_By_ HAMILTON CRAIGIE
Fear beset Gerald Marston at the very moment of his entry into the
chamber—an intense, gripping horror which laid an icy hand upon his
forehead and fingers of a damp coldness about his heart.
It was as if one invisible from within had reached forth to make him
prisoner to its atmosphere, which, heightened physically by the slimy
walls, the velvet darkness, and the ceaseless, slow dripping of liquid
upon stone, chilled his soul with a nameless foreboding, a daunting
menace of unutterable dread.
And yet that Something, as he told himself, was behind him—his victim,
the man whom he had killed.
Even now It walked, rather, upon the surface of the oily night, felt,
but unseen, driving him forward inexorably, pitilessly—so that now he
stood in the entrance to this lesser blackness, his huge bulk shaking in
an anguish of uncertainty but one degree removed from the panic which
had ridden him until, at length, distraught and near to madness, he had
stumbled into this subterranean oubliette in his frantic flight.
It seemed a week since he, together with Professor Pillsbury, had
descended into this whispering labyrinth of tombs—long galleries of
Aztec construction vying in completeness with the catacombs of early
Rome—sinuous corridors crossing and re-crossing in a maze of underground
warrens of apparently interminable extent.
It had been the Professor himself, an archaeologist whose devotion to
his calling amounted almost to an obsession, who had suggested the
exploration—nay, insisted on it—nor had he, in his singleness of purpose,
remembered that it had been Marston, his friend, who had, as it were,
with a very triumph of casualness, implanted in his mind the first tiny
seed of suggestion.
Scarcely a month before Marston had felicitated his friend upon the
latter’s engagement to Lucille Westley, beautiful and imperious, but
there had been death in his heart. Perhaps, however, he had fancied, with
the perverted hope which had grown in his heart like a green and pallid
flame of lust, that, given his chance, he might have possessed this
incomparable creature for his own.
And so, like a destroying fire, his obsession had mounted until, with
the cunning of his twisted brain, he had evolved a plan, or, rather,
deep within his consciousness, had spawned a thought: foul, slimy,
furtive—even to himself half-born—an abortion, in truth, and yet....
* * * * *
As they had passed from the clean sunlight into the Stygian darkness of
the cavern, somehow, unbidden, there had arisen in Marston’s mind an echo
of the classroom—a fugitive whisper which, he could have sworn, took on
suddenly the form and substance of mocking speech: “_Facilis decensus
Averni_,” it whispered in his ear, as in a dim current of the whispering
wind.
Marston had brought with him a ball of stout twine as a necessary
precaution in threading the uncharted deeps of the underground corridors.
This he had knotted firmly in a clove hitch (for Marston had been a
sailor). There could have been no fear of its working loose, and less
danger of its fraying out against the rough walls of the passageways,
since at all times it would be loosely held. Like a thin snake, it spread
itself behind them, and like a snake....
The accident had been impossible to foresee. He had _known_ that it could
not happen; and yet....
The Professor, leading the way with lantern held well aloft, had
exclaimed aloud at the vivid beauty of a stalactite in his path, adjacent
to a broad, deep ledge some three feet in height.
“Ah, Gerald!” he had cried. “It is _alive_—it writhes with motion—observe
how it has grown, layer upon layer of smooth perfection! And the ledge—a
perfect replica of an ancient sarcophagus! Look—”
But he was destined never to complete the speech.
For with the words he stumbled—a bight of the line snaked out to coil
around his ankle—tottered, even as from behind him something moved,
flashed, descended upon his head—something cold and hard. He fell, with a
sodden crash, face downward in the mold.
And with his fall the lantern crashed to the floor of the cavern,
sputtered a moment feebly in a brief spark of life, and then died
abruptly. And at the feet of Marston that which had been sentient, alive,
now lay still and motionless in the dust.
Marston stood for a moment, with groping fingers extended into the void
about him; his head sang, his eyes blurred. The velvet black became
suddenly, as it were, endowed with life and movement, mysterious,
whispering. Near at hand there sounded abruptly a horrible, fetid
panting—a gross intake of whistling breath which, in a sudden,
overmastering panic, he did not recognize as his own labored breathing.
“God!” he cried, insanely, and then, in panic-struck terror at the sound
of his voice, fell silent and stood shivering like a frightened horse.
With fumbling fingers he felt in his pockets and produced a box of
matches, finally, after many attempts, lighting one which he held
tremblingly above his head. He did not glance at the figure at his feet,
but over and beyond it, where his shadow, monstrous and grotesque, seemed
flung headforemost into a shallow niche, within which there rested a flat
slab of rock perhaps three feet in height.
To his distorted imagination the sudden suggestion seemed filled with
a vague menace—as if the brooding shadow of death had reached forth to
touch, to summon, to beckon with an imperious, chill finger there in that
stifling abode of changeless dark.
Abruptly, as the quick flame ate downward to his finger-tips, he made
a short, backward step—stumbled—and the box fell from his nerveless
hand, the match winked out, and at one stride the dominion of the dark
enveloped him.
He bent swiftly, with frantic fingers searching in the mold, scratching,
clawing in a fever of anxiety.
He found—nothing. Then, as if impelled from behind by an inexorable
Force, he began to ran, stumbling, falling, bruising himself against the
sharp, unseen angles of the passageway along which he fled....
Time had merged into an eternity of physical pain and mental torture,
of corroding fear which left him in a sweat of agony as he fared onward
in his blundering flight. The sense of direction which in the pitch
blackness renders the familiar outlines of one’s very bed-chamber
strangely distorted—this had become confused in his first headlong rush
away from the scene of that which was branded upon his heart in letters
of fire.
Now, in his warped and twisted brain the germ of a thought grew,
expanded, flowered abruptly in an insane cacophony of sound.
A laugh, reedy, discordant, cackling echoed in his ears, beginning in a
low chuckle, then rising all about him in a furious stridor of sound. It
was as if the demons of the place were welcoming him to their midst as
one worthy of their company.
Again he fell prone, groveling in the mold in an ecstasy of terror at the
unrecognizable mouthings which issued from his throat. But even as his
insanity peopled the void about him with shapes of terror, in especial
the hideous Shape which he knew even now followed him, he got somehow
to his feet, arose, and lurched headlong into a recess in the rocky
corridor, which would have been familiar could he have but beheld it even
in the brief flaring of a match.
It was then that he heard the ceaseless, slow dripping that smote
him afresh with an indescribable, crawling fear, beside which his
previous insane panic had been as nothing. For a moment he heard also a
gibbering—a squeaking, a rustle which with his coming ceased abruptly
in a faint shadow of sound. For the moment, he could have sworn that a
slinking, furtive, Something, unbelievably swift, had brushed past his
leg, touched him lightly as with the faint, fugitive contact of a dead,
wind-blown leaf.
That slow, continuous dripping—too well he knew its meaning, or thought
that he did. And in the same breath he became aware of the place in
which he stood—_recognized_ it for what it was even in the enveloping
blackness.
At any other time he would have known that measured dripping for what
it was: the curiously suggestive rhythm of the stalactite’s slow
_drip-drip_, like the sluggish dripping of blood.
In his headlong flight, cleaving an unimagined depth of Cimmerian
darkness, through which it seemed he was breathing the oily tide of a dim
nightmare of viscid flood, all sense of direction had been completely
lost.
Now, as he stood, within this fearsome catacomb, of a sudden he stumbled,
knelt, put forward a groping hand, and then recoiled with a windy
shriek—as his shaking fingers encountered _the clammy surface of a human
face_!
* * * * *
He had returned, willy nilly, as it seemed, to the body of his victim. It
was the face of Pillsbury, cold, clammy, silent, unresponsive.
Doomed! He was doomed, then, to kneel there, in that groping blackness of
this frightful charnel—alone, yet prisoner to that silent figure—forever
to hear that ceaseless dripping, regular as the beating of a heart, of
a heart that was stilled forever, yet strangely pulsing in its slow
_drip-drip_—inexorable, insistent, ever louder, as it seemed—rising in a
veritable thunder against the low-hung curtain of the dark.
Trembling, urging his will by the severest effort he had ever known, in a
sudden lucid interval he passed an exploring hand over the rigid outlines
of the body, which lay, as upon a bier, on a sort of rocky shelf,
perhaps three feet in height, just level with his shoulders as he bent
before it. But it had not been there before! When he had left it in his
overmastering panic _it had been lying, face downward in the mold_!
But it did not occur to him to question its position; the strange
significance of the fact affected him not at all, for, curiously enough,
with the contact there came a measure of reassurance: the Thing which
had been Pillsbury, his friend—the Thing which he had left behind—had not
been following him; it had existed merely in his coward imagination. Or,
if it had hunted him through the maze of corridors, it was now returned
to its chosen resting-place. There it was, under his hand!
It was absurd to think that he had been followed, for dead men did not
walk, save in dreams, and he had returned to prove that it lay where he
had left it, silent, cold, incapable of movement without volition.
On his hands and knees, his questing fingers, tracing the rigid outline
of the limbs, came suddenly upon a length of line, knotted about the
ankle. _Ah!_
Feverishly he felt about him in the blackness, clawing forward on hands
and knees. Yes, the line ran clear, unbroken, _away_ from the niche. He
was saved!
In his sudden revulsion, he gave way to primitive emotion—he chuckled,
moaned, cried, wept, laughed in a horrible travesty of mirth.
Like a drowning man, he seized upon it with clutching fingers as if
by some sudden magic he might be drawn, on the instant, out of this
labyrinth of black terror which was eating into his soul with the
corroding bite of an acid. For at the other end of that thin thread lay
sunlight and life and liberty. He held that within his shaking grasp
which was in truth a life-line, a tenuous yet certain means of safety,
of escape from a death, the grisly face of which had but a moment before
leered at him out of the tomblike depths.
In his eagerness to be gone, he straightened from his kneeling posture
with a convulsive movement, his fingers holding the line, jerked it
violently, and, before he could rise, there came a rustle, a thud, and
a suffocating weight descended upon his back. As he fell, face downward
in the mold, he squeaked like a rat as, out of the dark, two hands went
round his neck and clawlike talons encircled his throat.
Curiously alive they seemed, and yet—with his own hand he had accounted
for that life. It was not possible—no, it could not be!—it was
unthinkable....
For a space he lay, inert, passive, but, notwithstanding his terror, his
fingers still clutching the line, spread out before him in the blackness.
Presently, when his panic had somewhat abated, when he found that he was
still alive, unharmed, by slow stages of tremendous effort he rose to his
knees, tottering under the Incubus upon his back.
Now that he knew what it was, after an interval he attempted to disengage
the fingers about his neck, but he could not. He found that grip rigid,
unyielding. Like a bar of iron, it resisted his utmost efforts.
It was as if a Will, implacable, inexorable, had informed those stiffened
talons with purpose; it was as if the last sentient effort of an
Intelligence had, by some supernatural quality, _bequeathed_ to those
fingers a message, a command to be performed. _Rigor mortis_—that was
it—the unbreakable hold of those implacable fingers: Pillsbury’s vengeful
fingers, reaching out, even after death, in a dreadful cincture of doom!
But Marston rose slowly to his feet, staggering, swaying beneath that
frightful burden whose fingers wrenched by a superhuman effort from his
neck, bit into his shoulders like hooks of steel.
“God!” he mumbled, again, in an unconscious travesty—a hideous burlesque
of supplication.
It _was_ the end, then. Weakened as he was, his nerves a jangle of
discordant wires, his mind a chaos of bemused and frantic thought, he
stood, helpless, swaying, foredone, beaten, trapped by the insensate clay
of his own making.
No longer a man but a beast, his brain wiped free of every thought but
the blind, unreasoning impulse to live, like an animal he drew, from some
unsuspected physical reservoir within him, the strength to proceed.
Tottering, swaying, he reverted to the brute, and, with the dumb, inhuman
impulsion of the brute, roweling even his apelike strength to superhuman
effort, he continued to advance, falling at times, and rising as with the
last spent effort of a runner at the tape, yet somehow going on and on,
feeling his way along that thin thread whose other end, miles distant,
centuries away, stretched into the ether of Heaven!
In a nightmare of suffocating blackness, shot through at times with the
red fires of the Pit, he fared onward, and now he saw, with a sudden,
agonized return to the perception of the human, that those fires were all
about him. They were Eyes, venomous, hateful, red with the lust of unholy
anticipation....
He heard about him the slither of gaunt bodies, the patter of innumerable
feet—rats they were, but of an unconscionable size, huge and voracious,
such as infested this underground kingdom of the dead.
While he moved he knew that they would not attack him. While he lived,
even without movement, he believed that he was safe.
But why had they refrained from that which he had given them to feast
upon, the Thing which even now flapped about him, the inanimate yet
strangely animate shell which he had transformed at a stroke from life
to death, its legs striking against his as he moved, as if to urge him
onward, rowel him forward as in a race with death?
The sounds that he had heard, the squeaks, the gibbers—as of ghouls
disturbed at a ghastly rendezvous—could there have been any significance
in these? Somewhere he had heard of drunken miners, asleep in the deep
levels of coal, brought to a sudden, horrid awakening by cold lips
nuzzling cheek or neck, but his brain considered this dully, if at all.
An odd hallucination began to possess him; dimly he dreamed that his
dreadful burden was alive, but unconscious, insentient. But he knew that
it was an hallucination.
He would make no immediate effort to rid himself of the Thing he
carried—not now, at any rate. When he became stronger he would bury it,
hide it. Years might pass—perhaps a chance party might discover in one
of the innumerable corridors a moldering skeleton—but the body of his
guilt would be a _corpus delicti_—there could be no conviction without
evidence, and no murder without a victim produced as of due process of
law.
But in a moment it seemed this thought gave place to the overmastering
panic terror of escape. Instinct alone held him to his course. If there
had been light one might have seen the foam which gathered on his lips,
the glassy stare of his eyes.
Again he fell, and this time he fancied that the narrowing circle had
drawn nearer. Even to his dulled brain he was aware of an intelligent
rapacity in those burning eyes, an anticipation which sprang from
_knowledge_.
Somehow, once more, he rose upright, after a multiplied agony of
straining effort, but he felt, deep within his consciousness, that he was
but a puppet in the hands of a ruthless fate, doomed to wander forever
under his detestable load.
Of a sudden, also, an illumination, like a fiery sword, cut through the
dulled functioning of his intelligence: the beast that was Marston reeled
with the suggestion that penetrated the surface of his physical coma.
What if the line he followed led, not into the clean brightness of the
outer air, but, by some frightful mischance, still farther into the womb
of the hills, deeper and deeper into oblivion, down and down into the
uttermost hell of one’s imagining?
In the flux and reflux of images which had taken the place of coherent
thought he saw all this, he felt it to be a possibility, and with the
terror of the brute he strove once more to rid himself of this insensate
tyrant, this incubus which rode him, roweling his sides with grotesquely
dangling feet, spurring him on in a mad welter of fear and pain from
which he could not escape.
But it was useless. Try as he would, he could not disengage that grip of
steel, and thewed mightily as he was, he found that every last ounce of
his great strength was needed to go on. He was just weak enough to render
futile any effort to dislodge those clinging fingers, and just strong
enough to continue his progress, like a mole in the dark—and that was all.
He must go on and on until flesh and blood could endure no more, the
victim of his own contriving, the veritable bond-slave of his passionate
soul. And when at length he should fall, no more to rise, then would
come, not swift oblivion, but death, indeed, lingering, horrible,
unthinkable, even for a beast....
* * * * *
Time had ceased, feeling had ceased; thought remained only in the faint
spark which glowed somewhere within him, flickering now, glowing at the
core of his being even as about him there narrowed the fell circle of the
blazing eyes.
_Slap—slap—shuffle—slap...._ With the infinite slowness of exhaustion,
his feet moved, dragged, went forward, while ever at his back those other
lifeless feet rose and fell in a grotesque travesty of life, of movement,
spurring forward his all but fainting soul.
Dimly he perceived that the floor upon which he moved had taken an upward
trend; he felt the line go suddenly taut; then, abruptly, before him,
for a single instant, a pale glimmer flickered and died as from dim
leagues of distance.
Summoning the last remnant of his strength, he began to run, or thought
that he did, but in reality he moved by inches, and by inches the faint
glimmer grew, expanded, broadened to a luminous grayness.
Stumbling, slipping, swaying from side to side, the sight of that pale
shadow of the day intoxicated him with a feverish exultation, despite the
weakness which seemed to dissolve his being to water. He was saved.
By a last, titanic effort, a tremendous wrenching of the will, he fell
rather than staggered into the outer air—beheld, with lack-lustre eyes,
the ring of faces about him, all staring eyes and white lips and working
faces.
Then he sank abruptly to his knees as eager hands relieved him of his
burden. He heard voices, meaningless, yet filled with meaning....
He fell instantaneously down a long stairway to the deep, enveloping
mercy of unconsciousness.
* * * * *
Presently, after a timeless interval, he opened his eyes, and then closed
them again, blinking owlishly at the strong sunlight. He heard a voice,
incoherent, babbling, which, after a moment, he recognized as his own:
“The stalactite—it was the stalactite that killed him, I tell you.... It
was an accident—an _accident_....”
He rolled his eyes wildly from right to left; and at what he saw a
strangled, mad cry of sudden comprehension—of understanding—issued from
his throat ere the thick veil of a retributive insanity descended upon
him forever:
“_The rats_ ... knew....”
Before him, his face death-white, his hands scarred from the rough
stone up which he had clawed to the rocky shelf, a clean bandage about
his forehead, was the face of Pillsbury. In that brief instant, like a
lightning flash, illumination seared into the brain of Marston, and, by
its very white-hot intensity, shriveled it to the dust of a gibbering
madness:
The drunken sleep of the miners....
The nibbling of the rats.... Pillsbury’s awakening to consciousness....
His instinctive, _upward_ effort to escape to the ledge from which, with
the half-conscious, and then wholly conscious grip that would not be
denied, he had fallen upon Marston....
Potential murderer that he was, Marston himself, by a poetic irony of
justice, had been the unwitting savior of his intended victim!