A house of silence, broken at times by a weird wailing as from the Pit; a
house of dreams, gray in the moonlight, under the leprous-silvered finger
of the moon, brooding now, a grim, gray fortress of the damned: the
stronghold of the Beast.
Dense pines grew about it, so that when the wind wailed among them, like
the wailing of a lost soul, it met and mingled with an eerie ululation
rising as if muffled by many thicknesses of walls, to end, after a
little, with a quick shriek and a sudden hush, with, after a moment, the
faint echo of a taunting laugh.
That laugh would have struck terror to the swart soul of a lucivee, if
lucivees have souls, for it was like an eldritch howling, faint and thin;
like the thin, tinkling laughter of a fiend, without pity and without
ruth.
Here, in the sanitarium of Doctor Elphinstone, there were secrets within
secrets, walls within walls, downward, as in Dante’s Seventh Hell, and
from this monastery of the hopeless there penetrated, on occasion,
outward from its battlemented walls, wild, frantic laughter, but there
was nothing demoniac about it, because it was the laughter of the insane.
But that other laughter, like a sound heard in dreams—passers-by, if
there were any such, hearing it, would shudder, and pass on. For the
secret of that house of doom was a secret, terrible and grim; a secret,
for him who might have guessed at it, to be whispered behind locked doors
and with bated breath. And there had been those who had whispered of
the lost souls within those walls, and the whisper ran that they were,
indeed, madmen who had not been always mad, because—they had become such
_after_ their commitment to the bleak house within the wood.
These were but whispers, merely, for the power upon that house was not
alone the power of Evil, rising like a dark tide among the pines; for in
Dry Bone, and beyond it, in Palos Verde and Mojave, it was rumored that
the strong arm of the Law upheld it, or such law, say, as might have
issued from the devious hand of Hamilton Rook.
Once—and it was never repeated—a man had come there from the capital; he
had demanded to see the doctor’s patients; that had been a long time in
the past.
And as the investigator had stood there, viewing with a faint, creeping
horror the nondescripts paraded before him, gibbering, mouthing, in an
inarticulate, furious babble, a man had burst suddenly from the line with
a strangled cry:
“Jerry—don’t you know me? I’m Humiston—Newbold....”
The voice had been the voice of Humiston, but the face—it had been the
face of another, totally unlike; there had been no possible resemblance.
But the man had been—_sane_. The investigator was persuaded of that;
suffering under a peculiar delusion, indeed, but sane.
The man had rushed forward then, baring his arm; and there, on that thin,
pitiful flesh that had once been healthy and hard, there ran a curious
design in red; the investigator sucked in his breath as that tell-tale
birth-mark sprang, livid, under his gaze. For he had seen it before.
The doctor’s eyes had narrowed to slits; somehow, the man from the
capital had gained the impression that it was the first time that he had
seen that mark. But the investigator could do nothing. Birth-marks can be
duplicated. He had waited then, in a curious indecision as the bearded
doctor had interposed a suave:
“Well, of course, Commissioner, you’re quite aware, or you should be, how
it is: these paranoiacs are noted for their delusions—ah—megalocephalic
tendencies, I should say.... They believe themselves to be—someone else,
and always a bank president, say, a famous actor, an author, a great
general.... Now—Mr. Humiston—you knew him, I believe?” Beneath the silken
tone there ran suddenly a hint of iron, of menace, veiled but actual; the
investigator felt it. “This patient knew your name, of course,” the suave
voice had continued. “Poor fellow—we must be gentle with him.”
And there the matter had ended. Curiously enough, the man who had claimed
to be Banker Humiston had, after that first burst of frenzied speech,
kept silent. Perhaps that mordant gleaming in the doctor’s eyes had
telegraphed a warning, a message, a command.
But the investigator went home, oddly shaken, to dream, like Pilate’s
wife, of a white face with staring eyes which changed, even as he gazed,
into the face of his friend, Newbold Humiston; to hear, even in his
dream, a voice, and it was the voice of the living, and of the dead.
* * * * *
In a bare cell, six feet by six—a cubicle in which there was barely
sufficient head room for a tall man to stand upright—a figure stood
with its hands clenched upon the bars, staring outward at the grim wood
visible to the south.
Travis Annister had abode here in this living tomb three weeks now, three
centuries, in which, as in a nightmare of cold horror, he had been aware
merely of a face, three-pointed, bearded, the eyes active with a malign
intelligence, the lips smiling always with the cold smile of death.
Twice a day the small panel in his cell door had slid backward without
sound, to frame, in the opening, the face of Dr. Elphinstone, like a face
without a body, and without a soul.
The father of Black Steve Annister knew that it was not a dream that
would pass, because, on the second day, the head had spoken. Travis
Annister was scarcely a coward; he had fought like a baited grizzly when
surprised in his Summer camp by the men who had brought him, under cover
of the night, to this prison-house beyond the pale.
Now, at the voice, like the slow drip of an acid, Annister stared
straight before him, with the gaze of a man who has abandoned hope.
“My dear Mr. Annister,” the voice had whispered, “the little matter of
that check, if you please.... You will make it out to ‘Cash’.... Ah, that
is good; I perceive you are—wise.”
It had not been the pistol in the lean, clawlike hand; nor the eyes,
even, brooding upon him with the impersonal, cold staring of a cobra;
Travis Annister might have refused if it had not been for those sounds
that he had heard, the sights that he had seen when, taken at midnight
from his cubicle, he had beheld the administration of the Cone.
And, like Macbeth, with that one sight, and the sight of that which came
after, he had “supped full of horrors,” until now, at the bidding of that
toneless voice, he had obeyed. Three times thereafter, at the command of
his dark jailer, he had paid tribute, nor had he been, of all that lost
battalion, the single victim; there had been others....
Now, separated from him scarce a dozen feet, a girl with golden hair
sat, huddled, eyes in a sightless staring upon the stone floor of
her cell. Cleo Ridgley had not been killed; she had been saved for a
fate—beside which death would be a little thing—a fate unspeakable, even
as had—Number Thirty-three.
Mary Allerton, removed from the others by a narrow corridor running
cross-wise in the cell-block, watched and waited now for the signal of
the man to whom she had dispatched that message, it seemed, a century in
the past.
That morning they had found the rope; they had removed it without
comment, while the ophidian gaze of the dark Doctor had been bent upon
her with what she fancied had been a queer, speculative look: a look of
anticipation, and of something more. So far she had been treated decently
enough; her cell was wide and airy, plainly but comfortably furnished;
but as to that look in the gray-green eyes of the Master of Black
Magic—she was not so sure.
There came a sudden movement in the corridor without; a panting, a
snuffling, and the quick _pad-pad_ of marching feet. Mary, her eye to
the keyhole of that door, could see but dimly; she made out merely the
sheeted figures, like grim, gliding ghosts; the figure, rigid, on the
stretcher, moving, silent, on its rubber-tired wheels. Then, at an odor
stealing inward through the key-hole, she recoiled.
That perfume had been sickish-sweet, overpowering, dense and yet sharp
with a faint, acrid sweetness; the odor of ether. And then, although she
could not see it, a man in the next cell had risen, white-faced, from his
cot, to sink back limply as the dark hand, holding that inverted cone,
had swept downward to his face.
A choked gurgle, a strangled, sharp cry, penetrating outward in a vague
shadow of clamor—and then silence, with the faint whisper of the wind
among the pines, the brool of the rushing river, the faint, half-audible
footfalls passing and repassing in that corridor of the dead.
* * * * *
Travis Annister sprang to his feet as the narrow door swung open to press
backward against the window-bars as the High-Priest of Horror, followed
by his familiars, cowled and hooded, entered with a slow, silent step.
The Doctor spoke, and his voice was like a chill wind:
“My friend, I bring you—forgetfulness.... A brief Lethe of hours.... And
then—ah, then, you will be a _new_ man, a man re-born, my friend....
Now....”
Annister, his face gray with a sort of hideous strain, stared silent,
white-lipped, as, at a low-voiced order, the attendants came forward.
The lean hand reached forward; it poised, darted, swooped; and in it was
the Cone.
_CHAPTER TWELVE_