “Or at least – children.”

•   •   •

Braile nodded. “I noticed that.”

“Consider the reports,” Ricori went on. “Miss Bailey is described as charitable and devoted to children. Her charities, presumably, took the form of helping them. Marshall, the banker, was interested in child welfare. The bricklayer, the acrobat and the trapeze performer had children. Anita was a child. Peters and the Darnley woman were, to use McCann’s expression, ‘daffy’ over a baby.”

“But,” I objected, “if they are murders, they are the work of one hand. It is beyond the range of possibility that all of the eight were interested in one baby, one child, or one group of children.”

“Very true,” said Braile. “But all could have been interested in one especial, peculiar thing which they believed would be of benefit to or would delight the child or children to whom each was devoted. And that peculiar article might be obtainable in only one place. If we could find that this is the fact, then certainly that place would bear investigation.”

“It is,” I said, “undeniably worth looking into. Yet it seems to me that the common interest idea works two ways. The homes of those who died might have had something of common interest to an individual. The murderer, for example, might be a radio adjuster. Or a plumber. Or a collector. An electrician. And so on and so on.”

Braile shrugged a shoulder. Ricori did not answer; he sat deep in thought, as though he had not heard me.

“Please listen, Ricori,” I said. “We’ve gotten this far. Method of murder – if it is murder – unknown. Opportunity for killing – find some person whose business, profession or whatnot was a matter of interest to each of the eight, and whom they visited or who visited them; said business being concerned possibly, in some way with babies or older children. Now for motive. Revenge, gain, love, hate, jealousy, self-protection? – None of these seems to fit, for again we come to that barrier of dissimilar stations in life.”

“How about the satisfaction of an appetite for death – wouldn’t you call that a motive?” asked Braile, oddly.

Ricori half rose from his chair, stared at him with a curious intentness, then sank back. I noticed he was now all alert.

“I was about to discuss the possibility of a homicidal maniac,” I said, somewhat testily.

“That’s not exactly what I mean. You remember Longfellow’s lines:

“I shot an arrow into the air,

It fell to earth I know not where.”

“I’ve never acquiesced in the idea that was an inspired bit of verse meaning the sending of an argosy to some unknown port and getting it back with a surprise cargo of ivory and peacocks, apes and precious jewels. There are some people who can’t stand at a window high above a busy street, or on top of a skyscraper without wanting to throw something down.

“They get a thrill in wondering who or what will be hit. The thrill is in the safety of the thrower as well as in the uncertainty. And also the feeling of power.

“It’s just a bit like being God and loosing the pestilence upon the just and the unjust alike. Longfellow must have been one of those people. In his heart, he wanted to shoot a real arrow and then mull over in his imagination whether it had dropped in somebody’s eye, hit a heart, or just missed someone and skewered a stray dog. Carry this on a little further.

“Give one of these people power and opportunity to loose death at random, death whose cause he is sure cannot be detected. He sits in his obscurity, in safety, a god of death. With no special malice against anyone, perhaps – impersonal, just shooting his arrows in the air, like Longfellow’s archer, for the fun of it.”

“And you wouldn’t call such a person a homicidal maniac?” I asked, dryly.

He shook his head. “Not necessarily. Merely free of inhibitions against killing. He might have no consciousness of evil whatever. Everybody comes into this world under sentence of death – time and method of execution unknown. Well, this killer might consider himself as natural as death itself. No one who believes that things on earth are run by an all-wise, all-powerful God thinks of Him as a homicidal maniac. Yet he looses wars, pestilences, misery, disease, floods, earthquakes – on believers and unbelievers alike. If you believe things are in the hands of what is vaguely termed Fate – would you call Fate a homicidal maniac?”

“Your hypothetical archer,” I said, “looses a singularly unpleasant arrow. Also the discussion is growing far too metaphysical for a simple scientist like me. Ricori, I can’t lay this matter before the police. They would listen politely and laugh heartily after I had gone. If I told all that is in my mind to the medical authorities, they would deplore the decadence of a hitherto honored intellect. And I would rather not call in any private detective agency to pursue inquiries.”

“What do you want me to do?” he asked.

“You have unusual resources,” I answered. “I want you to sift every movement of Peters and Hortense Darnley for the last two months. I want you to do all that is possible in the same way with all the others—”

I hesitated.

“I want you to find that one place to which, because of their love for children, each of these unfortunates were drawn. For though my reason tells me you and Braile have not the slightest real evidence upon which to base your suspicions, I grudgingly admit that I have a feeling you may be right.”

“You progress, Dr. Lowell,” Ricori laughed. “I predict that it will not be long before you will as grudgingly admit the possibility of my witch.”

“I am sufficiently abased,” I replied, “by my present credulity not to deny even that.”

Ricori laughed again, and busied himself copying the essential information from the reports. Ten o’clock struck. McCann came up to say that the car was waiting and we accompanied Ricori to the door. The gunman had stepped out and was on the steps when a thought came to me.

“Where do you begin, Ricori?”

“With Peters’s sister. I go there now.”

“Does she know Peters is dead?”

“No,” he answered, reluctantly. “She thinks him away. He is often away for long, and for reasons which she understands he is not able to communicate with her directly. At such times I keep her informed. And the reason is because she dearly loved him and would be in much sorrow.”

“Does she know the Darnley woman is dead, I wonder?”

“I do not know. Probably. Although McCann evidently does not.”

“Well,” I said, “I don’t see how you’re going to keep Peters’s death from her now. But that’s your business.”

“Exactly,” he answered, and followed McCann to the car.

Braile and I had hardly gotten back to my library when the telephone rang. Braile answered it. I heard him curse, and saw that the hand that held the transmitter was shaking. He said: “We will come at once.”

He set the transmitter down slowly; then turned to me with twitching face.

“Nurse Walters has it!”

I felt a distinct shock. As I have said, Walters was a perfect nurse, and besides that a thoroughly good and attractive young woman. A pure Gaelic type – blue-black hair, blue eyes with astonishingly long lashes, milk-white skin – yes, singularly attractive. After a moment or two of silence I said:

“Well, Braile, there goes all our fine-spun reasoning. Also your murder theory. From the Darnley woman to Peters to Walters. No doubt now that it’s some infectious disease.”

“Isn’t there?” he asked grimly. “I’m not prepared to admit it. I happen to know Walters spends most of her money on a little invalid niece who lives with her – a child of five. Ricori’s thread of common interest moves into her case.”

“Nevertheless,” I said as grimly, “I intend to see that every precaution is taken against a dangerously infectious malady.”

By the time we had put on our hats and coats my car was waiting. The hospital was only two blocks away, but I did not wish to waste a moment. I ordered Nurse Walters removed to an isolated ward used for observation of suspicious diseases. Examining her, I found the same flaccidity as I had noted in the case of Peters. But I observed that, unlike him, her eyes and face were devoid of terror. Horror there was, and a great loathing. Nothing of panic. She gave me the same impression of seeing both within and without. As I studied her, I distinctly saw a flash of recognition come into her eyes, and with it appeal. I looked at Braile – he nodded, he, too, had seen it.

I went over her body inch by inch. It was unmarked except for a pinkish patch upon her right instep. Closer examination made me think this had been some superficial injury such as a chafing, or a light burn or scald. If so, it had completely healed, the new skin healthy.

In all other ways her case paralleled that of Peters – and the others. She had collapsed, the nurse told me, without warning while getting dressed to go home. My inquiry was interrupted by an exclamation from Braile. I turned to the bed and saw that Walters’ hand was slowly lifting, trembling as though its raising was by some terrific strain of will. The index finger was half pointing. I followed its direction to the discolored patch upon the foot. And then I saw her eyes, by that same tremendous effort, focus there.

The strain was too great; the hand dropped, the eyes again were pools of horror. Yet clearly she had tried to convey to me some message, something that had to do with that healed wound.

PART TWO

Could Dr. Lowell’s science solve the ghastly secret that lay behind those fiend-ridden faces?

LEADING UP TO
THIS INSTALLMENT

Dr. Lowell, who is telling the story, first encountered the mysterious, diabolical form of death one evening when Julian Ricori, suave New York underworld king, brought Thomas Peters, one of his underlings, to the doctor for treatment. Dr. Lowell, one of the leading nerve and mental specialists of the country (the name is not his real one, for good reasons), is on the staff of one of New York’s leading hospitals. Yet he is completely baffled by the case of Thomas Peters.

According to Ricori, Peters became suddenly unconscious. His eyes are wide open, staring with terror, then horror. A diabolical, fiendish look comes into them and he dies without regaining consciousness. Dr. Lowell and his assistant, Dr. Braile, find absolutely nothing that could have caused death. Only one unnatural phenomenon is revealed – a white corpuscle of Peters’s blood glows with a faint luminosity – something unheard of to Science.

Discreet inquiry by Dr. Lowell reveals that seven persons in the city have already died in this same strange manner – into all of their countenances came the bestial look just before death, “as though something within them was urging their own death,” as Dr. Braile puts it.

Ricori, the intelligent, urbane underworld character for whom Dr. Lowell has formed a liking, works with the two doctors on the case. They find no possible connection between the eight victims; one was a child, one a banker, one a bricklayer, another an acrobat, and so on. They do learn, however, that all of them were either children, fond of children or had children of their own. To get at the source of the murders, for murders they seem to be, the one thing that linked the victims must be discovered.

Ricori, despite his polish and intelligence, mutters, “Black magic,” when he hears of the death symptoms. The doctors, being rational men, scoff at that, but – they admit they are baffled. Meanwhile, Nurse Walters, who attended Peters, is stricken. The doctors rush to her, find her half conscious.

— IV —

RICORI IS STRICKEN

I questioned the nurse as to whether Walters had said anything to anyone about any injury to her foot. She replied that she had not to her, nor had any of the other nurses spoken of it. Nurse Robbins, however, shared the apartment with Harriet and Diana. I asked who Diana was, and she told me that was the name of the little niece. This was Robbins’s night off, I found, and gave instructions to have her get in touch with me the moment she returned to the apartment.

By now Hoskins was taking his samples for the blood tests. I asked him to concentrate upon the microscopic smears and to notify me immediately if he discovered one of the luminous corpuscles. Bartano, an outstanding expert upon tropical diseases, happened to be in the hospital, as well as Somers, a brain specialist in whom I had strong confidence. I called them in for observation, saying nothing of the previous cases.

While they were examining Walters, Hoskins called up to say he had isolated one of the corpuscles. I asked the pair to go to Hoskins and give me their opinion upon what he had to show them. In a little while they returned, somewhat annoyed and mystified. Hoskins, they said, had spoken of a “leukocyte containing a phosphorescent nucleolus.” They had looked at the slide but had been unable to see any such thing. Hoskins, taking their place at the microscope, had been unable to find it again.

Somers very seriously advised me to insist upon Hoskins having his eyes examined. Bartano said caustically that he would have been quite as surprised to have seen such a thing as he would have been to have seen a miniature mermaid swimming around in an artery. By these remarks, I realized afresh the wisdom in my silence.

Nor did the expected changes in expression occur. The horror and intense loathing persisted, and were commented upon by both Bartano and Somers as “unusual.” They thought that the condition was caused by a brain lesion of some kind. They did not think there was any evidence either of microbic infection or of drugs or poison. Agreeing that it was a most interesting case, and asking me to let them know its progress and outcome, they departed.

At the beginning of the fourth hour there was a change of expression, but not what I had been expecting. All terror vanished, leaving only the intense loathing. Once I had thought I had seen a flicker of the devilish anticipation flash over the face. If so, it was quickly mastered. About the middle of the fourth hour we saw recognition again return to her eyes. Also there was a perceptible rally of the slowing heart, and I seemed to sense an intense gathering of nervous force.

And then her eyelids began to rise and fall, slowly, as though by tremendous effort, in measured time and – purposefully. Four times they raised and lowered; there was a pause; then nine times they lifted and fell; again the pause, then they closed and opened once. Twice she did this—

“She’s trying to signal,” whispered Braile. “But what?”

Again the long-lashed lids dropped and rose – four times… pause… nine times… pause… once…

“She’s going,” whispered Braile.

I knelt, stethoscope at ears… slower, slower, beat the heart… and slower… and stopped.

“She’s gone,” I said, and arose. We bent over her, waiting for that last hideous spasm, convulsion – whatever it might be.

It did not come. Stamped upon the dead face was the loathing, and that only. Nothing of the devilish glee. Nor was there sound from the dead lips. Beneath my hand I felt the flesh of the white arm begin to stiffen.

The unknown death had destroyed Nurse Walters – there was no doubt of that. Yet in some obscure, vague way I felt that it had not conquered her. Her body, yes. But not her will!

•   •   •

I returned home with Braile, profoundly depressed. It is difficult to describe the effect the sequence of events I am relating had upon my mind from beginning to end – and beyond the end. It was as though I walked almost constantly under the shadow of an alien world; nerves prickling as if under surveillance of invisible things not of our life… the subconsciousness forcing itself to the threshold of the conscious, battering at the door between and calling out to be on guard… every moment to be on guard. Strange phrases for an orthodox man of medicine? Let them stand.

Braile was pitiably shaken. So much so that I wondered whether there had been more than professional interest between him and the dead girl. If there had been, he did not confide in me.

It was close to four o’clock when we reached my house. I insisted that he remain with me. I called the hospital before retiring, but they had heard nothing of Nurse Robbins. I slept a few hours, very badly.

Shortly after nine Robbins called me on the telephone. She was half hysterical with grief. I bade her come to my office, and when she had done so Braile and I questioned her.

“About three weeks ago,” she said, “Harriet brought home to Diana a very pretty doll. The child was enraptured. I asked Harriet where she had gotten it, and she said in a queer little store ’way down town.

“‘Job,’ she said – my name is Jobina – ‘there’s the queerest woman down there. I’m sort of afraid of her, Job.’

“I didn’t pay much attention. Besides, Harriet wasn’t ever very communicative. I had the idea she was a bit sorry she had said what she had.

“Now I think of it, though, Harriet acted rather funny after that. She’d be gay and then she’d be – well, sort of thoughtful. About ten days ago she came home with a bandage around her foot. The right foot? Yes. She said she’d been having tea with the woman she’d gotten Diana’s doll from. The teapot upset and the hot tea had poured down on her foot. The woman had put some salve on it right away, and now it didn’t hurt a bit.

“‘But I think I’ll put something on that I know something about,’ she told me. Then she slipped off her stocking and began to strip the bandage. I’d gone into the kitchen and she called me to come and look at her foot.

“‘It’s queer,’ she said. ‘That was a bad scald, Job. Yet it’s practically healed. And that salve hasn’t been on more than an hour.’

“I looked at her foot. There was a big red patch on the instep. But it wasn’t sore, and I told her the tea couldn’t have been very hot.

“‘But it was really scalded, Job,’ she said. ‘I mean it was blistered.’

“She sat looking at the bandage and at her foot for quite a while. The salve was bluish and had a queer shine to it. I never saw anything like it before. No, I couldn’t detect any odor to it. Harriet reached down and took the bandage and said:

“‘Job, throw it in the fire.’

“I threw the bandage in the fire. I remembered that it gave a queer sort of flicker. It didn’t seem to burn. It just flickered and then it wasn’t there. Harriet watched it, and turned pale. Then she looked at her foot again.

“‘Job,’ she said, ‘I never saw anything heal as quick as that. She must be a witch!’

“‘What on earth are you talking about, Harriet?’ I asked her.

“‘Oh, nothing,’ she said. Only I wish I had the courage to rip that place on my foot wide open – and rub in an antidote for snake bite.’

“Then she laughed, and I thought she was fooling. But she painted it with iodine and bandaged it with an antiseptic. The next morning she woke me up and said:

“‘Look at that foot now. Yesterday a whole pot of scalding tea poured over it. And now it isn’t even tender. And the skin ought to be just smeared off. Job, I wish to the Lord it was!’

“That’s all, Dr. Lowell. She didn’t say any more about it and neither did I. She just seemed to forget all about it. Yes, I did ask her where the shop was and who the woman was, but she wouldn’t tell me. I don’t know why.

“And after that I never knew her so gay and carefree. Happy, careless… Oh, I don’t know why she should have died… I don’t… I don’t!”

Braile asked: “Do the numbers 491 mean anything to you, Robbins? Do you associate them with any address Harriet knew?”

She thought, then shook her head. I told her of the measured closing and opening of Walters’s eyes.

“She was clearly attempting to convey some message in which those numbers figured. Think again.”

Suddenly she straightened, and began counting upon her fingers. She nodded.

“Could she have been trying to spell out something? If it was letters they would read d, i and a. They’re the first three letters of Diana’s name.”

Well, of course that seemed the simple explanation. She might have been trying to ask us to take care of the child. I suggested this to Braile. He shook his head.

“She knew I’d do that,” he said. “No, it was something else.”

A little after Robbins had gone, Ricori called up. I told him of Walters’s death. He was greatly moved. And after that came the melancholy business of the autopsy. The results were precisely the same as in the death of Peters. There was nothing whatever to show why she had died.

At about four o’clock the next day Ricori again called me on the telephone.

“Will you be at home between six and nine, Dr. Lowell?” There was suppressed eagerness in his voice.

“Certainly, if it is important,” I answered after consulting my appointment book. “Have you found out anything, Ricori?”

He hesitated.

“I do not know. I think perhaps – yes.”

“You mean,” I did not even try to hide my own eagerness, “you mean – the hypothetical place we discussed?”

“Perhaps. I will know later. I go now to where it may be.”

“Tell me this, Ricori – what do you expect to find?”

“Dolls!” he answered. And as though to avoid further questions he hung up before I could speak.

Dolls! I sat thinking. Walters had bought a doll. And in that same unknown place where she had bought it, she had sustained the injury which had so worried her – or rather, whose unorthodox behavior had so worried her. Nor was there doubt in my mind, after hearing Robbins’s story, that it was to that injury she attributed her seizure, and she tried to tell us so. We had not been mistaken in our interpretation of that first desperate effort of will I have described. She might, of course, have been in error. The scald, or rather the salve, may have had nothing whatever to do with her condition. Yet Walters had been strongly interested in a child. Children were the common interest of all who had died as she had. And certainly the one great common interest of children is dolls. What was it that Ricori had discovered?

I called Braile, but could not get him. I called up Robbins and told her to bring the doll to me immediately; which she did.

The doll was a peculiarly beautiful thing. It had been cut from wood, then covered with gesso. It was curiously lifelike. A baby doll, with an elfin little face. Its dress was exquisitely embroidered, a folk-dress of some country I could not place. It was, I thought, almost a museum piece, and one whose price Nurse Walters could hardly have afforded. It bore no mark by which either maker or seller could be identified. After I had examined it minutely I laid it away in a drawer. I waited impatiently to hear from Ricori.

•   •   •

At seven o’clock there was a sustained, peremptory ringing of the door bell. Opening my study door, I heard the voice of McCann, Ricori’s bodyguard, in the hall, and called to him to come up. At first glance I knew something was wrong. His tight-mouthed, tanned face was a sallow yellow, his eyes held a dazed look. He spoke from stiff lips:

“Come down to the car. I think the boss is dead.”

“Dead!” I exclaimed, and was down the stairs and out beside the car in a breath. The chauffeur was standing beside the door. He opened it, and I saw Ricori huddled in a corner of the rear seat. I could feel no pulse, and when I raised the lids of his eyes they stared at me sightlessly. Yet he was not cold.

“Bring him in,” I ordered. McCann and the chauffeur carried him into the house and placed him on the examination table in my office. I bared Ricori’s breast and applied the stethoscope. I could detect no sign of the heart functioning. Nor was there, apparently, any respiration. I made a few other rapid tests. To all appearances, Ricori was quite dead. And yet – I was not satisfied. I did the things customary in doubtful cases, but without result.

McCann and the chauffeur had been standing close beside me. They read my verdict in my face. I saw a strange glance pass between them, and obviously each of them had a touch of panic, the chauffeur more markedly than McCann. The latter asked in a level, monotonous voice:

“Could it have been poison?”

“Yes, it could—” I stopped.

Poison! And that mysterious errand about which he had telephoned me! And the possibility of poison in the other cases! But this death – and again I felt the doubt – had not been like those others.

“McCann,” I said, “when and where did you first notice anything wrong?”

He answered, still in that monotonous voice:

“About six blocks down the street. The boss was sitting close to me. All at once he says, ‘Jesu!’ Like he’s scared. He shoves his hands up to his chest. He gives a kind of groan an’ stiffens out. I says to him, ‘What’s the matter, boss, you got a pain?’ He don’t answer me, an’ then he sort of falls against me an’ I see his eyes is wide open. He looks dead to me. So I yelps to Paul to stop the car and we both look him over. Then we beat it here like hell.”

I went to a cabinet and poured them stiff drinks of brandy. They needed it. I threw a sheet over Ricori.

“Sit down,” I said, “and you, McCann, tell me exactly what occurred from the time you started out with Mr. Ricori to wherever it was he went. Don’t skip a single detail.”

He said:

“About two o’clock the boss goes to Mollie’s – that’s Peters’s sister – stays an hour, comes out, goes home and tells Paul to be back at four thirty. But he’s doing a lot of phoning so we don’t start till five. He tells Paul where he wants to go, a place over in a little street down off Battery Park. He says to Paul not to go through the street, just park the car over by the Battery. And he says to me, ‘McCann, I’m going in this place myself. I don’t want ’em to know I ain’t by myself,’ he says. ‘I got reasons. You hang around an’ look in now an’ then, but don’t come in unless I call you.’ I says, ‘Boss, do you think it’s wise?’ An’ he says, ‘I know what I’m doing an’ you do what I tell you, see.’ So there ain’t any argument to that.

“We get down to this place an’ Paul does like he’s told, an’ the boss walks up the street an’ he stops at a little joint that’s got a lot of dolls in the window. I looks in the place as I go past. There ain’t much light, but I see a lot of other dolls inside an’ a thin gal at a counter. She looks white as a fish’s belly to me, an’ after the boss has stood at the window a minute or two he goes in, an’ I go by slow to look at the gal again because she sure looks whiter than I ever saw a gal look who’s on her two feet.

“The boss is talkin’ to the gal who’s showing him some dolls. The next time I go by there’s a woman in the place. She’s so big, I stand at the window a minute to look at her because I never seen anybody that looks like her. She’s got a brown face an’ it looks sort of like a horse, an’ a little mustache an’ moles, an’ she’s as funny a looking brand as the fish-white gal. Big an’ fat.

“But I get a peep at her eyes – Geeze, what eyes! Big an’ black an’ bright, an’ somehow I don’t like them any more than the rest of her. The next time I go by, the boss is over in a corner with the big dame. He’s got a wad of bills in his hand and I see the gal watchin’ sort of frightened like. The next time I do my beat, I don’t see either the boss or the woman.

“So I stand lookin’ through the window because I don’t like the boss out of my sight in this joint. An’ the next thing I see is the boss coming out of a door at the back of the shop. He’s madder than hell an’ carrying something an’ the woman is behind him an’ her eyes are spitting fire. The boss is jabbering, but I can’t hear what he’s saying, an’ the dame is jabbering, too, an’ making funny passes at him. Funny passes? Why, funny motions with her hands. But the boss heads for the door an’ when he gets to it I see him stick what he’s carrying inside his overcoat an’ button it up around it.

“It’s a doll; I see its legs dangling down before he gets it under his coat. A big one, too, for it makes quite a bulge—”

He paused; began mechanically to roll a cigarette; then glanced at the covered body and threw the cigarette away. He went on:

“I never see the boss so mad before. He’s muttering to himself in Italian an’ saying something over an’ over that sounds like ‘strayga.’ I see it ain’t no time to talk so I just walk along with him. Once he says to me, more as if he’s talking to himself than me if you get what I mean – he says, ‘The Bible says you shall not suffer a witch to live.’ Then he goes on muttering an’ holding one arm fast over this doll inside his coat.

“We get to the car an’ he tells Paul to beat it straight to you an’ to hell with traffic – that’s right, ain’t it, Paul? Yes. When we get in the car he stops muttering an’ just sits there quiet, not saying anything to me until I hear him say, ‘Jesu!’ like I told you. And that’s all, ain’t it, Paul?”

The chauffeur did not answer. He sat staring at McCann with something of entreaty in his gaze. I distinctly saw McCann shake his head. The chauffeur said, in a strongly marked Italian accent, hesitatingly:

“I do not see the shop, but everything else McCann say is truth.”

I got up and walked over to Ricori’s body. I was about to lift the sheet when something caught my eye. A red spot about as big as a dime – a blood stain. Holding it in place with one finger, I carefully lifted the edge of the sheet. The blood spot was directly over Ricori’s heart.

I took one of my strongest glasses and one of my finest probes. Under the glass I could see on Ricori’s breast a minute puncture, no larger than that made by a hypodermic needle. Carefully I inserted the probe. It slipped easily in and in until it touched the wall of the heart. I went no further.

Some needle-pointed, exceedingly fine instrument had been thrust through Ricori’s breast straight into his heart.

I looked at him, doubtfully; there was no reason why such a minute puncture in this region of the heart should cause death. Unless, of course, it had been poisoned; or if there had been some other violent shock which had contributed to that of the wound itself. But such shock or shocks might very well bring about in a person of Ricori’s peculiar temperament some curious mental condition, producing an almost perfect counterfeit of death. I had heard of such cases. No, despite my tests, I was not sure Ricori was dead. But I did not tell McCann that. Alive or dead, there was one sinister fact that McCann must explain. I turned to the pair, who had been watching me closely.

“You say there were only the three of you in the car?”

Again I saw the strange glance pass between them.

“There was the doll,” McCann answered, half defiantly. I brushed the answer aside, impatiently.

“I repeat: there were only the three of you in the car?”

“Three – men, yes.”

“Then,” I said grimly, “you two have a lot to explain. Ricori was stabbed. I’ll have to call the police.”

McCann arose and walked over to the body. He picked up the glass and peered through it at the tiny puncture. He looked at the chauffeur. He said:

“I told you the doll done it, Paul!”

— V —

MCCANN EXPLAINS

I said, incredulously, “McCann, you surely don’t expect me to believe that.” He did not answer, rolling another cigarette which this time he did not throw away. The chauffeur staggered over to Ricori’s body; he threw himself on his knees and began what I gathered to be mingled prayers and implorations. McCann, curiously enough, was now completely himself. It was as though the removal of uncertainty as to the cause of Ricori’s death had restored all his old cold confidence. He lighted the cigarette; he said, almost cheerfully:

“I’m aiming to make you believe.”

I walked over to the telephone. McCann jumped in front of me and stood with his back against the instrument.

“Wait a minute, doc. If I’m the kind of a rat that’ll stick a knife in the heart of the man who hired me to protect him – ain’t it occurred to you the spot you’re on ain’t so healthy? What’s to keep me an’ Paul from giving you the works an’ making our get-away?”

Frankly, that had not occurred to me. Now I realized in what a truly dangerous position I was placed. I looked at the chauffeur. He had arisen from his knees and was standing, regarding McCann intently.

“I see you get it,” McCann smiled, mirthlessly. He walked to the Italian. “Pass your rods, Paul.”

Without a word the chauffeur dipped into his pockets and handed him a pair of automatics. McCann laid them on my table. He reached under his left arm and placed another pistol beside them; reached into his pocket and added a fourth.

“Sit there, doc,” he said, and indicated my chair at the table. “That’s all our artillery. Keep the guns right under your hands. If we make any breaks, shoot. All I ask is you don’t do any calling up till you’ve listened.”

I sat down, drawing the automatics to me, examining them to see that they were loaded. They were.

“Doc,” McCann said, “there’s three things I want you to consider. First, if I’d had anything to do with smearing the boss, would I be giving you a break like this? Second, I was sitting at his right side. He had on a thick overcoat. How could I reach over an’ run anything as thin as whatever killed him must have been through his coat, an’ through the doll, an’ through his clothes, an’ through him without putting up some kind of a fight. Hell, Ricori was a strong man. Paul would have seen us—”

“What difference would that have made,” I interrupted, “if Paul was an accomplice?”

“Right,” he acquiesced, “that’s so. Paul’s as deep in the mud as I am. Ain’t that so, Paul?” He looked sharply at the chauffeur, who nodded. “All right, we’ll leave that with a question mark behind it. Take the third point – if I’d killed the boss that way, an’ Paul was in it with me, would we have took him to the one man who’d be expected to know how he was killed? An’ then when you’d found out as expected, hand you an alibi like this? Doc, I ain’t loco enough for that!”

His face twitched.

“Why would I want to kill him? I’d ’a’ gone through hell an’ back for him, an’ he knew it. So would Paul.”

I felt the force of all this. Deep within me I was conscious of a stubborn conviction that McCann was telling the truth – or at least the truth as he saw it. He had not stabbed Ricori. Yet to attribute the act to a doll was too fantastic. And there had been only the three men in the car. McCann had been reading my thoughts with an uncanny precision.

“It might’ve been one of them mechanical dolls,” he said. “Geared up to stick.”

“McCann, go down and bring it up to me,” I said sharply.

“It ain’t there,” he said, and grinned at me again mirthlessly. “It jumped out!”

“Preposterous—” I began.

The chauffeur broke in: “It’s true. Something jump out. When I ope’ the door. I think it cat, dog, maybe. I say, ‘What the hell—’ Then I see it. It run like hell. It stoop. It duck in shadow. I see it just as flash an’ then no more. I say to McCann, ‘What the hell!’ McCann, he’s feeling around bottom of car. He say, ‘It’s the doll. It done for the boss!’ I say, ‘Doll? What you mean, doll?’ He tell me. I know nothing of any doll before. I see the boss carry something in his coat, si. But I don’t know what. But I see one thing that don’t look like cat, dog. It jump out of the car, through my legs, si!”

I said ironically, “Is it your idea, McCann, that this mechanical doll was geared to run away as well as stab?”

He flushed, but answered quietly, “I ain’t sayin’ it was a mechanical doll. But anything else would be – well, pretty crazy, wouldn’t it?”

“McCann,” I asked abruptly, “what do you want me to do?”

“Doc, when I was down Arizona way, there was a ranchero died. Died sudden. There was a feller looked as if he had a lot to do with it. The marshal said, ‘Hombre, I don’t think you done it – but I’m the lone one on the jury. What say?’ The hombre says, ‘Marshal, give me two weeks, an’ if I don’t bring in the feller that done it, you hang me.’ The marshal says, ‘Fair enough. The temporary verdict is deceased died by shock.’ It was shock all right; bullet shock. All right, before the two weeks was up, along comes this feller with the murderer hog-tied to his saddle.”

“I get your point, McCann. But this isn’t Arizona.”

“I know it ain’t. But couldn’t you certify it was heart disease? Temporarily? An’ give me a week? Then if I don’t come through, shoot the works. I won’t run away. It’s this way, doc. If you tell the bulls, you might just as well pick up one of them guns an’ shoot me an’ Paul dead right now. If we tell the bulls about the doll, they will laugh themselves sick an’ fry us at Sing Sing. If we don’t we fry anyway. If by a miracle the bulls drop us – there’s them in the boss’s crowd that’ll soon remedy that. I’m telling you, doc, you’ll be killing two innocent men. An’ worse, you’ll never find out who did kill the boss, because they will never look any further than us. Why should they?”

A cloud of suspicion gathered around my conviction of the pair’s innocence. The proposal, naive as it seemed, was subtle. If I assented, the gunman and the chauffeur would have a whole week to get away, if that was the plan. If McCann did not come back, and I told the truth of the matter, I would be an accessory after the fact – in effect, co-murderer.

If I pretended that my suspicions had only then been aroused, I stood at the best convicted of ignorance. If they were captured, and recited the agreement, again I would be charged as an accessory. It occurred to me that McCann’s surrender of the pistols was extraordinarily clever. I could not say that my assent had been constrained by threats. Also, it might have been only a cunningly conceived gesture to enlist my confidence, weaken my resistance to his appeal. How did I know that the pair did not have still other weapons, ready to use if I refused?

Striving to find a way out of the trap, I walked over to Ricori. I took the precaution of dropping the automatics into my pockets as I went. I bent over Ricori. His flesh was cold, but not with the peculiar chill of death. I examined him once more, minutely. And now I could detect the faintest of pulsation in the heart… a bubble began to form at the corner of his lips… Ricori lived!

I continued to bend over him, thinking faster than ever I had before. Ricori lived, yes. But it did not lift the peril. Rather it increased it. For if McCann had stabbed him, if the pair had been in collusion, and learned that they had been unsuccessful, would they not finish what they had thought ended? With Ricori alive, Ricori able to speak and to accuse them – a death more certain than the processes of law confronted them. Death at Ricori’s command at the hands of his henchmen. And in finishing Ricori they would at the same time be compelled to kill me.

Still bending, I slipped a hand into my pocket, clenched an automatic, and then whirled upon them, gun leveled.

“Hands up! Both of you,” I said.

Amazement flashed over McCann’s face, consternation over the chauffeur’s. But their hands went up.

I said, “There’s no need of that clever little agreement, McCann. Ricori is not dead. When he’s able to talk he’ll tell what happened to him.”

•   •   •

I was not prepared for the effect of this announcement. If McCann was not sincere, he was an extraordinary actor. His lanky body stiffened. I had never seen such glad relief as that stamped upon his face. Tears rolled down his tanned cheeks. The chauffeur dropped to his knees, sobbing and praying.

My suspicions were swept away. I did not believe this could be acting. In some measure I was ashamed of myself.

“You can drop your hands, McCann,” I said, and slipped the automatic back in my pocket.

He said, hoarsely, “Will he live?”

I answered, “I think he has every chance. If there’s no infection, I’m sure of it.”

“Thank God!” whispered McCann, and over and over, “Thank God!”

And just then Braile entered, and stood staring in amazement at us.

“Ricori has been stabbed. I’ll explain the whole matter later,” I told him. “Small puncture over the heart and probably penetrating it. He’s suffering mainly from shock. He’s coming out of it. Get him up to the annex and take care of him until I come.”

Briefly I reviewed what I had done and suggested the immediate further treatment. And when Ricori was on his way to the annex, I turned to the gunman.

“McCann,” I said, “I’m not going to explain. Not now. But here are your pistols, and Paul’s. I’m giving you your chance.”

He took the automatics, looking at me with a curious gleam in his eyes.

“I ain’t saying I wouldn’t like to know what touched you off, doc,” he said. “But whatever you do is all right by me – if only you can bring the boss around.”

“Undoubtedly there are some who will have to be notified of his condition,” I replied. “I’ll leave that all to you. All I know is that he was on his way to me. He had a heart attack in the car. You brought him to me. I am now treating him – for heart attack. If he should die, McCann – well, that will be another matter.”

“I’ll do the notifying,” he answered. “There’s only a couple that you’ll have to see. Then I’m going down to that doll joint an’ get the truth outa that hag.”

His eyes were slits, his mouth a slit, too.

“No,” I said, firmly. “Not yet. Put a watch on the place. If the woman goes out, discover where she goes. Watch the girl the same way. If it appears as though either of them or both of them are moving away – running off – let them. But follow them. I don’t want them molested or even alarmed until Ricori can tell what happened there.”

“All right,” he said, but reluctantly.

“Your doll story,” I reminded him, sardonically, “would not be so convincing to the police as to my somewhat credulous mind. Take no chance of them being injected into the matter. As long as Ricori is alive, there is no need of them being so injected.”

I took him aside.

“Can you trust the chauffeur to do no talking?”

“Paul’s all right,” he said.

“Well, for both your sakes, he should better be,” I warned.

They took their departure. I went up to Ricori’s room. His heart was stronger, his respiration weak but encouraging. His temperature, although still dangerously subnormal, had improved. If, as I had told McCann, there was no infection, and if there had been no poison nor drug upon the weapon with which he had been stabbed, Ricori should live.

Later that night two thoroughly polite gentlemen called upon me, heard my explanation of Ricori’s condition, asked if they might see him, did see him, and departed. They assured me that “win or lose” I need have no fear about my fees, nor have any hesitancy in bringing in the most expensive consultants. In exchange, I assured them that I believed Ricori had an excellent chance to recover. They asked me to allow no one to see him except themselves, and McCann. They thought it might save me trouble to have a couple of men whom they would send to me, to sit at the door of the room – outside, of course, in the hall. I answered that I would be delighted.

In an exceedingly short time two quietly watchful men were on guard at Ricori’s door, just as they had been over Peters.

In my dreams that night dolls danced around me, pursued me, threatened me. My sleep was not pleasant.

— VI —

A STRANGE EXPERIENCE

Morning showed a marked improvement in Ricori’s condition. The deep coma was unchanged, but his temperature was nearly normal; respiration and heart action quite satisfactory. Braile and I divided duties so that one of us could be constantly within call of the nurses. The guards were relieved after breakfast by two others. One of my quiet visitors of the night before made his appearance, looked at Ricori and received with unfeigned gratification my reassuring report.

After I had gone to bed the obvious idea had occurred to me that Ricori might have made some memorandum concerning his quest; I had felt reluctance about going through his pockets, however. Now seemed to be the opportunity to ascertain whether he had or had not. I suggested to my visitor that he might wish to examine any papers Ricori had been carrying, adding that we had been interested together in a certain matter, that he had been on his way to discuss this with me when he had undergone his seizure; and that he might have carried some notes of interest to me. My visitor agreed; I sent for Ricori’s overcoat and suit and we went through them. There were a few papers, but nothing relating to our investigation.

In the breast pocket of his overcoat, however, was a curious object – a piece of thin cord about eight inches long in which had been tied nine knots, spaced at irregular intervals. They were curious knots, too, not quite like any I could recollect having observed. I studied the cord with an unaccountable but distinct feeling of uneasiness. I glanced at my visitor and saw a puzzled look in his eyes. And then I remembered Ricori’s superstition, and reflected that the knotted cord was probably a talisman or charm of some sort. I put it back in the pocket.

When again alone I took it out and examined it more minutely. The cord was of human hair, tightly braided – the hair a peculiarly pale ash and unquestionably a woman’s. Each knot, I now saw, was tied differently. Their structure was complex. The difference between them, and their irregular spacing, gave the vague impression of forming a word or sentence. I had the same sensation of standing before a blank door which it was vitally important for me to open that I had felt while watching Peters die. Obeying some obscure impulse, I did not return the thing to the pocket but threw it into the drawer with the doll.

Shortly after three, McCann telephoned me. I was more than glad to hear from him. In the broad light of day his story of the occurrences in Ricori’s car had become incredibly fantastic; all my doubts returning. I had even begun again to review my unenviable position if he disappeared. Some of this must have shown in the cordiality of my greeting, for he laughed heartily.

“‘Thought I’d rode off the range, did you, doc? You couldn’t drive me away. Wait till you see what I got.”

I awaited his arrival with impatience. When he appeared he had with him a sturdy, red-faced man who carried a large paper clothing-bag. I recognized him as a policeman I had encountered now and then on the Drive, although I had never before seen him out of uniform. I bade the two be seated, and the officer sat on the edge of a chair, holding the clothes-bag gingerly across his knees. I looked at McCann, inquiringly.

“Shevlin,” he waved his hand at the officer, “said he knew you, doc. But I’d have brought him along anyway.”

“If I didn’t know Dr. Lowell, it’s not me that’d be here, McCann me lad,” said Shevlin glumly. “But it’s brains he’s got in his head, an’ not a cold boiled potato like that damned lootenant.”

“Well,” said McCann maliciously, “the doc’ll prescribe for you anyway, Tim.”

“’Tis no prescribing I want, I tell you,” Shevlin bellowed. “I seen it wit’ me own eyes, I’m tellin’ you. An’ if Dr. Lowell tells me I was drunk or crazy I’ll tell him t’ hell wit’ him like I told the lootenant. An’ I’m tellin’ you, too, McCann.”

I listened to this with growing amazement.

“Now, Tim, now, Tim,” soothed McCann, “I believe you. You don’t know how much I want to believe you – or why, either.”

He gave me a quick glance, and I gathered that whatever the reason he had brought the policeman to see me, he had not spoken to him of Ricori.

“You see, doc, when I told you about that doll getting up an’ jumping out of the car you thought I was loco. All right, I says to me, maybe it didn’t get far. Maybe it was one of them improved mechanical dolls, but even if it was it has to run down some time. So I goes hunting for somebody else that might have seen it. An’ this morning I runs into Shevlin here. An’ he tells me. Go on, Tim, give the doc what you gave me.”

Shevlin blinked, shifted the bag cautiously and began. He had the dogged air of repeating a story that he had told over and over. And to unsympathetic audiences; for as he went on he would look at me defiantly, or raise his voice belligerently.

“It was one o’clock this mornin’. I am on me beat when I hear somebody yellin’ desperate like. ‘Help!’ he yells. ‘Murder! Take it away!’ he yells. I go runnin’, an’ there standin’ on a bench is a guy in his soup-an’-nuts an’ a high-hat jammed over his cars, an’ a-hittin’ this way an’ that wit’ his cane, an’ a-dancin’ up an’ down and it’s him that’s doin’ the yellin’.

“I reach over an’ tap him on the shins wit’ me night-club, an’ he looks down an’ then flops right in me arms. I get a whiff of his breath an’ I think I see what’s the matter wit’ him all right. I get him on his feet, an’ I says:

“‘Come on now, the pink’ll soon run off the elephants,’ I says. ‘It’s this Prohibition hooch that makes it look so thick.’ I says. ‘Tell me where you live an’ I’ll put you in a taxi, or do you want t’go to a hospital?’ I says.

“He stands there a-holdin’ onto me an’ a-shakin’ an’ he says: ‘D’ye think I’m drunk?’ An’ I begins t’ tell him, ‘An’ how—’ when I looks at him, an’ he ain’t drunk. He might’ve been drunk, but he ain’t drunk now. An’ all t’once he flops down on the bench an’ pulls up his pants an’ down his socks, an’ I sees blood runnin’ down from a dozen little holes, an’ he says, ‘Maybe you’ll be tellin’ me it’s pink elephants done that?’

“I looks at ’em an’ feels ’em, an’ it’s blood all right, as if somebody’s been jabbin’ a hat-pin in him—”

Involuntarily I stared at McCann. He did not meet my eyes. He was imperturbably rolling a cigarette—

“An’ I says: ‘What the hell done it?’ An’ he says – ‘The doll done it!’”

A little shiver ran down my back, and I looked again at the gunman. This time he gave me a level, warning glance. Shevlin glared up at me.

“‘The doll done it!’ he tells me,” Shevlin shouted. “He tells me the doll done it.”

McCann chuckled and Shevlin turned his glare from me to him. I said hastily: “I understand, officer. He told you it was the doll made the wounds. An astonishing assertion, certainly.”

“Y’don’t believe it, y’ mean?” demanded Shevlin furiously.

“I believe he told you that, yes,” I answered. “But go on.”

“All right, would y’be sayin’ I was drunk, too, t’believe it? Fer it’s what that potato-brained lootenant did.”

“No, no,” I assured him hastily. Shevlin settled back, and went on:

“I asks the drunk, ‘What’s her name?’ ‘What’s whose name?’ says he. ‘The doll’s,’ I says. ‘I’ll bet you she was a blond doll,’ I says, ‘an’ wants her picture in the tabloids. The brunettes don’t use hat-pins,’ I says. ‘They’re all fer the knife.’

“I Officer,’ he says, solemn, ‘it was a doll. A little man doll. An’ when I say doll I mean a doll. I was walkin’ along,’ he says, ‘gettin’ the air. I won’t deny I’d had some drinks,’ he says, ‘but nothin’ I couldn’t carry. I’m swishin’ along wit’ me cane,’ he says, I when I drops it by that bush there,’ he says, pointin’. ‘I reach down to pick it up,’ he says, ’an’ there I see a doll. It’s a big doll an’ it’s all huddled up crouchin’, as if somebody dropped it that way. I reaches over t’ pick it up,’ he says, an’ as I touch it, the doll jumps as if I hit a spring, an’ jumps right over me head,’ he says. ‘I’m surprised,’ he says, ‘an’ considerably startled, an’ I’m crouchin’ there look-in’ where the doll was when I feel a hell of a pain in the calf of me leg,’ he says, ‘like I been stabbed. I jump up, an’ there’s this doll wit’ a big pin in its hand just ready t’ jab me again,’ he says.

“‘Maybe,’ says I to the drunk, ‘maybe ’twas a midget you seen.’ ‘Midget, hell!’ says he. ‘It was a doll! An’ it was jabbin’ me wit’ a hat-pin. It was about two feet high,’ he says, ‘wit’ blue eyes, an’ it was grinnin’ at me in a way that made me blood run cold,’ he says. ‘An’ while I stood there paralyzed, it jabbed me again. I jumped on the bench,’ he says, ‘an’ it danced around, an’ around, an’ jumped up an’ jabbed me, an’ jumped down an’ up again an’ jabbed me. I think it meant to kill me, an’ I yelled like hell,’ says the drunk. ‘An’ who wouldn’t?” he asks me. ‘An’ then you come,’ he says, ‘an’ the doll ducked into the bushes there, an’ fer Lord’s sake, officer, come wit’ me till I can get a taxi an’ go home,’ he says, ‘fer I make no bones tellin’ you I’m scared right down to me gizzard,’ says he.

“So I take the drunk by the arm,” went on Shevlin, “thinkin’, poor lad, what this bootleg booze’ll make you see, but still puzzled about how he got them holes in the legs, an’ we come out to the Drive. The drunk is still a-shakin’ an’ I’m a-waitin’ to hail a taxi, when all of a sudden he lets out a squeal – ‘There it goes! Look, there it goes!’

“I follow his finger, an’ sure enough I sees somethin’ scuttlin’ over the sidewalk an’ out on the Drive. The light’s none too good, an’ I think it’s a cat or maybe a dog. Then I see there’s a little coupe drawn up opposite at the curb. The cat or dog, whatever it is, seems to be makin’ fer it. The drunk’s still yellin’ an’ I’m tryin’ to see what it is, when down the Drive hell-fer-leather comes a big car. It hits this thing kersniack an’ never stops. He’s out of sight before I can raise me whistle. I think I see the thing wriggle an’ I say, still thinkin’ it’s a cat or a dog, ‘I’ll put you out of your misery,’ an’ I run over to it wit’ me gun. As I do the coupe that’s been waitin’ shoots off hell-fer-leather, too. I get over to what the other car hit, an’ I look at it—”

He slipped the bag off his knees, set it down beside him and untied the top.

“An’ this is what it was.”

Out of the bag he drew a doll, or what remained of it. One leg hung by a thread. Its clothing was torn and begrimed with the dirt of the roadway. It was a doll – but uncannily did it give the impression of a mutilated pygmy. Its neck hung limply over its breast.

McCann stepped over and lifted the doll’s head—

I stared, and stared… with a prickling of the scalp… with a slowing of the heart beat…

For the face that looked up at me, blue eyes glaring, was the face of Peters!

And on it, like the thinnest of veils, was the shadow of that demoniac exultance I had watched spread over the face of Peters after death had stilled the pulse of his heart!

— VII —

THE PETERS DOLL

Shevlin watched me as I stared at the doll. He was satisfied by its effect upon me. “A hell of a lookin’ thing, ain’t it?” he asked. “The doctor sees it, McCann. I told you he had brains.” He jounced the doll down upon his knee, and sat there like a red-faced ventriloquist with a peculiarly malevolent dummy – certainly it would not have surprised me to have heard the diabolic laughter issue from its faintly grinning mouth.

“Now I’ll tell you, Dr. Lowell,” Shevlin went on. “I stands there look-in’ at this doll, an’ I picks it up. I There’s more in this than meets the eye, Tim Shevlin,’ I says to meself. An’ I looks to see what’s become of the drunk. He’s standin’ where I left him, an’ I walk over to him an’ he says: ‘Was it a doll like I told you? Hah! I told you it was a doll! Hah! That’s him!’ he says, gettin’ a peek at what I’m carryin’. So I says to him, ‘Young feller me lad, there’s somethin’ wrong here. You’re goin’ to the station wit’ me an’ tell the lootenant what you told me an’ show him your legs an’ all,’ I says. An’ the drunk says, I Fair enough, but keep that thing on the other side of me.’ So we go to the station.

“The lootenant’s there an’ the sergeant an’ a coupla flatties. I marches up an’ sticks the doll on the top of the desk in front of the lootenant.

“I What’s this?’ he says, grinnin’. Another kidnappin’?’

“‘Show him your legs,’ I tells the drunk. ‘Not unless they’re better than the Follies,’ grins this potato-brained ape. But the drunk’s rolled up his pants an’ down his socks an’ shows ’em.

“‘What t’ hell done that?’ says the lootenant, standin’ up an’ losin’ his grin.

“‘The doll,’ says the drunk. The lootenant looks at him, and sits back blinkin’. An’ I tells him about answer-in’ the drunk’s yells, an’ what he tells me, an’ what I sees. The sergeant laughs an’ the flatties laugh, but the lootenant gets red in the face an’ says, Are you tryin’ to kid me, Shevlin?’ An’ I says, I I’m tellin’ you what he tells me an’ what I seen, an’ there’s the doll.’ An’ he says, ‘This bootleg is fierce but I never knew it was catchin’.’ An’ he crooks his finger at me an’ says, ‘Come up here, I want t’ smell your breath.’ An’ then I knows it’s all up, because t’ tell the truth, the drunk had a flask an’ I’d took one wit’ him. Only one an’ the only one I’d had. But there it was on me breath. An’ the lootenant says, ‘I thought so. Get down.’

“An’ then he starts bellerin’ an’ hollerin’ at the drunk – ‘You wit’ your soup-an’-nuts an’ your silk hat, you ought to be a credit to your city an’ what t’ hell you think you can do, corrupt a good officer an’ kid me? You done the first but you ain’t doin’ the second,’ he yelps. ‘Put him in the cooler,’ he yelps, I an’ throw his damned doll in wit’ him t’ keep him company!’ An’ at that the drunk lets out a screech an’ drops t’ the floor. He’s out good an’ plenty. An’ the lootenant says, ‘The poor damn fool… he believes his own lie. Bring him around an’ let him go.’

“An’ he says t’ me, ‘If you weren’t such a good man, Tim, I’d have you up for this. Take your degen’ret doll an’ go home,’ he says. ‘I’ll send a relief t’ your beat. An’ take t’-morrow off an’ sober up,’ says he. An’ I says t’ him, ‘All right, but I seen what I seen. An’ t’ hell wit’ you all,’ I says t’ the flatties. An’ everybody’s laughin’ fit t’ split. An’ I says t’ the lootenant, ‘If you break me for it or not t’ hell with you, too,’ I says. But they keep on laughin’ so I takes the doll an’ walks out.”

He paused.

“I take the doll home,” he resumed. “I told it all t’ Maggie, me wife. An’ what does she tell me? ‘I think you’ve been off the hard stuff or near off so long,’ she says, ‘an’ now look at you!’ she says, ‘wit’ this talk of stabbin’ dolls, an’ insultin’ the lootenant, an’ maybe gettin’ sent t’ Staten Island,’ she says. ‘An’ Jenny just gettin’ into high school! Get t’ bed,’ she says,’ an’ sleep it off, an’ throw the doll in the garbage,’ she says. But by now I was gettin’ good an’ mad, an’ I do not throw it in the garbage but I take it wit’ me. An’ a while ago I meets McCann, an’ somehow he knows somethin’, an’ I tells him an’ he brings me here. An’ just fer what I don’t know.”

“Do you want me to speak to the lieutenant?” I asked.

“What could you say?” he replied, reasonably enough. “If you tell him the drunk was right an’ the doll stabbed him, an’ that I’m right an’ I did see the doll run, what’ll he think? He’ll think you’re as crazy as I must be. An’ if you explain maybe I was a little off me nut just fer the minute, it’s to the hospital they’ll be sendin’ me. No, doctor, I’m much obliged. All I can do is say nothin’ more an’ be dignified an’ maybe hand out a shiner or two if they get too rough. It’s grateful I am fer the kindly way you’ve listened. It makes me feel better.”

Shevlin got to his feet, sighing heavily.

“An’ what do you think? I mean about what the drunk said he seen, an’ what I seen?” he asked somewhat nervously.

“I cannot speak for the inebriate,” I answered cautiously. “As for yourself – well, it might be that the doll had been lying out there in the street, and that a cat or dog ran across just as the automobile went by. Dog or cat escaped, but the action directed your attention to the doll and you thought—”

He interrupted me with a wave of his hand.

“All right. All right. ’Tis enough. I’ll just leave the doll wit’ you to pay for the dignoses, sir.”

With considerable dignity and perceptibly heightening color Shevlin stalked from the room. McCann was shaking with silent laughter. I picked up the doll and laid it on my table. I looked at the malignant little face – and I did not feel much like laughing.

For some obscure reason I took the child’s doll out of the drawer and placed it beside the Peters doll; took out the strangely knotted cord and set it between them. McCann was standing at my side, watching. I heard him give a low whistle.

“Where did you get that, doc?” he pointed to the cord. I told him. He whistled again.

“The boss never knew he had it, that’s sure,” he said. “Wonder who slipped it over on him? The old hag, of course. But how?”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Why the witch’s ladder,” he pointed again to the cord. “That’s what they call it down Mexico way. It’s bad medicine. The witch slips it to you and then she has power over you…” He bent over the cord… “Yep, it’s the witch’s ladder – the nine knots an’ woman’s hair… an’ in the boss’s pocket!”

He stood staring at the cord. I noticed that he made no attempt to pick it up.

“Take it up and look at it closer, McCann,” I said.

“Not me!” he stepped back. “I’m telling you it’s bad medicine, doc.”

I had been steadily growing more and more irritated against the fog of superstition gathering ever heavier around me, and now I lost my patience.

“See here, McCann,” I said, hotly, “are you, to use Shevlin’s expression, trying to kid me? Every time I see you I am brought face to face with some fresh outrage against credibility. First it is your doll in the car. Then Shevlin. And now your witch’s ladder. What’s your idea?”

He looked at me with narrowed eyes, a faint flush reddening the high cheekbones.

“The only idea I got,” he drawled more slowly than usual, “is to see the boss on his feet. An’ to get whoever got him. As for Shevlin – you don’t think he was faking, do you?”

“I do not,” I answered. “But I am reminded that you were beside Ricori in the car when he was stabbed. And I cannot help wondering how it was that you discovered Shevlin so quickly today.”

“Meaning by that?” he asked. “Meaning,” I answered, “that your drunken man has disappeared. Meaning that it would be entirely possible for him to have been your confederate. Meaning that the episode which so impressed the worthy Shevlin could very well have been merely a clever bit of acting, and the doll in the street and the opportunely speeding automobile, a carefully planned maneuver to bring about the exact results it did. After all, I have only your word and the chauffeur’s word that the doll was not down in the car the whole time you were here last night. Meaning that—”

I stopped, realizing that essentially, I was only venting upon him the bad temper aroused by my perplexity.

“I’ll finish for you,” he said. “Meaning that I’m the one behind the whole thing.”

His face was white, and his muscles tense.

“It’s a good thing for you that I like you, doc,” he went on, levelly. “It’s a better thing for you that I know you’re on the level with the boss. Best of all, maybe, that you’re the only one who can help him if he can be helped. That’s all.”

“McCann,” I said, “I’m sorry, deeply sorry. Not for what I said, but for having to say it. After all, the doubt is there. And it is a reasonable doubt. You must admit that. Better to spread it before you than keep it hidden.”

“What might be my motive?”

“Ricori has powerful enemies. He also has powerful friends. How convenient to his enemies if he could be wiped out without suspicion, and a physician of highest repute and unquestionable integrity be inveigled into giving the death a clean bill of health. It is because of my professional pride, not personal egotism, that I am that kind of a physician, McCann.”

He nodded. His face softened and I saw the dangerous tenseness relax.

“I’ve no argument, doc. Not on that or nothing else you’ve said. But I’m thanking you for your high opinion of my brains. It’d certainly take a pretty clever man to work all this out this-a-way. Sort of like one of them cartoons that shows seventy-five gimcracks set up to drop a brick on a man’s head at exactly twenty minutes, sixteen seconds after two in the afternoon. Yeah, I must be clever.”

I winced at this broad sarcasm, but did not answer. McCann took up the Peters doll and began to examine it; I went to the phone to ask Ricori’s condition. I was halted by an exclamation from the gunman. He beckoned me, and, handing me the doll, pointed to the collar of its coat. I felt about it. My fingers touched what seemed to be the round head of a large pin. I pulled out as though from a dagger sheath a slender piece of metal nine inches long. It was thinner than an average hat-pin, rigid and needle-pointed.

Instantly I knew that I was looking upon the instrument that had pierced Ricori’s heart!

“Another outrage!” McCann drawled. “Maybe I put it there, doc!”

He laughed. I studied the queer blade – for blade it surely was. It appeared to be of finest steel, although I was not sure it was that metal. Its rigidity was like none I knew. The little knob at the head was half an inch in diameter and less like a pin-head than the haft of a poniard. Under the magnifying glass it showed small grooves upon it… as though to make secure the grip of a hand… a doll’s hand… a doll’s dagger! There were stains upon it.

PART THREE

Could science solve those fiendish murders and worse-than-murders? Dr. Lowell had to try—

LEADING UP TO
THIS INSTALLMENT

A strange partnership to combat a murderous evil is formed one night when Julian Ricori, educated and polished New York underworld king, hurries with his unconscious lieutenant, Thomas Peters, to Dr. Lowell, one of the city’s leading nerve and mental specialists.

Peters’s case intrigues and baffles the doctor. On the face of the gangster, who had been suddenly stricken, is a look of terror and horror, replaced by a diabolical leer that persists until his death.

Dr. Lowell, making a quiet inquiry, discovers that seven other people have recently died in the same manner. With Ricori, he determines to discover the secret of these mystifying deaths. One thing they learn: All of the dead people either had children or were interested in children.

Nurse Walters, who had taken care of Peters, is the next to go, but she, in the final moments, seems to conquer the malignant spirit that takes her life but cannot break her will.

Dr. Lowell and his assistant, Dr. Braile, are startled when Ricori himself is stricken. They learn from McCann, his bodyguard, that he had gone to a doll shop – the same shop where Nurse Walters had purchased a doll for a little girl. Ricori took one of the dolls from the woman proprietress, put it under his coat and entered his car. McCann says that he suddenly noticed that the “boss” was unconscious, and he swears that he saw the doll running away.

Dr. Lowell discovers that Ricori is not dead. He has been stabbed with a needle-like dagger, but there is a chance of his recovery. The next startling development is when a policeman reports that a drunken man had begged protection on the street, claiming that a doll had been stabbing him. A tiny figure darts from concealment, is struck by a speeding car. When the policeman picks it up he finds it is merely a mutilated doll – but it is the image of the dead Peters! Dr. Lowell, who is telling the story, is examining it.

— VIII —

BEHEADED

I shook my head impatiently, and put the little dagger aside, determining to test those stains later. They were blood-stains, I knew that, but I must make sure. And yet, if they were, it would not be certain proof of the incredible – that a doll’s hand had used this deadly thing.

I picked up the Peters doll and began to study it carefully. I could not determine of what it was made. It was not of wood, like the other doll.

More than anything else, the material resembled a fusion of rubber and wax. I knew of no such composition. I stripped it of the clothing. The undamaged part of the doll was anatomically perfect. The hair was human hair, carefully planted in the scalp. The eyes were blue crystals of some kind. The clothing showed the same extraordinary skill in the making as the clothes of the child’s doll. But the whole doll was extraordinary in its fidelity to life.

I saw now that the dangling leg was not held by a thread. It was held by a wire. Evidently the doll had been molded upon wire framework. I walked over to my instrument cabinet, and selected a surgical saw and a couple of knives.

“Wait a minute, doc.” McCann had been following my movements. “You going to cut this thing apart?”

I nodded. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a heavy hunting knife. Before I could stop him, he brought the blade down like an ax across the neck of the Peters doll. It cut through it cleanly. He took the head and twisted it. A wire snapped. He dropped the head on the table and tossed the body to me. The head rolled. It came to rest against the cord he had called the witch’s ladder.

The head seemed to twist and to look up at us. I thought for an instant the eyes flared with a hellish fire, the features contorted, the malignancy intensified – as I had seen it intensify upon Peters’s living face… I caught myself up, angrily… a trick of the light, of course… I turned to McCann and swore.

“Why did you do that?”

“You’re worth more to the boss than I am,” he answered cryptically.

I did not answer. I cut open the decapitated body of the doll. As I had suspected, it had been built upon wire framework. As I cut away the encasing material, I found this framework was a single wire, or a single metal strand, and that as cunningly as the doll’s body had been shaped, just as cunningly had this wire been twisted into an outline of the human skeleton!

Not, of course, with minute fidelity, but amazingly complete… there were no joints nor articulations… the substance of which the doll was made was astonishingly pliant… the little hands flexible… it was horribly like dissecting some manikin rather than a doll…

I glanced toward the severed head. McCann was bending over it, staring down into its eyes, his own not more than a few inches away from the malignantly glinting blue crystals. His hands clutched the table edge and I saw that they were strained and tense as though he were making a violent effort to push himself away. When he had tossed the head upon the table it had come to rest against the knotted cord. But now that cord was twisted around the doll’s severed neck and around its forehead as though it were a small serpent!

And distinctly I saw that McCann’s face was moving closer… slowly closer to that tiny one… as though it were being drawn to it… and that in the little face a living evil was concentrated, and that McCann’s face was steeped in fascinated horror…

“McCann!” I cried, and thrust an arm under his chin, jerking back his head. And as I did this I could have sworn the doll’s eyes turned to me with a glare of hellish hatred and that its lips writhed.

McCann staggered back. He looked at me for a moment as though dazed, and then leaped to the table. He picked up the doll’s head, dashed it to the floor and brought his heel down upon it again and again, like one stamping out the life of a venomous spider. Before he ceased, the head was a shapeless blotch, all semblance of humanity or anything else crushed out of it – but within it the two blue crystals that had been its eyes still glinted, and the corded knots of the witch’s ladder still wound through it.

“Lord! It was… drawing me down to it…”

McCann lighted a cigarette with shaking hand, tossed the match away. The match fell upon what had been the doll’s head.

There followed, simultaneously, a brilliant flash, a disconcerting sobbing sound and a wave o f intense heat. Where the crushed head had been there was now only an irregularly charred spot upon the polished wood. Within it lay the blue crystals that had been the eyes of the doll – lusterless and blackened. The knotted cord had vanished.

“Look!” whispered McCann.

The body of the doll had disappeared. Upon the table was a nauseous puddle of black waxy liquid out of which lifted the ribs of the wire skeleton!

The annex phone rang; mechanically I answered it.

“Yes,” I said. “What is it?”

“Mr. Ricori, sir. He’s out of the coma. He’s awake!”

I turned to McCann.

“Ricori’s come through!”

“Yip!” He gripped my shoulders with a shout – then drew a step away, a touch of awe apparent on his gangster face.

“Yeah?” said McCann. “He came through when I burned the knots! It freed him! It’s you an’ me that’s got to watch our step now!”

— IX —

NURSE WALTERS’ DIARY

Hurriedly I took McCann up with me to Ricori’s bedside. Confrontation with his chief would be the supreme test, I felt; settling one way or another and finally all my doubts as to his sincerity. For I had realized, almost immediately, that bizarre as had been the occurrences I have just narrated, each and all of them could have been a part of the elaborate hocus-pocus with which I had tentatively charged the gunman.

The cutting off of the doll’s head could have been a dramatic gesture designed to impress my imagination. It was he who had called my attention to the sinister reputation of the knotted cord. It was he who had found the pin. His fascination by the severed head might have been assumed. And the tossing of the match a calculated action designed to destroy evidence.

And yet – it was difficult to credit McCann with being so consummate an actor, so subtle a plotter. Ah, but he could be following the instructions of another mind capable of such subtleties. I wanted to trust McCann. I hoped that he would pass the test in triumph. Very earnestly I hoped it.

The test was ordained to failure. Ricori was fully conscious, wide awake, his mind probably as alert and sane as ever. But the lines of communication were still down. His mind had been freed but not his body. The paralysis persisted, forbidding any muscular movements except the deep-seated unconscious reflexes essential to the continuance of life. He could not speak. His eyes looked up at me, bright and intelligent, from an expressionless face – looked up at McCann with the same unchanging stare.

McCann whispered: “Can he hear?”

“I think so, but he has no way of telling us.”

The gunman knelt beside the bed and took Ricori’s hands in his. He said, clearly: “Everything’s all right, boss. We’re all on the job.”

Not the utterance nor the behavior of a guilty man – but then I had told him Ricori could not answer. I said to Ricori:

“You’re coming through splendidly. You had a severe shock, and I know the cause. I’d rather you were this way for a day or so than able to move about. I have a perfectly good medical reason for this. Don’t worry, don’t fret, try not to think of anything unpleasant. Let your mind relax. I’m going to give you a mild hypo. Don’t fight it. Let yourself sleep.”

I gave him the hypodermic, and watched with satisfaction its quick effect. It convinced me that he had heard.

I returned to my study with McCann. I was doing some hard thinking. There was no knowing how long Ricori would remain in the grip of the paralysis. He might awaken fully restored, or it might hold him for days. In the meantime there were three things I felt it necessary to ascertain. The first, that a thorough watch was being kept upon the place where Ricori had gotten the doll; second, that everything possible be found out about the two women McCann had described; third, what it was that had made Ricori go there. I had determined to take the gunman’s story of the happenings at the store at their face value – for the moment at least. At the same time, I did not want to admit him into my confidence any more than was necessary.

“McCann,” I began, “have you arranged to keep the doll store under constant surveillance, as we agreed last night?”

“You bet. A flea couldn’t hop in or out without being spotted.”

“Any reports?”

“The boys ringed the joint close to midnight. The front’s all dark. There’s a building in the back an’ a space between it an’ the rear of the joint. There’s a window with a heavy shutter, but there’s a line of light under it, an’ they know somebody’s inside. About two o’clock this fish-white gal comes slipping up the street and lets herself in. The boys at the back hear a hell of a squalling, an’ then the light goes out. This morning the gal opens the shop. After a while the hag shows up too. They’re covered, all right.”

“What have you found out about them?”

“The hag calls herself Mme. Mandilip. The gal’s her niece. Or so she says. They rode in about eight months since. Nobody knows where from. Pay their bills regular. Seem to have plenty of money. Niece does all the marketing. The old woman never goes out. Keep to themselves like a pair of clams. Have strictly nothing to do with the neighbors. The hag has a bunch of special customers – rich looking people many of them. Does two kinds of trade, it seems – regular dolls an’ what goes with ’em, an’ special dolls which they say the old woman’s a wonder at. Neighbors ain’t a bit fond of ’em. Some of ’em think she’s handling dope. That’s all – yet.”

Special dolls. Rich people. Rich people like the spinster Bailey, the banker Marshall? Regular dolls – for people like the acrobat, the bricklayer? But these might have been “special” too, in ways McCann could not know.

“There’s the store,” he continued. “Back of it two or three rooms. Upstairs a big room like a storeroom. They rent the whole place. The hag an’ the wench they live in the rooms behind the store.”

“Good work!” I applauded, and hesitated – “McCann, did the doll remind you of somebody?”

He studied me with narrowed eyes. “You tell me!” he said at last, dryly.

“Well – I thought it resembled Peters.”

“Thought it resembled!” He exploded. “Resembled – hell! It was the lick-an’-spit of Peters!”

“Yet you said nothing to me of that. Why?” I asked, suspiciously.

“Well, I’m damned—” he began, then caught himself. “I knowed you seen it. I thought you kept quiet account of Shevlin, an’ I followed your lead. Afterwards you were so busy putting me through the jumps there wasn’t a chance.”

“Whoever made that doll must have known Peters quite well.” I passed over this dig. “Peters must have sat for the doll as one sits for an artist or a sculptor. Why did he do it? When did he do it? Why did anyone desire to make a doll like him?”

“Let me work on the hag for an hour an’ I’ll tell you,” he answered, grimly.

“No,” I shook my head. “Nothing of that sort until Ricori can talk. But maybe we can get some light in another way. Ricori had a purpose in going to that store. I know what it was. I do not know what caused him to go. I have reason to believe it was information he gained from Peters’s sister. Do you know her well enough to visit her and to draw from her what it was she told Ricori yesterday? Casually – tactfully – without telling her of Ricori’s illness?”

He said bluntly: “Not without you give me more of a lead – Mollie’s no fool.”

“Very well. I am not aware whether Ricori told you, but the Darnley woman is dead. We think there is a connection between her death and Peters’s death. We think that it has something to do with the love of both of them for Mollie’s baby. The Darnley woman died precisely as Peters did—”

He whispered – “You mean with the same – trimmings?”

“Yes. We had reason to think that both might have picked up the – the disease – in the same place. Ricori thought that perhaps Mollie might know something which would identify that place. A place where both of them might have gone, not necessarily at the same time, and have been exposed to – the infection. Maybe even a deliberate infection by some ill-disposed person. Quite evidently what Ricori learned from Mollie sent him to the Mandilips. There is one awkward thing, however – unless he told her yesterday, she does not know her brother is dead.”

“That’s right,” he nodded. “He gave orders about that.”

“If he did not tell her, you must not.”

“You’re holding back quite a lot from me, ain’t you, doc?” He drew himself up to go.

“Yes,” I said frankly. “But I’ve told you enough.”

“Yeah? Well, maybe.” He regarded me somberly. “Anyway, I’ll soon know if the boss broke the news to Mollie. If he did, it opens up the talk natural. If he didn’t – well, I’ll call you up after I’ve talked to her. Hasta luego.”

With this half-mocking adieu he took his departure. I went over to the remains of the doll upon the table. The nauseous puddle had hardened. In hardening it had roughly assumed the aspect of a flattened human body. It had a peculiarly unpleasant appearance, with the miniature ribs and the snapped wire of the spine glinting above it. I was overcoming my reluctance to collect the mess for analysis when Braile came in. I was so full of Ricori’s awakening, and of what had occurred, that it was some time, before I noticed his pallor and gravity. I stopped short in the recital of my doubts regarding McCann to ask him what was the matter.

“I woke up this morning thinking of Harriet,” he said. “I knew the 4-9-1-code, if it was a code, could not have meant Diana. Suddenly it struck me that it might mean diary. The idea kept haunting me. When I had a chance I took Robbins and went to the apartment. We searched, and found Harriet’s diary. Here it is.”

He handed me a little red-bound book. He said:

“I’ve gone through it.”

I opened the book. I set down the parts of it pertinent to the matter under review:

Nov. 3. Had a queer sort of experience today. Dropped down to Battery Park to look at the new fishes in the Aquarium. Had an hour or so afterwards and went poking around some of the old streets, looking for something to take home to Diana. Found the oddest little shop. Quaint and old looking with some of the loveliest dolls and dolls’ clothes in the window I’ve ever seen. I stood looking at them and peering into the shop through the window.

There was a girl in the shop. Her back was turned to me. She turned suddenly and looked at me. She gave me the queerest kind of shock. Her face was white, without any color whatever, and her eyes were wide and sort of staring and frightened. She had a lot of hair, all ashen-blond and piled up on her head. She was the strangest looking girl I think I’ve ever seen. She stared at me for a full minute and I at her. Then she shook her head violently and made motions with her hands for me to go away.

I was so astonished I could hardly believe my eyes. I was about to go in and ask her what on earth was the matter with her, when I looked at my watch and found I had just time to get back to the hospital.

I looked into the shop again and saw a door at the back beginning slowly to open. The girl made one last, and it almost seemed despairing, gesture. There was something about it that suddenly made me want to run. But I didn’t. I did walk away though. I’ve puzzled about the thing all day. Also, besides being curious, I’m a bit angry. The dolls and clothes are beautiful. What’s wrong with me as a customer? I’m going to find out.

Nov. 5. I went back to the doll shop on Allen Street this afternoon. The mystery deepens. Only I don’t think it’s much of a mystery. I think the poor thing is a bit crazy. I didn’t stop to look in the window but went right in the door.

The white-faced girl was at a little counter at the back. When she saw me her eyes looked more frightened than ever and I could see her tremble.

I went up to her, and she whispered: “Oh, why did you come back? I told you to go away!”

I laughed, I couldn’t help it, and I said: “You’re the queerest shopkeeper I ever met. Don’t you want people to buy your things?”

She said low and very quickly: “It’s too late. You can’t go now. But don’t touch anything. Don’t touch anything she gives you. Don’t touch anything she points out to you.” And then in the most everyday way she said quite clearly: “Is there anything I can show you? We have everything for dolls.”

The transition was so abrupt that it was startling. Then I saw that a door had opened in the back of the shop, the same door I had seen opening before, and that a woman was standing in it looking at me.

I gaped at her I don’t know how long. She was truly extraordinary. She must be almost six feet and heavy with enormous breasts. Not fat. Powerful. She has a long face and her skin is brown. She has a distinct mustache and a mop of iron-gray hair. It was her eyes that held me spellbound. They are simply enormous, black and so full of life! She must have a tremendous vitality. Or maybe it is the contrast with the white girl, who seems to be drained of life. No, I’m sure she has a most unusual vitality.

I had the queerest thrill when she was looking at me. I thought, nonsensically: “What big eyes you have, grandma!”

“The better to see you with, my dear!”

“What big teeth you have, grandma!”

“The better to eat you with, my dear!”

(I’m not so sure, though, that it was all nonsense.) And she really has big teeth, strong and yellow.

I said, quite stupidly: “How do you do?” She smiled and touched me with her hand, and I felt another queer thrill. Her hands are the most beautiful I ever saw. So beautiful, they are uncanny. Long, with tapering fingers, and so white. Like the hands El Greco or Botticelli put on their women. I suppose that is what gave me the odd shock. They don’t seem to belong to her immense coarse body at all. But neither do the eyes. The hands and the eyes go together. Yes, that’s it.

She smiled and said: “You love beautiful things.” Her voice belongs to hands and eyes. A deep, rich, glowing contralto. I could feel it go through me like an organ chord. I nodded. She said: “Then you shall see them, my dear. Come.”

She paid no attention to the girl. She turned to the door, and I followed her. As I went through the door I looked back at the girl. She appeared more frightened than ever and I saw her lips form the word – “Remember.”

The room she led me into was – well, I can’t describe it. It is like her eyes and hands and voice. When I went into it I had the strange feeling that I was no longer in New York. Nor in America. Nor anywhere on earth, for that matter. I had the feeling that the only real place that existed was the room. It was frightening. The room was larger than it seemed possible it could be, judging from the size of the store. Perhaps it was the light that made it seem so. A soft mellow, dusky light. It is exquisitely paneled, even the ceiling.

On one side there is nothing but these beautiful old dark panels with carvings in very low relief covering them. There is a fireplace and a fire was burning in it. It was unusually warm, but the warmth was not oppressive. There was a faint fragrant odor, probably from the burning wood. The furniture is old and exquisite too, but unfamiliar. There are some tapestries, clearly ancient. It is curious, but I find it difficult to recall clearly just what is in that room. All that is clear is its unfamiliar beauty. I do remember clearly an immense table, and I recall thinking of it as a “baronial board.” And I remember intensely the round mirror, and – I don’t like to think of that.

I found myself telling her all about myself and about Diana, and how she loved beautiful things. She listened, and said in that deep sweet voice: “She shall have one beautiful thing, my dear.” She went to a cabinet, and came to me with the loveliest doll I have ever seen. It made me gasp when I thought how Di would love it. A little baby doll, and so lifelike.

“Would she like that?” she asked.

I said: “But I could never afford such a treasure. I’m poor.”

And she laughed and said: “But I am not poor. This shall be yours when I have finished dressing it.”

It was rude, but I could not help saying: “You must be very, very rich to have all these lovely things. I wonder why you keep a doll store.” And she laughed again and said: “Just to meet nice people like you, my dear.”

It was then I had the peculiar experience with the mirror. It was round and I had looked and looked at it because it was like, I thought, the half of an immense globule of clearest water. Its frame was brown wood elaborately carved, and now and then the reflection of the carvings seemed to dance in the mirror, like vegetation on the edge of a woodland pool when a breeze ruffles it. I had been wanting to look into it, and all at once the desire became irresistible.

I walked to the mirror. I could see the whole room reflected in it. Just as though I were looking not at its image or my own image but into another similar room with a similar me peering out. And then there was a wavering and the reflection of the room became misty, although the reflection of myself was perfectly clear. Then I could see only myself, and I seemed to be getting smaller and smaller until I was no bigger than a large doll. I brought my face closer and the little face thrust itself forward. I shook my head and smiled, and it did the same. It was my reflection – but so small! And suddenly I felt frightened and shut my eyes tight. And when I looked in the mirror again everything was as it had been before.

I looked at my watch and was appalled at the time I had spent. I arose to go, still with the panicky feeling at my heart. She said, “Visit me again tomorrow, my dear. I will have the doll ready for you.” I thanked her and said I would. She went with me to the door of the shop. The girl did not look at me as I passed through.

Her name is Mme. Mandilip. I am not going to her tomorrow, or ever again. She fascinates me but she makes me afraid. I don’t like the way I felt before the round mirror. And when I first looked into it and saw the whole room reflected, why didn’t I see her image in it? I did not! And although the room was lighted, I can’t remember seeing any windows or lamps. And that girl! And yet – Di would love the doll so!

Nov. 7. Queer how difficult it is to keep my resolution not to return to Mme. Mandilip. It makes me so restless! Last night I had a terrifying dream. I thought I was back in that room. I could see it distinctly. And suddenly I realized I was looking out into it. And that I was inside the mirror. I knew I was little. Like a doll. I was frightened and I beat against it, and fluttered against it like a moth against a window pane. Then I saw two beautiful long white hands stretching out to me. They opened the mirror and Caught me, and I struggled and fought and tried to get away. I awoke with my heart beating so hard it nigh smothered me. Di says I was crying out, “No! No! I won’t! No, I won’t!” over and over. She threw a pillow at me and I suppose that’s what awakened me.

Today I left the hospital at four, intending to go right home. I don’t know what I could have been thinking about, but whatever it was I must have been mighty preoccupied. I woke up to find myself in the subway station just getting on a Bowling Green train. That would have taken me to the Battery. I suppose absent-mindedly I had set out for Mme. Mandilip’s. It gave me such a start that I almost ran out of the station and up to the street. I think I’m acting very stupidly. I always have prided myself on my common sense. I think I must consult Dr. Braile and see whether I’m becoming neurotic. There’s no earthly reason why I shouldn’t go to see Mme. Mandilip. She is most interesting and certainly showed she liked me. It was so gracious of her to offer me that lovely doll. She must think me ungrateful and rude. And it would please Di so. When I think of how I’ve been feeling about the mirror it makes me feel as childish as Alice in Wonderland – or Through the Looking-glass, rather. Mirrors or any other reflecting surfaces make you see queer things sometimes. Probably the heat and the fragrance had a lot to do with it. I really don’t know that Mme. Mandilip wasn’t reflected. I was too intent upon looking at myself. It’s too absurd to run away and hide like a child from a witch. Yet that’s precisely what I’m doing. If it weren’t for that girl – but she certainly is a neurotic! I want to go, and I just don’t see why I’m behaving so.

Nov. 10. Well, I’m glad I didn’t persist in that ridiculous idea. Mme. Mandilip is wonderful. Of course, there are some queer things I don’t understand, but that’s because she is so different from anyone I’ve ever met and because when I get inside her room life becomes so different. When I leave, it’s like going out of some enchanted castle into the prosiest kind of world. Yesterday afternoon I determined I’d go to see her straight from the hospital. The moment I made up my mind I felt as though a cloud had lifted from it. Gayer and happier than I’ve been for a week. When I went in the store the white girl – her name is Laschna – stared at me as though she was going to cry. She said, in the oddest choked voice, “Remember that I tried to save you!”

It seemed so funny that I laughed and laughed. Then Mme. Mandilip opened the door, and when I looked at her eyes and heard her voice I knew why I was so light-hearted – it was like coming home after the most awful siege of homesickness. The lovely room welcomed me. It really did. It’s the only way I can describe it. I have the queer feeling that the room is as alive as Mme. Mandilip. That it is a part of her – or rather, a part of the part of her that are her eyes and hands and voice.

She didn’t ask me why I had stayed away. She brought out the doll. It is more wonderful than ever. She has still some work to do on it. We sat and talked, and then she said, “I’d like to make a doll of you, my dear.” Those were her exact words, and for just an instant I had a frightened feeling because I remembered my dream and saw myself fluttering inside the mirror and trying to get out. And then I realized it was just her way of speaking, and that she meant she would like to make a doll that looked like me. So I laughed and said, “Of course you can make a doll of me, Mme. Mandilip.” I wonder what nationality she is.

She laughed with me, her big eyes bigger than ever and very bright. She brought out some wax and began to model my head. Those beautiful long fingers worked rapidly as though each of them was a little artist in itself. I watched them, fascinated. I began to get sleepy, and sleepier and sleepier. She said, “My dear, I do wish you’d take off your clothes and let me model your whole body. Don’t be shocked. I’m just an old woman.”

I didn’t mind at all, and I said sleepily, “Why, of course you can.” And I stood on a little stool and watched the wax taking shape under those white fingers until it had become a small and almost perfect copy of me. I knew it was perfect, although I was so sleepy I could hardly see it. I was so sleepy, Mme. Mandilip had to help me dress.

And then I must have gone sound asleep, because I woke up with quite a start to find her patting my hands and saying, “I’m sorry I tired you, child. Stay if you wish. But if you must go, it is growing late.”

I looked at my watch and I was still so sleepy I could hardly see it, but I knew it was dreadfully late. Then Mme. Mandilip pressed her hands over my eyes and suddenly I was wide awake.

She said, “Come tomorrow and take the doll.” I said, “I must pay you what I can afford.” She said, “You’ve paid me in full, my dear, by letting me make a doll of you.” Then we both laughed and I hurried out. The white girl was busy with someone, but I called “Au ’voir” to her. Probably she didn’t hear me for she didn’t answer.

Nov. 11. I have the doll and Diana is crazy about it! How glad I am I didn’t surrender to that silly morbid feeling. Di has never had anything that has given her such happiness. She adores it! Sat again for Mme. Mandilip this afternoon for the finishing touches on my own doll. She is a genius. Truly a genius! I wonder more than ever why she is content to run a little shop. She surely could take her place among the greatest of artists. The doll literally is me. She asked me if she could cut some of my hair for its head and of course I let her. She tells me this doll is not the real doll she is going to make of me. That will be much larger. This is just the model from which she will work. I told her I thought this was perfect but she said the other would be of less perishable material. Maybe she will give me this one after she is finished with it. I was so anxious to take the baby doll home to Di that I didn’t stay long. I smiled and spoke to Laschna as I went out, and she nodded to me although not very cordially. I wonder if she can be jealous.

Nov. 13. This is the first time I have felt like writing since that dreadful case of Mr. Peters on the morning of the 10th. I had just finished writing about Di’s doll when the hospital called to say they wanted me on duty that night. Of course, I said I could come. Oh, but I wish I hadn’t. I’ll never forget that dreadful death. Never! I don’t want to write or think about it. When I came home that morning I could not sleep, and I tossed and tossed trying to get the memory of his face out of my mind.

I thought I had schooled myself too well to be affected by any patient. But there was something – Then I thought that if there was anyone who could help me to forget, it would be Mme. Mandilip. So about two o’clock I went down to see her.

Madame was in the store with Laschna and seemed surprised to see me so early. And not so pleased as usual, or so I thought, but perhaps it was my nervousness. The moment I entered the lovely room I began to feel better. Madame had been doing something with wire on the table but I couldn’t see what because she made me sit in a big comfortable chair, saying, “You look tired, child. Sit here and rest until I’m finished and here’s an old picture book that will keep you interested.”

She gave me a queer old book, long and narrow and it must have been very old because it was on vellum or something and the pictures and their colorings were like some of those books that have come down from the Middle Ages, the kind the old monks used to paint. They were all scenes in forests or gardens and the flowers and trees were the queerest! There were no people or anything in them but you had the strangest feeling that if you had just a little better eyes you could see people or something behind them. I mean it was as though they were hiding behind the trees and flowers or among them and looking out at you. I don’t know how long I studied the pictures trying and trying to see those hidden folk but at last Madame called me. I went to the table with the book still in my hand.

She said, “That’s for the doll I am making of you. Take it up and see how cleverly it is done.” And she pointed to something made of wire on the table.

I reached out to pick it up and then suddenly I saw that it was a skeleton. It was little, like a child’s skeleton and all at once the face of Mr. Peters flashed in my mind and I screamed in a moment of perfectly crazy panic and threw out my hands. The book flew out of my hand and dropped on the little wire skeleton and there was a sharp twang and the skeleton seemed to jump. I recovered myself immediately and I saw that the end of the wire had come loose and had cut the binding of the book and was still stuck in it.

For a moment Madame was dreadfully angry. She caught my arm and squeezed it so it hurt and her eyes were furious and she said in the strangest voice, “Why did you do that? Answer me. Why?” And she actually shook me. I don’t blame her now although then she really did frighten me, because she must have thought I did it deliberately.

Then she saw how I was trembling and her eyes and voice became gentle and she said, “Something is troubling you, my dear. Tell me and perhaps I can help you.” She made me He down upon a divan and sat beside me and stroked my hair and forehead and though I never discuss cases to others I found myself pouring out the whole story of the Peters case. She asked who was the man who had brought him to the hospital and I said Dr. Lowell called him Ricori and I supposed he was the notorious gangster. Her hands made me feel quiet and nice and sleepy and I told her about Dr. Lowell and how great a doctor he is and how terribly in secret I am in love with Dr. B. I’m sorry I told her about the case. Never have I done such a thing. But I was so shaken, and once I had begun I seemed to have to tell her everything. Everything in my mind was so distorted that once when I had lifted my head to look at her I actually thought she was gloating. That shows how little I was like myself!

After I had finished she told me to lie there and sleep and she would waken me when I wished. So I said I must be going at four. I went right to sleep and woke up feeling rested and fine. When I went out the little skeleton and book were still on the table, and I said I was so sorry about the book.

She said, “Better the book than your hand, my dear. The wire might have snapped loose while you were handling it and given you a nasty cut.” She wants me to bring down my nurse’s dress so she can make a little one like it for the new doll.

Nov. 14. I wish I’d never gone to Mme. Mandilip’s. I wouldn’t have had my foot scalded. But that’s not the real reason I’m sorry. I couldn’t put it in words if I tried. But I do wish I hadn’t. I took the nurse’s costume down to her this afternoon. She made a little model of it very quickly. She was gay and sang me some of the most haunting little songs. I couldn’t understand the words.

She laughed when I asked her what the language was and said, “The language of the people who peeped at you from the pictures of the book, my dear.”

That was a strange thing to say. And how did she know I thought there were people hidden in the pictures? I do wish I’d never gone there. She brewed some tea and poured cups for us. And then just as she was handing me mine her elbow struck the teapot and overturned it and the scalding tea poured right down over my right foot. It pained atrociously.

She took off the shoe and stripped off the stocking and spread salve of some sort over the scald. She said it would take out the pain and heal it immediately. It did stop the pain, and when I came home I could hardly believe my eyes. Job wouldn’t believe it had really been scalded.

Mme. Mandilip was terribly distressed about it. At least she seemed to be. I wonder why she didn’t go to the door with me as usual. She didn’t. She stayed in the room. The white girl Laschna was close to the door when I went out into the store. She looked at the bandage on my foot and I told her it had been scalded but Madame had dressed it. She didn’t even say she was sorry.

As I went out I looked at her and said a bit angrily, “Good-by.” Her eyes filled with tears and she looked at me in the strangest way and shook her head and said “Au ’voir!” I looked at her again as I shut the door and the tears were rolling down her cheeks. I wonder why?

I wish I had never gone to Mme. Mandilip’s!

Nov. 15. Foot all healed. I haven’t the slightest desire to return to Mme. Mandilip’s. I shall never go there again. I wish I could destroy that doll she gave me for Di. But it would break the child’s heart.

Nov. 20. Still no desire to see her. I find I’m forgetting all about her. The only time I think of her is when I see Di’s doll. I’m glad. So glad I want to dance and sing. I’ll never see her again. But, dear God, how I wish I never had seen her! And still I don’t know why.

•   •   •

This was the last reference to Mme. Mandilip in Nurse Walters’s diary. She died on the morning of November 25.

— X —

END OF
THE PETERS DOLL

Braile had been watching me closely. I met his questioning gaze, and tried to conceal the perturbation which the diary had aroused. I said:

“I never knew Walters had so imaginative a mind.”

He flushed and asked angrily: “You think she was fictionizing?”

“Not fictionizing exactly. Observing a series of ordinary occurrences through the glamour of a too active imagination.”

He said, incredulously: “You do not realize that what she has written is an authentic even though an unconscious description of an amazing piece of hypnotism?”

“The possibility did occur to me,” I answered tartly. “But I find no actual evidence to support it. I do perceive, however, that Walters was not so well balanced as I had supposed her. I find evidence that she was surprisingly emotional; that on at least one of her visits to this Mme. Mandilip she was plainly overwrought and in an extreme of nervous instability. I refer to her indiscreet discussion of the Peters case, after she had been warned by me, you will remember, to say nothing of it to anyone whatsoever.”

“I remember it so well,” he said, “that when I came to that part of the diary I had no further doubt of the hypnotism. Nevertheless, go on.”

“In considering two possible causes for any action, it is desirable to accept the more reasonable. Consider the actual facts, Braile. Walters lays stress upon the odd conduct and warnings of the girl.

“She admits the girl is a neurotic. Well, the conduct she describes is exactly what we would expect from a neurotic. Walters is attracted by the dolls and goes in to price them, as anyone would. She is acting under no compulsion.

“She meets a woman whose physical characteristics stimulate her imagination and arouse her emotionalism. She confides in her. This woman, evidently also of the emotional type, likes her and gives her a doll. This woman is an artist. She sees in Walters a desirable model. She asks her to pose – still no compulsion and a natural request – and Walters does pose.

“The woman has her technique like all artists, and part of it is to make skeletons as the framework of her dolls – a natural and intelligent procedure. The sight of the skeleton suggests death to Walters, and the suggestion of death brings up the image of Peters, which has been powerfully impressed upon her imagination. She becomes momentarily hysterical – again evidence of her overwrought condition.

“She takes tea with the doll-maker and accidentally is scalded. Naturally this arouses the solicitude of her hostess, who dresses the scald with some salve in whose efficacy she believes. And that is all! Where in this entirely commonplace sequence of events is there evidence that Walters was hypnotized? And finally, assuming that she was hypnotized, where is there any evidence of motive?”

“The doll-maker herself gave it,” he answered – “‘to make a doll of you, my dear!’”

•   •   •

I had almost convinced myself by my argument, and this remark exasperated me. “I suppose,” I said, “you would have me believe that once lured into the shop, Walters was compelled by occult arts to return until this Mme. Mandilip’s devilish purpose was accomplished. That the compassionate shopgirl tried to save Walters from what the old melodramas called a fate worse than death – although not precisely the fate they meant; that the doll she was to be given for her sister was the bait on the hook of a sorceress; that it was necessary Walters be wounded so the witch’s salve could be applied; that it was the salve which carried the unknown death. That the first trap failing, the accident of the teakettle was contrived and was successful. And that now Walters’s soul is fluttering inside the witch’s mirror, just as she dreamed. And all this, my dear Braile, is most outrageous superstition!”

“Ah!” he said obliquely. “So those possibilities did occur to you, after all? Your mind is not so fossilized as, a few moments ago, I supposed.”

I became still more exasperated.

“Is it your theory that from the moment Walters entered the store, every occurrence she has narrated was designed to give this Mme. Mandilip possession of her soul – a design that was consummated by Walters’s death?”

He hesitated, then said: “In essence – yes.”

“A soul!” I mused, sardonically. “But I have never seen a soul. I know of no one whose evidence I would credit who has seen a soul. What is a soul – if it exists? Is it ponderable? Material? If your theory is correct, it must be. How could one gain possession of something which is both imponderable and non-material? How would one know one had it if it could not be seen nor weighed, felt nor measured, nor heard? If not material, how could it be constrained, directed, confined? As you would have me believe has been done with Walters’s soul by this doll-maker.

“If material, then where does it reside in the body? Within the brain? I have operated upon scores and never yet have I opened any secret chamber housing this mysterious occupant. Little cells, far more complicated in their workings than any machinery ever devised, changing their possessor’s mentality, moods, reason, emotion, personality – according to whether the little cells are functioning well or ill. These I have found, Braile – but never a soul. Surgeons have thoroughly explored the balance of the body. They have found no secret temple within it. Show me a soul, Braile, and I’ll believe in – Mme. Mandilip.”

He studied me in silence, then nodded.

“Now I understand. It’s hit you pretty hard, too, hasn’t it? You’re doing a little beating of your own against the mirror, aren’t you? Well, I’ve had a struggle to thrust aside what I’ve been taught is reality – and to admit there may be something else just as real. This matter, Lowell, is extra-medical, outside the science we know. Until we admit it, however, we’ll get nowhere.

“There are still two points I’d like to take up. Peters and the Darnley woman died the same kind of death. Ricori finds that they both had dealings with Mme. Mandilip – or so we can assume. He visits her and narrowly escapes death. Harriet visits her, and dies as Darnley and Peters did. Reasonably, therefore, doesn’t all this point to Mme. Mandilip as a possible source of the evil that overtook all four?”

“Certainly,” I answered.

“Then it must follow that there could have been real cause for the fear and forebodings of Harriet. That there could have existed a cause other than emotionalism and too much imagination – even though Harriet were unaware of these circumstances.”

Too late I realized the dilemma into which my admission had put me, but I could reply only in the affirmative.

“The second point is Harriet’s loss of all desire to return to the doll-maker after the teapot incident. Did that strike you as curious?”

“No. If Harriet were emotionally unstable, the shock would automatically set itself up as an inhibition. A subconscious barrier. Unless they are masochists, such types do not like to return to the scene of an unpleasant experience.”

“Did you notice her remark that after the scalding the doll-maker did not accompany her to the door of the store? And that it was the first time she had neglected to do so?”

“Not particularly. Why?”

“This. If the application of the salve constituted the final act, and thereafter death became inevitable, it might be highly embarrassing to Mme. Mandilip to have her victim going in and out of her shop during the time it took the poison to kill. The seizure might even take place there, and lead to dangerous questions. The clever thing therefore would be to cause the unsuspecting sacrifice to lose all interest in her; indeed, feel a repulsion against her, or, if possible, forget her. This could be easily accomplished by posthypnotic suggestion. And Mme. Mandilip had every opportunity for it. Would this not explain Harriet’s distaste as logically as imagination – or emotionalism?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“And so,” he said, “we have explained the woman’s failure to go to the door with Harriet that day. Her plot had succeeded. It was all over. She had planted her suggestion. No need now for any further contact with Harriet. She lets her go, unaccompanied. Significant symbolism of finality!”

He sat, thinking.

“No need to meet Harriet again,” he half whispered, “till after death!”

I said, startled: “What do you mean by that?”

“Never mind,” he answered.

He crossed to the charred spot upon the floor and picked up the heat-blasted crystals. They were about twice the size of olive pits and apparently of some composite. He walked to the table and looked down upon the grotesque figure with its skeleton ribs.

“Suppose the heat melted it?” he asked, and reached to lift the skeleton. It held fast, and he gave it a sharp tug. There was a shrill twanging sound, and he dropped it with a startled oath. The skeleton fell to the floor. It writhed, the single wire of which it was made uncoiling.

Uncoiling, it glided over the floor like a serpent and came to rest, quivering.

We looked from it to the table.

The substance that had resembled a sprawling, flattened, headless body was gone.

In its place was a film of fine gray dust which swirled and eddied for a moment in some unfelt draft – and then it, too, was gone!

— XI —

NURSE’S CAP

“She knows how to get rid of the evidence!”

Braile laughed – but there was no mirth in his laughter. I said nothing. It was the same thought I had held of McCann when the doll’s head had vanished. But McCann could not be suspected of this. Evading any further discussion of the matter, we went to the annex to see Ricori.

There were two new guards on watch at his door. They arose politely and spoke to us pleasantly. We entered softly. Ricori had slipped out of the drug into a natural sleep. He was breathing easily, peacefully, in deep and healing slumber. The room is a quiet one at the rear, overlooking a little inclosed garden. Both houses are old-fashioned, dating back to a far more peaceful New York, and sturdy vines of Virginia creepers climb up it both at front and back. I cautioned the nurse to maintain utmost quiet, arranging her light so that it would cast only the slightest gleam upon Ricori; in going out I similarly cautioned the guards, telling them that their chief’s speedy recovery to health might depend upon it.

It was now after six. I asked Braile to stay for dinner, and afterward to drop in on my patients at the hospital and to call me up if he thought it worth while. I wanted to stay at home and await Ricori’s awakening, should it occur.

We had almost finished dinner when the telephone rang. Braile answered.

“McCann,” he said. I went to the instrument.

“Hello, McCann. This is Dr. Lowell.”

“How’s the boss?”

“Better. I’m expecting him to awaken any moment and to be able to talk.” I listened intently to catch whatever reaction he might betray to this news.

“That’s great, doc!” I could detect nothing but deepest satisfaction in his voice. “Listen, doc, I seen Mollie an’ I got some news. Dropped round on her right after I left you. Found Gil-more – that’s her husband – home, an’ that gave me a break. Said I’d come in to ask her how she’d like a little ride. She was tickled an’ we left Gil home with the kid—”

“Does she know of Peters’s death?” I interrupted.

“Nope. An’ I didn’t tell her. Now listen. I told you Horty – What? Why, Missus Darnley, Jim Wilson’s gal. Yeah. Let me talk, will you? I told you Horty was nuts on Mollie’s kid. Early last month Horty comes in with a swell doll for the kid. Also she’s nursing a sore hand she says she gets at the same place she got the doll. The woman she got the doll from gave it to her, she tells Mollie—

“What? No, gave her the doll, not the hand. Say, doc, ain’t I speaking clear? Yeah, she gets her hand hurt where she got the doll. That’s what I said. The woman fixes it up for her. She gives her the doll for nothing, Horty tells Mollie, because she thought Horty was so pretty an’ for posing for her. Yeah, posing for her, making a statue of her or something. That makes a hit with Horty because she don’t hate herself an’ she thinks this doll woman a lallapaloozer. Yeah, a lallapaloozer – a corker! Yeah.

“About a week later, Tom – that’s Peters – shows up while Horty’s there an’ sees the doll. Tom’s a mite jealous of Horty with the kid an’ asks her where she got it. She tells him a Mme. Mandilip an’ where, an’ Tom he says as this is a gal-doll she needs company so he’ll go an’ get a boy-doll. About a week after this Tom turns up with a boy-doll the lick-an’-spit of Horty’s. Mollie asks him if he pays as much for it as Horty. They ain’t told him about Horty not paying nothing for it or posing.

“Mollie says Tom looks sort of sheepish but all he says is well, he ain’t gone broke on it. She’s going to kid him by asking if the doll woman thinks he’s so pretty she wants him to pose, but the kid sets up a whoop about the boy-doll an’ she forgets it. Tom don’t show up again till about the first of this month. He’s got a bandage on his hand an’ Mollie, kidding him, asks him if he got it where he got the doll. He looks surprised an’ says yes, but how the hell did you know that? Yeah – yeah, that’s what she says he told her.

“What’s that? Did the Mandilip woman bandage it for him? How the hell – I don’t know. I guess so, maybe. Mollie didn’t say an’ I didn’t ask. Listen, doc, I told you Mollie’s no dummy. What I’m telling you took me two hours to get. Talking about this, talking about that an’ coming back casual like to what I’m trying to find out.

“I’m afraid to ask too many questions. What? Oh, that’s all right, doc. No offense. Yeah, I think it pretty funny myself. But like I’m telling you I’m afraid to go too far. Mollie’s too wise.

“Well, when Ricori comes up yesterday he uses the same tactics as me I guess. Anyway, he admires the dolls an’ asks her where she gets ’em an’ how much they cost an’ so on. Remember I told you I stay out in the car while he’s there. It’s after that he goes home an’ does the telephoning an’ then beats it to the Mandilip hag. Yeah, that’s all. Does it mean anything? Yeah? All right then.”

He was silent for a moment or two but I had not heard the click of the receiver. I asked: “Are you there, McCann?”

“Yeah. I was just thinking.” His voice held a wistful note. “I’d sure like to be with you when the boss comes to. But I’d best go down an’ see how the hands are getting along with them two Mandilip cows. Maybe I’ll call you up if it ain’t too late. Good-by, doc.”

I walked slowly back to Braile, trying to marshal my disjointed thoughts. I repeated McCann’s end of the conversation to him exactly. He did not interrupt me. When I had finished he said, quietly:

“Hortense Darnley goes to the Mandilip woman, is given a doll, is asked to pose, is wounded there, treated there. And dies. Peters goes to the Mandilip woman, gets a doll, is wounded there, is presumably treated there. And dies like Hortense. You see a doll for which, apparently, he has posed. Harriet goes through the same routine. And dies like Hortense and Peters. Now what?”

Suddenly I felt rather old and tired. It is not precisely stimulating to see crumbling what one has long believed to be a fairly well-ordered world of recognized cause and effect. I said wearily:

“I don’t know.”

He arose and patted my shoulder.

“Get some sleep. The nurse will call you if Ricori wakes. We’ll get to the bottom of this thing.”

“Even if we fall to it,” I said, and smiled.

“Even if we have to fall to it,” he repeated, and did not smile.

After Braile had gone I sat for long, thinking. Then, determined to dismiss my thoughts, I tried to read. I was too restless, and soon gave it up. Like the room in which Ricori lay, my study is at the rear, looking down upon the little garden.

I walked over to the window and stared out, unseeingly. More urgent than ever was that feeling of standing before a blank door which it was vitally important to open. I turned back into the study and was surprised to find it was close to ten o’clock. I dimmed my light and lay down upon the comfortable couch. Almost immediately I fell asleep.

I awoke from that sleep with a start, as though someone had spoken in my ear. I sat up listening. There was utter silence around me. And suddenly I was aware that it was a strange silence, unfamiliar and oppressive. A thick, dead silence that filled the study and through which no sound from outside could penetrate.

I jumped to my feet and turned on the lights, full. The silence retreated, seemed to pour out of the room like something tangible. But slowly. Now I could hear the ticking of my clock – ticking out abruptly, as though a silencing cover had been whisked from it. I shook my head impatiently, and walked to the window. I leaned out to breathe the cool night air. I leaned out still more, so that I could see the window of Ricori’s room, resting my hand on the trunk of the vine. I felt a tremor along it as though someone were gently shaking it – or as though some small animal were climbing it—

The window of Ricori’s room broke into a square of light. Behind me I heard the shrilling of the annex alarm bell which meant the urgent need of haste. I raced out of the study, up the stairs two at a time, and over.

As I ran into the corridor I saw that the guards were not at the door. The door was open. I stood stock-still on its threshold, incredulous—

One guard crouched beside the window, automatic in hand. The other knelt beside a body on the floor, his pistol pointed toward me. At her table sat the nurse, head bent upon her breast – unconscious or asleep. The bed was empty. The body on the floor was Ricori!

The guard lowered his gun. I dropped at Ricori’s side. He was lying face down, stretched out a few feet from the bed. I turned him over. His face had a pallor of death, but his heart was beating.

“Help me lift him to the bed,” I said to the guard. “Then shut that door.”

He did so, silently. The man at the window asked from the side of his mouth, never relaxing his watch outward:

“Boss dead?”

“Not quite,” I answered, then swore as I seldom do: “What the hell kind of guards are you?”

The man who had shut the door gave a mirthless chuckle.

“There’s more’n you goin’ to ask that, doc.”

I gave a glance at the nurse. She still sat huddled in the limp attitude of unconsciousness or deep sleep. I stripped Ricori of his pajamas and went over his body. There was no mark upon him. I gave him an injection of adrenalin. I went over to the nurse and shook her. She did not awaken. I raised her eyelids. The pupils of her eyes were contracted. I flashed a light in them, without response. Her pulse and respiration were slow, but not dangerously so. I let her be for a moment and turned to the guards.

“What happened?”

They looked at each other uneasily. The guard at the window waved his hand, as though bidding the other to do the talking. This guard said, hesitantly:

“We’re sitting out there. All at once the house gets damned still. I says to Jack there, ‘Sounds like they put a silencer on the dump.’ He says, ‘Yeah.’ We sit listening. Then all at once we hear a thump inside here. Like somebody falling out of bed. We crash the door. There’s the boss like you seen him on the floor. There’s the nurse asleep like you see her. We glim the alarm and pull it. Then we wait for somebody to come. That’s all, ain’t it, Jack?”

“Yeah,” answered the guard at the window, tonelessly. “Yeah, I guess that’s all.”

I looked at him suspiciously.

“You guess that’s all? What do you mean – you guess?”

Again they looked at each other.

“Better come clean, Bill,” said the guard at the window.

“Hell, he won’t believe it,” said the other.

“And nobody else; anyway, tell him.”

The guard Bill said:

“When we crashed the door, we seen something like a couple of cats fighting there beside the window. We didn’t see the boss, he was out of range. We had our guns out, but was afraid to shoot for what you told us. Then we heard a funny noise outside like somebody blowing a flute. The two things broke loose and jumped up on the window sill, and out. We jumped to the window. And we didn’t see nothing.”

“You saw the things at the window. What did they look like then?” I asked.

“You tell him, Jack.”

“Dolls!”

•   •   •

A shiver went down my back. It was the answer I had been expecting – and dreading. Out the window! I recalled the tremor of the vine when I gripped it. The guard who had closed the door looked at me, and I saw his jaw drop.

“Cripes, Jack!” he gasped. “He believes it!”

I forced myself to speak. “What kind of dolls?” The guard at the window answered, more confidently: “One we couldn’t see well. The other looked like one of your nurses if she’d shrunk to about two feet!”

One of my nurses… Walters… I felt a wave of weakness and sank down on the edge of Ricori’s bed.

Something white on the floor at the head of it caught my eye. I stared at it stupidly, then leaned and picked it up.

It was a nurse’s cap. A little replica of those my nurses wear. It was about large enough to fit the head of a two-foot doll…

There was something else where it had been. I picked that up.

It was a knotted cord of hair… pale ashen hair… with nine curious knots spaced at irregular intervals along it…

The guard named Bill stood looking down at me anxiously. He asked:

“Want me to call any of your people, doc?”

“Try to get hold of McCann,” I bade him; then spoke to the other guard: “Close the windows and fasten them and pull down the curtains. Then lock the door.”

PART FOUR

Black magic – sorcery – witchcraft! How else could Dr. Lowell explain the diabolical murder genius he was fighting?

LEADING UP TO
THIS INSTALLMENT

Malignant, mysterious, baffling, yet apparently connected in some manner are the deaths of several New York people being investigated by Dr. Lowell, one of the city’s leading nerve and mental specialists. His attention is brought to the cases when Julian Ricori, underworld leader, brings his unconscious lieutenant, Peters, to Dr. Lowell for treatment.

Peters’s case history is the same as that of all the other victims, who are either children or people fond of children. They become unconscious, a look of terror overspreads their countenances, replaced by one of malignant evil, then they die. Only one, Nurse Walters, in love with Dr. Braile, Dr. Lowell’s assistant, was able to conquer that malignant spirit before she dies.

Ricori, investigating, discovers that the afflicted people had visited a doll shop run by a peculiar woman, Mme. Mandilip, who creates marvelously lifelike dolls. Ricori himself is stricken, and is hurried to Dr. Lowell by McCann, his bodyguard. The doctor learns that Ricori had left the doll shop with a doll under his overcoat, that he had been stabbed, apparently by the doll. Ricori does not die, but remains in a stupor.

Lowell and Braile, finding Nurse Walters’s diary, read of her unusual experiences with the Mandilip woman, who possesses strange, almost hypnotic powers and who got the nurse to pose for her while she made a doll. Despite Dr. Lowell’s firm convictions in his scientific learning, all the evidence seems to point to the fact that the dolls of Mme. Mandilip are animated in some way, that they can move and think like human beings.

Ricori, in Dr. Lowell’s hospital, is being watched by two of his gunmen, who are posted outside the door of his room. Dr. Lowell is suddenly awakened by the alarm bell, which has been set off by one of the guards. The doctor hurries in, to find Ricori on the floor. The guards tell of having heard a thud in the room and rushing in to see two small figures leap to the window and disappear.

— XII —

TEMPORARY MADNESS

Bill, Ricori’s guard, began to telephone. Stuffing the cap and knotted cord into my pocket I walked over to the nurse. She was rapidly recovering and in a minute or two I had her awake. At first her eyes dwelt on me, puzzled; took in the lighted room and the two men and the puzzlement changed to alarm. She sprang to her feet.

“I didn’t see you come in! Did I fall asleep? What’s happened?” Her hand went to her throat.

“I’m hoping you can tell us,” I said, gently.

She stared at me uncomprehendingly. She said, confusedly:

“I don’t know… it became terribly still… I thought I saw something moving at the window… then there was a queer aromatic fragrance… and then I looked up to see you bending over me.”

I asked: “Can you remember anything of what you saw at the window? The least detail – the least impression. Please try.”

She answered, hesitantly: “There was something white… I thought someone… something… was watching me… then came the fragrance, like flowers… that’s all.”

Bill hung up the telephone: “All right, doc. They’re after McCann. Now what?”

“Miss Butler,” I turned to the nurse. “I’m going to relieve you for the balance of the night. Go to bed. And I want you to sleep. I prescribe—” I told her what.

“You’re not angry – you don’t think I’ve been careless—”

“No to both.” I smiled and patted her shoulder. “The case has taken an unexpected turn, that’s all. Now don’t ask any more questions.”

I walked with her to the door, opened it for her.

“Do exactly as I say.”

I closed and locked the door behind her.

I sat beside Ricori. The shock that he had experienced – whatever it might have been – should either cure or kill, I thought grimly. As I watched him, a tremor went through his body. Slowly an arm began to lift, fist clenched. His lips moved. He spoke, in Italian and so swiftly that I could get no word. His arm fell back. I stood up from the bed; the paralysis had gone; he could move and speak. But would he be able to do so when consciousness assumed sway? I left this for the next few hours to decide. I could do nothing else.

“Now listen to me carefully,” I said to the two guards. “No matter how strange will seem what I am going to say, you must obey me in every detail – Ricori’s life depends upon your doing so. I want one of you to sit close beside me at the table here. I want the other to sit beside Ricori, at the head of the bed and between him and me. If I am asleep and he should awaken, arouse me. If you see any change in his condition, awaken me at once.”

They said: “Okay.”

“Very well. Now here is the most important thing of all. You must watch me even more closely. Whichever of you sits beside me must not take his eyes off me. If I should go to your chief it would be to do one of three things only – listen to his heart and breathing – lift his eyelids – take his temperature. I mean, of course, if he should be as he now is. If I seem to awaken and attempt to do anything other than these three – stop me. If I resist, make me helpless – tie me up and gag me – no, don’t gag me – listen to me and remember what I say. Then telephone to Dr. Braile – here is his number.”

I wrote, and passed it to them.

“Don’t damage me any more than you can help,” I said, and smiled.

They stared at each other, plainly disconcerted.

“If you say so, doc—” began the guard Bill, doubtfully.

“I do say so. Do not hesitate. If you should be wrong, I’ll not hold it against you.”

“The doc knows what he’s about, Bill,” said the guard Jack.

“Okay then,” said Bill.

I turned out all the lights except that beside the nurse’s table. I stretched myself in her chair and adjusted the lamp so my face could be plainly seen. That little white cap I had picked from the floor had shaken me – damnably! I drew it out and placed it in a drawer. The guard Jack took his station beside Ricori. Bill drew up a chair, and sat facing me. I thrust my hand back into my pocket and clutched the knotted cord, closed my eyes, emptied my mind of all thought and relaxed. In abandoning, at least temporarily, my conception of a sane cosmos I had determined to give that of Mme. Mandilip every chance to operate.

Faintly, I heard a clock strike one. I slept.

•   •   •

Somewhere a vast wind was roaring. It circled and swept down upon me. It bore me away. I knew that I had no body, that indeed I had no form. Yet I was. A formless sentience whirling in that vast wind. It carried me into infinite distance. Body-less, intangible as I knew myself to be, yet it poured into me an unearthly vitality. I roared with the wind in un-human jubilance. The vast wind circled and raced me back from immeasurable space…

I seemed to awaken, that pulse of strange jubilance still surging through me… Ah! There was what I must destroy… there on the bed… must kill so that this pulse of jubilance would not cease… must kill so that the vast wind would sweep me up again and away and feed me with its life. But careful… careful… there – there in the throat just under the ear… there is where I must plunge it… then off with the wind again… there where the pulse beats… what is holding me back?… caution… caution… “I am going to take his temperature.”… that’s it, careful… “I am going to take his temperature.” Now – one quick spring then into his throat where the pulse beats… “Not with that you don’t!”… Who said that?… Still holding me… rage, consuming and ruthless… blackness and the sound of a vast wind roaring away and away…

I heard a voice: “Slap him again, Bill, but not so hard. He’s coming around.” I felt a stinging blow on my face. The dancing mists cleared from before my eyes. I was standing halfway between the nurse’s table and Ricori’s bed. The guard Jack held my arms pinioned to my sides. The guard Bill’s hand was raised – it held a gun. There was something clenched in my own hand. I looked down. It was a strong scalpel, razor-edged!

I dropped the scalpel. I said, quietly: “It’s all right now, you can release me.”

The guard Bill said nothing. His comrade did not loosen his grip. I twisted my head and I saw that both their faces were sallow white. I said:

“It was what I had expected.. It was why I instructed you. It is over. You can keep your guns on me if you like.”

The guard who held me freed my arms. I touched my cheek gingerly.

“You must have hit me rather hard, Bill,” I said mildly.

He said: “If you could ’a’ seen your face, doc, you’d wonder I didn’t smash it.”

I nodded, clearly sensible now of the demoniac quality of that rage. I asked:

“What did I do?”

The guard Bill said: “You wake up and set there for a minute staring at the chief. Then you take something out of that drawer and get up. You say you’re going to take his temperature. You’re half to him before we see what you got. I shout, ‘Not with that you don’t!’ Jack grabs you. Then you went – crazy. And I had to slam you. That’s all.”

I nodded again. I took out of my pocket the knotted cord of woman’s pale hair, held it over a dish and touched a match to it. It began to burn, writhing like a tiny snake as it did so, the complex knots untying as the flame touched them. I dropped the last inch of it upon the plate and watched it turn to ash.

“I think there’ll be no more trouble tonight,” I said. “But keep up your watch just as before.”

I dropped back into the chair and closed my eyes.

Well, Braile had not shown me a soul, but – I believed in Mme. Mandilip.

— XIII —

A DOLL KILLS

The balance of the night I slept soundly and dreamlessly. I awakened at my usual hour of seven. The guards were alert. I asked if anything had been heard from McCann, and they answered no. I wondered a little at that, but they did not seem to think it out of the ordinary. Their reliefs were soon due, and I cautioned them to speak to no one but McCann about the occurrences, reminding them that no one would be likely to believe them if they did. They assured me, earnestly, that they would be silent. I told them that I wanted the guards to remain within the room thereafter, as long as they were necessary.

Ricori was sleeping deeply and naturally. In all ways his condition was most satisfactory. I concluded that the second shock, as sometimes happens, had counteracted the lingering effects of the initial one. When he awakened, he would be able to speak and move. I gave this news to the guards. I could see that they were bursting with questions. I gave them no encouragement.

At eight, my day nurse for Ricori appeared, plainly much surprised to have found Roberts sleeping and me taking her place. I made no explanation, simply telling her that the guards would now be stationed within the room instead of outside the door.

At eight thirty, Braile dropped in on me for breakfast, and to report. I let him finish before I apprised him of what had happened. I said nothing, however, of the nurse’s little cap, nor of my own experience.

I assumed this reticence for well considered reasons. One, Braile would accept in its entirety the appalling deduction from the cap’s presence. I strongly suspected that he had been in love with Walters, and that I would be unable to restrain him from visiting the doll-maker. Usually hard-headed, he was in this matter far too suggestible.

It would be dangerous for him, and his observations would be worthless to me. Second, if he knew of my own experience, he would without doubt refuse to let me out of his sight. Third – either of these contingencies would defeat my own purpose, which was to interview Mme. Mandilip entirely alone – with the exception of McCann to keep watch outside the shop.

What would come of that meeting I could not forecast. But, obviously, it was the only way to retain my self-respect.

To admit that what had just occurred was witchcraft, sorcery, supernatural – was to surrender to superstition. Nothing can be supernatural. If anything exists, it must exist in obedience to natural laws. Material bodies must obey material laws. We may not know those laws – but they exist nevertheless. If Mme. Mandilip possessed knowledge of an unknown science, it behooved me as an exemplar of a known science to find out what I could about the other. Especially as I had recently responded so thoroughly to it. That I had been able to outguess her in her technique – if it had been that, and not a self-induced illusion – gave me a pleasant feeling of confidence. At any rate, meet her I must.

It happened to be one of my days for consultation, so I could not get away until after one. I asked Braile to take charge of matters after that, for a few hours.

Close to ten the nurse telephoned that Ricori was awake, that he was able to speak, and was asking for me.

He smiled at me as I entered the room. He said as I leaned over and took his wrist:

“I think you have saved more than my life, Dr. Lowell; Ricori thanks you. He will never forget!”

A bit florid, but thoroughly in character. It showed that his mind was functioning normally. I was relieved. “We’ll have you up in a jiffy.” I patted his hand.

He whispered: “Have there been any more – deaths?”

I had been wondering whether he had retained any recollection of the affair of the night. I answered:

“No. But you have lost much strength since McCann brought you here. I don’t want you to do much talking today.” I added casually: “No, nothing has happened. Oh, yes – you fell out of bed this morning. Do you remember?”

He glanced at the guards and then back at me. He said:

“I am weak. Very weak. You must make me strong quickly.”

“We’ll have you sitting up in two days, Ricori.”

“In less than two days I must be up and out. There is a thing I must do. It cannot wait.”

I did not want him to become excited. I abandoned any intention of asking what had happened in the car. I said, incisively:

“That will depend entirely upon you. You must not excite yourself. You must do as I tell you. I am going to leave you now, to give orders for your nutrition. Also, I want your guards to remain in this room.”

He said: “And still you tell me – nothing has happened?”

“I don’t intend to have anything happen.” I leaned over him and whispered: “McCann has guards around the Mandilip woman. She cannot run away.”

He said: “But her servitors are more efficient than mine, Dr. Lowell!”

I looked at him sharply. His eyes were inscrutable. I went back to my office, deep in thought. What did Ricori know?

At eleven o’clock McCann called me on the telephone. I was so glad to hear from him that I was angry.

“Where on earth have you been—” I began.

“Listen, doc. I’m at Mollie’s – Peters’s sister,” he interrupted. “Come here, quick.”

The peremptory demand added to my irritation.

“Not now,” I answered. “These are my office hours. I will not be free until one.”

“Can’t you break away? Something’s happened. I don’t know what to do!” There was desperation in his voice.

“What has happened?” I asked.

“I can’t tell you over—” His voice steadied, grew gentle; I heard him say, “Be quiet, Mollie. It can’t do no good!” Then to me – “Well, come as soon as you can, doc. I’ll wait. Take the address.” Then when he had given it to me, I heard him again speaking to another – “Quit it, Mollie! I ain’t going to leave you.”

He hung up abruptly. I went back to my chair, troubled. He had not asked me about Ricori. That in itself was disquieting. Mollie? Peters’s sister, of course! Was it that she had learned of her brother’s death, and suffered collapse? I recalled that Ricori had said she was soon to be a mother. No, I felt that McCann’s panic had been due to something more than that. I became more and more uneasy. I looked over my appointments. There were no important ones. Coming to a sudden determination, I told my secretary to call up and postpone them. I ordered my car, and set out for the address McCann had given me.

McCann met me at the door of the apartment. His face was drawn and his eyes haunted. He drew me within without a word, and led me through the hall. I passed an open door and glimpsed a woman with a sobbing child in her arms. McCann took me into a bedroom and pointed to the bed.

There was a man lying on it, covers pulled up to his chin. I went over to him, looked down upon him, touched him. The man was dead. He had been dead for hours. McCann said:

“Mollie’s husband. Look him over like you done the boss.”

I had a curiously unpleasant sense of being turned like a potter’s wheel by some inexorable hand – from Peters, to Walters, to Ricori, to the body before me… would the wheel stop there?

I stripped the dead man. I took from my bag a magnifying glass and probes. I went over the body inch by inch, beginning at the region of the heart. Nothing there… nothing anywhere… I turned the body over—

At once, at the base of the skull, I saw a minute puncture!

I took a fine probe and inserted it. The probe – and again I had that feeling of infinite repetition – slipped into the puncture. I manipulated it, gently.

Something like a long thin needle had been thrust into that vital spot just where the spinal cord connects with the brain. By accident, or perhaps because the needle had been twisted savagely to tear the nerve paths, there had been paralysis of respiration and almost instant death.

I withdrew the probe and turned to McCann.

“This man has been murdered,” I said. “Killed by the same kind of weapon with which Ricori was attacked. But whoever did it made a better job. He’ll never come to life again – as Ricori did.”

“Yeah?” said McCann quietly. “An’ me an’ Paul was the only ones with Ricori when it happened. An’ the only ones here with this man, doc, was his wife an’ baby! Now what’re you going to do about that? Say those two put him on the spot – like you thought we done the boss?”

I said: “What do you know about this, McCann? And how did you come to be here so – opportunely?”

He answered, patiently: “I wasn’t here when he was killed – if that’s what you’re getting at. If you want to know the time, it was two o’clock. Mollie got me on the phone about an hour ago an’ I come straight up.”

“She had better luck than I had,” I said dryly. “Ricori’s people have been trying to get hold of you since one o’clock last night.”

“I know. But I didn’t know it till just before Mollie called me. I was on my way to see you. An’ if you want to know what I was doing all night, I’ll tell you I was out on the boss’s business and yours. For one thing trying to find out where that hell-cat niece keeps her coupe. I found out – too late.”

“But the men who were supposed to be watching—”

“Listen, doc, won’t you talk to Mollie now?” he interrupted me. “I’m afraid for her. It’s only what I told her about you an’ that you was coming that’s kept her up.”

“Take me to her,” I said, abruptly.

We went into the room where I had seen the woman and the sobbing child. The woman was not more than twenty-seven or eight, I judged, and in ordinary circumstances would have been unusually attractive. Now her face was drawn and bloodless, in her eyes horror, and a fear on the very borderline of madness. She stared at me, vacantly; she kept rubbing her lip with the tips of her forefingers, staring at me with those eyes out of which looked a mind emptied of everything but fear and horror. The child, a girl of four, kept up her incessant sobbing. McCann shook the woman by the shoulder.

“Snap out of it, Mollie,” he said, roughly, but pityingly, too. “Here’s the doc.”

The woman became aware of me, suddenly, as though by a violent effort of will. She looked at me steadily for slow moments, then asked, less questioning than like one relinquishing a last thin thread of hope: “He is dead?”

She read the answer in my face. She cried:

“Oh, Johnnie – Johnnie! Dead!”

She took the child up in her arms. She said to it, almost tranquilly: “Johnnie Boy has gone away, darling. Daddy has had to go away. Don’t cry, darling, we’ll soon see him!”

I wished she would break down, weep; but that deep fear which never left her eyes was too strong; it blocked all normal outlets of sorrow. Not much longer, I realized, could her mind stand up under that tension.

“McCann,” I whispered, “say something, do something that will arouse her. Make her violently angry, or make her cry. I don’t care which.”

He nodded. He snatched the child from her arms and thrust it behind him. He leaned, his face close to the woman’s. He said, brutally:

“Come clean, Mollie! Why did you murder John?”

For a moment the woman stood, uncomprehending. Then a tremor shook her. The fear vanished from her eyes and fury took its place. She threw herself upon McCann, fists beating at his face. He caught her, pinioned her arms. The child screamed.

The woman’s body relaxed, her arms fell to her sides. She crumpled to the floor, head bent over her knees. And tears came. McCann would have lifted, comforted her. I stopped him.

“Let her cry. It’s the best thing for her.”

And after a little while she looked up at McCann and said, shakily:

“You didn’t mean that, Dan?”

He said: “No. I know you didn’t do it, Mollie. But now you’ve got to talk to the doc. There’s a lot to be done.”

She asked, normally enough now: “Do you want to question me, doctor? Or shall I just go on and tell you what happened?”

McCann said: “Tell him the way you told me. Begin with the doll.”

I said: “That’s right. Tell me your story. If I’ve any questions, I’ll ask them when you are done.”

•   •   •

She began: “Yesterday afternoon Dan here came and took me out for a ride. Usually John does not… did not… get home until about six. But yesterday he was worried about me and came home early, around three. He likes… he liked… Dan, and urged me to go. It was a little after six when I returned.

“‘A present came for the kid while you were out, Mollie,’ he said. ‘It’s another doll. I’ll bet Tom sent it.’ Tom is my brother.

“There was a big box on the table, and I lifted the lid. In it was the most lifelike doll imaginable. A perfect thing. A little girl-doll. Not a baby-doll, but a doll like a child about ten or twelve years old. Dressed like a schoolgirl, with her books strapped and over her shoulder – only about a foot high, but perfect. The sweetest face – a face like a little angel!

“John said: ‘It was addressed to you, Mollie, but I thought it was flowers and opened it. Looks as though it could talk, doesn’t it? I’ll bet it’s what they call a portrait-doll.’

“At that, I was sure Tom had sent it. Because he had given little Mollie one doll before, and a friend of mine who’s… who’s dead… gave her one from the same place, and she told me the woman who made the dolls had gotten her to pose for one. So putting this together, I thought Tom had gone and gotten little Mollie another. I asked John: ‘Wasn’t there a note or a card or anything in it?’ He said, ‘No – oh, yes, there was one funny thing. Where is it? I must have stuck it in my pocket.’

“He hunted around in his pockets and brought out a cord. It had knots in it, and it looked as if it was made of hair. I said, ‘Wonder what Tom’s idea was in that?’ John put it back in his pocket, and I forgot it.

“Little Mollie was asleep. We put the doll beside her where she could see it when she woke up. When she did, she was in raptures over it. We had dinner and Mollie played with the doll. After we put her to bed I wanted to take it away from her, but she cried so we let her take it with her. We played cards until eleven, and then got ready for bed.

“Mollie is apt to be restless, and she still sleeps in a low crib – so she can’t fall out. The crib is in our bedroom, in the corner beside one of the two windows. Between the two windows is my dressing table, and our bed is set with its head against the wall opposite the windows. We both stopped and looked at Mollie, as we always do… did. She was sound asleep with the doll clasped in one arm, its head on her shoulder.

“John said: ‘Lord, Mollie – that doll looks as alive as the baby! You wouldn’t be surprised to see it get up and walk. Whoever posed for it was some sweet kid.’

“And that was true. It had the sweetest, gentlest little face… and, oh, Dr. Lowell… that’s what helps make it so dreadful… so utterly dreadful.”

I saw the fear begin to creep back into her eyes.

McCann said: “Buck up, Mollie!”

“I tried to take the doll. It was so lovely I was afraid the baby might roll on it or damage it some way,” she went on again quietly. “But she held it fast, and I did not want to awaken her. So I let it be. While we were undressing, John took the knotted cord out of his pocket.

“‘That’s a funny looking bunch of knots,’ he said. ‘When you hear from Tom ask him what it’s for.’ He tossed the cord on the little table at his side of the bed. It wasn’t long before he was asleep. And then I went asleep too—

“And then I woke up… or thought I did… for if I was awake or dreaming I don’t know. It must have been a dream – and yet… oh, God… John is dead… I heard him die…”

•   •   •

Again, for a little time, the tears flowed. Then:

“If I was awake, it must have been the stillness that awakened me. And yet – it is what makes me feel I must have been dreaming. There couldn’t be such silence… except in a dream. We are on the second floor, and always there is some sound from the street. There wasn’t the least sound now… it was as though… as though the whole world had suddenly been stricken dumb. I thought I sat up, listening… listening thirstily for the tiniest of noises. I could not even hear John breathing. I was frightened, for there was something dreadful in that stillness. Something – living! Something – evil! I thought I tried to lean over to John, tried to touch him to awaken him.

“I could not move! I could not stir a ringer! I tried to speak, to cry out. I could not!

“The window curtains were partly drawn. A faint light showed beneath and around them from the street. Suddenly this was blotted out. The room was dark – utterly dark.

“And then the green glow began—

“At first it was the dimmest gleam. It did not come from outside. It was in the room itself. It would flicker and dim, flicker and dim. But always after each dimming it was brighter. It was green – like the light of the firefly. Or like looking at moonlight through clear green water. At last the green glow became steady. It was like light, and still it wasn’t light. It wasn’t brilliant. It was just glowing. And it was everywhere – under the dressing table, under the chairs… I mean it cast no shadows. I could see everything in the bedroom. I could see the baby asleep in her crib, the doll’s head on her shoulder…

“The doll moved!

“It turned its head, and seemed to listen to the baby’s breathing. It put its little hands upon the baby’s arm. The arm dropped away from it…

“The doll sat up!

“And now I was sure that I must be dreaming… the strange silence… the strange green glow… and this…

“The doll clambered over the side of the crib and dropped to the floor. It came skipping over the floor toward the bed like a child, swinging its school books by their strap. It turned its head from side to side as it came, looking around the room like a curious child. It caught sight of the dressing table, and stopped, looking up at the mirror.

“It climbed up the chair in front of the dressing table. It jumped from the chair seat to the table, tossed its books aside and began to admire itself in the mirror.

“It preened itself. It turned and looked at itself first over this shoulder and then over that. I thought: ‘What a queer fantastic dream!’ It thrust its face close to the mirror and rearranged and patted its hair. I thought: ‘What a vain little doll!’ And then I thought: ‘I’m dreaming all this because John said the doll was so lifelike he wouldn’t be surprised to see it walk.’ And then I thought: ‘But I can’t be dreaming, or I wouldn’t be trying to account for what I’m dreaming!’ And then it all seemed so absurd that I laughed. I knew I had made no sound. I knew I couldn’t. That the laugh was inside me. But it was as though the doll had heard me. It turned and looked straight at me—”

She shuddered, then went on: “My heart seemed to die within me. I’ve had nightmares, Dr. Lowell – but never in the worst of them did I feel as I did when the doll’s eyes met mine…

“They were the eyes of a devil!” They shone red. I mean they were – were – luminous… like some animal’s eyes in the dark. But it was the – the – hellishness in them that made me feel as though a hand had gripped my heart! Those eyes from hell in that face like one of God’s own angels…

“I don’t know how long it stood there, glaring at me with those devil’s eyes. But at last it swung itself down and sat on the edge of the dressing table, legs swinging like a child’s, and still with its eyes on mine. Then slowly, deliberately, it lifted its little arm and reached behind its neck. Just as slowly it brought its arm back. In its hand was a long pin… like a dagger.

“It dropped from the dressing table to the floor. It skipped toward me and was hidden by the bottom of the bed. An instant – and it had clambered up the bed and stood, still looking at me with those red eyes, at John’s feet.

“I tried to cry out, tried to move, tried to arouse John. I prayed – ‘Oh, God, wake him up! Dear God – wake him!’

“The doll looked away from me. It stood there, looking at John. It began to creep along his body, up toward his head. I tried to move my head, to follow it. I could not. The doll passed out of my sight…

“I heard a dreadful, sobbing groan. I felt John shudder, then stretch and twist… I heard him sigh…

“Deep… deep down… I knew John was dying… and I could do nothing… in the silence… in the green glow.

“I heard something like the note of a flute, in the street, beyond the windows. There was a tiny scurrying. I saw the doll skip across the floor and spring up to the window sill. It knelt there for a moment, looking out into the street. It held something in its hand. And then I saw that what it held was the knotted cord John had thrown on his table.

“I heard the flute note again… the doll swung itself out of the window… I had a glimpse of its red eyes… I saw its little hands clutching the sill… and it was gone…

“The green glow… blinked and… went out. The light from the street returned around the curtains. The silence seemed… seemed… to be sucked away.

“And then something like a wave of darkness swept over me. I went down under it. Before it swept over me I heard the clock strike two.

“When I awakened again… or came out of my faint… or, if it was just a dream, when I awakened… I turned to John. He lay there… so still! I touched him. He was cold… so cold!

“I knew he was dead!

“Dr. Lowell… tell me… what was dream and what was real? I know that no doll could have killed John!

“Did he reach out to me when he was dying, and did the dream come from that? Or did I… dreaming… kill him?”

— XIV —

THE VANISHING ACT

There was an agony in her eyes that forbade the truth, or any part of it. So I lied to her. “I can comfort you as to that, at least. Your husband died of entirely natural causes – from a blood clot in the brain. My examination satisfied me thoroughly. You had nothing to do with it. As for the doll – you had an unusually vivid dream, that is all.”

She looked at me as one who would give her soul to believe. She said: “But I heard him die!”

“It is quite possible—” I plunged into a somewhat technical explanation – even if she did not quite understand it, it would sound important and therefore, perhaps, convincing. “You may have been half-awake – on what we term the borderline of waking consciousness. In all probability the entire dream was suggested by what you heard.

“Your subconsciousness tried to explain the sounds, and conceived the whole fantastic drama you have recited to me. What seemed, in your dream, to take up many minutes actually passed through your mind in a split second – the subconsciousness makes its own time. It is a common experience. A door slams, or there is some other abrupt and violent sound. It awakens the sleeper. When he is fully awake he has recollection of some singularly vivid dream which ended with a loud noise. In reality, his dream began with the noise. The dream may have seemed to him to have taken hours. It was, in fact, almost instantaneous, taking place in the brief moment between noise and awakening.”

She drew a deep breath; her eyes lost some of their agony. I pressed my advantage.

“And there is another thing you must remember – your condition. It makes many women peculiarly subject to realistic dreams, usually of an unpleasant character.”

She whispered: “That is true. When little Mollie was coming I had the most dreadful dreams—”

She hesitated; I saw doubt again cloud her face.

“But the doll – the doll is gone!” she said.

I cursed myself at that; caught unawares and with no ready answer. But McCann had one. He said, easily:

“Sure it’s gone, Mollie. I dropped it down the chute into the waste. After what you told me I thought you’d better not see it any more.”

She asked, sharply:

“Where did you find it? I looked for it.”

“Guess you weren’t in shape to do much looking,” he answered. “I found it down at the foot of the crib, all messed up in the covers. It was busted. Looked like the kid had been dancing on it in her sleep.”

She said, hesitantly: “It might have slipped down. I don’t think I looked there—”

I said, severely, so she might not suspect collusion between McCann and myself:

“You ought not to have done that, McCann. If you had shown it, Mrs. Gilmore would have known at once that she had been dreaming and would have been spared much pain.”

“Well, I ain’t a doctor.” His voice was sullen. “I done what I thought best.”

“Go down and see if you can find it,” I ordered, tartly. He glanced at me sharply. I nodded – and hoped he understood. In a few minutes he returned.

“They cleaned out the waste only fifteen minutes ago,” he reported, lugubriously. “The doll went with it I found this, though.”

He held up a little strap from which dangled a half-dozen miniature books. He asked:

“Was them what you dreamed the doll dropped on the dressing table, Mollie?”

She stared at it, and shrank away.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Please put it away, Dan. I don’t want to see it.”

He looked at me, triumphantly.

“I guess maybe I was right at that when I threw the doll away, doc.”

I said: “At any rate now that Mrs. Gilmore is satisfied it was all a dream, there’s no harm done.”

“And now,” I took her cold hands in mine, “I’m going to prescribe for you. I don’t want you to stay in this place a moment longer than you can help. I want you to pack a bag with whatever you and little Mollie may need for a week or so, and leave at once. I am thinking of your condition – and a little life that is on its way. I will attend to all the necessary formalities, and you can instruct McCann as to – the other details. But I want you to go. Will you do this?”

To my relief, she assented readily. There was a somewhat harrowing moment when she and the child bade farewell to the body. But before many minutes she was on her way with McCann to relatives. The child had wanted to take the “boy and girl dolls.” I had refused to allow this, even at the risk of again arousing the mother’s suspicions. I wanted nothing of Mme. Mandilip to accompany them to their refuge. McCann supported me, and the dolls were left behind.

I called an undertaker I know. I made a last examination of the body. The minute puncture would not be noticed, I was sure. There was no danger of an autopsy, since my certification of the cause of death would not be questioned. When the undertaker arrived I explained the absence of the wife – imminent maternity, and departure at my order. I set down the cause of death as thrombosis – rather grimly I recalled the similar diagnosis of the banker’s physician, and what I had thought of it.

When the body had been taken away, and while I sat waiting for McCann to return, I tried to orient myself to this phantasmagoria through which, it seemed to me, I had been moving for endless time. I tried to divest my mind of all prejudice, all preconceived ideas of what could and could not be. I began by conceding that this Mme. Mandilip could possess some strange wisdom of which modern science is ignorant. I refused to call it witchcraft or sorcery; the words mean nothing, since they have been applied through the ages to entirely natural phenomena whose causes were not understood. Not so long ago, for example, the lighting of a match was witchcraft to many savage tribes. No, Mme. Mandilip was no “witch,” as Ricori thought her. She was mistress of some unknown science – that was all.

And being a science, it must be governed by fixed laws – unknown though those laws might be to me. If the doll-maker’s activities defied the laws of cause and effect as I conceived them – still they must conform to laws of cause and effect of their own. There was nothing supernatural about them – it was only that like the South Sea Islander, I did not know what made her matches burn.

Something of these laws, something of the woman’s technique – using the word as signifying the details, collectively considered, of mechanical performance in any art – I thought I perceived. The knotted cord, the “witch’s ladder,” apparently was an essential in the animation of the dolls. One had been slipped into Ricori’s pocket before the first attack upon him. I had found another beside his bed after the disturbing occurrences of the night. I had gone to sleep holding one of the cords – and had tried to murder my patient! A third cord had accompanied the doll that had killed Gilmore.

Clearly the cord was a part of the formula for the direction or control of the dolls. Against this, was the fact that the intoxicated stroller could not have been carrying one of the “ladders” when attacked by the Peters doll. It might be, however, that the cord had only to do with the initial activity of the puppets; that once activated, their action might continue for an indefinite period.

There was evidence of a fixed formula in the making of the dolls. First, it seemed, the prospective victim’s free consent to serve as model must be obtained; second, a wound which gave the opportunity to apply the salve which caused the unknown death; third, the doll must be a faithful replica of the victim. That the agency of death was the same in each case was proven by the similar symptoms. But did those deaths actually have anything to do with the motility of the dolls? Were they actually a necessary part of the operation? The doll-maker might believe so; indeed, undoubtedly did believe so. I did not.

That the doll which had stabbed Ricori had been made in the semblance of Peters, that the “nurse doll” which the guards had seen poised on my window-ledge might have been the one for which Walters had posed, that the doll which had thrust the pin into Gilmore’s brain was, perhaps, the replica of little Anita, the thirteen-year-old schoolgirl – all this I admitted.

But that anything of Peters, anything of Walters, anything of Anita, had animated these dolls… that dying, something of their vitality, their minds, their “souls” had been drawn from them, had been transmuted into an essence of evil and imprisoned in these wire-skeletoned puppets… against this all my reason revolted. I could not force my mind to accept the possibility.

My analysis was interrupted by the return of McCann.

He said, laconically: “Well, we put it over.”

I asked: “McCann – you weren’t by any chance telling the truth when you said you found the doll?”

“No, doc. The doll was gone all right.”

“But where did you get the little books?”

“Just where Mollie said the doll tossed ’em – on her dressing table. I snaked ’em after she’d told me her story. She hadn’t noticed ’em. I had a hunch. It was a good one, wasn’t it?”

“You had me wondering,” I replied. “I don’t know what we could have said if she had asked for the knotted cord.”

“The cord didn’t seem to make much of a dent on her—” He hesitated. “But I think it means a hell of a lot, doc. I think if I hadn’t took her out, and John hadn’t happened home, and she’d opened the box instead of him – I think it’s Mollie he’d have found lying dead beside him.”

“You mean—”

“I mean the dolls go for whoever gets the cords,” he said, somberly.

Well, it was much the same thought I had in my own mind.

I asked: “But why should anybody want to kill – Mollie?”

“Maybe somebody thinks she knows too much. And that brings me to what I’ve been wanting to tell you. The Mandilip hag knows she’s being watched!”

“Well, her watchers are better than ours,” I echoed Ricori. I told him then of the second attack in the night, and why I had sought him. He listened without interruption.

“An’ that,” he said when I had ended, “proves the hag knows who’s who behind the watch on her. She tried to wipe out both the boss and Mollie. She’s onto us, doc.”

“The dolls are accompanied,” I said. “The musical note is a summons. They do not disappear into thin air. They answer the note and make their way – somehow – to whomsoever sounds the note. The dolls must be taken from the shop, therefore one of the two women must take them. How?”

“I don’t know.” His lean face was worried. “It’s the fish-white gal does it. Let me tell you what I found out, doc. After I leave you last night I go down to see what the boys have to say. I hear plenty. They say about four o’clock the wench goes in the back an’ the old woman takes a chair in the store. They don’t think nothing of that. But about seven who do they see walking down the street and into the doll joint but the wench? They give the boys in the back hell, but they ain’t seen her go, an’ they pass the buck to the boys in front.

“Then, about eleven o’clock, one of the relief lads comes in with worse news. He says he’s down at the foot of Broadway when a coupé turns the corner an’ driving it is the gal. He can’t be mistaken because he’s seen her in the doll joint. She goes up Broadway at a good clip. He sees there ain’t nobody trailing her and he looks around for a taxi. Course there’s nothing in sight – not even a parked car he can lift. So he comes down to the gang to ask what the hell they mean by it. An’ again nobody’s seen the gal go.

“I take a couple of the boys an’ we start out to comb the neighborhood to find out where she stables the coupé. We don’t have no luck at all until about four o’clock when one of the tails – one of the lads who’s been looking – meets up with me. He says about three he sees the gal – at least he thinks it’s her – walking along the street round the corner from the joint. She’s got a coupla big suitcases, but they don’t seem to trouble her none. She’s walking quick. But away from the doll joint. He eases over to get a better look when all of a sudden she ain’t there. He sniffs around the place he’s seen her. There ain’t hide-nor-hair of her. It’s pretty dark, an’ he tries the doors an’ the areaways, but the doors are locked an’ there ain’t nobody in the areaways. So he gives it up an’ hunts me.

“I look over the place. It’s about a third of the way down the block around the corner from the doll joint. The doll joint is eight numbers from the corner. They’re mostly shops an’ I guess storage up above. Not many people living there. The houses are all old ones. Still I don’t see how the gal can get to the doll joint. I think maybe the tail’s mistaken. He’s seen somebody else, or just thinks he’s seen somebody. But we scout close around, an’ after a while we see a place that looks like it might stable a car. It don’t take us long to open the doors, an’ sure enough, there’s a coupé with its engine still hot. It ain’t been in long. Also it’s the same kind of coupé the lad who’s seen the gal says she was driving.

“I lock the place up again, an’ go back to the boys. I watch with ’em the rest of the night. Not a light in the joint. But nigh eight o’clock, the wench shows up inside the shop an’ opens up!”

“But still,” I said at this point, “you have no real evidence she had been out. The girl your man thought he saw might not have been the right one at all.”

He looked at me pityingly.

“She got out in the afternoon without ’em seeing her, didn’t she? What’s to keep her from doing the same thing at night? The lad saw her driving a coupé, didn’t he? An’ we find a coupé like it close where the wench dropped out of sight.”

I sat thinking. There was no reason to disbelieve McCann. And there was a sinister coincidence in the hours the girl had been seen. I said, half-aloud:

“The time she was out in the afternoon coincides with the time the doll was left at the Gilmores’. The time she was out at night coincides with the time of the attack upon Ricori and the death of Gilmore.”

“You hit it plumb in the eye!” said McCann. “She goes an’ leaves the doll at Mollie’s, an’ comes back. She goes an’ sets the dolls on the boss, waits for ’em to pop out, then goes an’ collects the one she’s left at Mollie’s. Then she beats it back. They’re in the suitcases she’s carrying. She’s taking them home.”

I could not hold back the irritation of helpless mystification that swept me.

“And I suppose you think she got out of the house by riding a broomstick up the chimney,” I said sarcastically.

“No,” he answered, seriously. “Them houses are old and I think maybe there’s a rat-hole of a passage or something she gets through. Anyway, they’re watching the street an’ the coupe stable now, an’ she can’t pull that again.” He added, morosely: “At that, I ain’t saying she couldn’t bit a broomstick if she had to.”

I said, abruptly: “McCann, I’m going down to talk to this Mme. Mandilip. I want you to come with me.”

He said: “I’ll be right beside you, doc. Fingers on my guns.”

I said: “No. I’m going to see her by myself. But I want you to keep close watch outside.”

He did not like that; argued; at last reluctantly assented.

I called up my office, talked to Braile and learned that Ricori was recovering with astonishing rapidity. I asked Braile to look after things the balance of the day, inventing a consultation to account for the request. I had myself switched to Ricori’s room. I had the nurse tell him that McCann was with me, that we were making an investigation along a certain line, the results of which I would inform him on my return; and that unless Ricori objected I wanted McCann to stay with me the balance of the afternoon, and Ricori sent back word that McCann must follow my orders as though they were his own, and that I could keep him as long as I desired. Ricori wanted to speak to me, but that I did not want, and pleading urgent haste rang off.

I ate an excellent and hearty lunch. I felt that it would help me hold tighter to the realities – or what I thought realities – when I met this murderous mistress of illusions. McCann was oddly silent and preoccupied.

The clock was striking three when I set off to meet Mme. Mandilip.

PART FIVE

It was to be science against the unknown forces of evil as Dr. Lowell entered the dread abode of Mme. Mandilip.

LEADING UP TO
THIS INSTALLMENT

A power or agency that is apparently supernatural is causing the death of person after person in New York. Two men have banded together to search it out and destroy it. One is Dr. Lowell, who is telling this story, the other is Julian Ricori, underworld king for whom Dr. Lowell has formed a strong liking.

Ricori first brought the situation to the attention of Dr. Lowell and his assistant, Dr. Braile, when he requested them to examine his lieutenant, Peters, who had suddenly and unaccountably become unconscious. Peters does not regain consciousness; his face assumes a look of terror and malignant fury and he dies.

Investigation shows that the several other victims of this unnameable malady exhibit the same symptoms before death, and it soon becomes apparent that all of them, being interested in children, have had dealings with a strange woman, Mme. Mandilip, who has a small doll shop.

The diary of one of the victims, Nurse Walters, tells of a weird experience inside the shop of the doll-maker where, in a gorgeously decorated inner room, the nurse posed for Mme. Mandilip while the latter made a doll resembling her. Dr. Lowell believes the woman has hypnotic powers. Ricori himself is stricken after a visit to the shop, and McCann, his bodyguard, tells Dr. Lowell that a doll he had taken from the shop had stabbed his chief; that the doll had jumped from their automobile and escaped. Ricori does not die, but he remains in the hospital.

The deaths continue, and the terrified witnesses assure Dr. Lowell that dolls are the murderers. Posting McCann and other of Ricori’s men outside Mme. Mandilip’s shop, Dr. Lowell enters it. He asks to be shown the finest dolls, and the woman conducts him to the inner room.

— XV —

MME. MANDILIP
(CONT’D)

I crossed the threshold and paused, looking about the room with swift disquietude. For here was no spacious chamber of enchantment such as Nurse Walters had described. True enough, it was somewhat larger than one would have expected. But where were the exquisite old panelings, the ancient tapestries, that magic mirror which was like a great “half-globe of purest water,” and all those other things that had made it seem to her a Paradise?

The light came through the half-drawn curtains of a window opening upon a small inclosed and barren yard The walls and ceiling were of plain, stained wood. One end was entirely taken up by small, built-in cabinets with wooden doors. There was a mirror on the wall, and it was round – but there any similarity to Walters’s description ended. There was a fireplace, the kind one can find in any ordinary old New York house. On the walls were a few prints. The great table, the “baronial board,” was an entirely commonplace one, littered with dolls’ clothing in various stages of completion.

My disquietude grew. If Walters had been romancing about this room, then what else in her diary was invention – or, at least, as I had surmised when I had read it, the product of a too active imagination?

And yet – she had not been romancing about the doll-maker’s eyes, nor her voice, and she had not exaggerated her appearance nor the peculiarities of the niece. The doll-maker’s voice recalled me to myself, broke my thoughts.

“My room interests you?”

She spoke softly, and with, I thought, a certain secret amusement.

I said: “Any room where any true artist creates is of interest. And you are a true artist, Mme. Mandilip.”

“And how do you know that?” she mused.

It had been a slip. I said, quickly: “I am a lover of art. I have seen a few of your dolls. It does not take a gallery of his pictures to make one realize that Raphael, for example, was a master. One picture is enough.” She smiled, in the friendliest fashion. She closed the door behind me and pointed to a chair beside the table.

“You will not mind waiting a few minutes before I show you my dolls? There is a dress I must finish. It is promised, and soon the little one to whom; I have promised it will come. It will not take me long.”

“Why, no,” I answered, and dropped into the chair.

She said, softly: “It is quiet here. And you seem weary. You have been working hard, eh? And you are weary.”

I sank back into the chair. Suddenly I realized how weary I really was. For a moment my guard relaxed and I closed my eyes. I opened them to find that the doll-maker had taken her seat at the table.

•   •   •

And now I saw her hands. They were long and delicate and white and I knew that they were the most beautiful I had ever beheld. And just as her eyes seemed to have life of their own, so did those hands seem living things; having a being independent of the body to which they belonged. She rested them on the table. She spoke again, caressingly.

“It is well to come now and then to a quiet place. Where peace is. One grows so weary – so weary. So tired so very tired.”

She picked a little dress from the table and began to sew. The long white fingers plied the needle while the other hand turned and moved the small garment. How wonderful was the motion of those long white hands – like a rhythm, like a song! Restful! She said, in low sweet tones:

“Ah, yes – here nothing of the outer world comes. All is peace – and rest – rest—”

I drew my eyes reluctantly from the slow dance of those hands; the weaving of those long and delicate fingers which moved so rhythmically. So restfully. The doll-maker’s eyes were on me, softly, gently. They were full of that peace of which she had been telling. It would do no harm to relax a little, gain strength for the struggle which must come. And I was tired. I had not realized how tired! My gaze went back to her hands. Strange hands – no more belonging to that huge body than did the eyes and voice.

Perhaps they did not! Perhaps that gross body was but a cloak, a covering, of the real body to which eyes and hands and voice belonged. I thought over that, watching the slow rhythm of the hands. What could the body be like to which they belonged? As beautiful as hands and eyes and voice?

She was humming some strange air. It was a slumberous, lulling melody. It crept along my tired nerves, into my weary mind – distilling sleep… sleep. As the hands were weaving sleep. As the eyes were pouring sleep upon me—

Sleep!

Something within me was raging, furiously. Bidding me rouse myself. Shake off this lethargy—

The doll-maker was hypnotizing me!

By the tearing effort that brought me gasping to the surface of consciousness, I knew that I must have passed far along the path of that strange sleep. And for an instant, on the threshold of complete awakening, I saw the room as Walters had seen it.

Vast, filled with mellow light; the ancient tapestries, the panelings, the carved screens behind which hidden shapes lurked laughing – laughing at me. Upon the wall the mirror – and it was like a great half-globe of purest water within which the images of the carvings round its frame swayed like the reflections of verdure round a clear woodland pool!

The immense chamber seemed to waver, shake – and was gone.

•   •   •

I stood beside an overturned chair in that room to which the doll-maker had led me. And the doll-maker was beside me, close. She was regarding me with a curious puzzlement and, I thought, a shadow of chagrin. It flashed upon me that she was like one who had been unexpectedly interrupted—

Interrupted! When had she left her chair? How long had I slept? What had she done to me while I had been sleeping? What had that terrific effort of will by which I had broken from her web prevented her from doing?

I tried to speak – and could not. I stood tongue-tied, furious, humiliated. I realized that I had been trapped like the veriest tyro – I who should have been all alert, suspicious of every move. Trapped by voice and eyes and weaving hands… by the reiterated suggestion that I was weary… so weary… that here was peace… and sleep… sleep…

What had she done to me while I slept? Why could I not move? It was as though all my energy had been dissipated in that one tremendous thrust out of her web of sleep. I stood motionless, silent, spent. Not a muscle moved at command of my will. The enfeebled hands of my will reached out to them – and fell.

The doll-maker laughed. She walked to the cabinets on the far wall. My eyes followed her, helplessly. There was no slightest loosening of the paralysis that gripped me. She pressed a spring, and the door of a cabinet slipped down. 9 A – 19

Within the cabinet was a child-doll. A little girl, sweet faced and smiling. I looked at it and felt a numbness at my heart. In its small, clasped hands was one of the dagger-pins, and I knew that this was the doll which had stirred in the arms of the Gilmore baby… had climbed from the baby’s crib… had danced to the bed and thrust.

“This is one of my peculiarly best!” The doll-maker’s eyes were on me and filled with cruel mockery. “A good doll! A bit careless at times, perhaps. Forgetting to bring back her schoolbooks when she goes visiting. But so obedient! Would you like her – for your granddaughter?”

Again she laughed – youthful, tingling, evil laughter. And suddenly I knew Ricori had been right and that this woman must be killed. I summoned all my will to leap upon her. I could not move a finger.

The long white hands groped over the next cabinet and touched its hidden spring. The numbness at my heart became the pressure of a hand of ice. Staring out at me from that cabinet was Walters—

And she was crucified!

So perfect, so – alive was the doll that it was like seeing the girl herself through a diminishing glass, I could not think of it as a doll, but as the girl. She was dressed in her nurse’s uniform. She had no cap, and her black hair hung disheveled about her face. Her arms were outstretched, and through each palm a small nail had been thrust, pinning the hands to the back of the cabinet. The feet were bare, resting one on the other, and through the insteps had been thrust another nail. Completing the dreadful, the blasphemous, suggestion, above her head was a small placard. I read it:

THE BURNED MARTYR

The doll-maker murmured – in a voice like honey garnered from flowers in hell:

“This doll has not behaved well. She has been disobedient. I punish my dolls when they do not behave well. But I see that you are distressed. Well, she has been punished enough – for the moment.”

The long white hands crept into the cabinet, drew out the nails from hands and feet. She set the doll upright, leaning against the back. She turned to me.

“You would like her for your granddaughter, perhaps? Alas! She is not for sale. She has lessons to learn before she goes again from me.”

•   •   •

Her voice changed, lost its diabolic sweetness, became charged with menace. “Now listen to me – Dr. Lowell! What – you did not think I knew you? I knew you from the first. You too need a lesson!” Her eyes blazed upon me. “You shall have your lesson – you fool! You who pretend to heal the mind – and know nothing, nothing I say, of what the mind is. You, who conceive the mind as but a part of a machine of flesh and blood, nerve and bone – and know nothing of what it houses. You – who admit existence of nothing unless you can measure it in your test tubes or see it under your microscope. Who define life as a chemical ferment and consciousness as the product of cells. You fool!

“Yet you and this savage Ricori, have dared to try to hamper me, to interfere with me, to hem me round with spies! Dared to threaten me – Me – possessor of the ancient wisdom beside which your science is a crackling of thorns under an empty pot! You fools! I know who are the dwellers in the mind – and the powers that manifest themselves through it – and those who dwell beyond it! They come at my call. And you think to pit your paltry knowledge against mine! You fool! Have you understood me? Speak!”

She pointed a finger at me. I felt my throat relax, knew I could speak once more.

“You hell-hag!” I croaked. “You damned murderess! You’ll burn in the electric chair before I’m through with you!”

She came toward me, laughing.

“You would give me to the law? But who would believe you? None! The ignorance that your science has fostered is my shield. The darkness of your unbelief is my impregnable fortress. Go play with your machines, fool! Play with your machines! But meddle with me no more!”

Her voice grew quiet, deadly.

“Now this I tell you. If you would live, if you would have those live who are dear to you – take your spies away. Ricori you cannot save. He is mine. But you – think never of me again. Pry no more into my affairs. I do not fear your spies – but they offend me. Take them away. At once. If by nightfall they are still on watch—”

She caught me by the shoulder with a grip that bruised. She pushed me toward the door.

“Go!”

I fought to muster my will, to raise my arms. Could I have done so I would have struck her down as I would a ravening beast. I could not move them. Like an automaton I walked across the room to the door. The doll-maker opened it.

There was an odd rustling noise from the cabinets. Stiffly, I turned my head.

The doll of Walters had fallen forward. It lay half over the edge. Its arms swung, as though imploring me to take it away. I could see in its palms the marks of the crucifying nails. Its eyes were fixed on mine—

“Go!” said the doll-maker. “And remember!”

With the same stiff motion I walked through the corridor and into the shop. The girl watched me, with vague, fear filled eyes. As though a hand were behind me, pressing me inexorably on, I passed through the shop and out of its door, into the street.

I seemed to hear, did hear, the mocking evil-sweet laughter of the doll-maker!

— XVI —

THE DOLL-MAKER STRIKES

The moment I was out in the street, volition, power of movement, returned to me. In an abrupt rush of rage, I turned to reenter the shop. A foot from it I was brought up as against an invisible wall. I could not advance a step; could not even raise my hands to touch the door. It was as though at that point my will refused to function, or rather that my legs and arms refused to obey my will. I realized what it was – posthypnotic suggestion of an extraordinary kind; part of the same phenomenon which had held me motionless before the doll-maker, and had sent me like a robot out of her lair. I saw McCann coming toward me, and for an instant had the mad idea of ordering him to enter and end Mme. Mandilip with a bullet. Common sense swiftly told me that we could give no rational reason for such killing, and that we would probably expiate it within the same apparatus of execution with which I had threatened her.

McCann said: “I was getting worried, doc. Just about to break in on you.”

I said: “Come on, McCann. I want to get home as quickly as possible.”

He looked at my face, and whistled.

“You look like you been through a battle, doc.”

I answered: “I have. And the honors are all with Mme. Mandilip – so far.”

“You came out quiet enough. Not like the boss, with the hag spitting hell in his face. What happened?”

“I’ll tell you later. Just let me be quiet for a while. I want to think.”

What I actually wanted was to get back my self-possession. My mind seemed half blind, groping for the tangible. It was as if it had been enmeshed in cobwebs of a peculiarly unpleasant character, and although I had torn loose, fragments of the webs were still clinging to it. We got into the car and rolled on for some minutes in silence. Then McCann’s curiosity got the better of him.

“Anyway,” he asked, “what did you think of her?”

By this time I had come to a determination. Never had I felt anything to approach the loathing, the cold hatred, the implacable urge to kill, which this woman had aroused in me. It was not that my pride had suffered, although that was sore enough. No, it was the conviction that in the room behind the doll shop dwelt blackest evil. Evil as inhuman and alien as though the doll-maker had in truth come straight from that Hell in which Ricori believed. There could be no compromise with that evil. Nor with the woman in whom it was centered.

I said: “McCann, in all the world there is nothing so evil as that woman. Do not let the girl slip through your fingers again. Do you think she knew last night that she was seen?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Increase the guards in front and back of the place at once. Do it openly, so that the women cannot help noticing it. They will think, unless the girl is aware that she was observed, that we are still in ignorance of the other exit. They will think we believe she managed to slip out unseen either at front or back. Have a car in readiness at each end of the street where she keeps the sedan. Be careful not to arouse their suspicions. If the girl appears, follow her—” I hesitated.

McCann asked: “And then what?”

“I want her taken – abducted, kidnaped – whatever you choose to call it. It must be done with the utmost quietness. I leave that to you. You know how such things are done better than I. Do it quickly and do it quietly. But not too near the doll shop – as far away from it as you can. Gag the girl, tie her up if necessary. But get her. Then search the car thoroughly. Bring the girl to me at my house – with whatever you find. Do you understand?”

He said: “If she shows, we’ll get her. You going to put her through the third degree?”

“That – and something more. I want to see what the doll-maker will do. It may goad her into some action which will enable us to lay hands on her legitimately. Bring her within reach of the law. She may or may not have other invisible servants, but my intention is to deprive her of the visible one. It may make the others visible. At the least, it will cripple her.”

He looked at me, curiously. “She must ’a’ hit you pretty hard, doc.”

“She did,” I answered curtly.

He hesitated. “You going to tell the boss about this?” he asked at last.

“I may or I may not – tonight. It depends upon his condition. Why?”

“Well, if we’re going to pull off anything like a kidnapping, I think he ought to know.”

I said: “McCann, I told you Ricori’s message was that you were to obey orders from me as though they were from him. I have given you your orders. I accept all the responsibility.”

“Okay,” he answered, but I could see that his doubt still lingered.

•   •   •

Now, assuming Ricori had sufficiently recovered, there was no real reason why I should not tell him what had happened during my encounter with Mme. Mandilip. It was different with Braile. More than suspecting, as I did, the attachment between him and Walters, I could not tell him of the crucified doll – and even now I thought of it not as a doll crucified, but as Walters crucified. If I told him, I knew well that there would be no holding him back from instant attack upon the doll-maker. I did not want that.

But I was aware of a most stubborn reluctance to tell Ricori the details of my visit. The same held good for Braile in other matters beside the Walters doll. And why did I feel the same way about McCann? I set it down to wounded vanity.

We stopped in front of my house. It was then close to six. Before getting out of the car I repeated my instructions.

McCann nodded. “Okay, doc. If she comes out, we get her.”

I went into the house, and found a note from Braile saying that he would not be in to see me until after dinner. I was glad of that. I dreaded the ordeal of his questions. I learned that Ricori was asleep, and that he had been regaining strength with astonishing rapidity.

I instructed the nurse to tell him, should he awaken, that I would visit him after I had dined. I lay down, endeavoring to snatch a little sleep before eating.

I could not sleep – constantly the face of the doll-maker came before me whenever I began to relax into a doze, throwing me into intense wakefulness.

At seven I arose and ate a full and excellent dinner, deliberately drinking at least twice the amount of wine I ordinarily permit myself, and finishing with strong coffee. When I arose from the table I felt distinctly better; mentally alert and master of myself once more – or so I believed. I had decided to apprise Ricori of my instructions to McCann concerning the abduction of the girl. I realized that this was certain to bring down upon me a minute catechism concerning my visit to the doll shop, but I had formulated the story I intended to tell—

It was with a distinct shock that I realized that this story was all that I could tell! Realized that I could not communicate to the others the portions I had deleted, even if I desired. And that this was by command of the doll-maker – posthypnotic suggestion that was a part of those other inhibitions she had laid upon my will; those same inhibitions which had held me powerless before her, had marched me out of her shop like a robot and thrust me back from her door when I would have reentered!

During that brief tranced sleep she had said to me: “This and this you must not tell. This and this you may.”

I could not speak of the child-doll with the angelic face and the dagger-pin which had pricked the bubble of Gilmore’s life. I could not speak of the Walters doll and its crucifixion. I could not speak of the doll-maker’s tacit admission that she had been responsible for the deaths that had first led us to her.

However, this realization made me feel even better. Here at last was something understandable – the tangibility for which I had been groping; something that had in it nothing of sorcery or of dark power; something entirely in the realm of my own science. I had done the same thing to patients, many times; bringing their minds back to normality by these same posthypnotic suggestions.

Also, there was a way by which I could wash my own mind clean of the doll-maker’s suggestions if I chose to do so. Should I do this? Stubbornly I decided I would not. It would be admission that I was afraid of Mme. Mandilip. I hated her, yes – but I did not fear her. Knowing now her technique, it would be folly not to observe its results with myself as the laboratory experiment. I told myself that I had run the gamut of those suggestions – that whatever else it had been her intention to implant within my mind had been held back by my awakening—

Ah, but the doll-maker had spoken truth when she called me – fool!

•   •   •

When Braile appeared, I was able to meet him calmly. Hardly had I greeted him when Ricori’s nurse called up to say her patient was wide awake and anxious to see me.

I said to Braile: “This is fortunate. Come along. It will save me from telling the same story twice over.”

He asked: “What story?”

“My interview with Mme. Mandilip.”

He said, incredulously: “You’ve seen her?”

“I spent the afternoon with her.” I was enjoying his amazement. “She is most – interesting. Come and hear about it.”

I led the way rapidly to the annex, deaf to his questions. Ricori was sitting up. I made a brief examination. Although still somewhat weak, he could be discharged as a patient. I congratulated him on what was truly a remarkable recovery. I whispered to him:

“I’ve seen your witch – and talked to her. I have much to tell you. Bid your guards take their stations outside the door. I will dismiss the nurse for a time.”

When guards and nurse were gone, I launched into the story of the day’s happenings, beginning with my summons to the Gilmore apartment by McCann. Ricori listened, face grim, to my recital. He said:

“Her brother – and now her husband! Poor, poor Molly! But she shall be avenged! Si – greatly so!”

I came to the end of my tale. I told Ricori what I had bidden McCann to do. I said:

“And so tonight, at least, we can sleep in peace. For if the girl comes out with the dolls, McCann gets her. If she does not, then nothing can happen. I am quite certain that without her the doll-maker cannot strike. I hope you approve, Ricori.”

He studied me for a moment, intently.

“I do approve, Dr. Lowell. Most greatly do I approve. You have done as I would have done. But – I do not think you have told us all that happened between you and the witch.”

“Nor do I,” said Braile.

“At any rate, I’ve told you the essentials. And I’m dead tired. I’m going to take a bath and go to bed. It’s now nine thirty. If the girl does come out it won’t be before eleven, probably later. I’m going to sleep until McCann fetches her. If he doesn’t, I’m going to sleep all night. That’s final. Save your questions for the morning.”

Ricori’s searching gaze had never left me. He said:

“Why not sleep here? Would it not be safer – for you?”

I succumbed to a wave of intense irritation. My pride had been hurt enough by my behavior with the doll-maker and the manner in which she had outwitted me. And the suggestion that I hide from her behind the guns of his men opened the wound afresh.

“I am no child,” I answered angrily. “I am quite able to take care of myself. I do not have to live behind a screen of gunmen—”

I stopped, sorry that I had said that. But Ricori betrayed no anger. He nodded, and dropped back on his pillows.

“You have told me what I wanted to know. You fared very badly with the witch, Dr. Lowell. And you have not told us all the – essentials.”

I said: “I am sorry, Ricori!”

“Don’t be.” For the first time he smiled. “I understand, perfectly. I also am somewhat of a psychologist. But I say this to you – it matters little whether McCann does or does not bring the girl to us tonight. Tomorrow the witch dies – and the girl with her.”

•   •   •

I made no answer. I recalled the nurse, and re-stationed the guards within the room. Whatever confidence I might feel, I was taking no chances with Ricori’s safety. I had not told him of the doll-maker’s direct threat against him, but I had not forgotten it.

Braile accompanied me to my study. He said, apologetically:

“I know you must be damned tired, Lowell, and I don’t want to pester you. But will you let me stay in your room with you while you are sleeping?”

I said with the same stubborn irritability: “For Lord’s sake, Braile, didn’t you hear what I told Ricori? I’m much obliged and all of that, but it applies to you, as well.”

He said quietly: “I am going to stay right here in the study, wide awake, until McCann comes or dawn comes. If I hear any sounds in your room, I’m coming in. Whenever I want to take a look at you to see whether you are all right, I’m coming in. Don’t lock your door, because if you do I’ll break it down. Is that all quite clear?”

I grew angrier still. He said:

“I mean it.”

I said: “All right. Do as you damned please.”

I went into my bedroom, slamming the door. But I did not lock it.

I was tired, there was no doubt about that. Even an hour’s sleep would be something. I decided not to bother with the bath, and began to undress. I was removing my shirt when I noticed a tiny pin upon its left side over my heart. I opened the shirt and looked at the under side. Fastened there was one of the knotted cords!

I took a step toward the door, mouth open to call Braile. Then stopped short. One of the things that I had not told was my hypnotization by the doll-maker. Obviously, if I showed the cord to Braile, revealed where I had found it, I could no longer conceal this part of my experiences. No, better say nothing. I reached for a match to burn the thing, heard Braile’s step at the door and thrust it hastily in my trousers pocket.

“What do you want?” I called.

“Just want to see you get into bed all right.”

He opened the door a trifle. What he wanted to discover, of course, was whether I had locked it. I said nothing.

•   •   •

My bedroom is a large, high-ceilinged room on the second floor of my home. It is at the back of the house, adjoining my study. There are two windows which look out on the little garden. They are framed by the creeper. The room has a chandelier, a massive, old-fashioned thing covered with long pendants of cut glass from which rise the candle holders. When I bought the house I would not allow it to be taken down, nor even be wired for electric bulbs.

My bed is at the end of the room, and when I turn upon my left side I can see the windows outlined by faint reflections. The same reflections are caught by the pendants so that the chandelier becomes a nebulously glimmering tiny cloud. It is restful, sleep-inducing. There is an ancient pear tree in the garden, the last survivor of an orchard which in spring, in New York’s halcyon days, lifted to the sun its flowered arms. The chandelier is near the foot of the bed. The switch which controls my lights is at the head of my bed. At the side of the room is an old fireplace, its sides of carved marble and with a wide mantel at top. To visualize fully what follows, it is necessary to keep this arrangement in mind.

By the time I had undressed, Braile, evidently assured of my docility, had closed the door and gone back into the study. I took the knotted cord, the witch’s ladder and threw it contemptuously on the table. I suppose there was something of bravado in the action; perhaps if I had not felt so sure of McCann I would have pursued my original intention of burning it. I mixed myself a sedative, turned off the lights and lay down to sleep. The sedative took quick effect.

I sank deep and deeper into a sea of sleep… deeper… and deeper…

I looked around me… how had I come to this strange place? I was standing within a shallow circular pit, grass lined. The rim of the pit came only to my knees. The pit was in the center of a circular, level meadow perhaps a quarter of a mile in diameter. This, too, was covered with grass; strange grass, purple flowereted. Around the grassy circle drooped unfamiliar trees… trees scaled with emeralds green and scarlet… trees with pendulous branches covered with fern-like leaves and threaded with slender vines that were like serpents. The trees circled the meadow, watchful, alert… watching me… waiting for me to move…

No, it was not the trees that were watching! There were things hidden among the trees… lurking… malignant things… evil things… and it was they who were watching me, waiting for me to move!

But how had I gotten here? I looked down at my legs, stretched my arms… I was clad in the blue pajamas in which I had gone to bed… gone to my bed in my New York house… in my own house in New York… how had I come here? I did not seem to be asleep.

•   •   •

Now I saw that three paths led out of the shallow pit. They passed over the edge, and stretched, each in a different direction, toward the woods. And suddenly I knew that I must take one of these paths, and that it was vitally important that I pick the right one… that only one could be traversed safely… that the other two would lead me into the power of those lurking things.

The pit began to contract. I felt its bottom lifting beneath my feet. The pit was thrusting me out. I leaped upon the path at my right and began to walk slowly along it. Then involuntarily I began to run, faster and faster along it, toward the woods. As I drew nearer I saw that the path pierced the woods straight as an arrow’s flight, and that it was about three feet wide, and bordered closely by the trees, and that it vanished in the dim green distance. Faster and faster I ran. Now I had entered the woods, and the unseen things were gathering among the trees that bordered the path, thronging the borders, rushing silently from all the wood. What those things were, what they would do to me if they caught me I did not know… I only knew that nothing that I could imagine of horror or agony could equal what I would experience if they did catch me.

On and on I raced through the wood, each step a nightmare. I felt hands stretching out to clutch me… heard shrill whisperings…

Sweating, trembling, I broke out of the wood and raced over a vast plain that stretched, treeless, to the distant horizon. The plain was trackless, pathless, and covered with brown and withered grass. It was like, it came to me, the blasted heath of Macbeth’s three witches. No matter, it was better than the haunted wood. I paused and looked back at the trees. I felt from them the gaze of myriads of the evil eyes.

I turned my back, and began to walk over the withered plain. I looked up at the sky. The sky was misty green.

High up in it two cloudy orbs began to glow… black suns… no, they were not suns… they were eyes…

The eyes of the doll-maker!

They stared down at me from the misty green sky…

And now over the horizon of that strange world two gigantic hands began to lift… began to creep toward me… to catch me and hurl me back into the wood… white hands with long fingers… and each of the long white fingers a living thing…

The hands of the doll-maker!

Closer came the eyes, and closer writhed the hands.

From the sky came peal upon peal of laughter…

The laughter of the doll-maker!

That laughter still ringing in my ears, I awakened – or seemed to awaken. I was in my room, sitting bolt upright in my bed. I was wet with sweat, and my heart was pumping with a pulse that shook my body. I could see the chandelier glimmering in the light from the windows like a nebulous small cloud. I could see the windows faintly outlined… it was very still.

There was a movement at one of the windows. I would get up from the bed and see what it was—

I could not move!

•   •   •

A faint greenish glow began within the room. At first it was like the flickering phosphorescence one sees upon a decaying log. It waxed and waned, waxed and waned, but grew ever stronger. My room became plain. The chandelier gleamed like a decayed emerald—

There was a little face at the window! A doll’s face! My heart leaped, then curdled with despair. I thought: “McCann has failed! It is the end!” The doll looked at me, grinning. Its face was smooth shaven, that of a man about forty. The nose was long, the mouth wide and thin-lipped. The eyes were close set under bushy brows. They glittered greenly.

The doll crept over the sill. It slid, head-first, into the room. It stood for a moment on its hands, legs waving. It somersaulted twice. It came to its feet, one little hand at its lips, green eyes upon mine – waiting. As though expecting applause! It was dressed in the tights and jacket of a circus acrobat. It bowed to me. Then with a flourish, it pointed to the window.

Another little face was peering there. It was austere, cold, the face of a man of sixty. It had small side whiskers. It stared at me with the expression I supposed a banker might wear when someone he hates applies to him for a loan – I found the thought oddly amusing. Then abruptly ceased to feel amused.

A banker-doll! An acrobat-doll!

The dolls of two of those who had suffered the unknown death!

The banker-doll stepped with dignity down from the window. It was in full evening dress, swallowtails, stiff shirt; all perfect. It turned and with the same dignity raised a hand to the window sill. Another doll stood there – the doll of a woman about the same age as the banker-doll, and garbed like it in correct evening dress.

The spinster!

The spinster-doll took the proffered hand. She jumped lightly to the floor.

Through the window came a fourth doll, all in spangled tights from neck to feet. It took a flying leap, landing beside the acrobat-doll. It looked up at me with grinning face, then bowed.

The four dolls began to march toward me; the acrobats leading, and behind them with slow and stately step, the spinster-doll and banker-doll – arm in arm.

Grotesque, fantastic, these they were – but not humorous. Lord – no! Or if there was anything of humor about them, it was that at which only devils laugh.

I thought desperately: “Braile is just on the other side of the door. If I could only make some sound.”

The four dolls halted and seemed to consult. The acrobats pirouetted, and reached to their backs. They drew from the hidden sheaths their dagger-pins. In the hands of banker-doll and spinster-doll appeared similar weapons. They presented the points toward me.

The four resumed their march to my bed.

The eyes of the second acrobat-doll – the trapeze performer I knew him now to be – had rested on the chandelier. He paused, studying it. He pointed to it, thrust the dagger-pin back into its sheath, and bent his knees, hands cupped in front of them. The first doll nodded, then stood, plainly measuring the height of the chandelier from the floor and considering the best approach to it. The second doll pointed to the mantel, and the pair of them swarmed up its sides to the broad ledge. The elderly pair watched them, seemingly much interested. They did not sheathe their dagger-pins.

The acrobat-doll bent, and the trapeze-doll put a little foot in its cupped hands. The first doll straightened, and the second flew across the gap between mantel and chandelier, caught one of the pendants, and swung. Immediately the other doll leaped outward, caught the chandelier and swung beside its spangled mate.

I saw the heavy old fixture tremble and sway. Down upon the floor came crashing a dozen of the pendants. In the dead stillness, it was like an explosion.

I heard Braile running to the door. He threw it open. He stood on the threshold. I could see him plainly in the green glow, but I knew that he could not see – that to him the room was in darkness. He cried:

“Lowell! Are you all right? Turn on the lights!”

I tried to call out. To warn him.

He groped forward, around the foot of the bed, to the switch. I think that then he saw the dolls. He stopped short, directly beneath the chandelier, looking up.

And as he did so the doll above him swung by one hand, drew its dagger-pin from its sheath and dropped upon Braile’s shoulders, stabbing viciously at his throat!

Braile shrieked – once. The shriek changed into a dreadful bubbling sigh.

And then I saw the chandelier sway and lurch. It broke from its ancient fastenings. It fell with a crash that shook the house, down upon Braile and the doll-devil ripping at his throat.

Abruptly the green glow disappeared. There was a scurrying in the room like the running of great rats.

The paralysis dropped from me. I threw my hand round to the switch and turned on the lights; leaped from the bed.

Little figures were scrambling up and out of the window. There were four muffled reports like pop-guns. I saw Ricori at the door, on each side of him a guard with silenced automatic, shooting at the window.

I bent over Braile. He was quite dead. The falling chandelier had dropped upon his head, crushing the skull. But—

Braile had been dying before the chandelier had fallen.

His carotid artery was severed. The doll that had murdered him – was gone!

— XVII —

THE WITCH GIRL

I stood up. I said bitterly: “You were right, Ricori – her servants are better than yours.” He did not answer, looking down at Braile with pity filled face.

I said: “If all your men fulfill their promises like McCann, that you are stall alive I count as one of the major miracles.”

“As for McCann “ – he turned his gaze to me somberly – “he is both intelligent and loyal. I will not condemn him unheard. And I say to you, Dr. Lowell, that if you had shown more frankness to me this night, Dr. Braile would not be dead.”

I winced at that – there was too much truth in it. I was racked by regret and grief and helpless rage. If I had not let my cursed pride control me, if I had told them all that I could of my encounter with the doll-maker, explained why there were details I was unable to tell, give myself over to Braile for a cleansing counter-hypnotization – no, if I had but accepted Ricori’s offer of protection or Braile’s to watch over me while asleep – then this could not have happened.

I looked into the study and saw there Ricori’s nurse. I could hear whispering outside the study doors – servants, and others from the annex who had been attracted by the noise of the falling chandelier. I said to the nurse:

“The chandelier fell while Dr. Braile was standing beside my bed talking to me. It has killed him. But do not tell the others that. Simply say that the chandelier fell, injuring Dr. Braile. Send them back to their beds – say that we are taking Dr. Braile to the hospital. Then return with Porter and clean up what you can of the blood. Leave the chandelier as it is.”

When she had gone I turned to Ricori’s gunmen.

“What did you see when you shot?”

One answered: “They looked like monkeys to me.”

The other said: “Or midgets.”

I looked at Ricori and read in his face what he had seen. I stripped the light blanket from the bed.

“Ricori,” I said, “have your men lift Braile and wrap him in this. Then have them carry him into the small room next the study and place him on the cot.”

He nodded to them, and they raised Braile from the debris of shattered glass and bent metal. His face and neck had been cut by the broken pendants, and by some chance one of these wounds was close to the spot where the dagger-pin of the doll had been thrust. It was deep, and had probably caused a second severance of the carotid. I followed with Ricori into the small room. The men placed the body on the cot, and Ricori ordered them back to the bedroom to watch while the nurses were there. He closed the door, then turned to me.

“What are you going to do, Dr. Lowell?”

What I felt like doing was weeping, but I answered:

“It is a coroner’s case, of course. I must notify the police at once.”

“What are you going to tell them?”

“What did you see at the window, Ricori?”

“I saw – the dolls!”

“And I. Can I tell the police that? You know I cannot. No, I shall tell them that we were talking when, without warning, the fixture dropped upon him. Splintered glass from the pendants pierced his throat. What else can I say? They will believe that readily enough when they would not believe the truth—”

I hesitated; then my reserve broke; for the first time in many years I wept.

“Ricori – you were right. Not McCann but I am to blame for this… the vanity of an old man… if I had spoken freely, fully… he would be alive… but I did not… I did not. I am his murderer…”

He comforted me – gently as a woman.

“It was not your fault. You could not have done otherwise, being what you are, thinking as you have so long thought. If in your unbelief, your entirely natural unbelief, the witch found her opportunity, still, it was not your fault. But now she will find no more opportunities. Her cup is full and overflowing.”

He put his hands on my shoulders.

“Do not notify the police for a time – not until we hear from McCann. It is now close to twelve, and he will telephone even if he does not come. When I have heard from McCann – I must leave you.”

“What do you mean to do, Ricori?”

“Kill the witch,” he answered quietly. “Both her and the girl. Before the day comes. I have waited too long. I will wait no longer. She shall kill no more.”

•   •   •

I felt a wave of weakness, my sight dimmed. I sank into a chair. After all – it must be. And yet I recoiled from it, now that it was on the very threshold of being. I opened my eyes. Ricori was lifting a glass of water to my lips. I drank, thirstily. I heard through the roaring in my ears a knocking at the door and the voice of one of Ricori’s men:

“McCann is here.”

Ricori said: “Tell him to come in at once.”

The door opened. McCann strode into the room. He closed the door behind him and turned, his eyes gleaming—

“I got her—”

He stopped short, staring at us. His eyes fell upon the covered body upon the cot and his face grew grim:

“What’s happened?”

Ricori answered: “The dolls killed Dr. Braile. You captured the girl too late, McCann. Why?”

“Killed Braile? The dolls! God!” McCann’s voice was as though a hand had gripped his throat.

Ricori asked: “Where is the girl, McCann?”

He answered, dully: “Down in the car, gagged and tied.”

Ricori asked: “When did you get her and where?”

Looking at McCann, I suddenly felt a great pity and sympathy for him. It sprang from my own remorse and shame. I said:

“Sit down, McCann. I am far more to blame for what has happened than you can possibly be.”

Ricori said, coldly: “Leave me to judge that. McCann, did you place cars at each end of the street, as Dr. Lowell instructed?”

“Yes.”

“Then begin your story at that point.”

McCann said: “She comes into the street. It’s close to eleven. I’m at the east end an’ Paul at the west. I say to Tony: ‘We got the wench pocketed!’ She carries two suitcases. She looks around an’ trots where we located her car. She opens the door. When she comes out she rides west where Paul is. I’ve told Paul what doc tells me, not to grab her too close to the doll shop. I see Paul tail her. I shoot right down the street and tail Paul.

“The sedan turns into West Broadway. There she gets the break. A Staten Island boat is just in an’ the street’s lousy with a herd of cars. A Ford shoots over to the left, trying to pass another. Paul hits the Ford and wraps himself round one of the ‘L’ pillars. There’s a mess. I’m a minute or two getting outa the jam. When I do, the sedan’s outa sight.

“I hop down an’ telephone Rod. I tell him to stick a couple more cars quick at each end of the street. I tell him to get the wench when she shows up, even if they have to rope her off the steps of the doll shop. An’ when they get her bring her right here.

“I come up here. I figure maybe she she’s headed this way. I coast along by here an’ then take a look in the Park. I figure the doll-hag’s been getting all the breaks an’ now one’s due I get it. I see the sedan parked under some trees. We get the gal. She don’t put up no fight at all. But we gag her in the car. Tony rolls the sedan away an’ searches it. There thing in it but the two suitcases an’ they’re empty. We bring the gal here.”

I asked: “How long between when you caught the girl and your arrival?”

“Ten – fifteen minutes, maybe. Tony nigh tore the sedan to pieces. An’ that took a little time.”

I looked at Ricori; McCann must have come upon the girl just about the moment Braile had died. He nodded:

“She was waiting for the dolls, of course.”

McCann asked: “What do you want me to do with her?”

He looked at Ricori, not at me. Ricori said nothing, staring at McCann with a curious intentness. I saw him clench his left hand, then open it, fingers wide.

McCann said: “Okay, boss.”

He started toward the door. It did not take unusual acumen to know that he had been given his orders nor could their significance be mistaken.

“Stop!” I intercepted him, and stood with my back against the door.

“Listen to me, Ricori. I have something to say about this. Dr. Braile was as close to me as Peters to you. Whatever the guilt of Mme. Mandilip, this girl is helpless to do other than what she orders her. Her will is absolutely controlled by the doll-maker. I strongly suspect that a good part of the time she is under complete hypnotic control. And I cannot forget that she tried to save Walters.”

Ricori said: “If you are right, all the more reason why she should be destroyed quickly. Then the witch cannot use her before she herself dies.”

“I will not have it, Ricori. And there is another reason. I want to question her. I may discover how Mme. Mandilip does these things – the mystery of the dolls – the ingredients of the salve – whether there are others who share her knowledge. All this and more, the girl may know. And if she does know, I can make her tell.”

McCann said, cynically: “Yeah?”

Ricori asked: “How?”

I answered, grimly: “By using the same trap in which the doll-maker caught me.”

PART SIX

“She is a witch – a murderess! She must die!” Ricori had declared – But Mme. Mandilip’s unholy powers were greater than he knew.

LEADING UP TO
THIS INSTALLMENT

The “Witch Woman,” some call her, believing she has supernatural powers. Dr. Lowell, who has met her and been bested by her, believes she is merely an expert hypnotist – yet even hypnotism cannot explain her awful ability to drive people to fear-crazed death.

Dr. Lowell, who is telling the story, is one of New York’s foremost mental specialists. The case of the nefarious Mme. Mandilip, doll-maker extraordinary, was first brought to his attention when Julian Ricori, likable New York underworld chief, brought his lieutenant, Peters, to Dr. Lowell for observation. Peters was unconscious; a look of fear and loathing was on his face; he soon died.

Person after person dies in this same manner. Ricori and Dr. Lowell learn that they have all had dealings with Mme. Mandilip, a hideous but dominating woman who makes amazingly lifelike dolls.

Then begins a series of deaths in which the victims are stabbed, according to witnesses, by dolls. Dolls that appear to be tiny figurines of Mme. Mandilip’s customers whom she has induced to pose for her.

Ricori himself is stabbed, but Dr. Lowell saves his life. Dr. Lowell, determined to solve the sinister mystery surrounding the doll-maker, visits her shop – and is himself hypnotized. She warns him off and he finds himself powerless to do anything but obey her.

Ricori’s henchmen, led by McCann, his bodyguard, are convinced that dolls do the killing, being carried from the shop at night by the pale-faced, half-awake girl who works in the shop. She releases them; they climb porches and enter windows to do their gruesome work; then she takes them back to the shop.

McCann captures the girl and takes her to Dr. Lowell and Ricori. Dr. Lowell proposes to hypnotize her and learn Mme. Mandilip’s secrets from her.

— XVIII —

END OF THE WITCH GIRL

For a full minute Ricori considered me gravely. “Dr. Lowell,” he said, “for the last time I yield my judgment to yours in this matter. I think you are wrong. I know that I was wrong when I did not kill the witch that day I met her. I believe that every moment this girl is permitted to remain alive is a moment laden with danger for us all. Nevertheless, I yield – for this last time.”

“McCann,” I said, “bring the girl into my office. Wait until I get rid of anyone who may be downstairs.”

I went downstairs, McCann and

Ricori following. No one was there. I placed on my desk a development of the Luys mirror, a device used first at the Salpetrière in Paris to induce the hypnotic sleep. It consists of two parallel rows of small reflectors revolving in opposite directions. A ray of light plays upon them in such a manner as to cause their surfaces alternately to gleam and darken. A most useful device, and one to which I believed the girl, long sensitized to hypnotic suggestion, must speedily succumb. I placed a comfortable chair at the proper angle and subdued the lights so that they would not compete with the mirrors.

I had hardly completed these arrangements when McCann and another of Ricori’s men brought in the girl. They placed her in the easy chair, and I took from her lips the cloth with which she had been silenced.

Ricori said: “Tony, go out to the car. McCann, you stay here.”

The girl made no resistance whatever. She seemed entirely withdrawn into herself, looking up at me with the same vague stare I had noted on my visit to the doll shop. I took her hands. She let them rest passively in mine. They were very cold. I spoke to her gently, reassuringly:

“My child, no one is going to hurt you. Rest and relax. Sink back in the chair. I only want to help you. Sleep if you wish. Sleep.”

She did not seem to hear, still regarding me with that vague gaze. I released her hands. I took my own chair, facing her and setting the little mirrors revolving. Her eyes turned to them at once; rested upon them fascinated. I watched her body relax; she sank back in the chair. Her eyelids began to droop—

“Sleep,” I said softly. “Here no one can harm you. While you sleep none can harm you. Sleep… sleep…”

Her eyes closed; she sighed.

I said: “You are asleep. You will not awaken until I bid you. You cannot awaken until I bid you.”

She repeated in a murmuring, childish voice: “I am asleep. I cannot awaken until you bid me.”

•   •   •

I stopped the whirling mirrors. I said to her: “There are some questions I am going to ask you. You will listen, and you will answer me truthfully. You cannot answer them except truthfully. You know that.”

She echoed, still in that faint childish voice: “I must answer you truthfully. I know that.”

I could not refrain from darting a glance of triumph at Ricori and McCann. Ricori was crossing himself, looking at me with wide eyes in which were both doubt and awe. McCann sat chewing nervously, and staring at the girl.

I began my questions, choosing at first those least likely to disturb. I asked:

“Are you truly Mme. Mandilip’s niece?”

“No.”

“Who are you, then?”

“I do not know.”

“When did you join her, and why?”

“Twenty years ago. I was in a crèche, a foundling asylum at Vienna. She took me from it. She taught me to call her aunt. But she is not my aunt.”

“Where have you lived since then?”

“In Berlin, in Paris, then London, Prague, Warsaw.”

“Did Mme. Mandilip make her dolls in each of these places?”

She did not answer; she shuddered; her eyelids began to tremble.

“Sleep! Remember, you cannot awaken until I bid you! Sleep! Answer me.”

She whispered: “Yes.”

“And they killed in each city?”

“Yes.”

“Sleep. Be at ease. Nothing is going to harm you—” Her disquietude had become marked, and I veered for a moment from the subject of the dolls. “Where was Mme. Mandilip born?”

“I do not know.”

“How old is she?”

“I do not know. I have asked her, and she has laughed and said that time is nothing to her. I was five years old when she took me. She looked then just as she does now.”

“Has she any accomplices – I mean are there others who make the dolls?”

“One. She taught him. He was her lover in Prague.”

“Her lover!” I exclaimed, incredulously – the image of the immense gross body, the great breasts, the heavy horse-like face of the doll-maker rising before my eyes. She said:

“I know what you are thinking. But she has another body. She wears it when she pleases. It is a beautiful body. It belongs to her eyes, her hands, her voice. When she wears that body she is beautiful, terrifyingly beautiful. I have often seen her wear it.”

Another body! An illusion, of course… like the enchanted room Walters had described, and which I had glimpsed when breaking from the hypnotic web… a picture drawn by the doll-maker in the mind of the girl. I dismissed that, and drove again to the heart of the matter.

“She kills by two methods, does she not – by the salve and by the dolls?”

“Yes, by the unguent and by the dolls.”

“How many has she killed by the unguent in New York?”

She answered, indirectly: “She has made fourteen dolls since we came here.”

So there were other cases that had not been reported to me! I asked:

“And how many have the dolls killed?”

“Twenty.”

I heard Ricori curse, and shot him a warning look. He was leaning forward, white and tense; McCann had stopped his chewing.

“How does she make the dolls?”

“I do not know.”

“Do you know how she prepares the unguent?”

“No. She does that secretly.”

“What is it that activates the dolls?”

“You mean makes them – alive?”

“Yes.”

“Something from the dead!”

Again I heard Ricori curse. I said: “If you do not know how the dolls are made, you must know what is necessary to make them – alive. What is it?”

She did not answer.

“You must answer me. You must obey me. Speak!”

She said: “Your question is not clear. I have told you that something of the dead makes them alive. What else is it you would know?”

“Begin from where one who poses for a doll first meets Mme. Mandilip. And go to the last step when the doll, as you put it – becomes alive.”

“She has said one must come to her of his own will. He must consent of his own volition, without coercion, to let her make the doll. That he does not know to what he is consenting matters nothing. She must begin the first model immediately. Before she completes the second – the doll that is to live – she must find opportunity to apply the unguent. She has said of this unguent that it liberates one of those who dwell within the mind, and that this one must come to her and enter the doll. She has said that this one is not the sole tenant of the mind, but with the others she has no concern. Nor does she select all or any of those who come before her. How she knows those with whom she can deal, or what there is about them which makes her select them, I do not know. She makes the second doll. At the instant of its completion, he who has posed for it begins to die. When he is dead – the doll lives. It obeys her – as they all obey her…”

She paused, then said musingly… “All except one—”

“And that one?”

“She who was your nurse. She will not obey. My – aunt – torments her, punishes her… still she cannot control her. I brought the little nurse here last night with another doll to kill the man my – aunt – cursed. The nurse came, but she fought the other doll and saved the man. It is something my aunt cannot understand… it perplexes her… and it gives me… hope!”

•   •   •

Her voice trailed away. Then suddenly, with energy, she said: “You must make haste. I should be back with the dolls. Soon she will be searching for me. I must go or she will come for me… and then… if she finds me here… she will kill me…”

I said: “You brought the dolls to kill me?”

“Of course.”

“Where are the dolls now?”

She answered: “They were coming back to me. Your men caught me before they could reach me. They will go… home. The dolls travel quickly when they must. It is more difficult without me… that is all… but they will return to her.”

“Why do the dolls kill?”

“To… please… her.”

I asked: “The knotted cord, what part does it play?”

She answered: “I do not know – but she says—” then, suddenly, desperately, like a frightened child, she whispered: “She is searching for me. Her eyes are looking for me… her hands are groping… she sees me! Hide me! Oh, hide me from her… quick…”

I said: “Sleep more deeply! Go down – down deep – deeper still into sleep. Now she cannot find you! Now you are hidden from her!”

She whispered: “I am deep in sleep. She has lost me. I am hidden. But she is hovering over me… She is still searching.”

Ricori and McCann had left their chairs, and were beside me.

Ricori asked:

“You believe the witch is after her?”

“No,” I answered. “This is not an unexpected development. The girl has been under the woman’s control so long, and so completely, that the reaction is natural. It may be the result of suggestion, or it may be the reasoning of her own subconsciousness… she has been breaking commands… she has been threatened with punishment if she should—”

The girl screamed, agonized:

“She sees me! She has found me! Her hands are reaching out to me!”

“Sleep! Sleep deeper still! She cannot hurt you. Again she has lost you!”

The girl did not answer, but a faint moaning was audible, deep in her throat.

McCann swore, huskily: “Lord! Can’t you help her?”

Ricori, eyes unnaturally bright in a chalky face, said: “Let her die! It will save us trouble!”

I said to the girl, sternly:

“Listen to me and obey. I am going to count five. When I come to five – awaken! Awaken at once! You will come up from sleep so swiftly that she cannot catch you! Obey!”

I counted, slowly, since to have awakened her so swiftly would, in all likelihood, have brought her the death which her distorted mind told her was threatened by the doll-maker.

“One – two – three—”

An appalling scream came from the girl. And then—

“She’s caught me! Her hands are around my heart… Ah-h-h…”

Her body bent; a spasm ran through her. Her body relaxed and sank limply in the chair. Her eyes opened, stared glassily; her jaw dropped.

I ripped open her bodice, set my stethoscope to her heart. It was still.

And then from the girl’s throat issued a voice, organ-toned, sweet, laden with menace and contempt…

“You fools!”

The voice of Mme. Mandilip!

— XIX —

“BURN, WITCH, BURN!”

Curiously enough, Ricori was the least affected of the three of us. My own flesh had crept. McCann, although he had never heard the doll-maker’s voice, was greatly shaken. And it was Ricori who broke the silence.

“You are sure the girl is dead?”

“There is no possible doubt of it.”

He nodded to McCann. “Carry her down to the car.”

I asked: “What are you going to do?”

He answered: “Kill the witch.” He quoted with satiric unctuousness: “In death they shall not be divided.” He said, passionately: “As in Hell they shall burn together forever!”

“You do not approve of this, Dr. Lowell.” He looked at me, sharply.

“Ricori, I don’t know – I honestly do not know. Today I would have killed her with my own hands, but now that rage is spent… what you have threatened is against all my instincts, all my habits of thought, all my convictions of how justice should be administered. It seems to me – murder!”

He said: “You heard the girl. Twenty killed here by the dolls. And twelve dolls. Twelve who died as Peters did!”

“But, Ricori, no court could consider allegations under hypnosis as evidence. It may be true, it may not be. The girl was abnormal. What she told might be only her imaginings – without supporting evidence, no court on earth could accept it as a basis for action.”

He said: “No – no earthly court—” He gripped my shoulders. He asked: “Do you believe it was truth?”

I could not answer, for deep within me I felt it was truth. He said:

“Precisely, Dr. Lowell! You have answered me. You know, as I know, that the girl did speak the truth. You know, as I know, that our law cannot punish the witch. That is why / must kill her. In doing that, I, Ricori, am no murderer. No, I am God’s executioner!”

He waited for me to speak. Again I could not answer.

“McCann” – he pointed to the girl – “do as I told you. Then return.”

And when McCann had gone out with the frail body in his arms, Ricori turned to me.

“Dr. Lowell – you must go with me to witness this execution.”

I recoiled at that. I said:

“Ricori, I can’t. I am utterly weary – in body and mind. I have gone through too much today. I am broken with grief—”

“You must go,” he interrupted, “if we have to carry you gagged as the girl was, and bound. I will tell you why. You are at war with yourself. Alone, it is possible your scientific doubts might conquer, that you would attempt to halt me before I have done what I swear by my hopes of Heaven I shall do. You might even yield to weariness and place the whole matter before the police. I will not take that risk. I have affection for you, Dr. Lowell, deep affection. But I tell you that if my own mother tried to stop me in this I would sweep her aside as ruthlessly as I shall you.”

I said: “I will go with you.”

“Then, until all is over, we remain together. I am taking no more chances.”

•   •   •

I took up the telephone and gave the necessary order. McCann returned, and Ricori said to him: “We go to the doll shop. Who is in the car with Tony?”

“Larson and Cartello.”

“Good. It may be that the witch knows we are coming. It may be that she has listened through the girl’s dead ears as she spoke from her dead throat. No matter. Are there bars on the door?”

McCann said: “Boss, I ain’t been in the shop. I don’t know. There’s a glass panel. If there’s bars we can work ’em. Tony’ll get the tools.”

“Dr. Lowell,” – Ricori turned to me – “will you give me your word that you will not change your mind about going with me? Nor attempt to interfere in what I am going to do?”

“I give you my word, Ricori.”

“McCann, you need not come back. Wait for us in the car.”

As I walked with Ricori out of my house, a clock struck one. I remembered that this strange adventure had begun, weeks ago, at that very hour.

I rode in the back of the car with Ricori, the dead girl between us. On the middle seats were Larson and Cartello, the former a stolid Swede, the latter a wiry little Italian. The man named Tony drove, McCann beside him. We swung down the avenue and in about half an hour were on lower Broadway. As we drew near the street of the doll-maker, we went less quickly. The sky was overcast, a cold wind blowing off the bay. I shivered, but not with cold.

We came to the corner of the doll-maker’s street. For several blocks we had met no one, seen no one. It was as though we were passing through a city of the dead. Equally deserted was the street of the doll-maker.

Ricori said to Tony:

“Draw up opposite the doll shop. We’ll get out. Then go down to the corner. Wait for us there.”

My heart was beating uncomfortably. There was a quality of blackness in the night that seemed to swallow up the glow from the street lamps. There was no light on the doll-maker’s shop, and in the old-fashioned doorway, set level with the street, the shadows clustered. The wind whined, and I could hear the beating of waves on the Battery wall. I wondered whether I would be able to go through that doorway, or whether the inhibition the doll-maker had put upon me still held me.

McCann slipped out of the car, carrying the girl’s body. He propped her, sitting, in the doorway’s shadows. Ricori and I, Larson and Cartello followed. The car rolled off. And again I felt the sense of nightmare unreality which had clung to me so often since I had first set my feet on this strange path.

The little Italian smeared the glass of the door with some gummy material. In the center of it he fixed a small vacuum cup of rubber. He took a tool from his pocket and drew with it on the glass a foot-wide circle. The point of the tool cut into it as though it had been wax. Holding the vacuum cup in one hand, he tapped lightly with a rubber-tipped hammer. The circle of glass came away in his hand. All had been done without the least sound. He reached through the hole and fumbled about noiselessly for a few moments. There was a faint click. The door swung open.

McCann picked up the dead girl. We went, silent as phantoms, into the doll shop. The little Italian set the circle of glass back in its place. I could dimly see the door that opened into the corridor leading to that evil room at the rear. The little Italian tried the knob. The door was locked. He worked for a few seconds, and the door swung open. Ricori leading, McCann behind him with the girl, we passed like shadows through the corridor and paused at the farther door—

The door swung open!

•   •   •

We heard the voice of the doll-maker: “Enter, gentlemen. It was thoughtful of you to bring me back my dear niece! I would have met you at my outer door – but I am an old woman, and timid!”

McCann whispered: “One side, boss!”

He shifted the body of the girl to his left arm, and holding her like a shield, pistol drawn, began to edge by Ricori. Ricori thrust him away. His own automatic leveled, he stepped over the threshold. I followed McCann, the two gunmen at my back.

I took a swift glance around the room. The doll-maker sat at her table, sewing. She was serene, apparently untroubled. Her long white fingers danced to the rhythm of her stitches. She did not look up at us. There were coals burning in the fireplace. The room was very warm, and there was a strong aromatic odor, unfamiliar to me. I looked toward the cabinets of the dolls.

Every cabinet was open. Dolls stood within them, row upon row, staring down at us with eyes green and blue, gray and black, lifelike as though they were midgets on exhibition in some grotesque peep-show. There must have been a hundred of them. Some were dressed as we in America dress; some as the Germans do; some as the Spanish, the French, the English; others were in costumes I did not recognize. A ballerina, and a blacksmith with his hammer raised… a French chevalier, and a German student, broadsword in hand, livid scars upon his face… an Apache with knife in hand, drug-madness on his yellow face, and next to him a vicious-mouthed woman of the streets, and next to her a jockey…

The loot of the doll-maker from a dozen lands!

The dolls seemed to be poised to leap. To flow down upon us. Overwhelm us.

I steadied my thoughts. I forced myself to meet that battery of living dolls’ eyes as though they were but lifeless dolls.

There was an empty cabinet… another and another… five cabinets without dolls. The four dolls I had watched march upon me in the paralysis of the green glow were not there… nor was Walters.…

I wrenched my gaze away from the tiers of the watching dolls. I looked again at the doll-maker, still placidly sewing… as though she were alone… as though she were unaware of us… as though Ricori’s pistol were not pointed at her heart… sewing… singing softly—

The Walters doll was on the table before her!

It lay prone on its back. Its tiny hands were fettered at the wrists with twisted cords of ashen-yellow hair. They were bound round and round, and the fettered hands clutched the hilt of a dagger-pin!

Long in the telling, but brief in the seeing – a few seconds in time as we measure it.

The doll-maker’s absorption in her sewing, her utter indifference to us, the silence, made a screen between us and her, an ever thickening though invisible barrier. The pungent aromatic fragrance grew stronger. The silence was the warp of the screen and the strange fragrance the woof of it. Silence and scent knit on that screen as busily as sewed the white fingers of the doll-maker.

McCann dropped the body of the girl on the floor. He tried to speak – once, twice; at the third attempt he succeeded. He said to Ricori hoarsely, in a strangled voice:

“Kill her… or I will—”

Ricori did not move. He stood L rigid, automatic pointed at the doll-maker’s heart, eyes fixed on her dancing hands. He did not seem to hear McCann, or if he heard, he did not heed. The doll-maker’s song went on… it was like the hum of bees… it was a sweet droning… it garnered sleep as the bees garner honey… sleep…

Ricori shifted his grip upon his gun. He sprang forward. He swung the butt of the pistol down upon the wrists of the doll-maker.

Her hands dropped, the fingers writhed… hideously the long white fingers writhed and twisted… like serpents whose backs have been broken…

Ricori raised the gun for a second blow. Before it could fall the doll-maker had leaped to her feet, overturning her chair. A whispering ran over the cabinets like a thin veil of sound. The dolls seemed to bend, to lean forward…

The doll-maker’s eyes were on us now. They seemed to take in each and all of us at once. And they were like flaming black stains in which danced tiny crimson flames.

Her will swept out and overwhelmed us. It was like a wave, tangible. I felt it strike me as though it were a material thing. A numbness began to creep through me. I saw the hand of Ricori that clutched the pistol twitch and whiten, the fingers strain to press the trigger. I knew that same numbness was gripping him… as it gripped McCann and the others…

That once more the doll-maker had trapped us!

I whispered: “Don’t look at her, Ricori… don’t look in her eyes—”

With a tearing effort I wrested my own away from those flaming black ones. They fell upon the Walters doll. Stiffly, I reached to take it up – why, I did not know. The hand of the doll-maker was quicker than mine. She snatched it, and held it to her breast. She cried, in a voice whose vibrant sweetness ran through every nerve, augmenting the creeping lethargy:

“You will not look at me? You will not look at me! Fools – you can do nothing else!”

Then began that strange, utterly strange episode which was the beginning of the end.

The aromatic fragrance seemed to pulse, to throb, grew stronger. Something like a sparkling mist whirled out of nothingness and covered the doll-maker, veiling the horse-like face, the ponderous body. Only her eyes shone through that mist—

The mist cleared away. Before us stood a woman of breath-taking beauty – tall and slender and exquisite! Naked! Her hair, black and silken fine, half-clothed her to her knees. Through it the pale golden flesh gleamed. Only the eyes, the hands, the doll still clasped to one of the round, high breasts told who she was.

Ricori’s automatic dropped from his hand. I heard the weapons of the others fall to the floor. I knew they stood rigid as I, stunned by that incredible transformation, and helpless in the grip of the power streaming from the doll-maker.

She pointed to Ricori and laughed: “You would kill me – me! Pick up your weapon, Ricori – and try!”

Ricori’s body bent slowly, slowly… I could see him only indirectly for my eyes could not leave the woman’s… and I knew that his could not… that, fastened by them, his eyes were turning upward, upward as he bent. I sensed rather than saw that his groping hand had touched his pistol – that he was trying to lift it. I heard him groan. The doll-maker laughed again.

“Enough, Ricori – you cannot!”

Ricori’s body straightened with a snap, as though a hand had clutched his chin and thrust him up—

There was a rustling behind me, the patter of little feet, the scurrying of small bodies past me.

•   •   •

At the feet of the woman were four mannikins… the four who had marched upon me in the green glow… banker-doll, spinster-doll, the acrobat, the trapeze performer.

They stood, the four of them, ranged in front of her, glaring at us. In the hand of each was a dagger-pin, points thrust at us like tiny swords. And once more the laughter of the woman filled the room. She spoke, caressingly:

“No, no, my little ones! I do not need you!”

She pointed to me.

“You know this body of mine is but illusion, do you not? Speak!”

“Yes.”

“And these at my feet – and all my little ones – are but illusions?”

I said: “I do not know that.”

“You know too much – and you know too little. Therefore you must die, my too wise and too foolish doctor—” the great eyes dwelt upon me with mocking pity, the lovely face became maliciously pitiful. “And Ricori, too, must die – because he knows too much. And you others – you, too, must die. But not at the hands of my little people. Not here, no! At your home, my good doctor. You will go there silently – speaking neither among yourselves nor to any others on your way. And when there, you will turn upon yourselves… each slaying the other… rending yourselves like wolves… like—”

She staggered back a step, reeling.

I saw – or thought I saw – the doll of Walters writhe. Then, swift as a striking snake, raise its bound hands and thrust the dagger-pin through the doll-maker’s throat… twist it savagely… and thrust and thrust again… stabbing the golden throat of the woman precisely where that other doll had stabbed Braile!

And as Braile had screamed – so now screamed the doll-maker.

She tore the doll from her breast. She hurled it from her. The doll hurtled toward the fireplace, rolled, and touched the glowing coals.

There was a flash of brilliant flame, a wave of that same intense heat I had felt when the match of McCann had struck the Peters doll. And instantly, at the touch of that heat, the dolls at the woman’s feet vanished. From them rose swiftly a pillar of the brilliant flame. It coiled and wrapped itself around the doll-maker, from feet to head.

I saw the shape of beauty melt away. In its place was the horse-like face, the immense body of Mme. Mandilip… eyes seared and blind… the long white hands clutching at her torn throat, and no longer white, but crimson with her blood.

Thus for an instant she stood, then toppled to the floor.

And at the instant of her fall, the spell that had held us was broken.

Ricori leaned toward the huddled hulk that had been the doll-maker and spat upon it. He shouted, exultantly:

“Burn, witch, burn!”

He pushed me to the door, pointing toward the tiers of the watching dolls that strangely now seemed lifeless! Only – dolls!

Fire was leaping to them from draperies and curtains. The fire was leaping at them as though it were some vengeful spirit of cleansing flame!

We rushed through the door, the corridor, out into the shop. Through the corridor and into the shop the flames poured after us. We ran into the street.

Ricori cried: “Quick! To the car!”

Suddenly the street was red with the light of the flames. I heard windows opening, and shouts of warning and alarm. We swung into the waiting car and it leaped away.

— XX —

WHAT WAS SHE?

Three weeks had passed since the events I have just narrated. I sat with Ricori in a pleasant country place. I had been quite ill – the continuous strain, the shock of Braile’s death, the destructively alien quality of so many of the experiences I had passed through, had all combined to bring about a breakdown. But as I rested in this quiet, guarded spot to which Ricori had brought me for my convalescence, the most disturbing elements seemed to have retreated over the rim of the world. The nightmare depression and anxiety had vanished. That day, for the first time, I had been able to go over the whole case thoroughly and dispassionately, putting Ricori in possession of phases of it which hitherto he had not known. I had found further relief in doing so. Ricori spoke, breaking a long silence. “Now, after this lapse of time, when you can look back on all these things, see them in perspective – what, do you think, was Mme. Mandilip?”

“She was a murderess,” I answered. “No doubt of that. Her unguent killed. Also, she was an extraordinary hypnotist, a mistress of illusion – it may be the greatest that ever lived…”

He asked: “And nothing more?” I hesitated, then answered: “Except the deaths by the unguent, much of what we saw was hallucinatory. Like the things seen in delirium, whether produced by fever or drink or drugs, or seen in a dream. They occurred, or seemed to occur, after contact with the woman – either personal contact or contact with that peculiar mechanism, for mechanism I believe it to have been, the knotted cord of hair. It is probable, therefore, that many of the things we witnessed were illusions produced by her.”

“You do not think the dolls were real?”

“The dolls were real enough,” I said. “The illusion was in what we saw them do – perhaps.”

He echoed, ironically: “Perhaps!”

I said: “It is possible that the woman had discovered physical laws still unknown to us. If the dolls did act, then it could not be otherwise than by such laws. And the woman was equally bound by them. Unknown laws, yes – but natural laws which the dolls and she must obey.”

“But if the dolls’ actions were not real, if they were illusion, hallucination, why did more than one of us, at precisely the same time, see precisely the same things?”

“You know how real was that illusion of a beautiful body. Yet we know it was not. We saw it dissolve in the flames. But it had seemed as veritable as the actions of the dolls. It was mass hypnotism, Ricori – the same suggestions impressed simultaneously upon a plurality of minds. It is well known that some East Indian adepts can accomplish this. It is well known that it has reached a high degree of development in Tibet. No witchcraft nor sorcery in that, Ricori.”

He asked: “You say that if it were illusion, personal contact with the woman or contact with the knotted cord was essential to produce it?”

“I think so.”

“Then explain the attack upon the too convivial gentleman in the park. He knew nothing of Mme. Mandilip, nor had he been given the cord. I pass over Shevlin, because, after all, he did not see the doll until it had been crushed by the car.”

I said: “I have admitted the possibility of physical laws unknown to us. And yet, we have only the wastrel’s word that the wounds upon his legs were made by the doll. None, as you point out, witnessed the attack.”

•   •   •

He looked at me, wonderingly. He said, with sarcasm:

“Is it your idea that the discovery of this doll close by, and soon after the man had told his circumstantial story – and the same doll, mind you, which had shortly before attacked me – is it your idea that this discovery was merely a coincidence?”

“I did not say that.” I moved, uncomfortably. “I do say that we have no real evidence that it was not a coincidence. And as for the attack on you, Ricori – well, it is perfectly possible that there was none. Entirely possible that, obeying the command of the doll-maker impressed upon you during your encounter in the shop, you, yourself, took the hand of the doll and thrust the dagger-pin into your own breast.”

He murmured: “My dear doctor – your explanation seems as incredible to me as mine would be to you.”

I said, with some heat: “My explanation is entirely within the possibilities of hypnotic phenomena.”

He smiled, and asked: “You have said that the dolls, assuming they actually did what we thought we saw them do, must have obeyed an unbreakable natural law which bound the doll-maker as well?”

“Yes. It was either that or illusion. There can be no other explanations. Nothing of soul, or mind, or other intangible essence of those in whose likenesses they were made, animated them. The dolls were material. Therefore they could obey only material laws. The immaterial cannot command material laws. Therefore it cannot affect us – who are material. Any spiritual essence we possess cannot be material, Ricori, as it were, it would have been isolated and analyzed long ago. If the actions of the dolls were real, their activation could come only from the doll-maker.”

He said, blandly: “Then how account for the actions of the little nurse? Why did she not obey this unknown law – and also, therefore, the doll-maker? The little nurse would not obey – and so saved us all. The girl said she would not obey. The woman told you she would not. And at the end the little nurse killed the witch. Or is it that you think the witch killed herself?”

Now I had given much thought to that, and I answered him as I had answered myself:

“Precisely so! As for the disobedience of the doll, we have only the statements of the girl and the Woman. The girl was manifestly under the absolute control of Mme. Mandilip, obeying her will, thinking as Mme. Mandilip bade her think.

“It is probable that her strange mind was at times the victim of the same illusions she induced in others. That at times she, herself, considered the dolls alive. It is probable that in this strange mind was conceived a hatred for the doll of Walters. And that at the last, under the stimulation of our entry, this belief reacted upon her. She thought the doll alive; she hated it; she tormented it; she expected the doll to avenge itself if it had the opportunity.

“So strong was the expectation that when the favorable moment arrived it took form in action. Mme. Mandilip, like you perhaps, unconsciously manipulated the doll – and plunged the dagger-pin into her own throat. And so strong was that self-induced hallucination of the avenging doll that we, forced by her into partial hypnosis, saw what she was seeing. Saw the doll move and writhe upward and pierce the doll-maker’s throat. It is the very reasonable explanation. And it is well within the possibilities.”

“And Braile?”

“A sliver of glass from the chandelier. I was in no condition after my return to make an examination. You know that.”

“Gilmore?”

“Killed by his wife under the influence of the cord. Don’t forget I tried to murder you while under the influence of another of them.”

He arose impatiently, then faced me.

“Dr. Lowell, I am of an old race that holds many ancient beliefs. Belief in evil spirits and good; belief in forces and powers that can, and do at times, make themselves manifest; conscious forces that can, and do, raise or ruin; beliefs in an immaterial, or if you will a spiritual, world filled with entities as living as any creatures of this material world. You tell me that all material things must obey material laws. And that if there do exist immaterial beings, they cannot affect us either for good or evil because we, being material, can respond only to the laws of matter, which these, being immaterial, cannot command.

“I tell you that behind this curtain of the material – at which your vision halts – there are forces inimical to us – which God in his inscrutable wisdom permits to be. That these powers can, and do at times, reach through the veil of matter and become manifest in creatures like the doll-maker. It is so. Witches and sorcerers hand in hand with evil! It is so. And there are other powers friendly to us which make themselves manifest in their chosen.

“I say to you – Mme. Mandilip was an accursed witch! An instrument of these evil powers. Concubine of Satan! She burned as a witch should burn. She will burn in Hell – forever! I say to you that the little nurse was an instrument of the good powers. And she is happy today in Paradise – as she will be forever!”

He was silent, trembling with his own fervor. He touched my shoulder.

“Tell me, Dr. Lowell – tell me as truthfully as though you stood before the seat of God believing in Him as I believe – do those scientific explanations of yours satisfy you?”

I answered, very quietly:

“No, Ricori.”

Nor do they.

— THE END —

Argosy Weekly, 22 Oct-26 Nov 1932