Collected Short Fiction, page 268
Fast in a frozen sea of dread, I dimly knew that Doctor Kyle was turning toward the door. I could scarcely hear him say:
“You may go bade to your room, Clay. You see why you can never marry Valyne.”
4. At the Mercy of—Monstrosity!
BACK in my own frosty room, I collapsed on the bed. I tried to think. But red chaos ruled my brain. Only one clear thought emerged: If I couldn’t marry Valyne Kirk, then I must die.
I tried to doubt what Doctor Kyle had told me. It was hideously incredible, and belief in it meant death. But the sober, convincing manner of his telling, the strangeness that had shadowed all my life, the lurking dread that festered in Creston, the hideous monster in the cellar—these combined to bring me maddening conviction.
I tried to think it a lie. But what reason had Doctor Kyle to lie to me, to whom he had always been a second father? What motive could he have for a deception calculated only to drive me away from Creston, a crazed and hopeless fugitive, for ever? And what lie could have darkened all my life, and set me apart from men, even in the distant East?
No! I could not escape the clutching intuition of horror. Strange and fearful blood burned through my body. In all the world was no being of my own kind—none save that chained monstrosity! And my love for Valyne could give birth only to terror, madness, and death.
Distantly, from below, I heard a sound like howling, and a chain clanking, and wood splintering. The monster—my twin.
Cold, trembling, I sat up on the edge of the bed. It was struggling; perhaps it would escape. A terrible resolve steadied me. I would never see it again.
I strode grimly to the window. Outside was night; the silent, immemorial forests of Creston; the gloomy, tangled slope of Blue Squaw Mountain, whose summit was crowned with that altar of frightful sacrifice.
Shrinking from the darkness and the horror of it, I was suddenly conscious of the weight sagging against my chest. There was a surer way. . . .
With a hand now steady, I slipped the automatic out of its holster. It was heavy and cold and black. Its grim steel efficiency was a match for all the festering evil of ancient Creston. I snapped back the slide and watched the bright, blunt cartridge leap into the chamber.
I thrust the hard muzzle resolutely against my temple, hardly conscious of the quiet, swift rapping upon my door. But it was flung open, and Valyne rushed to me. Her urgent hand jerked my arm away.
“Clay! Clay!” gasped her terrified whisper. “I came because I was afraid you would!”
She stood before me. Her trembling hand still held down the gun. Her breast was fluttering to her quick breathing. Her violet eyes, wide, glistening with tears, held my face. The live, pulsating beauty of her slim body stung my own eyes with tears. Every soft line of it was infinitely precious. My resolution found new steel.
“Why shouldn’t I?” I rasped the hoarse demand. “You know what I am! You know why we can’t marry! And that the sooner I die the less likely I am to revert to—to something hideous!”
“I know what Doctor Kyle says.” Her eyes probed to the back of my brain. “And you believe it, Clay?”
“I—I do. I tried not to. But my whole life points to the truth of it—even to the rage that struck down Jud Geer!
“You must go away, Valyne,” I said. I pushed her toward the door. “You must let me kill that fiend in me before it injures you.”
Her body stood tremulously firm against the pressure of my hands.
“You don’t understand, Clay,” she told me, and a ringing strength was in her voice. “Even if it’s true, I can’t let you die—alone! For I love you, Clay.”
I returned the gun to its holster, and caught her hands in mine. For I had been touched and elated by the sudden conviction that our love was a pure flame that could bum all the tainting horror from my blood.
Her warm hands clasped mine, and she whispered:
“Clay, promise me that you will live as long as I do! Promise me that you will never again surrender to that horror! Just promise. And we will go away from Creston, in the morning, as we planned. Perhaps we can find a way to happiness. At least we can be together for a while—and together when we die!”
I promised. I thought we might consult some psychiatrist or occultist. . . .
THE glory of her love seemed for a little time to banish the sinister chill of evil from the room. I begged her to stay with me; for the dread that still haunted me was stronger than my regard for convention. And perhaps she would have stayed; for she too was strained and white with unuttered forebodings.
But there was a light, hurried knocking on the door, and old Sarah Kyle hobbled into the room. Her dark, pointed face was bloodless. Her small, bright eyes darted about the room, and a thin, anxious whisper lisped from her toothless mouth:
“Have ye seen it, Clay? Have ye heard it?”
“You mean——” I wet my lips. “You mean the thing in the cellar?”
Her glittering eyes met mine, veiled with unspeakable dread.
“Your brother,” shrilled her tremulous whisper, “has broken his chains and gone.”
I swayed, and caught Valyne to me, as if an icy dark wind had sought to drag her away.
The cracked whisper insisted:
“Have ye heard it?”
“Half an hour ago I heard the chain tattling, and the sound of breaking wood.”
The thin lips came together, like strips of dried leather.
“That must have been when it escaped. God knows where it went!”
Valyne whispered, into the fearful silence:
“What will it do, Mother Kyle?” Her big violet eyes came to me, with a naked horror pleading in them. “One day,” she whispered, “I went down into the cellar, and it saw me through the bars. It wanted me, Clay! It tried to break out. For days it howled, and wouldn’t touch its food.
“I’m afraid, Clay.”
Her tense, trembling arms slipped around my neck, and her frightened eyes went back to Sarah Kyle.
Her thin lips still were pursed.
“I don’t know what it will do,” her thin voice said slowly. “It is cunning, and aflame with demon lusts. You’re in danger, Valyne. Go back to your room, and lock the door. The rest of us must try to find it. The doctor and the servants are searching, now.
“And you must be careful for yourself, Clay. It was friendly, a while ago—it knew its own blood. But if it learns that you love Valyne, its affection will turn to jealous rage. . . .
“Listen!”
The whispered warning fell suddenly, and for a moment we were silent in the frosty room.
“I thought I heard it,” said Sarah Kyle. “We must hasten. You must keep with me, Clay. The doctor thinks it will come to you.”
In a shivering voice, Valyne said:
“Let me go with you.”
“No, darling,” protested the old woman; “you must keep out of its sight. Remember, once it went mad at sight of you. If it saw you again, we could never quiet it. And it might harm you.”
Valyne acquiesced, and we took her to her room. She kissed me, and her lips were cold.
“Remember your promise, Clay,” she whispered. “And tomorrow we shall go away together. Don’t let it harm you!”
We heard the lock snap in her door, and went down the stairs.
Sarah Kyle took a kerosene lamp from the dining-table.
“We shall go to the cellar to begin.” Her bright, sunken eyes darted at me suddenly. “Have ye any sense for it, Clay? Any intuition from the common blood? Do ye think that ye could trail it?”
“I don’t know.”
My dazed brain was still spinning blindly along the black, swift river of horror.
“The doctor says it will come to you,” she was saying. “And when it comes, I can calm it. It ever heeded me——”
“It won’t come to nobody,” put in the flat, mannish voice of big Joseph Hand, who had just appeared out of the dark hall. “It wants that girl! It smelled the odor of her on him, when he came to speak to it. It broke out to git her, and it won’t come to nobody——”
SARAH KYLE led the way down the steps, and I carried the lamp into the walled-off cell. The heavy door had been crushed outward, torn from its hinges as if by some terrific projectile. A broken length of rusty iron chain lay across the threshold. Beyond was a rude wooden trough, which had been overturned, to spill dark, clotted blood across the foul stone floor.
Suffocatingly strong in the room was that acrid, animal stench. Reeling with its nausea, I stumbled back toward the door. But an idea had struck me. The others had seemed unaware of the odor; perhaps I had an abnormal sensitivity to it. If I could follow the trail——
Faintly, then, I heard Valyne’s scream. I ran up the two flights of stairs to her room, vainly cursing the blind folly that had left her alone. Sarah Kyle came clattering along behind, carrying the lamp.
“Valyne!” I gasped, at the door. “Valyne, are you all right?”
The answer was the bang of a loose shutter.
The door was still locked. I kicked it twice, thrust my arm through the hole to twist the key that she had left in the lock. The yellow flicker of Sarah Kyle’s lamp showed that the room was empty. The bed was turned down; a filmy pink nightdress was laid across the pillow.
The window was open; the unfastened shutter banged again.
Ashen-faced, Sarah Kyle was staring out into the frosty dark.
“It was outside,” she whispered. “It climbed over the tool shed, and broke through the window. It has carried the poor darling out into the forest.”
Her voice became a thin, fervid scream. “I wish to God my husband had killed that fiend when it was born!”
“Where”—the wild whisper leapt from my lips—“where are the others?”
I heard her say, “Searching——”
Then my frantic voice was ringing through the gloomy halls:
“Doctor Kyle! It has taken Valyne!” Ghastly echoes gibbered at me.
“Where could they all be?”
“Searching,” said Sarah Kyle. “They must be outside.”
“God! I can’t stand here wasting time! Where could it have taken her?”
The stooped old hag came suddenly toward me and thrust the sputtering lamp into my face. The skeletal fingers of one claw-like hand sank savagely into my arm. Her piercing eyes transfixed me. Her high voice sank to a strained and husky whisper.
“Don’t ye know, Clay? Doesn’t your own sleeping demon whisper it to your own stained soul? Won’t your own dark blood draw ye there?”
Instinctively jerking back, I demanded: “What do you mean?”
Her fingers clung to my arm with a terrible strength, and her voice rasped on with its unthinkable accusation:
“Have ye never felt the call of the elder dark beings that are your kin, Clay? Are ye never drawn to the black altar on the mountain, where your evil father came to your mother? Have ye no sense of secret power of that circle of stones——”
“You mean”—the gasp broke from my lips—“you mean it has taken her—there?”
Her shriveled head jerked to a quick, sinister nod.
“It knows the place,” she said, “for your mother often took it there. She told me it was ever most content in the occult power of that mystic circle. It must have taken Valyne there. And may she die before the demon-child is born!”
5. The Beast in the Beast
I THINK that Sarah Kyle tried to follow me up Blue Squaw Mountain. But desperation had lent me frantic wings. Her shrill voice fell behind, screaming: “Wait for me, Clay! I can calm it! It always understood——”
The night was moonless and frosty and still. It was very dark beneath the gnarled and ancient trees, upon that rugged mountain slope. And it was many years since I had trod it. Again and again I sprawled and fell in the thorny tangles of undergrowth, or blundered heavily into the boles of gigantic trees. And once I rose, fingering my lacerated, bleeding face, to realize that I was lost. But grim urgency brought back youthful memories with the effect of preternatural vision. And obscure instincts brought me at last, breathless and fearful, to the leafy edge of that forbidden glade that since childhood I had apprehensively shunned.
There horror struck me motionless.
Red tongues of malevolent flame set lurid shadows into a fantastic demon dance against the surrounding dark wall of forest. Glowing sinister scarlet outlined the circle of rough-hewn monolithic stones, standing twice a man’s height. Within that cabalistic circle I could see the low, blood-darkened altar—burdened with madness and terror!
Valyne Kirk lay across it, on her back, between two wan and ghastly fires. She was stripped nearly nude; her alabaster loveliness was bare to the red, mounting flames. Her wrists and ankles were bound with rope. She was motionless, and, I thought, unconscious.
Crouching over her, looming colossal and grotesque and hideous in the sinister gleam of the altar fires, was the monster I had glimpsed in the cellar dungeon—that dread creature of my own dark blood. It brought back those haunting lines from Poe:
They are neither man nor woman—
They are neither brute nor human—
It was gigantic, yet vaguely man-like in outline. It was horned. Its long, angular legs ended in cloven hoofs. Its body was heavy, bulging, hideously gross. It was covered with coarse, dark hair.
The stench of it came to me where I stood, an odor overwhelmingly nauseating as that of a reptile’s den.
The red flames burst higher, on either side of Valyne’s helpless body, and suddenly I saw its face. To my mind came that other line:
They are Ghouls.
There are things that words cannot describe, even by suggestion. I can say that its face was grossly broad, and yet made savage with an angular gauntness; that it was noseless, queerly hairy, livid; that its eyes were crimson lakes of flaming hell.
But the demon that glared from it escapes the words.
It is enough to say that when I looked into that creature’s face, and knew that its blood was mine—then I realized that my promise to Valyne had been mad folly. If the blood of that beast was in my veins, then it must be spilled before its pollution touched another human soul.
It was curiously just, I thought, that one fiend should destroy another. For once I was conscious of no shrinking from combat. I was frankly glad of the red and dreadful rage that swept me into the fury of destruction.
As I leapt past the circle of tall stones, I saw that the twin fires were burning close to Valyne. Their crimson tongues would soon be licking her naked flash—unless I won.
The monstrosity saw me. With an uncouth, bestial snarl of surprize and rage, it lumbered toward me. Its hairy, taloned, foul-smelling hand slapped at me. The blow flung me to the frosty ground, at the foot of the black altar.
I stumbled back to my feet, plunging blindly toward it. . . . The gun under my coat was forgotten. And all the details of the fight have been fogged with that red madness. I know that I fought that being, body to body. I know that I staggered with the sickness of its nauseating effluvium. I remember being crushed in its powerful, hairy arms, being flung to the ground and kicked with its cloven hooves. I dimly recall that it battered at my head, with a great black stone from the altar. . . .
But when the shock of returning sanity struck me, it was slumping to the ground. I reeled over it, swinging a last desperate blow. It went wild; I stumbled groggily to my knees.
THE gross, hairy bulk lay before the black altar. It quivered a little, and ceased to move. The mad horror of its face was hidden, for which I was thankful. I saw a little dark hole in the side of its long, flattened head, saw dark blood gushing out. That surprized me, for it was a bullet wound, and I didn’t remember having drawn my gun. But in that crimson chaos Valyne moaned. I lurched to the low black altar, and lifted her from between the two licking fires. I untied the ropes. She was shivering. Her violet eyes looked at me, and it sickened me to see their mute and shrinking terror.
“The thing”—she choked—“the thing——”
“It will never frighten you again,” I promised, “Valyne darling.”
I carried her a little-away from the inert horror by the altar, and wrapped my coat around her. My arms clung to her. The last embrace. . . .
From the moment I glimpsed that hideous face, my purpose had been clear. Hope and doubt alike had died before the grim resolve that never should another such demon be born into the world. Not if my death could prevent it. . . .
I was glad when Valyne seemed to drop again into unconsciousness—from shock and fear, I was certain, rather than from any injury. It was better that she shouldn’t see me go.
I left her, and reluctantly touched the gray, motionless bulk of the monster. Its limp weight and the rush of blood from the little wound assured me that it was truly dead.
Resolutely, then, I strode toward the dark wall of forest that would hide my body, fumbling under my coat for the automatic.
“Clay!”
The strong hollow voice boomed from beyond the circle of stones, and gaunt.
Doctor Kyle stalked into the crimson light. His powerful hand gripped a hunting-rifle. Gray smoke was curling from its muzzle. He stood for a moment between two red-lit pillars, and in the scarlet flickering his head looked more than ever like a skull.
He nodded to my voiceless question. “Yes,” he said, “I shot your brother, Clay—I should have killed him the day he was born. You were unarmed; he was getting the better of you. Sarah,” he explained, “told us where you had come.—Valyne! is she all right?”
I turned for a moment to look at her motionless body. It wavered and faded with my tears, and my voice was husky when I said:
“She isn’t harmed, Doctor. And you needn’t fear that I shall wreck her life, or that there shall be born another of my blood. For I’m going—after my brother.” The sunken eyes that flamed from that gaunt, skeletal head were abmptly crimson in the firelight. Through thin lips came the ghastly rasp:
“Perhaps—perhaps that is best.”
And I strode on, away from the twin red fires of the blood-stained altar, through the tall silent stones, toward the dark forest waiting to drink my blood. I was reaching again for the cold, comforting grip of the automatic. Its swift flame would burn all the horror and the madness from my brain. When I was dead, I thought with dim gratitude, I should be at last like other men. . . .
