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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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Terror Tales, July 1935 with "Creatures Of The Dusk"
Night after night, those weird figures prowled through the evening gloom. The bravest men in that once-peaceful village locked themselves in, armed themselves with shotgun, pitchfork and axe to protect their loved ones. What were those ghastly creatures who held Compton Village in the thralldom of terror? Dean Madison, frantically striving to free his own beloved from their lewd clutches, was to know finally—but that knowledge would take him into the shadowy half-world of those who exist forever without hope...
IT was past nine o'clock and already quite dark when Dean Madison drove into Compton Village. Fear rode at his side, a pallid companion, clutching his arm with death-cold grip, forcing him to breakneck speed. Yet instinctively, he throttled his motor down from the full-throated roar with which he had torn along the state highways.
There was something wrong about this sprawling little community on the edge of the hills. Welcome to Compton, said the streamer across the road, illuminated by the glare of the headlights. But there was no welcome in its dark, tight blob against the darker masses of the gaunt, scarred hills.
Dean brought his coupé to a sliding halt and peered desperately around. It was only nine in the evening, yet every store on the single twisting street was closed. Blank window fronts stared blackly at him. Dean cursed with the futile accents of despair. He needed directions badly and the village seemed completely empty of life.
He turned off his ignition and sprang nimbly to the ground. His haunted eyes swept the darkness. Off to one side, up a dirt road, there gleamed a diffused panel of light. Yet even here, the dim glow filtered through close-drawn blinds and heavy curtains. No other illumination showed anywhere.
Dean shrugged angrily to rid himself of the strange feeling of brooding terror and moved on quick, silent feet up the rutted road. The pools of darkness held no difficulties for him; he could see at night like a cat.
The faint glow ahead came from a two-story, frame house that merged indistinguishably with its background. Dean ascended the porch and knocked on the door. The staccato raps pierced the stillness of the night like clanging cymbals. He waited. There was no answer, yet his sharpened senses caught the murmur of faint movement inside.
He knocked again, this time louder, and shouted: "Open up, please!"
Hesitant footsteps dragged interminably on the other side of the door. A muffled voice quavered: "Who is it?"
Dean shouted to make himself heard through the thickness of the barricade: "A traveler. I'm looking for directions. Open so I can talk to you!"
Terror seemed to seep through the wood. "I don't open for no one. What do you want?"
Dean shrugged disgustedly. "How do I get to Bryson Waters' place?"
Someone screamed within; it was a woman. The scream ended abruptly.
"Hush up, Maria!" a new voice cried. It was a man's—grim, determined. "Harkee, stranger," he sang out. "If ye be one of them things, get away from my door. Afore God, I'm gonna shoot; I'm a-pointing straight at ye!"
A shiver ran down Dean's spine. The close-pressing night was suddenly full of eerie, muttering shapes. Even as he eased noiselessly to one side, he knew that somehow the fear that gripped Compton Village was related to the desperate entreaty in Winfred Garde's voice. She had been pleading with him, and an ominous break in the line had cut off further communication.
Then anger obscured all other emotions. "What the devil's the matter?" Dean demanded. "I'm asking you a civil question, and I'll get a civil answer if I have to break your door in!"
The woman screamed again. "Joe, Joe! Tell 'im; let 'im go away!"
"Hush up, woman. And don't ye try no tricks like that, stranger. My shotgun's loaded. If ye be flesh an' blood, an' be seekin' old Bryson Waters, take my advice. Go back where ye came from as fast as ye can."
Oh God! Dean groaned to himself. Then it all has something to do with Winifred! His scalp prickling with obscure fears, he fought his voice to steadiness, down to the casual anger of a tourist who is impatient of nonsense.
"I'm not asking advice," he said. "I'm asking directions."
"Then the devil take ye. It's the first turn to the left from the main road, about half a mile up. Now get away from my house. I'm a-counting ten; then I'll shoot. One—two—three—"
DEAN was already off the porch, racing back to his car. Pray God he got to Bryson Waters before it was too late—before whatever it was that threatened Winifred could attack her.
A faint, muffled ten came to him; then the roar of a shotgun smashed through the night. The man had kept his word. Dean shuddered as he kicked over the starter. The echoes of the gun brought no hasty figures to the doors of the tight-shut houses, no usual gathering of the curious. The clash of the gears sounded particularly loud in the heaviness of the night. What was wrong with Compton Village? what was wrong with Bryson Waters? The villager had been scared enough to shoot at a chance wayfarer; in back of his assumed boldness, Dean had sensed an awful fear. Of what?
He sent the coupé hurtling recklessly up the winding street; he swerved perilously at the left intersection on two wheels, roared up a graveled road. The headlights made fantastic, bobbing illumination against the blackness of the night. The stars were cold and infinitely remote; the moon had not yet risen. Strange thoughts plucked at Dean's mind, whispered mockingly in his ear. Dread filled the narrow confines of the coupé with its misty presence, made him force the accelerator to the floor. The picture of Winifred Garde, ward of Bryson Waters, was etched deeply into the blazing agony of his brain. She was in deadly peril; otherwise, she would not have called. Never would he forget the deathlike silence that followed her last, tortured cry for help; the maddening wait while an indifferent operator tried to re-establish the connection, the icy sheath that enveloped him when she answered his fevered questioning with a monotonous: "They do not answer, sir. Something has gone wrong with the line."
Hurry, hurry! Faster, faster!
A curve in the road showed dark-silhouetted trees flanking a driveway. At the farther end, across a sloping lawn, stood a great, shadowy house. The hill stretched precipitously upward immediately to the rear, a dark mass of jagged granite and stunted trees. Dean shot up the driveway, squealed to a halt before a vast, arched door of hand-hewn timbers, built as if to repel the blows of a battering ram.
He cut the ignition, literally threw himself out of the car. No sound disturbed the brooding silence; no light sent its comforting glow from the fortress before him. Terror seeped through its blankness, even as it had from the frame cottages in Compton Village. For a split second, Dean hesitated while he stared with a little foreboding shiver at the grim, gaunt structure.
It seemed a Norman chateau, transported to the incongruous surroundings of the Ramapos. Massive, four-square stone, with slits for windows—now vacant and staring like dead eyes—turreted and battlemented as in the days of the robber barons. Waters had queer tastes, Dean knew, and money enough to satisfy his whims. Or rather, Winifred Garde, whose guardian he was, had plenty. The sudden thought exploded in Dean's brain, sent him catapulting forward. He lifted his tense hand to the wrought-iron knocker on the door.
It froze in mid-air. The great portcullis was yielding cavernously before him. Yellow light flooded outward, but no one was in sight. Dean's heart thumped loudly as he stepped forward. The huge door crashed shut behind him with a startling bang. There was the sound of slammed bolts and creaking chains. Dean whirled.
A well-plumped-out man, obviously the butler, was fastening the door as if his life depended on it. His ordinarily ruddy cheeks were staring white, his fumbling hands trembled uncontrollably.
Dean pounced on him. "Where's Winifred—Miss Garde?"
The man jumped at the sound of Dean's voice, turned, leaned limply against the wall. Terror blanked his eyes. "I—I don't know, Mr. Madison," he gasped.
PLUCKING hands drew Dean's skin tight over his frame, vibrated in a devil's tattoo along his spine. He was too late! For an eternity, he stood, helpless, swaying, suddenly sick at this climax to all the lurking fears which had accompanied him on the mad race from New York. Then he jerked forward, jaw grim and tight, eyes blazing, and sank steel-strong fingers into the flabby shoulder of the trembling man. "Out with it, Minton!" he rasped. "What's happened to Miss Garde?"
The butler writhed, like a bloated eel, out of his grasp. His face was a grey, bloodless mask. He cowered back against the wall; his eyes slid past Dean in mortal terror. "A—a dead man took her!" he chattered through stiff lips.
"A dead man took her?" Dean repeated uncomprehendingly. Then the blood froze to solid ice in his veins, and horror prickled his scalp. What had that man in Compton Village said? If ye be one of them Things... Things? Did he mean dead men? Great God, had a corpse seized Winifred? Then disbelief and anger swept over him. He clenched his fist threateningly. "By Heavens, Minton," he squeezed through his throat. "Don't lie to me! If this is a game..."
"It's no game, Madison!" The voice boomed hollowly through the cavernous hall. "It's God's truth... and I'm next!"
Dean swung around. Two men stood at the top of the magnificent staircase leading to the upper floor. Even as he stared, they came clumping down, one leaning heavily on the other. Minton, the butler, fled across the polished oaken floor, dived into the servants' quarters behind the stairs.
Bryson Waters was a large man, quite overtopping his companion. Yet his largeness was flabby and unhealthy; there was a hectic redness to his loose, billowing jowls; the puffs under his sunken eyes were startlingly black. The hand that shook Dean's jerked incessantly. He seemed under a terrible strain.
"I didn't expect you here, Madison," he said. His booming voice sounded somehow hollow, artificial, as if he were straining against hysteria.
His companion spoke: "Hello, Madison, you certainly picked a swell time for a visit!" The man did not take his hands, from his pockets. Dean knew him slightly as Felix Cambray, a distant cousin of Winifred's—her only living relative besides Bryson Waters, who was her uncle and guardian. His features were dark and heavy and unrippled by any emotion.
Dean's mouth was dry and hot. He jittered with impatience. Couldn't these fools tell him what he wanted to know? "It's no visit," he ground out. "Winifred 'phoned me. She seemed in dreadful fear. She asked me to come and take her away. She started to tell me why, when there was a sudden shriek, and the 'phone went dead. Now for God's sake, tell me, Waters, what happened to her?"
Waters stared at him with eyes that held little glimmers of approaching madness. "The same thing that's going to happen to me," he babbled. "They killed Winifred, and they're going to kill me—corpses!"
His shaky voice trailed off into a high, thin scream. Suddenly the vast hall with its medieval arches seemed like a tomb, in spite of the ambered light. Terror stalked in its vaulted traceries—terror... and death!
"Killed! Winifred!" Dean muttered in a dull monotone. Every drop of blood seemed to have drained out of his body. Winifred, dead! The girl he loved, the girl who had promised to marry him within a month.
CAMBRAY interrupted in his unruffled voice. "Waters is overstating the case, Madison. All we know is that we heard Winifred scream in her room. When we got there, she was gone, and the receiver was dangling, off its hook."
Dean's brain whirled. "But what—what has that got to do with dead men?" he stammered.
Waters collapsed limply into a high-backed chair. He buried his twitching, haunted face in his hands. "Tell him the rest, Felix," he groaned.
Cambray shrugged his shoulders. "It does sound incredible, insane. But—," he hesitated, and something of fear crept into his voice. "Let me begin at the beginning, Madison. Mr. Waters suffered a slight nervous breakdown about a month ago, and came up here for a rest. It's away from everything, and the nearest village, Compton, is as sleepy and placid as one could wish."
Dean nodded dully. He knew that part of the story, knew that Winifred had come up to spend the weekend with her guardian uncle. How gay and adorable she had been at the railroad station, how the warm pressure of her tiny hand had sent shooting thrills into his heart! Through a haze, he heard Cambray go on while Waters sat in his chair, face hidden in his hands, unmoving.
"It isn't sleepy or placid any more," he explained. There seemed a tinge of bitterness in his voice. "About a week ago, a man died suddenly in the village. Heart failure, the doctor called it. He was prepared for burial, and left in the parlor of his home over night. The regular custom, you know. When the family awakened in the morning, however, the body was gone, vanished completely! It hasn't been found again either."
Dean caught desperately at a thread. He didn't want to believe; he didn't want to think of Winifred... "Perhaps they were ghouls, working for some medical school?" he suggested, almost timidly.
Cambray shook his head. "No. In the empty coffin, they found a card, an ordinary strip of pasteboard, about three by four inches. A crude skull was drawn on it. Around the skull were words: "I am going after Bryson Waters!"
The words were like stones dropping into bottomless pools. Someone was panting softly. It was Waters. He raised his twitching head and glared madly at Dean. And he screamed suddenly: "He's after me; they all are!"
Pulses hammered in Dean's temples; the breath froze in his throat. Then he burst out: "But good God! It was Winifred he took!"
Cambray glanced sidewise at the trembling man and went on as if he had not heard. "There's more to it. The following day, another villager died of—also of heart failure! At night his body went too. But this time, some one saw it go. His wife heard a noise and went down to find out what it was. She saw her dead husband rise stiffly out of the coffin, and walk steadily through the open front door into the night. She's in the hospital now. There was the same note left in the coffin."
Cambray's matter of fact tones beat like trip-hammers in Dean's skull. The eerie recital went on.
"There have been more," he said. "Men who died and vanished. The last was two days ago. This time, the dead man was seen by a passing automobilist walking stiff-legged along the road. The car ran into a tree; the driver escaped with a broken leg. He swears he wasn't drunk."
"They're after me; they're all after me!" Waters moaned, lifting an ashen face. His jowls were pendulous grey sacks, his eyes were crawling with little flares.
SOMETHING snapped in Dean's brain. Winifred was in the clutch of dead Things, corpses that should be quiet in their graves, and Waters was absorbed only in his own terror. As for Cambray—one look at his heavy, dull countenance showed that no help could be expected from him.
He whirled violently on his toes, sprang for the door. Waters jittered to his feet, alarm thick upon his flabby face. "For God's sake, Madison!" he whined. "Don't open that door! They're waiting outside, waiting to get in."
Dean's fingers were heaving at the bolts. "Let them!" he cried. "I'm going to find Winifred. I'll tear the place inside out if necessary. I—"
"Don't," Cambray interposed. "Wait a while. As soon as we found out that Winifred was gone, that the 'phones were out of order, Haley volunteered to make his way through the woods to the village for help. They should be back soon."
Dean swung back. "Haley?" he echoed. "I didn't know he was here."
"He came up with me early this morning from the city," Cambray explained. "We wanted to see how Waters was getting along."
Mortimer Haley was Waters' partner in the brokerage business of Waters, Haley & Co. It was the business in which Waters had invested Winifred's money, promising her a share of the profits. Dean had met Haley several times—a man of distinguished presence and of very old New York stock. Tall, military, with nose and lips firmly chiseled, and grey streaking the black of his hair, he was quite a contrast to Bryson Waters.
"Haley won't get any one to help him in the village," Dean said grimly. "I'm going to—"
Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong!
The great door jerked violently against Dean's hand as the outside knocker struck against it. The brazen echoes reverberated resoundingly through the baronial hall, brought Waters to a shrinking crouch.
"They're coming; they're coming!" he screamed.
The knocker was a thing alive, an accelerating frenzy of sound and motion. Even Cambray moved tentatively back to the curving stairs, as if poised for immediate flight. The booming thuds were reiterated trip-hammers, pounding on Dean's heart. Someone—something—was in a desperate hurry to get inside. In spite of himself, spidery fear crawled up and down Dean's spine.
"Who is it?" he cried, even as the terror-stricken householder had done back in Compton Village.
Strangled sounds seeped through the thickness of the oak—garbled noises that held no human meaning. The rattling was a blurred tattoo now. The great hall shook with the dreadful clamor.
"It's the dead men!" Waters shrieked. "For God's sake, Madison, don't let them in!" His lips were a livid blue, his fleshy face was a mask of madness. Cambray said nothing; his form was dim in the half-shadows near the stairs.
The noise grew louder and louder. A faint cry seeped through the door, a muffled shrillness. The short hairs bristled along the nape of Dean's neck. His fingers were lead-heavy on the bolts. Good God, was it possible? Did men who had died return from the grave? Were they even now congregating out there, eager to drag Bryson Waters off with them? Had Winifred somehow fallen into their clutches?
The sounds were exploding rockets in his skull. The knocker blows redoubled, seemed instinct with an awful fear. Waters was praying, moaning: "Don't open! Don't open!"
THEN, suddenly, the frenzied rapping ceased. A dull thud sounded outside, as if someone had slumped against the door. That little noise broke the nightmare fear which had held Dean in iron embrace. Perhaps it was a human being on the doorsteps, clawing vainly with hands that bled to get in to safety and the warmth of human kind. Perhaps—the thought knifed through his consciousness like a sear of fire—it was... He clenched his teeth, fumbled at the intricate chains with gelid hands. He must take the chance; he must! Let there be corpses waiting with shrouded skeletons; let there be devils out of Hell, yet he must open. God, if Winifred were huddled before the blank solidity of that door, and he, Dean Madison, the man to whom she was engaged, had denied her entrance because he was afraid...!
Waters was behind him, clawing at his arm with feeble fingers. "You fool!" he bleated insanely. "I won't let you open. I tell you—"
Dean shoved him back with desperate strength, sent him sprawling across the polished floor. Damn these bolts, damn his clumsy fingers! His breath whistled in his throat; his lungs were forcing bellows. All sounds outside had ceased. The Thing that sought admittance had fainted, or else... Oh God, not that, not that!
The last bolt was drawn finally, the last chain was down. Dean's frozen hand grabbed for the latch, froze. Was that a whimpering, a whining eagerness, or only the blood seething in his ears? Suppose it was all a cunning ruse; suppose Things that had once been men lay in secret waiting, gloating over their prospective victim... Behind him Waters stirred and groaned. No sound came from Cambray.
Dean jerked the door wide. The cool night air rushed in with a great sweep. A dark body, flattened against the timbered oak, catapulted into the hall. A high, eerie sound welled from its throat.
Dean sprang back instinctively, every pulse hammering. Waters scrambled to his feet with a shriek of terror. The shape whirled into the glow of the lights, and disclosed—Mortimer Haley!
A shroud of fear engulfed Dean for the moment. This was not the man he had met several times; this was not the erect, dignified man of affairs he had known as Mortimer Haley. This was a shrunken, gibbering wretch with bloodless cheeks and rolling eyes, whose every move was filled with an awful dread.
"For God's sake, Haley!" burst from Dean's stiffened lips. "What's the matter?"
Haley glared wildly at him, rushed to the door, slammed it into place, jammed the bolts with feverish movements. Then, and then only, as he leaned panting against the stout timber, did he seem once more the man Dean had known. His body straightened, the glare in his eyes died, but his cheeks remained waxen white.
"They—they chased me—all the way!" he mouthed. He seemed to have difficulty in talking, in breathing.
Dean started: "Who—?" and stopped. Suddenly he was afraid; suddenly, he did not want to know. But Waters, with the worms of madness already crawling in his eyes, whispered: "They! The Dead, you mean. The corpses who said they were coming for me?"
Haley, breathless, nodded his head. He still seemed winded from his frightful flight. Cambray stood to one side, face sullen and dark and wiped clean of all emotion. But his eyes were fathomlessly bright, shifting alertly, from one to the other.
Waters was a grey old man. His flabby frame seemed to collapse; light froth flecked his lips. "Oh God, what do they want of me?" He seized Haley's arm with a deathlike grip. "Mortimer," he implored, "save me from them. Save me!"
Haley unloosed the clutching fingers gently. Remembered fear was in his eyes, as if he were still savoring that dreadful, flogging pursuit through the woods. "We all are doomed," he said with an effort, and shuddered. "I don't understand how I got away." His eyes fell on Dean, tense and agonized, waiting, yet dreading to hear news of Winifred. They lit with surprise. "Madison, you here!" he breathed, then drooped his head hopelessly. "You too—all of us—doomed!" His voice died to a whisper.
Ice clogged Dean's veins. "Pull yourself together, man," he said half angrily. "What happened?"
HALEY stiffened. One could see he was making a tremendous effort to compose himself. "I—I volunteered to go to the village for help after Winifred disappeared," he explained. "The 'phone was dead, and the cars—I tried them both—wouldn't start. So I determined to run for it. The road was dark and I was scared, but nothing happened until I was around the bend. Then something burst out of the underbrush and came for me."
"It might have been an animal," Dean suggested weakly.
Haley turned haunted eyes on him. "No. I saw its face glimmering in the starshine." He shivered and put his hands up to his eyes. "It—it was the face of a dead man!"
Waters moaned, swayed unsteadily. "For me! For me!" he whispered hoarsely.
"I cried out, started running," Haley continued. "Behind me I heard thudding feet; then more and more, as if—as if the dead man had been joined by his fellow dead. I flung myself frantically across the lawn, banged on the door. No one of you answered. Perhaps I fainted, perhaps..." He closed his eyes, remained still.
Silence hovered like a live thing in that baronial hall when he had finished. The strange wheeze in Waters' throat was like a death rattle. Dean's scalp tingled with dreadful premonitions. Winifred in the hands of men who had died—of Things whom the grave could not hold...!
His jaw set with a snap. "I'll get through," he said very low. "My car's outside. At Haledon there are State Troopers. I'll—"
Haley started. He seemed puzzled. "Car?" he queried. "I didn't see any car!"
A great fear dewed Dean's forehead. He whirled without answering, raced for the nearest window. It was a narrow embrasure, set in thick stone and too narrow for a grown man to squeeze through. The others hastened after him. They crowded each other in their eagerness to look out.
The moon had risen. It was a great, bronze disk on the eastern horizon. Its coppery rays swept in level swaths over the black grimness of the trees, fell in weird, uncanny illumination over the dull hues of the lawn. The driveway made a great graveled arc to the doorway, swung around to meet the road again.
Dean cried out hoarsely. There was no sign of his car; no sign that it had ever been there!
For a long moment they hunched before the embrasure, frozen with apprehension. Dean's thoughts were a whirling pinwheel. The car was gone, and with it, their last chance for safety. Outside, in the woods, lurked the horrible dead; somewhere in its depths lay Winifred, her lovely body stiff in the clammy coldness of death, or—but that way lay madness! He must not think; oh God, he must not think! The brazen moon mocked him, played tricks with the shadows under the edge of the trees. Shadows that moved with a strange being of their own; that glided with stealthy tread.
Waters screamed like a horse whose entrails have been smashed by shrapnel. Haley said: "Oh God! Oh God!" again and again as if it were a curse. Cambray made no sound. Perhaps that heavier breathing was his...
DEAN went mad. That was the only way he could explain it afterward. He jerked at the latch of the mullioned window, sent the steel casement crashing outward. He must see, make certain that it was not a delusion of the eerie light.
His fingers tightened on the sill, rasped into bleeding rawness on the stone. His eyes strained until his eyeballs seemed ready to burst. Merciful God in Heaven, it was true! Unless—unless he were mad! He clung to that thought, coddled it, hugged it crazily to himself. He laughed harshly, not knowing that he laughed. He did not hear the stir of movement, the strange whimperings behind him. All his being was concentrated on that coppery, dull red glow.
A single shape thudded slowly from beneath the trees. Thump, thump, bearing down with doomful tread on the grassy sod. No insubstantial wraith was this, no misty, swirling ghost whose body lay moldering in six feet of earth. This was the corpse itself—the earthy body from which the soul had fled.
It moved with stiffened joints to the middle of the lawn. The weird illumination shrank affrighted from that awful shape. Sober, decent black enclosed its rigid form, the Sunday best of a man who had lived—and died—in Compton Village. Then the figure raised its head, faced directly toward the open window.
A hoarse scream burst unknowing through Dean's clenched lips. His skull was an iron press, grinding his brain to a sickening pulp. His skin was a sheath too tight for his body, caving his ribs, clamping his heart. Never, since the world began, had a human being looked like that.
Grey-green was the face, with hollow cheeks and lank, lean jaws. The lips were red with blood, as if the teeth they hid had crunched on unmentionable things. But the eyes—dear God, the eyes—were bottomless pits of darkness, from whose stygian depths Death peered and leered.
The dead man lowered his head. As if this were a signal, another ghastly figure clumped from the shadow of the trees and moved with jerking, doll-like steps to the side of his mate. Then, as Dean stood rigid with horror, another and another of the walking dead emerged to take their places in a hideous row; grey corpses shrouded in grave clothes, faces fronting the house, great black hollows where their eyes should be. More and more... an endless, terrible stream. Dean's heart pumped in dreadful unison with their thumping procession. God, would it never end?
Five were in that swaying row. Bodies that moved from side to side to an unheard tune from the unseen lips of a shrilling Devil. Dead men in a chorus on the stage of Hell itself. Then, slowly dissociating itself from the unwilling shadows, so slowly that it seemed a gigantic finger emerging from the ground, came a sixth. Bent in an arc, corpse-face down, back doubled under a shapeless load. Mockery of mockeries, diabolic japery! How Satan must have howled with laughter in the depths of his infernal realm. Formal evening wear decked the elongated frame. White shirt front gleamed with ghastly luster against the grey-white of the face above. Black tails flapped like great bats in back; black, silk-striped trousers encased legs that held no blood; patent-leather pumps moved soundlessly over the grass.
What frightful burden did the thing carry? Dean's eyes glued desperately to that dark, limp mass. Blood fell in a mist before his vision, hazed it so he could not see. Time seemed to stand still. His shrieking thoughts raced round and round in an endless circle, afraid of the grim solution that burned in his brain.
The dress-suited corpse reached his brothers from Hell. The sack-like thing on his shoulder was a shadowed blur. The row of dead men swayed, locked grey hands, revolved in a dance infernal round their fellow and the limp burden that bent him under.
Round and round in a devilish reel, grey-green heads thrust back, blood-red lips widely gaping, eyeless pits uplifted to a coppery moon. Round and round, faster and faster, heavy feet thudding on the shrinking ground. One, two, three, four—one, two, three—Faster until the very trees seemed to writhe and twist with macabre laughter...
DEAN could not move nor stir. Nightmare horror held him fast. Behind him was only dreadful silence; in front, only the quickening stamp of feet belonging to men who had died.
Then the dead man in the middle lifted his ghastly face and started to turn like a marionette pirouetting on a string. Dean's breath froze in his throat. Ice sheathed his heart. He tried to scream, to run away, before the moon could shine full on the swinging burden, but his limbs were riveted to the ground. He did not want to see, but his eyes were uncontrollable. A limply hanging arm showed white over the turning man's shoulder—a dreadfully drooping head whose tresses were burnished copper in the gloating moonlight.
It was Winifred Garde!
Dean's mind ripped loose from its insecure foundations. Roman candles flared and exploded in his skull. He went mad, berserk. Behind him someone uttered a queer gurgling moan and thudded heavily to the floor. That was Bryson Waters.
But Dean was beyond listening, beyond knowing. Like a steel spring uncoiling, he sprang for the door. There were shouts, hoarse cries from the others, but he did not hear. He ripped at the chains in frantic haste. One blazing thought flamed in meteoric ruin through his swirling mind. Winifred, the girl he loved, must be rescued, dead or alive. Not all the corpses on earth nor all the devils from Hell could stop him from that.
Thank God, at last the door was open! He catapulted headlong into the night just as Haley and Cambray reached him, mouthing hoarse, indistinguishable things. It was too late! Jaw ridged into steel, eyes a glaring madness, breath sobbing in his throat, Dean raced for the dancing, whirling dead men.
A whistle sounded; a shrill, piercing sound that flooded the lawn, flung back from the hill with mocking laughter. The corpses spun to a halt. Their faces were horrible in the moonlight. The dead Thing in the dress suit dropped the girl. She fell to the turf with a dull thud, huddled in a motionless heap. As though moved on wires, the six who once had been men went stiff-leggedly across the lawn, vanished into the ominous blackness of the trees. From the depths of the woods floated back an eerie, mechanical chuckle, as if the vocal cords through which it vibrated had long been unused. Then that, too, was gone.
Dean did not follow then. In his madness he had already forgotten their very being. All his consciousness was directed to that poor limp bundle which lay dark in the cold, copper moonlight. Dear God, let her be alive, let her be unharmed, he prayed. He did not know that his lips moved.
In a whirlwind of plunging legs and arms, he reached the motionless girl. Her lovely face was drained of blood; her long eyelashes were black traceries on paper-thin skin. Dean snatched her in his arms, whirled, went crashing back toward the house. Fear had penetrated his madness now. Fear because Winifred was so queerly light in his arms, as if—as if the blood had been drained from her body; fear because dead eyes burned holes into the back of his head. The grating chuckle rose again in the night behind him. A strange feeling possessed him that he had been a mere pawn in the fiendish web of the corpse-men; that he had done exactly what they wanted.
He flogged his frenzied limbs to a last spurt of energy, fell half across the door sill, kicked the ponderous barrier shut with his heel, and shuddering, placed his dear burden on the cushioned settle that flanked the door.
NEAR the embrasure of the window, a dark shape sprawled on the floor. Haley was bending over the body, chafing a flaccid, unstirring hand.
"Bryson!" he cried, frightened anguish in his ordinarily precise voice, "speak to me! Tell me you're alive. Tell me you're not dead!"
Felix Cambray made no move to help. His dark face was more sullen than ever, his hands remained thrust in his pockets. His eyes, the only part of him that seemed alive, jerked from Waters to the pallid loveliness of Winifred, his cousin, and veiled again with strange thoughts.
Waters stirred, groaned feebly. "Thank God!" Haley shouted joyfully. "Water, water!" He jumped up, ran madly to the servants' quarters.
Dean chafed Winifred's hands, loosened the high collar of her dress; massaged her forehead, called on her, implored her to open her eyes. Haley slammed back with a carafe, poured it in a trickling flood over his partner. Waters gasped, groaned, sat up cowering and trembling, traces of madness in his eyes. Dean snatched the goblet from Haley's hands, dipped his handkerchief into the cold, fresh fluid, slapped Winifred's dead-white cheeks with vigorous motion.
Her lashes parted, and blue eyes stared uncomprehendingly up at him. A great sob tore at Dean's throat, a sob of happiness. Winifred was alive, was his once again.
"Darling!" he cried. "It's Dean; no one else! Say you recognize me."
She nodded feebly. Fear clouded the clarity of her gaze. A long shudder went rippling over her slender body. "Dean!" she whispered faintly: "Don't let them get me again!"
"I won't, darling," he swore grimly. She was in his arms now. "Tell me what happened."
She pressed her hand to her throbbing forehead. "I—I don't really know. I was calling you—I was afraid of the tales brought us from the village, of queer noises I heard around the house at night—when suddenly a cold, heavy hand clamped over my mouth, something scratched along my arm. Everything went dark then, and I don't remember another thing until now." She looked up anxiously at her fiancé. "Dean, dearest, tell me. Where was I; what was done to me?"
"Nothing; nothing at all," he assured her hastily. "You just fainted." How could he tell her that soulless bodies had held her in thrall for hours; that it was a miracle she was here? Or was it? He remembered the strange whistle, the eerie laughter of the lurking dead men. His scalp tightened; he pressed her fiercely to himself. Never, never would be let her out of his sight again.
Bryson Waters tottered over to them weakly. The madness had been driven out of his eyes, but deep within, the little devils lurked, waiting to flare again.
"The corpses!" he croaked, clutching his heart. "They got you, but it's me they're after. Me. Me!" He was shrilling hysterically again.
Winifred stiffened against her lover. "Why, uncle," she exclaimed, "what do you mean?"
Furious anger swept over Dean. The man had disintegrated into spineless cowardice—into a vast, overwhelming selfishness. Then his eyes narrowed. Good Lord, it was impossible, yet—
He opened his mouth to say something, when a high, terrible scream cut him short. It rose and fell in an ecstasy of agony; then it choked off suddenly as if it had never been.
Dean left Winifred on the settle, crashed to his feet. So did the others. That scream had come from the serving pantry; it had been the panic-stricken voice of Minton, the butler.
Dean galloped to the rear of the stairs, fists tight, muscles knotted. Crowding his heels came Cambray and Haley. But Waters sank trembling and gasping on the seat beside Winifred.
THE three slammed through the swinging door almost simultaneously, jerked to an unbelieving halt. Minton stood in the very center of the utensil-crowded room. His hands were clawing vainly at his throat as though he were trying to rip it open. His plump face was drawn with agony and mottled in blue cyanosis. His mouth gaped open, and his tongue lolled out in a vain attempt for air.
"For God's sake, Minton," Haley jittered, "what's the matter?"
The butler turned a strangling face toward them all; his lips twisted violently as though he wanted to say something, but only queer, animal noises came forth. Then, clutching desperately at his heart, he fell headlong to the floor. A quick, jerking shudder, and he was still.
Dean reached him first. One glance was sufficient. The man was dead. Cambray stared down at the body with expressionless face. "Heart trouble," he said briefly.
Dean's mouth was suddenly dry, and the palms of his hands were hot and fevered. A heart attack—? That was...? Haley's military figure seemed to crumple. He cried out: "Heart attack—? My God! They all died of that!"
"Right!" Cambray agreed. Even his eyes were blank.
Dean shook his head violently to clear away obscuring mists. It was incredible, it was impossible! Minton had died because his heart was unequal to the dreadful events of the past few hours. And he was dead as dead could be. There was no question about that. He would never rise from his bier as did those others.
Dean's jaw locked tight. He was trembling inside; his stomach was weak and queasy, but he forced his voice to steadiness. "I'm staying up to watch the body," he announced.
Cambray looked at him with strange, unfathomable glance. Was that a sneer in his voice? "What for?" he asked. "Minton'll stay dead without you."
But relief showed in the chiseled lines of Haley's face. He wrung Dean's fingers warmly. "I think it's the best thing to do," he said in low tones. He stared down at the waxen features of the butler and shivered. "I'm afraid of the very same thing that you are, Madison."
It was past midnight. They worked feverishly, locking all doors, barring all windows. There were no servants now in the great house. All but Minton had quit without notice earlier in the week. The butler's body was laid on trestles in the great hall, and a chair placed near it for Dean to sit and watch. The others went upstairs to their rooms. Dean pressed Winifred to his heart, kissed her. A strange premonition assailed him that this was the last time he would see the girl he loved, but he shrugged it off angrily. It was damned nonsense, he assured himself. There was nothing to worry about. The dead men who lurked outside in the woods were physically solid; they could not pass like smoke through oaken doors and heavy shutters. And as for Minton—again he felt that premonitory shudder—he was sitting there to see that no tricks would be played. Nevertheless he whispered to the girl: "Please, dear, remember to lock your door. And don't open for anyone—do you understand?"
She nodded bravely and went upstairs. Waters had to be supported by his partner. He was no longer the big, slightly pompous man whom Wall Street knew and feared for his ruthless power; he was a shrunken, babbling old man with wavering glance and the worms of madness in his reddened eyes.
"They'll get me tonight!" he muttered tonelessly. "Me, Bryson Waters!"
Haley patted his shoulder and flicked a warning glance back to the others. "Not a chance, Bryson," he said cheerfully. "What you need is a good night's sleep."
Cambray paused on the upper step. "Haley's right," he said venomously. "If anyone goes, it won't be you." There was no mistaking the bitterness in his tone, the unmasked hatred for his uncle.
Then the upper floor swallowed them all...
IT was after two. Dean Madison had looked at his wrist watch to verify the time. He was cramped from long, strain-full watching. The great, vaulted hall was deathly silent. Several times his sharpened ears had seemed to hear stealthy movements somewhere in the dim recesses of the house, but they had died away even as he arose to investigate. It must have been the pounding of the blood in his own body, he decided, and dropped back into his chair. He knew his nerves were jittery, that his mind was aflame with a thousand fears. Was Winifred asleep in her bed, safe after the terrible experience she had undergone? Was Minton to remain dead, a motionless corpse?
So far, he had. So far, his body rested immobile on the long board trestle, seemingly for all eternity. His face was hard and cold in the icy embrace of Death; the agony with which he had died still glared from his staring eyes. The eyelids had refused to shut.
After an age of waiting, it was two-thirty. The hall was still deathly quiet; the dead man had not stirred. Yet something prickled up and down Dean's spine. The atmosphere seemed to become closer and more oppressive. What was that?
This time there was no mistake about the sound. It came from the serving pantry, where Minton had gasped out his last whistling breath. It was a low, scratching noise, a fumbling and slithering along the walls, the slow, stealthy approach of something not human. Then, even as Dean's fingers bit deep into the arms of his chair, and the blood retreated from his heart, the sound changed.
Thud-thud-thump!
The Thing had found whatever it was it wanted—had thrown off its stealth. It was coming through the pantry, clumping with iron-shod feet into the hall. Dean's scalp tightened over his skull. His heart pounded against his ribs; the blood in his veins turned to ice. He tried to rise, but his feet were weighted with lead.
A figure thrust from behind the stairs, into the illumination of the central hall. A scream ached in Dean's throat, died unuttered in a tight constriction of the muscles. A grey-green face showed ghastly in the yellow glow; great black pits yawned where once eyes had been. A long, clawed hand, grey with the bloodlessness of death, reached out as if to tear at Dean's frozen flesh.
It was the corpse in the hideous mockery of the dress suit, the corpse who had carried Winifred! It was coming now for Dean—coming to claim him for his own.
Invisible bonds held him in nightmare paralysis, choked off the clamor in his throat. His brain was one vast, ruining explosion. Was it madness that made the lights seem dimmer, as if they were fading out?
Slowly, slowly, they went. The hall gloomed into semi-darkness. The body of the walking corpse had vanished now; only a greenish head, alive with some strange phosphorescence of its own, floated bodilessly toward him. A ghastly snarl distorted the too-red lips, lips that seemed to drip with the blood of its victims.
It was getting darker. Only a pale glimmer remained. The eerie, floating head remained poised. The thumping sounds had stopped. A wilder fear than any Dean had ever known before assailed him. It was at the foot of the stairs that the Thing had paused. That meant—oh God! Thud, thump, creak!
The body less head was soaring up, up! The dreadful specter had passed him by, had sniffed other and more tempting prey. His feet were a doomful dirge on the stairs. He was going for Winifred, the girl who had escaped him once...!
DEAN'S brain churned with dreadful motion. His bones were dust and powder; his flesh an icy envelope. He threw all his will against his leaden weight. Slowly he trembled to his feet, fighting for sanity, battling for the strength to hurl himself forward, to lock in a last, fatal embrace with that Thing from Hell.
A little puff, a current of air, fanned past his tight-drawn cheek. There was something strangely sweet about it, something sickeningly cloying. He swayed like a drunken man even as the fateful stamp of corpse-feet receded along the upper corridor.
There was a haze before his eyes. He rocked on a suddenly pitching floor. It was nausea, no doubt, that made him see the body of Minton, the butler whose heart had yielded to fear, roll a bit. It was the sickening odor that made the dead man appear to heave a stiff leg over the side of the trestle, and jerk to an erect position on the floor.
But it was pure, shrieking madness when the corpse lifted its right leg stiffly, creakily, set it down again. Its left leg went up, came down with a hollow thud. The arms swung like pendulums. Minton, who was dead, was walking directly toward him!
At the same time, from above, came the piercing shriek of a woman in mortal terror. Winifred Garde!
The creeping paralysis of Dean's limbs snapped. His nerves blazed fiery channels back to an exploding brain. He flung up from his chair, took one step forward. The sweetish odor puffed into a choking envelope.
Dean's senses reeled in sickening eddies, and he pitched headlong to the floor. In the grey blankness that swept down upon him he heard, or thought he heard, a thin sneer of laughter...
Dean Madison rolled his head feebly. His brain seemed too large for his skull, and it ached with a dull, sick pain. His mouth was stuffed with cotton and his throat was a searing fire. A faint, but unmistakable, odor clung to his clothes, made his stomach churn with nausea.
Somewhere, far off it seemed, came a faint, moaning sound. It held no human quality; it was the whimper of an animal whose leg had been broken in the steel jaws of a trap. Dean tried to open his eyes. The lids were strangely heavy. With an effort of returning consciousness he pried them apart.
Where was he? What had happened? For a moment his clouded senses registered nothing. The universe seemed a dead grey void, in which his aching body turned end on end, interminably. Then the darkness took form and vision. He raised his head feebly, but it was too leaden for the muscles of his neck. It drooped back on his heaving chest again.
A dim, greenish luminescence pushed the wall of blankness back from him. It impinged on shrouding walls, stirred the formless shadows in the corners.
The moaning increased in volume. It broke into a babble of senseless words. There was something strangely familiar about that voice. Dean jerked his head erect again, unmindful of shoulder strain.
The light seemed clearer now—or perhaps the haze was quitting his eyes. In the center of the room—it was a room, he could see that now—a man was standing. The sourceless luminosity beat dimly upon his large frame, thrust verdigris shadows into the hollow pouches of his face, snaked into the crawling madness of his eyes, made green poison of the foam that flecked his writhing mouth.
A great cry racketed from Dean. "Damn you!" he mouthed. "So you were the one. I might have known it. I might have known you wanted to kill Winifred and grab her money. Damn you!"
He jerked forward, anger flaring through him like new wine. But something snapped him back, made the teeth in his mouth rattle like castanets. Strong ropes held him fast to his chair, cut into his flesh like slashing knives.
The man he had cursed made no move. He stood where he was, in the center of the green-tinged room, and chattered on in horrible, monotonous iteration. A dreadful suspicion flared through Dean. He thrust his head sideways as far as he could, and horror drenched him in an icy sweat.
Bryson Waters was bound, even as he!
STEEL plates had been bolted into the floor. From a central socket rose a smooth, round shaft of steel, head high. Steel links suspended from riveted hooks, passed in a chain around his waist, ended in manacles that encircled his wrists and ankles. Bryson Waters was chained to a stake as if he were a wild beast, as if the faggots were already heaped about his feet in preparation for an auto-da-fe!
Dean's eyes started from his head, hammers smashed at his skull. Who had done this dreadful thing; what more terrible events were being prepared? Already the man was mad; a mindless, babbling wretch.
"Waters!" he shouted again, trying to pierce the veil of insanity that seemed to have enveloped him. "Can you hear me?"
The man's head came up slowly. For the first time, his gaze was full on Dean. His eyes lit with a gleam that was not mad; there was recognition and memory in their depths. He opened his mouth to speak, when, outside, somewhere, feet lifted and came down with slow, iron-hard regularity. At once, the green worms of approaching madness glittered again in his eyes, and Waters, the man of affairs, cowered back in his chains like a broken, shivering wretch.
Thud—thump—thud!
Dean felt the sweat roll down his weakened form, congeal into a winding-sheet of ice. The corpses, the men who were dead, were coming to glut their hunger for human flesh, to ease their thirst for human blood. That was what they wanted, that was why their lips were red, that was why they quitted their coffins to roam the night, seeking whom they might devour.
The thumping noise was nearer now. Down the long corridor it echoed, making the sound into the marching tread of an army. Dean threw back his shaky head and laughed. He was a little mad himself. An army of Things from the grave, bodies returned from Hell, marching in unison to Satan's piping, sweeping the countryside, draining it dry. War, that's what it was! War between the living and the dead!
Funny, wasn't it? He must laugh, he must... The roaring in his brain increased; something was snapping. A shriek tore through his madness with jagged, shearing edges, brought him back to sanity like a slap of cold water.
Waters crouched back against the steel shaft, jerking frantically at his chains.
"Oh God!" he screamed, "they have come for me! They want to drag me with them to Hell!" His frenzied eyes sought Dean, clung to him imploringly. "Don't let them do it, Madison!" he panted. "Don't let them—oh my God!"
But Dean was not listening. Someone was coming into the room. Once he had been plump of face and ruddy of complexion; once he had been obsequious and deft. Now his face was a ghastly smear of grey, his cheeks dark hollows that seemed to expose the skeleton beneath. His great, eyeless sockets were gruesome shadows in the greenish dimness. His mouth was a twisted mockery, red with gore. Once he had been Minton, the butler, and now—the very walls seemed to spin before Dean's horrified gaze—he was a Thing that was dead!
Minton walked past Dean with queer, mechanical tread. His black coat brushed against Dean's arm, sent him quivering back against his bonds. The charnel odor of the grave was strong in his nostrils. The Thing stopped in front of the chained and manacled man. He stood rigid, silent, slightly swaying.
Waters cringed. His eyes were wide; broken sounds gasped from his trembling lips. Another figure clumped into the room and took his place beside Minton. And another—and another—until Dean, straining helplessly against the ropes, counted six in this dreadful assemblage of the dead. All in a line they stood, swaying slightly from side to side, eyeless sockets focused on the helpless man at the stake...
A GLIMMER of reason penetrated the murk in Dean's brain. Six, even as on the lawn. But Minton was added, and the Thing in formal black was missing...
There was silence for a long moment—silence in which the awful six swayed noiselessly like a chorus in Hell's drama—silence punctuated only by the rapid clicking of Waters' teeth, the hissing, meaningless sounds that burst from his lips. The man was on the shaky verge of absolute and permanent insanity.
Then, from down the hall, came a new sound. A slow, shuffling, dragging noise, as if the walker were weighted down. Oh God, was there more of this? Dean tried to obscure the torture of his frenzied senses, but he could not. Whatever it was that latest comer dragged on his shoulder, he must see, and drain the bitter lees of madness.
There it was at the door now. It was coming in, shuffling, dragging. Dean moaned and shut his eyes. He did not want to see; he did not want to know; but some power beyond his will forced them wide open to gaze on the apparition of the gruesome Thing in dress clothes, on the limp burden of Winifred as she dangled, head downward, over his shoulder. Her warm brown hair fell in ringlets over her wan, drawn face, her bloodless arms swung with the momentum of their passage.
In spite of himself, Dean screamed. He jerked savagely at his ropes until they made a bleeding gridiron of his flesh; he shouted and cursed and yelled in a voice that was not his own. Bryson Waters swerved toward him, lifted eyes in which the flames of Hell were already mounting, and laughed and snarled and cackled in hideous cacophony.
Winifred stirred, moaned, and opened her eyes. She saw the swaying corpses, felt the icy grave-cold of the corpse who carried her. With a shriek of terror, she fell struggling to the floor. The Thing stepped over her as if she did not exist, took his place in the swaying line of his fellow dead, and swayed even as they.
A vast hope flared through Dean. These were dead bodies, wrested from the peace of the earth, performing a mechanical routine. Winifred's revival had been an accident, not contemplated in their orders. They would continue their diabolic tasks as if nothing untoward had happened—as if the girl were still unconscious.
"Winnie, Winnie!" he cried out desperately. "I am here, bound to a chair. Quick, loosen the ropes. Hurry!"
She lifted her poor brave head. A bruise discolored her temples. Fear widened her eyes; terror stiffened her limbs. Faintness was upon her, but at the voice of the man she loved, she urged her water-weak limbs into painful, dragging motion. Along the floor she crept, like a beautiful serpent whose back has been broken, almost under the feet of the swaying corpses. Waters, her uncle, was chained to a stake; but he was insane, mouthing and gabbling of unmentionable things, roaring with laughter, holding horrible converse with the gruesome row before him. Her first duty was to her lover. He urged her on, encouraged her to greater efforts.
She was now at Dean's bound feet. With a tremendous effort she raised her head. "I am here, darling," she gasped faintly. Then she collapsed again.
Dean groaned. Rescue was so close, and now the cup of hope had been withdrawn. "Winifred, darling, sweetheart!" he cried. "You must—you must get up!
Even in her faintness she heard him. Her lips moved soundlessly to show that she had heard. Her slender, bloodless fingers plucked weakly at the rope that bound his feet. Dean talked, exhorted, scolded sharply to break through the haze of her senses, frantic as the precious moments slipped by. Any second and the dead men would leave their hypnotic swaying. Then... Ah, there it was. The first knot had slipped. Now the next, and...
A whistle blasted down the corridor. At its ominous shrilling, the row of corpses jerked to fiendish life. The Thing in the dress suit bent down, twitched as if to drop a fancied burden to the floor. Then, in a sudden spring, he was on his knees, mouthing with fierce red lips at—empty air!
WATERS watched and yelled with frightful laughter. To his mad brain it was a grotesquerie fit for this hideous farce. But now Dean knew the dreadful secret, and the skin crawled up and down his spine. "My God, Winnie," he whispered fiercely, "faster, or it will be too late!"
"It is too late, Madison." The muffled, expressionless voice rang in Dean's ears with the terrible thunders of a crashing universe. So near had they been to freedom, and now...!
A hooded and shrouded figure glided into the room. His robe was blood-red and his hood was scarlet. In one swift motion he swept the girl into the folds of his robe, was carrying her over to the soulless corpse that still groveled on the floor, seeking vainly for its prey.
Horror smashed with giant blows against Dean's skull. Was this sinister figure Satan himself, come to marshal the forces he had evoked, to bring to gruesome fruition the devilish work they had begun.
But no. That voice, muffled, disguised as it was, was somehow familiar. The scarlet figure dropped Winifred before the seeking Thing. Its fleshless hands gripped the fainting girl with taloned claws. She stared up into its ghastly face, shrieked with the last accents of despair, and swooned into merciful blankness.
Red anger seethed through Dean. The form in red was human. This was no supernatural being, no fiend released from Hell. Yet somehow he caused the dead to walk, to obey his fiendish orders.
"You damnable beast!" he raged. "Let her go! If you hurt one hair of her head, I'll tear you to pieces myself, limb from limb." Futile melodramatics! The ravings of a helpless man at the sight of the girl he loved in the claws of a corpse.
The scarlet figure rose. Flames seemed to spurt from the slits in his hood. Then he chuckled, and the laughter made hideous concord with the eerie cacklings of Bryson Waters. Waters, who was seemingly beyond all human help now, irretrievably insane.
"Do you know who I am?" he demanded.
"Not yet," Dean retorted. "But I shall when I tear that hood from your evil face."
"Words, vain words!" the other purred contemptuously. "It wouldn't matter if you did know me. Soon you will be dead and," he chuckled ominously again, "an obedient member of my faithful crew."
Dean felt the marrow in his bones freeze at the thought. But he needed time, time to work with surreptitious haste at the last knot that held his legs, time to catapult himself, a raging, crashing thunderbolt, upon this demon in human guise. After that, he did not care.
"What have you against us?" he asked, with an effort at rigid composure.
"Against you? Nothing! Except that you blundered into my plans, and must pay the penalty of all blundering fools. But your lovely sweetheart and that idiot who thought himself a Napoleon of finance, are in my way. They must be removed. These slaves I have gathered from the realms of the dead will do that very neatly for me. Winifred must die, but Bryson Waters must not." He thrust back his shrouded head and laughed with dreadful intonation. The poor hulk at the stake rattled his chains and laughed with him at the japery. "Look at him now. His wits are fuddled, gone completely. But I am taking no chances. He shall witness the terrible fate about to overtake his niece. That will snap the last slim thread which holds his darkening mind together. If that is not enough, the corpse-men—a very pleasant crew you see—will soon reduce him to that most desirable condition. But he must not die. Oh no, he must live to a ripe old age, a raving, screaming madman!"
Dean clenched his teeth to hold back a snarl of hate. Foot rubbed against foot. Success! The rope was slipping. Now, if he could only jerk his hands loose...!
THE robed man spun round on his toes just as Dean forced his tottering limbs upward. A startled oath ripped from his hidden mouth. Then he was a hurtling thunderbolt, crashing Dean back into the chair, jerking the slipping ropes tight with fiendish ferocity until they sank into pain-swept flesh.
"So that was your game!" he snarled. "Well, it's your last play. And because of that, I'll make you watch what happens to your sweetheart. Look!"
A low whistle pervaded the room. The row of living corpses swung like a well-trained battalion to one side, against the wall. The stage was clear for the final act, and Dean and Waters were the helpless audience.
The Thing that clutched Winifred growled. It was the throaty rasp of a wolf slavering over its kill. The grey hands dug deep into the girl's unresisting flesh. Her head dropped backward to the floor. Her face was waxen, and the pure line of her throat was exposed. The dead man retracted his red-dyed lips, showed yellow grinding teeth. The growl became a whimper of desire. He dipped his head.
Great God in Heaven! The Thing was a vampire, feeding on human blood! Those yellow fangs were plunging straight for Winifred's throat. Dean threw himself forward with superhuman strength. His brain was a rocketing blaze of madness. He yelled like a soul in torment. The chair teetered, righted itself; pain lanced his bleeding body.
Bryson Waters stopped his inane drooling. He looked around with a bewildered air. His wide, startled gaze fell on the hideous sight in front of him. For the first time, he seemed to realize what was happening. The muscles of his flabby face twitched in a St. Vitus Dance of horror; the spume frothed from his mouth. Shriek after shriek tore from his throat. Far better if his tortured mind had not returned to temporary sanity.
Dean was a writhing, twisting animal. Sharp knives tore at his flesh, but he did not heed. The girl he loved was at the mercy of a dead Thing, a blood-drinking vampire!
The fangs edged against the pure, white skin. Winifred's eyes were closed in the stillness of death. In another instant, sharp teeth would puncture, and the bright red blood would spurt. Dean gritted his teeth, lashed forward with every dying ounce of strength. The chair tottered, fell over with a crash. Sobbing, panting, Dean flung himself along the floor. The rungs of the chair slammed sharply against the hooded figure.
There was a howl of rage; then the looming form buckled and went sprawling over the chair. The vampire corpse seemed to freeze in a tableau, teeth bared over the girl's pulsing jugular. The hideous chorus of dead men became rigid statues against the wall.
There was a rending, splintering sound. Dean's falling body had smashed the chair. A fierce exultation bounded through Dean's veins. His legs were free, even though he was still snared in his bonds. But the devil in red was thrashing over him, growling in his throat like a dog with a bone. Long, lean hands whipped out from under the robe, caught at Dean's windpipe with a throttling grip. Stars blazed with coruscating fires in Dean's skull. His head lolled from side to side, trying to break that punishing hold. But the fingers were steel-hard. There was no mercy in the baleful glare from the slits in the hood.
IF only his hands were free! But the knots held with a terrible tightness. Waves of agony coursed through Dean's body; fire swept his tortured throat. Darkness blanked his eyes. In a haze he heard the triumphant growl of the man who was choking him. Far-off came a scream. He was floating down a great void, but that scream jerked him back like a taut rope. It was Winifred! She had awakened, seen the bared teeth at her throat...!
A superhuman, agonized strength came to Dean then. He jerked up his knees, lashed out his feet. They sank into something soft and yielding. There was a howl of pain, the cry of a man who had been struck in a vital spot. Suddenly, nerveless fingers relaxed from Dean's aching throat, and a thrashing body rolled over to slam headlong into the kneeling corpse in the dress suit.
Something must have snapped then; some invisible thread of influence. A long, eerie cry burst from the corpse; his hands loosed their hold on the screaming girl, darted like striking snakes for the sprawling form of his erstwhile master.
As if they, too, were released from a spell, the dead men who lined the wall galvanized into hideous action. With un-human screeches they threw themselves upon the scarlet figure. In the twinkling of an eye they were a squirming, struggling, gruesome mass. From underneath came a long-drawn out yell of a man in mortal agony. Then there was nothing but the fearful whimperings of blood-mad creatures.
Dean watched, sick with horror, but helpless. Waters sagged in a dead faint in his chains. Winifred pulled herself erect, tottered over to Dean, fumbled with frozen fingers at the ropes lashing his hands. As they fell away, leaving him free, he knew it was too late.
The dead men had finished their grisly work. A silent, bloody figure lay in a broken heap on the floor. The corpses sagged; slow, rippling shudders seemed to pass over their bodies. Then they too fell to the floor, motionless, limp.
Dean forced back the nauseous repulsion that overtook him. He picked his way over the fallen bodies, plucked with trembling fingers at the scarlet hood. The torn cloth fell back to reveal the bloody, but aristocratic features of Mortimer Haley, of the firm of Waters, Haley & Co!
Together, Dean and Winifred unchained the sagging frame of Bryson Waters, laid him gently on a couch. The girl ministered to him and to Felix Cambray, whom they found unconscious in his bedroom. Then, and then only, did Dean examine the bodies of the dead men, the slaves whom Haley had used for his nefarious plans, and who had turned on him at the last.
His sharp cry racketed down the hall, brought Winifred running, forced Cambray weakly to his elbow.
"Winnie!" he shouted. "These men are not dead! They're just in a stupor. Haley must have injected some drug into them that simulated heart failure and sapped their will. By some hypnotic means, he forced them to his bidding. Perhaps it was with the whistling notes. Look, dear, they're all breathing. They'll come out of it soon. And see, the grey of their skin smudges off, their lips have been painted, and the black around their eyes is only charcoal. Haley fixed them up that way to make them more gruesome."
"But why did he do this terrible thing?" Winifred gasped.
Dean's jaw was a grim, tight line. "I'm pretty sure I've got the reason," he said slowly. "Mortimer Haley, for all his family and air of breeding, was a gambler and speculator. As a result, he lost all of his private fortune in a hurry. Then he started mulcting the partnership. But the accountants were coming within the month, and his withdrawals would have been discovered. Waters' nervous breakdown gave him the idea. It would be comparatively easy to drive his partner mad with corpses who walked. Everything that took place was planned with that in view. Haley was prepared to go to any limits."
"But why drive him mad?" Winifred asked in some bewilderment. "He could have killed him much easier."
"Because," Dean explained, "death dissolves a partnership automatically. There would have been an immediate accounting on behalf of the two heirs—yourself and Felix Cambray—as well as a demand for the return of all your own money that Waters had invested in the concern. The shortages would have been discovered at once. With Waters alive, but insane, Haley would have continued in sole charge, and would eventually have been able to cover up his withdrawals. Even if the heirs demanded the appointment of a committee on behalf of the incompetent, it would have taken considerable time. The chances are that Haley, as his partner, would have been appointed anyway."
"Then why did he want my death?"
DEAN shivered. "Because, with you alive and under age, the court would have appointed another guardian in Waters' place, who would have had full access to the partnership books. This way Waters was your heir. Haley was a fiend, but a damned clever one. He was secretly in the village every night, picking his victims, injecting his drug. He must have hid them in the woods, in a stupor, during the day. Minton was the final hideous touch. He jabbed him in the butler's pantry, that time he raced in there for a glass of water. It was he who slipped downstairs tonight to let his drugged slaves into the house. It was he who pushed my car down the road. Cambray suspected him all along, and caught him in the act. He was slugged for his pains." His face tightened. "Haley came uncomfortably close to success. Is your uncle—all right?" It was as if he were afraid to ask.
"Yes. Weak from his ordeal, but sane. He's sleeping now." Winifred came close to Dean. Her eyes met his. Something shone in them that was not fear. He pulled her gently to him; their lips met in silent ecstasy...
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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