"A charm," the preacher told Lanark as he labored with the pen. "These
mystic words and the crosses will defend you in your slumber, from all
wicked spirits. So says Albertus Magnus, and Hohman as well."
"What do they mean?"
"I do not know that." Jager blew hotly upon Lanark's palm to dry the
ink. "Will you now write the same thing for me, in my right hand?"
"If you wish." Lanark, in turn, dipped in the inkpot and began to copy
the diagram. "_Opera_ is a word I know," he observed, "and _tenet_ is
another. _Sator_ may be some form of the old pagan word, _satyr_--a
kind of horned human monster----"
He finished the work in silence. Then he lighted another cigar. His
hand was as steady as a gun-rest this time, and the match did not even
flicker in his fingertips. He felt somehow stronger, better, more
confident.
"You'll give me a place to sleep for the night?" he suggested.
"Yes. I have only pallets, but you and I have slept on harder couches
before this."
Within half an hour both men were sound asleep.
_10. Enid Mandifer Again_
The silence was not so deadly the following noon as Lanark and Jager
dismounted at the hitching-rack in front of Enid Mandifer's; perhaps
this was because there were two horses to stamp and snort, two bridles
to jingle, two saddles to creak, two pairs of boots to spurn the
pathway toward the door.
Enid Mandifer, with a home-sewn sunbonnet of calico upon her head, came
around the side of the house just as the two men were about to step
upon the porch. She called out to them, anxiously polite, and stood
with one hand clutched upon her wide skirt of brown alpaca.
"Mr. Lanark," she ventured, "I hoped that you would come again. I have
something to show you."
It was Jager who spoke in reply: "Miss Mandifer, perhaps you may
remember me. I'm Parson Jager, I live south of here. Look." He held out
something--the _Long Lost Friend_ book. "Did you ever see anything of
this sort?"
She took it without hesitation, gazing interestedly at the cover.
Lanark saw her soft pink lips move, silently framing the odd words
of the title. Then she opened it and studied the first page. After a
moment she turned several leaves, and a little frown of perplexity
touched her bonnet-shaded brow. "These are receipts--recipes--of some
kind," she said slowly. "Why do you show them to me, Mr. Jager?"
The ex-sergeant had been watching her closely, his hands upon his heavy
hips, his beard thrust forward and his head tilted back. He put forth
his hand and received back the _Long Lost Friend_.
"Excuse me, Miss Mandifer, if I have suspected you unjustly," he said,
handsomely if cryptically. Then he glanced sidewise at Lanark, as
though to refresh a memory that needed no refreshing--a memory of a
living-dead horror that had recoiled at very touch of the little volume.
Enid Mandifer was speaking once more: "Mr. Lanark, I had a dreadful
night after you left. Dreams ... or maybe not dreams. I felt things
come and stand by my bed. This morning, on a bit of paper that lay on
the floor----"
From a pocket in the folds of her skirt, she produced a white scrap.
Lanark accepted it from her. Jager came close to look.
"Writing," growled Jager. "In what language is that?"
"It's English," pronounced Lanark, "but set down backward--from right
to left, as Leonardo da Vinci wrote."
The young woman nodded eagerly at this, as though to say that she had
already seen as much.
"Have you a mirror?" Jager asked her, then came to a simpler solution.
He took the paper and held it up to the light, written side away from
him. "Now it shows through," he announced. "Will one of you try to
read? I haven't my glasses with me."
Lanark squinted and made shift to read:
"'Any man may look lightly into heaven, to the highest star; but who
dares require of the bowels of Earth their abysmal secrets?'"
"That is my stepfather's handwriting," whispered Enid, her head close
to Lanark's shoulder.
He read on: "'The rewards of Good are unproven; but the revenges of
Evil are great, and manifest on all sides. Fear will always vanquish
love.'"
He grinned slightly, harshly. Jager remembered having seen that grin in
the old army days, before a battle.
"I think we're being warned," Lanark said to his old sergeant. "It's a
challenge, meant to frighten us. But challenges have always drawn me."
"I can't believe," said Enid, "that fear will vanquish love." She
blushed suddenly and rosily, as if embarrassed by her own words. "That
is probably beside the point," she resumed. "What I began to say was
that the sight of my stepfather's writing--why is it reversed like
that?--the sight, anyway, has brought things back into my mind."
"What things?" Jager demanded eagerly. "Come into the house, Miss
Mandifer, and tell us."
"Oh, not into the house," she demurred at once. "It's dark in
there--damp and cold. Let's go out here, to the seat under the tree."
She conducted them to the bench whither Lanark had accompanied her the
day before.
"Now," Jager prompted her, and she began:
"I remember of hearing him, when I was a child, as he talked to his
son Larue and they thought I did not listen or did not comprehend. He
told of these very things, these views he has written. He said, as if
teaching Larue, 'Fear is stronger than love; where love can but plead,
fear can command.'"
"A devil's doctrine!" grunted Jager, and Lanark nodded agreement.
"He said more," went on Enid. "He spoke of 'Those Below,' and of how
they 'rule by fear, and therefore are stronger than Those on High, who
rule by weak love.'"
"Blasphemy," commented Jager, in his beard.
"Those statements fit what I remember of his talk," Lanark put in. "He
spoke, just before we fought the guerrillas, of some great evil to come
from flouting Those Below."
"I remember," nodded Jager. "Go on, young woman."
"Then there was the box."
"The box?" repeated both men quickly.
"Yes. It was a small case, of dark gray metal, or stone--or something.
This, too, was when I was little. He offered it to Larue, and laughed
when Larue could not open it."
Jager and Lanark darted looks at each other. They were remembering such
a box.
"My stepfather then took it back," Enid related, "and said that it held
his fate and fortune; that he would live and prosper until the secret
writing within it should be taken forth and destroyed."
"I remember where that box is," Lanark said breathlessly to Jager. "In
the old oven, at----"
"We could not open it, either," interrupted the preacher.
"He spoke of that, too," Enid told them. "It would never open, he told
Larue, save in the 'place of the Nameless One'--that must be where the
house burned--and at midnight under a full moon."
"A full moon!" exclaimed Lanark.
"There is a full moon tonight," said Jager.
_11. Return of the Sacrifice_
Through the cross-hatching of new-leafed branches the full moon shone
down from its zenith. Lanark and Enid Mandifer walked gingerly through
the night-filled timber in the gulley beyond which, they knew, lay the
ruins of the house where so much repellent mystery had been born.
"It's just eleven o'clock," whispered Lanark, looking at his big silver
watch. He was dressed in white shirt and dark trousers, without coat,
hat or gloves. His revolver rode in the front of his waistband, and as
he limped along, the sheath of Jager's old cavalry saber thumped and
rasped his left boot-top. "We must be almost there."
"We are there," replied Enid. "Here's the clearing, and the little
brook of water."
She was right. They had come to the open space where first they had
met. The moonlight made the ground and its new grass pallid, and struck
frosty-gold lights from the runlet in the very center of the clearing.
Beyond, to the west, lay menacing shadows.
Enid stooped and laid upon the ground the hand-mirror she carried,
"Stand to one side," she said, "and please don't look."
Lanark obeyed, and the girl began to undress.
The young man felt dew at his mustache, and a chill in his heart that
was not from dew. He stared into the trees beyond the clearing, trying
to have faith in Jager's plan. "We must make the devils come forth and
face us," the sergeant-preacher had argued. "Miss Mandifer shall be our
decoy, to draw them out where we can get at them. All is very strange,
but this much we know--the unholy worship did go on; Miss Mandifer
was to be sacrificed as part of it; and, when the sacrifice was not
completed, all these evil things happened. We have the hauntings, the
blue fire of the house, the creature that attacked Mr. Lanark, and a
host of other mysteries to credit to these causes. Let us profit by
what little we have found out, and put an end to the Devil's rule in
this country."
It had all sounded logical, but Lanark, listening, had been hesitant
until Enid herself agreed. Then it was that Jager, strengthening his
self-assumed position of leadership, had made the assignments. Enid
would make the journey, as before, from her house to the gulley, there
strip and say the words with which her stepfather had charged her four
springs ago. Lanark, armed, would accompany her as guard. Jager himself
would circle far to the east and approach the ruins from the opposite
direction, observing, and, if need be, attacking.
These preparations Lanark reviewed mentally, while he heard Enid's bare
feet splashing timidly in the water. It came to him, a bit too late,
that the arms he bore might not avail against supernatural enemies. Yet
Jager had seemed confident.... Enid was speaking, apparently repeating
the ritual that was supposed to summon the unnamed god-demon of Persil
Mandifer:
"A maid, alone and pure, I stand, not upon water nor on land; I hold a
mirror in my hand, in which to see what Fate may send...." She broke
off and screamed.
Lanark whipped around. The girl stood, misty-pale in the wash of
moonlight, all crouched and curved together like a bow.
"It was coming!" she quavered. "I saw it in the mirror--over yonder,
among those trees----"
Lanark glared across the little strip of water and the moonlit grass
beyond. Ten paces away, between two trunks, something shone in the
shadows--shone darkly, like tar, though the filtered moon-rays did
not touch it. He saw nothing of the shape, save that it moved and
lived--and watched.
He drew his revolver and fired, twice. There was a crash of twigs, as
though something had flinched backward at the reports.
Lanark splashed through the water and, despite his limp, charged at the
place where the presence lurked.
_12. Jager_
It had been some minutes before eleven o'clock when Jager reined in his
old black horse at a distance of two miles from Fearful Rock.
Most of those now alive who knew Jager personally are apt to describe
him as he was when they were young and he was old--a burly graybeard, a
notable preacher and exhorter, particularly at funerals. He preferred
the New Testament to the Old, though he was apt to misquote his texts
from either; and he loved children, and once preached a telling sermon
against the proposition of infant damnation. His tombstone, at Fort
Smith, Arkansas, bears as epitaph a verse from the third chapter of the
first book of Samuel: _Here am I, for thou didst call me_.
Jager when young is harder to study and to visualize. However, the
diary of a long-dead farmer's wife of Pennsylvania records that the
"Jager boy" was dull but serious at school, and that his appetite for
mince pie amounted to a passion. In Topeka, Kansas, lives a retired
railroad conductor whose father, on the pre-Rebellion frontier, once
heard Jager defy Southern hoodlums to shoot him for voting Free-state
in a territorial election. Ex-Major Kane Lanark mentioned Jager
frequently and with admiration in the remarkable pen-and-ink memoir on
which the present narrative is based.
How he approached Fearful Rock, and what he encountered there, he
himself often described verbally to such of his friends as pretended
that they believed him.
The moonlight showed him a stunted tree, with one gnarled root looping
up out of the earth, and to that root he tethered his animal. Then,
like Lanark, he threw off his coat, strapping it to the cantle of his
saddle, and unfastened his "hickory" blue shirt at the throat. From
a saddlebag he drew a trusty-looking revolver, its barrel sawed off.
Turning its butt toward the moon, he spun the cylinder to make sure
that it was loaded. Then he thrust it into his belt without benefit of
holster, and started on foot toward the rock and its remains of a house.
Approaching, he sought by instinct the cover of trees and bush-clumps,
moving smoothly and noiselessly; Jager had been noted during his
service in the Army of the Frontier for his ability to scout at night,
an ability which he credited to the fact that he had been born in the
darkest hours. He made almost as good progress as though he had been
moving in broad daylight. At eleven o'clock sharp, as he guessed--like
many men who never carry watches, he had become good at judging the
time--he was within two hundred yards of the rock itself, and cover had
run out. There he paused, chin-deep in a clump of early weeds.
Lanark and the girl, as he surmised, must be well into the gulley by
this time. He, Jager, smiled as he remembered with what alacrity Lanark
had accepted the assignment of bodyguard to Enid Mandifer. Those two
young people acted as if they were on the brink of falling in love, and
no mistake....
His eyes were making out details of the scene ahead. Was even the full
moon so bright as all this? He could not see very clearly the ruined
foundations, for they sat in a depression of the earth. Yet there
seemed to be a clinging blue light at about that point, a feeble but
undeniable blue. Mentally he compared it to deep, still water, then to
the poorest of skimmed milk. Jager remembered the flames that once had
burned there, blue as amethyst.
But the blue light was not solid, and it had no heat. Within it, dimmed
as though by mist, stood and moved--figures. They were human, at least
they were upright; and they stood in a row, like soldiers, all but two.
That pair was dark-seeming, and one was grossly thick, the other thin
as an exclamation point. The line moved, bent, formed a weaving circle
which spread as its units opened their order. Jager had never seen such
a maneuver in four years of army service.
Now the circle was moving, rolling around; the figures were tramping
counter-clockwise--"withershins" was the old-fashioned word for that
kind of motion, as Jager remembered from his boyhood in Pennsylvania.
The two darker figures, the ones that had stood separate, were nowhere
to be seen; perhaps they were inclosed in the center of the turning
circle, the moving shapes of which numbered six. There had been six of
Quantrill's guerrillas that died in almost that spot.
The ground was bare except for spring grass, but Jager made shift
to crawl forward on hands and knees, his eyes fixed on the group
ahead, his beard bristling nervously upon his set chin. He crept ten
yards, twenty yards, forty. Some high stalks of grass, killed but not
leveled by winter, afforded him a bit of cover, and he paused again,
taking care not to rustle the dry stems. He could see the maneuvering
creatures more plainly.
They were men, all right, standing each upon two legs, waving each
two arms. No, one of them had only an arm and a stump. Had not one of
Quantrill's men--yes! It came to the back of Jager's mind that Lanark
himself had cut away an enemy's pistol hand with a stroke of his saber.
Again he reflected that there had been six dead guerrillas, and that
six were the forms treading so strange a measure yonder. He began to
crawl forward again. Sweat made a slow, cold trickle along his spine.
But the two that had stood separate from the six were not to be seen
anywhere, inside the circle or out. And Jager began to fancy that his
first far glimpse had shown him something strange about that pair of
dark forms, something inhuman or sub-human.
Then a shot rang out, clear and sharp. It came from beyond the circle
of creatures and the blue-misted ruins. A second shot followed it.
* * * * *
Jager almost rose into plain view in the moonlight, but fell flat a
moment later. Indeed, he might well have been seen by those he spied
upon, had they not all turned in the direction whence the shots had
sounded. Jager heard voices, a murmur of them with nothing that sounded
like articulate words. He made bold to rise on his hands for a closer
look. The six figures were moving eastward, as though to investigate.
Jager lifted himself to hands and knees, then rose to a crouch. He ran
forward, drawing his gun as he did so. The great uneven shaft that was
Fearful Rock gave him a bar of shadow into which he plunged gratefully,
and a moment later he was at the edge of the ruin-filled foundation
hole, perhaps at the same point where Lanark had stood the night
before.
From that pit rose the diluted blue radiance that seemed to involve
this quarter. Staring thus closely, Jager found the light similar to
that given off by rotten wood, or fungi, or certain brands of lucifer
matches. It was like an echo of light, he pondered rather absently,
and almost grinned at his own malapropism. But he was not here to make
jokes with himself.
He listened, peered about, then began moving cautiously along the lip
of the foundation hole. Another shot he heard, and a loud, defiant yell
that sounded like Lanark; then an answering burst of laughter, throaty
and muffled, that seemed to come from several mouths at once. Jager
felt a new and fiercer chill. He, an earnest Protestant from birth,
signed himself with the cross--signed himself with the right hand that
clutched his revolver.
Yet there was no doubt as to which way lay his duty. He skirted the
open foundation of the ruined house, moved eastward over the trampled
earth where the six things had formed their open-order circle. Like
Lanark, he saw the opened grave-trench. He paused and gazed down.
Two sack-like blotches of pallor lay there--Lanark had described them
correctly: they were empty human skins. Jager paused. There was no
sound from ahead; he peered and saw the ravine to eastward, filled with
trees and gloom. He hesitated at plunging in, the place was so ideal an
ambush. Even as he paused, his toes at the brink of the opened grave,
he heard a smashing, rustling noise. Bodies were returning through the
twigs and leafage of the ravine, returning swiftly.
Had they met Lanark and vanquished him? Had they spied or sensed Jager
in their rear?
He was beside the grave, and since the first year of the war he had
known what to do, with enemy approaching and a deep hole at hand. He
dived in, head first like a chipmunk into its burrow, and landed on the
bottom on all fours.
His first act was to shake his revolver, lest sand had stopped the
muzzle.
A charm from the _Long Lost Friend_ book whispered itself through his
brain, a marksman's charm to bring accuracy with the gun. He repeated
it, half audibly, without knowing what the words might mean:
"_Ut nemo in sense tentant, descendre nemo; at precedenti spectatur
mantica tergo._"
At that instant his eyes fell upon the nearest of the two pallid, empty
skins, which lay full in the moonlight. He forgot everything else.
For he knew that collapsed face, even without the sharp stiletto-like
bone of the nose to jut forth in its center. He knew that narrowness
through the jowls and temples, that height of brow, that hair white as
thistledown.
Persil Mandifer's skull had been inside. It must have been there, and
living, recently. Jager's left hand crept out, and drew quickly back
as though it had touched a snake. The texture of the skin was soft,
clammy, moist ... _fresh_!
And the other pallidity like a great empty bladder--that could have
fitted no other body than the gross one of Larue Mandifer.
Thus, Jager realized, had Lanark entered the grave on the night before,
and found these same two skins. Looking up, Lanark had found a horrid
enemy waiting to grapple him.
Jager, too, looked up.
A towering silhouette shut out half the starry sky overhead.
_13. Lanark_
The combination of pluck and common sense is something of a rarity,
and men who possess that combination are apt to go far. Kane Lanark
was such a man, and though he charged unhesitatingly across the little
strip of water and at the unknown thing in the trees, he was not
outrunning his discretion.
He had seen men die in his time, many of them in abject flight, with
bullets overtaking them in the spine or the back of the head. It was
nothing pleasant to watch, but it crystallized within his mind the
realization that dread of death is no armor against danger, and that
an enemy attacked is far less formidable than an enemy attacking. That
brace of maxims comforted him and bore him up in more tight places than
one.
And General Blunt of the Army of the Frontier, an officer who was all
that his name implies and who was never given to overstatement, once so
unbent as to say in official writing that Captain Kane Lanark was an
ornament to any combat force.
And so his rush was nothing frantic. All that faltered was his lame
leg. He meant to destroy the thing that had showed itself, but fully as
definitely he meant not to be destroyed by it. As he ran, he flung his
revolver across to his left hand and dragged free the saber that danced
at his side.
But the creature he wanted to meet did not bide his coming. He heard
another crash and rattle--it had backed into some shrubs or bushes
farther in among the trees. He paused under the branches of the first
belt of timber, well aware that he was probably a fair mark for a
bullet. Yet he did not expect a gun in the hands of whatever lurked
ahead; he was not sure at all that it even had hands.
Of a sudden he felt, rather than saw, motion upon his left flank.
He pivoted upon the heel of his sound right foot and, lifting the
saber, spat professionally between hilt and palm. He meant killing,
did Lanark, but nothing presented itself. A chuckle drifted to him, a
contemptuous burble of sound; he thought of what Enid had said about
divining her stepfather's mockery. Again the chuckle, dying away toward
the left.
But up ahead came more noise of motion, and this was identifiable as
feet--heavy, measured tramping of feet. New and stupid recruits walked
like that, in their first drills. So did tired soldiers on the march.
And the feet were coming his way.
Lanark's first reaction to this realization was of relief. Marching
men, even enemies, would be welcome because he knew how to deal with
them. Then he thought of Enid behind him, probably in retreat out of
the gully. He must give her time to get away. He moved westward, toward
the approaching party, but with caution and silence.
The moonlight came patchily down through the lattice-like mass of
branches and twigs, and again Lanark saw motion. This time it was
directly ahead. He counted five, then six figures, quite human. The
moonlight, when they moved in it, gave him glimpses of butternut
shirts, white faces. One had a great waterfall of beard.
Lanark drew a deep breath. "Stand!" he shouted, and with his left hand
leveled his pistol.
They stood, but only for a moment. Each figure's attitude shifted ever
so slightly as Lanark moved a pace forward. The trees were sparse
around him, and the moon shone stronger through their branches. He
recognized the man with the great beard--he did not need to see that
one arm was hewed away halfway between wrist and elbow. Another face
was equally familiar, with its sharp mustaches and wide eyes; he had
stared into it no longer ago than last night.
The six guerrillas stirred into motion again, approaching and closing
in. Lanark had them before him in a semi-circle.
"Stand!" he said again, and when they did not he fired, full for the
center of that black beard in the forefront. The body of the guerrilla
started and staggered--no more. It had been hit, but it was not going
to fall. Lanark knew a sudden damp closeness about him, as though he
stood in a small room full of sweaty garments. The six figures were
converging, like beasts seeking a common trough or manger.
He did not shoot again. The man he had shot was not bleeding. Six pairs
of eyes fixed themselves upon him, with a steadiness that was more than
unwinking. He wondered, inconsequentially, if those eyes had lids....
Now they were within reach.
He fell quickly on guard with his saber, whirling it to left and then
to right, the old moulinets he had learned in the fencing-room at the
Virginia Military Institute. Again the half-dozen approachers came to
an abrupt stop, one or two flinching back from the twinkling tongue of
steel. Lanark extended his arm, made a wider horizontal sweep with his
point, and the space before him widened. The two forms at the horns of
the semi-circle began to slip forward and outward, as though to pass
him and take him in the rear.
"That won't do," Lanark said aloud, and hopped quickly forward, then
lunged at the blackbeard. His point met flesh, or at least a soft
substance. No bones impeded it. A moment later his basket-hilt thudded
against the butternut shirt front, the figure reeled backward from the
force of the blow. With a practised wrench, Lanark cleared his weapon,
cutting fiercely at another who was moving upon him with an unnerving
lightness. His edge came home, and he drew it vigorously toward
himself--a bread-slicing maneuver that would surely lay flesh open to
the bone, disable one assailant. But the creature only tottered and
came in again, and Lanark saw that the face he had hacked almost in two
was the one with bulge eyes and spike mustaches.
All he could do was side-step and then retreat--retreat eastward in the
direction of Fearful Rock. The black-bearded thing was down, stumbled
or swooning, and he sprang across it. As he did so the body writhed
just beneath him, clutching with one hand upward. Hooked by an ankle,
Lanark fell sprawling at full length, losing his revolver but not his
sword. He twisted over at his left side, hacking murderously in the
direction of his feet. As once before, he cut away a hand and wrist
and was free. He surged to his feet, and found the blackbeard also up,
thrusting its hairy, fishy-white face at him. With dark rage swelling
his every muscle, Lanark carried his right arm back across his chest,
his right hand with the hilt going over his left shoulder. Then he
struck at the hairy head with all the power of arm and shoulder and,
turning his body, thrust in its weight behind the blow. The head flew
from the shoulders, as though it had been stuck there ever so lightly.
Then the others were pushing around and upon him. Lanark smelled blood,
rot, dampness, filth. He heard, for the first time, soft snickering
voices, that spoke no words but seemed to be sneering at him for
the entertainment of one another. The work was too close to thrust;
he hacked and hewed, and struck with the curved guard as with brass
knuckles. And they fell back from him, all but one form that could not
see.
It tottered heavily and gropingly toward him, hunching its headless
shoulders and holding out its handless arms, as though it played with
him a game of blind-man's-buff. And from that horrid truncated enemy
Lanark fled, fled like a deer for all his lameness.
* * * * *
They followed, but they made slow, stupid work of it. Lanark's sword,
which could not kill, had wounded them all. He was well ahead, coming
to rising ground, toiling upward out of the gully, into the open
country shadowed by Fearful Rock.
He paused there, clear of the trees, wiped his clammy brow with the
sleeve of his left arm. The moon was so bright overhead that it almost
blinded him. He became aware of a kneading, clasping sensation at his
right ankle, and looked down to see what caused it.
A hand clung there, a hand without arm or body. It was a pale hand that
moved and crawled, as if trying to mount his boot-leg and get at his
belly--his heart--his throat. The bright moon showed him the strained
tendons of it, and the scant coarse hair upon its wide back.
Lanark opened his lips to scream like any woman, but no sound came.
With his other foot he scraped the thing loose and away. Its fingers
quitted their hold grudgingly, and under the sole of his boot they
curled and writhed upward, like the legs of an overturned crab. They
fastened upon his instep.
When, with the point of his saber, he forced the thing free again,
still he saw that it lived and groped for a hold upon him. With his
lip clenched bloodily between his teeth, he chopped and minced at the
horrid little thing, and even then its severed fingers humped and
inched upon the ground, like worms.
"It won't die," Lanark murmured hoarsely, aloud; often in the past he
had thought that speaking thus, when one was alone, presaged insanity.
"It won't die--not though I chop it into atoms until the evil is driven
away."
Then he wondered, for the first time since he had left Enid, where
Jager was. He turned in the direction of the rock and the ruined house,
and walked wearily for perhaps twenty paces. He was swimming in sweat,
and blood throbbed in his ears.
Then he found himself looking into the open grave where the guerrillas
had lain, whence they had issued to fight once more. At the bottom he
saw the two palenesses that were empty skins.
He saw something else--a dark form that was trying to scramble out.
Once again he tightened his grip upon the hilt of his saber.
At the same instant he knew that still another creature was hurrying
out of the gulley and at him from behind.
_14. Enid_
Lanark's guess was wrong; Enid Mandifer had not retreated westward up
the gulley.
She had stared, all in a heart-stopping chill, as Lanark made for the
thing that terrified her. As though of themselves, her hands reached
down to the earth, found her dress, and pulled it over her head. She
thrust her feet into her shoes. Then she moved, at only a fast walk,
after Lanark.
There was really nothing else she could have done, and Lanark might
have known that, had he been able to take thought in the moments that
followed. Had she fled, she would have had no place to go save to the
house where once her stepfather had lived; and it would be no refuge,
but a place of whispering horror. Too, she would be alone, dreadfully
alone. It took no meditation on her part to settle the fact that Lanark
was her one hope of protection. As a matter of simple fact, he would
have done well to remain with her, on the defensive; but then, he could
not have foreseen what was waiting in the shadowed woods beyond.
She did carry something that might serve as a weapon--the hand-mirror.
And in a pocket of her dress lay the Bible, of which she had once told
Lanark. She had read much in it, driven by terror, and I daresay it was
as much a talisman to her as was the _Long Lost Friend_ to Jager.
Her lips pattered a verse from it: "Deliver me from mine enemies, O my
God ... for lo, they lie in wait for my soul."
It was hard for her to decide what she had expected to find within
the rim of trees beyond the clearing. Lanark was not in sight, but a
commotion had risen some little distance ahead. Enid moved onward,
because she must.
She heard Lanark's pistol shot, and then what sounded like several
men struggling. She tried to peer and see, but there was only a swirl
of violent motion, and through it the flash of steel--that would be
Lanark's saber. She crouched behind a wide trunk.
"That is useless," said an accented voice she knew, close at her elbow.
She spun around, stared and sprang away. It was not her stepfather
that stood there. The form was human to some degree--it had arms and
legs, and a featureless head; but its nakedness was slimy wet and dark,
and about it clung a smell of blood.
"That is useless," muttered once more the voice of Persil Mandifer.
"You do not hide from the power that rules this place."
Behind the first dark slimness came a second shape, a gross immensity,
equally black and foul and shiny. Larue?
"You have offered yourself," said Persil Mandifer, though Enid could
see no lips move in the filthy-seeming shadow that should have been a
face. "I think you will be accepted this time. Of course, it cannot
profit me--what I am now, I shall be always. Perhaps you, too----"
Larue's voice chuckled, and Enid ran, toward where Lanark had been
fighting. That would be more endurable than this mad dream forced upon
her. Anything would be more endurable. Twigs and thorns plucked at her
skirt like spiteful fingers, but she ripped away from them and ran. She
came into another clearing, a small one. The moon, striking between the
boughs, made here a pool of light and touched up something of metal.
It was Lanark's revolver. Enid bent and seized it. A few feet away
rested something else, something rather like a strangely shaggy
cabbage. As Enid touched the gun, she saw what that fringed rondure
was. A head, but living, as though its owner had been buried to his
bearded chin.
[Illustration: "It was a head, but living, as though its owner had been
buried to his bearded chin."]
"What----" she began to ask aloud. It was surely living, its eyebrows
arched and scowled and its gleaming eyes moved. Its tongue crawled out
and licked grinning, hairy lips. She saw its smile, hard and brief as a
knife flashed for a moment from its scabbard.
Enid Mandifer almost dropped the revolver. She had become sickeningly
aware that the head possessed no body.
"There is the rest of him," spoke Persil Mandifer, again behind her
shoulder. And she saw a heart-shaking terror, staggering and groping
between the trees, a body without a head or hands.
She ran again, but slowly and painfully, as though this were in truth
a nightmare. The headless hulk seemed to divine her effort at retreat,
for it dragged itself clumsily across, as though to cut her off. It
held out its handless stumps of arms.
"No use to shoot," came Persil Mandifer's mocking comment--he was
following swiftly. "That poor creature cannot be killed again."
* * * * *
Other shapes were approaching from all sides, shapes dressed in filthy,
ragged clothes. The face of one was divided by a dark cleft, as though
Lanark's saber had split it, but no blood showed. Another seemed to
have no lower jaw; the remaining top of his face jutted forward, like
the short visage of a snake lifted to strike. These things had eyes,
turned unblinkingly upon her; they could see and approach.
The headless torso blundered at her again, went past by inches. It
recovered itself and turned. It knew, somehow, that she was there;
it was trying to capture her. She shrank away, staring around for an
avenue of escape.
"Be thankful," droned Persil Mandifer from somewhere. "These are no
more than dead men, whipped into a mockery of life. They will prepare
you a little for the wonders to come."
But Enid had commanded her shuddering muscles. She ran. One of the
things caught her sleeve, but the cloth tore and she won free. She
heard sounds that could hardly be called voices, from the mouths of
such as had mouths. And Persil Mandifer laughed quietly, and said
something in a language Enid had never heard before. The thick voice
of his son Larue answered him in the same tongue, then called out in
English:
"Enid, you only run in the direction we want you to run!"
It was true, and there was nothing that she could do about it. The
entities behind her were following, not very fast, like herdsmen
leisurely driving a sheep in the way it should go. And she knew that
the sides of the gulley, to north and south, could never be climbed.
There was only the slope ahead to the eastward, up which Lanark must
have gone. The thought of him strengthened her. If the two of them
found the king-horror, the Nameless One, at the base of Fearful Rock,
they could face it together.
She was aware that she had come out of the timber of the ravine.
All was moonlight here, painted by the soft pallor in grays and silvers
and shadow-blacks. There was the rock lifted among the stars, there the
stretch of clump-dotted plain--and here, almost before her, Lanark.
He stood poised above a hole in the ground, his saber lifted above his
head as though to begin a downward sweep. Something burly was climbing
up out of that hole. But, even as he tightened his sinews to strike,
Lanark whirled around, and his eyes glared murderously at Enid.
_15. Evil's End_
"Don't!" Enid screamed. "Don't, it's only I----"
Lanark growled, and spun back to face what was now hoisting itself
above ground level.
"And be careful of me, too," said the object. "It's Jager, Mr. Lanark."
The point of the saber lowered. The three of them were standing close
together on the edge of the opened grave. Lanark looked down. He saw at
the bottom the two areas of loose white.
"Are those the----"
"Yes," Jager replied without waiting for him to finish. "Two human
skins. They are fresh; soft and damp." Enid was listening, but she was
past shuddering. "One of them," continued Jager, "was taken from Persil
Mandifer. I know his face."
He made a scuffing kick-motion with one boot. Clods flew into the
grave, falling with a dull plop, as upon wet blankets. He kicked more
earth down, swiftly and savagely.
"Help me," he said to the others. "Salt should be thrown on those
skins--that's what the old legends say--but we have no salt. Dirt will
have to do. Don't you see?" he almost shrieked. "Somewhere near here,
two bodies are hiding, or moving about, without these skins to cover
them."
Both Lanark and Enid knew they had seen those bodies. In a moment three
pairs of feet were thrusting earth down into the grave.
"Don't!" It was a wail from the trees in the ravine, a wail in the
voice of Persil Mandifer. "We must return to those skins before dawn!"
Two black silhouettes, wetly shiny in the moonlight, had come into the
open. Behind them straggled six more, the guerrillas.
"Don't!" came the cry again, this time a command. "You cannot destroy
us now. It is midnight, the hour of the Nameless One."
At the word "midnight" an idea fairly exploded itself in Lanark's
brain. He thrust his sword into the hands of his old sergeant.
"Guard against them," he said in the old tone of command. "That book of
yours may serve as shield, and Enid's Bible. I have something else to
do."
He turned and ran around the edge of the grave, then toward the hole
that was filled with the ruins of the old house; the hole that emitted
a glow of weak blue light.
Into it he flung himself, wondering if this diluted gleam of the old
unearthly blaze would burn him. It did not; his booted legs felt warmth
like that of a hot stove, no more. From above he heard the voice of
Jager, shouting, tensely and masterfully, a formula from the _Long Lost
Friend_:
"Ye evil things, stand and look upon me for a moment, while I charm
three drops of blood from you, which you have forfeited. The first from
your teeth, the second from your lungs, the third from your heart's own
main." Louder went his voice, and higher, as though he had to fight to
keep down his hysteria: "God bid me vanquish you all!"
Lanark had reached the upward column of the broken chimney. All about
his feet lay fragments, glowing blue. He shoved at them with his toe.
There was an oblong of metal. He touched it--yes, that had been a door
to an old brick oven. He lifted it. Underneath lay what he had hidden
four years ago--a case of unknown construction.
But as he picked it up, he saw that it had a lid. What had Enid
overheard from her stepfather, so long ago? "... that he would live
and prosper until the secret writing should be taken forth and
destroyed ... it would never open, save at the place of the Nameless
One, at midnight under a full moon."
With his thumbnail he pried at the lid, and it came open easily.
The box seemed full of darkness, and when he thrust in his hands he
felt something crumble, like paper burned to ashes. That was what it
was--ashes. He turned the case over, and let the flakes fall out, like
strange black snow.
From somewhere resounded a shriek, or chorus of shrieks. Then a
woman weeping--that would be Enid--and a cry of "God be thanked!"
unmistakably from Jager. The blue light died away all around Lanark,
and his legs were cool. The old basement had fallen strangely dark.
Then he was aware of great fatigue, the trembling of his hands, the
ropy weakness of his lamed leg. And he could not climb out again, until
Jager came and put down a hand.
* * * * *
At rosy dawn the three sat on the front stoop of Jager's cabin. Enid
was pouring coffee from a serviceable old black pot.
"We shall never know all that happened and portended," said Jager,
taking a mouthful of home-made bread, "but what we have seen will tell
us all that we should know."
"This much is plain," added Lanark. "Persil Mandifer worshipped an evil
spirit, and that evil spirit had life and power."
"Perhaps we would know everything, if the paper in the box had not
burned in the fire," went on Jager. "That is probably as well--that
it burned, I mean. Some secrets are just as well never told." He fell
thoughtful, pulled his beard, and went on. "Even burned, the power of
that document worked; but when the ashes fell from their case, all was
over. The bodies of the guerrillas were dry bones on the instant, and
as for the skinless things that moved and spoke as Mandifer and his
son----"
He broke off, for Enid had turned deathly pale at memory of that part
of the business.
"We shall go back when the sun is well up," said Lanark, "and put those
things back to rest in their grave."
He sat for a moment, coffee-cup in hand, and gazed into the brightening
sky.
To the two items he had spoken of as plainly indicated, he mentally
added a third; the worship carried on by Persil Mandifer--was that name
French, perhaps Main-de-Fer?--was tremendously old. He, Persil, must
have received teachings in it from a former votary, his father perhaps,
and must have conducted a complex and secret ritual for decades.
The attempted sacrifice rite for which Enid had been destined was
something the world would never know, not as regards the climax. For
a little band of Yankee horsemen, with himself at their head, had
blundered into the situation, throwing it completely out of order and
spelling for it the beginning of the end.
The end had come. Lanark was sure of that. How much of the power and
motivity of the worship had been exerted by the Nameless One that now
must continue nameless, how much of it was Persil Mandifer's doing,
how much was accident of nature and horror-hallucination of witnesses,
nobody could now decide. As Jager had suggested, it was probably as
well that part of the mystery would remain. Things being as they were,
one might pick up the threads of his normal human existence, and be
happy and fearless.
But he could not forget what he had seen. The two Mandifers, able to
live or to counterfeit life by creeping from their skins at night, had
perished as inexplicably as they had been resurrected. The guerrillas,
too, whose corpses had challenged him, must be finding a grateful rest
now that the awful semblance of life had quitted their slack, butchered
limbs. And the blue fire that had burst forth in the midst of the old
battle, to linger ghostwise for years; the horned image that Jager had
broken; the seeming powers of the _Long Lost Friend_, as an amulet and
a storehouse of charms--these were items in the strange fabric. He
would remember them for ever, without rationalizing them.
He drank coffee, into which someone, probably Enid, had dropped sugar
while he mused. Rationalization, he decided, was not enough, had never
been enough. To judge a large and dark mystery by what vestigial
portions touched one, was to err like the blind men in the old doggerel
who, groping at an elephant here and there, called it in turn a snake,
a spear, a tree, a fan, a wall. Better not to brood or ponder upon what
had happened. Try to be thankful, and forget.
"I shall build my church under Fearful Rock," Jager was saying, "and it
shall be called Fearful Rock no more, but Welcome Rock."
Lanark looked up. Enid had come and seated herself beside him. He
studied her profile. Suddenly he could read her thoughts, as plainly as
though they were written upon her cheek.
She was thinking that grass would grow anew in her front yard, and that
she would marry Kane Lanark as soon as he asked her.