THE HAUNTED CHURCH
As the trio approached the church, Buddy hung back reluctantly. He did
not relish this nocturnal invasion of the gospel-house where no human
foot had trod since the killing of his father. In truth, Lem shared this
apprehension also, but was valiantly cautious not to betray this
aversion in Belle-Ann's presence. With this cryptic timidity, both the
boys marveled at the voluble mirth and bold blithesome advance of the
girl; not understanding that Belle-Ann's education had burned away all
barriers of superstition.
The denizens on Hellsfork had long given this lonely, desolate structure
a wide berth. Many a bold and audacious spirit, knowing no other fear,
quaked with the thought of entering that dilapidated storm-battered
sepulchre. Not because a man had been killed therein, but there was a
ghostly phenomenon connected with that musty, bat-haunted altar,
uniquely horrible.
That rubric cross had cut its ragged blight into the senses of the
mountaineers to a degree that forbade all thoughts of approach. There
was something at once subtle and strange and unspeakably terrifying in
the remembrance of that red picture, something that inspired them with a
lasting, superstitious dread.
Indeed, a treasure trove could have reposed upon the dank floor of this
haunted church within easy sight without fear of molestation. Weird and
creepy tales were rife outlining amazing visitations here. It was told
with conviction by some whose ears had heard, and whose eyes had seen,
that on each moonlight night a screech-owl would flutter to the broken
window of the church and call. Whereupon the red, ragged picture on the
altar would stir and move and sit up; then gather itself into human
semblance and stalk to the window. And old Captain Lutts' ghost would
commune with the little feathered creature. Then the screech-owl would
hurtle away, and the phantom would stalk back and lie down, and resolve
itself again into that fearsome, crimson death-splotch that naught save
fire could ever obliterate.
Belle-Ann was in the lead when the three reached the door-block of the
church. Then, with a self-conscious lack of chivalry which inspired him
with a sudden spurt of courage, Lem stepped in front of her, where he
stood lighting the lantern, when Buddy, who had halted at the corner of
the building, suddenly hissed softly and motioned for them to join him.
Bud stood pointing ominously amid the skeleton limbs of a dead sycamore
tree. Belle-Ann laughed amusedly.
"Why, Buddy," she reassured, "that's only a pretty, harmless little
owl."
"But hits a scrutch-owl," frowned the boy, shrinking away.
"Oh, come on, Buddy!--I really believe you are afraid of ghosts,"
returned Belle-Ann, taking him protectingly by the hand.
Re-enforced by the girl's utter absence of fear, Lem pushed the door
open, and stepping within led the way, lantern in hand. Upon their
approach to the altar, the bull-bats flapped their bony wings amongst
the rafters. There was in the fetid gloom of the place a permeating musk
of things seemingly not of this earth. Lem hung up the lantern on the
hook at the end of the dingy rope suspended near the pulpit. The rope,
which great spiders had converted into a swing, now felt soft and snaky
beneath his touch. He turned the light up as high as he could without
smoking and faced Belle-Ann. He saw at a glance that a measure of her
temerity had vanished.
A smothered exclamation fell from Lem's lips. He pointed through the
buff halo cast from the lantern. There against the south wall of the
room some of the benches could be dimly discerned overturned,--others
twisted and broken and scattered in a mass of wreckage--while one
balanced perilously on the casement as though a hand had sought to take
it out through the window.
"Who yo' 'low done thet?" inquired Buddy in a tremulous whisper,
clinging timorously to Belle-Ann's skirts.
"I don't 'low any human bein' done hit," predicted Lem in faint
undertones that faltered with a creeping, choking apprehension. A queer
brain-numbing apathy settled upon them that seemed to deprive them
suddenly of the use of their tongues and limbs.
"Oh, nonsense!" discredited Belle-Ann bravely. "Some mean boys perhaps."
Disbelieving, the brothers stood rigid and shook their now pale faces in
denial. Belle-Ann did not fear ghosts, but there was undeniably some
strange mortal influence circulating the eery atmosphere of this place
like the proximity of some menacing presence close at hand, but unseen.
She fought hard to repel this unknown fear that was stealing upon her,
but, despite her valiant struggle, it was fast seizing upon her nerves
and permeating her whole being with singular insistency.
With an effort she gathered herself together.
"Now hurry on, boys," she directed briskly in a voice that sounded
unnaturally furtive and low. "Buddy, you get in here between Lem and
I--there--that's it. Now, boys, we are going to say a little prayer for
pap and maw, and you, Lem, remember."
At a slight sound the three impulsively and unconsciously took hold of
each other and turned blanched faces toward the window opposite the
altar. At the same instant, a screech-owl closed his wings on the window
casement and sat immobile, like a creature without life, while a
slender, livid finger of moonlight crossed its speckled back and,
continuing on, pointed specifically to the bloody cross athwart the
altar.
Little Bud faltered weakly and shook like a boy with the ague. His lips
worked mutely and tried to whisper something, but his tongue cleft,
paralyzed with a prickly dread that stole over him, and his teeth began
a forbidding tattoo. He cast an appealing look at Lem; wherefore the
mere sight of Lem's white face accentuated his own fleeting courage. The
grim lethargy of this subtle, contagious dread had communicated its
blight to Lem's senses with equal virulence.
A pall of lethal fear deprived Belle-Ann of words and action. What with
the awful thick dark, made pitchy beyond the buff circle of the
flickering lantern; a fetid, curdy, musty, stifling blackness which, she
now felt instinctively, held screened just there, some hidden horror
reaching out to wrap its smothering terror about her.
The fan-like hiss of the hybrid bats that blundered aloft, their vicious
unearthly squeaks, stabbing the dead stillness, added to her cryptic
dread. Upon a sudden current of vagrant air a handful of fire-flies were
driven through one of the sundered windows, whereupon they bobbed and
swayed about evilly against the haunting gloom of the church like
ghastly corpse candles. Together with the unblinking stare of the
screech-owl from the moon-touched window casement, all these menacing
influences combined and laid hold of Belle-Ann's will like overpowering
hands of living agencies crowding her remorselessly to the verge of
panic.
She stood rigid, listening with a natant, sickening consciousness that
something terrible hung at her back. Then, ashamed of her exposition of
timid indecision and fear, she valiantly strove to disguise with action
the sudden racking shudder that compassed and rippled over her being,
like the chill of an icy current.
Belle-Ann summoned all her failing faculties and levied upon her will to
proceed with the ceremony of the sacred mission that had led them to
this Godless place. But she only stood fixedly, rigid and helpless,
growing paler with each succeeding moment, and gazed blankly at Bud and
Lem alternately. Their nerves were as yielding as jelly strings. Other
than the silky rustle aloft, punctuated occasionally with the thin
needle-like anathemas of the bull-bats, there was now not the slightest
sound within to disrupt the death-hush of this place. Nevertheless, Lem
craned his neck, edging closer to the other two, and whispered
portentously:
"Ded yo'-all heer anything?"
"No," returned Belle-Ann faintly and uncertainly.
Buddy could only shake his head. Then sharply and, oddly enough, in
unison, impelled by a sudden common instinct, the trio wheeled about,
facing the wrecked benches. What they saw in that instant congealed the
warm flow in their veins to currents of ice and drove their very breaths
away.
Three hearts smote their ribs a single whack; then seemingly, melted
away and sank downward and out of their bodies, leaving a trio of
lifeless, inanimate mummies, frozen into horrified, stony attitudes. An
awful thing hung there on the edge of the grommet of light. A blurred,
half-naked, grisly monster sprawled on its loathsome haunches before
them,--a thing topped with a blood-mottled, hideous head, made frightful
by two luridly igneous, horrible eyes. Eyes girded and shot with a
bloody film bulged fixedly up at them, glaring through the flickering
orange light. The eyes--the eyes!
Divided by the part in the middle, one half of the wiry hair stuck up,
the dead white hue of chalk, admitting its stains of red. The other half
bristled, an ebon black blighted with its share of gore. At once it gave
the startling impression of separate semi-faces filched from two
different rawheads and slapped together thus, in smeared, mismated
makeshift, that was hideous. Had only its fearful Nemesis stayed his
devil-genius and spared the torrid eyes,--monstrous ember eyes that
flamed like live coals against the dark,--mad-red eyes that burned and
sparkled and sputtered up from their dancing depths, emitting and
vomiting over the brims, a changing luster, blended with all the fevered
fires of hell--eyes that eroded a nauseous path with their abhorrent
stare. The accursed thing crouched there as immobile as the owl. A limp,
blood-oozing tongue protruded from an addled, unspeakable mouth,
distended and heinous with jagged teeth askew. Girding the besmeared
forehead at the hispid white and black hair line of this festering
scourge-scathed visage, just where the scalp separated and curled apart,
a revolting ribbon of pure skull shone,--a strip of skull drained dry
and clear and white as polished ivory; shimmering out like the badge of
a death-head from some grim grot of perdition.
The three tried to flee from the awful, withering presence of this
nameless thing. They tried vainly to cry out; to vent the horror that
was upon them, depriving them of all utterance and action.
They only clutched each other nervelessly and stared insanely.
Thereupon, in an unlooked-for instant before their livid faces, this
ghastly misshapen thing struggled to its naked feet and lurched past
them toward the altar, with the faltering wabble of a foundered ox. Up
across the corner of the pulpit it clambered, and, reeling too near the
edge, tumbled off the other side and struck the floor with a heavy,
resounding thud, where, amidst jerky groans that were not human
enunciations, it panted and floundered and arose once more.
Up again with a mighty torturous effort, the hulk mounted the platform a
second time, and with head dangling at the end of a limp neck, crawled
to the ragged cross, etched out with the blood of old Cap Lutts. Here it
mumbled gutturally and labored crazily to gather up the crimson
altar-piece into its seared, torn arms. Then again up to its feet it
reared, and, standing thus with arms upflung, the stillness was
shattered with frantic echoes of a broken word-spluttering, hell-twisted
cackle, carrying a faint gleam of coherency and culminating in ravings
that made the night hideous.
"I say--I say--I say--" gathering stress, louder and louder it shrieked
until the very air curdled with these eery cries. "I say--you there, you
there--you God--you God--I say the law's here--the law's here--the law,
the law, the law I say--hear me?--hiding, hiding?--no, no, no, I have
never hidden from men--I'll not hide now from my God--I'm here now,
God--'Thou shalt not kill--thou shalt not kill'--but I done it--I done
this--these hands done it--see, God? They are wet with this deed--but I
swear the law drove me to it--the law saddled a hundred offenses to my
life--but I'm here now, God--I bring these offenses here--I done it--I
done it--these hands done it--these two blood-stained hands--the law
made me--I swear it--listen--you can't get me--you can't rend me--you
starved heathens--stand back--stand back, you dungeon-dogs--stand away
there, you ratty jail-birds--you can't get at me, ha, ha, ha!--gnaw your
iron cuffs apart first--bite your cuffs in two--gnaw them until your
teeth shatter, and your gums flood your felon throats--ha, ha, ha!--Oh,
my head, my head--Christ, the world's afire--the world's burning
up--listen--listen----!"
Hereupon the screech-owl awoke to quick animation. With trembling wings
slightly lifted, it thrust its head through the broken window-pane and
uttered a scathing arraignment--a long-drawn, graduating, derisive
titter that raked the ghoulish solitude of the church like
perdition-music--a mockery medley wafted from a cortege of the doomed.
As the last prickly notes dropped down and trailed like a thread of sin
back into the owl's speckled breast, the gory raw-head blundered around
and fixed that mawkish, ghastly hell-mask full upon the girl and two
boys, whose feet were locked immovably to the floor with terror. Then in
emulation, seemingly, of the owl's tittering, it belched its awful laugh
into their faces. Such a laugh--its chilling, unhallowed screech
launched a petrific measure of untold vocal wickedness, an awesome,
direful gamut of echoes that gathered volume, scattered and split,
crossed and recrossed; reverberating through the death-still atmosphere
like the hysterical chattering of a band of stricken, tortured souls.